Author: roughghosts

Literary blog of Joseph Schreiber. Writer. Reader. Editor. Photographer.

Memories, visions, and grief: The Dissenters by Youssef Rakha

I think I hear the dawn azan much earlier than it is supposed to sound. The world, spaced out, is speeding down some derelict highway in time. And long before my attic visions start, Shimo, I am thinking it is time that happens to people. We talk about having and saving and wasting it as if it is ours to work with, but really it is we who are time’s property. It molds and meddles with us, changes us without our knowing, so that one day we wake up with no idea who we are. And suddenly the life we’ve lived is no longer ours.

Youssef Rakha’s latest novel, his first composed in English, explores the remarkable, multi-dimensional life  of a strong-willed, enigmatic woman, set against the tumultuous years of recent Egyptian history, from the mid-fifties through the January Revolution of 2011 and its aftermath. But to put it like that sounds too simple, too conventional, for the tale that The Dissenters unleashes. Not content to embark on a straightforward narrative (which would not be his style anyhow), Rakha has chosen to tell the story of Amna Hanim Abu Zahra—Nimo to her friends, Mouna to her husband and children—through the memories and hallucinatory visions of her eldest son Nour. In the wake of his mother’s death, his grief-tinged, ecstatic narrative unfolds in a series of letters to his estranged younger sister Shimo in California. He wishes to share with her the understanding of Mouna, their mother, that he has gained through the strange rift in the fabric of time that has allowed him, within the confines of the cramped attic of the their family home, to slip into her earlier existence, living, reliving or closely observing her experiences, even those from long before he was born.

The Dissenters is, then, essentially a one-sided epistolatory novel consisting of three long letters with an interlude stolen from Mouna’s own notebook. Nour engages his sister directly and imagines her responses, but the apparent silence on her end provides no indication whether his dream-inspired insights will manage to heal, as he hopes, the unresolved rupture between mother and daughter that precipitated  Shimo’s unannounced departure from Cairo years earlier. However, it would seem that this is not the only loose end Nour is attempting to tie up. He is a forty-five year-old journalist who returned home to live with his mother after his divorce in 2010, and there is much that he must resolve with respect to his own life and his relationship to his country.

Moving between more recent, post-revolution events to which Nour—and in one section Mouna herself—can speak directly, and the attic revelations that reach back further into the past, Rakha unwinds a tale that works with, and against, temporal framings to create a narrative that slowly builds to reveal a full, multi-dimensional portrait of a singular woman and the shifting political, social, and civic world around her. Nour’s earliest visions take him back to 1956 when his mother, a teenager still known as Amna, is deprived of a chance to take her baccalaureate  exams and forced to marry a forty year-old man her family has selected. The awkward marriage will remain unconsummated and ultimately be dissolved, which allows young Amna the opportunity to finally pursue her dream of going to college.

There she will meet Amin, the young Communist lawyer who steals her heart and gives her the name “Mouna,” but their newfound joy is short-lived, as he is arrested and imprisoned a few short months after they move in together. The years of their separation, Nour tells his sister, see their mother exercising a new confidence and independence as she finishes school and enters the workforce. As a modern, stylish Egyptian woman, her friends and colleagues call her “Nimo.” When Amin is released from jail, a diminished and disillusioned man, she continues to work, even finding herself, for a time, acting as a secret agent. And then, at last, in 1969 Nour is born. By the time her second child, another boy, arrives, Mouna is again transformed. She has remade herself as a pious, middle-class Muslim mother.

The alternate thread of Nour’s correspondence with his sister, who is thirteen years younger than he is, explores more recent family matters including their parent’s comfortable estrangement, their brother Abid’s sadistic tendencies, and the circumstances that seem to have caused Shimo’s relationship with her mother to become strained and then permanently broken. But the primary focus is the dramatic impact that the 2011 revolution had on their mother. It seemed to awaken a long dormant political spirit in Mouna, giving her a new purpose and a new life.  On February 11, the night Mubarak stepped down from power, Nour walks home from Tahrir Square and is distraught to find that she is not there. Immediately his mind goes to all manner of horrors, imagining her lying in a puddle on the sidewalk.  And then, she appears, holding a flag, smartly dressed, her headscarf gone:

—You’re home early Mouna trills, the premillennial warmth of her voice restored.

Now my mother is smiling for real: an expression utterly unlike the baraka she used to project going about her devotional duties. I haven’t seen such peacefulness in her face since before Baba died. She stands waving her flag, then steps over the puddle that no longer shows her dead.

—I couldn’t stay home on a day like this, now, could I, she says. Besides, I just took the Metro to Kast El Ainy and walked to Tahrir. C’était incroyable, ya Nour. Hold your head high, you’re Egyptian, we chanted. But it wasn’t just a chant, you understand. It was real.

Soon, however, Mouna becomes aware of a strange and disturbing phenomenon. Something that others do not seem to register. Suddenly women are jumping off roofs and out of windows. She begins to investigate, finding a few others who also seem to be aware of this unusual trend. She even tries to recruit Nour, encouraging him to report on the situation. He doesn’t know what to make of the Jumpers,  but she sees a truth in their tragedies. These ill-fated women become a mystery, and then an obsession, even a madness, that fuels Mouna’s final years as the promise of the revolution turns again to upheaval and violence.

This ambitious, hypnotic novel tells a story that is very intimate, turning at times erotic or violent, but it is about much more than the life of one woman. For one thing, the conscious incongruity of having a complex woman’s life recounted and, at times experienced, through the vessel of a man sets up an interesting dynamic, speaking as it does to the shifting roles and restrictions that impact women in Egyptian society from an unlikely angle. Of course, The Dissenters also addresses the price paid by anyone who defies political and social conventions, and highlights the challenges of navigating  the forces of power for one’s own safety or (as in the case of Abid who joins the Secret Police) one’s advantage. Thus, Mouna’s story is much much larger than she is. As Nour confides to his sister:

But I’m no longer talking of my mother, am I. I’m talking of the Mother of the World. Surely you know that’s what Egypt is called, dear sister. At moments like this it seems as if Amna Abu Zahra is a fractal of our country, her biography a variation on its history, a version of the same story.

Finally, although Rakha is writing this novel in English—a language Nour and his sister share—his prose carries a strong Egyptian flavour. Many Arabic terms and expressions are woven into the text without comment or glossary (one can always look them up, mind you), and because Mouna was educated in French schools growing up and continued to use the language in her working years, French phrases regularly appear in her speech. This distinctive voice, in conjunction with the rhythmic flow of a narrative structure that blends the fantastical possibility of Nour’s visions with the reality of his own need for understanding and reconciliation, makes for a compelling and exceptionally rewarding read.

The Dissenters by Youssef Rakha is published by Graywolf Press.

Marking eleven years of roughghosts with a few thoughts about writing book reviews

It always catches me by surprise, that annual notification from WordPress informing that yet another year has passed. As of yesterday, May 31, 2025, roughghosts is eleven years old.

Each anniversary leaves me a little bemused. After all, this modest corner of the internet was birthed at the height of a major manic episode—one that would end my career and fundamentally change my life. And although I created this blog with the vague notion that it might offer a space for my own writing, I could not have imagined where it would be eleven years on. It has not only become a place in which I write, primarily about books, but an avenue to writing and editing for online journals.

I have found that I find writing about books very rewarding, but am bemused by the ongoing complaints about a lack of book reviews, especially of titles published by smaller independent publishers. For some reason, book blogs don’t count. (Personally I prefer to describe roughghosts as a “literary site” because of this stigma even though I do not have a problem with the other designation.). My intention with the majority of the reviews I publish is to maintain the same practice I was first exposed to when I was invited to contribute to Douglas Glover’s late great journal Numéro Cinq. They are the same principles that I have preached when invited to speak about reviewing to others, and relied upon as Criticism Editor for 3:AM Magazine.

Basically, my goal is to fashion a piece that is well-written and entertaining,  that attempts to open up a way into a text for a potential reader (especially with books that may be more complex or unconventional) and that aims to call attention to what is interesting about it. In a longer (2500+ word) piece for publication elsewhere, I will take this aspect to a greater depth, but for my blog I am generally aiming for a simpler, shorter (less than 1500 word) review. Most critically, I try to stay out of  my reviews as much as possible unless I have a very good reason to share a little of my own experience or a particularly personal perspective. As Doug Glover would say—I try to limit the “I” statements. You are still reading my reaction, of course, and at times my enthusiasm is palpable, but I always want to leave a text, especially one that raises more questions than answers, open for a reader to explore on their own. I may have very strong feelings about what is really happening, or what something really means, but my specific opinions to that end have no place in a review. That kind of response is for a book club or a conversation with a bookish friend over coffee. However, I do occasionally allow myself to be more present when I am writing what I describe as a “response” to a book—typically one where I know the author fairly well, in person or virtually—or where my own lived experience strongly colours my reading of particular work.

I also tend to spend a ridiculous amount of time writing most of the reviews on my site, regardless of how long they might be. It can take me days to complete a piece, much of that time spent spinning my wheels trying to find the best way to frame my approach. Then, when I finally find my footing it rarely takes less than six to eight hours of focused writing, often a lot more to complete a post. So, I’m a slow reader and an even slower writer. My productivity is not high (I like to imagine it’s quality over quantity) and when life gets complicated, as it does from time to time, it’s even lower. But between reading, writing about books, and editing essays for Minor Literature[s], I am quite content with this blogging life. It has introduced me to so many interesting, intelligent people, opened unexpected opportunities to travel, and, of course, led me to so many wonderful writers, translators, and publishers—not to mention more books that I will ever have time to read.

And now, on to year twelve!

A mirror to a life: Self-Portrait in the Studio by Giorgio Agamben

A form of life that keeps itself in relation to a poetic practice, however that may be, is always in the studio, always in the studio.

Granted that what Giorgio Agamben calls a “studio” might be better understood by English language readers as a “study,” the ideal space is the same: some kind of a desk , plenty of shelving for books, and some room on the walls for  a few well-chosen prints or framed memorabilia. Over the years the Italian philosopher has occupied a number of studios, most rented or borrowed from friends, and each one, revisited through photographs often grainy or discoloured, contains the memories of friends and colleagues and others who have, through their writing, influenced and inspired him. With this slender, generously illustrated volume, Self-Portrait in the Studio, Agamben reflects on his own intellectual journey, which is, in his case, nothing less than a life journey, from the sixties through to the present day, via photographs, paintings, poems, beloved books, and precious friendships.

In this day of the ubiquitous selfie—that practice of intentionally placing oneself front and centre at any site of interest—one might expect a book with “self-portrait” (autoritratto) in the title to be a self-focused venture. Yet, although Agamben does appear with friends, mentors and fellow students in a number of  the included photographs, his motivation is to centre those whose words and ideas have touched him and the lessons they have passed on. In a parenthetical aside he addresses this objective:

(What am I doing in this book? Am I not running the risk, as Ginevra [his spouse] says, of turning my studio into a museum through which I lead readers by the hand? Do I not remain too present, while I would have liked to disappear in the faces of friends and our meetings? To be sure, for me inhabiting meant to experience these friendships and meetings with the greatest possible intensity. But instead of inhabiting, is it not having that has got the upper hand? I believe I must run this risk. There is one thing, though, that I would like to make perfectly clear: that I am an epigone in the literal sense of the word, a being that is generated only out of others, and that never renounces this dependency, living in a continuous, happy epigenesis.)

This desire to stay out of his own way goes a long way to explaining the surprisingly engaging nature of this book. It is not a  detailed or rigorous intellectual autobiography, but rather a chance to spend a little time with a philosopher who truly seems to delight in the exchange of ideas, someone who wishes to honour some of the friendships, writers and artists who have helped shape his own development over the years.  Of course, given that he is writing from the vantage point of his early eighties, there is also a clear appreciation of the fact that the themes and dreams of a life are ever necessarily unfinished. In his preamble he muses: “While all our faculties seem to dimmish and fail us, the imagination grows to excess and takes up all possible space.” There are regrets—for example, sorrow that he did not come to appreciate Ingeborg Bachmann’s poetry while she was still alive—but the text ends with a positive, and still forward looking, affirmation of life and love.

Progress through this book of memories is essentially chronological, Agamben employs objects in or associations with his various  studio settings as touchstones that trigger memories of a particular person or persons who came into his life, and, frequently, the poets or writers that any one connection might have him led to explore. The tapestry of a life of ideas ever expanding, moving from friendships with important contemporary literary and intellectual figures, to meditations on the ideas of those he came to know only through their work, and back again. He never devotes more than a few pages to any one individual, social group, or writer as he honours those who have influenced and inspired his own thought over time.

For myself, many of the individuals he talks about, including those he counts among his important friendships, were previously unknown to me (but easy to look up, of course), but others, especially the writers he feels a strong connection to—like Simone Weil, Walter Benjamin, Hölderlin, and Robert Walser—were not. Of particular interest is the way he considers our relationships to those we read carefully or enjoy close intellectual companionship—what is it to engage intensely with the ideas of others?

As he makes his way along this retrospective pathway, Agamben draws some striking connections that he measures himself against in assessing his own life. Notably, he comments on a piece written just three years before Walser’s commitment to the hospital where he would spend the rest of his life, in which he questions the idea that Hölderlin’s last decades were ones of misery, suggesting instead that his loss of his senses wisely  afforded him the time and space to dream :

The tower in the carpenter’s house in Tübingen and the little hospital room in Herisau: these are two places on which we should never tire of meditating. What was accomplished within those walls—the refusal of reason on the part of two peerless poets—is the strongest objection that has ever been raised against our civilization. And once again, in the words of Simone Weil: only those who have accepted the most extreme state of social degradation can speak the truth.

I also believe that in the world that befell me, everything that seems desirable to me and seems worth living for can find a place only in a museum or a prison or a mental hospital. I know this with absolute certainty, but unlike Walser I have not had the courage to follow out all its consequences. In this sense, my relation to the facts of my existence that could not happen is just as—if not more—important than my relation to those that did. In our society, everything that is allowed to happen is of little interest, and an authentic autobiography should rather occupy itself with facts that did not.

So where does that put his little exercise in self-reflection? In a class of its own. With Self-Portrait in the Studio,  Agamben, traces a rich network of interconnection, through personal contacts, study and research, and even, in some locations, a coincidental proximity to history, to produce a work that is entertaining, intelligent and humane.

Self-Portrait in the Studio by Giorgio Agamben is translated from the Italian by Kevin Attell and published by Seagull Books.

What the streets cannot retain: Border Documents by Arturo Soto

Considering the escalating tensions on the Mexico – US border, heightened even more under the present American administration, Mexican photographer and writer Arturo Soto’s new photo book, Border Documents, is an especially opportune release. The images belong to today; the texts to another time. The late fifties through the late seventies, to be exact. They reflect the environment in which his father grew up in the deeply entwined sister cities of Juárez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas. That world has been irrevocably altered by social and political forces over the past three or four decades, but this uniquely personal project sets out to attempt to “see” echoes of a remembered past in the urban landscape of today. The challenges arise not simply from the passage of time, but from the reputation, both earned and exaggerated, that this area now bears. As Soto points out in his Afterword:

People acquainted with Juárez, particularly those outside of Mexico, tend to know it for its infamies. The femicides of the late nineties cemented an infernal image of the city amply propagated in pop culture. A few years later, the ‘war on drugs’ further precipitated the erosion of civic life, which encouraged the media to focus its attention solely on the gruesome side of things. Such a narrow understanding renders everyday life invisible, putting it at risk of being lost. The past cannot be restored, but it can be conjured for insight to understand past and present lives.

The presentation of Border Documents is clean and spare. (See selections here.) Two-tone school photos of the senior Soto from the sixties and seventies line the inside of the front and back covers. Stark black and white photographs, taken in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso in 2016, appear as almost ghostly images of the streets and neighbourhoods of his childhood and youth. They are characterized by harsh light, sharp angles, lonely vistas. Parked cars are common, but few people are in sight (notably there is one where the photographer’s shadow stretches out from the lower right corner). By contrast, the accompanying vignettes are populated with a vivid cast of friends, classmates, grandmothers, siblings, parents and other relatives. The juxtaposition of the chronological collection of memories, anecdotes, and musings filled with life in all its shades of joy and discontent against contemporary images of the settings where they once took place demonstrates the complex reality of the environments in which we grow up and the degree to which they are both preserved and lost over time.

A case in point, border crossing. Apart from being a source of employment opportunities for Juárez residents, legal or not, El Paso was also a destination for amusements, such as a trip to the zoo, or, more commonly, a place to acquire goods and access services otherwise unavailable at home. An early memory from 1958 captures a child’s early impressions of the experience:

We took the transnational trolley to shop at JC Penney, everyone’s favorite store. The journey felt tediously long despite the short distance because of the long immigration line. They even forced some passengers to get vaccinated before letting them in. Overheard conversations had led me to believe things were much nicer on the other side, but everything looked more or less the same once we reached El Chuco. Over time, I found reference points that sparked my imagination along the route. Some of my favorites were the old customs building, the Spirit of St. Louis replica above a cantina and the clay figures of sleeping Mexicans flanking Don Marcos Flores’ house. A former municipal president, he had a gift shop close to the Santa Fe bridge. My grandma Esther cashed the money my aunt wired her from Los Angeles there. Don Marcos, always at the entrance, greeted her by name, which made me feel distinguished.

However, the photograph that faces the above memory depicts, from across the cracked pavement of West 4th Avenue, a plain, all-purpose structure with its available services painted right onto its front wall in English and Spanish—Copies, Fax, Foto, Income Tax, Public Notary, Medicare, Medicaid. Hard to picture such a destination sparking a child’s imagination today.

Some of the photographs captured appear to closely align with the accounts of the relative freedom afforded by a makeshift cement and brick playground in a barrio defined by specific streets and bridges. Perhaps these scenes are little changed with time. Of course, not every photo has a story, though each one has a location indicated. Likewise, not every story is matched to a photo. Soto’s father’s anecdotes carry enough humour, wisdom, and empathy to form vivid portraits on their own. He recalls, for example, a near spiritual crisis on the occasion of his First Communion with his sister Elsa in 1963. His mother was able to find him a second hand outfit and, with luck and a generous repayment plan, a most elegant new dress for Elsa. Simply clothing the outside, however, was not enough:

My peace of mind and the purity of my soul proved harder to secure. Some distant relatives were in town, and my cousin kissed me while playing a game. I felt very conflicted. This happened after my confession, and we had just been instructed on the consequences of receiving communion in a state of sin. I went back to the church and explained myself to the priest. He laughed and made me promise not to do it again but assigned me no penance. Liberated, I bought an orange from the market, feeling closer and closer to heaven with every slice I ate.

Life was not easy—along with the typical boyhood and adolescent adventures, and misadventures with friends and siblings, there was an alcoholic uncle, a father inclined to infidelity and other challenges—but the reflections Soto’s father shares show a distinct compassion or understanding, even if it is filtered through an adult’s appreciation of his younger self. One can see why his son who grew up listening to his stories would be inspired to encourage him to engage in this project even if some memories would be destined to transcend the physical spaces in which they were formed:

I keep a sad memory of the Cine Reforma. I watched there El Señor Doctor when Cantinflas was at the height of fame. Since overselling tickets was standard, I had to watch it on my feet. At some point, I thought I recognized someone a few rows ahead, but it wasn’t until the credits rolled that I made out my uncle Carmelo, a subject of constant gossip in our family. My dad used to say that his sister, the fearful Aunt Berta, would seize Carmelo’s salary. On Sundays, she would give him just enough for a newspaper, a shoeshine, and a movie ticket. I always thought my dad exaggerated the situation, but I confirmed my uncle’s capitulation was true that day.

As in Arturo Soto’s earlier work, a strong thread of social commentary is woven into the relationship between images and commentary. He is drawn to challenging the existing assumptions about a place by focusing on the ordinary to expose the everyday reality overshadowed by the outsized image an urban centre may otherwise project. His last work, A Certain Logic of Expectations (see my review) was the outcome of his time spent studying for his PhD in Fine Art at Oxford University during the BREXIT years. But rather than focusing on the famed campus environment, he turned his camera on the other Oxford, the working class community that belongs to a geographically larger but psychologically and socially distinct space from the hallowed University environs. Of course, he views this world from the perspective of a Mexican outsider who can’t help but marvel at how relatively safe and clean even the “rough” parts of town feel. However, with this new collaborative project, he is exploring an urban environment he frequently visited while growing up in Mexico City, but that always felt at odds with the images his father’s anecdotes had conjured. In revisiting these streets, avenues and corners, Soto allows his camera to offer a visual counterpoint to the record of his father’s memories and the result is a very powerful—and personal—documentary that crosses borders, both temporal and political.

Border Documents by Arturo Soto is published by and available from Eriskay Connection.

What passes and what remains: Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose

The fictional world of British writer C. D. Rose is one that slips in and out of time, balancing the fantastic and the realistic, peopled with the lonely, the lost, and the brilliant misfits, some drawn from history, others from his expansive imagination. His universe is at once familiar and strange, and as is the case with the best literary fables, it offers a welcome refuge in a troubled world. At least, that was what I found after floundering with attempts to lose myself in prose during a busy, stressful stretch. Rose’s short story collection Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea turned out to be the perfect antidote to a reading slump.

Central to this collection of nineteen tales is the idea and experience of time—tracking its passage, defying its constraints, longing to hold it fast. Rose’s characters often have a most awkward relationship with time. The protagonist of “Everything is Subject to Motion, and Everything is Motion’s Subject,” for example, nineteenth century French physiologist and chronophotographer Étienne-Jules Marey, in a narrative that flows with the imagery of his two obsessions, circulation and the pursuit of the fine details of movement, feels himself divorced from any perception of time beyond the immediate:

In life, this tangle. His constant passage from Paris to Naples, Naples to Paris. The demands of work, love, money pushing him one way and pulling him the other. A life always in transition, never stopping, always moving. Always in the present tense. Were he to stop and think of the past or the future, what would happen? When and where, he sometimes thinks, will I finally rest? His life like his pictures: tracing a motion back and forth across Europe.

Elsewhere, philosopher Henri Bergson, defender of primacy of immediate experience, finds himself caught a warped time loop of maids and spilled tea in “Henri Bergson Writes About Time.” Or in “Violins and Pianos are Horses,” an unnamed composer fitfully tries to reclaim his past on a visit with his daughter to the town he grew up in. Memories beset him during their stay, but the childhood home he remembers remains elusive, while all his fame and achievements are cold comfort.

Sometimes time takes on a surreal, even ghostly, quality in Rose’s fables. At other times, he leans hard into the absurd. “The Neva Star,” for example features three Russian sailors, all named Sergei, who have stubbornly (or perhaps foolishly) stayed aboard their ship, abandoned by its owners to rust in a port in Naples. In the charming “Arkady Who Couldn’t See and Artem Who Couldn’t Hear,” the narrator passes a long train trip across the snow-covered Russian landscape in the company of an odd pair of twins, one blind, one deaf, who are engaged in the careful construction of a matchstick model of their childhood home—a collaborative effort to remember their birthplace:

They were thin men, curiously built, with long square bodies and short legs, but both moved with a careful grace, their slow, deliberate gestures reminding me of mime artists or expert craftsmen. When I asked how long they had been building their model, they looked at each other and smiled. All our lives, said Arkady, all our lives.

The stories the brothers share about their lives conflict depending on which twin is doing the telling and whether the other is asleep, but it is clear that neither intends to allow their life project to come to completion. As if one can preserve time so it never truly passes. But, of course, time has its own designs.

Rose crafts many of his tales over the biographies of real people—photographers, scientists, writers, philosophers—stretching, reshaping, and imagining them from the inside looking out at a world that moves too quickly, too slow, or too strangely. Other narratives tend to similarly feature protagonists, narrators or characters that connect with temporal reality in idiosyncratic ways. And some seem to defy time and conventional narration altogether, like the experimental “What Remains of Claire Blanck” in which the narrative has all but evaporated leaving only footnotes, their numbers hanging against empty space above a detailed literary analysis of a story that can no longer be read. The nature of storytelling, how or if one can or even should write about a particular subject, also preoccupies certain narrators or protagonists, but again, that is a theme not inseparable from time.

Writing this review on the day that the new pope, an American of the Augustinian order, has been elected and the curious have been scrolling through his twitter account to gather a sense of the man, it’s some strange coincidence that the funniest, most affectionately absurd title in this collection is “St Augustine Checks His Twitter Feed.” In this brief tale the saint struggles with the temptation of social media, fretting about likes and the lack of a blue check mark, as he tries to focus on beginning to write his confessions. This clever little piece works, as do the others in this collection of intelligent, wide ranging fables, because Rose has a keen sense of just how long a story should be based on its level of absurdity and relative complexity. Frequently that is no more than a few pages. His mastery of the form is impressive, bringing to mind writers like Italo Calvino, Magdelena Tulli, and, of course, Borges, and yet his voice is distinct and contemporary and this collection a delight.

Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C. D. Rose is published by Melville House.

Elegy on the wing: Butterfly Valley by Inger Christensen

Since reading The Condition of Secrecy, a collection of essays by Danish poet and writer Inger Christensen (1935–2009) In January, I have set out to read one of her works each month until I run out of available volumes. This past month was largely absorbed by working for and worrying about the Canadian Federal election which has just passed, so my reading was scattered at best, and most suited to poetry and short fiction. I am squeezing this brief reflection on this single-poem volume, Butterfly Valley, as National Poetry Month draws to a close. Note that this is a dual-language edition, whereas the US edition from New Directions entitled Butterfly Valley: A Requiem contains this same translation by Susanna Nied, Christensen’s longtime poetry translator, along with three other medium-length poems, but does not include the original Danish. I intend to get that book eventually, however I would suggest that having the original and the translation face-to-face allows a reader to appreciate the complexity of Christensen’s achievement as it is possible to gain a sense of the musicality and rhyme structure present in the Danish, even though it would be unsatisfactory to attempt to reproduce that fully in the English.

“Butterfly Valley” is a fifteen part sequence of sonnets, the first fourteen linked by first and last lines which are then gathered form the final powerful poem. Christensen was a lover of form, structure, and imagery drawn from science and nature. Musicality was also very important. These qualities all come into play with this sequence which features the fourteen lines of the sonnet presented as two quatrains and two tercets with the rhyming pattern: ABAB CDCD EFE GFG (several follow ABBA CDDC in the first two stanzas). The poems are linked by repetition—through the first fourteen sonnets, the last line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the following one. VI, for example, closes with:

Here gooseberry and blackthorn bushes grow;
whichever words you eat, they make
your life butterfly-easy to recall.

Perhaps I will cocoon myself and stare
at the white Harlequin’s sleights of hand,
delusion for the universe’s fool.

And VII begins:

Delusion for the universe’s fool
is the belief that other worlds exist
that there are gods who bellow and roar
and call us random tosses of the dice

The fifteenth sonnet is composed of all of these repeated first/last lines, in order, with the typical rhyming pattern maintained. Each individual sonnet is thus crafted with an eye (and ear) to the finale.

Within this sequence, a host of colourful butterflies rise and fall through the Brajcino Valley’s noon-hot air. Christensen, who believes that poems are composed of words, first and foremost, employs butterfly-related imagery and the names and colours of different species, directly and metaphorically, along with a mythologically-tinged sensibility. But her themes are the very human, even existential, reflections on life and death, love and loss, art and nature.

When with their image-language, butterflies
can use dishonesty and so survive,
then why should I be any less wise,

if it will soothe my terror of the void
to characterise butterflies as souls
and summer visions of vanished dead. (X)

As ever, Inger Christensen’s poetry is an intricate and articulate celebration of language, meaning and life itself. This slender volume highlights these qualities well.

Butterfly Valley by Inger Christensen is translated by Susanna Nied and published in a bilingual edition by Dedalus Press.

In that strange, that golden light: Psyche Running – Selected Poems, 2005–2022 by Durs Grünbein

And suddenly you saw it, far below
the coast road, after the twelfth curve,
stomach surging from the hair-pin drive.
En route for the south; so we sped on
perched above the drop, windows down.
Sorrento with its villas, its fan palms,
had been swallowed by the plug-hole
of the mirror in a great green swirl.
It hung in the haze, a hulk of bare rock.

The sea dead still. Not a trace of myth,
but for the yachts decked out in chrome
glinting in the sunlight. On a white hull
we made out ‘Nausicaa’ in faded letters.

Infectious energy, shifting, rising and falling. Durs Grünbein is a poet who writes as if regularly navigating the kind of winding roadway described here in “Island without Sirens” from his 2013 collection Colossus in the Mist. This poem, dedicated to Alexander Kluge, which begins with the promise of finding a site with rumoured Homeric association and ends with the view of an island not unlike a mass of barren lunar rock rising out of the water, is a clear reflection of what has made him one of the most important and successful contemporary German poets. Now his most recent release in English translation, Psyche Running: Selected Poems, 2005–2022, has just been shortlisted for the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize (his second such honour for this prestigious award).

Born in Dresden in 1962, Grünbein moved to Berlin in his twenties to study theatre. Since the fall of the Wall, he has travelled widely and presently he lives in both Berlin and Rome. He has published more than 30 books of poetry, along with translations of classical and contemporary authors, essays, libretti, lectures, and collaborations with artists, composers and filmmakers. His prolific writings cover such a wide scope of literary form and history that he has, as translator Karen Leeder notes in her valuable Introduction, called himself an “unpoet.” Nonetheless, poetry remains central to his work, having won him widespread recognition and a number of major awards. The present collection offers an ample illustration of the breadth and appeal of his poetic vision.

The selections in Psyche Running represent nearly two decades of Grünbein’s output, drawn from ten volumes published beginning in his early forties through to the age sixty. As such, they trace the poet’s growth in mid-life and mid-career, his changes in tone, themes and exploration of form. This collection opens with work drawn from two books published in 2005. Both feature poetry inspired by history, though in very different contexts. Portraits of personalities and scenes from the ancient world figure in The Misanthrope on Capri while his focus turns closer to home with Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of my City. The latter is a cycle of forty-nine numbered poems, a lament for Dresden, destroyed by Allied bombers in 1945. Yet, even in an elegy, Grünbein’s playful tendencies surface—something that was not necessarily received well by some readers:

Not a rowdy wedding-do. It was The Night of Broken Glass
or, what sharp-tongued folk called: the glazier’s lucky day.
And Ash Wednesday just a hop, skip and jump away.
Fools and Nazis—huzzah!—sure, they had a blast.
What’s that? Innocent? Disgrace came long ago.
Dresden shepherdesses, German bands, where are you now?

–  from “4”/ Porcelain

Twenty-four of the short poems from this sequence are included in this collection, but the complete work, with photographs and one additional poem, has been published as a separate volume, also translated by Karen Leeder and published by Seagull Books. My own review can be found here.

2007’s Verses for the Day After Tomorrow marks a turn to a more personal focus, exploring  themes of memory and human experience, then, after Grünbein began to spend more and more time in Italy, another shift occurs. With Aroma: A Roman Sketchbook (2010) and Colossus in the Mist (2013) classical elements appear, as do poems that draw direct inspiration from Rome and its environs. In a number of the pieces selected from these two works he demonstrates a wonderful sensitivity to the natural world, as in “Island without Sirens,” quoted above, and this magical evocation of a murmuration of starlings moving through the evening skies above Rome in “Aroma XLIX (Starling Swarms)”

How one envied them their nose dives, swooping down on
.      gravel lanes,
or taking in Rome from a bird’s-eye view, conqueror style.
In fact, they only wanted a little urban updraft to be transformed
into currents and reflections, as their aureoles appeared
.     before
the rosé of the cloud-shading, in a sky painted by Turner.
It was a dance of veils, a stunt performed by thousands of
.      points in synch:
something like the sound of bells, visible in silhouette above
.      the domes.

The influence of  thinkers, ideas, and science on Grünbein’s poetic instincts takes centre stage in the next section, the first published translations from 2014’s Cyrano; or, Returning from the Moon. Each piece in this cycle of eighty-four poems, inspired by Cyrano de Bergerac, “takes its cue from a moon crater” Leeder tells us, “and pays homage to a thinker or philosopher known for their study of the moon.” The poems presented here were selected by the author and I, for one, would love to be able to read this inventive work in full. The mood changes once again with the next selection, the long poem “The Doctrine of Photography” from The Zoo Years: A Kaleidoscope (2015). Presented alongside postcards of prewar Dresden from Grünbein’s personal collection, this piece imagines into being scenes from daily life in the community as darker times close in:

Another spring. Imperial gardens on display:
for six months the magic of flowers
serves to ease the effects of the new
constraints, the new laws.
A hymn to existence, a scared hymn
to the beauty of nature around us,
the newspapers swoon in the
grandiose style of the times.
More powerful than any Olympiad,
closer to a feminine aesthetic sense,
like Hitler’s hands, eunuch-white.

A strong selection of poems have been chosen to represent the final two volumes collected in Psyche Running. Sparkplugs (2017) and Equidistance (published in 2022, marking the poet’s sixtieth birthday) build on imagery, sometimes dreamlike, drawn from science, nature, and everyday life to explore more introspective or existential themes that reflect an increasing awareness of aging and remembrance:

Do I know how many summers we have?
Whether we will recognize them as they were,
these  outdoor scenes, where we
slipped quietly past each other like angelfish
in that strange, that golden light?

I only know the day that keeps what
will happen next hidden behind glass.
Things grow more distant, swim up close,
in the film light. And the projector is me.

–  from “The Projector” / Sparkplugs

Altogether, this generous sampling of Grünbein’s poetic work over the better part of the last twenty years, fills in a long overlooked gap—Porcelain notwithstanding—in the availability of his poetry for an English language audience going back to Michael Hofman’s  2005 translation of a selection of poems from his first four collections, Ashes for Breakfast. Karen Leeder, who in addition to Porcelain also translated Grunbein’s Oxford lectures, For the Dying Calves (Seagull, 2022), has come to know the poet well over the years and has a deep affinity for his wry, vibrant spirit. Her informative Introduction and detailed notes provide an overview of the collection, her approach to this translation, and added detail, as required. Although he frequently draws on historical, philosophical, literary, and scientific sources, there is, in Grünbein’s perceptive, witty, and engaging verse, an irresistible quality that naturally invites a closer read. This volume, then, is not only an important addition to his available writing in English translation, but a wide ranging and vital introduction for anyone new to his work.

Psyche Running: Selected Poems, 2005–2022 by Durs Grünbein is translated from the German by Karen Leeder and published by Seagull Books.

To translate the human experience: Arabic, between Love and War edited by Yasmine Haj and Norah Alkharashi

We live in a world that is always in flux. Conflict, natural disasters, and political destabilization are continually reshaping our world and threatening our future on an intimate, community and global scale. An element of the universality of the human condition unites us in our response to these factors while privilege, culture, and history set us apart. To begin to understand where others have come from, what they have been through, their trials and their dreams, we must be able to speak to one another, learn to listen, and read their words. This is why translation matters.

The art of literary translation is often said to be both impossible and necessary. Impossible because no linguistic code is commensurable with any other—particularly so in the case of poetic language which, being among the most refined and expressive of literary forms, is expected to have myriad and complex nuances. Yet translation remains necessary. Without it there would be no conversation across linguistic and cultural barriers, no prospect of the mutual understanding that remains a prerequisite for the peaceful, emancipated life towards which we are all striving.

These are the words of translator and scholar Norah Alkharashi from her introduction to arabic, between love and war, a distinctive collection of poetry co-edited with Yasmine Haj and newly released by the independent Canadian publisher trace press. This anthology, which gathers the work of poets and translators from across the Arabic speaking world and its diaspora, arose from a series of creative translation workshops, facilitated by the editors, that allowed translators from varying backgrounds the time and space to explore the “processes of loss and unlearning encountered on their path to translation as critical creation.” This unique collaborative engagement ultimately led to the selection of thirty-seven thematically linked poems, presented alongside their translations—Arabic to English or English to Arabic—that comprise the first release in the trace: translating  [x] series.

The title and theme of this project illustrates one of the central challenges of the art of translation: how to reflect the nuances implicit in one language within the context of another. In Arabic, only one extra letter separates the word for “love” حب from the word for “war” حرب , a distinction that can have many implications in poetic discourse, especially when the two realities are often so deeply entwined in the lived experience of so many in the Arabic speaking world. Here the collected poems are divided into three sections: Love, Interval, and War, but the boundaries cannot be so clearly drawn. War frequently lingers in the background, even when a poet speaks of love; while love is a persistent life force even in the face of loss, loneliness, and displacement. And once again, the memory and fear of war haunts, even in the quiet in between conflicts—in the interval.

The poems of the first section, “Love,” tend to be tinged with sadness and longing, be it for for an imprisoned child or a lost lover:

I remembered you!
.              I remembered the silence growing slightly wet,
.              and the trees that shaded us,
.              and the fragrance drawing near.

.              I didn’t know
that we were on the edge of everything
and that one word
alone was enough to wither a tree,
.              that silence turns into shade,
.              and the heart a safe haven for pain.

– from “One Word” by Ali Mahmoud Khudayyir
Translated from Arabic by Zeena Faulk

Meanwhile, the longest section, “Intervals,” casts the widest emotional net, speaking to the most fundamental elements of human experience—birth, death, hope, despair—in a world that can seem to turn without reason, or as the epigraph to this part says, those “liminal spaces where wars of flesh and love—ongoing, past, or yet to pass—have lingered. Holding hearts and words in limbo, with beats yet to be translated.” Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s “Time Travel,” originally written in English, captures this unsettled sense succinctly:

. . . We travel because
motion is more comfort

than settling, calcifying.
We travel because it means

we haven’t gotten to where
we’re going yet, the story

is still being written and
our fractures aren’t done setting.

There is still a chance
we’ll turn out different

or better or—best of all—
like our parents without

knowing we’ve become
who they were. . .

Finally, it is sadly no surprise that the poems in the “War” section are the most direct and unequivocal. But they are not without a promise, however faint, and hope for a future free from the ravages of war:

I wish I could, I wish it were in my hands
to uproot injustice
and dry the rivers of blood
off this planet.
I wish I could, I wish it were in my hands,
to hold for this man, tired
in the path of confusion and sorrow,
a lamp of prosperity and serenity
and grant him a safe life.
I wish I could, I wish it were in my hands,
yet all I have at hand is a ‘but’.

– from “This Earthly Planet” by Fadwa Tuqan
Translated from Arabic by Eman Abukhadra

These are but three brief excerpts. The poems gathered here represent the work of fifteen poets chosen for translation by fourteen translators (some translate more than one poet or are also poets themselves), and together the contributors come from varied Palestinian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Saudi Arabian, Lebanese, Sudanese, Tunisian, Egyptian, Syrian, Canadian, American and British backgrounds. Some of the poets write in English (and are thus translated into Arabic), whereas some of the translators are scholars specializing in Arabic. This rich range of perspectives and differing Arabic literary traditions must have contributed to a vibrant workshop environment which is distilled in this elegant and vital anthology.

arabic, between love and war is edited by Yasmine Haj and Norah Alkharashi, and published by trace press.

I who dreamed of Africas: The Harmattan Winds by Sylvain Trudel

As for me, I didn’t exist until I was six months old, because up to then no one wanted to be bothered with such a case. Just my luck, I was not an official being, since there was no trace in the records of my coming into the world. Born by the side of the road like a natural disaster incarnate, I had not known the holy oil of baptism, and no one thought to scrawl my name on a government document or anything resembling it, nor even to take an ink print of my tiny foot for a hospital data sheet, even if it was as cute as a tiny goblet. In short, no one dared to believe in me even if I was born bottoms up, like everyone else.

Such is the misfortune of Hugues, abandoned in a shopping cart in a bog of bulrushes by the side of the road, only to be rescued and adopted by Céline Francoeur and her new husband Claude, granting them an instant family, or as he describes it, “they could have all of that indescribable joy, minus nausea or miscarriages, as long as no one went to claim me from the lost property counter.” Despite his unfamiliar appearance, his crossed, slightly almond-shaped eyes, it is not until he overhears his “adaptive” parents arguing over whether he should be told the truth, that the reality of Hugues’ origin story becomes known to him, forever shifting his perspective. Céline and Claude become his semi-parents, his brother and sister his semi-siblings, and his entire existence, in his heart, is rendered incomplete.

The Harmattan Winds, by French-Canadian writer Sylvain Trudel, originally published in French in 1986, is the dramatic, youthful account of a boy who does not know where he really comes from. However, there are two unlikely companions who give meaning and purpose to what might have otherwise been a lonely life in an isolated town in 1970s Quebec. One is a well-worn  collection of poetry by the fictional Gustave Désuet, a flea market find that Hugues carries with him everywhere, reading from it like a guidebook, memorizing the florid and overwrought verses which he admits he doesn’t always understand. He turns to it for comfort and enlightenment—and one also suspects much of his exuberant sense of drama, tragedy and romance are inspired by the poet’s example, even if his misunderstandings and misspelling lend his often enigmatic narrative an internal logic entirely its own. Hugues believes that Désuet, long dead by his own hand (and a rope), helped him to live his life.

He was sort of a paper tiger who one day took up his pen as you would arm to do evil, and poison dripped from his nib. A real viper, that tiger. He said that we, the rich of America and Europe, we’re living in the Accident, curled up in our accidental countries, and the Bible’s Apocalypse is a great idiocy because it has already begun and no one sees it, it’s ongoing right under our eyes that choose to run and hide behind their lids, but it’s there, and, in fact it’s us, yes, the Apocalypse,  it’s ourselves, we are the cataclysm of the poor, seeing that we kill them with one hand hidden behind our backs in the convenient darkness of our heads, so as to stay rich at their expense.

This accidental (that is, occidental) guilt inspired in our hero by his beloved poet, no doubt prepares him to embrace the second companion who suddenly comes into his life. When Habéké, an Ethiopian boy orphaned by famine and adopted by a couple from Montreal, arrives in town, Hugues is naturally drawn to him. They are the same age, and both are potential social outcasts amid the vagaries of early adolescence and the latent racism of the local community, but even though Habéké has already learned the essentials of his new life—to speak French, sing O Canada, and ride a bicycle—he carries within him the dark mysteries of a world beyond the Accident. An irresistible attraction.

I remember that I loved talking with him about Africa, and that is why I know some things today, for example that Africa is a stew of languages and that Habéké’s is full of burgeoning vowels or that in Africa men’s problems, due to their galloping demography, are both acute and grave, high-pitched and low, therefore circumflex, making Africa a kind of quotient, for it is, according to Habéké, the product of divisions between peoples, and over there that’s all there is, peoples. . . . There exist, however, little hooded hats made of soft rubber to rein in the ardor of the peoples, not well attuned to the circumflex dilemmas of Muslims or animists. And then those rubbers look like the moltings of snakes or little caimans, and I’m wondering what a man of this ilk would do with such a device, he who revers the companionship of sacred pythons and crocodiles.

But there is more. Habéké’s exotic wisdom, along with his distinctive appearance, set him apart from the world in which fate had landed him so far from his native land, and in this Hugues finds an echo of his own mysterious dislocatedness.  He sees in him a brother in arms and confesses his own truth: “I told him about my calamity in the bulrushes, my botched birth, my lost invoice, my semi-family, my other man’s eyes, and all and all.” An unbreakable bond is formed—one that sees them through all manner of adventure, outrageous schemes, and some incredibly close calls.

With the spirit of a fairy tale, yet at the same time grounded in small town Quebec (or Canada generally) in an age before video games, computers or many available television channels, this novella surges with energy. Hugues’ willingness to follow Habéké’s increasing desire to connect with his traditional heritage, arising from myth as much as memory, and bound to their mutual desire to escape, not only lands them in more than a few risky situations, but also ends up threatening the safety of two teenage girls they befriend.

Youthful narrators can be hit or miss, but the magic of this coming of age tale rests firmly on the imagination, determination, and entirely idiosyncratic worldview of Hugues and Habéké. The endless forests, rivers, and railway lines that surround them become the African landscape they dream of exploring, and the island of exile they imagine escaping to to live out their naïve utopian dreams. Fast paced and original, it is wonderful to finally have access to The Harmattan Winds in Donald Winkler’s lively English translation.

The Harmattan Winds by Sylvain Trudel is translated from the French by Donald Winkler and published by Archipelago Books.

The woman on page eight: Azorno by Inger Christensen

Believe me, I know how dangerous it is to dream of Azorno. Believe me, I know how dangerous it is. I have known Azorno long enough to realize that it’s not dreams that come true.

Danish poet Inger Christensen, in her essay “It’s All Words,” insists that: “ . . . poems aren’t made out of experiences, or out of thoughts, ideas, or musings about anything. Poems are made out of words.” To some extent, the same may also apply to her fiction. Words are formed into sentences, and the accumulation of these sentences appears to describe a certain reality—the environment of the story—within which a character or characters exist. But the world into which the reader enters is not always what it seems. Consider the phenomenon of the unreliable narrator. Christensen’s Azorno might then be considered a novella with multiple unreliable narrators, one of whom, Sampel, is a famous author and one, Azorno, the main character in his latest novel, and five women—Katarina, Randi, Louise, Xenia, and Bet Sampel—each of whom insists, at some time or another, that they are the woman the main character meets on page eight. Oh, and did I mention that each of these women is pregnant, by the same man?

What makes this clever experimental novella so engaging—and disorienting—is Christensen’s exploration of the interaction between language, perception, and reality, the primary theme driving all her writing. It is unclear who is actually narrating (and presumably writing) the novel we are reading. Phrases, descriptions, settings and circumstances continually repeat, evolving as the story unfolds, echoing through the apparent voices of multiple characters, the accounts they give, the letters they write to one another, and the experiences they have. Just when you think you know where you are, reality shifts again and you are forced to reorient yourself. Even the mysterious narrator does not seem to have control of the narrative:

How in the world to take control over the progression of a story that from the beginning has simply contained a concealed desire to communicate something that would catch their attention, but then turned out to be to their liking, to such an extent that they swallowed it raw and later had to throw up the indigestible remains and, in the company  of friends and acquaintances, regard them as the consequences of an incomprehensible but harmless disease. In this way I quickly lost touch with my story, and what began on my part as a downright lie could easily slide toward something seriously close to the truth.

We have, then, a puzzle, a narrative nested within narratives, not exactly like a Russian doll but bound with a logic of its own. Although there is a conclusion reached at the end of this structured maze of mirrored, reflected, and misleading sentences, one would almost have to leave a trails of breadcrumbs and work back from end to beginning to sort out just how all the pieces, so scattered at the outset, eventually fall into place. The temptation at first reading is to attempt to keep  track of the letters, conversations and accounts that build, one upon another, making note of the dates, places, objects and motifs that are layered one on top of another to try to determine exactly who the narrator is and which one of the characters is actually the author, especially if, as is sometimes suggested, another character’s voice is openly adopted by the writer to carry the narrative. It’s a slippery terrain. It may be best, perhaps, to simply let go and follow the story as it leads you through its own strange world, one that is simultaneously real and unreal.

Azorno by Inger Christensen is translated from the Danish by Denise Newman and published by New Directions.