And she ruled: Queen by Birgitta Trotzig

Through the darkness swept the beam. Capturing – releasing: capturing  – releasing. So deep the darkness when the light released its grip, like falling down through a well, darkness, no end; sleepers were struck by the light as if by a knife; again darkness, all the while they were on their way into darkness downward and downward, whirling, falling. Without pause the lighthouse beam swept across ever-new light-unstruck never-seen waves.

Queen, by Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig (1929–2011) is an expansive exercise in grey: the landscape, the sea, the central characters all feature in shades of grey that run from the muted, milky white, to the sombre, murky black. But, amid all this greyness lies a tale of stark, mythic intensity that turns with its own tragic beauty. It is a love story, albeit a damaged one, in that the love that holds it together is both fierce and repressed, arising not with warmth but in agony, as if happiness is an unimagined possibility. And yet, as we read it we do hold out hope.

This luminous novel, vividly translated by Saskia Vogel, opens with the arrival of an odd-looking, child-like woman, a widow from America, who is bound for a farm in a village on the eastern coast of the county of Skåne in southern Sweden. It is November of 1930 and the Great Depression is spreading across the world. Exactly who this woman is, and how she is connected to the once-proud farm to which she has been sent, we will not know until later. But her arrival will prove pivotal for the two middle-aged siblings awaiting her appearance with curiosity and distrust.

The farm in question belongs to the Lindgren family. It had once been a large and prosperous venture but at the time this tale begins, at the close of the nineteenth century, it is slowly falling into disrepair, and its sprawling pastures are being sold off piece by piece.  Johan Lindgren, who inherited the thriving farm from his father, finds himself ill-suited to the task of caring for it. He is a man who “did not much love people, they were too heavy, something about them was unsurmountable to him.” Instead he loved animals, especially horses. Lacking the energy to dedicate himself to the work of the farm, he spirals into a cycle of selling assets and acquiring debt. His wife, never a strong personality, weakens and fades into the background after a postpartum illness that never fully fades. Thus it falls to the eldest child, Judit, to carry the load, in the field and in the home. She is stern and responsible, while her brother Albert is shy and sluggish, and Viktor, the youngest, is restless and untamed.

From an early age, Judit is aware that she bears the responsibility of caring for everyone around her: “She never had much time to be a child, but neither did she value such things: her soul had been old and mature from the start.” She rises under the burden, standing straight, tall, unbreakable. She earns the name Queen young and carries the crown boldly, even as her kingdom shrinks and decays around her. But there is a harsh emotional cost, planted early, when at the age of twelve she becomes surrogate mother/sister to her youngest brother Viktor, with whom she instantly bonds. Trotzig vividly depicts the moment everything shifts for her Queen. Sitting on the ground holding the newborn baby, Judit suddenly sense a fissure open in her world. She weeps and weeps, then stops. Her expression closes over:

But deep within that which is locked up the weeping continues. The gray features harden, the gaze becomes clear, dark, tearless. Deep down the weeping continues. Stifled it bores itself ever deeper downward, vanishing undermost in the deadest layer of earth underneath hidden crumblings, through stone chips down in the desiccated rock-hard packed stratum of the ground. There the weeping could no longer be heard, it had vanished from sight and sound, far down in the invisible, in dead earth it whimpered and sobbed.

Viktor, the infant she adores and raises as if he were her own, is a challenge. Their father takes an immediate and unreasonable dislike to the child, unleashing regular beatings on the boy. At school he causes trouble, and as he grows up he becomes more uncontrollable and wild. He does his military service but returns a drinker and gambler. He impregnates a couple of local girls. Finally, when he decides to head to America to build a life for himself, Judit greets the news with a mix of sadness and relief.

Viktor arrives in New York City in 1920, at a time when opportunities abound and he makes his way from one job to another, a journey that ultimately takes him through the southern US. But when economic pressures begin to build he finds his way back to New York. He will never return to Sweden. Meanwhile, back home, Judit and Albert struggle to keep what’s left of the farm going.  Well, more accurately, the Queen does. As the siblings age they are increasingly cut off from the rest of the local community, together viewed as an oddity. And then the stranger from America arrives.

Observed intimately and yet with a calculated distance—one longs to get beneath the surface, to understand what and how the characters are truly feeling if they even know themselves—the protagonists never speak directly. They belong, after all, to a place where silence reigns, where little is said, but rumours pass on the wind. The narrative sweeps across landscapes, rural and urban alike, with an existential heaviness, leaving a tapestry woven of soil, sand, and sea, of lives, limbs, and longings. Time is unforgiving. Years pass. Decades pass. Losses seem to mount. Yet, Trotzig continually reminds us to place our trust in language. Against a plot that is often sketched out with limited details, she intuitively knows when and how to amplify an emotional condition with intense vivid imagery. Life is not easy, but as her characters are pushed further into themselves and against one another, always at risk of becoming too hard or too weak and vulnerable, new cracks appear when one least expects and slowly, a little light seeps in.

In her Afterword, Norwegian writer Hanne Ørstavik tells how she came to know of Trotzig’s work and how it saw her through a difficult transitional period in her own writing, ultimately allowing her to write The Pastor. A brilliant novel of haunting landscape, with characters trying to come to terms with life and death in different ways, one can see the influence. It is exciting to know that Archipelago will be releasing at least three more of this enigmatic Swedish writer’s novels in the near future.

Queen by Birgitta Trotzig is translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel, with an Afterword by Hanne Ørstavik, translated by Martin Aitken, and published by Archipelago Books.

Even in these half-dark times: The World Is Made Up Every Day by Alok Dhanwa

The lights on the bridges
have no end
My nights are full of them
I will remember
the lights
even in the face of death

– from “Theatre”  (1996)

In recent years, Seagull Books has been bringing the work of under appreciated Hindi cult writers to English audiences, via the translations of Saudamini Deo. The latest writer to receive this attention is  Alok Dhanwa whose defiant and socially engaged poetry combines the personal and the political with deep emotional and intellectual intensity. Born in Bihar in 1948, just one year after India’s independence, Dhanwa grew up alongside his country, witness to its many growing pains. Against the backdrop of the rising Maoist, Naxalite and other Communist movements in the late 1960s and the tumultuous 1970s under Indria Ghandi’s leadership, including the twenty-one month Emergency (1975–77) during which constitutional and civil rights were suspended, there was much for a young working-class poet to speak to—and against. Often drawing on rural themes and imagery, his poems addressed, directly and indirectly, the struggles of ordinary people, earning him a popular cult like status in Bihar and neighbouring states of northern India.

Unsurprisingly, relatively little of his poetry was published during these earlier years. His first collection, The World is Made Up Every Day, did not appear in Hindi until 1998 and was, until recently, his only published volume of work. Now his voice can finally be heard in English, through the resounding notes of Deo’s translation. (Brief YouTube videos of Dhanwa reading in Hindi can be found online and offer a taste of his tone and character that can be carried into reading his poems.) And although the particular political context of his poetry—even when the settings are decidedly bucolic—is essential, in her Translator’s Forward, Deo cautions that to read Dhanwa simply as a poet of the past would be a mistake:

Contemporary Indian milieu is far more complex, with its growing shift towards majoritarian politics and authoritarianism. His lines ‘that India no longer exists / the one in which I was born’ hauntingly resonates with the contemporary reader. Or when he writes: ‘Homicide and suicide are made to look alike / in these half-dark times. Do spot the difference, my friend,’ it feels as though he is speaking about present day India. And, perhaps, there is no end to these half-dark times.

One might venture that such a sentiment has a resonance far beyond India these days. As such, in Dhanwa’s poetry, there are many notes that may ring familiar.

There are direct, often angry, even despairing, references to political violence and oppression in some of the poems collected here, and a certain melancholy when the poet considers his country and the men and women he sees, be they gathering in city centres or working on farms. Dhanwa demonstrates a wonderful facility for employing striking imagery from nature and from everyday objects to  address the concerns that trouble him, as a man and as a poet. The poet, in his vision has a critical role, he or she is tasked to speak to both the immediate and the future. Thus, his is not merely an artistic role, it is at once ancient and urgent, yet he takes it on with a measured humility. In “Water” (1997), he begins with his imagined mission:

People, but not just people,
I believed I would teach
even water to inhabit India.

I believed
Water would be simple—
like the East,
like a straw hat,
like candlelight.

In the golden hour,
the other side is barely visible,
leading us to wander
in a country
yet to appear on the map.

But he ends up wondering if all the words we write are wasted, leading to ruin as water follows its own course in spite of us. He asks:

Do the voices of water
remain in the voices of women?
And what of other voices?

In a sad and broken heart
there is only the night of water.
There lies hope, and there lies
the only path back into the world.

Many writers have, over the years, been described as giving voice to the marginalized, but for Dhanwa this is not simply a matter of speaking on the behalf of those who cannot. In his world, those who might be imagined to be on the disadvantaged side of the endless class struggle are not content to stand by quietly. And he is standing with them. He also holds a perspective that extends beyond the joys and the demands of the everyday—it is civilizational in scope. His world view is not static; it is in motion. In one of the longer pieces in this book, “Canvas Shoes” (1979), he begins with a pair of old canvas shoes left by the railway tracks and imagines a life for this worn and humble footwear that entails a long journey that echoes the history of the world:

These canvas shoes
soft and filled with air
as cigarettes and handkerchiefs.
Woven like nests—
against solid things in this world like murder and rape,
these liquid shoes stand
bending with grass and language,
edging closer to salt—
And for the rats, these canvas shoes are like the alphabet—
it’s where they begin to nibble.

Here, simple shoes carry the density of human existence—in the day to day and over  vast swathes of time. By the final verse the journey is complete yet eternal:

Those canvas shoes are now so old
that one might say,
wherever they move, Time doesn’t exist—
even Death would no longer want to wear them.
But poets do wear those shoes
and tread across centuries.

In the end it is the poet who is tasked with continuing the journey and translating it into words. To speak to the indefatigable human will to resist, to survive. Something that Alok Dhanwa is well versed to do.

The World is Made Up Every Day: Selected Poems by Alok Dhanwa is translated from the Hindi by Saudamini Deo and published by Seagull Books.

“at nightfall, the night herons no longer called”: Chronicles of a Village by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện

these are the chronicles of my village, the vessels of remembering and reminiscing, tale upon tale of yesterday, yesteryear, yestercentury or yestermillennia, now plainly precise, now hazily adrift, an abundance, or maybe an overabundance of news that reads like some kind of a novel, some kind of novella or some kind of essay reshaped into fictional form, they, the news, the chronicles, constantly expand, contract, compel, pressure, evoke and awaken before culminating in a perhaps inevitable explosion, shattering all the burnished grandiose narratives that so desperately try to conceal the fatal historical disabilities of a land.

In a small village, nestled at the foot of Mun Mountain, somewhere in Central Vietnam,  a scribe is recording a history—of his life, his family, his village, his community. Mythical visitors, birds and beasts, dynastical rulers, colonizers, invaders, and ghosts pass in and out of his amorphous, fragmented, non-chronological account. But binding it together are memories, of childhood and family, and of the routines of agricultural life. Nguyễn Thanh Hiện’s lyrical Chronicles of a Village cannot easily be categorized. Is it a collection of stories, a novella, a documentary or a prose poem? Labels do not matter. It is a mesmerizing evocation of the passage of time—a record of what is lost, what is gained, and what remains—a shifting portrait of a land and its people.

Chronicles opens with an account of the disruptive arrival of “sightless humans” marching into the village. No one is quite prepared for the danger these outsiders represent. They march the residents out into the open and when the narrator’s father dares to address the invaders, he is tied up and taken away. This narrative is followed by a detailed note further explaining the nature of the man who has been captured and who will, in time, be freed. At this point this work appears to be presenting itself a historical document of some kind, which it is in its way, but what unfolds in the ensuing pages refuses to follow conventions a western reader might anticipate, the story to be told exists on many levels at once. Even the scribe himself is unable to clearly define his project, as in the quote above and at many other points where he approaches the question of fictions and truths, histories and unhistories.

The mythic and magic of Mun Mountain rises above the quotidian routine defined by rice and fabric. The cultivation of fields and the weaving of cotton have supported this small community for centuries, skills originally brought to them by god-like travellers who arrived in the Land of the Upper Forest—or so the legend goes—taught to the people, and passed down from father to son and mother to daughter. The scribe, using the lowercase “i” as first person pronoun, favours commas over full stops to affect a living, breathing quality to the tales he shares. In long, unbroken sentences that that often extend for pages, he writes of his childhood, his parents and older brother, and other important characters of his hometown, of his “birthsoil.” He writes of the forest, the birds, and the mystical creatures that could be imagined in the formations atop the mountain. And, of course, along with stories of the rising and falling political dynasties of the distant past, he recounts the ways the outside world began to impose control, first over his nation and eventually his local region in more recent times.

At first, he recalls, war in his country caused by the French colonists seemed so far away. To adolescent boys it seemed romantic, their heads filled with images of troops fighting on horseback as in the wars they had learned about in school. It seemed romantic, like a fairy tale and they set about secretly weaving grass into horses. But when adult war suddenly arrived, with fire bombings and destruction, the magic was incinerated as were many homes and villages. The lives of classmates, friends and first girlfriends, were lost.

the sound was abrupt yet belonged to an eternity, and afterwards, young maiden, you didn’t come around here anymore, at nightfall, the night herons no longer cried among the dews, my fellow villagers went their separate ways, in two distinct directions along the horizon, to tell the truth no one wanted that to happen, somebody said it was because a venomous wind blew past and entangled everyone’s way of thinking, it was true that my homeland was then tumbling into the sorrowing pages of history

The chronicles, as they unfold, weave together fragmentary, often dreamlike stories that seem, at first glance, to be unconnected. However, each chapter is linked to the next  through images and ideas—that which closes one is picked up  and carried, perhaps in a new direction, in the next. Motifs and phrases repeat, within chapters and across the work as a whole, imbuing the prose with an incantatory rhythm and meditative feel. It honours the past, acknowledges the devastation of war, and offers the hope of continuity, of  resilience:

i’d like to speak of the tokay geckos that lived in the hollows of the sandbox trees by the village entrance as if i were delivering , on behalf of my fellow villagers, a note of gratitude to the descendants of the beastly dinosaurs, those creatures that existed back in the Triassic days of the Mesozoic Era, if those geckos living in the hollows of the sandbox trees by the village entrance were the legitimate descendants of those dinosaurs, evolution might stand a chance of brightening up, for centuries the gecko families had been living in the hollows of those sandbox trees by the village entrance, but once the war began, the trees were all knocked down by bombs and bullets, there was not a single plant left by the village entrance, but in the night one could still hear the sound of the geckos, ‘this century-long exile of the tokay geckos’ . . .

By putting words to the page, the village scribe is preserving the story of his people, and a way of life that is disappearing under the weight of modernization, but he is not alone in his task—the ghosts of his loved ones, now gone from this life, visit him still. In his words and his visions, dead live on.

For all the sorrow running through it, Chronicles of a Village shimmers with a unique beauty, one that runs clear and crisp against a misty backdrop. Translator Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng has taken great care with the selection of words, creating unique expressions when needed, to best reflect meanings that do not have a direct English equivalent. In a conversation with Alex Tan that can be found here at Minor Literature[s],she shares her approach to some of the language and literary aspects of the original and talks about translation as she understands it.

Chronicles of a Village by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện is translated from the Vietnamese by Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng and published by Yale University Press.

The church that falls again will rise again: A Parish Chronicle by Halldór Laxness

This is the story of a church, one that exists whether it is standing or not. Standing high above the Mosfellsdalur Valley in southwest Iceland, not far from the nation’s capital, Mosfell Church has,  at the time of the telling of the story—mid-twentieth century—been recently rebuilt, but it holds a history of rising and falling that reaches back a thousand years. Somewhere along the way it became associated with what parishioners believed were the bones of 10th century poet and national hero, Egill Skallagrímsson. However, the self-named inkman who is committing this account to paper has a more specific focus: he wants to put right a report of the events leading up to the last time the building was destroyed, and resolve the questions that lingered in the wake of that event:

Here, the story will be told of how the church was dismantled and razed to the ground for the third time in the latter part of the 19th century. It will be shown how powerful exponents worked together to destroy this church ever since the Danish king ordered its removal in 1774, although one hundred and twenty years passed before that order was implemented. For almost four generations, consequential parties laid their hands to that plow, such as the government in Denmark, the Icelandic Alþingi time and again, the church authorities one after another, bishops and deans as well as lesser parish authorities; finally, local farmers and honest housewives and robust men belonging to this parish, until no one remained to defend this church but a certain aged farmer at Hrísbrú named Ólafur Magnússon, and an indigent girl, a maid of the priest at Mosfell, named Guðrún Jónsdóttir.

In his introduction to A Parish Chronicle, Salvatore Scibona describes the circumstances surrounding Nobel Prize winning Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness’ decision to begin to work on this novella while vacationing in Rome in 1969. In spite of all the successes and accolades he had received by that time, he still felt like a failure because he felt had not yet gained the international readership he longed for and, at the age of sixty-seven, he may have assumed he was closing in on the end of his productive life. Having already lived two decades longer than his own father, he could not have imagined that he still had twenty-eight years and six more novels ahead of him. But he did, and the first would be this spirited tale, originally drafted six years earlier. First published in Icelandic in 1970,  it has finally been made available for English language readers in Philip Roughton’s lively translation.

With its folksy tone and wry humour, this tale begins as the story of a parish and the social rather than religious role of the church in the everyday lives and politics of a rural community, but expands to offer a colourful sketch of the impact of increasing modernization on a nation with a long and deeply rooted culture and history. It attempts to adopt a documentary approach, but the events are often exceptional and the characters are eccentric, larger-than-life heroes and heroines of a homespun saga in which Icelandic poets are quoted more than any Bible passage is, even if a church (or its emptied yet still consecrated grounds) stands at its centre. Some of these folk even had real-life counterparts with the same names living in the Mosfellsdalur region. To be on the safe side though, Laxness included a note to the first Icelandic edition that read: “References to named individuals writings documents places times and events do not serve a historical purpose in this text.”

When it appears that the long overdue order to consolidate two parishes into one and construct a new church, was finally going to be implemented, old Ólafur of Hrísbrú, the crusty farmer and sheep herder, sharpens the blade of his scythe and, accompanied by one of his sons, arrives at the church and threatens to lead a revolt. But, in the absence of locals willing to take up the cause with the same steely vigour, a petition is launched instead. In the end, the only other person willing stand by his side, at least in writing, is the maid,  Guðrún Jónsdóttir, or, as she is known Big Gunna. Their letter fails to hit its mark and the church is taken down and carted away.

For the inkman who is doing his best to faithfully record the events that occurred before his own birth, Big Gunna becomes an important source of information. His interviews with her when she is an old woman are worked into his narrative. Never inclined to take a husband or to accept money for her labour, she relied on the support of the community to carry her through the long years following the demise of the church and the end of her job there. But she is not a charity case. Delightfully plain-spoken, with her own commendable value system, she describes how she traveled around the region offering her services for almost any work that needed doing—the tougher and dirtier the better.

Then in the latter part of the book, a third key character enters the scene, a young runaway who is, against all odds, taken into the home of old Ólafur and unofficially adopted. This young lad turns out to have an uncanny sense of a good deal, an inexhaustible love of automobiles, and boundless generosity. In his own way, he carries the folks of the Mosfellsdalur Valley into a new era in style.

This book is my first encounter with Halldór Laxness and, I am inclined to think it is as good as any place to start as any. Especially with the excellent introduction (reproduced here at LitHub) to the varied and shifting nature of the Icelandic master’s oeuvre.  Known for his ability to be very funny, even in his longer, bleaker novels, the narrative tone of A Parish Chronicle rests on an irresistible sly, understated humour that runs throughout. This passage, for example, describing the typical encounter travellers would have as they passed by Hrísbrú where Ólafur and one or more of his sons invariably could be found standing outside their buildings, captures the centrality of sheep to the rural consciousness:

The folk at Hrísbrú were rather pleasant of manner apart from old Ólafur when he was wrangling with the priest, but showed no particular interest in dragging people out of the mud bordering the walkway and inviting them inside. They asked for news of sheep from all over the country, because life in Iceland was, as it still is today, all about sheep. For example, when talking about the weather, it was only from the perspective of how it suited the sheep. Good weather was the weather that was good for sheep. A good year was one in which enough grass grew for the sheep. A beautiful landscape in Iceland is one in which there’s good pasturage for sheep. People’s livelihoods and outlooks on life were determined by that creature. The Hrísbrú folk were kept informed by travelers of the circumstances of sheep all over the country, and for their part, told stories about the welfare of sheep in the Mosfell district. They remembered exactly what the weather had been like for the sheep year by year for thirty years back. Those people never wore coats, but their woolen cardigans and sweaters stood up to water and wind like the fleece of an Icelandic sheep. All homemade and in the sheeps’ natural colors, mainly russet.

The world Laxness paints is, for all its quirkiness, one shaped by an abiding affection for the land and its people, his land and his people. This is, after all, the area in which he grew up and the inkman dipping his pen into the ink bottle, is a stand-in for himself. There may not be, as he once insisted, a historical purpose to the details of the account he has presented, but it is a thoroughly entertaining story.

A Parish Chronicle by Halldór Laxness is translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton with an Introduction by Salvatore Scibona and published by Archipelago Books.

The landscapes that shape us, the landscapes we carry with us: Tamil Terrains, Edited by Nedra Rodrigo and Geetha Sukumaran

Raging winds howl to the vakai trees as their pods tremble in fear.
A land cloaked with countless peaks
yet not an ounce of soul.
It was this cold grim path that he,
the ruler of my heart, chose
over lying in my tender embrace.

“What the Heroine Said” – Avvaiyat (translation by Gobiga Nada)

The second in trace press’ translating [x] series, Tamil Terrains, arises from a series of online workshops conducted over six weeks in Autumn of 2022 and Spring of 2023. Editors Nedra Rodrigo and Geetha Sukumaran invited poets and translators from India, Malaysia, Singapore, Ilankai (Sri Lanka), and Canada to explore classical and modern Tamil poetry and enter into conversation about “what it means to translate in anti-racist, feminist, and decolonial ways.” With a history that extends back over two thousand years, Tamil is a language that is deeply entwined with its indigenous landscapes—mountain, forest, field, desert, and coast. But this relationship to land has long been troubled by conflict, colonization, and displacement, so this project also seeks to ask how a connection to these terrains, with its layers and accumulated losses, can be understood in traditional Tamil speaking communities in South and Southeast Asia and throughout the diaspora.

As both Nedra and Geetha, and a number of the participants in the workshops, live in Takaronto (so-called Toronto, Canada), the workshop discussions opened with the question of how diasporic translators “who occupy Indigenous lands as refugee and immigrant settlers, might critically engage with, and contest, ongoing erasures carried out on the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island.” This raises a perspective often ignored, or at best simply addressed with rote land acknowledgements, but one that has deeper, and in our present day, significant implications. In recognition, then, of the ways in which translation has been employed to dismiss the cultures and peoples of Turtle Island, this book opens with Tamil translations of work from two Indigenous poets—Mi’kmaw poet shalan joudry and Michi Saagiig and Nishnaabeg poet Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. The volume closes with an essay by Thamilini Jothilingam, whose family was forced to flee civil war in Jaffna when she was a small child. She reflects on the two places where she feels most at home—her current home in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia and the Vanni region of northern Sri Lanka. Both places carry a legacy of colonial violence.

Another distinctive feature of this project and the collection that emerged from it, is the desire of the facilitators to gather people who identify as Tamil, regardless of individual fluency, thus opening a point of connection and collaboration to those who may have grown up away from their ancestral homelands. As a result, the approach to translation explored in the workshops and reflected in Tamil Terrains is varied and creative. Participants are encouraged to engage in retelling, re-creation, expansion and commentary, especially with ancient and classical poetry and traditional folk songs. Nedra Rodrigo describes the decision to differentiate types of translation for the workshops—Root, Branch, and Driftwood:

Root as a direct translation from the source text; Branch as a translation supported by a bridge translation; and Driftwood as a transcreation that was inspired by the source text or that archived some aspect of the text.

The invaluable nature of this approach is clearly reflected in the work selected for publication.

The original texts are presented Tamil script, with a few exceptions where the original poem was written in English or where the decision made to use transliteration. At times, several translations of a single poem may follow, perhaps by translators from different geographical areas, or employing different approaches. Sometimes a translation or transcreation may also be accompanied by a reflection that allows the translator to express the thoughts, experiences, and emotions guiding their personal approach to the piece. Such insights are particularly interesting and add another layer to the process of translating or re-imagining a poem or song.

Finally, translation is also recognized as an act of resistance, speaking to the dislocation from homelands due colonial actions, war, and migration, and the displacements of the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island. The poetry selected for the workshops from more recent and contemporary Tamil poets, much of it touched with a measure of darkness and grief, was chosen to encourage exploration of these concerns, understanding that “(r)esistance here does not mean shutting out but opening up to each other, to allow each other the chance to dwell in our imaginations.”

I remember
the Saamiyadi resting after his trance
swatches of vermillion scattered
all over the entrance.
Withered betel leaf, with shrunken veins.
Everyone standing in the dark smoke
yearning for something
enchanted by the words of the Saamiyadi.

I remember
we were no further than an arm’s reach.
Even so
between us the distance widened
like these ones on one street
and those ones on another.

From “Tree with Broken Shade” by S. Bose (translation by Yalini Jothilimgam)

This volume, reflective of the collaborative spirit of the workshops that led to it, offers an opportunity to appreciate the many complex ways Tamil speaking people, and their descendants who may be spread far and wide, can maintain a connection to the landscapes, traditions, and histories of their respective homelands through poetry and other cultural elements such as art and film. Reaching from the Sangam era (300BCE – 300CE) to the present day, the translations, transcreations, and reflections gathered here combine to make reading this book a very dynamic and moving experience.

Tamil Terrains is edited by Nedra Rodrigo and Geetha Sukumaran and published by trace press.

Writing toward the endless horizon: Landscape with Landscape by Gerald Murnane

In his Foreword to Landscape with Landscape, written for its 2016 re-issue with Giramondo, Gerald Murnane describes his reaction to a number negative reviews that this, his fourth work and first foray into short fiction, received upon its release. He admits that he ultimately felt vindicated when others confessed to liking it and it achieved some modest rewards, but as he puts it: “here it is being republished thirty years after its harsh early life and when it’s old enough to stand up for itself.” Well, now it is seeing its first release outside of Australia, and it’s yet another decade older and its author has finally been properly “discovered” at home and abroad. So, does it stand up well? That depends, perhaps, on just how much of the classic Murnane narrator one can take, because this collection of six loosely interlinked stories (or novellas—most of the pieces is about 50 pages long) and, with the exception of one especially clever, and somewhat unsettling, tale, it could be argued that the length of the individual stories tends to undermine their impact, individually, and of the project as a whole. However, many readers may well feel differently.

Landscape with Landscape was first published in 1985, three years after The Plains, his elusive and evocative tale of an aspiring filmmaker who ventures into a vast, open landscape with plans to make a film that, decades on, have yet to come to fruition. Meanwhile, the stories in Landscape are firmly rooted in a suburban Melbourne of the 1960s and 70s and its outlying districts, even if that “Melbourne” is, one case, bizarrely transplanted and turned upside down in distant Paraguay. But Murnane’s unnamed narrators are all obsessed with a landscape of some kind, even if it exists solely within their imaginations. They all dream of becoming writers or poets, sometimes with a role model, like Kerouac or Housman, and typically they toil away in unpublished isolation (even if they marry and have a family), work as civil servants or teachers, and drink heavily. There is often a legacy of Catholic guilt, sexual frustration, and social awkwardness, and each of these variations on the Murnane-type narrator is characterized by a self-obsessed, myopic, almost solipsistic nature that, at times, even he seems to acknowledge. Finally, in each story the narrator mentions a story he is reading or that he has just finished, or published, after decades of false starts, and the title of that work is the title of the story that follows.

Taken together, the stories in this collection explore the slow simmer of literary ambition and the way it not only motivates the protagonist, but serves to keep him isolated from those around him. Everything is filtered through the narrator’s imagination, there is no dialogue and few characters are actually given names—most are referred to with a measured anonymity like “my wife,” “the president,” “my younger cousin,” “the Artist.” This social disconnect creates a narrative that centres the protagonist’s obsessions and idiosyncrasies, but as some of these stories drag out over several unproductive or counterproductive decades they risk losing their steam even if there are some really wonderful elements at play. Just how many times can a man wake up with a hangover and vague memories of vomiting in a bush in pursuit of a concept of a landscape he can’t even articulate before he outstays his welcome?

Having said all this, there is something to like in each of the stories in Landscape with Landscape and whether it works better as whole or a collection—even Murnane admits he was not entirely certain what it was as he put it together—is best judged by the reader. But one can argue that the centrepiece of the work is the third story, “The Battle of Acosta Nu.” In the late 1800s, a small group of Australians migrated to Paraguay to establish a utopian socialist colony. Due to internal conflict and difficult living conditions, most of the original settlers returned home, but a number of families stayed, eventually marrying into the local population and their descendants remain there to this day. Here Murnane’s narrator, an even more proud and dysfunctional protagonist than usual, is a man whose father made him aware of his superior Australian heritage which he believes sets him apart from the primitive Paraguayans around him. He does not speak of his background—though he suspects others sense his difference—and learns whatever he can about  Australia so he can one day return to his native land. In his mind he superimposes an Australianness on his environment (he lives in Melbourne), while shunning Paraguayan culture and civilization (which is, of course, perfectly modern). Despairing of ever finding a true Australian woman, however, he is forced to marry a local, and accepts that his firstborn, a daughter, is necessarily Paraguayan, but when his son arrives he feels obligated to help the boy understand that he too is set apart from others. Yet, when his son becomes critically ill, things really start to become disturbing.

The doctors talked quietly with their backs to me. I saw how absurd had been my thinking on the way to the hospital that some young doctor might take me aside when he met me and ask me if I could explain some oddity he had found in my son: perhaps an unheard-of blood-group or an unusually well-developed heart or merely the boy’s astonishing toughness in his fight against this infection. (I had thought at the time that I would tell the doctor the truth about my son and myself – not as a boast but simply to remind the medical man that his science overlooked much of importance: that if he wanted to know what enabled people to survive he had better ask himself what was the very essence of a man and what distinguished one race of men from another and why years of exile could inure a  body against lesser hardships.) But of course the doctors had nothing to ask me.

The narrator, so convinced of his—and his son’s—superiority, is unable to acknowledge the gravity of his situation to the extent that he is even divorced from his body’s natural emotional responses. He is determined to keep trying to rise above what is going on. This story is absurd, at first funny and then not funny at all. It raises countless questions about identity and sanity, and what it means to find one’s place in the world. Somehow, the landscape that is always just out of reach is the one you are longing for. It is also the one you are least likely to recognize even if it is stretched out before you.

Landscape with Landscape by Gerald Murnane is published by And Other Stories (and in Australia by Giramondo).

 

You are neither silence nor language: The Answer to Lord Chandos by Pascal Quinard

Austrian poet, writer and librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal signalled a break with his earlier works when, in 1902, he published the story “A Letter,” also known as “The Lord Chandos Letter.” It is presented as a letter to Francis Bacon, dated August 1604, from his (fictional) friend Philip, Lord Chandos, in which the latter defends his abandonment of the poetic life, and society in general, as a result of his nearly complete loss of the ability to express himself in words.  The sentiment expressed in this communication echoes an abrupt change in Hofmannsthal’s own approach to language and the limits of the word so closely that it has been thought to have had at least some autobiographical grounding. But, it is, in fact reflective of the contemporary emergence of new ideas about thought and expression, especially in Vienna, and the impact that would have on philosophy, science and the arts. Although the exact context has been debated, clearly Hofmannsthal was seeking to express some aspects of his own shifting literary  perspective through the existential crisis of faith in language expressed by his character in his fictional letter.

More than a century later, French author Pascal Quinard is not content to leave this influential “letter” as a one-sided communication. So he has picked up the pen of Lord Bacon to respond to Chandos (and presumably his creator) with The Answer to Lord Chandos. In his introduction, Jean-Luc Nancy suggests Quinard may have a wider perspective in mind:

Literature began to distrust itself at the dawn of the twentieth century, beginning with Nietzsche and Mauthner (much read by Hofmannsthal). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we doubt instead if literature still takes place. Hofmannsthal’s recoil before words responds to the wear and tear of a certain grandiloquence  and literary profusion of the nineteenth century. The vibrant defense of those same words, in Quinard, responds to a banalization and informanization of language ushered in by the twentieth century.

The result is a moving defense of the vital importance of language and poetry that arises from decades of Quinard’s personal contemplation of the original story.

He opens this essay with an imaginative consideration of two artists who preferred to pull themselves away from the world, more comfortable with limited contact with others, but who continued to have faith in their art. He writes about how Emily Bronte’s time in Brussels in 1842, and the necessary social engagement required of her there, only deepened her need for solitude. Her beloved moorlands, which she wandered with her dog and pet bird of prey, served as her inspirational wellspring. Society was not essential for Bronte or for German-born English composer, George Handel. In 1710, Handel travelled to London where he would remain for the rest of his life, becoming in 1718, the director of music to the current duke of Chandos (hmm…) before becoming involved in opera and theatre. But as Quinard describes him, he preferred to live and compose in relative isolation:

Inside Handel’s small living room—according to the inventory made after his death—there was a large secretary made of walnut, a water bowl, a full-length mirror ringed with brass, and two striking wooden heads on which his wigs were placed. Two big heads without eyes or mouth, so that the wigs, reeking with sweat and smoke, could dry out when the evenings were over. So that the smell of society and its solicitations, its judgments, its resentments, its heartbreaks, were not brought any further into the house.

Ultimately, Quinard’s thoughts turn to “A Letter” and its author. Acknowledging that Hofmanthal had suffered a nervous breakdown right as the century turned, fueled by personal matters, Quinard, himself falling under the darkness of depression in 1978, fashioned a response to his fictional young letter writer.

Lord Chandos’ letter to Lord Bacon begins with an apology for taking two years responding to his friend’s last missive inquiring about his well-being. He then goes on to express his conviction that the inspired poet he once was is no more, and explain how he has lost his faith in language and the ability to express himself in any meaningful way. At the age of twenty-six he has abandoned a promising literary career and intends to retreat further from the society in which he was previously engaged. Quinard’s Lord Bacon  opens his own answer to Lord Chandos with a similar apology for taking yet another two years to reply. But his explanation is initially simple—he strongly disagrees with his friend’s argument and has needed time to formulate an answer.

The response is relatively long and passionate, likely longer than the story that inspired it. But it serves as a moving defense of the power of poetry. Bacon’s argument carries an intensity that is sensual, pointed, and persistent. He is intent on chastising and encouraging his friend to pull him out of the abyss into which he has let himself fall and advise him to hold fast to his pen no matter what:

Remember that words only abandon those who have hollowed them out and somewhat devitalized them. And if words resist those who are in the middle of speaking: never do they resist those who write. Those who write have nothing but time for them, nothing but time to go back over their sentence, nothing but time to crack open their lexicons, their chronologies, their dictionaries, nothing but time to seek the help of their old, quite incomplete grammar manual which dates to the end of childhood, nothing but time to revisit, to revive, to re-etymologize, to revise to correct, to surprise. Do not resort to stupor.

Reading the original story before reading this treatise will enhance the experience of Quinard’s response, but it is not essential. This slight volume is a celebration of the expressive force and intrinsic value of literature that will speak to anyone who loves language.

The Answer to Lord Chandos by Pascal Quinard is translated from the French by Stéphanie Boulard and Timothy Lavenz, with an Introduction by Jean-Luc Nancy and published by Wakefield Press.

People look so human: Becoming Animal by Teresa Präauer

Just exactly where can we draw the line between human and animal, man and beast, and exactly how fuzzy (or furry?) is that line? How has our understanding of movement across that line changed over time? And what about those beings, those creatures that have been understood, or imagined to stand somewhere in between? These are the kinds of questions that Austrian writer and visual artist, Teresa Präauer, entertains in her charming, yet focused philosophical and cultural essay, Becoming Animal. The terrain she explores is one populated by a host of liminal creatures—hybrids, monsters, and chimeras— the sort of beings that have continued to inspire both our scientific and artistic imaginations from Antiquity through to the present.

Präauer begins with the harpy, one of the most distinctive figures to appear time and again in early efforts to catalogue all known living beings—factual, mythological, and “exotic” alike—that occupied artists and thinkers from the Medieval era on into the Age of Discovery.

In the Historia naturalis animalism, a seventeenth-century treatise on natural history by John Johnston, there is a bird-like creature with a human head. This ‘Harpyie’ or ‘Harpyia’ has a sceptical, not unfriendly face and long, flowing locks that are gently tucked behind one ear and extend halfway down her body—a bird’s body, of course—the plumage growing thicker and darker towards the back. Compact like a small chicken, the harpy sits atop a pair of enormous talons that could just as easily support a bird of prey.

It’s not her first appearance in natural histories, she has been depicted and evolving for a century. From our scientifically “sophisticated” vantage point today though, such a creature and many of her companions depicted in such volumes seem fanciful, but were they any more so than the angels and demons that also figured in many hierarchical systems? And early Modern scholars often had to work from accounts and drawings made by those with direct experience of the animals in question, as well as reports from travellers often carried second or third hand over time or distance, as they strived to catalogue and categorize all forms of life—mineral, vegetable, animal, and magical. Many of these life forms sat on the edge of classifiably, “pretty monsters” like the harpy and, as time went on and naturalists became more rigorous in their efforts, the fanciful creatures began to be weeded out, but others, like humans with hirsutism, found themselves defined as distinct from their hairless brethren, but like all humans, still very different from other primates. Yet, now, with the ability to study DNA, we know we share 99% of our genes with chimps and bonobos and suddenly the need to once again draw a clear boundary between ourselves and animals has become more important—and more difficult to maintain.

A relatively brief work, only 96 pages long, Becoming Animal is not a chronological survey of the development of taxonomical conventions—although Linnaeus makes more than one appearance—but rather a varied account that moves back and forth, from Michelangelo to contemporary literary theorists, from prehistoric cave paintings to “furries.” It is an engaging flow of ideas that pulls in scientific elements along with literary sources such as Ovid, Kafka, Nabokov, and Inger Christensen to explore the many facets of our connection with and within the natural world. It is the kind of entertaining exercise that can’t quite be pinned down, but Präauer’s primary interest ultimately lies in the space between human and animal, a space that can be approached from either direction. It is a space of movement. She notes that French theorists Deleuze and Guattari, when speaking of “becoming-animal,” perceived it as one of many forms of being, as a “demand for a mode of writing that moves within transitions and liminalities,” however:

Becoming is a verb, a doing that does not mean being. I write ‘becoming animal’ as two separate words, not joined by a hyphen. Animal is noun, and becoming is a verb. When I am becoming animal, I am not an animal. I am in transition. An animal that is becoming human is also in such a transition, albeit in a different way.

This thoughtful essay ends, as it opened, with the author observing the myriad forms of life visible from her window, leaving her reader with much to contemplate about this world in which we are just one element of a much larger whole.

Becoming Animal by Teresa Präauer is translated from the German by Kári Driscoll and published by Seagull Books.

I’m often out of step with the times: An Instinctive Feeling of Innocence by Dana Grigorcea

As if tugged by an invisible thread, I stroll the same old streets—under linden and chestnut trees, past potholes where water or fallen autumn leaves used to gather and kids used to splash and stomp around—breathing more deeply as I walk by the walls enclosing certain yards. Behind one I detect an elderberry bush, or maybe it’s jasmine, or even the more fragrant Japanese honeysuckle. I know there must be rusty garage door in the near courtyard, which will echo the sound of my heels and wake up the neighbour’s dog. And the small starlings lining the now-obsolete rooftop TV antennae will promptly chime in, too, right on cue.

After many years in Zurich, Victoria, the protagonist of Swiss-Romanian writer Dana Grigorcea’s novel An Instinctive Feeling of Innocence, has returned to her native Bucharest, a city now transformed from the Communist-era world in which she grew up into a place reshaped by post-revolutionary currents. It is a place she experienced in flux, as a member of the “so-called transitional generation,” but it has changed even more in her absence. She doesn’t tell us exactly why she has come back, but she is living in her family’s apartment and working at a bank. That is, until the bank is robbed by an old man with whom she will again cross paths as his geriatric crime spree continues. This unlikely occurrence not only knocks her off-kilter, but when her employer insists  she take leave to “process the trauma,” it opens up time and space for her to reconnect with the people and places of her past.

And so, in the stifling summer heat, trailed by the sticky scent of linden blossoms, Victoria fills her newly freed days wandering the city. Bucharest becomes a kind of post traumatic memory theatre with a personal grid superimposed on its layered historical structure. Street names are critical to her ability to orient herself, especially on those arteries that have been renamed, sometimes a number of times, as political currents have shifted. She regularly encounters people from her childhood and adolescence—school friends, former boyfriends, characters from her neighbourhood. Not exactly stream of consciousness, Victoria’s line of thought takes regular digressions as she sees or thinks of something or someone she once knew. Her new boyfriend Flavian will frequently try to navigate this altered landscape with her, offering a frame of reference wherever he can to the many changes that have occurred during her many years in Zurich. And her parents, who have also been living abroad, arrive to visit, further disturbing the unsettled dust of memory. She has an awkward lunch with her mother:

She picks up her knife and fork and continues eating, and I wonder if it would be better for us to talk about her life in the south of France but we tied that last time and it only made her sad. ‘We moved there too late, just too late.’ Or should I tell her about what’s going on here in Bucharest—about her dental practice which is going well? But she already knows. Once again, I refrain from asking her where she parked the car whose keys she’s  left with me, and what it looks like. I’d bet it’s a cream-coloured Peugeot, upholstered in cream-coloured leather. Some day I’ll come across it by accident while strolling about the neighbourhood. The door will pop right open for me, just like in Petre Ispirescu’s fairy tales of eternal youth and everlasting life, stories where the hero returns to his homeland after a long absence and finds that everything has changed, he doesn’t recognize a thing, and even starts to doubt whether he ever had any homeland at all.

As she traverses the city, Victoria notes the heavily weighted history of buildings, landmarks, public squares, and roadways. Her senses are on high alert, yet she is distracted by the smallest details, like the colour of nail polish she has chosen. And there is a constant, uneasy misfit between past and present that unnerves the narrative flow. Sometimes Victoria repeats herself, other times she falls into a side story about someone from her past that may or may not be fleshed out later, or seems to lose track of the thread of events that are—or appear to be—happening in the present. Sometimes the line between truth and illusion breaks down altogether like when a ride on the bus on the same route she used to take every day with her grandmother becomes a surreal, dystopian detour through a decaying urban landscape where cellphone service suddenly disappears and other passengers seem to morph into people Victoria thinks she recognizes.

Of course, she is a less than reliable narrator; her interpretation of reality and her emotional engagement is uncertain. Past lovers continually reappear, leading Flavian to ask “Are you waiting for a lover?” He eyes her with suspicion. “If so, I’ll stay by the door to catch him.” But through it all, Victoria remains an infectiously engaging story teller drawing on a wide range of characters and experiences. From the tale of a philandering neighbour murdered by his wife, to memories of her wildly eccentric grandmother, to details of unconventional tendencies of her parents and their friends, to an account of joining a crowd of thousands to catch a glimpse of Michael Jackson during his Dangerous tour in 1992, the Bucharest that she brings to life is the Ceausescu-era city she grew up in overlayed by a changed, modern metropolis that doesn’t exactly match at the seams. In these cracks she encounters people from her past, both in memory and  in real time. But then, what is real time when life has been disrupted by an unexpected event in a city that has itself been disrupted by more than one political upheaval?

An Instinctive Feeling of Innocence by Dana Grigorcea is translated from the German by Alta L. Price and published by Seagull Books.

2025 Wrap Up: Reading and other stuff

 

I don’t know what I expected when this year began. Ever since 2020 it seems we have greeted each year with some measure of optimism—I mean how could it be worse than the one that just passed? And somehow, each year has managed to be worse in some new, unanticipated way. 2025 saw the continuation of conflict, famine, destruction, climate catastrophes.  We also witnessed the further escalation of intolerance, racism, sexism, anti-trans sentiment, religious fundamentalism, and autocratic politics. Where I am in western Canada we have witnessed all of this, not just from our neighbours to the south, or distant nations, but right here close to home. It is hard not to lose hope, but giving up is not an option and so, 2026, here we come, preparing for the worst but dreaming of the best.

Personally, I struggled a bit this year. Family stuff, some depression, and, in late November, a car accident that has left me with stiffness and pain that is slow to subside. But, on the bright(er) side, my focus and concentration has returned, and replacing my damaged car proved easier than it might have been. My old Honda Fit had more value than I expected, and I happened to see a (newer) used vehicle that fit my needs for a very good price and was fortunately in the position to buy it. If the police manage to find the impaired driver who hit me (assuming she was insured) I will even get my deductible back. But, quite honestly, I’ll be happy to be able to look over my left shoulder again!

As for reading/reviewing, 2025 was a mixed year. I had a few off times when I struggled to finish books (or gave up altogether), and a number of mediocre reads passed without public mention. At the same time, I read some excellent poetry in English, but could not find the words to write coherent reviews. For some reason, I feel I lack the knowledge and vocabulary to say the “right” thing about poetry in my own language—I feel more comfortable responding to translations. And I did read a lot of poetry in translation this year.

Looking back over 2025, the singular defining force for me was the work of Danish experimental poet and writer Inger Christensen (1935–2009). In January I read her essay collection  The Condition of Secrecy, and I was immediately entranced by her love of language and her view of the world as informed by science, nature, music, and mathematics. I knew I wanted to read all of her poetry and fiction and, throughout the year, that is exactly what I did. I read eight of her translated works and only have one left to obtain although I have a dual language edition of one of the sequences in that volume (“Butterfly Valley”). Along the way I also decided I wanted to learn to read Danish as there are elements of her work that simply cannot be reproduced in translation (mathematical constraints in particular).

And so, I am learning Danish, or, should I say, jeg lærer dansk.

Although I enjoyed all of her books, my favourite piece of fiction was the crazy word play mystery Azorno (1967) and my favourite work of poetry was her monumental it/det (1969), both earlier works. Of course, the wonderful book length poem alphabet (1981) is also amazing. Her poetry and essays are translated by Susanna Nied, her fiction by Denise Newman.

Some thoughts about a few of my other favourite reads from the past year:

 Prose:

Ceilings – Zuzana Brabcová (translated from the Czech by Tereza Veverka Novická)

Set on the detox ward of a psychiatric hospital in Prague, Brabcová captures the institutional environment and the strangeness of psychotic interludes with the skill only personal experience can provide. This wild and delirious ride pulled me out of a reading slump.

Dreaming of Dead People – Rosalind Belben

I read two novels by Rosalind Belben this year, The Limit which was re-issued by NYRB Classics several years ago and this one which was re-issued by And Other Stories this year. Both are strange in a brutal yet beautiful way, but Dreaming is, to me, a more accomplished, in depth novel.

Love Letter in Cuneiform – Tomáš Zmeškal (translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker)

One of those books I’ve been meaning to read for years and when I finally picked it up off the shelf, I was delighted to find out how funny and weird this multi-generational family drama truly is. Zmeškal lends magical realism and historical reality with a cast of eccentric characters to create a memorable tale.

Self-Portrait in the Studio – Giorgio  Agamben (translated from the Italian by Kevin Attell)

Far from a conventional memoir, Agamben invites his reader on a tour of the various studios he has occupied over the years, reflecting on the people, books, and places that come to mind along the way. A surprisingly engaging work.

The Dissenters – Youssef Rakha

The final two novels on my list are both highly inventive in style and form. Egyptian writer Youssef Rakha’s first novel written in English manages to seamlessly incorporate Arabic expressions without explanation, adding to the richness of this original, multi-dimensional story of one remarkable woman set against the events of recent Egyptian history. Endlessly rewarding.

Nevermore – Cécile Wajsbrot (translated from the French by Tess Lewis)

This ambitious novel is a moving evocation of loss and change. A translator has come to Dresden to work on a translation of the central “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse from English into French. Reflections on change and transformation drawn from her own state in life and various historical events accompany the process of translation.

Poetry:

Of Desire and Decarceration – Charline Lambert (translated from the French by John Taylor)

It is most unusual for a poet as young as Lambert (b. 1989) to see her first four volumes of poetry published together so early in her career, but translator John Taylor felt that the Belgian poet’s books show a natural growth best appreciated as a whole. He is not wrong (he is also a translator whose judgement I always trust).

Psyche Running: Selected Poems 2005–2022 – Durs Grünbein (translated from the German by Karen Leeder)

This selection of poetry rightfully won the Griffin Prize this past year. Grünbein’s work tends to draw on his hometown of Dresden and Italy where he now spends much time, and this selection presents a good introduction to the variety of his mid-career work. One can only hope that the attention he has received with this book will lead to full translations of more of his work.

arabic, between love and war – Norah Alkharrashi and Yasmine Haj (eds)

The first of a new translation series by Toronto-based trace press, this selection of original poems with their translations—most written in Arabic, with some written in English and translated into Arabic, exists as a kind of conversation between poets from across the Arabic speaking world and its diaspora. Vital work.

The Minotaur’s Daughter – Eva Luka (translated from the Slovak by James Sutherland-Smith)

This book, a complete surprise tucked into a package from Seagull Books, is a delight. Luka’s world is a strange and quirky one, transgressive and fantastic. Leonora Carrington is a huge influence, with a number of  ekphrastic poems inspired by her paintings but given life from Luka’s own unique angle. Loved it!

Ancient Algorithms – Katrine Øgaard Jensen (with Ursula Andkjær Olsen and others)

This is the book that marked my return to reading post-accident. And how could it not. Jensen’s translations of Olsen’s poetic trilogy are very close to my heart. This unique work begins with poems selected from those books (in the original Danish), followed by Jensen’s translations, which set the stage for a series of collaborative mistranslations guided by rules set by the various poet translators involved. A wonderful celebration of poetry and translation and the necessary bond between the two.

My Heresies – Alina Stefanescu

Finally, one of the English language poetry collections I read and did not review (I did have a great title though). Alina Stefanescu breathes poetry as a matter of course, as is clear to anyone who has had an opportunity to engage with her online. There is an infectious defiance to this collection which straddles Romania and America, conjures angels and demons, and explores the everyday reality of romantic and parental love. I connected most directly with wry observations of motherhood that resonated with my own less than conventional parental existence.

There are, as ever, many other books I read this year that could have made this year end review. You’ll have to check my blog to find them!

Happy new year!