We’ll Not Die in Paris

The Poetry of Natalka Bilotserkivets

Natalka Bilotserkivets is a poet whose work should be better known in the United States and Western Europe, her themes as ageless and timely as love and alienation, as Picasso and 9/11.  Inspired by the great Russian poets Blok, Pasternak, Akhmatova, and Mandestam, as well as by the French symbolists Baudelaire and Verlaine, her poetry nevertheless remains highly accessible to the Western reader.  “Life for Bilotserkivets,” writes Gerard Rasch, “has an indestructible integrity, with a hint of a mystic unity in which the sacred and the profane, the rose and the worm, the stench of urine and the aroma of spring can exist side by side…”

Here are two favorites of mine:

Hotel Central

for anyone

in one of the cities where at an uncertain time
capricious fate acknowledges us
where in the evening you can hear jazz in the restaurants
in the morning — bells from the gothic arches
water-lilies bloom in the canals there
people drink coffee there and later on beer
and the bicycles of radiant schoolgirls fly
in their sweet way in flocks

their backpacks bright and light
their legs long their hips slim
my God we once were like them too
ten twenty thirty years ago
but cast aside your itinerant pity
there's a Hotel Central in every city —
for those just like you who are no one for no one

here you'll unpack your ordinary things
remove the contacts from your eyes
wash your flesh get your drink
push the button of the pay TV —
there's everything you'd want; and how you'd want it too;
shut your eyes enter and take
nocturnal music knows no bounds
in the chambers of your Hotel Central

at three AM God like Bosch will come
to Hotel Central from the heavenly halls
with insects playing clarinets
with mosquitoes drinking submissive blood
with frogs and snails;
with fish, too;
and all your love —
is just caviar in the repositories of hell

just the struggle of a puny and a miserable slave
spread all over the walls,
of a human being — with a smiting Spirit
he sculpts and bends your body
then throws it into a tub of dung
removing it with his two fingers
shaking it looking and listening

like the first look of tender compassion
like the first touch of a somber "I love you"
like the burst of sun in the folds of a curtain —
Hotel Central meets the new dawn

and every day is like your last chance
and every night as though for the last time
and over the lily-flowered canals
the bicycles
of anxious schoolgirls fly

Grand Hotel Central
Rotterdam, June 22, 2002

© 2002, Natalka Bilotserkivets 

We'll Not Die in Paris

I will die in Paris on Thursday evening.

                                        — Cesar Vallejo

You forget the lines smells colors and sounds
sight weakens       hearing fades       simple pleasures pass
you lift your face and hands toward your soul
but to high and unreachable summits it soars

what remains is only the depot       the last stop
the gray foam of goodbyes lathers and swells
already it washes over my naked palms
its awful sweet warmth seeps into my mouth
love alone remains though better off gone

in a provincial bed I cried till exhausted
through the window       a scraggly rose-colored lilac spied
the train moved on       spent lovers stared
at the dirty shelf heaving beneath your flesh
outside a depot's spring passed       grew quiet

we'll not die in Paris       I know now for sure
but in a sweat and tear-stained provincial bed
no one will serve us our cognac       I know
we won't be saved by kisses
under the Pont Mirabeau murky circles won't fade

too bitter we cried       abused nature
we loved too fiercely
                        our lovers shamed
too many poems we wrote
                        disregarding poets
they'll not let us die in Paris
and the alluring water
                        under the Pont Mirabeau
will be encircled with barricades

*Translated by Dzvinia Orlowsky

From Three Worlds: New Ukrainian Writing.
Special issue (#12) in the series of Glas : New Russian Writing. Ed. by Ed Hogan
Zephyr Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 1996

Here, for those interested, is Bilotserkivets reading her poetry (in Ukrainian for those who know it; for those who don’t, listen anyway):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo4iDhL77sU

Natalka Bilotserkivets was born in Ukraine in 1954 and holds a degree in Ukrainian literature from Kiev University.  Some of her poetry can be found in the excellent compilation New European Poets edited by Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer and published by Graywolf Press (http://www.graywolfpress.org.)

Peter Adam Nash

An Artist of the Quiet World: Natsume Sōseki

The Gate

 

How do you like your books?  Large or small? Loud or soft? Full of pretense or as plain as a Quaker Meeting-House? 

 

There is the literature of agoraphila: Moby-Dick for example, or Doctor Zhivago, the open sea or the endless tundra, each swallowing up a human drama that derives, in part, from the vastness of the space where it occurs.  Or War and Peace, where space and time and the weight of history conspire to create the greatest novel of agoraphilia.  Victor Serge, 2666 (the world as graveyard), Ha Jin's War Trash, Thomas Glavinic's Night Work and David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress--where -philia tips over into -phobia as solitary characters wander aimlessly through  a world otherwise devoid of human beings.  The agoraphilic novel mostly terrifies as it removes the sense of scale and proportion that was the primary attraction of the genre in the first place.  The novel's precursors--epic poems, story collections by Chaucer and Boccaccio, mythic tales of travel--gave way in the eighteenth century to the emerging bourgeois world of domesticity, feminine consciousness, claustrophilia--to Richardson and Rousseau and Goethe.

 

My own preference is for books about small things, quiet books where nothing much happens--Proust, of course, is the demi-god of this subspecies of fiction--also Robert Musil, Robert Walser (The Assistant), all of Georges Perec, David Foster Wallace's Pale King (a book about boredom--perfect!), and nearly every Japanese novel I have ever read--from Genji (a summer's worth of nothing much) to minimalists like Kawabata and Oe.

 

Those who love their literature quiet--string quartets rather than symphonies--will love, as I did, Natsume Soseki's The Gate, a zen-like story of a married couple, Sosuke and Oyone, who live within the tiny confines of their small house, their garden, and their childless, but loving, marriage.  No problem--of money, of filial relations, of health or happiness--is important enough to require an immediate solution; for the most part, Sosuke, a melancholy, fatalistic office-worker, is content to let life go on around him without intervention.  He's indolent, Oblomovian, not one to say either 'no' or 'yes,' but always 'not yet.'  He believes in destiny, and his is to be no one; and yet he is devoid of envy and rancor--it would be too much trouble to feel such things, and he prefers to watch the world from the comfort of his veranda.   

 

At one point in the novel, Sosuke's younger and far more ambitious brother, Koroku, moves into the tiny "six-mat" room in Sosuke's house...there isn't money to send Koroku to university, and no one has a clue as to what to do about the young man's future until fate intervenes. Here we have Sosuke, just returned from work, inquiring about his brother:

 

"After a few sips of hot tea Oyone had brought him, [Sosuke] asked, 'Is Koroku home?'

     It was of course certain that his brother was there. But not the faintest sound could be heard from the six-mat room, and it seemed impossible that there could be anyone inside. As Oyone rose to call Koroku, Sosuke stopped her: There was no need to speak to him right now. Then, burrowing under the quilt attached to the portable kotatsu [a low table, covered by a quilt, with a heater underneath], he lay stretched out on his side. Twilight had already made its presence felt in this room, where the shoji all faced the steep embankment. His arm pillowed beneath his head, he simply gazed into the dark, confined space, his mind a blank."

 

With Sosuke, one might be tempted to think of Bartleby or Hamlet, but that would be inaccurate: these figures are still and inactive in the midst of activity--Sosuke is the calm center of no storm, of a world that is sequestered, monastic, unchanging (ironically the book culminates in Sosuke visiting a zen monastery--as if a respite were required from doing nothing). Aside from the neighbor's daughter's piano practice, it appears no one does much of anything behind the gated world of the novel.  Perhaps Soseki, who wrote the book in 1910, was nostalgically invoking pre-Meiji Japan, a world before modernization and the urban displacement of traditional Japanese life. 

 

The Gate reminded me of a quiet summer I spent just outside of Tokyo as a guest in the home of an older Japanese couple. We could not speak to one another, and, in the evenings, the three of us would sit, in unbroken silence, staring out into the garden, bamboo entwined with delicate pink hibiscis  (I took them as such), smoking and sipping tea. 

 

 

 

The Gate is available through New York Review Books, with a typically intelligent and helpful introduction by Pico Iyer, translated by William F. Sibley. 

 

http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

Paying Attention: Hahm Dong-seon, Choi Young-mi, and Others

Since I have been half-asleep all week, tonight I want to read in order to pay attention:

This is from "Record of a Journey," by the contemporary Korean poet Hahm Dong-seon:

If I go to my old home,
If I go to my old home on this journey,                        
I will see the doorway where we once stood
Gauging our height with a notched string
Gone slack by now like an old clothesline
   anchored to a pole.

And in this train that rattles with speed
I watch the wind-pulled stalks of corn
Lean their weight toward the passenger cars
That stir the same insects I fanned away
   when I was a child--
....

And this poem, by another contemporary Korean poet, Choi Young-mi:

Some Reincarnation

I do not believe the proposition
that spirits come around in April
as buds, as flowers.

I do not believe the poem that claims
the shades that left the earth in May
weep dolefully, changed to wind.

I cannot believe the song
that says the young one (I was standing right there)
that fell on the rowdy street in June
has now assumed the form of a flower, or wind,
  or anything else.
I cannot even dream it.

Back from the dead, this morning opens its eyes
with minimum travel,
no need to roam like a flower, like wind.

When the desk lamp flickers on
a riot of voices rushes straight for me.


The idea of being pulled into another life, or into a memory of another life--'has now assumed the form of a flower'--reminds me of Walt Whitman's "To A Stranger," well known, but worth quoting:

Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,

You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as of a dream,)

I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,

All is recall'd as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,

You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,

I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours only nor left my body mine only,

You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,

I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone,

I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,

I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

"I am not to speak to you"-- this is also Choi Young-mi, from "The Mind's Mediterranean"

....I'm waiting for the perfection of silence.
Like the noon sun that departs
after warming my forehead,                  
like the fog that clears quickly
after its slow rising.

These lines lead me to Ruth Stone, "From the Porch." A wonderful poet, just looking:

What is a wild tree
but the tops of the maples                                                           
but the tops of the maples
when a storm
brawls up the mountain.
Or chokecherry smothering
the barn with its interlocking roots,
Or the entire mountain in September--
yellow and scarlet
and then turning brown
from the mountaintop,
slowly descending in front,
the dirt road
swirling past in a flutter of leaves.

All simple poems--from Seoul and Brooklyn and Vermont--records of what we might see if we can remain awake and pay attention.  Wendell Berry puts the matter of paying attention about as well as any poet I know:

What We Need Is Here

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

 Poems by Hahm Don-seon and Choi Young-mi quoted from the translations of Yu Jung-yul and James Kimbrell, Three Poets of Modern Korea, published by Sarabande Books http://www.sarabandebooks.org/

George Ovitt (2/8/13)














 

“Minha Terra”: Ivo’s Brazil

Snakes’ Nest or A Tale Badly Told

But sometimes, it was as if the sea did not exist, and he lived among stones, in a nest of snakes.

“During a dictatorship, all narratives are poorly told…” writes Lêdo Ivo in reference to the rambling, unreliable narration of this short novel. Indeed, as University of New Mexico professor Jon Tolman explains in his helpful introduction, Snakes’ Nest is set in Brazil in the 1940’s, during what was known as the “New State,” a semi-fascist experiment in caudillismo, a cult of personality around the charismatic leader, Getúlio Vargas, that lasted from 1930-1945.  At heart an allegory of good and evil, this “sunny nightmare” rises like a miasma from the streets of Maceió—from the bars and brothels and sugar depots that distinguish this seedy port city in  northeastern Brazil that even today is renowned for its rampant corruption and violence.  As described in a 2011 article in The Economist, “The road from Maceió, the capital of Alagoas state, to its airport passes luxury-car showrooms and shops selling outsize Jacuzzis. In the central reservation, indigent families live under plastic sheeting. Even by the standards of Brazil's north-east, Alagoas is scarred by poverty and extreme inequality. With 107 murders per 100,000 people, Maceió is also the most violent state capital in Brazil, just as, with 60 murders per 100,000, Alagoas is the country's most violent state. It is a place of sugar and cattle, where the sugarcane cutters settle scores with fists and knives and the well-connected escape punishment by using contract killers instead.”  It is this latter world that serves as the setting for this collection of powerfully rendered vignettes about the workaday men and women of Maceió—the lawyers, gangsters, sailors, poets, prostitutes, and nuns—a story, a novel (though Ivo denied it the name) in which the narration flits like a hummingbird from character to character, from place to place, sipping here, drinking there, darting back and forth in time as if drunk on the nectar it finds. In an age when more and more American writers are forced by the market to answer to the same dull master, that is, plot over character, murder and mystery over language and symbol and theme, this novel comes as a positive relief. 

Ivo’s heterodox approach to storytelling, to fiction, should come as no surprise to anyone who knows of him, for he was a poet, first and foremost, a writer who flirted with Modernism before turning his back on it to embrace more classical, more traditional forms. One feels the poetry in his language and rhythms, in the weight and balance of his words, yet there is nothing fussy or self-conscious about his style. Even in English his phrasing has the blunt simplicity, the force and gravitas, of prophesy or scripture, as in this passage describing the moments—the minutes, the seconds—before one of his characters, a manager of a local airline agency, blows out his brains:

It was raining—it was a rain of words.  The wind blew—it was a wind of words.  The world wasn’t made of skies, clouds, cities, sugarcane mills, ports, dams, yards, old cars, streets, power plants, houses, men.  It was made only and exclusively of words—and the people spoke in words. Even the paving stones of Maceió were made of words.  Alexandre Viana ate words, slept words, worked words.  And he felt more alone than ever, as if the very weapon that sketched itself before his eyes would turn into a word.

While Snakes’ Nest is set in the Maceió of Ivo’s childhood, what he calls “minha terra” or “my land,” it is important to note that the period in which the novel was written, that is, the early 1970’s, was actually a more politically repressive time for Brazilian artists and writers than that of the quasi-fascist caudillismo of Getúlio Vargas, evidence enough that such authoritarianism is perfectly at home in the rich Brazilian soil. What makes this significant, what makes it  especially poignant to me, is that I have only just now finished reading the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s book, Brazil: A Land of the Future, a gushing, 250 page hymn to the nation that had given him home and sanctuary as a Jew in flight from Hitler’s Europe. The picture he paints of early 1940’s Brazil and its future in the world is just short of utopian, an incredible feat, given Vargas’ staunchly corporatist, right-wing, anti-Marxist politics, a tyranny over thought and expression that included censorship and the harassment, torture, and execution of leftists.  Somehow, for all of Zweig’s perspicacity as a writer and exile, he had failed to see the forest for the trees. Blinded to the rise of fascism there, in Brazil (in the selfsame period described by Ivo’s novel), by his desperate need to keep faith with the human race, to believe in the possibility of a paradise on earth, Zweig ends his introduction to this Panglossian tribute by writing: “For that reason, one of our best hopes for a future civilizing and pacification of a world that has been desolated by hate and madness is based upon the existence of Brazil.”  That Brazil was indeed a sort of paradise to Zweig is clear; what is also clear—a fact perhaps only acknowledged by Zweig himself on the eve of his suicide in 1942—is that, by the time he’d finished writing Brazil: A Land of the Future, the Serpent was already in. 

Here, to conclude, is one of Ivo’s better known poems:

The Sound of the Sea

Sunday afternoon, I return to the old Maceió cemetery
where my dead never stop dying
their consumptive and cancerous deaths
that penetrate the ebb tide stench and constellations
with coughs, groans, imprecations
and their dark mucus
and in silence I summon them to return to this life
where from childhood on they slowly lived
with the bitterness of long days fixed to their monotonous existence
and the fear of dying of those who witness the close of day
when, after rain, the ants are scattered
across the maternal ground of Alagoas and can no longer fly.
I say to my dead: Arise, come back to this unfinished day
that has need of you, of your persistent cough and your tired gestures
and your footsteps on Maceió’s crooked lanes. Return to those insipid dreams
and windows opening on to suffocating heat.

On Sunday afternoon, among mausoleums
that seem suspended by the wind
in the bluish air,
the silence of the dead tells me they won’t come back.
No use calling them. From the place where they are now, there’s no return.
Just names carved in stone. Just names. And the sound of the sea.

© Translation: 2010, Alexis Levitin

Lêdo Ivo (1924-2012) was a Brazilian journalist, poet, novelist, and essayist who was awarded the prestigious Brazilian Walpmap Prize in 1973.  Born in Maceió, Alagoas, Brazil, the son of Floriano and Euridice Placido de Araujo Ivo, he later married Maria Leda Sarmento de Medeiros and fathered three children.  Ivo’s first volume of poems — As Imaginações — granted him national recognition in 1944. His other works of include Ode and Elegy, Ode to Twilight, Birth of the Sonnet, Language, and The Common Soldier.  In addition to Snakes’ Nest, he write three other novels: Alliances, The Road without Adventure, and The Death of Brazil.  Snakes’ Nest is published by New Directions Books. 

Peter Adam Nash

Vampires, Curlicues, Lumps, and Insula Dei

I was already dyspeptic, feverish, out of sorts this morning when I came upon Michiko Kakutani's review of Karen Russell's new book, Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Knopf).  I said to my dogs--"Guys, why does the lead book-chat person of the New York Times--arguably the most influential critic in America--devote her column to yet another book about the undead?"

"A vampire couple who live in an Italian lemon grove, a pack of girls sent away by their werewolf parent to be educated by nuns, a minotaur and his [sic] human family joining the great westward American migration . . . "

Not that I dislike vampires--not when the greatest actor of all time, Klaus Kinski, gave life (so to speak) to the dead in the 1979 Werner Herzog remake of my all-time favorite horror film, Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, the genuinely freaky 1922 German Expressionist version of Bram Stoker's Dracula directed by F.W. Murnau, starring the positively blood-curdling Max Schreck as Count Orlok (I thought, a great name for a pug).  But these guys--Kinski (above right) and Schreck (below) were real vampires--they weren't pretty boys and nubile starlets with a dribble of fake blood on their chins--these two were the stuff of nightmares, all those odd-ball Herzog close-ups, and that limbic shadowland Murnau used to evoke the Freudian netherworlds of human fears come to life.  Kinski gave me the creeps in everything he was in--he looked like a demented David Bowie--and in make-up, hell, he was my id come to life. 


So: it's bad enough that even vampires have to be metrosexuals now, but then Ms. Kakutani goes on to criticize Russell's style--style?  I said to the dogs: "This is a book about vampires and we're worrying about style?"

"Vampires in the Lemon Grove shows Ms. Russell more in control of her craft than ever: the occasional curlicues of language that distracted the reader's attention [!] in her earlier books have been tamed in these pages, and the structural lumps in 'Swamplandia' have given way here to finely hammered stories that have an organic shape and speed." [my emphasis]

Organic speed? Hammered stories? I liked Karen Russell's Swamplandia! and even enjoyed the "curlicues of language"--that is, the style and voice--in which the book was written. (I like Karen Russell, okay?)  I mentioned to Rosie, our heeler, that language and "lumps" are the whole point--"What's this woman want," I said to Rosie, "who doesn't like a lumpy story?" What would Ms. Kakutani make of any random sentence from Kertesz or Bernhard or Robert Walser--talk about lumpiness!  I remember when MK trashed David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest for being too long, self-indulgent, inorganic. Why do we read if not to be scared out of our wits by great prose, by style and language that clots up like the blessed little formless doughballs in our oatmeal?  Do we want our vampires well-groomed, with two-hundred dollar haircuts? Boys and girls out of Vogue and GQ?  No: I want creepy Klaus, drooling out of the deformed hole that was his mouth, sniffing around his victims like a rabid dog--talk about lumps!

So I put the paper down, went to work, and as soon as I could, I reread a story by the great Dutch writer Nescio (Jan Frederik Grönloh, 1882-1961) called "Insula Dei."  This story is collected, with a handful of Nescio's other writings, in Amsterdam Stories, published by New York Review Books.  No vampires are to be found in this little gem of a tale about finding God in war time and trying to find meaning in memory:

 "You want to do something, make a difference. But these aren't the first eventful times I've lived through and if I'm granted even more years then with God's help I will most likely get to my third war. The silent course of things takes its silent, implacable course, the little man who is a hero today will tomorrow, when peace comes, be scolded in his stupid little job or maybe won't have a job at all and will turn back into the useless piece of clockwork he used to be." 

  Not all sentences go straight, not all writers eschew lumps, not all readers want their prose forged....Not all of the undead are vampires.  


Grönloh was born in Amsterdam, was director of a trading company, had four daughters, and wrote just a handful of short tales in what is considered, by those who know Dutch, to be the finest modern examples of that language.  The NYRB has a nice introduction by Joseph O'Neill whose Netherland (2008) is splendid--a great novel about New York City and cricket.         http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/amsterdam-stories/ 

Eros Mexicano

 The Colonist

by Michael Schmidt

Of late I’ve grown weary of the standard Bildungsroman, the often highly autobiographical, nearly always confessional coming-of-age-style story set in some quaint, typically southern town, complete with its cast of local eccentrics, its folksy wisdom, and its often shrink-wrapped epiphanies about innocence, race, and sex. While the tradition in this country is a rich one and not to be disparaged (one has only to think of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye), and while my favorite novel in the world, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, is nothing if not a protracted and supremely self-indulgent Bildungsroman, it was nevertheless with reluctance that I picked up a copy of Michael Schmidt’s novel The Colonist in a second-hand bookstore last winter. Three things had alerted me to a possible difference: the novel's  setting (Mexico), its publisher (The Gay Men’s Press) and the language (original, poetic, adroit).  Intrigued, I bought the book for $3.95, though it took me nearly a year to actually read it.  I am happy I did.

Set in the town of San Jacinto in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, The Colonist tells the story of a sickly English boy growing up in Mexico (in the de facto absence of his aloof and wealthy parents) in the nurturing company of the family’s devoted housekeeper, Doña Constanza, and a handsome local orphan named Chayo, the narrator’s friend, ‘brother,’ and romantic obsession. Remarkably, there is nothing hackneyed, nothing saccharine, in Schmidt’s treatment of the fraught and tender affinity between these boys. While clearly autobiographical, and every bit a story about the painful disenchantment of youth, The Colonist offers readers a fresh and moving exploration of the seemingly intractable divisions of class, race, religion, and sexual orientation, as the narrator is driven to act with increasing desperation to safeguard his relationship with Chayo, to fend off time itself in order to keep their little ‘green island’ intact.  Told in retrospect, from the vantage of an older man now settled in England, the novel is a compelling portrait of one’s man’s attempt to find completion in the past.

Here, to conclude, to entice you, is the novel’s very fine first page:

     Often even now when I wake up I think I’m there.  I retain the error of a few moments, half-consciously—seem to smell the conflicting scents and hear the bristling of tropical foliage, pretend that I am not alone in bed, extend my hand—into vacancy, and let my eyes fall open on English daylight.

     I still keep the habit of sleeping with the curtains drawn back and the windows thrown wide, even in winter.  I explain it as a hunger for fresh air.  But it is more a chronic expectation, as I lie gazing at the blue or cloudy blank framed by pelmet, curtains and sill.  It’s futile as the childhood prayers of an atheist, which recur to him instinctively and are half said before he catches himself out.  Sometimes an inert white moon lies against a daylit sky like a tiny cloud without a drop of water.

     In the disorientation of early morning I return there—because the events were incomplete.  It was a place and time alive as little has been since.  I spend hours interrogating it, like an historian puzzling at a fragmentary chronicle, who takes the problems home because they will not let him go.  Finally he decides to understand it at all costs, if only to be shut of them at last; he packs away his books, travels backwards in time, takes boat to the place where the lost events occurred;-- and there, in a suggestive climate, among ruins and citrus trees, in the dusty roads, among high white-washed rooms, in the cafés and bars of the descendants—there in the very face of change—he creates the matter missing from the text.  It is not a form of evidence his professional colleagues would countenance, but something better, whose truth the pulse acknowledges, the body understands uncritically, regardless of disciplines of mind.  As he approaches, it recedes, drawing him further on—and into it, so that in the end he finds an absence, or himself, or perhaps in a rare moment (and only for a moment) the thing he sought.  He has discovered that nothing but detail is ever lost for good.  The forms survive in present forms—flawed, as years pass, the flaws grow deeper. Nothing changes, each thing becomes in time more itself, defined, uniquely broken.

Michael Schmidt OBE FRSL is a Mexican-British poet, novelist, scholar, and publisher who was born in Mexico City in 1947. He is founder (1969) and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press and a founder (1973) and general editor of PN Review.

Peter Adam Nash

Philip Schultz: Two Poems

Did you ever drop a beloved book into the bathtub?  And you weren't even bathing?

While he's drying, here's two from Philip Schultz's Failure, appropriately a Mariner Book, from Houghton, Mifflin (2007).


What I Like and Don't Like

I like to say hello and goodbye.
I like to hug but not shake hands.
I prefer to wave or nod. I enjoy
the company of strangers pushed
together in elevators or subways.
I like talking to cabdrivers
but not receptionists. I like
not knowing what to say.
I like talking to people I know
but care nothing about. I like
inviting anyone anywhere.
I like hearing my opinions
tumble out of my mouth
like toddlers tied together
while crossing the street,
trusting they won't be squashed
by fate. I like greeting card cliches
but not dressing up or down.
I like being appropriate
but not all the time.
I could continue with more examples
but I'd rather give too few
than too many. The thought
of no one listening anymore--
I like that least of all.

The Truth

You can hide it like a signature                                    
or birthmark but it's always there
in the greasy light of your dreams,
the knots your body makes at night,
the sad innuendos of your eyes,
whispering insidious asides in every
room you cannot remain inside. It's
there in the unquiet ideas that drag and
plead one lonely argument at a time,
and those who own a little are contrite
and fearful of those who own too much,
but owning none takes up your life.
It cannot be replaced by a house or a car,
a husband or wife, but can be ignored,
denied, and betrayed, until the last day,
when you pass yourself on the street
and recognize the agreeable life you
were afraid to lead, and turn away.

South African Writers: Alex la Guma and Zakes Mda

In my third year of graduate school at the University of Massachusetts, I had the good fortune to take a course in the "African Novel" given by one of its greatest practitioners--Chinua Achebe.  That year, 1975, Achebe was invited to give a talk on African writing, during which he memorably denounced Joseph Conrad as a "bloody racist."  Several of the assembled English professors, inclined as they were to see the study of literature as divorced from politics, were incensed at the effrontery of the remarks made by the regal and charismatic Achebe--after all, Conrad was a sacrosanct figure, unassailable, certainly beyond criticism by an invited (African) guest.  [The text of Achebe's notorious talk is now included in the Norton edition of Heart of Darkness. So it goes.]


It was under Achebe's guidance that I first read Alex la Guma, Dennis Brutus, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, and Nuruddin Farah (nearly all of whom, from different nations, spent time in prison for their writing)--writers whose work was steeped in the realities of colonialism, racism, poverty, and violence. All at once my eyes were opened to another world; or, as I have since come to think of it, from that moment I ceased looking through a darkened glass and saw things, at last, in the clear light of day.

Alex la Guma's In the Fog of the Season's End, published in 1972, is a classic of anti-apartheid literature.  La Guma spent years in prison before leaving South Africa for London in 1966.

"What the enemy himself has created, these will become battle-grounds, and what we see now is only the tip of an iceberg of resentment against an ignoble regime, the tortured victims of hatred and humiliation. And those who persist in hatred and humiliation must prepare. Let them prepare hard and fast--they do not have long to wait." (In the Fog...)

 La Guma died in 1985, missing, tragically, and by just a few years, the historic moment, on February 2, 1990, when F.W. de Klerk, president of South Africa, announced that Nelson Mandela would be released from Robben Island after twenty-seven years--that moment was twenty-three years ago today. When Mandela walked away from Verster Prison on the eleventh of February the whole world watched, knowing that the end of the apartheid state in South Africa had come.

But not the end, surely, of South Africa's woes, including problems of race.  It is a contemporary South African, Zakes Mda, who has taken up the story of black South Africa where La Guma and others* left off.  The remarkably prolific Mda, (b. 1948) has examined the transitional period of South African history with a sensibility attuned to both the tragic and comic.  In Ways of Dying, his first novel (published in 1995), an impoverished but resourceful Toloki invents a career for himself as a professional mourner--and the many funerals he attends (deaths through mischance and random violence are not uncommon in the townships) allow Mda to explore with  compassion and pathos the plight of South Africa's poverty-stricken black majority.  As I read Ways of Dying over the past couple of days,  I was reminded again and again of a remarkable work of reportage I read late last year by Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, a grim and strangely (sometimes) uplifting story of the lives of men and women and mostly children who live atop a vast sea of fetid garbage next to Mumbai's international airport. (The surprising sales of Boo's book cheered me a bit about the future of publishing, but not for long).   As in Mda, Boo reveals, without editorializing, the desperate measures the poor must take to gain a foothold on the unwelcoming edges of modern "developing" nations. I thought again while reading Mda of how foolish it is to subscribe to theories of a "flat earth" or to believe in the glorious future of globalization. Instead of "false dawns" (John Gray's term for the delusions of modern capitalists) one reads Mda with a sense of wonder at the resourcefulness and pure spunk of people who have nothing--neither possessions nor hope.  Toloki's memories of his home village allow Mda to evoke the traditional life of the townships, which is no better than life in the cities.  And yet, gently, Mda allows his characters a glimmer of hope:

"Somehow the shack [in which Toloki has settled] seems to glow in the light of the moon, as if the plastic colours are fluorescent.  Crickets and other insects of the night are attracted by the glow. They contribute their chirps to the general din of the settlement. Tyres are still burning. Tyres can burn for a very long time. The smell of burning rubber fills the air. But this time it is not mingled with the sickly stench of roasting human flesh. Just pure wholesome rubber."

Just pure wholesome rubber.  Not much, but something.



The works of la Guma and most other African writers of note are available from Heinemann's The African Writers' Series--or at least they were.  The series appears to have been discontinued, but many titles are available on-line (Heinemann appears to have been bought out by an educational publisher). Mda's books, or many of them, are readily available in attractive editions from Picador, a division of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux--http://www.picador.com/

*I have chosen to focus in this piece on two black South African writers; this is not to gainsay the power of the critique of South African society by its great "white" writers, J.M. Coetzee, Andre Brink, Nadine Gordimer, Breyten Breytenbach, and many others.

George Ovitt (2/2/13)

Zeruya Shalev

Husband and Wife

When finally I put down this novel I was trembling. Described in The Scotsman as an “emotional white-knuckle ride,” this story plunges the reader deep into the heart of a rapidly disintegrating marriage in present-day Jerusalem. In prose so accomplished, so stirring, at times so achingly beautiful that one is tempted to drop one’s guard, to sit back, relax, and surrender oneself to its rhythms, Shalev is relentless in her determination to draw the reader inside the very skin of her protagonist, a mother and social worker named Na’ama Newman, as she registers the bruising daily trauma—each banal and horrific detail—of her imploding love life and family.   

The simple plot is set in motion one morning when Na’ama’s husband, Udi, a healthy, active man, wakes up at home after a solitary outing in the desert to discover that he cannot move his legs.  Unable to find a physical, medical explanation for his paralysis, they are forced to recognize that the problem lies elsewhere, in their marriage itself, their once-happy life together attacked from within by an aggressive emotional cancer.  From there, their relationship quickly spirals out of control, fueled—as fire by gasoline—by years of pent-up disappointment, longing, recrimination, and fear. Told from Na’ama’s acute, often startling perspective, Husband and Wife is the story of one woman’s desperate, exasperating, sometimes valiant attempt to save her marriage and family, to check the momentum of what at points seems as terrible, as implacable as fate.  While the novel might just as well have been set in Shanghai, Durban, or Madrid, so little do we see of modern Israel, so broadly human is the story’s appeal, one cannot help but suspect that this tangled and septic relationship is somehow reflective of the anguish and violence of Jerusalem itself.

Grim, depressing as this sounds—and is (Why would anyone but a masochist read such stuff? Or recommend it?), the novel is also singularly exhilarating in its pacing and candor, in its fearless—thereby hopeful—depiction of relationships and love.  “Husband and Wife is not a book for the faint-hearted,” writes critic Jamie Jauncey, “but for anyone prepared…to experience with almost hallucinatory vividness the complex and conflicting emotions of a modern woman dealing with a disintegrating relationship, there can be no finer opportunity.”  If, like Kafka, you believe that a book should be an axe for the frozen sea inside us, then pick up a copy of this one.  It will shake you to your core.

Zerya Shalev was born at Kibbutz Kinneret. She has an MA in Biblical studies and works as a literary editor at Keter Publishing House. Shalev has published five novels, a book of poetry and a children`s book. Her novels Love Life, Husband and Wife, and Late Family (Terra) have received critical acclaim both in Israel and abroad and have been bestsellers in several countries. Love Life has been included in Der Spiegel`s prestigious list of "20 Best Novels in World Literature" over the last 40 years, together with the work of Saul Bellow, J. M. Coetzee and Philip Roth. Husband and Wife is included in the French Fnac list of the "200 Best Books of the Decade." Shalev has been awarded the Book Publishers Association’s Gold and Platinum Prizes, the Corine Prize (Germany, 2001), the Amphi Award (France, 2003), the ACUM Prize three times (1997, 2003, 2005), and the French Wizo Prize (2007).  Husband and Wife was also nominated for the Femina Prize (France, 2002). A feature film of Love Life, produced in Germany, was released in 2008. Her books have been published abroad in 25 languages.  Husband and Wife (‏בעל ואישה‎) was translated by Dalya Bilu and is published by Grove Press, New York.

Peter Adam Nash

Veronica Volkow

Years ago, during a long sojourn in Mexico City, I became acquainted with the poetry of Veronica Volkow.  I first heard her name in conjunction with her translations, into Spanish, of Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and, among prose writers, Victor Serge and Leon Trotsky.  I was able to read a handful of her poems in the fine anthology published by Copper Canyon Press, Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry, edited by Monica de la Torre and Michael Wiegers--a book I often turn to for relief from the increasingly obscure and pointless verse featured in the notable American poetry journals. Volkow and many of her contemporaries (she was born in 1955) write challenging poetry that is engaged with politics and history and political traditions within Latin America--the obvious influences on Volkow are Octavio Paz and César Vallejo, whose volume Trilce (1922) brought the aesthetic of surrealism to Latin American poetry; other influences on Volkow are mystics like St. John of the Cross and, especially, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.  Bishop was also a central figure for Volkow, and she has noted that Bishop's sense of the opacity of reality fits her (Volkow's) own sensibility.  "We are all dancing above the void," Volkow has written, and there is in her poetry a sense of the magic of a life lived in the spirit of this dance.

This poem is from her newest collection, Arcana, and Other Poems, translated by Luis Ingelmo and Michael Smith.

 

El mago                                                                                   

¿Quién escuchó la voz del viento,

la palabra que dice,

su grito interminable en la montaña,

y descifró el lenguaje de los ruidos,

el galopar de letras del follaje,

y las «eles» del agua?

¿Quién atrapó con un nombre el fondo de la noche,

la rasgadura del rayo?

Poderes precisos de lo etéreo,
 

y un saber que rescata en manos de aire.

Lo eterno es hueco, es forma, es alma

—esa imposible sed de la memoria.

Sin cuerpo y sin las cosas,

sólo viento y sueños, las palabras,

viento tejido por los sueños,

almas al aire que el silencio olvida,

estatuas de la ausencia insomnes,

despertar de la nada hacia la nada.

Hay sombras en los sueños

que no son de las cosas,

sino cuerpos quizá de las palabras,

ánimas de los nombres,

resurrección de la llamada.

Para poder morir son las palabras:

salvación profunda de lo ido,

tiempo enamorado que habla.

The Magician

Who listened to the voice of the wind,

the word that speaks,

its unceasing shout in the mountain,

and deciphered the language of noises,

the galloping of the letters of foliage,

the liquid ‘l’s’ of water?

Who captured with a name the night’s depth

and the tearing flash of lightning?

Precise power of the ethereal,

and a knowledge that rescues in aerial hands.

The eternal is a gap, a form, a soul

—that impossible thirst of memory.

Bodiless and without substance,

nothing but wind and dreams, words,

wind woven by dreams,

souls in the air which silence forgets,

insomniac statues of absence,

waking from nothingness to nothingness.

In dreams there are shadows

which are not of things,

but maybe the body of words,

the soul of names,

the resurrection of calls.

Words are to help us die:

profound salvation of what’s gone,

time speaking in love.

 

 

 
Arcana and Other Poems was published by Shearsman Books, one of the best, if not the best, sources of contemporary poetry from Europe and the Americas.  Here is the link for Volkow, and for the press.

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/translations2.html

For Reversible Monuments, see https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/pages/browse/book.asp?bg=%7BCA0BE3F5-93A0-4DE4-A897-BCB32043AEBF%7D

What is literary genius? Remarks on Imre Kertész

It reads: "You get what you deserve" or "to each his due," words inscribed on the gate looking out from the administration building at Buchenwald.  It was to Buchenwald that Imre Kertész was taken as boy, after spending, by his own account, three days in Auschwitz.  He survived, and wrote a trilogy of novels that, for me, offer one definition of literary genius--Fateless, (or, Fatelessness*), Kaddish for an Unborn Child, and Fiasco.  I toured the grounds of Buchenwald; it is, as the young narrator of Fateless says, an oddly idyllic spot, and yet the feeling of the place is more akin to another gate, another greeting, the one above the City of Woes encountered by Dante in Canto III of Inferno.

"The Wehrmacht occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944. On the previous day [Admiral Miklos] Horthy had met Hitler at Klessheim.  Under the threat of unilateral military action, the Nazi leader compelled the regent to accept the German occupation and set up a pro-German government.  Hitler also demanded that some 100,000 Jews be delivered 'for labor' in Germany. Horthy submitted."**

In Fateless, the young narrator, György Köves, is taken from his home in Budapest to Auschwitz, and then on  to Buchenwald, and finally to a small camp at Zeitz.  He nearly dies, presumably of typhus, but survives his ordeal to return home "[A]t about the same time of year as I had left. At any rate, the forests all around Buchenwald were green, grass was already sprouting over the mass graves of buried corpses . . . "

As I made my way through this slender novel, whose bland, two-line plot summary, given above, makes it sound like one of  many novels about the Holocaust, it occurred to me that I was in the presence of something else entirely--I was reading a book that was a work of genius, and I wondered aloud at the effect Kertész's oddly understated style was having on me.  Halfway through Fateless, I told my colleague Peter Nash how moved I was by the book, and what genius Kertész possessed, but I was hard pressed to say what I meant.  What does the term "literary genius" mean?  Many writers nowadays appear to write "works of genius," but I confess to having encountered few such works, and am often disappointed to find this high praise attached to the most quotidian of books.


In Fiasco, the "old boy," Köves himself, lives in a tiny, precisely described apartment with his wife, is a writer, and reminiscences about the process of composing his first novel (which was Fateless, published in 1975): "My work--writing the novel--actually consisted of nothing else than a systematic atrophying of my experiences in the interest of an artificial--or if you prefer, artistic--formula that, on paper, and only on paper, I could judge as an equivalent of my experiences." And, "As soon as I started to write the novel, I stopped remembering." [74-5; my emphasis]

As counter-intuitive as these sentences sound, they are correct, and capture the genius of Fateless: Kertész doesn't reproduce his experiences, or capture them in language--he relives them, with the reader as witness, right on the page.  Fateless isn't a novel of the Holocaust told from the point of view of history, or narrated retrospectively--with the burden of history's cunning imposed by our memories--Kertész tells the story of his experience of the "Endlösung der Judenfrage" as the child he was, believing in the goodness of adults, trusting that his life would continue, that no one, certainly no German, could wish him ill.  The books is, as the author tells us, lived and not told. 

Young Köves, newly arrived in Auschwitz, reports his impressions--one wishes to say "naive" impressions, but could they have been other than what they were?  Who could believe what the camp was for, what the thick smoke, the odor portended? The lack of irony makes this passage wrenching: "...I saw no sign of confusion or fear in the German soldiers near us. I remembered the terrified reactions at home to air raids, and this superb calm, this invincibility, suddenly helped me to understand better the respect with which people at home in general spoke of Germans. Just then I noticed two lightning-bolt symbols on their collars. I realized that they must belong to the famous SS troops, of which I had already heard so much back home."  Köves's mind reaches backward, to "what he heard at home" and extends no further than the point where he stands--in the gravel, just off the train from Budapest, hungry and thirsty, but not terrified, not yet terrified.  Literary genius, it occurred to me, is this quality: not to mirror reality, or to comment on the world, or to report one's state of mind, but to unfold the world as it is experienced, purely and clearly, as if for the first time, through the words of someone who appears to know no more than the reader. 

Every student of Wittgenstein's Tractatus is familiar with the famous seventh aphorism, the tautology which states that "Those things of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence."  Of course.  But far more interesting is an earlier aphorism which says that "the meaning of the world lies outside of the world."  When Kertész writes in Fiasco: "I was taken to Auschwitz not by the train in the novel but by a real one," he is asserting the primacy of experience over both language and memory; in Fateless, Kertész comes as close to opening for the reader the terror of the Holocaust as one can come.  This, for me, is one way of thinking about literary genius: both extending the reach of expression and showing what lies beyond it, in the realm of the unspeakable.



*At the university library, I looked up Sorstalanság in a fat Hungarian-English dictionary; it means "fatelessness."  My copy, translated by Christopher C. and Katherine M. Wilson and published in 1992 in the wonderful Northwestern University Press series of European fiction (this was a full decade before  Kertész won the Nobel Prize), is called Fateless.  Tim Wilkinson, a noted translator of Hungarian fiction, has produced a version, titled Fatelessness, and published it with Vintage Books in 2004.  Wilkinson's Fiasco, published by another great press, Melville House, was a delight (I'm awaiting Kaddish in the mail).  I have no basis for comparing the translations and have quoted the earlier Wilson version here.

**From Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945: The Years of Extermination.