Which of the two writes the poem?
He who sleeps waking with the cypresses
of India or you who live enamored
of the streets of Buenos Aires
I’m going to build a window in the middle of the street in order to not feel lonely. I will plant a tree in the middle of the street, and it will grow to the astonishment of the passersby. I’ll raise birds that will never flit to other trees, and they will remain perched and chirping to the surrounding noise and general disinterest. I’ll grow an ocean framed within the window.
By DELIA VELASQUEZ and JULIA LICHTBLAU
I met Delia Velasquez in the late 1990s through her daughter, Ericka Rubin, who was a friend of our babysitter. My daughter, Zoë, and son, Gabriel, were adopted from Guatemala, and she and her husband, Alberto, both from Guatemala, were curious to meet us. They had three sons, and we became friends. One blistering July day in 2005, I brought Gabriel over to play. Ericka, Doña Delia, and I sat in their Brooklyn kitchen, talking and cooking, and the subject of marriage came up. I mentioned my grandmother was married at fourteen.
Book by HARUKI MURAKAMI
Translated JAY RUBIN and PHILIP GABRIEL
Reviewed by
Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 is no meager feat. At nine hundred twenty-five pages, published as three volumes in Japan, two in the UK, and one here in the US, it is the grandest novel he has yet undertaken.
The novel primarily alternates between the stories of two characters, Aomame (the name means “green peas” in Japanese) and Tengo.
Aomame works as a fitness instructor, but is also a secret assassin. Originally motivated by the murder of a childhood friend, who died at the hands of her abusive husband, Aomame created a weapon that leaves no traces. She is recruited by a wealthy widow, who runs a safe-house for battered women, to use this weapon to take the lives of abusive men who cannot be incapacitated through other means. On the way to complete one of the widow’s jobs, Aomame is forced to take a detour on foot off a traffic-jammed highway. After climbing down a rickety service staircase, Aomame realizes the world around her has changed. The policemen carry different weapons and there is a slaughter that she never remembers reading about in the newspapers. Two moons hang in the sky. She is no longer in the 1984 she knows; she dubs her new reality 1Q84.
Translated by CHRISTOPHER BAKKEN & JOANNA ELEFTHERIOU
SUICIDES
A wave of suicides has swept over our battalion. Those who attempt suicide are deceived if they think they may do with themselves as they please. From now on, I order company commanders to carry out preliminary inquiries, interrogating anyone who has attempted suicide. The results of such inquiries will be sent to me immediately and official indictments will be remanded to a Special Military Court.
–Daily orders of Captain Commander Vasilopoulos Antonios on March 6, 1948.
Translated by JACQUELYN POPE
In love everything is possible. You doggedly
paper a tree with roses
and say: this was the place
and everyone who passes should
Translated by PHILIP NIKOLAYEV
I wore the same checkered coat for six winters in a row. It had once been warm and even elegant in its way, but then developed holes and faded. Whether because the cotton lining had become matted or because the outer cloth had worn thin from wind and rain, the garment no longer gave any warmth. I felt cold even in reasonably warm weather. Wind would penetrate it in unpredictable spots, now chilling my waist, now freezing my shoulder blades, as if someone had thrown a piece of ice behind my collar. When one time I arrived at the Kolosovs all soaked and melancholy with hunger, Ivan hung my coat on the kitchen radiator and scratched the back of his head.
By JUAN RULFO
Translated by ILAN STAVANS and HAROLD AUGENBRAUM
I’m sitting by the sewer waiting for the frogs to come out. Last night, while we were having dinner, they started kicking up a huge ruckus and didn’t stop singing until dawn. That’s what my godmother says, too: that the frogs’ shouting scared her sleep away. And she’d like to sleep now. That’s why she told me to sit here, near the sewer, waiting with a board in my hand so that I can smash to smithereens any frog that hops out … Frogs are green all over, except for their bellies. Toads are black. My godmother’s eyes are black, too. Frogs are good to eat. You shouldn’t eat toads; but I’ve eaten them, too, though you’re not supposed to, and they taste the same as frogs.
By ROBERT BAGG
Harper Perennial published The Complete Plays of Sophocles: A New Translation by Robert Bagg and James Scully, on July 26, 2011. The book includes all seven extant plays by Sophocles, two of which will be included in the Norton Anthology of World Literature. The following essay was derived from Robert Bagg’s talk at the Coolidge Presidential Library and Museum in Northampton, MA.
With burning eyes
she rose before dusk
the mountains beneath her
and all the hills
filling like window panes with liquid suns
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