Tag: literature

The invisible man’s story: Children of the Ghetto II: Star of the Sea by Elias Khoury

The first volume of Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto trilogy, My Name is Adam, presents itself as a collection of writings by a Palestinian falafel maker living in exile in New York City. Never intended for publication, they include an aborted attempt to write a novel about a seventh-century Yemini poet and the unedited attempt by the author, Adam Dannoun, to understand himself by writing his own story. After a lifetime of trying to leave history, his own and his people’s, behind, two events—the screening of a film based on Khoury’s famous novel Gate of the Sun, and a conversation with a man he has not seen since he was seven years old—motivate this decision to finally commit an account of his life to paper. He will then set the stage for his own death. Elias Khoury supposedly comes into possession of Adam’s notebooks after he has died and, following some consideration, decides to publish them as they are, unedited. The result is an often troubled and circular narrative beginning in New York and making its way back in time in an effort to reconstitute what he knows of his earliest years, during and in the immediate aftermath of the Nakba. Born in Lydda in 1948 he wants to piece together as much as he can about the horrific events of the massacre in the city, the containment of the Arab residents in what the Israeli soldiers labelled a “ghetto,” and the harsh conditions he and his mother endured.

The double-authorship of the first volume—Khoury as the custodian of Adam’s writing—is assumed to be understood, but not mentioned, in Star of the Sea. Rather, the entire tone and approach of the work shifts as Adam steps back from his own story to adopt a distanced perspective: Point of Entry: the Third Person, or the Absent Conscience. That the narrator and author of the novel (and he does call it a novel at this point) is also the protagonist is not a secret, but as he makes clear in the opening passages, it does raise certain challenges:

The question keeping the writer of these stories awake at night is the following: how can the absentee write? Can they tell their own story using “I,” thereby writing as though remembering? Or should they employ the third person to write in their place?

Pronouns in Arabic are extraordinarily supple, unmatched in any other language. The written letters that take a person’s place are called “consciences”, but since the conscience is also an invisible  moral compass, how can a novelist write using the conscience of one who is absent? And finally, what does its corollary—that the conscience must be absent in order for a person to tell their story really mean?

So, although Adam’s account now takes a more straightforward and generally chronological quality, the multi-layered reflective and metafictional elements of the first volume persist, now that the present self (the writer) has separated himself from his past invisible, absent self and reluctant hero of his story.

Although he made passing references to his adolescent and young adult years in the first part of his grand life writing exercise, the primary focus of My Name is Adam was on a period of his life  history of which he had either no direct memories or only a child’s recollections. Now, Adam is on much firmer ground, memory-wise, and in a position to try to face his conflicted emotions about the choices he faced as he navigated life in a country to which he could never fully belong. This is, then, a story of one man’s relationship to his own identity and his desire to live without any history or nostalgia. Even if it means living a lie.

This second volume begins in 1963, with fifteen year-old Adam’s decision to leave home. He had moved to Haifa with his mother, Manal, following her marriage to Abdallah al-Ashal, and, after years of watching his relentless abuse drive her further into a lifeless shell, he knew it was time to get away. Manal seemed to know too and, on the night Adam left, she quietly saw him off, handing him his father’s will before he disappeared into the stormy night. He was now on his own.

With a short detour, Adam makes his way to the garage of mechanic named Gabriel, a Polish Jew who had picked him up one night when he was hitchhiking. Struck by the boy’s fair hair and skin, Gabriel saw in Adam the image of his deceased younger brother. He had promised that he could help him out, thinking of possibly teaching him his trade. But Adam was determined to continue his schooling. So the mechanic not only offered him a place to stay in return for odd jobs in the shop, but also helped him get into a Jewish school. His old life now behind him, this period marked the beginning of Adam’s new story. He changed his name from Dannoun to Danon, and with it he assumed a new identity. He looked the part, spoke Hebrew well, and his existing ghetto origin was malleable:

If the heroes of novels could break through the fourth wall (page) and speak without an intermediary, then Adam could very well have told his story not as the invisible man, but a man formed from his imagination. And indeed he had imagined an entire personality that both matched his true nature and was completely different. From the moment he left his mother’s house on the night of the rain, Adam realized that he could represent himself however he wanted by using certain true events to create a compelling background.

This new story follows the reinvented Adam through his first teenage love—unfortunately for him, it is with Gabriel’s daughter Rivka, a situation not destined to end well—into his university years and beyond. Although he enjoys new freedoms with his assumed Israeli identity, he cannot escape his official Arab designation so he often straddles the Jewish and Palestinian communities, spending his days in one and working and living in another. Along the way he meets an assortment of interesting individuals who will influence his life in varying ways, but the central focus of this second volume of Children of the Ghetto lies with the ghetto he where allows others to believe his origins actually lie—in Warsaw.

As a student of Hebrew Literature, Adam develops a close friendship with his German-born professor Jacob Ebenheiner, a relationship based on shared intellectual curiosities and interests. Jacob does not pry into Adam’s life, and the latter offers no details. But a class trip to Warsaw at the end of the first term will ultimately lead to a betrayal of his secret. The visit to Poland has huge impact on the eighteen year-old Palestinian-in-disguise—walking through the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto and listening, through a translator, to the stories of the guide and survivors. But it is an evening spent in the company of Marek Edelmann, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and life-long anti-Zionist who remained in Poland and became a famed cardiologist, that unsettles him most. Adam is not only left questioning who he is and where he belongs, but it brings to light the extent of the gap that exists between himself and his defiantly proud Israeli teacher.

Throughout this book, Adam relies on a degree of invisibility afforded by his appearance to continue to live a lie into his adult professional life, but in his personal life the balance is more difficult, and not all ghosts can be left in the past, no matter how much he may want them to be. For many years he will keep to himself as much as possible, the personification of the “present absentee.” That is, until he meets Dalia, the young woman who turns his world upside down when he is in his mid-forties, the woman who finally makes him believe in love. But we know, for he has often told us, that it will not last.

Although familiarity with the first volume is assumed, Star of the Sea is building on a much wider story with a fresh angle on questions about what it means to write about one’s own life, about truth, and about what one can really tell. Given his reluctance to talk about his past, Adam does not detail his early experiences, nor does he explain things we as readers know about his true origins, facts that he himself was unaware of until much later in life. Here is focused on telling this aspect of his story in a specific manner. Yet, by the time the novel ends he has glossed over much of what will be the most significant romantic relationship of his life, so one can only assume that Dalia will take centre stage in volume three. But where will Adam be standing as he tells this part of his story? The final part of the trilogy only came out in Arabic in 2023, so it seems that Anglophone readers will have to wait for a translation to find out.

Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea by Elias Khoury is translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies and published by Archipelago Books.

“and every day / you elucidate a knot”: Of Desire and Decarceration by Charline Lambert

When a poet’s work first appears in translation, it is rarely more than a single volume or an edited selection. Even then, it can take decades for a prominent foreign language poet to be finally be translated and published in English. But for young Belgian-Francophone poet Charline Lambert (b. 1989), the situation is quite different—her first four books of poetry (originally published between 2016 and 2020) have recently been released in one single, dual-language volume titled Of Desire and Decarceration. As her translator, John Taylor, explains in his Introduction (an earlier version can be found online here):

The motivation for bringing forth this substantial corpus is that the four books respond to each other, grow out of each other. They are like stages—beginning with the evocations of bewitchment, temptation, restraint, and detention besetting Ulysses, Circe, and Penelope in the poet’s first book, Hemp and Ivy—of an ongoing quest to grasp the mysteries of desire and gain insight into its innermost relationship, not only with the body, but also with language.

Her work is vibrant, ecstatic, alive—rich with imagery drawn from mythology, philosophy, nature, science and physiology. As someone very familiar with Taylor as a translator and a poet, I can see why he was so immediately captivated by her emotionally and linguistically inventive poetry which he has brought into English with such care and attention.

To read Lambert’s first four books—each an extended sequence of verse and poetic prose pieces—in sequence is to experience the poet’s deepening exploration into questions of identity, where an embodied self-expression is examined at the minute, physiological level in concert with an expansive metaphysical self-realization within an external world of earth, wind and water. Although subject, voice, and form shift as one moves from volume to volume, her writing is typically spare, and the same essential human forces—desire, solitude, spirit, joy—are present, even if they may be the source (or the outcome) of struggle and pain, while her occasional use of uncommon, even esoteric, words reflects the limits and the potential of language to capture complex states of being—in the body, the mind, and the world. There is a tension in the interplay of all these elements that courses through her work, finding new expression with each successive book.

Her first book, Hemp and Ivy (Chanvre et Lierre), as noted above, reimagines Ulysses’ encounter with Circe and brings Penelope in to the drama. All three characters struggle with desire and temptation in their own ways. For Ulysses, bound to his mast, his desire and the lengths he must go to avoid a tragic fate is depicted with vivid intensity:

.     A desire swarms, coming from even farther
than the esophagus, a desire rounder than the
navel, more burning than the urethra. A resonant
canalizing desire, which widens the dikes of the
arteries and erodes the epidermis. It will later
become a song, if it is not hemp.

.     Circe’s fate is a patient fate.

*

.    Naked ivy on the mast, a column of climbing
vertebrae.
.    In volutes of breath and nervous arabesques,
he hoists himself into the sky.
.    He unfurls his great back muscles of wing or
verve.

From this mythologically themed excursion, Lambert’s work turns towards a more abstracted poetic examination of the themes and questions that inspire her. Her second book, Dialyzing (Sous Dialyses) turns on her idiosyncratic approach to language. As Taylor indicates: “Lambert’s writing, which often appeals to scientific and medical terminology, also sets into motion a poetic and self-analyzing process of ‘dialysis.’” Akin to the medical functions and procedures associated with the term, her subject here is removing an element from her body—physical, emotional, or mental—examining, processing, purifying it through the act of writing and returning it to the embodied form in which she exists. “She is ‘dialyzing’,” hence the title as Taylor has chosen for his translation. This sequence of poems also begins to hint at the struggle to break down the boundaries between the body and the self, a theme that will be explored more directly in her next book.

Lambert’s poetry is perhaps at its most explicitly scientific here, witnessed in the incorporation of unexpected  natural and physiological terminology in striking ways as her subject explores the intricacies of her own desires in a manner that blurs or escapes the limitations of the physical form and merges with a natural environment:

.    At the edge of a cliff, potent dialysis, she
fights over the infinite with the ocean. But they
breathe at the same gill.

.    Their breath escapes, enters through a crack,
dashes to lose itself in the volutes of her pleura-
colored dress.

There is a breathless intensity to her verse that is especially evident in this sequence as her subject repeatedly loses, dissembles, and reconstructs herself in a windy, watery, earthy space:

.     She unstitches each vertebra from her
spine, carries out the denuding of her neck, her
windpipe, her thighbone.
.     Erects them into a new nudity of columns.
.     Anchors it in soil, and watches herself grow.

But in the end, she is enveloped once more.

With her third book, Decarceration (Désincarceration), Lambert seeks to redefine identity and existence beyond the prison of embodied existence. The idea of breaking free from an incarcerated state of being (incarnation) is openly explored now in succinct, precise verse, addressed to “You”—a movement, at least in the progressive reading experience, closer to the speaker’s own self. The fleshy matter of the body has a limit that can seem impossible to override, so the first step is to free the language you employ to define your being:

You are a countable solitude.

You are a light shattered
into beams.

You are
A barely recognized fire.

*

You want to decarcerate the language from you,
decar–

cerate these words from your plexus
and every day
you elucidate a knot.

The struggle to emerge is a tension between solitude and longing as a path to both self-identification and transcendence. It is critical to be free to form and shape yourself before being named, defined by a  body and a pronoun.

Before evaluating
the situation,

draw up an inhuman
report

*

Re-forming oneself as meander, winding
into the maze before
the accident,

before having to be called
something.

This poetic invocation is open and affirming, and can be understood in more than one sense. In his introduction, Taylor speaks of the many challenges he encountered in his attempt to preserve or replicate the distinct word choices, puns, and double entendres that Lambert revels in. I would suggest that, as a primarily but not entirely unilingual Anglophone reader, one’s appreciation of her poetry is not dimmed for the inevitable loss of some of the allusions and word play. As for her fondness for unfamiliar words and scientific terms, many are essentially the same in both the French and English versions, and my dictionary did see considerable use, something which only served to enhance my reading experience (and vocabulary).

Finally, with A Salvo (Une salve), Lambert’s fourth—and in this context, final—volume, her poetic quest reaches a certain degree of resolution, and an understanding of Taylor’s impulse to translate and present these works together as one becomes clear. Again the voice shifts, as the poet’s speaker adopts an imperative tone, addressing the sensual and physical experience in relation to a natural and cosmic reality. An intense, incantatory rhythm propels this relatively short sequence, with its recurring double-stranded refrain “Inhabit the night / Enter the sea.” This is established in the opening pages as a rejection of the soul crushing cage of darkness:

Never again sight, its eyes aborting the horizon,
.    that rude roughness in the psalms of the hand
.    from which the song of the clouds is removed.

And an invitation to a kind of whole body rebirth in the water:

Washing oneself–while seeking a flesh in which
.   to be, a skin to embody oneself in. A swim.
.   A lapse of time. A parturient’s dawn. Then,
.   nothing will better express thickness than
.   fraying and fleetingness.

The strength of A Salvo lies, not only in its sustained energy—as befits its title—and in Lambert’s own maturity as a poet, but, in the deep satisfaction that arises from reading it as the culmination of the existential quest that unites her first four books of poetry. What a joy it is to have them together in one volume.

Inhabit the night—and these crystals of being,
.   emaciated out of deterioration, become meteors.
Enter the sea—and what you have already
.   experienced, decimated into a thousand
.   scintillations, becomes a sparkling splinter.

Of Desire and Decarceration by Charline Lambert is translated from the French by John Taylor and published by Diálogos.

 

 

 

An inexhaustible landscape of words: The Condition of Secrecy by Inger Christensen

Writing poems is just as much a mysterious miracle. Not that there’s anything mystical or ceremonial about it. Or anything religious. It’s a neutral miracle, so to speak, granted in advance, because in the process of writing we need to use language in its whole, indissoluble connection with reality. It’s that connection with reality that’s a mysterious miracle. And that’s what poetry has to enter into.

It is clear from the essays collected in The Condition of Secrecy, that Danish poet, novelist, and essayist Inger Christensen (1935–2009) was not only in love with words, but that she understood language—and the way we seek to give meaning to the world—as part of the dynamic process of nature. For those who are already familiar with the experimental writer’s poetry and fiction, this collection offers insight into her view of the world, which was heavily influenced by a lifelong interest in science, mathematics, and linguistic theory, and the questions she was inclined to ask about her own engagement with language. For those who are new to her work, myself included, her philosophical musings and poetic investigations are no less interesting, and may well serve as an invitation to explore her work further—and fortunately there is a good selection currently available in English translation with more forthcoming this year.

What is most immediate in this compilation of essays, originally published across four decades, from the 1960s through the 1990s, and arranged intentionally rather than chronologically, is the sheer force of Christensen’s intellectual curiosity. At its most basic, it is a book about writing and meaning, but a book by an original inventive poet trained in German, mathematics, and medicine, who read six modern and two ancient languages. And, as a child of the Second World War, social and political concerns are never far from her mind. The Cold War and the fear of nuclear annihilation casts a clear shadow on a number of pieces. So, although this volume only numbers 138 pages, Christensen encourages her reader’s close engagement with ideas as she herself works her way through her own questions about the world and the way we find meaning in it through language.

Words are, of course, essential and she has a wonderful way of employing them. Her opening sentences are often quite special. “Interplay,” an essay about coming to understand time and one’s place in history as a child in Denmark at the end of World War II, begins:

When I was nine years old, the world, too, was nine years old. At least, there was no difference between us, no opposition, no distance. We just tumbled around from sunrise to sunset, body and earth as alike as two pennies.

Another piece, one of several more explicitly about words, meaning, and form, especially in the art of poetry, “Silk, the Universe, Language, the Heart,” opens:

Silk is a noun. All nouns are very lonely. They’re like crystals, each enclosing its own little piece of our knowledge about the world.

This playful essay, in conversation with the Ars Poetica or Wen Fu of Chinese poet Lu Chi (261–303 AD), examines the personalities of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs, along with the ever important prepositions that hold them in relation to one another.

Another essay that explores the interconnectedness of words, meaning, and writing poems, “It’s All Words,” moves from an analysis of what it means to say: “The word creates what it names” with all its Biblical overtones, through an existential (and anthropological) notion of naming the world into existence, to try to answer the question of why poetry is not a common practice when it requires no special tools beyond a paper and pen.

As it is right now, when the world has existed for so long, words come from everywhere, and they’re never there for the first time. Not only that. Although there may not be an infinite number of them, nor an infinite number of combinations, nevertheless there is an inexhaustible landscape of words, there are more than any one individual could manage to travel through. This is where it ends and where it begins, if a person is going to write poems: in the imagined concept of this mysterious landscape. For poems are created exclusively from words.

What makes this piece especially intriguing is that it leads into a discussion of the creation of one Christensen’s most inventive book-length poems, Alphabet. She began collecting words and then, in her gathering, she happened to come across Fibonacci numbers, a formula of increasing numbers that describe a pattern present in the growth principles of many plants. By employing this structure, she had a framework upon which her poem could eventually grow and bloom.

Most of the essays in this volume are short, some are only a few pages long, but midway through, the longest piece, coming in just shy of 30 pages, marks a turn of focus to more philosophical and political themes—not without abandoning talk of writing poetry and fiction, mind you. “The Regulating Effect of Chance” is an extended discussion of the role that chance plays in the world—fundamental, as she sees it, in accord with Jacques Monod’s Chance & Necessity—and in our experience of the world, our tendency to assign a notion of fate or destiny, and our understanding of art, creativity, imagination and much more. The later essays turn their attention to subjects such as the nature of truth, the depiction of night and, in a futuristic and somewhat fatalistic effort, “Snow,” the idea of the inevitability of nuclear winter.

This collection is one that I have owned for a number of years, without any previous experience of Christensen’s poetry or prose. Several times I pulled it from the shelf, but it did not seem that the time was right. Now I am especially keen to read her poetry. There are four volumes available in English, all translated, like The Condition of Secrecy, by Susanna Nied who enjoyed a close collaborative relationship with Christensen when working on her poetry. So, all things in good time; the words will be waiting.

The Condition of Secrecy: Selected Essays by Inger Christensen is translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied and published by New Directions.

“Most of the things you ‘recognise’ you’ve never seen before” Sojourn by Amit Chaudhuri

From the opening passages of Amit Chaudhuri’s quiet, lugubrious novella Sojourn, one can already sense that his unnamed narrator, an Indian writer on a four month visiting professorship in Berlin, is slightly out of sync with the world around him, but it’s not clear if it’s simply the strangeness of his environment or some unease he carries with him. It’s not even his first visit to the city, but little seems familiar. He constantly requires directions and gets lost easily. There is, however, a subtle tension running through this lowkey narrative that gradually builds into something more disorienting in this portrait of a man’s shifting relationship to time and place as he enters mid-life.

The year is 2004, fifteen years after the fall of the Wall, but its shadow persists; former demarcation lines and vast areas not yet cleansed of their link to a dark past remain. Residents are inclined to point them out to visitors as if sharing the city’s history with a certain wistfulness, while the narrator tends to react to these spaces as if they hold a connection to an interruption of time in a city that now, after reunification, is still finding its footing.

At his first official function, just days after arriving, our protagonist meets Farqul, the self-styled Bangladeshi poet who appoints himself as his guide and guardian during the early weeks of his stay. Their conversations are peppered with snatches of Bangla. A journalist with Deutsche Welle, Farqul is an elusive yet ubiquitous figure—or perhaps, furtive, as the narrator speculates on their first encounter—who is a well-known exile and appears to be well-liked among members of Berlin’s immigrant community. He had emigrated to Germany in 1977, two years after being kicked out of Bangladesh for writing a blasphemous poem. Prior to leaving India he had spent a rather fractious interlude among the literati in Calcutta where he met and was apparently aided in his move to Berlin by none other than Gunther Grass. (The narrator simply conveys this information without question.) He is a generous, if eccentric, host. He not only shows the narrator around, but helps him get outfitted for the coming cold weather.

Farqul – in the excitement of being in your company – was a man who liked to share. He gave you food; he stood next to you in solidarity when you tried on jackets; he would have shared cigarettes and his flat if I’d been a smoker or needed a room; he might offer his woman. He didn’t create a boundary round himself, saying, ‘This is mine; not yours.’ As long as he was with you he was in a state of transport.

Yet when Farqul suddenly disappears without notice, the narrator flounders a little. Most of the acquaintances he makes through the university remain casual, but he does have the hint of an affair with a German woman who unexpectedly reaches out to him after having attended his inaugural lecture. She tells him she loves India (“I’m wary of Europeans who ‘love’ India – an old neurosis”) and their liaison, for what it’s worth, develops rather uncertainly. The narrator is often uneasy; he seems to be unwilling to exercise any agency. Rather, he tends to drift without commitment. As a result, those who come into his life with whom he may have grounds for connection—social, academic, romantic—have to be persistent if any kind of relationship is going to develop.

He also, for some reason, maintains a distance from the German language. His housekeeper speaks no English and the simple German phrases she uses with him he claims to understand only through her accompanying gestures. He seems content to exist in the city without being able to interpret the conversations around him—to revel in the meaning conveyed by the music of the language rather than its vocabulary or grammar:

They go on about the rebarbative sound German makes, but individual words and names have greater beauty – more history – than English can carry. I entered Hackescher Markt in my mind’s eye five or ten minutes before reaching there. ‘Friedrichstrasse’ had come up in a dream recently, as a port of arrival. Kristallnacht was transparent, broken. I woke up to words and didn’t bother with the language.

Certainly his sojourn in the city is necessarily brief, but his passivity is notable, as is his unwillingness to acknowledge how unmoored he is. That is, until he begins to become disoriented and experience blackouts. The narrative becomes more fragmented as he  loses himself navigating an unfolding layout of streets and network of train stations:

The trains emanate sorrow. Not like humans. The humans, in fact, are distracted and impatient. The trains aren’t alive in the way we understand the word. But they feel.

Domination of steel: steel smoke, steel sky.

This book has an intentionally unfinished feel owing to the fact that the narrator’s own mental state seems to be unravelling as his time in the city nears an end. We learn little about his earlier life because he admittedly feels disconnected from it himself, making for a mysterious, yet beautifully written tale of one man’s estranged sojourn in Berlin.

Sojourn by Amit Chaudhuri is published by New York Review Books.

Looking back at a year of reading: 2024 edition

Each year when I review the list of books that I have read, I face the same challenge deciding what to include and what to leave out of a final accounting. As usual there are the books that I know, even as I am reading them, will be among my favourites for the year. Just as I know the ones I don’t like, the ones I won’t even mention or take the time to review. Basically, everything else that I have reviewed, was a good book.

This year, my count far exceeds a respectable “top ten” or “baker’s dozen” and there are some striking factors at play. One is that the ongoing  violence in Gaza has heightened my focus on Palestinian and Arabic language literature—long an area of interest and concern. Five of the Palestinian themed books I read made my year end list. As well, I have paired several titles, typically by the same author or otherwise connected, because the reading of one inspired and was enhanced by the reading of the other (not to mention that such pairings allow me to expand my list). Finally, as reflected by my top books, I read and loved more longer works of fiction this year than usual (for me). No 1000 page tomes yet, but perhaps I’m overcoming some of my long book anxiety.

And so on to the books.

Poetry:
I read far more poetry than I review, but this year I wanted to call attention to four titles.

Strangers in Light Coatsevokes by Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan (Arabic, translated by Robin Moger/Seagull Books) is, perhaps, a darker than his earlier collections. Comprised as it is, of poems from recent releases, it actively portrays a world shaped by the reality of decades of occupation and war.

My Rivers by Faruk Šehić (Bosnian, translated by S.D. Curtis/Istros Books) is a collection particularly powerful for its depiction of a legacy of wars in Bosnia/Herzegovina including the genocide in Srebrenica. His speakers carry the burden of history.

Walking the Earth by Tunisian-French poet Amina Saïd (French, translated by Peter Thompson/Contra Mundum) is such a haunting work of primal beauty that I can’t understand why more of her poetry has not been published in English. Perhaps that will change.

Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Rainwater by Irma Pineda is one of a number of small Latin American poetry collection from poets and communities that have not been published in English before. This book, a trilingual collection in Didxazá (Isthmus Zapotec) and Spanish with English translations by Wendy Call (Deep Vellum & Phoneme Media) was particularly special.

 

Nonfiction:
This year, my favourites include a mix of memoir and essay and a couple of works that defy simple classification.

The Blue Light / Among the Almond Trees by Palestinian writer Hussein Barghouthi (Arabic, translated by Fady Joudah and Ibrahim Muhawi respectively/Seagull). Blue Light chronicles Barghouthi’s years in Seattle as a grad student and the eccentric circles he travelled in, whereas Among the Almond Trees is a much more sombre work written when he knew he was dying of cancer. The two books complement each other beautifully.

French intellectual, critic, ethnographer and autobiographical essayist Michel Leiris is a writer who means so much to me that the occasion of the release of Frail Riffs (Yale University), the fourth and final volume of his Rules of the Game in Richard Sieburth‘s translation, was not only an excuse to pitch a review but an invitation to revisit the earlier volumes. Definitely a highlight.

I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti (Palestinian/Arabic, translated by Ahdaf Soueif/Anchor Books) is a moving memoir detailing the author’s return to his homeland after thirty years of exile. Reading it reminded me that I had a copy of Scepters by his wife, Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour (Arabic, translated by Barbara Romaine/Interlink Books). This ambitious work blends fiction, history, memoir, and metafiction and I absolutely loved it, but my decision to include it here, like this, rests on the memoir element which complements her husband’s in its account of the many years he was exiled from Egypt—a double exile for him—especially the years in which she travelled back and forth with their young son to visit him while he was living in Hungary.

Candidate for the book with the best title, perhaps ever, Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears by Hungarian scholar  László Földényi (translated by Ottilie Mulzet/Yale University) was an endlessly fascinating collection of essays exploring the relationship between darkness and light (and similar dichotomies) through the ideas of a variety of writers, thinkers and artists.

 

Fiction:
As usual, fiction comprised the largest component of my reading and, as I’ve said, I read more relatively longer works than in the past. Normally I have a special fondness for the very spare novella and, of course, my list would not be complete without a few shorter works, including one more pair.

The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales  / Noone by Turkish writer Ferit Edgü—translated by Aron Aji (NYRB Classics) and Fulya Peker Cotra Mundum) respectively—who is sadly one of the writers we lost this year. His work, which draws on the time he spent teaching in the impoverished southeastern region of Turkey in lieu of military service, is filled with great compassion for the people of this troubled area. But his prose is stripped clean, bare, and remarkably powerful.

Recital of the Dark Verses by Luis Felipe Fabre (Mexico/Spanish, translated by Heather Cleary/Deep Vellum) is an award wining translation that seems to have garnered less attention than it deserves. This comic Golden Age road trip follows the misadventures of the body of John of the Cross on its clandestine voyage to Seville. Brilliant.

Celebration by Damir Karakaš (Croatian, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać/ Two Lines Press) is an exceptionally spare, unsentimental novella about the historical forces that pulled the residents of Lika in central Croatia into World War II.

Spent Light by Lara Pawson (CB Editions) is a book I’d been anticipating since reading her This Is the Place to Be. Strange, at times disturbing, often hilarious and always thoughtful, this is one of those books that (thankfully) defies description.

If Celebration is historical fiction at its most spare, Winterberg’s Last Journey by Czech writer Jaroslav Rudiš (German, translated by Kris Best/Jantar Publishing) is the exact opposite. Ambitious, eccentric, and filled with detail, it follows a 99 year-old man and his male nurse as they travel the railways with the aid of 1913 railway guide. What could possibly go wrong?

Children of the Ghetto I: My Name is Adam by Lebanese author Elias Khoury who also died this year (translated by Humphrey Davies/Archipelago Books) is the final Palestinian themed work on my list. This is a challenging and rewarding novel about a man born in the ghetto of Lydda during the Nakba that examines complex questions of identity.

Star 111 by Lutz Seiler (German, translated by Tess Lewis/NYRB Imprints)is the autobiographically inspired story of a young East German would-be poet’s experiences among an eccentric group of idealists in Berlin in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Wall. I was familiar with Seiler’s poetry before reading this, but I liked this novel so much that it lead me to follow up with his essays and the work of other poets important to him—the best kind of expanding reading experience.

Mauro Javier Cárdenas’ third novel American Abductions (Dalkey Archive) imagines the latest iteration of his hero Antonio in a future in which Latin American migrants are systematically sought out, separated from the children and deported. With a stream of single sentence chapters, he creates a tale that is both fun and uncomfortably too close for comfort. Quite an achievement!

Last but not least, my two favourite books this year are Hungarian:

In The End by Attila Bartis (translated by Judith Sollosy/Archipelago Books), a fifty-two year old photographer looks back on his life—his successes and his failures. He reflects on his relationship with his mother, his move to Budapest with his father in the early 1960s following her death, life under Communism and the secrets held by those around him, and the role the camera played in his life. Presented in short chapters, like photographs in prose each with its “punctum,” the 600+ pages of this book just fly by.

Like Attila Bartis, Andrea Tompa also comes from the ethnically Hungarian community of Romania’s Transylvania region and now lives in Budapest. Her novel Home (translated by Jozefina Komporaly/Istros Books) follows a woman travelling to a school reunion, but it is much more. It is a novel about language, about what it means to belong, to have a home and a mother tongue. It’s probably not surprising that my two favourite novels involve protagonists in mid-life, looking at where they are and how they got there. As to why they’re both Hungarian—I suppose I’ll have to read more Hungarian literature in the new year to answer that.

So that is my 2024 wrap up. I’d like to think 2025 will be better than I fear it will, but at least I know there are countless good books to look forward to.

Happy New Year!

‘I thought femininity was something that could be learned’: Antiboy by Valentijn Hoogenkamp

The unique challenge that arises when one attempts to write about what it feels like when the experience of gender fails to conform with cultural and societal expectations is rooted in the problem of a lack of consensus about terminology. Whether language and meaning are defined by individuals with lived experience or those looking in from the outside, there is no one way to talk about gender identity. There are the absolutists who see male and female / woman and man as fixed black and white entities among both those who identify as transgender and those who deny our existence. And then there are those accept and relate to the notion of a spectrum or continuum in lived expression (reflecting but not necessarily mirroring the intricacies of genetic variation). But transpeople are, first and foremost, people, and our understanding of ourselves not only evolves and changes over time, it is typically measured against those we encounter in the world. And often that can involve many years of wondering where to find our own selves reflected. Just like other people who, for some reason or another, feel a persistent sense that they do not belong.

Antiboy, by Dutch poet and writer Valentijn Hoogenkamp, is an attempt to articulate the strangeness, the sorrow, and the satisfaction that can accompany the quest for a more natural way of being. This very spare memoir, translated in crisp, poetic prose by Michele Hutchison, chronicles the author’s lifelong inability to find himself within the female body and life into which he was born. When a genetic mutation for a rare form of cancer (one that will claim his mother’s life) necessitates that he undergo a bilateral mastectomy, he finds an unexpected opportunity to explore his identity. Much to the consternation of others, he rejects breast implants and opts for a flat chest:

‘When I got the diagnosis, I pictured my funeral and that nobody there would really know me because I’ve never spoken up. And, in the conversations I had at the hospital, they kept telling me what most women would do in my situation,’ I say. ‘I kept wanting to look over my shoulder and see if that woman was standing behind me.’

‘Because you don’t feel like a woman?’

‘I thought femininity was something that could be learned.’

This is a searching text. Unsentimental and questioning, not stubborn and defensive like some other memoirs that venture into this territory. Hoogenkamp speaks not so much of a boy inside, but an absence where a girl or woman should be. An emptiness. The surgery presents the means to open himself to physical transformation—breasts being such fundamental indication of womanhood—but his decision to forgo implants is not random, there is precedent reaching back much further. He describes the childhood of a social outcast. Set aside. “No one to walk hand in hand to the gym with, to go around to the classes with on my birthday.” Girls playing together in the schoolyard seem strangely alien.

I can do this. I have the same arms and legs as them, I am approximately the same size. I can be one of them.

It should be easy. Natural. But it is not.

Sexuality is another avenue for exploration. Sexuality and gender can easily be conflated, both can be subject to labelling by others or rejection of an individual’s right to define themselves. Hoogenkamp has boyfriends and a female friend she has sex with—a female friend who will, in time, transition to male and provide a little guidance along the way. But his intimate partners prove less flexible than he would hope once he comes out as non-binary. And he allows himself to be used:

My sexual orientation was being wanted. I was sick to death of feeling unwanted.

Although Hoogenkamp finds a space to exist between genders (but adopting male pronouns), there is so much in this short book that resonated deeply with my own experiences growing up without any context for my sense of otherness, my attempts to understand myself through questions of sexuality, and my ultimate decision to transition more than twenty years ago. There are many ways of feeling and talking about a gender anxiety or disconnect, just as there are many ways of trying to describe how one knows that their sex and gender are aligned. At one point Hoogenkamp puts that question to a number of non-trans-identified men and women and finds many hard pressed to articulate an answer. But at a time when differences in gender identity are increasingly being denied or weaponized, it is more important than ever to listen to the varied personal experiences of transgender people.

Antiboy by Valentijn Hoogenkamp is translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison and published by Seagull Books as part of their Pride List.

Dramatically, melodramatically, or obliquely: American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas

. . . no, Antonio says to his daughters during dinner, Americans can’t imagine the conditions, and if they can’t imagine the conditions, they can’t imagine themselves as refugees, and if they can’t imagine themselves as refugees, they will conclude that refugees are different from them, a different species, Eva says, they read in the news that a different species from Central America have to flee their homes and that they’re coming here, and that we’re abducting their children to teach them a lesson, life is hard and then we die, Ada says. . .

There is something distinctly unsettling about reading the latest novel by Ecuadorian-American writer  Mauro Javier Cárdenas on the eve of Trump’s second term—Racist in Chief, anyone?—especially with tech billionaire Elon Musk on his arm assuming they haven’t broken up by then. Projected into a future that now seems shockingly close, American Abductions envisions a US in which the mass deportation of Latin American migrants, not just those who are illegal but naturalized citizens and sometimes even their children, is a large scale, technologically advanced, industrialized, and profit motivated operation. It consumes the waking and sleeping hours of its unfortunate targets and tears their lives apart in distinct yet similar ways. Antonio, the divorced cubicle-bound data analyst hero of Cárdenas’s last novel, Aphasia, who was trying to write a novel while juggling  commitments to his ex, his daughters, his mother and sister, plus a couple of girlfriends, has, in this scenario, been abducted and deported to his native Colombia. He was driving the girls to school when immigration officials apprehended him, a scene recorded by Ada, his eldest, on a video that subsequently went viral. When we catch up with him, decades have passed and his health is failing (he will die but continues to appear in recollected scenes from the past or via recordings of the many interviews he conducted with fellow deportees over the years). His daughters are grown. His youngest, Eva, a conceptual artist, joined him in Bogota after finishing university and has been there for seven years, while Ada has remained in San Francisco where she works as an architect. Add to this a varied cast of Latin American exiles and their families connected through either Antonio’s ongoing interview project and /or the lucid dream workshops of an online doctor, and you have the basic sketch of this dynamic and original work.

Cárdenas is a passionate devotee of the long sentence, producing multi-page strings of thoughts, reflections, and dialogue that tend to shift mid-stream—watch those commas, those “he says,” or “she thinks”—demanding attention while providing ample room for humour, recurring themes, and often biting commentary. But he is not simply obsessed with word count, an objective that in itself can lead to the proliferation of hopelessly unnecessary, redundant clauses. Rather, his sentences seem to propel themselves with an intrinsic energy that never overstays its welcome. There was, he admits in an interview for Minor Literature[s], a method guiding the writing of this book:

I wrote every sentence in American Abductions the same way. I started each sentence with a human impulse that I attempted to exhaust within the same sentence. This attempt to exhaust could be called In Search of Unexpected Linkages, with the caveat that this doesn’t translate to anything goes since the human impulse at the beginning determines the radius of operations. This approach also doesn’t allow for me adding a reference or an image three months later because that would disturb the progression of the sentence, which is based on the linkages previously generated. I typically spend one week on a 1,000-word sentence. Every day during that one week I read the sentence from the beginning so that I can ground myself on the opening impulse and what has already been generated. During that one week I have to read widely and wildly but in the vicinity of the radius of operations, which is as vague as it sounds — more Ouija board than research — though obviously I also do primary research (you would be surprised by how many facts are included in the opening sentence, for instance).

If that sounds like a recipe for a forced and artificial exercise it is anything but. This is a serious, albeit futuristic, novel that is unafraid to tilt at uncomfortable truths. There are continuing and developing threads and characters, whose stories reflect the fear, isolation, and (quite literal) dreams of those directly impacted by the anti-Latin American agenda of the “Pale Americans.” Central to this are, of course, Eva and Ada who are not only deprived of their rather eccentric father at a young age, but are unable to be together when he is sick or after his death, as they decide to continue his work. But there are other strained or separated families as well.

The subject matter—especially in light of the increasing antipathy and hostility toward immigrants in the Global North—may be grim, but this is a playful, absurdist novel nonetheless. Curious data and scientific facts are woven in to the narrative and literary references abound, some direct, such as the discussion of texts by Leonora Carrington, Bernhard, Borges, and Sebald; others less so, such as the adoption of the names of authors, musicians, artists, and Bolaño characters as intentional pseudonyms or nicknames for intelligent technologies. Sentence by sentence, each chapter builds on those that proceed it to create an intelligent, entertaining and, dare we say it, unnervingly prophetic novel.

American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas is published by Dalkey Archive Press. An excerpt can be found at Minor Literature[s].

The strange and even stranger world of Nightjar Press: Fabrication by Imogen Reid and Old Tutor, New Tutor by Arthur Mandal

There is something very precious about the chapbook format. The presentation of a single short prose piece or sequence of poems in a single bound volume, often printed as a defined, numbered run, is a way of isolating and calling special attention to a writer and their work. Since 2009, UK based Nightjar Press has published limited edition single short-story chapbooks. Editor Nicholas Royle and designer John Oakley have a fondness for stories that lean toward the uncanny, darker, and stranger side, as the press’s namesake might imply:

The nightjar – corpse fowl, goatsucker – is a nocturnal bird with an uncanny, supernatural reputation that flies at dusk or dawn as it hunts. It is more often heard than seen, its song a series of ghostly clicks known as a churring. Sylvia Plath, in ‘Goatsucker’, wrote that the ‘Devil-bird’ flies ‘on wings of witch cloth’; David Morley, in ‘Beethoven’s Yellowhammer’, calls it simply ‘Satanic’.

Two releases from this past October offer two different examples of the kind of oddly unsettling offerings they specialize in.

Imogen Reid’s Fabrication is a piece of experimental fiction that draws on the author’s interest in the way techniques employed in film can transform narrative form and readability. This story builds on an observed/experienced scene—a room, a desk, a man, a faded “missing” notice—that echoes and repeats elements as it circles back on itself, creating and reinforcing the ambient quality of a dream or remembered moment within which the subject, addressed in the second person, is both protagonist and object, perhaps in more than one sense.

you can’t recall being there, but you can feel the frayed edges of an unwritten narrative slowly crystallise around the grainy image tacked to the wall, barely held in place by a steel pin, its fragile edges fluttering in the breeze like shackled butterfly wings. Beneath it, in front of the desk, partially illuminated by the eerie glow emanating from the computer screen, the chair turns and re-turns silently swivelling on its well-oiled axis, the monotonous rhythm neither surging nor subsiding.

Disorienting and intriguing, this very short story invites repeated rereading becoming in the process a longer, circular piece without beginning or end.

More conventional in form, but equally unnerving and ambiguously unresolved, is Arthur Mandal’s Old Tutor, New Tutor. As this story opens, the tutor Mrs Craig hired to help her daughters prepare for their A-levels is late. The girls took immediately to Mark  (“he just wants to be called MO”) and now, suddenly, after six weeks, he has failed to arrive at the usual time. When she is finally convinced to call the number he had provided, she reaches what sounds like a distant, distorted connection. The tutor apologizes and promises to be back the following week. But a few days later when Mrs Craig is in town with her daughters she spots the tutor—pictured on a leaflet attached to a lamppost. Wanted for assault. The girls are in denial (“It’s nothing like him”), but their mother is convinced it’s the same man. Calls to Mark’s number go unanswered.

Then, the following week, a new tutor arrives at the usual date and time. The family is surprised, no one had called to arrange a replacement, but here he is. He introduces himself as Alan.

The new tutor stood before them, unperturbed. He wore a long, grey overcoat which dropped vertically from his shoulders to his knees. His face was young, freckled, cheeky but handsome. Although in his late twenties, he had the demeanor of a small child. In one hand he carried a briefcase; in the other an old-fashioned umbrella with a crocodile-skin handle.

The girls quickly take to the new tutor, even their previously resistant father warms to Alan’s charms. But Mrs Craig is uneasy. The source of her discomfort is uncertain; even she is at a loss to explain it. As the tale unfolds, we only have her perspective, and it becomes increasingly unclear whether her paranoia has any basis or whether she is losing her grasp on reality.

My first purchase from Nightjar Press was a signed M. John Harrison story in 2013. With a print run of only 200 copies per title, their chapbooks tend to sell out quickly, so one cannot wait too long if an offering  sounds intriguing. As with these two recent purchases—one an author familiar to me, the other new—something weird and wonderful is almost certainly guaranteed.

Fabrication by Imogen Reid and Old Tutor, New Tutor by Arthur Mandal are published by Nightjar Press (October 2024).

The only possible way: from In Case of Loss to Pitch & Glint by Lutz Seiler (and much more)

Some writers pass through your reading life and move on, perhaps appearing by chance now and then over the years, others ignite a clear desire to read more, if not all, that you can get hold of. That might be a small library of volumes to collect, but for those of us drawn to writers in translation—writers we often discover as a direct result of following a known or trusted translator—it can mean watching and waiting for more work to slowly emerge in English.

For me, one such writer is German poet, essayist and novelist Lutz Seiler. I first encountered his poetry about two and half years ago through Alexander Booth’s translation of his 2010 collection in field latin. At the time, the only other title available was his first novel Kruso which was, when I first checked, out of stock. Yet, when UK publisher And Other Stories announced they would be publishing Seiler’s debut poetry collection, Pitch & Glint, his second novel, Star 111, and a collection of essays, In Case of Loss, in late 2023, I took note. Then, when I had the opportunity to read Star 111 this year in advance of its North American release from NYRB in October, I quickly set about acquiring his other work. And, as these things go, while reading the poetry and the essays, I was inspired to add work by two of the poets Seiler writes about or honours—but more about that later.

Born in the Thuringia region of the GDR in 1963, Seiler’s poetry is rooted in the rural landscape of his childhood, scarred by years of uranium mining, sensitive to place and relationship to family, as child and as a parent. However, unlike many writers, he had no interest in books or literature when he himself was young. He did not start reading poetry until he was completing his mandatory military service in his early twenties, having already trained as a bricklayer and carpenter. He was certainly not writing, not even jotting the odd observation down, but something was brewing. As he says in his essay “Aurora: An Attempt to Answer the Question ‘Where is the Poem Going Today?’”:

Yet a good ten years later, I wrote poems that had been, in that earlier period, when poetry did not feature in my life, gathering and storing their subject matter, their materials. Doubly hidden from me at the time, clearly the poems had been, even then, making their way towards me. What is different these days is that I have become more conscious of the signs of a poem being on its way. I am aware of what situations, materials and substances it might respond to, what it is likely to ingest—for later use.

For a poet who came to literature somewhat unexpectedly, Seiler’s writing about writing, and about the poetic art and process is excellent, presumably of interest to other poets, but also, and perhaps more critically, for those of us who enjoy poetry but sometimes feel inadequate to examine a poem without a strong literary vocabulary and the requisite coursework (assumed to be) required to read and write it. In Case of Loss contains several essays about the work of other poets. One, Peter Huchel (1903–1981), was new to me. I was aware that Seiler is the custodian of the Huchel House in Wilhelmhorst near Berlin, but knew nothing of Huchel himself, one of the most an important German poets of the post-war era who ended up running afoul of the government of the GDR and was eventually allowed to migrate to the West. The title essay is an account of Seiler’s first impressions of the house itself after breaking in with Huchel’s widow’s blessing and his coming into possession of a notebook the poet kept all his life in which he recorded images, metaphors, lines, and tentative sketches, all categorized by theme. The manner in which Seiler traces some of the formative elements that will, often years later, appear as shadows or echoes in a finished piece is fascinating and a testament to the gestation period a poem can have. Of course, I wanted to read more, so I sought out These Numbered Days, Huchel’s 1972 collection, released in 2019 in an award winning English translation by Martin Crucefix (who is also the translator of In Case of Loss). His poetry often draws on the landscape of his youth for atmosphere frequently in concert with mythological, historical, and Biblical images to create crisp, even chilling poems. Although they are generally spare, one can sense that they have been carefully shaped and honed over time, each word or phrase carrying much weight, very often political—something confirmed by both Seiler’s insights, Crucefix’s notes, and Karen Leeder’s Introduction.

At the edge of the village the wind
flung its ton of frost
against the wall.
The moon lowered a fibrous gauze
on the wounds of the rooftops.

Slowly the emptiness of night descended,
filled with the howling of dogs.
Defeat sank
into the frozen veins of the country,
into the leather-upholstered seats
of old Kresmers in the coach sheds,
between the horse tack and grey straw
where children slept.

(Peter Huchel — from “Defeat”)

In addition to an unusual back to front reading of a book by Ernst Meister, the other poet Seiler devotes an essay to is Jürgen Becker. I had already read Becker’s fragmentary poetic novel, The Sea in the Radio, but a dedication to the poet (who very recently passed away) in Seiler’s collection Pitch & Glint, called to mind a collection of selected shorter poems, Blackbirds in September, which I was able to track down and read alongside the essay “’The Post-War Era Never Ends’: On Jürgen Becker.” Here Seiler takes a more personal approach acknowledging Becker’s influence and his own friendship with the older established poet. He traces his own process of learning to read and appreciate Becker’s poetry. Born in Cologne in 1932, Becker was a member of Group 47, the organization formed to promote young German writers after the war. He employed an experimental, open form of writing with an emphasis on landscape and the persistence of memories of the war in German land and history. His language tends to be spare and his poems have a calm, light feel, but that is only the surface.

But the landscape is rather quiet.
Invisible the destruction, if in fact
there is destruction.

And the time is passed
which the subsequent, the subsequent time produced.

But you never speak of Now.

Probably in the summer. At that time of year
we remember. Fence posts follow the paths,
or turned around, all of it belonging
to the landscape . . . who owns it? The landscape
leads into landscapes, from the visible ones
to the invisible ones which await us.

(Jürgen Becker — from “A Provisional Topography”/translated by Okla Elliott)

Other essays of particular interest in this collection (which gathers a selection of Seiler’s nonfiction from across twenty-five years) include “Illegal Exit, Gera (East),” a return in memory and in more recent years to a landscape that is being transformed and remediated, and “The Tired Territory” which begins as an exploration of the history of uranium mining in his home state, but turns into a meditation on the distinct poetic sensibilities that he had to define for himself after what he describes as the difficulties encountered in his “brief  career as a doctoral student in literary studies.” The categories that hold his fascination are intangible: heaviness, absence, tiredness. Understanding this for himself is essential:

Writing poetry: a difficult way to live and, at the same time, the only possible way.

One aspect of all this is that the poem engages specifically with what cannot be verbalised. The mute and non-paraphrasable and its unique, existential origin: the particular qualities of any poem arise from these two subtly interwoven elements. The poem travels towards the unsayable, yet this is a movement without an end.

It is not only the reading and writing of poetry that slips into Seiler’s essays—to a greater or lesser extent—but the final piece tackles his slow transition to prose. “The Soggy Hems of His Soviet Trousers: Image as a Way into the Narration of the Past” chronicles the year he moved with his wife and children to Rome for a period of dedicated novel writing. He dragged along boxes and boxes of books, research and paraphernalia he had gathered in preparation for the writing of his first novel. He’d planned to draw heavily on his own experiences moving to Berlin in the aftermath of the fall of the Wall and the more he describes his intentions, the more it sounds like what would eventually become his second novel, Star 111. But it’s only 2011 and our would-be novelist is staring at an empty page day after day. It is not until he finally gets out of his room, into the city, that everything changes. A suggestion that he write a short story set in a location he had not previously considered soon conjures forth an image so strong that ten pages become 500 and he has what will ultimately become his first novel Kruso.

Finally, if I return now to own Seiler’s poetry, in field latin and his debut collection from 2000, Pitch & Glint, more recently released in Stefan Tobler’s translation, many of the allusions in individual poems become clearer in light of having read his essays and the autobiographically influenced novel Star 111. But neither is necessary. Seiler’s poetry has a natural appeal. I wrote about in field latin here, and this earlier work (ten years separate the two volumes) is likewise rooted in the East Germany of the poet’s youth—the wildness, the strict schools, the land with its slag heaps and detritus of mining. Yet, for Seiler, the sound and rhythm are critical, as is the construction of images that move beyond the mere biographical. Darkness, frost, echoing footsteps recur. You can feel the chill:

wind came up the border
.   dogs were rising on
their delicate branching skeletons

whistled a bewitching witless
wanderlied. the snow came in
& tore the iron

curtain of their eyes, a
blunted gaze towards the hinterland
and made plain that we do.

(— from “in the east of the land”)

Seiler’s characteristic use of lower case letters and ampersands (especially striking in German where nouns are capitalized) adds to the mood and intensity of his poetry. One of the blurbs on the back of Pitch & Glint describes it as “a real-world Stalker with line breaks.” That captures the feel well.

The beauty of reading a number of works—nonfiction, fiction and poetry— that intersect like this is that each individual experience is heightened. Seiler’s poetry and fiction easily stand on their own, but the essays add an extra dimension. To be fair, one’s enjoyment of this collection may depend on whether one is a poet, or interested in poetry and the process of poetic inspiration/creation, or familiar with his other work. Nonetheless, his essays are thoughtful with a very strong personal flow and reflect the mind and experiences of a man for whom poetry is central to his very existence—in his memories, in his specific creative pursuits, and even in the everyday act of taking his daughter to dance lessons or son to football practice.

In Case of Loss and Pitch & Glint by Lutz Seiler are translated from the German by Martin Crucefix and Stefan Tobler respectively and published by And Other Stories. These Numbered Days by Peter Huchel is translated from the German by Martin Crucefix with and Introduction by Karen Leeder and published by Shearsman Books, and Blackbirds in September by Jürgen Becker is translated from the German by Okla Elliott and published by Black Lawrence Press.

Other titles mentioned and reviewed earlier on this site are Star 111 (And Other Stories/NYRB Imprints) and in field latin (Seagull Books), both by Lutz Seiler, translated from the German by Tess Lewis and Alexander Booth respectively.

“in the nostalgia of a world / from before this world”:  Walking the Earth by Amina Saïd

all paths
lead to the same place
journey is illusion’s horseback

the world’s embers
blacken its wanton footstep

they burn
our anxious tongues

within its form
the poem seeks itself

Poems for wanderers, or the poem as a series of wandering, emergent forces, Walking the Earth by Amina Saïd hums with an intoxicating, primal energy that speaks to something fundamentally vital and human, in a sense that is too easily buried in the noise and chaos of our constantly plugged-in contemporary reality. Born in Tunisia in 1953, to a French mother and Tunisian father, Saïd was raised in both Arabic and French. At the age of sixteen she moved to Paris with her family where, when she entered university, she decided to study English literature so not to have to choose between her two native languages. Her poetic vision, however, draws on French and Arabic sources and the sunlit Mediterranean landscapes of her birthplace.

Today, Saïd can be considered, according to Hédi Abdel Jaouad, the author of the Preface present text, as the “most potent—and prolific—poetic voice in Tunisia today, if not in the whole of Francophone Africa.” Yet, until this point, no complete, single volume of her work has been made available in English. Now, thirty years after its original 1994 release, Walking the Earth (Marche sur la terre), in Peter Thompson’s translation, finally corrects this oversight.

This haunting sequence of poems, untitled and distinguished only occasionally by dedications, or by shifts in format or theme, has a hushed meditative quality reinforced by the poet’s spare, concise language, subdued and mystical tone, and the recurrence of common motifs. The world her speakers evoke is shaped by primordial elements in concert with journeys across a vast unformed terrain:

earth is this round dream

in its heart
stones fusing

their fire tongues
gouge the pathways of blood
where another fire burns

In her prefatory Note, Saïd writes that this, her seventh book, can be understood as a search for “place”—one that moves from the intimate to the universal—her own journey and that of many who pass through spaces “as much geographical as mental.” She is thinking of the displaced, those driven to move by war or disaster, but also the wanderer and traveller. Wandering is a theme of particular importance in Maghrebi (Northwest African) literature, and one that touches the poet, as someone who writes to hold an intermediary space between the Orient and the Occident, deeply:

My belonging to these two worlds both legitimizes the quest for place and generates a proliferation of doubles: shadows, voices, witnesses, angels, those who keep vigil. . .

This quest for place is born of a profound feeling of exile. Isn’t any creative person “exiled,” a nomad, an eternal wanderer seeking a place—a utopia, a place imaginary, impossible, dreamed of—which poetry can, with a sudden flaring, show in an unforeseeable image?

The quest that stretches across the pages of Walking the Earth is rich in mythological and archetypal images. The recurrence of specific motifs—light, darkness, stones, deserts, shorelines, blood, fire, tongues, voices, screams, silence—contributes to the cyclical feel of the work. Walking is an existential act while language and words are formative elements:

a voice recites
a voice despairs
the choir takes heart

a hand inscribes
ancient alphabets

the light awakens

As the sequence progresses, it becomes clear that the search for “place” is ultimately a search for meaning. The poem itself is the journey, even if the end is but another beginning. It is a path a reader can walk over and over again, and arrive at a different “place” each time.

the poem scents itself
with deepest night

I inscribe myself with sand and dust
in the nostalgia of a world
from before this world

I’m absent
from the mirror of the tribe

Walking the Earth by Amina Saïd is translated from the French by Peter Thompson with a Preface by Hédi Abdel Jaouad and published by Contra Mundum Press.