Poetry as a journey: What Lies Ahead by Caroline Clark

The epigraph at the very beginning of Caroline Clark’s new collection of essays, What Lies Ahead, reads simply:

Can I be with you
while you read this?
Don’t look up or
say anything.

And, as you read the pieces that follow you will be aware of the author’s presence—not as an eerie feeling of someone looking over your shoulder—but in the companionable atmosphere of Clark’s calm and thoughtful engagement with the poetic ideas of others and her own lived experience to make some sense of where she has come from and where she is going. It is not a journey with rigid parameters and a fixed destination. Rather, these essays, she tells us in the introduction to this slender compilation, are “the trail of someone who doesn’t know but wants to know.” She reaches, reconsiders, questions. As such, there is a deep reflective quality that flows through in this short collection of essays written over the past two decades. One that richly rewards the reader fortunate enough to meet it.

In a mix of literary and personal pieces, Clark writes about poetry, language, writing, translation, and memory, drawing on the work of the many and varied writers who have inspired her, and her own experiences living in Russia and Canada, as a parent, and working as an interpreter. Her approach is internally driven, exploratory, and respectful of others in her life. This is not a confessional of the too-much-information variety, it is, rather, an examination of the shifting balance in the relationship between heart and intellect, ideas and creativity, that moves from early academic passions, through to an increasingly mature and individual engagement with literature, tempered by the stuff of life. Her personal journey takes her away from her native England in early adulthood—far away, first to Moscow, then to Montreal—before eventually leading her back to her hometown of Lewes. Along the way: falling in love, marriage, the birth of two daughters, and a diagnosis of cancer mark the passage of time.

Presented more or chronologically (as written) and intended for standalone publication, there is no single theme uniting the essays gathered here, but Clark’s longstanding desire to write (to be a poet), and her open dialogue with the words and ideas of other poets and writers features throughout, whether the piece leans toward the literary or the personal, or somewhere in between. The collection opens with the title essay “What Lies Ahead,” directed to her twenty-five-year-old self from a vantage point some half a dozen years later, looking back at what she learned, and what she wished she had known, when she was writing her MA thesis. Her greatest teachers at the time were her subjects—Osip Mandelstam and Paul Celan—and together they informed much of what she came to understand about reading and writing poetry. In simple terms, she advises: “Mandelstam taught me the importance of drafting and Celan taught me the importance of going deeper, the need to step beyond.” The essay goes on to explore what she took from their work and their approaches to writing, and how it has formed her personal experience of poetry outside the academic framework and how she finds herself, with a little distance, focusing less on the new readerly possibilities that lie ahead, and more on returning to the books of her studies armed with new sources and experiences to deepen her reading and understanding.

This ability to read deeply, to circle back again so as to move forward with a clearer vision, is a quality that shapes her essay writing, whether she is reflecting on her first reading of the work of Russian poet Leonid Aronzon, or encountering Gerald Murnane’s Inland, or starting with a simple memory just to see where it carries her. She begins “What’s Going to Happen?” with a recollection from childhood—watching The Big Breakfast before school with her younger brother—as a prompt to inform an essay without any preconceived direction:

I accept the challenge my mind has dredged up: to see where this banal memory might lead. My tools shall be the things that surround me: the books I’m reading, the words of my two-year-old. Here the essay will be simply a look around: a camera panning, a single shot mapping a field of vision, and with that movement the mind and senses must move too. And just by chance something might jump out from this field. A discovery might be made.

The show she had been watching, with its manufactured sense of “real life,” inspired questions about the nature of reality in her fourteen-year-old imagination. This quickly leads her, the adult essayist, to think about the existential musings of Clarice Lispector’s A Breath of Life and memory, be it neurobiological or digital. Which leads to Cloud storage and the anonymous 14th century text The Cloud of Unknowing, because, well, of course it does. But Clark charts this meandering exercise so beautifully it is difficult not to be charmed. Each of the essays in What Lies Ahead in takes the reader somewhere not entirely expected, as a good essay should. To enter into this selection of attentive, intelligent meditations to be willing to emerge richer for the experience.

What Lies Ahead and other essays by Caroline Clark is published by Black Herald Press.

Surely somebody knows something: Sarajevo Saga by Stefan Çapaliku

When noted Albanian author Lekë Cukali arrives in Sarajevo for a writer’s residency, he is met by an elegant but odd woman, his programme contact, who accompanies him to the flat where he is to stay for the next month. It is a little dated, but serviceable if they can find him a proper desk and chair. However, when he wakes up the next morning he discovers that there is no heat, no hot water, and no wi-fi. And although it is April, 2024, spring has not yet made itself known. Not exactly an auspicious start to his brief sojourn in the city.

Sarajevo Saga by Stefan Çapaliku, the third Albanian translation to be published by Istros Books, is a clever, briskly-paced story that combines mystery and history with just enough unresolved danger to make for a thoroughly entertaining adventure. Capaliku, a versatile writer known especially as a playwright and theatre director, draws on his dramatic skills to craft a tale that makes the most of its 133 pages to trace a fascinating line of connection between two Balkan countries that stretches back over a century.

While Lekë waits for his hosts to sort out the necessities of a comfortable and functional space in which to live and work, it occurs to him that he really has no idea what he hopes to accomplish with his time in Sarajevo:

I have in fact come here to write, though even if I did not write no one would reproach me for it. But I do want to write. I cannot trample on this opportunity, which lifts me out of my daily routine. I am at an age when I can no longer afford to squander my days, moments, least of all occasions such as this.

In other residencies I have always arrived with clear ideas in my head. I do not know why, this time, I have allowed myself to drift into free fall.

But if his professional ambitions are less clear, he does have a personal mission—to see if he can find any trace of members of his family, distant cousins, a widowed woman who, with her four children, left Albania presumably with the retreating Austrian army following the end of WWI. These relatives, captured in an old photograph in a family book back home in Shkodër, had fascinated him as a child, but little was known of their fate beyond the fact that they had ended up in Sarajevo. Contact had long been lost, and during the long years of communist rule, such matters were better left forgotten. However, when Lekë’s ninety-one year-old father learned that his son would be going to Sarajevo,  he insisted that he see what he might find out.

Meanwhile, within the first few chapters of the book, a second thread born of Lekë’s childhood imagination—or so it seems—takes us back to late October, 1918, as Mikel Cukali begins his account of the events leading up to his sudden departure from Shkodër with his mother, older sister and twin brothers. This second historical thread detailing the family’s journey to Sarajevo, their arrival, and the life they settled into there, will continue to alternate with Lekë’s present day story. This twinned narrative advances swiftly, in short, 3-page chapters  that nod back and forth one another. The continual switching creates a tension which builds and crosses between the threads.

As he explores the city, acquainting himself with its sights and coffee shops, Lekë is inclined to inquire whenever the opportunity arises, if anyone remembers or knows of someone with the surname Cukali. At first his search leads nowhere. And then, one day at his favoured café, the curiously named Amarcord—evoking thoughts of Fellini’s film and the notion of nostalgic remembrances, in name if not décor—his inquiry seems to raise the ire of the establishment’s owner. It’s the first clue that will ultimately lead to a connection with a possible descendant of his distant relatives. But the more he learns, the more he risks putting his own life in danger.

For a novella with two distinct threads separated by the better part of a century (or are they?), Çapaliku manages to weave a fair amount of societal, cultural, and historical detail into both. The language is unadorned, the accounts necessarily spare, and though one spans thirty  years and the other just a few weeks, there is a nice balance between the interwar environment of the imagined historical thread and the very contemporary, technology-dependent atmosphere of the present day strand. The two narrative voices complement one another well but, at the end of the day, it is the conversational-styled account of the rather neurotic writer-in-residence who in his efforts to connect with the past inadvertently stumbles upon ghosts better left undisturbed, that makes this sojourn in Sarajevo most memorable.

Sarajevo Saga by Stefan Çapliku is translated from Albanian by Vlora Konushevci and published by Istros Books.

Of dreams, memories, and the imagination: Slow Elephants of Milan by Ángel Bonomini

Imagine the sight: on a foggy February morning in Milan, the modest and apologetic narrator of the title story of this long overdue translation of short fiction by the enigmatic Argentinian writer  Ángel Bonomini (1929–1994), is surprised to see two elephants emerge from the mist on the Via Manin. As a visitor passing through this elegant city, he is at a loss to explain his reaction to this most unexpected, incongruous sighting, and the vision stays with him, haunting his travels and following him home to Buenos Aires. Obsessively, he writes about his elephants until they begin to take on a larger (elephant sized?) psychological and metaphysical quality:

On my eyelids, the elephants’ footfalls weigh like nightmares. If only elephants had wings, and didn’t always step as though onto a rubbery, sticky surface that hardly permits movement . . . but no. They softly beat the ground, hardly touching it, hardly using it, and perhaps they hardly weigh anything at all, being so delicate and even-tempered, as if ashamed of their enormity, careful not to stick out, desiring to conceal themselves. Elephants are very delicate. They may be the only animals that deserve to walk on the streets of Milan.

And this world, where  sometimes an elephant is more than an elephant, is the strange, gently surreal space Bonomini inhabits. A contemporary of Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Sylvia Ocampo, he was a prolific short story writer but today he is all but forgotten in his home country. Slow Elephants of Milan, along with the 2024 release of The Novices of Lerna—both translated by Jordan Landsman—represent an effort to introduce this lost master to English speaking audiences.

In Bonomini’s hands, writing the fantastic takes on a distinctly light, fluid feel, and an oddness that often lies less in the story itself than in the angle by which it is approached and navigated. The boundaries between memories, dreams, and the imagination are constantly in flux, while his narrators often struggle to make sense of their experiences. But rarely do they confront the strangeness, choosing instead to allow it to envelope them, accepting the fate they are allotted. As such, one cannot anticipate clear resolutions as his tales draw to a close, or even, at times, clear lines between one story and another.

This collection of twelve stories, ten from 1978’s Slow Elephants of Milan and two from Love Stories (1982), introduces us to a wide cast of characters who find themselves forced or inclined to navigate the indistinct edges of reality where almost anything can be possible or impossible. Like the couple in “You Must Go to Laar,” who follow a stranger’s advice and take an unscheduled detour to a city that is on no map, find themselves in an oddly silent, nearly uninhabited town of towers and canals where time and distance seem distorted. It is said that no one who visits Laar will return unchanged. But they were not warned that they might not return at all . . . Or the narrator of “Diary of my Portraits” who recounts in fragmentary excerpts, how he sits, day after day, while his artist  wife or lover captures variations of his likeness on her canvas, while reflecting on the existential relationship between his own being and her representations of him:

The fleetingness of things and beings. We love beings with a lasting glint in their eyes. Perhaps painting could rescue the eternity of an instant. But no. Everything is doomed  to failure. All we can do is hope for something that, though it isn’t ours, represents us before eternity—like a face, this one indeed eternal, wrapped in a nameless fog.

Or the lonely captain, hero of “Captain Burn’s Bed,” destined to spend his naval career crossing the Atlantic between Liverpool and Baltimore, who is haunted by a woman who appears in his dreams but defies all his efforts to communicate with her. When tragedy strikes and his ship is sunk, his unrecorded survival sets him on a long, unlikely path to crafting a reality that will eventually put him in contact with the mysterious woman with whom he has been obsessed.

The magic of Bonomini’s world lies in the diffused quality of light  he casts over the lives of his characters as they encounter the unexplained, experience violence, or lose themselves in erotic recollections that may or may not have any substance. The unreliability of memory and imagination is a pervasive theme, one that unites his eclectic tales. And his narrative tone, which tends to be thoughtful, questioning, and open to possibility, makes him a storyteller well worth spending a little time with.

Slow Elephants of Milan by Ángel Bonomini is translated from the Spanish by Jordan Landsman and published by Transit Books.

“I write in circles”: Beauty Burning: The Condition of Music by Daniela Cascella

Burn. The sight of beauty sets me on fire. I once read of the burning tremor of fear which the lover will suffer when the eye perceives a likeness of eternal beauty. Burn.

To read Daniela Cascella is to be swept into an ongoing conversation within a maze of words, of voices, of images, of moments that catch one off guard, inspire, alarm. Her writing is energetic, continually in motion, seeking, questioning, listening for echoes in time and space.

I have been reading her work for more than a decade now, but have only written about one of her books on this site. Even now, fear of stumbling over my own words, has me wondering if justice can be done. Back in 2017, I responded to Singed with a personal reflection on  her influence on my own attention to the words I read and write and returning to that post I am struck by my opening paragraph:

Daniela Cascella is a literary ecstatic. She engages with the word—written, spoken, sung, depicted—at an essential point of being, at that place where the spirit, soul, or daimon resides.

A literary ecstatic. That description was valid then, and even more so vividly now three books later.

Her most recent work, Beauty Burning: The Condition of Music, which is itself in conversation with her previous three volume, is an infectious essay that asks What is beauty? A burning question but one that seeks not an examination of that which may be defined as beautiful. Rather, it creates, in its rhythms and rhymes, the sensations, the tensions, the intensities that make the existence of beauty possible. The answer then, she tells us on the very first page, is “the condition of music.” But this book does not write about beauty or music. It does, however, begin with music:

The condition of music is a phrase written in 1923 by Mary Butts in her journals, as she yearned for being beyond and before words, yet wrote nonetheless: a condition haunted by, and longing to find words as forms in circular motion and cyclical transformation. Likewise these pages are written in circular ways which sometimes may evoke or hold a rhyme, sometimes a psychic rhyme, sometimes a repetition, in a prose that goes astray only to return to its beating core.

Cascella’s writing has an almost alchemical quality. As an Italian-British writer working in her nonnative language, she has an open, playful approach to words. She has an acute ear for sounds and takes advantage of homonyms, heteronyms, and neologisms to finetune the multifaceted meanings and musicality of her prose. Repetition and the recurrence of quotes and imagery create a choral effect, building an increasing strength and coherence to the disparate references she pulls together as her text progresses. That progression, though, is very organic, halting, inquisitive, and keenly felt.

Her touchstones, that chorus of voices and inspirations that echo throughout Beauty Burning are many and varied. Some she has engaged with at length in earlier texts,  others arise briefly but in passing leave their mark. Quotes from Osip Mandel’stam are important, but she also interacts with the words Clarise Lispector, Christina Campo, Marlene van Niekerk, Maria Gabriela Llansol, Dante, Lászlo Krasznahorkai, Roberto Calasso, and many more. (And, as many of these encounters are made possible through the invaluable work of translators, she thanks them all by name in her acknowledgements.) But in this book, three individuals were essential, as she describes it in her dedication, in setting the tone. They are avant-garde American fashion designer Rick Owens, and two Canadians, philosopher and visual artist Vivian Darroch-Lovowski, and poet and philosopher Tim Lilburn. Three diverse creative souls with whom she feels a special spiritual connection.

This is the kind of chemistry that fuels Cascella’s writing, perhaps more passionately and explicitly here than in her previous books. And I’m sure you know the experience. She is referring to daemonic encounters, those intense sparks of recognition that fire an aesthetic energy and conversations in the aether may be ignited. “Conversations in the aether are heard in reading and formed with the distant, with the dead.” That is, that sensation that the words you are reading you have heard, known, before you meet them. And it need not be confined to writing, perhaps it’s a moment in a film, or a piece of art, that ignites that spark. And sometimes it burns.

In the beauty of the encounter that burns, wounds, and prompts, at first I am speechless, so to articulate words here means learning to know the wound those same words pierced in my throat, the wound which first muffled my voice then made me regain it in the impetus of desire, stitched and broken, difficult, present, necessary. On encountering (on hearing) Vivian’s Voice of Hearing I learned my wound, my burning, my centre, my circle. From the very first page a sense of recognition, as if the future had come to greet me carrying the weight of a deep past.

One can feel the intensity of Cascella’s connection to Darroch-Lovowski’s writing which in turn, opens an avenue for me to again approach Voice of Hearing with a fresh appreciation for what is happening in a work that I may not have been prepared for on my own first encounter (which is, in itself, the beauty of discovering or rediscovering writers and artists through the appreciation of others—and how that same spark of recognition can send us down endless rabbit holes).

In Tim Lilburn, a very different type of writer, a poet and essayist deeply inspired by nature, the Desert Fathers and early thinkers and mystics of the Church, Cascella finds “the voice of reading, re-reading, repeating, in kinship.” Again the connection is immediate:

It was as if we often had underlined the same phrases in the same books, had been drawn to the same thinkers and writers who constantly questioned the borders of language, although we had done so under different timelines and circumstances, coming from different places, going in different directions. 

In writing, writing in circles, in listening, reading, communicating, engaging, Cascella winds her way toward a fuller sense of understanding what is burning at the heart of the questions that haunt her. It is a journey, no perhaps wandering is a better word, driven by desire, pain, and guided by a whisper that she suspects was born before her lips. And one that inspires me to be more attentive to the voices I hear, and return to writing, even if in circles, because certain words do not take leave from me, not I from them.

Beauty Burning: The Condition of Music by Daniela Cascella is published by Erratum Press.

An excerpt from the opening passages of this book can be found at Minor Literature[s].

“We laugh, and I truly believe that we genuinely like each other.”: Jérôme Lindon by Jean Echenoz

Jean Echenoz opens his tribute to his longtime editor and publisher, with an account that many other hopeful, and perhaps naïve, would-be authors might know well.  It is 1979, he has just turned thirty-one, and he has finished writing a novel—his first:

I don’t know if it’s my first; I don’t know if I’ll write another. All I know is that I’ve written one, and if I could find a publisher for it, that would be good. If that publisher could be Jérôme Lindon of Éditions de Minuit, it would of course be even better, but let’s not get greedy. Too serious a house, too austere and rigorous, the epitome of literary virtue, too good for me, not even worth trying. I therefore mail the manuscript to several publishers, all of whom send it back.

He continues to send his prospective novel out until he amasses a “near-exhaustive collection of rejection letters” and if for no other reason than to complete the set he takes a copy to the offices of the illustrious Éditions de Minuit, home to writers like Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. He expects nothing, so he is stunned when, on the way to a job interview, he learns that Jéróme Lindon has called his house and wants him to return the call as soon as possible. He phones the publishing house to explain that he has an interview and is invited to come by as soon as he is finished.

That initial meeting ends with a signed contract  and marks the beginning of a productive working relationship, if not exactly a firm friendship, that will continue until Lindon’s death in 2001 (and beyond that, of course, with his successor, his daughter Irène Lindon). The present text, Jérôme Lindon, is a slender volume written shortly after Lindon’s death in which Echenoz reflects on his own growth as an author under the guidance and encouragement—or when he was not impressed a glaring absence of either—of this legendary publisher. It is a warm, funny, and often gently self-deprecating reflection on both a singular man of vision, and a world of book publishing that sadly belongs to another era.

Jérôme Lindon was born into a Jewish family in Paris in 1925. During the war he went into hiding outside the city, and joined the Combat resistance as a teenager. In 1946 he went to work at Éditions de Minuit and two years later with support from his family he took over as director at the age of twenty-three, a position he would hold for over fifty years. If the early post-war years were difficult for the small publishing house, things began to turn around in 1951 when he accepted a novel rejected by other publisher—Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. Lindon would go to publish the central figures of the Nouveau Roman, expand Éditions de Minuit’s catalogue to include important French Philosophers and social theorists, and, from the 1970s to the mid- 80s, take on a number of fresh young French writers, of which Echenoz was one. He was, as Echenoz demonstrates in his affection tribute, a man with a keen, and typically immediate sense of what he liked without any reservation about making it equally clear when he felt a manuscript fell short of the mark. During their twenty year association, Echenoz experienced his effusive warmth and enthusiasm when he impressed his publisher, punctuated by lengthy stretches of icy distance when he did not.

Echenoz’s debut novel, in spite of Lindon’s eager embrace, failed to sell, something the novice author hadn’t even taken into account, being thrilled just to know it was out in the world. Then, one day, he receives a call informing him that he has won the Fénéon Prize. Still, the book does not sell, but Echenoz is unphased, reasoning: “I have a publisher and it’s Jérôme Lindon. The rest is unimportant.” And so, a year or two later, he delivers a second novel. It’s a disaster. Lindon is not impressed. In fact, he is at pains to describe in detail exactly what is bad about the book. They will not see each other for two and a half years.

But his next effort, awkwardly delivered, is met with unexpected enthusiasm and they’re back in business again. As time goes on, more books will be published, more prizes will be awarded, and Echenoz will learn to ride the waves of his publisher’s responses to what he writes and, as he becomes a more publicly known and admired writer, his engagements the wider literary world. Lindon has strong views about how his authors should conduct certain aspects of their careers, but as an editor, if he likes a work, he exercises a very light hand. Nonetheless, Echenoz recalls debates over book titles and long, surprisingly fun-filled, sessions spent haggling over commas.

Only 59 pages long, Jérôme Lindon, is a spare meditation on a  special working relationship that is infused with fondness for its subject, amid Echenoz’s humorous confessions of his own, often stumbling, growth as an author—his shyness, his missteps, and his inability to say no. And he shows a genuine appreciation of his  brilliant, if mercurial, publisher’s nature:

 Still, you shouldn’t think that the man is cold, brusque, authoritarian, unemotional, and who knows what else—quite the contrary. In fact, he’s passionate, he can be moved, he laughs, he lights up, he rejoices just as easily as he gets indignant or up in arms. Nor should you conclude that he’s unfriendly, that’s not the issue: he can be utterly pleasant. The issue is that he has other things on his mind than being likeable; likeability is not his concern. And besides, there’s also the fact that he simply has no time to waste, and he can be vigorously up-front about that. One day when I call him about who knows what, first apologizing if I’m disturbing him: Yes, he cuts me off, you are very definitely disturbing me—before hanging up without another word.

Beautifully presented with Echenoz’s own handwritten notes lining the inside of the covers and running across the centre spread, this touching little memorial work is an honest and unvarnished a portrait of an important figure in the world of post-war twentieth century French literature. It strikes just the right note and is guaranteed to make you smile, maybe even laugh out loud.

Jérôme Lindon by Jean Echenoz is translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti and published by Archipelago Books.

Voices that must be heard: Under a Pannonian Sky – Ten Women poets from Hungary, edited by Ottilie Mulzet

By the wine-press house, the road turns off
to the right, I see low village roofs

through the mountains, on roads burnished blue,
I’m a stranger here, for I intrude

no one in sight, only acacias, vineyards
sand-built houses beneath antennas

between wine cellars, under the Pannonian sky
a small donkey—grey prophet—walks by

waves back with ears of mother-of-pearl
respectable plebians once lived here

five hundred years ago, the wandering carts
of merchants left their traces in these parts

(from “Under a Pannonian Sky” by Ágnes Gergely, translation Ottilie Mulzet)

The Pannonian or Carpathian Basin is an extensive lowland area located in southeast central Europe that contains most of modern Hungary, and extends into a number of surrounding countries. It carries, in its soil, a rich geological and historical legacy that reaches far back in time. Many different cultures have passed through the region, and the poem above, by Ágnes Gergely, kindles the spirits of those who have, in the past, sheltered under the vast skies, and made the land their home. As such it is the ideal piece to lend its title to this remarkable anthology celebrating ten amazing Hungarian women poets, many who are appearing in English translation for the first time.

Edited by translator Ottilie Mulzet, the poetry collected in Under a Pannonian Sky spans several generations from Ágnes Nemes Nagy, born in 1922 , one of the most widely recognized Hungarian poets, to Anna T. Szabó born in 1972, whose work examines closely the motherhood and the role of women in contemporary Hungarian society. Naturally the turmoil and dramatic upheaval witnessed over the past century—the Second World War, the rise of communism in Hungary, and the disorientation of the early post-1989 years— feature throughout this anthology and all leave their mark, sometimes in deeply personal ways, on the lives of these women.

In her extensive and detailed Introduction, Mulzet sets out the origin and evolution of this project, which took place over a number of years, and offers a general framing of the authors at hand within the context of the restrictions faced by writers in the immediate post- war years, which was then followed by a significant cultural relaxation in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Mulzet notes that none of the poets in this volume were forced to make accommodations to censorship and that “it is a tribute to the strength and continuity of Hungarian literary culture that women writing today are still influenced by this seminal cohort of poets.” She then proceeds to consider each woman individually —the anthology is ordered chronologically—considering her background, her formative experiences, and the unique inspirations and qualities of her work. With such a substantial volume, and such a generous selection of poetry from each contributor, one might be well advised to read this introductory section in segments, one poet at a time, so as to best acquaint oneself with each poet’s history, style and tone just before reading her poems. Further, this anthology not only celebrates the work of ten poets, it also involves the dedicated work of six translators—Mulzet herself, of course, plus Anna Bentley, Erika Mihálysca, Clare Pollard, Ivan Sanders, and George Szirtes.

Although each writer comes from a unique background with her own distinct points of reference, the intersection of the personal and the political is clearly reflected in the voices of every poet featured in Under A Pannonian Sky. Between Nemes Nagy at one end of the chronological spectrum and Szabó at the other,  we are invited to spend time with the work of Zsuzsa Beney (1930–2006), Ágnes Gergely (1933– ), Gizella Hervay (1934–82), Magda Székely (1936–2007), Zsuzsa Takács (1938– ), Zsófia Balla (1949– ), Zsuzsa Rakovsky (1950– ), and Krisztina Tóth (1967– ). Their creative years may span some eight decades (while some are yet at the height of their careers), but there are concerns that recur throughout, albeit in differing forms and intensities.

For some, a devastating personal loss—of a parent, spouse, child, or extended family members as a result of deportation, tragedy, or misfortune—directly influences their poetic explorations, but, for women writing through successive periods of major historical and social change, it is not unexpected to find an underlying sense of loss and grief expressed more broadly. Likewise, it not uncommon to find attention to metaphysical questions, meditations on mortality, reflections on identity, and a focus on memory in the poems gathered here. In fact, it is striking in reading this anthology, how these poets tend to be willing to take on big questions of life and death, be it through grand scenes, mythology, dreams and fears, or in the significance of everyday affairs as they confront what it means to be a woman in her many dynamic relationships with others, and a Hungarian citizen in the modern world. Each poet, in her own way, confronts these challenges with a particular strength and resilience.

Now, if an anthology so rich and varied demands an Introduction that looks at each contributor separately, it would be cumbersome for a general review to attempt a passing glance at every poet. Rather, I wanted to be able to express how impressed I am by the power and diversity of the work presented here, and note how intrigued I am by the darkness that so often comes through. Gizella Hervay, for example, had an especially tragic life. She was born in Romania in 1930, and experienced a difficult, impoverished childhood in Budapest during the height of the war and the siege of the city. After the war she moved back to Romania where she studied Hungarian literature and began to write. By the early 1970s, she was becoming recognized for her poetry, but misfortune soon followed when her poet ex-husband died by suicide in 1976 and she lost her fifteen year-old son in the 1977 Bucharest earthquake. She would ultimately take her own life before reaching the age of fifty, but before that she published more than eleven volumes of poetry. Her work tends to be terse and grim, speaking to the traumas she witnessed:

Blood Dries
on the face of the earth

worries
tear up the trees from the root

nights squat
under pimpled sky

in shop windows
smashed in brows

skulls studded
with stones

(“Blood Dries” translated by Erika Mihálycsa)

Sixteen years younger than Hervay, Zsuzsa Rakovszky grew up in Sopron on the Austrian border which was closed until 1989, and where she still lives today. Her father died when she was very young, but she recalls a peaceful childhood and early exposure to literature. Her work draws inspiration from objects and photographs from the socialist years of the 1950s and 60s, and calls attention to the fate of ordinary lives, not only in an era of restraints and restrictions, but in the confusion of the immediate post-1989 years. The imagery of her poetry is often strikingly crisp and vivid, but it carries a heavy sense of history and alienation. The past is a ghostly presence, reflected in the dreams and hallucinations that frequently appear.  In, for example, “In an Alpha State” (translation Otillie Mulzet) surreal visions of heaven, and maybe hell, evoke the mood of the early 1990s, the hopes and fears of citizens as they faced the chaos of disruption and regime change:

‘I saw a city which exists in no land.
Between earth and sky: the meeting place,
lengthwise, of two points. There was neither sun nor moon,
no season ever passed, no time of day.
Into the narrow intervals, yellowish fog loomed,
nothing could be seen beyond the window frames.
Like a giant amoeba’s body, the fog swallowed it all,
began to eat away at the borders of all things:

‘no more difference between the living and the dead,
between dark and light, between good and bad.
I saw a man breastfeeding a snake,
I saw a woman swear allegiance
to a microwave. My own mother became
a fire hydrant. Behind the dense fog
endless battles raged, houses fell to rubble,
the main bus station swept away by floods,
boats sunken in flame-devoured water.
Yet none of this was real in any way.

It would be difficult to pick a favourite among the ten exceptional Hungarian women poets presented in this excellent anthology, but Rakovszky, who is also a well-respected novelist, is one that I would definitely like to come to know better. There were, however, so many poems that simply stopped me in my tracks throughout this volume, as a flurry of page markers erupting from my copy attest. For anyone interested in Hungarian poetry in general, and the responses of Hungarian women writers to the shifting social and political terrain of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in particular, Under a Pannonian Sky is essential reading.

Under a Pannonian Sky: Ten Women poets from Hungary, is edited by Ottilie Mulzet and published by Seagull Books.

To each time its people: On the Other Side is March by Sólrún Michelsen

What is a mother?

A mother is someone who puts plasters on knees and hearts. Your first cradle. Your confessional. Your ally against the world. A warm embrace. Someone who sings away trolls. Someone who possesses neither gender nor looks, but who just is.

That is, until she is no longer what she once was. . . but then who do you become? This is the existential question resting at the heart of Sólrún Michelsen’s novel On the Other Side is March. Set in the rugged, windswept landscape of the Faroe Islands, nestled between mountains and the sea, a woman in her early sixties is navigating the uncertain terrain between being a wife, mother, grandmother, and daughter as her own mother is slowly and steadily slipping away. And, as she seeks to balance the emotional demands of this generational crossroads, she examines what it means to be facing the final and shortest leg of her own life’s journey.

Unfolding in a fragmentary, meditative fashion, the narrative tends to be guided by the strange suspension of time that settles in when one is caring for an aging loved one with dementia. A growing sense of loss, a longing to hold on to what is gradually disintegrating guides logic and emotion. The protagonist is haunted by memories of earlier times when she was a young girl and her mother a beautiful, capable woman. She is nostalgic for a simpler time and  the world of imagination within which a creative young girl could escape the harsh circumstances of Faroese life. In the present day, she finds that childhood magic lingers on in her grandchildren who delight in making snowmen or find an imaginary friend in a sock  stretched over a hand, while at the same time reminding her that growing up somehow reduces our capacity to delight in the wonders in our immediate vicinity.

We grow. And shrink. The distance between head and feet determine whether we see what is right before our eyes. We become half blind. Stop marveling, relishing.

I used to see better. I knew them all. Every single house had its special people with their own particular behavior. Nobody was the same. Not even the ones who always wore black were the same. I knew their names and their appearances, but not only that. I also knew what they were like as people. Whether they had warm or cold eyes. Whether they would give you a penny to run an errand. What their gait was like. Whether to clear off or wait for a slice of cake. Whether they were fond of animals. Whether they told the truth or lied. Every single house in the village had its own household scent.

If the narrator’s world has become more ordered and pragmatic with the demands of adulthood, her mother’s world, once so full of friends and activities, is now on another plane altogether. One that is shrinking to the confines of her house. Increasingly filled with holes. Each visit finds a changed and changing woman. Sometimes disoriented, sometimes absent, and sometimes, for a few precious moments, once again the friend and confidante her daughter longs for. But it never lasts for long, suddenly evaporating into strange comments and irrational demands. As her mother’s health, mental and physical, continues to decline, their roles have shifted completely:

Somehow I feel pushed along. Shunted further and further onto a sidetrack, though I try to muster as much resistance as possible. Try to pretend that everything is the way it used to be. But being mother to my mother makes me feel older. I constantly have to remind myself not to treat her like a child. To show her the dignity she deserves. But she behaves like a child. Comes to me like a child. Obeys me, the way I once obeyed her. 

Although there is a thread of sadness and grief running through this novel, it is so much more. As a meditation on aging, caregiving between generations—a primarily female task to look after both the youngest and the oldest family members—memory, and, above all, the intricacies of loving, it is charged with quiet emotion and dark humour. The narrative moves with a gentle rhythm of its own. The past continually reflects and enhances the present, seasons fall out of order, and fragments of traditional Faroese hymns and ballads are woven in along the way. As well, there are no proper names in the narrator’s account; rather, translator Marita Thomsen has maintained family titles (mama, pápi, omma, langomma) and terms of endearment in the original Faroese without translation. The result is a deeply moving evocation what it means to be alive and what it means to lose a beloved parent. It is also the perfect introduction for Sólrún Michelsen, the highly respected Faroese writer and poet, to an English audience.

On the Other Side is March by Sólrún Michelsen is translated from the Faroese by Marita Thomsen and published by Transit Books.

All kinds of people, all kinds of lives, and all equally lonely: The Umbrella by Tove Ditlevsen

Sharp and unsentimental, the prose of Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen crackles across the page, exposing the painful insecurities of ordinary people as they navigate the often messy experiences of life—housewives who question their marriages, children who worry that they don’t belong, families falling apart, and a potential daughter-in-law who suddenly sees the charms of her beloved in a different light after meeting his mother. She excels at capturing domestic discomfort at all its varying levels of tension. The ten stories comprising her 1952 collection The Umbrella, each one short and neatly contained, demonstrate this ability clearly.

Ditlevsen’s stories reflect the time in which they were written, especially with respect to the restricted housebound roles women were often expected to accept once they were married, but her ability to dissect the strained dynamics between spouses, and between parents and children, is timeless, universal. The title story is a pitch-perfect example. Ditlevsen portrays Helga, the protagonist, in a cool, detached tone, as a woman with clear physical and emotional shortcomings—or as she puts it “only averagely equipped”—who had always expected more from life than it could deliver. In her case, she dreamed of owning an umbrella, but that was considered vain and frivolous. Yet, it is difficult not to empathize with her in the stifling conditions imposed on her by the social conventions of her time. Hopelessly attached to her mother and schooled to channel all her energies into keeping house and home for her husband, she is caught in a scheme so rigid and lifeless that it traps both her and Egon, driving him to drinking and her to withdraw. However, her much more proactive mother is concerned by the situation and insists that she sit down with her husband to “talk it out”:

But Helga had never tried to put herself in another person’s shoes; it had never been necessary. Her entire character consisted of a pile of memories without a pattern or plan. There were a number of pairs of brown eyes, a twilight mood, an immense, undefined expectation, a yellow dress, and an umbrella.

When the possibility of finally realizing her dream arises, something explodes in Helga—at least for a moment.

The couples in Ditlevsen’s stories struggle with real or imagined fears and desires, but when there are children involved, it often becomes even more complicated. Painful truths surface when marriages break up, families are torn apart, or new a baby threatens the fragile security of an adopted child. In “A Nice Boy,” seven year-old John was “the nicest boy in the whole area when it came to running errands, chopping wood, washing diapers, and whatever else a person has to do to get ahead in the world.” He was kind and gentle and terrified of doing anything that might cause his parents to regret “taking him in.” Especially now that they had a little boy of their own.

He raced ahead at the thought. He knew he was in debt to humanity because he wasn’t born properly to his mother and father like his little brother, but had ended up with them, by an improbable stroke of luck. He was adopted, and his real parents were horrible people from Copenhagen, who weren’t even married. ‘God forbid you ever meet them,’ his mother had said when she told him that. For a while afterward he would stare at the outsiders who visited his town, imagining they had come from Copenhagen to take him away.

Elsewhere, “One Morning in a Residential Neighbourhood” sees a little girl who is excited to be going on “a trip” with her father, unaware that she is leaving her mother and brother behind for good because her mother has fallen in love with another man. She cannot understand the sorrow and simmering anger of those around her.  In “Evening,” another girl whose parents have already parted, feels torn between her affection for her real mother and her real father, both of whom have remarried, and her uncertainty about how she feels about the new “mommy” and “daddy” who have come into her life. In the opening lines, she is introduced in manner that captures her state instantly:

Hanne was only seven, but she already possessed a great deal of formless anxiety. She always wanted to be somewhere other than where she was at the moment.

In this, as in the other stories in this collection, Ditlevsen so keenly captures her protagonist’s—and, to be honest, our—deepest desires, griefs, and apprehensions in precise poetic prose that is both clear-eyed and compassionate.

Published as part of the Penguin Archive collection of extracts from larger works, it must be noted that this same collection has also been published together with another of Ditlevsen’s collections as The Trouble with Happiness. Nonetheless, there is something quite irresistible about these red and white pocket-sized volumes that offer an excellent taste of an author’s work. The only shortcoming is the omission of a bio for the author and translator.

Umbrella by Tove Ditlevsen is translated from the Danish by Michael Favala Goldman and published by Penguin Random House.

In response to a broken world: Intelligence Is the Art of Remaining Faithful under Shifting Circumstances by Alexander Kluge and Anselm Kiefer

The striking title of this far-ranging intellectual and artistic collaboration between Alexander Kluge and Anselm Kiefer comes from Hölderlin’s unconventional translations of the Pindar Fragments:

The lonely school’s capacity for the world. The innocence of pure knowledge as the soul of intelligence. For intelligence is the art of remaining faithful in changing circumstances, and knowledge the art of being sure in one’s understanding in the midst of positive errors. If our understanding has been exercised intensely, it retains its strength even in diffusion; inasmuch as it easily recognizes alien things by its own honed sharpness, and so is not easily confused in uncertain situations.

Although the full passage does not appear until the final section—or Station— of this richly illustrated, interactive volume, the titular statement, that intelligence is the art of remaining faithful under shifting circumstances, clearly reflects the spirit guiding the discussions, observations, and speculations that shape this work. It is set out on the opening pages in an extract from a conversation between Kluge and Kiefer held on July 5, 2023, at the French Cathedral in Berlin, the day before Kiefer was awarded the German National Prize. It is a concept to be understood as realism. The artist insists that intelligence isn’t a skill:

Like all art, it doesn’t arise in your head, but in your fingertips. Intelligence feels things out, makes attempts, has character, it observes, it’s awake and constant, it takes decisions quickly, yet it knows how to wait patiently.

Like a physician, an architect building a cathedral, a mathematician or physicist. Kluge and Kiefer trade ideas and illustrations back and forth as they seek to interrogate what it means to remain true to oneself in a broken world.

Over the following ten “Stations”—one might describe them as points of intersection of ideas and images—that comprise this volume, Kluge, the writer and filmmaker, and Kiefer, the artist, explore how they and others have endeavoured to exercise their intelligence. Themes and subjects are drawn from Kiefer’s artwork. The inspiration he derives from history, literature, poetry, science, and mysticism is reflected in Kluge’s companion commentaries and experimental short films (accessed via QR codes), and expanded upon in excerpts from the above noted July 2023 discussion between these two important German artists. The result is a dynamic, multi-faceted enterprise.

Kluge and Kiefer each operate in different mediums that combine the ancient, even prehistoric (writing and painting) with the modern (photography and film), and exercise their own distinct understanding of the world with openness, curiosity, and conviction born of experience and experimentation, but their work, in their respective mediums and spaces, meets, as Kluge describes it, tangentially. This is an ideal plane for their collaboration. They discuss, they debate, they agree, they agree to disagree, but throughout it is clear they hold each other in the greatest esteem. Into their collaboration they welcome the contributions and voices of many others, including Hölderlin, Rimbaud, Celan, Joyce, Robert Fludd, and Johannes Kepler. Kluge’s characteristic observations, anecdotal in tone with a tendency to walk a very fine line between the factual and the fantastic, bring in classical mythology, military history, Kabbalistic wisdom, mathematics, and music to provide context and counterpoint for Kiefer’s paintings and sculptures which are reproduced, in detail and in whole (especially meaningful for anyone who has seen Kiefer’s  textured wall-sized paintings in person and knows just how difficult it is to capture the experience in any meaningful way with the camera on your phone).

Each Station has one or more themes, for example, “Tractate on Money, Love, Power and Truth / Four Currencies that Rule Our Lifespans,” “Stories of Exodus,” and  “Finnegan’s Wake and the Construction Site of Words,” just to name a few. There is natural flow and balance between discussion and direct commentary about Kiefer’s displayed artworks and Kluge’s embedded films, and the wide-ranging reflections and observations that surround them and at times veer off in unexpected angles. As Kluge notes:

One of the most surprising effects of great art is its ability to open up new directions. Emblems, perspectives, groundwater of experience emerge, no matter how old, how lost the underlying basis of experience may be. The panel pictures cannot be large enough. They are works of art, but they are also ‘the street signs of experience.’  

If you have not yet encountered one of Alexander Kluge’s books, collaborative or otherwise, especially the latter volumes with integrated multi-media, they can be difficult to contain or adequately describe in a review. There is a sense that they are larger on the inside than one at first suspects. They must be experienced. This particular work, translated by Alexander Booth who has ushered into English a good number of Kluge’s recent publications, is the latest to appear (although Kluge sadly passed away earlier this year at the age of 94, there may be more to come) and the perfectly-matched and well-timed collaboration with Anselm Kiefer makes it especially powerful. And intelligent.

Intelligence Is the Art of Remaining Faithful under Shifting Circumstances by Alexander Kluge and Anselm Kiefer is translated from the German by Alexander Booth and published by Seagull Books.

A poet whispers: How complete+ final the feeling as I lift its curve in the net by Ellen Dillon

I have been staring at Barrie Cooke’s pencil sketch for a month,  sucked into the mesh of scribbled lines whirling between two figures in a boat, hauling in a curved fish in a net.

They are a man and a boy to my eyes—an older boy, 17 or so—straining under the weight of the pike.

This may not be the case.

My mind’s eye may have made father and son of them, cleaved in both senses of the contranym by the tangle of pencil lines.

This sketch, Pike Fishing, Self and Ted Hughes (you will want to look it up), becomes a central point of reference for Irish poet Ellen Dillon in her captivating hybrid lyric-essay How complete + final the feeling as I lift its curve in the net. She breathes life into it, re-imagining a father-son relationship between the two abstracted figures depicted, and returns to it, addresses it, and holds it as a guiding image as she moves through an exploration of landscape, water, language, poetry, and translation. Barrie Cooke, the English-born Irish impressionist painter, friend of Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, was not only a devoted fisherman, but a passionate defender of rivers and waterways. It is no accident, then, that echoes of both Hughes and Sylvia Plath arise in the early pages of her poetic text. But, that is only the beginning.

 Moving between poetry, personal observation and reflection, to an exquisite act of transcreation, the voices of many poets and writers swim through her texts and verses, their words set apart in italics and referenced at the end, but there are three who are essential, who whisper to her from the future and the past: Scottish poet callie gardener whose hybrid debut, naturally it is not offers inspiration and an echoing refrain (“hold your temper loosely, or like a fish”); Irish poet Seán O’Ríordáin whose native language presents the beauty and challenge of translating; and American poet Fanny Howe whose words are invited to converse with O’Ríordáin’s. Throughout this innovative meditation, Dillon remains in tune with the natural world around her—the waterways, the birdsong, the wind—for that is where meaning and understanding lie. They must be listened to, as one can hear in an excerpt from a cento that channels gardener, John Ashbery, and Herman Melville:

Babbling upstream like an echo, fragment utterance

calls you out of the wind, finds you
at last a cave of sound too flimsy for a home
but to dwell in it is deeply refreshing
so invigorating you have learned to overlook
the many discomforts and minor threats to life.
an oily calmness floats out from the east
gathers power, pours through you, floods your cells
with a spacious sense of well-being.

Slowly and smoothly Dillon carries us from her early meditation on two figures in a boat to an Englishman fishing on a lake—that is, to the question of bringing that Englishman into the English language out of his existence in O’Ríordáin’s Irish, in his poem “Oileán agus Oileán Eile,” An Island and Another Island. The echoing island within islands, real or imagined, begins an extended examination that is the beating heart of this enterprise, at least for anyone fascinated by language and by the challenge of translating poetry.

Dillon tells us that she is no translator. “My Irish isn’t good enough, for starters. Words that should shimmer with a wealth of implications remain closed and lumpen in my schoolroom lexicon.” She moves into an exploration of translations, sensitively, feeling her way, guided by O’Ríordáin own poems, her familiarity with his personal geography, and tuned into her muses, including and especially, Fanny Howe. However, her efforts make her conscious of her limitations as she seeks to untangle the mess of charcoal lines that a poem can seem to become on its journey from one language to another. Something essential in the sound-weave of O’Ríordáin’s poetry seems to be escaping her grasp. Is there another route?

Anne Carson writes of translating the same poem over and over again, using the wrong words and it makes me feel I’ve been on the wrong track, one of many wrong tracks, with Seán. I’ve been so affronted by the razzle-dazzle of rockstar poets patching ‘concupiscence’ into his hard-won soundwaves as if he was a home-spun Wallace Stevens, that his poems have grown skeletal, marrowless, in my cold hands.

Perhaps straight translation, destined to lose many of the nuanced textures of the original is not the answer. Maybe a little experimentation is. Enter Fanny Howe. Doubt meets doubt as two writers speak across the years and distance and tongue in a collage of a translation of a section of “Oileán agus Oileán Eile” with lines from Howe’s Gone.

A poet whispers. A poet interrogates what it means to be a poet, to interact deeply with the poems of others, and in the process finds many questions and answers. As it should be.

Dillon’s poetic voice is vibrant, her spirit endlessly curious, and her willingness to engage with nature, art, and the wisdom and words of writers she admires makes for a multi-layered, richly intertextual experience. For a sense of the magic of this lovely lyrical book, you can find an excerpt at Minor Literature[s].

How complete+ final the feeling as I lift its curve in the net by Ellen Dillon is published by Broken Sleep Books.