Tag: poetry

Counting, accounting and recounting: The Folded Clock by Gerhard Rühm

two!
one two  –
one two  –  three!
.        two
one two three  –   four
.       two

“a recounting,” the first number poem you encounter in Gerhard Rühm’s The Folded Clock, opens with a lengthy note explaining exactly how the piece should be recited—volume and intensity directed and measured—before erupting across the following five pages as numbers, spelled out, descend, rise, and repeat. Finding the flow and riding it (guided with a few more directives along the way) is not difficult, especially if you allow yourself to read aloud and, there are you are, from the very beginning, not simply reading but actively engaging with the poem.

And there are ninety-nine more, each one involving numerical elements in some shape or fashion. Some are sequential, others visual, still others are in verse form. Clever or funny or profound, it is amazing just how far numbers can take you.

Born in Vienna in 1930, Rühm, who recently celebrated his ninety-fifth birthday, is an author, composer and visual artist. His poems reflect all of these interests. He was an early practitioner of concrete poetry and an original member of the influential Wiener Gruppe. His interest in numbers as “the most pared-down and at the same time most universal element of design” goes back to the early 1950s. When he composed his first number poems in 1954 he was unaware of Dadaist Kurt Schwitters’ own explorations in this area, but he has continued to incorporate numerals and digits into his spoken and visual poetry, expanding the possibilities numbers offer. The Folded Clock, newly released from Twisted Spoon Press in Alexander Booth’s translation, gathers one hundred of these poems in a handsome volume.

Many of Rühm’s poems play with the rhythm and sound of numbers in various sequences and patterns. Others exploit visual qualities and double meanings that arise from the titles and the images or words they are paired with. And a sly humour surfaces throughout, as in “imperfect counting poem”:

one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
toes

one’s missing

Or “sixty-nine pairs of lovers” which depicts, inverted on their side, six rows of ten and one row of nine (sixty-nine) 69’s.

But, Rühm is also inclined to employ numbers and words to make thought provoking statements about the world. “time poem”—another piece that begins with a note on recitation—takes on cosmic dimensions starting with:

1 january, 12:am: bang!
2
3
4

And so on, counting down one calendar year, day by day, marking the significant events, from the Big Bang to the first moon landing. Given that fish don’t begin to swim in water until December 19, the final day of the year opens up, first by hours, then half hours, and by 11:30 pm, minutes, until the final minute opens up into seconds to allow human history from the first cave paintings to space exploration to fall int place. (You can read this poem online here.) Elsewhere he allows climate change, odd historical facts, and interesting news stories inspire poetic creations. Ruminations on living also fit well with the measurement of one’s personal relationship to time as in “sense of time”:

a week ago i was still a child
five days ago i  was an adult
four days ago was the time of the “vienna group”
three days ago i was living in berlin
for two days now i’ve been in cologne
everything since the turn of the millennium happened yesterday
since early this morning i haven’t aged at all

The variety of poems in this collection is wide and endlessly entertaining. They range in length from just a few numerals, to pieces that extend for several pages, to sketches and collages. Even if you fear you might be intimidated by avant-garde or experimental poetry (or poetry at all), this is a work that is not only intelligent and entertaining, but that contains many pieces that you could easily find yourself unable to resist reciting aloud.

The Folded Clock: 100 number poems by Gerhard Rühm is translated from the German by Alexander Booth and published by Twisted Spoon Press. (Excerpt and images can be seen at the publisher’s website.)

In this violent solitude: Light, Grass, and Letter in April by Inger Christensen

But do not grieve for me
do not grieve for your lonely
to and fro
My hour has rusted
My poem has left
your beaten track
Do not grieve My young poem
is more deeply kissed by life
Deathly it creeps
over under through me
Poetry is murdered hope.

(from “In the wild loneliness of the mountains” / Light)

Having read most of the poetry of Inger Christensen (1935-2009) that is available in English translation, to return now to her earliest published collections, Light (1962) and Grass (1963) is somewhat like experiencing the formative spirit of a writer who will soon make her mark as an original and experimental literary force. And yet, it is clear in these poems composed in her mid-twenties, that she is already exploring the themes and perspectives that will define her most ambitious—and most popular—poetic works. This is perhaps to be expected because only six years separate the publication of Grass from the release of her monumental 200-plus page book-length cosmic poem Det in 1969 (“It” in English translation, 2006).

The present volume contains her first two collections, along with her fourth, A Letter in April (1979), a collaborative project that followed ten years after Det. Light and Grass being only one year apart, share much in common and reflect the time in which they were written. Yet as translator Susanna Nied (who has translated all of Christensen’s poetry and is thus well acquainted with her oeuvre) says regarding these two books:

Her lifelong themes are already evident: boundaries between self and other, between human beings and the world; our longing and struggle for direct connection beyond boundaries; the roles of language and writing as mediators of that connection; the distances between words and the phenomena that they stand for.

Images drawn from nature, domestic settings, and corporeal existence feature throughout these poems, with a strong sense of the landscape, the seasons, and the musicality of her homeland. Many of the pieces in both volumes tend to be shorter and lighter in form, though the not necessarily in content, but notably, the final poem in Grass, the sequence “Meeting,” is longer , closer to prose poetry, and seems to presage  sections that will later emerge in Det/It.

The unknown is the unknown and gold is gold I’ve heard, one
.      winter the birds froze fast to the ice without the strength
.       to scream, that’s how little we can do for words with words
the books press close to one another and hold themselves up,
.      backs to the living room, our buttoned-up words huddle
.      on the shelf, the queue-culture of centuries, inexorably
.      built up word by word, for who doesn’t know that the
.      word creates order

(from “Meeting: V” / Grass)

The third work collected in this volume, Letter in April, seems quite different in tone, quieter and more intimately focused. It arose as the result of a collaboration with graphic artist Johanne Foss who began with a series charcoal-on-parchment drawings based on Etruscan artworks. Christensen and Foss had known each other for a number of years and both had spent time at an artists’ residence in Italy and explored Etruscan ruins. Taken by Foss’s drawings, Christensen chose some and began writing responses to her images. These responses began as prose pieces, but she ended up discarding them and beginning again in poetry. Their project developed over two years as they worked together during the summer months while their children played. Several themes emerge in this work including parenthood, wonder, nature, and the account of a woman who travels to a foreign country with a child inspired by a trip Christensen took to France with her young son as part of her writing process.

Unpacking our belongings,
some jewelry
a few playthings
paper,
the necessities
arranged within
the world
for a while.
And while you draw,
mapping out
whole continents
between the bed
and the table,
the labyrinth turns,
hanging suspended,
and the thread
that never leads out
is, for a moment,
outside.

(Section I,  º )

However, more than a series of poems and drawings, Letter in April follows a complex yet unassuming structure. Each of the seven sections contains five segments marked by a sequence of small circles in varying order. For example, Section I follows the pattern: º º º º º, º º º º, º, º º, º º º .  Section II begins with º º º , and likewise each section begins with the same marking as the final segment of the one preceding. These markings link poetic segments with shared motifs, allowing  the entire work to either be read straight through, or by following the each pattern individually (i.e. I º, II  º, III  º, IV  º, and so on).  This flexibility reflects Christensen’s musical and mathematical instincts,  which are also apparent in the arrangement of elements of Det/It, but will be given full reign in her wonderful numerically and alphabetically framed poem Alphabet (1981).

Light, Grass, and Letter in April is a rich compilation of poetry that offers insight into Christensen’s development as a poet from the mid-twentieth century inspired modernism of her earliest work, through to a collaboration (unique in her oeuvre) that incorporates visual and dynamic elements. It is essential for those who already know and love her poetry, but can also serve as an introduction for those who have yet to encounter her masterworks.

So here we sit
in this violent solitude,
where bulbs work
underground,
and we wait.
Around noon
when the mountain rain stops,
a bird stands
on a stone.
Around evening
when the heart stands empty,
a woman stands
in the road.

(from IV  º º º º º)

Light, Grass, and Letter in April by Inger Christensen, is translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied, with Drawings by Johanne Foss. It is published by New Directions.

That day was a little bit odd: The Minotaur’s Daughter: Selected Poems by Eva Luka

That day was a little bit odd. After walking down the street
.       I stopped in a movement,
at one particular moment of growing older.
And I sensed it (the moment of growing older) like a scientist
.      over a microscope:
the precise split-second border between the former and the
.       future me.
In that borderline, tangible second, I was nothing; only an echo
of a former self and the germ of the future, the old me.

It lasted for only that one moment. Then the air rustled like
.      golden hay
and into the street a horse came.

(from “A Horse Came Into Our Street”)

Odd is one way to describe the poetry of Slovakian poet Eva Luka—deliciously, devilishly, delightfully odd. Her poems open up strange, shimmering vistas filled with fantastic imagery. Born Eva Lukáčová  in Trnava, Slovakia, in 1965, she studied English and Japanese, first in Slovakia and later in Japan. She began publishing poetry under her given name, first in anthologies and then, in 1999, with her first collection Divosestra (Wildsister).  For her second book, Diabloň (Deviltree), published in 2005, she adopted her nom de plume, along with what would become her practice of selecting a poem from each collection to provide the title for the work to follow. In this way, her poems speak to one another within and across collections which also include Havranjel (Ravenangel, 2011) and Jazver (I-Beast, 2019).

With The Minotaur’s Daughter, translated by James Sutherland-Smith, a selection of poetry drawn from her work to date, is now available in English for the first time. In his Afterword, Sutherland-Smith suggests that Lukáčová  may be one of the last great poets of resistance in Europe, citing her:

resistance to conform artistically and [a] resilience against the potential psychological pressures resulting from the circumstances of her life and times. Eva’s resistance to conform to being categorized within a specific poetic movement—particularly those associated with a single gender—reflects the individual nature of her work, and this artistic independence even challenges gender identity in the personae that inhabit her poems.

A transgressive spirit illuminates her poetry, extending beyond matters of gender, to explore questions of personal freedom, sexuality, and desire within a phantasmagorical landscape featuring eccentric figures, mythical creatures, and fabulous flora and fauna. She creates, with her poems, haunting, often dark, scenes or vignettes that can be as intriguing as they are disarming.

Unlike many similar selections that draw from across a poet’s oeuvre, the fifty-nine poems that comprise The Minotaur’s Daughter are not presented chronologically, or divided according to the individual volumes they come from. Rather, the assortment seems to be loosely thematic, with many of the earlier poems coming from more recent collections, and some of the Japanese inspired work from her first book coming later. And, because she sometimes writes companion pieces that appear one or two volumes apart—for example, “Wildsister,” the title poem from her first book, is later answered with “Wildbrother” in her third—here they are presented together. The impact is more powerful this way. It is also evident that Luka appreciates the poetic storytelling potential of triptychs and series, something that may have developed over time, as Sutherland-Smith seems to think that her upcoming fifth collection may include even more.

One of the most developed sequences in this selection begins with an ekphrastic poem inspired by Leonora Carrington’s painting  Portrait of the Late Mrs Partridge. In this piece, the speaker is the artist commissioned to capture the likeness of the wild-haired woman in her odd partridge skirt. He then becomes famous, but is ever haunted by the painting. Four more “Late Mrs Partridge” poems follow, addressing her body, her death, her husband, and finally her wake. Mrs Partridge herself voices all but her husband’s lament from beyond this life, even returning to her own wake, still nursing an internal flame, to drink a toast with the bereaved:

A man sits at the top table, his face,
wrinkled from the tertiary era, with an incalculable expression.
The atmosphere is gloomy, but still audible
is a ubiquitous slurping, gurgling and belching,
as if the whispered stories haven’t had as much power
as unstoppable bodily hunger and thirst.

Leonora Carrington’s eerie, fantastic paintings appear again as the stimulus for five other poems in this translation (not to mention the poet’s own artwork which graces the cover). At times, Luka stands as an observer, as in “And Then They Saw the Minotaur’s Daughter”  where she watches  the “two well-behaved boys—somewhere between childhood and doubt” watching the noble horned woman-creature while spirit-like forms fill the room, Elsewhere she animates and engages directly with the scene, even imagining the central figure outside their fixed setting as in the Mrs Partridge quintet and  “Necromancer,”  a poem after the abstracted, surreal painting of the same name.

The images that dominate Luka’s poetry are drawn from nature—water, flowers, birds, reptiles, and animals—but, as with her human beings, the line between the real and the spiritual is fluid. They inhabit a shifting borderland and there is a pagan, pantheistic sensibility at play. Her animals inspire awe and fear, mythological figures speak, and a woman invites an angelic black bird (Ravenangel) into her bed in a dark sequence of desire, longing, and loss. Hers is a magical world, albeit one that accepts that mystery can be tinged with heaviness and pain. But it is not a relentlessly dark place; rather it exists in a kind of intermediate, and yet, ultimately familiar, space:

It’s incomprehensible, that border of yours
between the feverish night and the healing morning; as if you
.       didn’t recognize
the differences between frenzied hyacinths and tamed hyenas.
.       What you tell me
in the evening, no longer applies in the morning, and vice versa

(from “You and Me When the Cock Crows”)

One might describe the poetry of Eva Luka as akin to richly woven tapestries; the vignettes she crafts are vivid, often disturbing, but they tend to close with a note of promise, that is, with a measure of the resilience that characterizes her work. This quality is evident in The Minotaur’s Daughter. Her striking imagery is well captured in Sutherland-Smith’s translations, while his decision to break with the typical chronological ordering of a “selected poems” collection offers her first English language readers a deeply rewarding introduction to her singular poetic universe.

The Minotaur’s Daughter: Selected Poems by Eva Luka is translated from the Slovak by James Sutherland-Smith and published by Seagull Books.

The words / created their own states of being: “it” by Inger Christensen

It may seem hard to imagine that a single poem (or sequence of poems) extending over 200 pages could become an instant hit upon publication, embraced by critics and the public alike, but that is exactly what happened when Danish poet Inger Christensen released what would become known as her masterwork, it, in 1969. What, you might wonder, does this simple pronoun, “it,” refer to. It might be simpler to ask what “it” does not refer to, for here it is simply the personal pronoun for the impersonal verb “to be”—as in “it is.” Danish, like English, necessitates such a construction, so this epic, moving as it does from the most basic elements, expanding in relation to one another, on into a world formed and named in its process of coming into being, and finally differentiated into individual, experiential existence, is a grand orchestral exploration of the nature of life. But it is also a piece that pulls you into to its rhythms, echoes and images. In Denmark it has become so iconic that sections have been set to music and certain lines from it have entered the daily lexicon.

In her introduction to the 2006 English translation by Susanna Nied, poet Anne Carson views Christensen as a contemporary counterpart of Greek epic poet Hesiod combining elements of his hymn of creation, Theogyny, and his moral guide, Works and Days: “Her det [it] is at once a hymn of praise to reality and a scathing comment on how we make reality what it is. The dazzled and the didactic interfuse in det.” However, the requirement for a personal pronoun for “to be” which does not exist the same way in Greek, means that her cosmogony is also a cosmology—a condition made explicit in the structure and realization of it. In a 1970 article, “In the Beginning was the Flesh” (quoted by Carson but since made available in its entirety in the essay collection The Condition of Secrecy), Christensen talks about some of the thinkers and artists, including linguist Noam Chomsky, whose ideas contributed to the genesis of what she a began to realize would be a creation poem:

Then I started thinking a little about this sentence: “In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word was made flesh,” I thought, what if we could think the unthinkable: that flesh could speak, that one cell could signal to another, so that the whole inarticulate world suddenly partook in the following impossible (to human awareness) experience: In the beginning was the flesh, and the flesh was made words . . .

To maintain a hold on the duality of these two paradoxical conditions, she started to write as if she wasn’t there, “as if it (“I”) were just a bit of flesh talking, a bit of protoplasm, acted as if I were just following along, while a language, a world, took shape.” She called this part, the opening of her work, the time before consciousness, PROLOGOS. However, although it first emerges as a pre-sentence entity, the poems that comprise this section follow a strict mathematical formula. Each line consists of 66 characters (in the original Danish) and there is one 66 line poem, two 33-line poems, three 22-line poems, six 11-line poems, eleven 6-line poems and so on until the final set of sixty-six single-line poems. (The translation is unable to preserve the character count of each line, but does keep the number of lines.) Thus, PROLOGOS sets the cosmological grounding for the poem to follow, moving from the most fundamental elements—beginning, of course, with “It. That’s it. That started it. It is. Goes on. Moves. Beyond. Becomes.”—and moving through abstract form and function, slowly evolving over time. Cosmic. Geological. Natural. Communal. And, finally, individual.

It’s come around. Come to stand on its own, confront itself. To disengage from the mass and stand out. It’s engaged in an evolution, shifted its stance, attained eminently engaging expression. Has pursued itself and accidentally found itself. As a natural result. Has come to stand for itself. And can begin by itself. To experiment with sets of freestanding, free-floating expressions. Occasionally with straight-swimming ones. Dreaming. In another world. To imply itself.

(from PROLOGOS)

The main body of the poem, LOGOS, explores the word as creative principle, or, as Christensen puts it: “The place where things are consciously staged, put into action, into relationship.” It contains three sections, STAGE, ACTION, and TEXT which are each further divided into eight subsections of eight poems each (Christensen, as ever, loves mathematical and musical structure). The inspiration for the subsections came from a work titled Præpositioners teori (A Theory of Prepositions) by Viggo Brøndal, an attempt to classify the words languages use to show relationship. She selected:

eight terms that could stay in a state of flux and at the same time give order to the indistinctiveness that a state of flux necessarily must produce: symmetry, transitivity, continuity, connectivity, variability, extension, integrity, and universality.

And thus, the stage was set, so to speak.

It is perhaps not surprising that the poems that comprise the first section, STAGE, are more varied in structure and form than those we will see later, order comes with time. Words are at work: “The words / created their own states of being / made a world out of ‘world.’” (STAGE, symmetries, 7), but it not a smooth operation. Here the imagery moves between descriptions of natural processes, and the intentional creation of sets, painted and varnished to “represent” mountains and scenery. A tension exists between what is and the way it can be expressed:

And when it’s said that words fly
(like birds that fill an end-
lessly vanishing space)
it’s probably to conceal the fact
that words are not one
with the world they describe.
Words do not have wings.
And neither do they flower nor will
but they take potential flowers
and set them in a garden
which they then set
in an image of a garden
in an image, etc.
The words stay where they are
while the world vanishes
This is a criticism of the way language is used
Because it’s a criticism of the way things are.

(from STAGE, connectiveness, 1)

When “I” becomes part of the dynamic, the relationship between humans and language becomes more complex, and existential questions begin to arise. This first part also introduces a wide variety of images, motifs, and refrains that will recur throughout the work as a whole, providing a coherency to it when read and experienced (as it is meant to be) as a single long poem.

With ACTION and continuing on through TEXT, Christensen introduces more structure—employing both formal and experimental forms— to the poems within each subsection, adopting a consistent line count, verse pattern and rhyme, if relevant, for at least the majority of the eight poems (Susanna Nied’s award-winning translation preserves form and rhyme whenever possible), thus adding an ever-shifting musicality to the poetry. Thematically, the net she casts is wide, taking in the natural world (deserts, forests, gardens), human awareness (self-identity, hope, despair, sex, death), and community engagement (cities, hospitals, factories). Her vision encompasses the personal and the political, always returning to the power of language, the fundamental quality of the word, creating and mediating the world as we know it, alone and in relation to others:

A society can be so stone-hard
That it fuses into a block
A people can be so stone-hard
That life goes into shock

And the heart is all in shadow
And the heart has almost stopped
Till some begin to build
A city as soft as a body

(ACTION, symmetries, 8)

Throughout the ACTION section, one can see the influence of the 1960s on Christensen’s  worldview and some of the imagery she employs. Of course, the more political and economic currents change, the more they stay the same. Poetry is timeless and this vibrant, life-affirming epic aims to reach beyond the limits of time—as does language—and as such, the third part, TEXT, offers poems that begin to speak to passion and meaning in living and loving. The tone, if not strictly prescriptive, carries positive energies. There are no promises that things will be easy or pain-free, but it is worth trying, even in a world that contains darkness and corruption.

After the fourth morning I seek
the lips’ speechless expression

Again and again I stand completely
still so the wheel goes around and
there’s no cause for panic

What you gave my thought is no-
where, with a body that’s a
gift to the earth

What you gave me is pure rest / restlessness

My passion:  to go further

(TEXT, variabilities, 4)

By the close of this section, the “I”, the speaker, has come to an understanding of her interconnectedness with the world, and all that it contains.

Then, finally, comes the EPILOGOS. Beginning and ending with “That’s it” this piece works its way through the many shades and facets of fear we encounter as embodied beings, to slowly embrace words as the very cells of the body, and ultimately find freedom in letting go:

Erotic attempts
when the body
in its blind
sexual
activity
strives to be invisible
the cells are words
when the body
is lost
in it all
and lost
as it is
persists
survives
surpasses
itself
and its limits
the cells are words

(from EPILOGOS)

This is a work that, the deeper you get into it, benefits from longer, sustained reading sessions (especially if inclined, as I tend to be, to move slowly through a collection of poems). Although any one of the poems in this extended, structured sequence could stand on its own, they speak to one another, repeating and re-imagining phrases and imagery—a quality that tends to mark Christensen’s poetry and prose—so that the reading builds its own exhilarating momentum. it is an experience.

it by Inger Christensen is translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied with an Introduction by Anne Carson and published by New Directions.

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.

“somewhere I am suddenly born”: alphabet by Inger Christensen

I write like the wind
that writes with clouds’
tranquil script

or quickly across the sky
in vanishing strokes
as if with swallows

I write like wind
that writes in water
with stylized monotony

or roll with heavy
alphabet of waves
their threads of foam

(from “alphabets exist”)

In her essay “It’s All Words” (included in the collection The Condition of Secrecy), Danish poet Inger Christensen offers a very simple, yet possibly unexpected, statement about the nature of poetry:

But poems aren’t made out of experiences, or out of thoughts, ideas, or musings about anything. Poems are made out of words.

It’s through our listening to the words, to their rhythms and timbres, the entirety of their music, that the meanings in them can be set free.

This particular essay happens to be about her stunning work, alphabet, a book-length sequence of poems in which each piece builds on, remixes, revisits, and expands upon what has come before. It is project that began as process of collecting words and, as she was foraging through the dictionary, she happened upon what would become her form: the Fibonacci sequence.

The concept was introduced to the western world by the medieval Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa (later referred to as Fibonacci by 19th century scientists) in his Book of the Abacus in 1202, although the calculation originated with Indian poetics and mathematics as far back as 200 BC. This sequence in which each successive number is the sum of the two preceding it (0,1,1, 2, 3, 5, 8,13, 21, 44, 65, etc) describes an exponentially increasing mathematical pattern that often occurs in nature as in the spiral growth seen in certain plants.

By combining this formula, or “wordless universal poem of numbers,” with the human-made alphabet, Christensen conceived of a structure (or implied form) for an unfinished sequence of poems. A framework upon which she could weave “a kind of spell”:

A prayer that apricots, doves, melons, and so on could continue to exist in the world. And at the same time, a prayer that atom bombs, hydrogen bombs, dioxin, and so on could disappear.

And herein lies the special charm of alphabet. Fourteen chapters, running from [a] to [n], each containing a single poem or series of poems that total a corresponding number of lines from 1 to 740.

The first poem simply reads: “apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist,” the second: “bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries; / bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen” and so the essential pattern is set, introducing the existential aspect of the everyday matter around us—that which is good and beautiful, that which is toxic, and an element that can either be vital to life or destructive. As the poems become longer and more complex, these early images reappear and the alphabetic aspects are more or less evident. As each chapter expands there is, as in life, an increasing and startling diversity and variety to be found.

life, the air we inhale exists
a lightness in it all, a likeness in it all,
an equation, an open and transferable expression
in it all, and as tree after tree foams up in
early summer, a passion, a passion in it all,
as if in the air’s play with elm keys falling
like mama there existed a simply sketched design,
simple as happiness having plenty of food
and unhappiness none, simple as longing
having plenty of options and suffering none,
simple as the holy lotus is simple
because it is edible, a design as simple as laughter
sketching your face in the air

(“life”)

Christensen is a poet who delights in form, but prefers to set her own rules. Each poem has its own structure, but the use of repetition and recurring motifs contributes to the overall hymn-like quality of this work. She celebrates the beauty of everyday moments, delights in magic of the natural world and, as in her essays, shows an acute concern for the legacy of the atomic bomb and the nuclear fears of the Cold War (this book was first published in Danish in 1981). Her vision moves back and forth between these poles of existence threading words into verse.

Translator Susanna Nied had translated several of Christensen’s volumes of poetry before alphabet was even written (including her masterpiece It), so when this book was published in Danish, the poet sent her a copy. In an interview in Circumference, she describes how she sat down to read it as soon as it arrived. She read straight through and began to translate almost immediately without telling Christensen.

I did eventually show that preliminary alphabet translation to Inger, who pronounced it flot (high praise) and went over it with me, asking excellent questions, musing and reminiscing about how she had written the poems. We had a long tussle over whether the key verb should be “exist/exists” or “is there/are there.” Inger ultimately won, thank goodness, though it took me several months to capitulate. As we worked together during the six weeks I spent in Copenhagen, I recognized the content of alphabet in Inger’s daily life and in her memories. I recognized its cadences and phrases in her speech. Again, invaluable.

She goes on to describe working on the translation for years and, even once it was published she was still thinking of ways it could be improved. Nonetheless, the long working relationship between poet and translator is reflected in the care with which Nied realized the many intertwined and contrasting elements in this unique and engaging work.

I would like to imagine that this is an experimental poem (or sequence of poems) that is not only original, but accessible to those who might fear poetry. Meaning can be found, or revealed to a reader, in a very natural and yet personal manner. Sometimes the defining letter has a major role, other times less so. Her poems take off and move in unexpected directions before returning to call up familiar images in new ways. It’s a truly wonderful work and a fantastic, award-winning translation.

alphabet by Inger Christensen is translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied and published by New Directions.

I accept. I accept it all: Return to My Native Land by Aimé Césaire

At the end of the small hours delicately sprouting handles for the market: the West Indies, hungry, hail-marked with smallpox, blown to bits by alcohol, the West Indies shipwrecked in the mud of this bay, wickedly shipwrecked in the dust of this town.

At the end of the small hours: the last, deceiving sorry scab on the wound of the waters; the martyrs who refuse to bear witness, the fading flowers of blood scattered on the futile wind like the screeches of chattering parrots; an old life’s ingratiating smile, lips apart in deserted anguish, an old wretchedness decomposing in silence beneath the sun; an old silence broken by tepid pustules, the dreadful zero of our reason for living.

The image of his hometown that opens Martinician poet, playwright and politician Aimé Césaire’s Return to My Native Land, is brutal and unforgiving, a bleak portrait of destruction, despair, and disease. With its uncompromising vocabulary, relentless energy, and pointed repetition, a pulsating beat soon settles into the language. It will carry the reader—or listener, for these words beg to be heard—through to the end of this powerful and inspiring epic. Explored through the lens of surrealist poetry, this intensely personal journey to self-affirmation and biting deconstruction of the colonial condition became a rallying cry for the African diaspora. It is also one of the best known French poems of the twentieth century.

Césaire was born in 1913 in the town of Basse-Pointe, Martinique, the second eldest of six children. Although his family were of modest means, they moved to the capital, Fort-de-France, so he might be able to have a good education. It was a wise investment, as Aimé received a scholarship to the Lycée Louis le Grand in Paris. But the move to Europe was a sobering one as the young man came face to face with the fact that although he was a French citizen, the colour of his skin openly set him apart. It would serve as the beginning of an understanding of himself in relation to an African heritage and a legacy of slavery and colonial domination. With fellow students, Léopold Senghor from Senegal and Léon Damas from Guyana, he contributed to the development of the concept of “Negritude” or black consciousness, a revolt against colonial values that not only formed the foundation of an intellectual movement but shapes his celebrated poem.

Return to My Native Land (Cahier d’un retour au pays natal) first appeared in print in 1939, the year Césaire left France and moved back to Martinique with his wife and first child. Over the years it would undergo several revisions before the definitive French language version was published in 1956. The English edition reviewed here is a recent (2024) rerelease of the 1969 translation by John Berger and Anna Bostock, edited and introduced Jamaican writer and scholar Jason Allen-Paisant. In his introduction, Allen-Paisant writes of his personal history and connection to this work, noting that his appreciation grew slowly, ultimately bridging the seventy-seven years age difference between himself and Césaire:

In time, I became aware that this poem inspired movements of liberation and cultural assertion across Africa and its diaspora. But above all, Césaire’s poem was about my body. It was a sound in which my body was at home. This enchanting sonic power (its rhythms suggestive of the drum, of chanting, of ceremony) is hard to strip away. Still today, even now that I understand the meaning of nearly all its words, I connect with this poem through its sound.

Although Césaire found his poetic expression through surrealism, there is a broad narrative arc to Return to My Native Land. The early section speaks of the poverty and decay of his hometown, recalls childhood memories, and acknowledges the pull of Europe as means of escape. Leaving home is seen as the only way one can find oneself. It is to become part of a long history of dislocation:

To leave.
As there are hyena-men and panther-men,
so I shall be a Jew man
a Kaffir man
a Hindu-from-Calcutta-man
a man from Harlem-who-hasn’t-got-the-vote

Famine man, curse man, torture man, you may seize him any moment, beat him, kill him – yes, perfectly fine to kill him – accounting no one, having to offer an excuse to no one

The wandering man, homeless, trying to find a place and meaning , grows increasingly angry and bitter in a world in which his people are either hated, seen as wretched beasts, or loved as novelty and entertainment. At times the anger takes on a wider, universal tone:

Words? We are handling
quarters of the world, we are marrying
delirious continents, we are breaking down
steaming doors,
words, ah yes, words! but
words of fresh blood, words which are
tidal waves and erysipelas
malarias and lavas and bush-fires,
and burning flesh
and burning cities . . .

Know this well:
I never play except at the millennium
I never play except at the Great Fear

Accommodate yourself to me. I won’t
accommodate myself to you!

As much as this is a work that seems to sing off the page, it can be harsh and demanding. The language can be quite brutal and disarming, the images, often dark and visceral, as the poet confronts his own feelings of disgust, guilt, shame, and anger in his response to the world around him and the history that shaped it. But gradually he begins to find a strength and direction in himself and a vision of future he wants to see for his people. Self-acceptance does not lead to weakness but to defiance:

Make me rebellious against all vanity but docile
.           to its genius
like the fist of our extended arm!
Make me the steward of its blood
make me the trustee of its rancour
make me a man of ending
make me a man of beginning
make me a man of harvesting
but also make me a man of sowing

The man who rises as the poem nears its close is one who accepts his biology but refuses to be defined by it. He is called and calls his people to rediscover and reclaim their humanity after centuries of dehumanization and trauma through a reimagined return to their African roots. That is the native land to which he has, in spirit, returned. In body, however, he will remain in the land of his birth and continue to explore these themes through his writing and plays, and put his passions into practice in political life. Aimé Césaire died in 2008 at the age of ninety-two, but Return to My Native Land, remains a critical call to action and profound anti-colonial statement that is now, eighty-five years after its first appearance and almost seventy years after the release of the definitive French edition, more important than ever.

Return to My Native Land by Aimé Césaire is translated from the French by John Berger and Anna Bostock, with an introduction by Jason Allen-Paisant, and published by Penguin Books.

To go where the language goes: Ten Thousand Miles of Clouds and Moons – New Chinese Writing, edited by Zuo Fei, Xiao Yue Shan and Simon Shieh

Grey cloud grasping light,
unrolling the softness of another world
towards the wobbling plane wing; its folds ripple,
someone has scattered seeds in each furrow.

Who’s thinking, underneath the clouds,
how hard it is to restore the life of a flower,
when rain never coincides with favorable winds.

But we have a shred of light.
Today, passing through a mid-gate
as if remembering.

(from “Introspection on a Cloud” by Du Lulu, translated by Dave Haysom)

What exactly does it mean to enter into another world, to open oneself to a landscape at once familiar and strange? That is, one might suggest, one of the functions of literature. But if the map that grants access to that other world with its many artistic and cultural riches is in another language, translation is the key. For the editors of Ten Thousand Miles of Clouds and Moons, a collaboration between Beijing-based Spittoon Literary Magazine, a dual-language journal of contemporary Chinese literature, and Honford Star, the guiding inspiration for this first anthology project is, in keeping with that of the magazine, to seek out and bring into English translation, some of the most original, exquisite, and daring voices—new and established—contributing to the present literary landscape in China.

The introduction lays out the vision that guided their selection of pieces

The work had to be excellent; the writer had to have a point of view that is under-explored in the Anglosphere; there had to be a balance of genders; and the language had to be so special that it has the potential to torture translators. This final aspect came only from our love for the Chinese language—which, like all languages, has a singular soul, a force drawn from its age and its malleability throughout time. The more a writer is able to tap into that soul, the more difficult the piece would inevitably be to translate.

Thus sixteen contributors—eight writers of fiction, six poets, and two essayists—were paired with eighteen translators, to offer readers a journey that covers a wide literary terrain. You will find yourself in a world with a long rich cultural history and traditions, and you will find stories that depict a modern society that Western, English language readers will instantly recognize, with influences drawn from an international well of literary sources. You will find work that pays homage to the China’s past and tales that turn on distinctly futuristic, apocalyptic visions. And surreal, experimental tones alongside traditional Chinese poetic form.

The opening story in the compilation sets the mood perfectly. A piece of dystopian science fiction that  revolves around the fate of the 18th century work considered the greatest of all Chinese novels, “Mass in Dream of the Red Chamber” by Chen Chuncheng (translated by Xiao Yue Shan) is set in the far future—the 4800s—at a time when this great work of literature is not only lost, but any effort to retrieve its contents or storyline are strictly forbidden. There is, at this time, a belief that the text was completed at the peak of the universe’s development, and that all had begun to decline and dissipate since that time. The narrative follows the recorded account of a prisoner, a man born in 1982, who fell into a deep coma for several thousand years, only to miraculously awake and find himself as a specimen in a museum exhibit. He becomes a kind of missing link to the lost masterpiece for a clandestine organization desperate to recreate, as much as possible, the original; its preservation being essential to the continued existence of the universe itself. But that also makes him, and those who come to hear him access his memories of the text, the target of murderous government forces. It is a wonderful meeting of the glory of past achievements and the horrors of a post-apocalyptic totalitarian future, connected with an out-of-time protagonist’s personal recollections of life in the 1990s and 2000s.

The settings of the tales that follow vary, from a contemporary urban environment where bored youth hang out and make trouble, to the account of family history, to a mystical encounter on a mountainside. The energy shifts from story to story, often turning to the unexpected, cracking the fragile veneer of reality. Particularly delightful is the excerpt from Lu Yuan’s novella The Large Moon and Other Affairs (translated by Ana Padilla Fornieles), a piece of weird fiction that reflects, perhaps, in its magical strangeness, the influence of Bruno Schulz whose work the author has translated. As the moon, being pulled toward the earth, grows larger and larger in the sky, the eccentric Mr. Lu struggles with insomnia and troubled dreams. One night, having taken a concoction to aid his sleep, he finds himself carried off on a nocturnal adventure through the skies:

Mr. Lu rose from the valley of dreams and rowed out the window, picturing himself an unthinking mycoplankton or a sea cow, heading back to the Amazon River Delta. Riding upon the clouds and the wind with neither a northeastern wife nor a Vietnamese mistress at his side, the invoices seeking his death yet to arrive, and the murderous plots working their shapeless, invisible night shifts had been temporarily put on hold. There were no cold, mechanical alarms, no greasy company breakfasts, and definitely no covetous relatives, neighbours, acquaintances, or colleagues. The naked Mr. Lu, wearing only a heavy pair of  plastic slippers, flew over the sparse suburban streetlights, bounding towards the corridors of stars spiraling in a snail-shell pattern along the horizon’s towers. A thin sheet of air gently caressed his bulging beer belly, and the city was as far away as a firefly, succumbing to the hallucinatory bird’s eye view of inebriated men.

The two nonfiction pieces add a welcome new dimension to the collection. Hei Tao’s “Three Essays” (translated by Simon Shieh and Irene Chen) paint delicate portraits of southern China, and a lifestyle that is gradually disappearing, while Mao Jian’s “No One Sees the Grasses Growing” is a relatable, and humorous, memoir of her years as a student at East China Normal University in Shanghai in the 1980s and 90s. She recalls a time when students paid less attention to their studies than might have been wise. They were young and in love with a certain literary coolness. Her first degree was in Foreign Languages, but she found it hard to resist the allure of another course of study:

The truth is, in the eighties, it was impossible to resist the passions of the Chinese Department. The notice boards were plastered with adverts promoting literary lectures, and all sorts of clubs and societies adopted the grandiose affectations of belles-lettres, prancing about the center of campus. If someone were to ask you about going corporate after graduation, you’d have to self-reflect on the unrefined impression you must have been giving off. Those years were the golden age of Casanovas, who made names for themselves by proclaiming their undying love for poetry, and any girl who could be moved by Rilke would inevitably enter into a spontaneous fling with one of these campus poets.

It was an era of living away from home, first trips to KFC, young love, and inspiring and unconventional professors. But looking back decades later, now a professor herself at the same institution, she realizes that that time is past, in so many different ways.

Spread out among the prose pieces, are the contributions of the poets, three poems each. This arrangement works very well, offering a change of pace and granting each poet the space to have their unique voice heard. As with the fiction and nonfiction, there is both variety and, of course, precise, evocative imagery that is at once modern, yet with an echo of the long-standing traditions of Chinese verse.

Anthologies can be uneven projects, but this selection of new Chinese writing is strong, varied, and continually fresh and surprising from beginning to end. The contributors range in age, with the youngest in his mid-twenties, the oldest in his mid-sixties. Their work is consistently fresh and vibrant, and the translators all appear to have produced results that feel effortless. It should also be noted that this volume is beautifully presented, with a simple, yet elegant design. This is an endlessly engaging collection for anyone with an interest in contemporary Chinese literature, especially if you are seeking work that challenges expectations.

Ten Thousand Miles of Clouds and Moons: New Chinese Writing is edited by Zuo Fei, Xiao Yue Shan and Simon Shieh, and published by Spittoon Literary Magazine in collaboration with Honford Star