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Review: The Extinction of Irena Rey

May 27, 2024 Reviews

By JENNIFER CROFT
Review by CHRIS JOHN POOLE

At first, the autobiographical roots of The Extinction of Irena Rey seem simple to trace. This is a novel by writer-translator Jennifer Croft, who works in Spanish and Polish; its protagonist is a Spanish writer-translator. This is a novel from the acclaimed translator of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights; the eponymous Irena Rey is a Polish literary megastar. This is a novel from a staunch advocate for translators’ visibility; its eight main characters are all translators who seek—and perhaps supplant–their elusive muse.

Yet it is the very abundance of extratextual parallels that makes it so difficult to situate Croft within her text. Unlike Croft’s debut Homesick, a hybrid novel-memoir, The Extinction of Irena Rey provides no single stand-in for its author; instead, a network of interlinked characters echo Croft’s own life. From the novel’s tantalising biographical parallels, countless questions arise: is Irena Rey modelled on Tokarczuk or Croft? Is protagonist Emilia a self-insert, or a novel creation? Ultimately, it seems, these characters are hybridisations of Croft and her influences, as within this novel the lines between self and other, like those between truth and fiction, begin to blur.

Friday Reads: Braving the Body

May 24, 2024 Poetry, Reviews

Review by JENNIFER FRANKLIN

Featuring poems by DIANE SEUSS, FRED MARCHANT, JUSTIN WYMER, and BRENDA CÁRDENAS

Walt Whitman famously wrote, “I am the poet of the body and I am the poet of the soul.” Braving the Body (Harbor Editions, 2024) a new anthology edited by Nicole Callihan, Pichchenda Bao, and Jennifer Franklin is a collection of poems that are both embodied and soulful; they spring from the imaginations and lived experiences of 116 brave bodies (including one who is no longer alive after a long battle with cancer). But in Karen Friedland’s exuberant poem, “It Recurred,” the speaker is present, alive, defiant, “At this tender moment, my death is merely theoretical, and life is all I’ll ever know. In Diane Seuss’s hair “the color of a field mouse” the speaker holds space for a painful teenage memory, Jesus “writing / parables in his head” and the body as “a world / of massive disappointments.” and Justin Wymer’s “pill the color of her hair;” JP Howard’s poem mediates on the body as home and the home as sanctuary in an often inhospitable and unsafe world, “this is a safe place for black boys becoming black men” and Fred Marchant’s prescient speaker tells us “thus i announce the world is burning.” But this is also a collection of the body as conduit of pleasure, joy, love, and freedom as when Brenda Cardenas cries, “Perhaps we lick the nape of a lost lover’s / neck, just to remind them we once tangoed / In the blooming garden of their chest.” As Nicole Callihan writes in her introduction, “Absurd, sublime, anxious, and tender—these poems resonate in the very place they were born—the brave body in all its gore and glory.”

—Jennifer Franklin

Losing the Daphne

May 21, 2024 Essays

By JESSICA E. JOHNSON

It was neither ice nor heat. That is, not one single ice storm and not one single heat wave. The relentless strangeness of weather left the Daphne this way, budded around the edge but dead in the center. She will probably not last another hot summer.

Daphne is a Daphne odora “Marginata.” The cultivar “Marginata” indicates glossy leaves that sport a pale, bright edge. It was the odora though—the sweet, pink mid-winter scent reminiscent of Fruit Loops—that made us want her in the first place, and tend to her, and carry her with us from one house to another, that made us prop her up when she grew heavy and underplant her with special varieties of bleeding heart and black mondo grass that would best show her off, that made us love and root for her, over and over.

Fallmore

May 16, 2024 Fiction

By LAURA NAGLE

Mairéad knows what she will say if her husband asks why she has been filling their eldest daughter’s bowl to the brim with porridge at every meal while taking less than a full serving for herself. She will talk about how much she hates oats, has always hated everything about them: the thick smell of the fields when the rain has been too heavy, the ache in her left hip each day of the harvest, the gluey texture of oatmeal porridge, the taste of it like dirty air, the way it sticks in her throat when she tries to swallow it.

She imagines Thomas’s response. It’s by God’s grace we’ve oats again, she can almost hear him saying. God’s grace there’s enough for the likes of us after the livestock are fed. This time last year, all they could get was Indian meal, and the whole village was sick for the better part of a week before the women figured out how to prepare it properly.

Poetry as an Ethnographic Tool: Leah Zani interviews Adrie Kusserow

May 13, 2024 Interviews

ADRIE KUSSEROW and LEAH ZANI are a rare sort: trained cultural anthropologists and poets, anthro-poets. The two met while Adrie was judging the Ethnographic Poetry Prize, the world’s only prize for poetry written by anthropologists. Shortly after, they began working together on the editorial team of Anthropology and Humanism, one of the few peer-reviewed academic journals that accepts poetry.

In this interview, Leah Zani connects with Kusserow about her latest memoir, The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems (Duke University Press, 2024), a collection of prose poems based on Kusserow’s experiences with refugee communities and humanitarian projects in Nepal, India, Bhutan, Uganda, South Sudan, and the United States. In this conversation, they discuss the lyricism of suffering and the role of poetry in enriching deep anthropological understandings of place.

Friday Reads: May 2024

May 3, 2024 Reviews

Just last week, we at The Common launched our flowery spring issue! Issue 27 features a special portfolio of Arabic stories from Chad, Eritrea, and South Sudan; vibrant paintings by Eritrean artist Michael Adonai; and poetry and prose from all over the world on history and memory, queerness and desire, and the small and large rebellions that shape our lives. In conjunction with the release of the issue, we are bringing back our Friday Reads book recommendation column, so you can learn what books have been inspiring our contributors this spring. Keep reading to hear from Issue 27’s Matthew Lippman, Michelle Lewis, and Kevin Dean!

The Fish Market

May 2, 2024 Fiction, Translation

By ESTHER KARIN MNGODO
Translated from the Swahili by JAY BOSS RUBIN

Piece appears below in English and the original Swahili.

Translator’s Note

I was drawn to “Soko la Samaki” by its rich variety of registers, and by its use of the second-person point of view, which in my experience is not so common in Swahili literature. I was also taken by the story’s close attention to class and gender dynamics, and the role of language, indeed languages, in interactions between men and women of different backgrounds and social standings. In my initial draft, I retained quite a bit of Swahili. As I began to revise, in consultation with both colleagues and the author, I was encouraged to seek out English that corresponds to not just Swahili meanings but Swahili cadences, especially when they play a role in one character trying to convince or gain entry into the world of another. The version here contains less Swahili than my earlier drafts, but the Swahili that is retained is more intentional. Of the handful of authors whose work I have been so fortunate to translate, my author-translator relationship with Esther Karin Mngodo has been, by far, the most interactive. In addition to drawing my attention to rhythm, Esther helped me comprehend some of the story’s slang and proverbial language, and she offered invaluable feedback and suggestions on how to render specific moments in English. Going back and forth in our comments in the margins of a shared doc, often when it was morning for me and evening for her, I felt like I was getting to collaborate with an author, editor, and fellow translator all at once. For that, and for the story itself, I am enormously grateful.

—Jay Boss Rubin

Salamisim

May 1, 2024 Dispatches

By CHARISSE BALDORIA

A sepia-tone image showing a young girl with a ribbon in her hair smiling next to a piano, one hand affectionately resting on the edge of the lid. The wall above is adorned with elephants.

Photo courtesy of author.

Manila, Philippines

In the lanai’s half-light, a softened sun to my left and amber on the keys, I played the piano for my father who did not know the names of notes. I-bitin mo, he said in Tagalog, shrouded in incandescent glow as I shifted from one chord to the next, a nine-year-old on the cusp of competition learning how to cadence. And so, I slowed into suspension, this bitin near the end of the phrase—and all stakes hung in the balance like the last inhale of a life or the final somersault before the thunder of disappointment or applause.

Review: Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging

April 29, 2024 Reviews

By JESSICA J. LEE
Reviewed by KATIE NOAH GIBSON

“These are essays written for a world in motion,” writes Jessica J. Lee in the introduction to her exquisite, haunting third book, Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging, a collection of 14 essays examining the movement—voluntary, forced and accidental—of people and plants across landscapes. Writing in a time of massive global migration, and having experienced several recent upheavals in her own life (including motherhood and the COVID-19 pandemic), Lee considers terms like rooted and migration in light of economic structures, political power, and her own Welsh-Taiwanese-Canadian ancestry. She probes, researches, and even delights in the ways in which plants—seeds, trees, rhizomes—consistently defy human notions of borders and boundaries.