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All posts tagged: 2019

A Secret Story

September 25, 2019 Dispatches

Sofia, Bulgaria

“There’s something doctors won’t acknowledge and won’t treat,” my grandmother says during our afternoon coffee. I’m visiting for the summer. These few months are the longest I’ve been in Bulgaria since my parents and I left for California in the early 90s. My grandmother and I drink our coffee in the living room, where we take our meals as well, facing a wall of cheaply made wooden cabinets, an Eastern European décor trend from the Cold War years. One cupboard has a glass door through which I can see a photograph of my mother from when she was a teenager.

Poetry by Isabel Zapata in Translation

September 18, 2019 Poetry, Translation

Poems by ISABEL ZAPATA

Translated from the Spanish by ROBIN MYERS

Poems appear in both Spanish and English.

Translator’s Note

Like many translators, I grow weary of talking about “faithfulness” and “betrayal,” about whether it’s “possible” to translate poetry, about what gets “lost” in translation. These queries quickly become platitudes, and platitudes are tiresome. But what’s always relevant, always urgent, and always exhilarating to me about translation is the idea of respect. The practice of care. One of my favorite translators, Sophie Hughes, recently said in an interview: “I approach a text that is already complete, mature, sure of itself, and it’s my responsibility to look after it, to respect it for what it is (its nature or essence), whilst protecting it from linguistic butchery, from translationese, from too many mistakes or outlandish mis- and reinterpretations.” And how can we respect anything for what it is until we truly listen to what it has to say about itself and how it sees the world?

August 2019 Poetry Feature

August 30, 2019 Poetry

New poems by Nathan McClain, Sara Elkamel, and Brian Simoneau

NATHAN MCCLAIN | The Flowers

| At the Park, a Boy’s Birthday

SARA ELKAMEL | Instructions for getting around a desert

BRIAN SIMONEAU | Each morning I get up I die a little

NATHAN MCCLAIN

The flowers

in the greenhouse
now flowers

in the supermarket
rubber-bound

clipped
from wherever

they seemed almost
to nod

their agreement with what
the breeze once said

now flowers
in some glass vase

on the dining room table
where no one eats

What race they are
doesn’t matter nor if

their stems are thorny
you see

They’re just flowers
They die

You walk by
them all the time

hardly thinking
twice about their names

At the Park, a Boy’s Birthday Party

No surprises here, really.
Not the plastic,

white cutlery
or the fancy glass bowl,

cubes of pineapple
and Bosc pear

floating in punch
(naturally red)

that no one
(thank the Lord)

has thought yet to spike.
Each boy, blindfolded,

spun in place, and shoved
down the piñata’s path

with a bat
he can barely lift,

the piñata star-shaped,
tasseled pink at its ends,

seems accurate.
At this age,

their limbs
inarticulate as the smoke

of catfish or pork ribs
that hiss on the park grill.

They hardly notice
the sun’s descent.

It’s getting late, I think
to say as someone’s father

knots the blindfold
over my eyes. Fits the bat

into my hands. In my ear,
the boys shriek, and there—

the star,
snagged in the oak

of my mind, the rope,
swaying

almost gently. How,
even dizzied,

do I step towards it?

SARA ELKAMEL

Instructions for getting around a desert

The bride is seeing ghosts today.
She stands expertly with unease

as subtle as a sweet surprise
dissolved under a cloud.

There is nothing around
to quiver. Just our unkindness

pouring out our hands
like sand.

When they describe sugar
they say it looks

like salt. Feels the same when
bitten. For its gentleness,

ideal as a cure for dryness,
acidity, soreness, even weak

eyesight. But when she sees
the same dream twice, the bride

self-medicates: dissolves elsewhere
in gentle hot earth. Fills

her palms with salt, but
are these the kinds of gifts

you give at the end?
How red is a red infinity

if you give it your back,
your head like a rosefinch

caught in the horizon.
How infinite?

BRIAN SIMONEAU

Each morning I get up I die a little

A truck rumbles the day to life, lifts with robotic arm our bin
and sets it softly down. We are living in the future

and the future brought pain to ankles, to knees, my temples
rendered gray. So today I don a fraying t-shirt, silk-screened
logo faded the way our favorite mix-tape songs now slip

from digital lives. What’s come won’t come undone, summer
hungover, and the slang we sang unstrung, each year a little

harder to believe. I walk the girls to school over squares
of cement cracked by frost and passing to nowhere, corners
with no corner stores, even gas stations an indecent drive

away, past bedroom after bedroom, two-car garages hiding
if people are home or not. Kids on the street wait for the day

to begin with vinyl seats and backpacks on laps, their task
what it is for us all: remake themselves to the minute at hand.
Unshaven, unshowered, a baseball cap tugged into place,

I flip-flop down the block, stop to watch a helicopter
overhead. I will hop and skip. I will not step on a crack.

Nathan McClain is the author of Scale(Four Way Books, 2017), the recipient of fellowships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Frost Place, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. His poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Poem-a-Day, The Baffler, West Branch Wired, upstreet, and Foundry. He teaches at Hampshire College.

Sara Elkamel is a journalist and poet, living between Cairo and New York City. She holds an M.A. in arts and culture journalism from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Guernica, The Common, Winter Tangerine, American Chordata and elsewhere.

Brian Simoneau is the author of the poetry collection River Bound (C&R Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, The Georgia Review, Mid-American Review, Southern Indiana Review, Third Coast, and other journals. Originally from Lowell, Massachusetts, he lives near Boston with his family.

Leaving Florida

August 28, 2019 Dispatches

By GRIFFIN LESSELL

We arrive at night, landing at West Palm International, still wearing jeans and fleece jackets as we step into the Florida night and walk to the taxi stand through air softened by warmth and humidity. Fifteen minutes later my sister and I stumble over the tiny brick path that leads from the edge of the cul-de-sac to the front door, swatting at mosquitos while my dad punches in the security code, everybody exhausted but excited to finally be back. It’s always like this, in all my memories of the place – an evening flight out of Boston landing us in West Palm sometime between ten and midnight, the night always clear, the air a humid 73.

The house belonged to my grandparents. Every February while I was in elementary school, my family would stay there for a week, a brief respite from the New England winter. My grandparents purchased the house as an eventual retirement home, but my grandfather had still not retired, and so the house occupied a strange sort of limbo, going entirely un-lived-in over the summer, and seeing only nine or ten weeks of use in the rest of the year. We returned each year to a sterile, static domicile that was clearly nobody’s home, greeted by the same immaculate white carpets, spotless tabletops, and barren kitchen. The house felt like a blank canvas over which our vacations were painted; it functioned simply as a base of operations. And this was the role my parents wanted it to play, because they were always desperate to get out of the house, to not let their week off go to waste. But for me, the house, and the similarly sterile neighborhood around it became the consummate vacation setting. February vacation came to be synonymous with Florida, the days 80 degrees and sunny, the blacktop so hot that wiffleball games couldn’t be played barefoot, the nights cool and humid and echoing with the hooting, melancholy whistle of the night train that passed along the outskirts of the gated community just after my nine-thirty bedtime.

Thirty-One Things About the Lime of Control

August 27, 2019 Essays

By KRITIKA PANDEY

Three weeks ago, my 11-year-old Indian American cousin woke me up with a series of heartbreaking text messages. Didi you up? Mom dad and everyone else can’t stop watching the news. Theyre thrilled. Kashmir sounds like kishmish. Whats the lime of control btw? Why do hindus dislike muslims? I had not yet gotten out of bed in my small, sleepy university town in Western Massachusetts. But my aunt and uncle were up early in the morning as friends and neighbors, fellow upper-caste pajama-clad Indian Americans with unbrushed teeth and undemocratic hearts, had gathered in their New Jersey apartment to watch the Home Minister of India officially and unilaterally revoke the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, live from the parliament.

Part of what makes Jammu and Kashmir special is what makes India special. As a kid, I used to mug up from my school textbooks that India is the land of festivals, colors, dances, languages, religions, so on and so forth, but I was unable to appreciate the water in which I was a fish. Now when I go for months without hearing words that I don’t understand, as every cashier in every store asks me to ‘have a good one’ in the exact same tone and pitch, I have to listen to a Rajasthani or a Tamil song just to reorient myself. I need to know that there will always be so much that I don’t know. Therefore, I must constantly remember India, much of which is sort of me but not quite me, because it makes me feel bigger than myself.

The Amherst Bulletin (excerpts)

August 14, 2019 Dispatches, Poetry

By SOFIA BELIMOVA

Gloria

After the rain, we get slices
of the grey and yellow world
which slip through the earnest bunches of acorns
in sheets of diffuse, papery light.

Review: Hurtling in the Same Direction – At Home in the New World

August 8, 2019 Reviews

Book by MARIA TERRONE

Review by SUSAN TACENT

Maria Terrone’s grandparents were among the estimated nine million people who emigrated from Italy between 1881 and 1927. While her parents were born in the United States, her connection to Italy is deep, informing her identity and experiences as much as being a lifelong New Yorker has.

Translation as Art: Against Flattening

August 7, 2019 Essays, Translation

Essay by HISHAM BUSTANI

English translation by ROBIN MOGER

Essay appears in the original Arabic here.

An introductory essay to Stories from Syria, a portfolio published in English by The Common and in Arabic by Akhbar Al Adab (Egypt).

Today, in the second installment of a transatlantic literary collaboration which I hope will last for many years to come, Akhbar Al Adab publishes the original Arabic texts of stories by Syrian writers whose English translations appear in a special portfolio in Issue 17 of The Common, a literary magazine based at Amherst College. The first portfolio in the series contained stories by Jordanian writers and was published in Issue 15 of The Common, which followed the collaboration’s inaugural project: an issue of the magazine (Issue 11, Spring 2016) entirely dedicated to contemporary Arabic literature in translation entitled Tajdeed (Renewal), in which editor-in-chief Jennifer Acker and I selected stories and artworks by twenty-six writers and five artists from fifteen Arabic-speaking countries, with eighteen translators bringing the work into English.

Island Lessons

July 31, 2019 Dispatches

By CHARMAINE WILKERSON

Westmoreland, Jamaica

Scorpions, jellyfish, poisonous flowers. My orientation as a young newcomer to a Caribbean island began with a litany of how to avoid being stung or cut or poisoned or burned. At age four, I learned to shake out my shoes to check for scorpions. I learned to back away from the pink blooms of jellyfish in the water. I learned to recognize the dark, flitting form of the stingray. I learned don’t step on a sea urchin, don’t eat an ackee raw, don’t taste the milky sap of the oleander plant.

Review: Farewell, Aylis: A Non-Traditional Novel in Three Works

July 30, 2019 Reviews

Book by AKRAM AYLISLI

Translated from Russian by KATHERINE E. YOUNG

Review by OLGA ZILBERBOURG

Contemporary books emerging from post-Soviet countries often deal with the dehumanizing effect of the region’s systems of government on its victims, seeking to trace and partially redeem the psychological and physical harm many have suffered. For understandable reasons, few authors care to look at the perpetrators, at the people who committed murders and mass murders, informed on and denounced their neighbors. Yet, in the post-Soviet reality, often it’s these people and their descendants who have risen to the top, taken charge of the new nation states, and written their laws.