Everything was better back then. Even my nostalgia was better, more piercing, more true. I miss missing things that much, but not as much as I missed missing things back then. Even my anxieties about the future, which have indeed come to pass, were more vivid back then, more real. Reality itself seemed more real back then—this clanking stage-play only a fool could find convincing—I fell for it all, and it killed me, again and again. Ghosts of myself wander the cities I’ve lived in, thinking of other cities, imagining me here imagining them. We nod to each other across the years, the way the last line of a poem will sometimes look back, wistfully, at the first.
Featured Art: Abstract Landscape by H. Lyman Saÿen
They sit like lumps at the kitchen table covered by a worn and graying cloth, milkdregs ghosting the glass of two tumblers. Their four feet dangle inches above the floor as Opa sucks his horehound. They can hear it slopping around, see it burrowing there behind his potato jowls. They smell the burnt-tire funk of it. It’s July and the brothers are long enough out of school that their stretched and empty afternoons have become kind of boring, they say. Nowadays, the two are mostly bored. Opa’s fat hand claps the table. He tongues his candy to the far end of the mouth and cries nonsense. There is no mostly, he tells them. No kind of. Either you are bored or you are not and if you are it is only you who is to blame. From the other room come the strangled words of their mother shouting at her mother. Opa nudges the boys out to the front porch. There he lowers his flanks onto a teak rocker. There’s an oomph and a curse and the old man begins to teach the boys a game.
Featured Art: New York Street, 1902 by Childe Hassam
In his leather snap cap & undertaker’s suit of shiny polyester black, one of those resisters of the transmitted order—an aging Marxist lost boy— alarm all over his shyly determined, axe-sharp face, tho a shadow falls upon that face, a gloom cast by the screen flash of corporations gaming the go-flo of dollars & broadband—he stands with umbrella outside Starbucks & silently hands out pamphlets, shucked by cold tourists. Does he have set rounds at subway stations and parks full of volatile sleepwalkers? Maybe he haunts the doorway of Filene’s at tag end of Presidents’ Day sales? Does he have a day job? wife or boyfriend? For change of pace does he sit in his kitchen obsessively scanning the box scores of road trip double-headers? Or is he always thinking how the world should be honorable, justice at hand?—like my old teacher in the dim Boston University lecture hall Howard Zinn—your life, he said, drives history—you can’t be neutral on a moving train— he died yesterday at 87 but left with his view still alive & intact of liberation possible for all.
Phil Rizzuto, shortstop, the Yankees’ Scooter & play-by-play announcer & The Money Store’s man of a certifiably trustworthy nature, but invented for me first in war stories told by my father— on a South Pacific island naval air station maybe it’d be fun to put Scooter in the game, brass thinks a sports star visitor to war zone great theater of operations P.R.— but basketball, not civilization-beating baseball, basketball my father’s game— “I could take him, he couldn’t get by me”: sayeth Norman Rivard, testimony of a former All-State point guard 1942 season Mass state champs team captain Durfee High School Fall River; his torpedoed destroyer sunk by a two-man Japanese sub (a sake brewers’ assistant & an Imperial War College ensign?), a few days earlier their suicide mission had sent my father to the base, rescued just in time for Scooter’s morale boosting visit, the two together on an asphalt court in cosmic time Holy Cow! an immortal, lucky accident— but will, pride, intensity count more for Norman—“don’t depend on luck OK, why don’t you just apply yourself?” my father’s question, frustrated by his distracted, blurry son— apply yourself, stay on track, stick to it, that’s the thing, you’ll adhere successfully to whatever you want (not sure I know what the wanting is for even now), you can be an architect, trial lawyer, oncologist, surveyor, if only you apply yourself— like a wing decal on the model of a Mustang P-51 Fighter or whiskey dried in a glass-sized ring on a liquor cart?— skim the ear wax off your eardrums, Dad—here is your poet, & here is your poem.
Featured Art: Red Parrot on the Branch of a Tree by Ito Jakuchu
When the parrot took the cracker I offered, it said:
“Thank you, my friend. You’re the first person to give me anything to eat in decades. There is no a priori order of things. I thought I had been living the good life, but what did I know? The poet fell sick, traveled to the capital, needed words, painted his curtains bright green. A sumptuous village girl threatened me with a cheap lighter. Night after night watching the corpses of rodents turn to bone. I remember when my mother took me to the city, remember how her perfume gave me a high. After that it took me years to find a mate. Night work. Elocution lessons. A treatise on Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen. I kept to the plan I started with. Death is not an experience, food is.”
Then it fell from its perch with a thump, and from its beak an ant exited soaked in the parrot’s blood.
with a singular total probity he fantasizes about women in our building the actual social interaction is nil or rather minimal and centers around coffee lines the young coffee lady at the corner stand he calls Casmira her real name is Dishwava but he doesn’t like that name Diswaba the deck he says and the large-hair customer at the IHS stand he calls Ingrid and the willowy customer on the HR floor he names Karen you can imagine his surprise when he found out Karen’s real name is Karen subconsciously now he thinks there’s a mind connection the world yet a more beautiful place there are single women in our office attractive and even affable why don’t you pay some attention to them I ask he says he read somewhere how an in-office relationship is bad very bad if one is looking for happiness
about the new guy? this is the thing he misappropriates as in you’ve seen my banana-label collection stickers on bananas I have the original collection that exists in the office he saw what I was doing and he copies it he has a collection now and I assure you it is not as extensive as egregious as mine although I am wondering how he got so many different Ecuadors but how can you be civil with someone essentially a thief other than that he’s all right
I mean the excitement level was just about in negative numbers as my sister’s basketball team lost its seventh straight and after it the girls are jumping up and down in total glee genuine happihappihappiness the reason? they broke the magic number ten in the losing score they didn’t actually break it but they finally made it to that number no sense of perspective in art too you have to see my sister’s painting of the flour mill with water wheel the central subject of which is a frog amidst the water lilies
What follows is by way of explaining what happened last Sunday, when I had more of a brush with sex than I’ve had in the five years since my divorce. What follows may explain my disappointment.
You see, the first man I fell in love with turned out to be gay and hanged himself from a tree along Highway 1 in California.
The second left me when I got pregnant. He was much shorter than me but had lovely lips and gentle eyes.
The third seemed promising: great sex, red-gold hair, tall. We met in a magical way. At a certain time on a certain day of the week, we passed each other going opposite directions on the campus of the University of Kansas. This was the sidewalk near the Student Union, which was burned down by hippies in 1972. I may have known one of the people who did it but I’m not positive about that. If it was the person I’m thinking of, he’s now an executive at an insurance company in Florida, with two kids.
Featured Art: Augustus Saint Gaudens II (Saint Gaudens and his model) by Anders Zorn
As if you rose out of your coffin—as if my heart was your coffin—you rose yesterday in the sapphire faceted light of syringes, hospital sheets, and toxic Niagara mist you painted into a glossy forever. I felt again your weight upon me that Manhattan night in our quasi-childhood. You moved lovelessly upon me, almost angry— anger I almost allowed myself to know— as we lay on a borrowed floor trying to make what might be called love. You broke each spell. The way Proust discovered love in captured rats squealing as the hat pin probed their vital organs. I was a slow student, I learned dumbly, blindly. And graduated to my own destructions. The white rats scamper through your landscapes of pill bottles and blood, chopped trees and massacred Adirondack deer and I dream of knocking all the books off my shelf so that in the light breaking from those pages I might behold, not hold, your broken face.
My mother had been failing for several years, slowly, but minimized the signs. We, her five grown children, were not to worry or be diverted from our lives. When it came, the time of her dying seemed to open of its own accord, its span neither too short nor too long. We had several weeks to talk, to tie up loose ends before the illness closed in and became a kind of weather we could no longer work around. On December 14, l997 she died at home in the company of her children and grandchildren. Snow was falling in Keene Valley, the small town in the Adirondack Mountains where she had lived for thirty-five years.
Emily Neville, my mother, was a well-known writer for young adults, and my relationship with her, as the oldest, a daughter, and also a writer, is complicated. Sometimes it seems like a difficult poem I have memorized but don’t yet understand. During her lifetime I was wary of such a strong, capable figure so close to me. My Aunt Mary, the sibling closest to my mother in age, once remarked, “As a child there was no point in doing anything—Emily could always do it better.” But she was a gentle person with no heavy-handed ways an oldest child could legitimately dispute, though I did resist her increasingly as I entered my teens. Since she was almost universally liked and respected my opposition put me at odds, not only with my mother, but with everyone I knew.
There’s no easy way in, or out, warned the LPN who buzzed us past the locked double doors, led me and my wife down the corridor to the nurses’ station where a handsome man, tall, and maybe sixty, wrung his hands while he stood over our daughter’s desk repeating her name— the way we had at her birth when we were listening in it for the ring of a bell— begging her to walk him back to school because he feared the bullies who’d tripped him and washed his face with snow when he’d delivered papers on his Ferry Street route, and before our daughter uncovered the steaming dish we’d brought, she took his hand, walked him around the floor past wandering patients and whirring machines then back to his room to help him search for his galoshes and gather his school books while his wife stood outside his door reading the little wishes in the greeting cards taped to his tinseled and holiday-lighted door frame, the hem of her velvet pants dripping and salt-stained from the parking lot slop, her Gloria hair-clip with streaking star and tarnished angel’s trumpet blowing silvery notes sideways through the frizz coming loose from her perm.
Featured Art: Winter Scene in Moonlight by Henry Farrer
His father limping from his stroke, throwing his lunch pail into the back of his pickup like some stubborn, gimpy shot putter, then driving off to the job they gave him after his rehab: steering a hi-lo through the greasy plant
after Danny died
one day recovering on the porch he hollered for the ice-cream man to stop, then bought us all popsicles
after Danny died
because his son—Vietnam—and so, and so. He had a cough that could maul a lion but he wouldn’t stop smoking
Featured Art: The House on the Edge of the Village by Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen
Leaves twitch. A wren flits. A rope between trees sags. By the well-head a few stranded dandelions. Rain opens stones so they shine. A crow calls with the voice of a hammer. The rain stops. The sun enters with the voice of a crow. Heat turns day to distraction and the trapped mind wilts. A hawk calls and small mammals dive for cover. Sky goes carillon, dwindles, cooling off until the moon fills windows and stains rooms. A door swings and things go strange as if they had to. If you hear a voice you hear a voice. I walk through the empty house, carefully, a cat’s whisker. When I get to the top floor, over the moonlit roofs I can see the prison and the small zoo. They must be able to see me here where I’m training the self to lose itself, the way the stream ignores the stream.
In the novel I’m writing there are no people, no “characters.” And if you expect a plot you’ll be sorely disappointed. There’s little to count on and precious little to critique. Beautiful language is absent; there is almost no language of any sort so you won’t see any reviews praising its style or humanity. In my novel, each place is the same as any other place so there can be no confusion about where you are. The novel builds to no denouement because there is no nouement. And there are no epiphanies unless the reader realizes that not having one is something of an epiphany in itself. Symbols are everywhere these days so there are none in my novel. The storyline consists simply of turning a page which can be thought of as a narrative in itself. If the novel has more than a page this could present something of a problem. And if you’re looking for something that passes for wisdom this isn’t the place, though I do think I have retained a sense of adventure simply as a consequence of sequence. So here goes, though my novel, unlike any other novel I can think of, is very short so as not to test the reader’s powers of concentration and patience. As I said, there are no characters. The world is overpopulated as it is, so why make matters worse? Perhaps I should stop right here. There may be too many people, but there are certainly too few trees.
Featured Art: Moonlight on Mount Lafayette, New Hampshire by William Trost Richards
Just because I’m dead now doesn’t mean I don’t exist any more. All those eulogies and the obituary in the corner of the newspaper made me feel more vibrant than ever.
I’m here in some fashion, maybe like a gust of wind that disturbs the upper leaves, or blows a hat around a corner, or disperses a little cloud of mayflies over a stream.
What I like best about this is you realizing you can no longer get away with the things you used to when it would be ten o’clock at night and I wouldn’t know where you were.
I’m all ears, you liked to say when you couldn’t bother listening. And now I’m all eyes, looking in every direction, with one eye always open just for you.
Featured Art: Willows and White Poplars by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot
In the shower she takes a swig of beer, sets the bottle on the edge of the tub, and begins prying leeches, flat and large as house keys, from her cold toes, the top of her foot, her ankle. She places three in a line next to the bottle, where they lie motionless, though alive. Thinned blood threads over her feet. When she and Neil moved to the country four years ago, miles downriver from his family’s farm, he taught her to peel off leeches rather than douse them with salt, which he said might make them vomit and spread disease.
An hour ago, when she capsized, she didn’t feel the leeches take hold. She was alone. It was dusk. She looked up to greet a pair of bats when the kayak teetered, hit a tree recently fallen from the riverbank, and flipped. After a long moment, she surfaced. Sputtering, dog paddling, adrenaline-jarred, skin-tightened, throat splicing eddies, heels churning mud. She held the kayak and wrestled to free it from the current and the willow it was pinned against. She imagined herself the puny accident bystander who suddenly has the strength to pull a giant, unconscious passenger from the wreckage. Even so, she worked half an hour to bring the kayak ashore, roll and empty it. Near dark, she returned for the paddle. More splashing, spitting, gulping, sinking in mud. More leeches latching on.
Featured Art: Forêt de Compiègne by Berthe Morisot
I gave Saul a room. Two years prior, he had left me for Utah. He left me for the wild, for backcountry slopes. He wanted to be in glossy magazines and have his ponytail flowing out behind him in pictures, carving some mountain, dropping through powder. He spoke like this, dropping through powder. I tried to tell myself I couldn’t be too mad: he paid more attention to skis and skiing forums than he did to me. In Utah, he grew his hair long and beautiful and got in some of those magazines, though mainly he just put up pictures of himself on the Internet. I know, I looked at them all, wondering if he was thinking of me when he was hiking up the slopes, skis on his back, or whether he might get a distant glimpse of our life together when he was on top of one of those mountains and looked east. He was gone for two years, but to me it seemed a lot longer. I often thought about all the other girls he probably had sex with and how people probably loved him and how he was living this wild, free life, and I was still in East Tennessee with my brother and mother and the probably comparatively lame Blue Ridge. So when I found out he was coming back because he had seriously injured himself and could no longer carve or ride or hike or otherwise put his health in danger in backcountry powder, I was happy and told him he had a room waiting. I wanted him to come back in the same state he had left me in: miserable and alone.
She says, I think you think too much when you talk dirty.
They are, in fact, having sex when she says this— he’s above her and had just kissed the inside of her ankle, which now rests on his shoulder. He asks what she means.
I mean, you’re too, I don’t know, exact, like you’re trying to not sound stupid even though that’s what you should sound like— you shouldn’t be thinking.
He slows down, almost stops but doesn’t. It’s the sort of comment, he thinks, that would make a passionate person stop and leave the room, then the house, viciously dressing while cursing. He doesn’t want to and isn’t even that hurt, more perplexed, really: how does one make a conscious effort to become unconscious?
The clouds were curtains that parted onto the show of sky above the scar of 89. Oh, the big blue screen of autumn days and score that featured mainly strings. Oh, the epic Something, Then Nothing that opened as a matinee but played into the night on a single reel inside the room that housed the machine. I drove with one eye open and the other closed. I couldn’t tell if the things I was seeing— broken line, blinking light, leaping deer—were live or frozen frames. Were on the road or in my mind, into which I’d also driven at a dangerous speed. I was bearing down in the passing lane inside the theater of my Chevrolet. I was seeing myself through the lens of a windshield in the opposite lane. I could smell the sky with the windows closed. I could hear her voice from every cloud, “Come home, my love. Come home.” I believed there was still a way, despite my fame as the man who flies, to return as myself some day and give her the keys.
Selected as runner-up for the 2013 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Stuart Dybek
Featured Art: Decorative Study: Satyr by Aubrey Vincent Beardsley
In the spring of 1985, Ben lived with his friend Marco in a second-floor apartment near the college where they were sophomores. For fun they watched girls sunbathe down in the small back yard across the alley. They kept a potted ficus by the window to obscure their faces.
One day, while they were staring at the girls through the ficus leaves, Marco said he had an idea. He went down the hall and came back holding the VHS camcorder Ben got for Christmas and kept beneath his bed.
Marco said they should use the camcorder to film the girls. “That way we can watch them on the VCR at night,” he said, “when it’s more fun to watch sexy stuff.”
“No way,” Ben said.
“But we can pause it and look really hard.” Marco described in loving detail the way the girls’ bikini bottoms pinched their thighs and the way their breasts drooped to the sides when they lay on their backs.
Ben liked that stuff too, but he wondered if filming the girls didn’t make him and Marco weirdos. Instead of explaining this to Marco he said, “Don’t touch my stuff. Camcorders are expensive.”
Featured Art: The Madame B Album by Marie-Blanche Hennelle Fournier
We don’t show these family slides much, in part, because the projector overheats, but also because we miss my father’s litanies of the dead and their diseases: congestive heart failure; cirrhosis; even gangrene— their ravaged, cancer-eaten, over-stressed organs recalled in official diagnoses, each dry account closing while the next was ratcheted into place, dad pressing the remote control as if it were the release button on a bomb sight.
To counterbalance, we kids attend less to people than to things: the Coleman cooler intact after twenty-seven years; the spangled (barely) red felt stockings in which we still stuff memory cards and batteries; the untouched Hai Karate cologne; the flight jacket Mom’s threatened for fifty-five years to toss. It’s funny, self-deprecatory, even vaguely reassuring until we get to the chilling reverse family portrait in which we sat on the same couch we’re now watching from, looking forward to ourselves, some new upholstery, and a smaller dog at our feet. There’s just enough time for a last inside joke, for recognizing the hard candy in its dish, pretending to spit out the piece now diminishing in my mouth, before the tone is torqued flush with our mortality.
In this faded family photo— Horton, Kansas, ’36— they are just two farmhands in overalls, kept, by a bowed velvet cordon, from some gala event. Except it’s a rattlesnake strung between them, five, perhaps six feet in length and thick as my young father’s outstretched arms. One might think his pride, that is, anticipation of us, would dictate looking at the camera, but he seems to be eyeing the slick, intricate patterns of risk now relaxed in his hand. Then again, given his uneasy, strained half-smile, he could be checking my grandfather’s grip, the snake so freshly dead, making sure any reflex is under control— suspecting the undulant weight of it, that he could never really let go.
When I’m feeling down about the human condition, that is, my human condition, I consider all the crappy jobs I could have had in another life. An executioner, say, or worse, the one to cart the bodies away—there are more difficult things than poetry, aren’t there, I remind myself, what if I’d been a mummy maker, with a desiccation degree, that would be no cakewalk, mummifica- tion was an industry, thousands of ibises and sacred cats, bulls even—those whoppers took 40 days in the sun to dry and speak- ing of meat, sacred or no, the smell was awful (those long days under the blood-orange Egyptian sun, you never got used to it, when you went home your wife refused to make love with you), but it was an important job, this populating the afterlives of oth- ers, providing guard animals, and pets, not to mention massive quantities of foodstuffs, none of which could you sneak home, the guards always patting you down, Ra forbid your old lady should be grateful enough to give an inch or you should live even a little of the afterlife you made for others. No, it is your lot to cater that picnic in paradise, never to partake of it, you have to be committed, as I tell my students, it is a way of life. The priests, they did the people, they didn’t really get it, what it entails to mummify a goddamn bull or 15-foot crocodile—they were fuck- ing huge—and the baboons, you had to yank their canines, house- break them dentally, before putting them down. No, it is no small job to populate the afterlife, it takes a brutal tenderness, atten- tion to life’s cruel details, all that moisture in which we live, the very lubricant of our mobility, drawn out molecule by molecule, though we didn’t think so micro then, and there you were lacing up your sandals, grabbing some rice cakes and dates for lunch, leaving for work, which, though worse than poetry, as fates go, could have been truly horrific—you could be quarrying stone for temples (long hours on barges, mosquitoes big as dung beetles, no hazard pay)—No, you had your own role to slave over, supply- ing pharaohs and courtesans a kind of Noah’s ark of totems and sacrifices, right down to the royal cock fights, so who could blame you for amusing yourself with the occasional mummy joke—the kitten placed in the sarcophagus of a lion, an ibis in a crocodile, a fish inside the ibis, a scarab inside the fish. It got you through those long-ass days while the sweat was drawn out of you gram by gram or iota by iota or however by whatever they measured it, and for what? What was waiting at home? A woman who couldn’t bear the stink of death on you, who probably spent most of her day rubbing olive oil into some noble’s feet, and so you get home and heave yourself down on a grass mat and say there just has to be a better way than this, than this life I am living and your wife says quit your bitching, this once, I’ll get the oil, and here you are, back in your hut of baked mud and palm thatching, your staff and sandals propped by the front door and it is cooler here out of the sun, out of the way, a moment’s pause, an eddy in the Nile, and it doesn’t matter if your sweetheart has been anointing other men’s feet or polishing their silver till her hands blackened, or the Papyrus Monthly won’t publish your work—you are together now, in this life, in this moment and the sleeping baby has your nose and the over-pounded, unleavened, tooth-shattering bread is warm, so quit your whining, you could be humping pyramid blocks through sandstorms, you’ve got it good, you can’t even smell yourself anymore, you are golden, here, have a fig.
What’s your next book going to be called, Demolition Work Still Sucks But Here I Am Again? —John (on the job site)
There is no larger truth here that has found me helping John and Ken again, to tear out the master bathroom of this wealthy couple in Washington Twp., except that work, hard labor, has overtaken me again— no matter how many tricks I’ve used to throw it off the scent— and I am not at all happy about it, and I am not all that used to it, my blood on the shards of tile and grout we’re prying from the shower.
But luckily there is this bucket for me to sit on while we take lunch in silence. My silence says I’ll be back to my classroom in a couple more days; theirs says the next job is tomorrow. Together they say There is nothing waiting for us there, on the other side of a back-spasming day of work except a paycheck—and the fact that though we wake to another day of the same grueling, tired sentence, wake in fact we do.
Featured Art: The Pearls of Aphrodite, 1907 by Herbert James Draper
From the clear vein a stream immortal flow’d Such streams as issues from a wounded god. Pure emanation! Uncorrupted flood, Unlike our gross, diseas’d terrestrial blood… – Pope’s Iliad, Book 5
Diomedes in his rampage cuts a hundred Trojans Down into the dust, a bulldozer Knocking over pines for another subdivision.
He is chainsaw, IED, a six-foot spinning razor, An Ugly Customer. In a helmet topped with boar-bristle, He’s hacking men to bits, his sword a red blur
& then he spies his prey, already spread-eagled, For a fellow Greek has flung his spear into the hipbone Of Prince Aeneas himself; its point burrows to marrow.
Spurting arterial blood, face against the dust, Aeneas moans & the blackness, Death’s imperious Stygian cloud, inevitable now, settles everywhere over him.
What can you do then but call out to mother, begging to die in her arms? Diomedes strides forward in his fury. This is what he came here for—to finish off a prince.
Selected as runner-up of the 2013 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Barbara Hamby
Featured Art: The Artist in His Studio by James McNeill Whistler
My parents were never crazy about Cavafy— They didn’t know much about poetry, at all, And barely had time to read anything but the papers;
Though sometimes a poem they liked would appear in their Beloved Hellenic Voice. (A poem that was always In rhyming stanzas, and deeply nostalgic.) Or else
I’d show them one of the Modern Greek poets that I Was trying to translate, and ask for their advice About a line. “Is this for school?” they’d say.
My parents were never crazy about Cavafy— To them he was too refined, too ALEX-AN- DRIAN, and they were only peasants, xhoríates.
And there was no Ithaka for them to go back to. When I’d beg them to read the Greek, they’d balk when they got To his purist kátharévousa diction—they just
Couldn’t stomach its formalist starch. His poems were never Demotic enough, never trapέzeiká: Songs to be sung across the kitchen table.
And if I read them Elytis, Odysseus Elytis Too was too elitist to trust, too drunk On the island sun of his own Ionian vision.
To people for whom elevation meant being raised In the steepening shadows of Peloponnesos. (“The great Odysseus,” my father would chide.)
And if Yannis Ritsos spoke their working-class language, And his poems weren’t hard to follow, still, once they heard That Ritsos was Marxist that’s all they needed to know.
Featured Art: Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare by Claude Monet
The Station A train has rolled in. Car after car stands here, but no doors are opening, no one’s getting off or on. Are there any doors at all? Inside, it’s teeming with closed-in people milling back and forth. They’re staring out through the unyielding windows. And outside, a man walks along the train with a maul. He’s hitting the wheels, a faint ringing. Except right here! 7 Here the sound swells unbelievably: a lightningstroke, 8 a cathedral bell tolling, a round-the-world sound 9 that lifts the whole train and the region’s wet stones. 10 Everything’s singing! You’ll remember this. Travel on!
In Tomas Tranströmer’s poem, “The Station,” from his ninth poetry collection, The Wild Market Square (1983), the ordinary scene of a train at the platform becomes a metaphor for something far from ordinary. The sound of the struck wheel widens beyond this singular everyday experience to contain the great mystery that surrounds our existence, a mysteriousness that, for a brief instant, feels as accessible as it does out of reach. This brings to mind Robert Bly’s often-cited remark about Tranströmer’s poems being “mysterious because the images have travelled a long way to get there.” “They are a sort of railway station,” he says. And quite literally so in “The Station,” where images arrive from vastly different points of origin and briefly stand together in the same place.
Featured Art: Sunset on the Sea by John Frederick Kensett
The challenges of translating from one language to another are well discussed and lamented. These challenges increase when poetry is involved: not only must the meaning emerge, but the product must sound like something that could count as a poem. When working in a native American language, these problems are, frankly, insuperable, but we are not thereby let off the hook. I am a linguist and scholar of the Choctaw language who comes to translation indirectly.
It is not clear that native Americans composed much poetry. (How would we know? What’s the difference between a war chant and a poem?) One group that, to my reckoning, clearly composed lyrical poetry was the Uto-Aztecans. The southern tribes, the Mixteca, had writing, after all, and we have a bit of the stupendous lyrical literature that was left unburned when the Spanish chose to rid humanity of indigenous cultural artifacts.
Surrealism was an art of serendipity. Its aesthetic and philosophy revolve around such elements as surprise, chance, marvel, and what the French call la trouvaille, the discovery, the treasure happened upon. André Breton argued repeatedly that the point of automatic writing—Surrealism’s first and most celebrated tool— was to provide Surrealism not with an exciting new literary technique but with a method of research, a doorway into unexploited mental processes that were within everyone’s reach. As he rather cheekily put it in the first Manifesto, “Language has been given to man so that he may make Surrealist use of it.”
The thing about serendipity, of course, is that it implies a fair amount of spontaneity and blind luck. You can’t plan chance occurrences. It’s one thing if you’re sitting at your favorite café table, paper at the ready and pen poised to take flight. It’s quite another if you’re trying to recreate, in another language, someone else’s experience of that flight, and this is where translation and automatic writing begin speaking at cross-purposes. The trick here, in other words, is that we’re dealing with a text composed (supposedly, at least) in a trance-like flow, in which one word or phrase begets the next, begets the next. The first challenge is to make the translation sound as if it was composed in the same way, but there’s more to it than that: there’s also a psychological element. The mental process that might generate a flux of words in French is rarely the same as the process in English.
One of the most difficult works I have translated from Russian is Hamid Ismailov’s The Railway. This novel has a huge geographical sweep, taking in not only most of Soviet Central Asia, but also Iran, Afghanistan and parts of European Russia and western Europe. It incorporates a great deal of twentieth-century political and cultural history. It comprises many separate stories, often linked together only tangentially. It is full of unfamiliar real-life detail—Soviet, Muslim, and (most bewilderingly of all) Muslim-with-a-Soviet-veneer-to-make-it-acceptable-to-the-authorities. And there are at least 137 different characters. How could I make all this not only comprehensible to people from another world but also interesting and enjoyable for them? One approach would be to simplify. The publishers of the French translation omitted about half the chapters, leaving out everything that did not relate to the story of the novel’s central family. I have no doubt that this stripped-down version has its merits, but this is not the way I wanted to go myself. The Railway is exuberant and Rabelaisian, full of slogans, spells and curses; Hamid (the author and I are close friends, so I shall refer to him by his first name) is deeply aware of the power of fantasy, of the way words beget words and stories beget stories, of the power of language to create reality. I did not want to sacrifice this exuberance.
Featured Art: Head of a Woman with Bent Head by André Derain
Tuk-tuks, manga as literature, onomatopoeia, Valentine’s Day
My wife and I climb with light luggage into the back of a three-wheeled Thai taxi, a tuk-tuk. As we drive off, city lights and a pink sunset blend marvelously together. Our tuk-tuk weaves through traffic as I see a gold adorned Buddhist pavilion, a Burmese-Mexican burrito restaurant, and then a Yamaha motorcycle dealership. It is, incidentally, from the land of Yamaha that we have just arrived by airplane.
Far away from our home in Tokyo, I’ll spend the week finishing an English translation for Wisut Ponnimit, Japan’s celebrated Thai author and illustrator. Wisut, who learned Japanese as an adult and now writes in the language, happens to be holding a joint art exhibition in Bangkok with Tokyo-based photographer Kotori Kawashima. Before attending the gallery show and conferencing with Wisut, there are a few difficulties to resolve with translating his manga book, Him Her That.
Wiesław Myśliwski’s magisterial 1984 novel of Polish village life Stone Upon Stone (Kamień na kamieniu) is a text in which language plays a central role. The entire novel reads like a magnificent sustained spoken monologue; Myśliwski’s gift for conveying the pithy, unsentimental wisdom of peasant language is apparent in every sentence, and it is language, not story, that ultimately drives the narrative and makes the book the masterpiece it is.
In the more than five-hundred pages of this astounding book, no word is more central than ziemia. Yet at the same time, no word is more untranslatable into English—despite the fact that ziemia is a seemingly ordinary, everyday word. The problem is that ziemia, unremarkable as it is, occupies the semantic space of several equally ordinary, overlapping notions in English. Foremost among these English meanings are: earth, in meanings such as that of one of the four classical elements, contrasted with air, water, and fire (it is, for example, the name of our planet in Polish); land, as in something one can farm, and that is measured in acres—it also appears in Polish in phrases such as “homeland” and “promised land,” and in this meaning is used in a phrase like “on land” to contrast with “on the sea”; ground, for instance in a phrase such as “lying on the ground” or “the ground under one’s feet”; and soil, the actual material in which one grows things.
Featured Art: Green and Blue: The Dancer by James McNeill Whistler
Άγε, ω βασιλεύ Λακεδαιμονίων
Δεν καταδέχονταν η Κρατησίκλεια ο κόσμος να την δει να κλαίει και να θρηνεί· και μεγαλοπρεπής εβάδιζε και σιωπηλή. Τίποτε δεν απόδειχνε η ατάραχη μορφή της απ’ τον καϋμό και τα τυράννια της. Μα όσο και νάναι μια στιγμή δεν βάσταξε· και πριν στο άθλιο πλοίο μπει να πάει στην Aλεξάνδρεια, πήρε τον υιό της στον ναό του Ποσειδώνος, και μόνοι σαν βρεθήκαν τον αγκάλιασε και τον ασπάζονταν, «διαλγούντα», λέγει ο Πλούταρχος, «και συντεταραγμένον». Όμως ο δυνατός της χαρακτήρ επάσχισε· και συνελθούσα η θαυμασία γυναίκα είπε στον Κλεομένη «Άγε, ω βασιλεύ Λακεδαιμονίων, όπως, επάν έξω γενώμεθα, μηδείς ίδη δακρύοντας ημάς μηδέ ανάξιόν τι της Σπάρτης ποιούντας. Τούτο γαρ εφ’ ημίν μόνον· αι τύχαι δε, όπως αν ο δαίμων διδώ, πάρεισι.»
Και μες στο πλοίο μπήκε, πηαίνοντας προς το «διδώ».
Come, O King of the Lacedaimonians
Cratisicleia did not deign to allow the people to see her weeping and grieving; she walked in stately silence. Her serene demeanor revealed nothing of her sorrow and her torments. But even so, for a moment she couldn’t contain herself; and before she boarded the hateful ship for Alexandria, she took her son to Poseidon’s temple, and when they were alone she embraced him and kissed him, who was “suffering grievous pain,” says Plutarch, “in a state of conturbation.” But her strong character fought back; and regaining her self-composure, the magnificent woman said to Cleomenes, “Come, O King of the Lacedaimonians, when we come out of here, let no one see us weeping or acting in any way unworthy of Sparta. For this alone is in our power; our fortune will be only what the god might give.”
And she boarded the ship, heading for that “might give.”
Featured art: Two Pupils in Greek Dress by Thomas Eakins
When I translated Jenny Mastoraki’s prose poem “The Unfortunate Brides” (1983) I drew on the beat and even the syllabic count of the Greek to create a rhythm that was legible, but new in English:
. . . the way a roóster lights up Hádes, or a gílded jaw the speéchless night, a beást jángling on the rún, and the ríder búbbles up góld.
For Anglophone readers, the four phrases make up a recognizable stanza, though somewhat unusual with two long beats in the first two phrases and three shorter, faster ones in the last two. Newness arose not simply from the surreal imagery, but from the sound on which it rode.
To focus on the sound of the source text is to run counter to the dominant translation strategy, which focuses on meaning. This is true more generally, but also in the case of Modern Greek poetry. Translations such as those by Edmund Keeley and Phillip Sherrard introduced the poetry of C. P. Cavafy, George Sef-eris, Odysseas Elytes and Yannis Ritsos in an idiom that reads easily in English and makes the living tradition of myth and history readily available to an Anglophone audience.
Newohioreview.org is archiving previous editions as they originally appeared. We are pairing the pieces with curated art work, as well as select audio recordings. In collaboration with our past contributors, we are happy to (re)-present this outstanding work.
Featured Art: Madame François Buron by Jacques-Louis David
The slender, balding fellow walking out of the yoga center with his neatly rolled up yoga mat and seraphic, post-yoga glow probably thinks he is superior to me as I clump down the sidewalk with my poor posture and relatively limited spinal flexibility, my failure to think deeply, if at all, about my breathing.
Which is fine. He’s entitled to his opinion.
However, what he doesn’t realize is that I live on the same street as he does and I happen to know, from walking past his house on garbage day, that he makes no effort whatsoever to recycle. Newspapers, bottles, plastic containers— the things you’re supposed to put in the blue bag— he just sticks in the white bag, along with the coffee grounds and cantaloupe halves and the rest of the so-called “wet” trash. Even beer cans are in there (a cheap, off-brand beer, I might add).
I guess saving the planet isn’t that important to him, compared with mastering Down Dog or Up Dog or whatever.
So here he is feeling superior to me, whereas in fact I am the more evolved being, and I give him a glance of cool, skeptical appraisal which I hope conveys this.
Stray hair is pulled from the lapel of her favorite wool coat years later in a secondhand shop, drawn free in a quick, definitive gesture that could only be called thoughtless. It settles on the worn carpet while another woman’s hand holds the hanger and drapes the coat across her chest—she eyes it
in the mirror with an air of cold appraisal, breath rising and falling, her chest plumbed with valves pulsing mindlessly, the forgotten hair underfoot still holding the map and code of everything another woman was: the face with the furrowed brow that could fold and break into a lightning smile, a woman with a knack for contentment and quick anger that dispersed as clouds over hills.
An arm slips in and she feels the cool silk lining on her bare skin. It is June. She does not need a coat but her mind craves autumn and being wrapped in well-wrought layers. She slips the other arm in and hugs herself, snugging the coat to her waist, wrapping it like a kimono, Yes, she thinks, seeing an older version of herself walking through a park— the image comes suddenly, like rain from nowhere.
Featured Art: Bar-room Scene by William Sidney Mount
Guys like us, we nod to each other when we pass on the street at night. We get that things are okay at the moment. The Nod says, you-don’t-mess-with-me, I-don’t-mess-with-you. That’s how it is with guys like us, because the world is a bad place— that we get—and we get that guys like us have something to do with it. But not tonight: you’re black, I’m white, we’re both black or white, whatever, we’re cool, nobody’s going to throw hands, —who said anything about throwing hands? Because it’s not a look, nobody says “What are you lookin’ at, dipshit?” No. The Nod reflects and respects and steers clear of trouble. It says we acknowledge our mutual suspicion, which masks our fear (we both get that The Nod is part mask). The Nod: Okay bud, I’d drag you out of a burning building, you’d pick me up if I fell off a barstool, cool, we know that, just don’t ask anything of me right now unless it’s some kind of fucking emergency. I’m on my way somewhere.
Featured Art: Underworld Scene with a Man and Woman Enthroned and Death Standing Guard by Robert Caney
Couples who fight in front of you. Couples who call each other every hour. Couples who show up early. Couples who are business partners.
Couples who say “Absolutely.” Couples who met in rehab. Couples who sleep with other couples. Couples who make out in front of you.
Couples who have been divorced more than twice. Couples who should get divorced. Couples who say they are not a couple. Cocaine couples.
Couples who stop having sex. Couples who tell you they stopped having sex. Couples who think you don’t already know. Couples who say “Absolutely.”
Couples you’re related to. Couples who leave the television on. Couples who wear matching t-shirts. Football couples.
Couples who have “an arrangement.” Couples who finish each other’s sentences. Couples who have no one else to argue with. Couples who never argue.
Couples who cancel each other’s vote. Couples who speak the language of couples. Couples with nicknames for each other. Dog show couples.
Couples who stop calling now that they’re a couple. Couples who start calling. Couples who die within a month of each other. Oh look, honey, at ourselves.
Featured Art: Kalaat el Hosn (Castle of the Knights, Syria) by Louis De Clercq
On the phone tonight it’s my ex-wife asking how I am. I’m fine, thanks, you? Well, she’s fine too: new place, friends, job, cousin, pet: perfect. But now she’s back on her friends again, friends, food, movies, books and I think, She sat where I’m sitting now, I remember, looked out at the back yard, the neighbor’s car, the sapling maple at the curb. She’d have used this plate, that glass, this chair. She’s still talking and I like her voice— politics, work, winter weather—except there’s this private inside silence going on and maybe it’s mine but I think it’s hers, or, it’s a kind of leaning forward through the phone meaning if we could talk the way we used to talk we’d know better where to go and what to do when we arrive. We’re quiet and I can hear her hear me hear this silence fill with implication and we’re still.
Featured Art: Bouquet of Spring Flowers in a Terracotta Vase by Jan van Huysum
Your ex is a skinny girl. Skinny like sex- starved cats, like tigers in Thailand teased with soccer balls in plastic wrap. Your ex is a crushed mustard seed. She stains our sheets, cowers in soft earth, and runs from every room I enter, wind teasing a tail. Your ex is a sieve, a fallen kite, Cyrillic G, a flattened hook. You ask if I love you. I answer, I do. Do you forgive me? I do. Do you forgive her? I say I do, practicing for what comes next, for the question she never got asked. Will you? Do you take? The path to proving my nubility is through humility. When she mocks me on the Internet, pokes fun in posts, I laugh too. Did I say nubile? I mean nobility. Really, I do.
Featured Art: Fishing in Spring, the Pont de Clichy (Asnières) by Vincent van Gogh
I was eating tagliatelle napolitana and drinking imitation Chablis when I remembered that I was supposed to be looking at a house. I said to the others, “I have to go and look at a house.” “We’ll order veal scaloppine,” they said. “We’ll wait for you.” Veal scaloppine was what you ordered at the Mussolini after tagliatelle napoli. The only other thing was grilled liver but Wendy didn’t like the blood so we never ordered it when she was there. Wendy and David had been married for about a year. Wendy was dark-eyed and beautiful and I was in love with her because she was utterly vivacious and she put up with me even though I was an idiot.
I was carrying a map of Sydney but I still got lost on my way to the house. That was one of the habits that made Wendy say, affectionately, “Richard! You’re an idiot!” The house turned out to be across the road from a vacant television factory. When I knocked on the red front door I could hear a cat miaowing. Julie answered in the big, nerdy glasses she wore for studying. She said, “Hi, come in. Watch out for the cat shit, don’t step in it.” But it was too late and I had to leave my sandshoes on top of the steps. The reason there was cat shit was that everyone thought it was Drew’s job to pick it up seeing as the cat belonged to him but Drew was always out. He played the recorder in a medieval band. Julie began by showing me Drew’s room, which was the one at the front. She said, “This’s quite a good room, except when you’re fucking because then people in the lounge can hear everything,” and I thought well, that wouldn’t bother me since I’m not doing any fucking, but I didn’t say so. In any case Drew wasn’t the one moving out so Julie took me to Toby’s room, which was upstairs at the back and not much bigger than the double bed that was covered in Toby’s black satin sheets. Toby’s girlfriend was the sort who was used to black satin. She was the reason he was moving, along with the disco up the street.
Eddie was the only Catholic boy I knew with a car of his own. It was black with a red top and a sweeping red stripe along each side—a car that swaggered. My mother, impressed in spite of herself (she drove an old Ford coupe the color of cement), made me promise to stay off the Schuylkill Expressway and never to ride with the top down. I agreed, but only because it was December.
Mercy Girls—I was a scholarship student at an all-girls high school, the Academy of the Sisters of Mercy—weren’t allowed to have boys pick us up at school. Not that we would’ve wanted to, since we also weren’t allowed to wear lipstick or jewelry or nail polish, and our uniforms remained deeply dowdy even after we’d rolled up the navy-blue pleated skirts at the waist and unbuttoned the top two buttons on the white cotton blouses. So my first chance to show off Eddie’s car to my friends was at the Junior Class formal, just before Christmas.
Featured Art: A City Park by William Merritt Chase
Ever so rare: the robin’s egg that’s fallen at the doorstep, as yet untouched by ants or useless knowledge. A letter mailed from France, its certain words predestined. New snow, appalling last spring on cars, mailboxes. Quite rare: the pollen of narcissus but more rare the bees that dance their distance. The choreography of plants, shadow of leaves. St. Francis granting pardon. More common: construction on the way to work, the broken earth and open pipe. The trite condolence of a friend. Misunderstandings on the phone. The removal of your blouse and skirt for the new doctor. How it’s come back in spite of all you’d hoped, your vain and human plannings.
Featured Art: Rain Sculpture, Salt Creek Cañon, Utah by William H. Bell
It’s the end of summer and the neighbors have gathered in Evan’s yard, young mothers with babies lounging in the shade on the front porch, older kids racing around the lawn, the men clustered by the grill in back. It is dry and hot, not yet Labor Day, but across the street the upper leaves on the maple in front of Natalie’s house, that precocious tree, are already tinged with red. Natalie wishes it were May again, not August. She longs for the promise of summer rippling outward like the surface of a pool.
Inside, another group of women has pulled up chairs around the kitchen table, mothers Natalie recognizes from around the neighborhood but doesn’t really know, the wives of Evan’s friends. Natalie is still the newcomer, the outsider, Evan’s new girlfriend. The women are bent forward in conversation, a closed set.
“Oh my heck,” one of them is saying. “Here? Really?” She has dark hair with bangs and long-lashed eyes, like a doll’s.
Another woman waves her hand. “It’s public information. Just Google Megan’s Law, you’ll see.”
Featured Art: St. Paul’s Choir by Wenceslaus Hollar
Some of my favorite memories of us never even happened.
Like when we sang the “Hallelujah Chorus.” I’m alto, you’re baritone, and it’s a community choir, maybe a department Christmas party. Maybe we’re at your alma mater for the holiday concert and can’t help but join in from our seats.
Wherever it is, we know our parts, every word, not realizing we’ve learned them over the years, overhearing the song in stores and restaurants, doing dishes, driving home.
And the reason I know this is a memory, that this is not just a fantasy, is because what I remember most is not the music, not even the sound of our voices. Harmony, surprisingly, has nothing to do with this.
What I remember and see again and again as they keep playing the song these weeks of December, is how just your eyes turn, your gaze sliding slowly to the side to meet my eyes, which are above my mouth, which is singing the exact words you’re forming with yours—
and this is where memory turns on me, where nostalgia bares its blade: you look forward again, a motion of such care, such carefulness, like when one’s trying not to spill. Pure recovery.
Featured Art: And I Saw an Angel Come Down from Heaven, Having the Key of the Bottomless Pit and a Great Chain in His Hand, plate 8 of 12 by Odilon Redon
The keys that disappeared opened what locks? Upturning every drawer in my old desk,
crawling about the floor with a flashlight, searching the front walk and the ruined garden,
retracing my steps, retracing my thoughts, I understand I’ve lost more keys than just
the useful ones that opened my front door. I’ve lost a set of phantom keys to things
I meant to keep, return to at my leisure. A demon out of the void snatched them up
so now I’ll never open my lost diary, or turn the tumbler in my London flat
with a practiced flick, a lock I couldn’t work without help from the bear-like landlord.
“It’s a Yale lock!” he’d roar. Wasn’t I a Yank? And now they’ve all vanished, keys to padlocks
clamped on lockers, keys to rusted stick-shifts, answer keys to the questions I got wrong,
keys to smoky rooms of sex and wine, keys to old friends’ doors that shall never
open again, and the spare set of keys to my mother’s house in another state,
empty now except for the pacing cat waiting for paramedics to bring her back.
Whoops! He was afraid this was going to happen. He’s been sucked up. The strong wind pulls him in against the stiff fringe of the brush attachment, where he gasps and tangles with bits of debris, strands of hair, crumbs, dust bunnies, specks, soot, and flecks of dander. The brush is swiped across the carpet, freeing him from the tough indifferent bristles. He flies up the silver tube, but since he’s heavier than the rest of the grime, he gets to catch his breath at the bend, pinned against the cold metal until he’s slapped free by a dancing paper clip. Swoop! Suck! Up he goes into the flexible plastic hose. Now and then he catches on the accordion folds, but the air is warmer now, and he feels himself being pulled closer and closer to the engine thrumming in the center. Why, this isn’t so bad. He almost feels excited as he approaches his destination, the special paper bag fitted inside the machine where all the dirt in the house congregates. And then he’s in! He’s dragged through the opening. It’s all over. There’s nothing to do but make a cozy nest in the mound of familiar filth.
Featured Art: A Gentleman Who Wanted to Study the Habits of Bees too Closely, plate 6 from Pastorales by Honoré Victorin Daumier
“La créateur est pessimiste, la création ambitieuse, donc optimiste.” —René Char
Because I feared I’d only make a mess Sticking yellow pom-poms onto black ones, Or bungle wings as I tried to shape the white Pipe-cleaners into an outline of flight, I never opened this kit I got one Christmas In my stocking—a joke from my sister: Create A Critter. Since I’m cleaning house I could throw it away. But all I need To make 2 Fuzzy Bees are glue and scissors. Everything’s here—the velvet-tipped feelers, Button noses, and eyes with moving pupils. Ages 6 and Up—well, that’s me, isn’t it? And as an Adult, too, I can Supervise Myself. So why do I still hesitate? If I make a bad bee I can toss it out. Look at this package. The cellophane’s intact, Directions printed on the cardboard backing. Even the little loose eyes seem to twinkle Inviting me to stick them to the heads Where they belong. Yes, they’re Choking Hazards, But I’m alone right now, no cats or babies, And the dining room table is cleared of junk. And so I do it. Soon my Fuzzy Bees Are finished, bouncing on their wire legs, Looking up at me, cute as their photos, Ready to begin their lives as . . . what? What have I done? I’ve given them existence. Their wings will never lift them to the sky, Their red noses will never scent a rose, But look at them! Ambitious, optimistic.
Featured Art: Dance of the Trojans by Henri Fantin-Latour
Every Sunday my daughter calls from California. “Church today, Mom,” she says, not a question: a truth. Every Sunday I mimic her tone. “DanceCraze at the Lautner Center,” I say, and every Sunday Angelie lets out a tunnel of sigh, long, and black at the edges. Today is like every Sunday. At Messler High this week, I’m teaching orbits: the sun, the moon, and the Earth all moving around each other in perfectly predictable ways. I feel like telling my daughter about it, but I don’t have time. DanceCraze starts at eleven. Usually it’s free, except for next week, when the lady from TV is coming.
Today, as always, Robert snorts as I pass him in my tights and sneakers. I walk the six blocks to the Lautner Center and push through its double doors just a couple minutes early, in time to get my spot in the back but after the chitchat. The clock on the wall is ticking toward eleven and everyone starts marching in place. Lila C. is up on stage between the two droopy flags, with the emergency exit behind her. The crowd today is about one-half oldies, one-quarter hoochies, and the rest children and miscellaneous. Miscellaneous, that’s me.
Featured Art: Jung You (Chu Yu), from the series “Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushiko)” by Utagawa Kuniyoshi
If it’s true, as they teach in elementary school, that ours is a secular republic, not gods but men do our temples and sacred monuments adorn, then how to explain the immediacy with which I recall my baptism into the cult of American identity, my consecration as a democratic individual, the very first things I bought at a store by myself— a cherry Slurpee in a collectible plastic superhero cup and a pack of baseball cards, hoping to find Bob Gibson. This was at the 7-Eleven on Porter Street, and soon the five-and-dime on Wisconsin Avenue cycled into orbit, musty aisles of G.C. Murphy & Co. where I might spend my allowance on plastic soldiers, a balsa wood airplane, a rabbit’s foot keychain, trinkets of no intrinsic worth ennobled by commerce, aglimmer with the foxfire of mercantile significance, toys of thought that blazed in the imagination every step walking home. Not to jingle pocket change, not to carry a crumpled dollar bill was to drift untethered from the enormous comfort and safety of the system, like the astronaut who crosses Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey, like a Stone Age tribe wandering into civilization from some last unmapped Amazonian tributary.
Featured Art: Destruction of Hood’s Ordinance Train by George N. Barnard
There was the rumor of a deep night/early morning secret train that a crew had to be called in for and they got double time for their trouble. Big money. They cleared the tracks for it, put everything on the side rails, even the coal cars that were priority. And when it left the yard it was only three cars with a puller and a pusher so it was jimmy-john scooting before it was out of sight. Everyone had a theory. Some millionaire had a coupe shipped to Norfolk from Europe and wanted it in New York by the weekend. Or the government needed a rocket pronto to Fort Meade. Or gold— gold was always a good bet. No one ever knew for sure or knew anyone who had been on the crew, but when the call came, and it would come, it would, why sure, sure, you’d go, that kind of money and all.
Featured Art: Ely Cathedral: Galilee Porch from Nave by Frederick H. Evans
Science is nothing to be scared of, I promise my eighth-graders. Science, I say, is what gives us words for what the earth, the universe, already know in a language of cells and change.
They are busy copying my name off the board.
I tell them to think about time, think about how we talk about the abstract idea of it like something physical: a road we’re traveling on. The road of life, we say. Moving past something, leaving it behind; or stepping into the future, looking forward to something. The future is ahead, the past behind, this is how we place ourselves.
But, I say, earlier cultures spoke about time as a road that you walked backwards on. They faced the past, its landscape visible and familiar, while taking tentative, shaky steps into the unknown behind them. The future, a darkness over the shoulder they had to carefully, fearfully move toward.
Featured Art: Tetards (Pollards) by Vincent van Gogh
[The following poem (and its Italian translation) reflect the actual search for the title of a selection of poems by John Ashbery published in a bilingual edition in Italy, and it reproduces the structure of Ashbery’s “Title Search,” from And the Stars Were Shining. The book was eventually published under the title Un mondo che non può essere migliore (A World that Cannot Be Better), translated by Damiano Abeni and Moira Egan, with an introduction by Joseph Harrison (Luca Sossella Editore: Rome, Italy, 2008). The translators thought it was aptly Ashberian that the final book title had not been considered in this search, and that it was derived from a poem not included in the Italian selection: “…while you, in this nether world that could not be better / Waken each morning to the exact value of what you did and said, which remains” (“Definition of Blue,” in The Double Dream of Spring).]
Featured Art: Beata Beatrix by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
We asked the distinguished translators listed below to write about any particularly thorny passages they had wrestled with, as well as the solutions they came up with. Their responses follow.
David Ferry Lydia Davis Damiano Abeni Moira Egan Rosamund Bartlett George Kalogeris Joanna Trzeciak Geoffrey Brock
Featured Art: Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower by Thomas Cole
A few years ago Damiano published the Italian version of 89 Clouds by Mark Strand (ACA Galleries, New York, 1999; 89 Nuvole, Edizioni L’Obliquo, Brescia, Italy, 2003). Some of these one-liners are quite straightforward, but some are really tough to translate. For instance, Cloud # 25 reads: “A cloud without you is only a clod.” Damiano’s main inspiration when translating comes from the approach Glenn Gould had when interpreting a musical score. Rather than focusing on the literal meaning of each word, he tried to play the same game the author was playing, to imitate his wittiness and to leave a trace of the strong cloud/clod alliteration. What came out, when back-translated, would sound something like “A cloud without part of you is almost nothing,” and here is how it looks in Italian: Una nuvola senza parte di voi è quasi nulla.
Featured Art: Spring by Eduard Willmann, after Eduard Marak
In chapter fourteen of the eighth and final part of Anna Karenina, some five thousand words before the end of the novel, Tolstoy produces one of his inimitable, participle-laden, congested sentences about the behaviour of bees in Levin’s apiary:
In front of the entrances to the hives sparkling bees and drones danced before his eyes as they circled and bumped into each other on one spot, and amongst them, continually plying the same route to the blossoming lime trees in the wood and back towards the hives, flew worker bees with their spoils and in pursuit of their spoils.
Перед летками ульев рябили в глазах кружащиеся и толкущиеся на одном месте, играющие пчелы и трутни, и среди их, все в одном направлении, туда, в лес на цветущую липу, и назад, к ульям, пролетали рабочие пчелы с взяткой и за взяткой.
It is one of those sentences which exemplifies the challenges posed by Tolstoy’s often tortuous but majestic prose in Anna Karenina—a novel he found hard to write due to profound spiritual crisis welling up inside him in the 1870s.
Featured Art: New York Sky Line, Dark Buildingsby Childe Hassam
I got into translation early in life, but instead of playing the field I have tended to go steady and stay with one poet for a long time. My first was Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish poet whom I have translated since the early nineties. Szymborska’s poetry, rife with wit, graceful and deeply humane, has earned her the Nobel Prize, a permanent place in the pantheon of poetry, and admirers such as Woody Allen. Her response to the world is rendered in one of her poems as one of “rapture and despair.”
In the 2002 collection Miracle Fair, I intimated six themes under which her poems might be clustered. One of them is our relation as human beings to animate and inanimate nature. Our attitudes toward other sentient beings is central to poems such as “Tarsier,” “Monkey,” “Seen from Above,” and “Birds Returning.” When it comes to the inanimate world she has devoted entire poems to the contemplation of water, rock, clouds, and sky. Or if not “sky” then perhaps “heavens”? Or maybe “heaven”? The Polish word is niebo [pronounced NYEH boh]. Here we start.
Featured Art: Handkerchief by Oriental Print Works
Despite the Italian adage traduttore/traditore, which equates translation with betrayal, nearly all translators I know claim fidelity as their goal (while also admitting the impossibility of perfect fidelity); it was certainly my goal as I set out to translate Umberto Eco’s 2005 novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. But what does “fidelity” mean to literary translators? Faithful to whom or what? There is less agreement on that score. The question is complex even with regard to what might be called vanilla prose; it’s deeply vexed with regard to most poetry or any prose that features puns or other word-play, or that contrasts its language with that of one of its dialects, or that relies on allusions that would be clear to source-language readers but opaque or even misleading to others—and so on. In such cases, liberties will often be taken at the expense of semantic fidelity but in the service of broader and arguably more important fidelities. In this piece, I will look at three such cases from Eco’s novel.
Newohioreview.org is archiving previous editions as they originally appeared. We are pairing the pieces with curated art work, as well as select audio recordings. In collaboration with our past contributors, we are happy to (re)-present this outstanding work.
Featured Art: Lorette with a Cup of Coffee by Henri Matisse
After my swim, I sit at a small table at Peet’s with my medium sugar-free, low-fat, vanilla freddo that the barista started as I walked in. I push the whipped cream deep into the cup and worry
about my daughter, who drives a perilously small car on the freeway, and my son in New Orleans, too poor to drive, whose illness frightens me most of all.
My father worried about us until the day he died. When I came home from college, he insisted I take the dog or my ten-year-old brother with me when I drove at night. At eighty-six, he called me daily
from the nursing home to make sure I was okay. I remember how my mother savored half a nickel-box of licorice bits and a single cigarette as she read each evening, waiting for us to come home,
and years later, how she devoured the Hershey bars and Cokes Dad brought her every afternoon, long after she had forgotten us all.
Featured Art:Fruit and Flowers by Orsola Maddalena Caccia
My father has a new woman. He’s 93, the old one is worn out. They used to hold hands and watch TV in his Independent Living cottage, but now there is the new one, to hold hands. The old one is in Assisted Living not 50 feet away but barely able to lift herself to her walker. He sits in her room after dinner, her mind wandering in and out. What if she escapes and comes over while my father is “taking a nap” with this new one? My mother is two miles away beneath her stone, relieved. I bring artificial flowers to her with my sister, who likes to do that when we visit. I am not much for demonstration. I would just stand there and say, oh, mother, he’s at it again. And she’d say, I am sleeping, don’t bother me with him anymore. And we’d commune in that way that knows well enough what we’re not saying. And I’d be lamenting my self-righteous silence in the past, my smart-aleck-motherjust- go-to-a-therapist talk. What I should have said was, was, was, oh, it was like a tower of blocks. Pull one out and all would fall. She would get a divorce and a job and marry some balding man like her father, who would be my ersatz father and would take her dancing and let her wear her hair the way she wanted, and she would cut it short and get it permed and life would quiet down and my father, to her, would morph into the handsome and funny Harvard Man he was in the old days, the way he posed her for his camera, tilting her head to the light with his devouring-passion fingertips and her days would begin to feel like a succession of pale slates to scribble on and erase before the new husband came home from work, while my father would spin off after whoever would “put up with him,” as he says, and would follow his new one around carrying her groceries and complaining that she spends too much, but biting his tongue and thinking how soon she would let him, well, you know, and I would be, what? The same as now, writing this down so that none of the shifting and sifting could get away cleanly without at least this small consequence.
Featured Art: A Vase of Flowers by Margareta Haverman
We’re at it again. It’s hard not to rewrite the years, though we couldn’t have known they were wrong, if they were. Life isn’t longer than it is, so off we go,
picturing how it might have happened, though one of us would have been taken, or both, and one of us lived up north, one by the warmest sea. We had no common
travel destinations, we rarely read the same books, there wasn’t one same friend, and either might have fled if it started to matter. Apologies, if made,
might not have been accepted. In truth we could only have met on the street, on one of your trips to the city. We’d both have held back. The courage to speak
would’ve yielded “Excuse me,” no more, all vision cordoned off by the sun. So we might as well indulge in the words for their sound: You would’ve been the one.
Featured Art: Stroll with Balloons by Hughie Lee Smith
We came across the camels every time we picnicked that merciless autumn, huge herds grazing on sparse vegetation. Camel comes from jamal, the Arabic root word for beauty. From a distance they did look lovely, their curvy silhouettes mimicking the contours of the dunes. Up close, however, they seemed slightly ridiculous, like bad female impersonators, batting their Scarlett O’Hara lashes to keep the sand out of their eyes, their long necks sloping toward us, then coyly withdrawing.
That we saw them so near the city surprised us. We’d heard stories of naive Westerners who’d driven for hours looking for adventure—for camels—and then stopped to explore the landscape with their pitifully small water bottles, supplemented, in some cases, by flasks of 100-proof siddiqi. Some were lost in the Empty Quarter, the largest desert in the world, never to be heard from again. I wrote a friend: If I were to start a literary journal here, I’d call it The Empty Quarterly.
Sometimes we’d see a row of black tents with goats tethered to a nearby post. Once, an old Bedouin waved a gnarled hand back and forth like a weathered stick. I thought we were in trouble, trespassing on his property, but as he ambled closer all he said, in a slow, proud English, was “See my camels.” He invited my husband into the largest of the tents. I waited in the air-conditioned Mazda, fiddling with the radio. Masculine voices jabbered in endless variations of the little Arabic I knew: Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullah, Allah akbar, Inshalla. The sounds seemed to emanate from deep down the throat, a rush of rough and phlegmy h’s, a conspiracy of k’s.
One is what one looks at—well, at least partially. —Joseph Brodsky
All morning in my hammock burning a tight one, poised with pencil and notebook and seven-week beard, I look to the pines outside my cabin, seeking inspiration from the birds and the squirrels whose singing and foraging, whose exclamations, no, arguments, reflect my inner my inner my inner . . . and every so often my cousin Ricky returns from hunting rabbits on my four-wheeler to tell me he’s thought of a new way to beat off: Anywhere around here to buy watermelons? Even his camo flannel can’t conceal that Superdome belly and I hate to think how long since anyone’s seen his diminutive dangle so I tell him in all seriousness, my sympathy sincere, You might be on to something, but after he tokes and rides away I get inspired, realize I should’ve said Go drive around these country roads, man, look for signs! and even Ricky would’ve nodded with a look of feigned profundity like he’s posing for an author photo but I let that moment go
Featured Art: Painting with Troika by Wassily Kandinsky
Seven in the morning laying insulation and wiring electric with a friend and his friend who make money building houses. Laying insulation at seven on Saturday because of a promise made the night before at the bar, where the ambition to learn something about house circuitry appeared like a blown fuse. This pink shit makes you itch. Not so with my friend here— he’s worked with this stuff so long he sleeps on it, wakes up throws a piece in the toaster, eats it slowly with cream cheese and coffee. Shouldn’t we be wearing respirators or something? How the hell should I know? But this is good. This kind of work is good for me—re-callous these grandma hands I’ve grown. Like back in those summers when I tar-sealed blacktop on ninety-five-degree early mornings. “And then in the afternoons,” I tell them. On break we smoke a joint in front of the site, drink water, sit there in silence. Silent like that until I start to count breaths. And wonder what happened to last night’s beer brotherhood. But then I recognize the similarity between our collective awareness and the object of our unfocused gazes: Margaret’s Creek, running muddy and a little high along the other side of the road. I could try to articulate this thought— it might break the silence. Then again it might make more, and I want to work with these guys on future jobs, so instead I tell them how I once caught a five-pound largemouth a quarter-mile up this creek that jerked so hard in my grip she stuck two of the treble hook barbs from the top-water Rapala I caught her with into my thumb, how I tried for an hour to loosen them from the nerve, feeling it in my front teeth, fish in the water, gone, how I had to push the points clear through the side of my thumb and clip the barbs with rusty wire cutters. “Sure,” I add, “there’s good fishing in this creek if you know the good holes.” Then my friend’s friend holds out his left thumb, a nubby little thing, tells us about an accident he had with a circular saw.
Recently I’ve become a “regular” at an especially sub-standard diner called Sam’s World. Although I have no special fondness for the soggy potatoes, greasy burgers or limp lettuce leaves they dish up, Sam’s World is within walking distance. This is important because I have no car and my apartment has no kitchen. There is an old, barely functioning refrigerator in the narrow hallway between the bathroom and the only other room. I don’t hold out much hope for this refrigerator since I can’t bring myself to defrost it. A solid block of ice has formed over the opening to the freezer, and at some point I expect the whole thing will just blow up.
One day I might be out of debt and able to afford an apartment larger than one hundred and fifty square feet. Then again, I may not. When I consider the size of my indebtedness I realize I could quite easily be dead before I pay it off.
Anyway, it’s Tuesday evening at Sam’s World; I’m not very hungry but am in need of comfort so I decide to skip actual food and have ice cream and coffee.
BUM fired me today but then he changed his mind. He said I didn’t really have to leave but if I wanted to it would be all right. Then he went back to our mail-sorting session as if nothing unusual had occurred. I would guess an episode like that does not bode well for job security.
Sent to visit one summer, Charlie and me, eight or nine years old, our mother putting us on a train in Providence, our father waiting on a platform in Detroit, pigeon murmur of loudspeakers in the station, man carrying our bags out into late afternoon light, click of boot heels across the concrete of parking garage, three of us riding out of the city in that old Impala of his, car floating big and loose as a motorboat in the dusk, radial drone of road and traffic under everything, burgers and fries in Flint, gas station in Saginaw, another hour to Grayling, Portage Lake, and the fishing cabin with our father at last.
Second Prize, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest selected by Charles Baxter
Featured Art: The Eventuality of Destiny by Giorgio de Chirico
I am this heart, this brain, only these, right now—no other. This is what Susan (that’s her name now) tells herself every morning upon waking. She opens her eyes and sees the flaking ceiling above her, sees the wash of sunlight coming through leaves. She touches her chest, feels her heart beating steadily—no rush of fear—and exhales. She’s alone. She touches her head, hair just starting to gray and she’s not bothering to color it. “This can be my new disguise,” she thinks, “my new self.” One of the million selves she’s been in the last twenty-odd years. She rubs her eyes and before she can silence herself again, she remembers days when she thought more, remembered more: a million legs all running toward the Pentagon or induction center or federal courthouse. Flowers in the barrel of a gun. A Viet Cong flag. Giant puppets of Kissinger, Nixon, McNamara. Or their heads atop the bodies of gigantic hawks, perched among the blackened trees of a burned landscape. Bring the war home. A placard of a napalmed child. If people see, they will join us and this atrocity will have to stop. A million hands waving. A million arms, fists raised in salute. They were the million legs and hands of her—her legs and hands—the million-limbed body of resistance, then revolution. Why does she allow these things to come back to her today? Because it’s spring and her curtains are the color of a daffodil she handed to a child once at a demonstration? She remembers when the remembered voices were always with her, singing off-key but loudly together. She never felt alone. But then suddenly she was alone, amputated from everyone and everything she knew. Most mornings she silences these memories of memories, she manages to.
Featured Art: Chrysanthemums by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
1880: John Stine proposes to his dead wife’s sister, Eliza. He is a farmer, about forty, she is a spinster midwife. She accepts, telling him, “I will marry you for the sake of the children, but I will never sleep with you.”
This sounds strange—would she have said sleep with in the nineteenth century?—but these are my grandmother’s words. It is 1993 and we are sitting in her house, which smells like cigarettes and meat. The curtains are drawn. Her second husband has been dead for fifteen years. She hasn’t gone blind yet.
1962: The Orlons sing Baby baby when you do the Twist, never never do you get yourself kissed.
Featured Art: Trees Against the Sky by Alfred Hutty
In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him; they ravaged the Ammonites, and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem. (2 Samuel 11:1)
11:6
He was halfway to Ramstein, the dust of Afghanistan still on his boots, when it finally hit him: home. In April no less. The cherry blossoms would be spinning down from their trees, sweet, light, floating. It was a military jet—noisy, hard, and sidewise—that took him to Germany, him in his camis, sand still hidden in the folds, hardly believing he was out of the desert. Four months into his first deployment to Afghanistan and, after the training and orientation at central command near Kabul, he’d spent his months out in the mountains, riding Humvees along what they called the main corridor, though it was pockmarked and potholed and barely paved, and humping alongside mules to little villages. Escorting the arrival of humanitarian aid, waiting while some brain from intel, some secret squirrel, interrogated the village elder.
Featured Art: Bath of Venus by Sir Edward Burne-Jones
My mother is immersed in membrane when I find her. Eggs cover her body, some cracked and spilling their spoils, some whole, resting on her belly, her breasts. White flecks of eggshells gravel her skin and the runnings of yellow yolks have dried, look like the peelings of a summer burn. Her head is underneath this mess when I look over the side of the tub.
“Mom?”
She surfaces, wipes film back into her hair, the glossy middle of the egg from her cheek. She blinks.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
She looks at me as if it’s quite obvious, which I guess it is. She is taking a bath in chicken eggs, dozens and dozens of them.
“I heard it’s good for your skin,” she says.
“Um…for your hair, maybe. Egg whites are supposed to be good for your hair.”
“Hmm,” she says, inhales a big gulp of air, and sloshes down under the eggs, the water beneath them. She waves her hand up at me. Eggs spill over the sides of the tub and drop onto the bathroom floor, cracking open.
