Ashfield, Massachusetts
She remembers a road that she walked along. Something about joy, maybe, something about light. It was her own lightness, or maybe it was the road’s. She walked it more than once, that week in September, a year past. There were rock walls fringed with pale asters. Tiny white butterflies hovered in sunlight, and the hills were green. That’s all that remained. A year ago, and it has faded.
Poems by ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK
Translated from the Spanish by ILAN STAVANS
Mexico City, Mexico
Translator’s Note
Translation is home. Whenever I travel, I seek it either by reading translations, or by translating as a grounding exercise. Lately I have been translating into English poems from Jewish Latin American poets, specifically works by conversos or those written in Yiddish and Ladino by immigrants and their offspring. And—in a room of her own—Alejandra Pizarnik, whose life makes me think of Emily Dickinson. I recreated these two poems while visiting my mother, who has been suffering from Alzheimer’s. Pizarnik distills the fibers of existence so as to reveal the madness that palpitates underneath. Her poetry is contagious. The toughest part is to convey her silences. I wish I had met her.
—Ilan Stavans
By JAMES STAIG
This piece is an audio recording. A transcript appears below.
Unincorporated Arapahoe County, Colorado
Through mantle, earth, gender, air
through false stories and true
undistracted by pectin, pucker, time
scale, sugar, seed, dripped rainbow of
oil, prism, crushed berry residue,
om of home, acid, oxygen song—
I grip jelly jars to my eyes
mock binocular my way to You—
“Newspaper Transferral on Plaster” by Hasami Ho (2020)
Location: Hong Kong
on the sudden closure of Apple Daily, the biggest pro-democracy press in Hong Kong
1.
We see the newspaper for tomorrow, not tomorrow
It’s already midnight. Today that is. News that stays
warm and inky on our fingertips at 2:30 am.
Gomel, Belarus
It had been fifteen years since my family left for the US, but my grandparents’ room in Gomel had not changed. I sat on the same Soviet-era sofa, holding the same replica of Cheburashka, my childhood-favorite TV character. The occasion of my visit had prompted Dedushka, my Belarusian grandpa, to take me to the village where he was born, now dilapidated, to generations of ancestors’ graves, through documents that told something of our fragmented history. One evening Dedushka donned his army uniform, and presented me with a newspaper clip detailing my father’s death. My grandmother was quiet, resigned to the shadows of old books and toys.
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