Tag: translation

“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.

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.

“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.

People can grow old anywhere: Man in the Holocene by Max Frisch

—only human beings can recognize catastrophe, provided they survive them; Nature recognizes no catastrophes.

—man emerged in the Holocene.

It has been raining for days now, no night passes without thunderstorms and cloudbursts. In fact, Geiser can catalogue more types of thunder than the Encyclopedia which, to be fair, is rather mute on the subject, preferring to describe lightening instead. But, when we meet him, the seventy-four year-old widower is passing yet another stormy night trying to build a pagoda out of crispbread. And worrying the possibility of landslides. The highway through the valley is blocked so the mail bus can’t get through. Periodically the power goes out. To get through, he is intent on keeping his mind active, reading, accumulating facts and endeavouring to remember those details—like mathematical formulas—that have slipped into the dust of his aging memory.

Man in the Holocene by Swiss writer Max Frisch is by turns the funny, unconventional, and bittersweet tale of a man who is waging his own little battle against the dying of the light, and attempting to construct a refuge in a gallery of facts while the storm rages outside his door.

Somewhere a tapping on metal.

He trains his field glasses on the mountainside watching for cracks, and reads up on the meteorological history of the valley he has lived in for the past fourteen years. He  delves into matters of rock formation, studies the measurement of geological time, and records details about dinosaurs. He begins by copying out information, but soon realizes that it is far more efficient to clip out passages of interest from the encyclopedia, the Bible, and other books, and then tape them to the walls of his home. Reproductions of his various cut and paste selections are embedded in the text.

Occasionally Geiser ventures out, umbrella in hand, to examine the state of his garden with its fallen dry stone wall, or once the power goes out for an extended period, to give away all the food in his deepfreeze—“the meat, usually hard as iron, is flabby, and the trout are repulsive to the touch, the sausages soft as slugs.” Only when he returns home, having foisted his thawed goods on his befuddled neighbours, does he remember that he could have at least roasted the meat over the fire in the wood stove.

One is becoming stupid—!

Through a fragmented text, repeated refrains, collected facts, and Geiser’s increasingly muddled meditations, Frisch brings us into the interior world of a truly memorable protagonist. He is a modest, somewhat eccentric figure who, at least since his wife’s death, has tended to keep to himself. Originally from Basel, where his daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren still live, he is an outsider, no matter how long he has lived in the valley. “A valley without through traffic,” as he describes it. A detailed description of the region, its industry, and social history is, if rather nonchalant in tone, not without moments of dry humour:

In the summer there are cranberries, also mushrooms. When it is not raining, the white trails of passenger planes can be seen high in the sky, though one does not hear them. The last murder in the valley—and that only rumored, since it never came to court—happened whole decades ago. Ever since the young men have owned motorcycles, incest has been dying out, and so has sodomy.

Women have had the vote since 1971.

What makes this novella work so well is that it is not simply an assemblage of fragmented passages, repeated refrains, and a collection of assorted facts. It is a well-paced and orchestrated, if crumbling, tragic comedy.  Geiser’s memory may be fading, but the narrative takes us into vivid accounts of the Icelandic landscape he once visited and a youthful attempt to climb the Matterhorn with his brother (a story he’s told so often that even his grandchildren are tired of it). And then there is his possibly ill-advised decision to, due to the blocked highway, head off early one morning with the goal of crossing the mountain pass so he can catch a train to the city. He changes his mind quite late into the adventure and returns home a weakened and diminished soul. A tired, confused man now determined to shut out the world once and for all, but still the reluctant hero of a story that is beautiful, sad, and quite unexpected.

Man in the Holocene by Max Frisch is translated from the German by Geoffrey Skelton and published by Dalkey Archive.

The reversal of the currents: The Lockmaster by Christoph Ransmayr

Five dead. That is the fact the opens and haunts The Lockmaster: A Short Story of Killing by Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr. Five people are killed when a longboat carrying twelve capsized above the Great Falls of the White River when the sluice gates suddenly opened releasing a torrent of water that caused the vessel to lose control and shoot downstream, all while a crowd of festival goers watched from the sidelines. The lockmaster, who had for thirty years, proudly guided boats safely around the falls through a series of locks, made a valiant effort to manually close the gate, and was locally regarded as a hero. But when his son, a hydraulic engineer working on a project in Brazil, receives word of the event, he is not so sure it is an accident.

Set in some indeterminate future time, when sea levels are rising and inland regions are drying out, this novella depicts a world in which water is a precious resource to be defended by force. In many places the tensions over resources have ignited tribal wars or enabled the rise of brutal dictatorships while in Europe the political landscape has been shattered into a vast number of warring microstates each with their own flags, languages, cultures and long list of enemies. The narrator and his sister Mira, as the children of the lockmaster and his foreign wife, grow up in a socially isolated home situated above the falls. The waterways are their playground, but all of their education is conducted over screens, so they rarely engage with other young people. As a result, they develop an intimate relationship, something that is no longer taboo but nonetheless unsettling to imagine, especially because the narrator is still so thoroughly obsessed with Mira who has a rare condition that makes her bones exceptionally fragile.

One year after the incident at the festival, the lockmaster himself disappears. When an angler reports having seen a man in a boat dragged over the crest of the Great Falls, although no remains are found, he assumed to have drowned. At this point, the narrator is still in Brazil, the very tight, globally controlled restrictions surrounding major water projects forbid his departure even for a family emergency. His sister is left to tidy up their father’s affairs (their foreign mother had long since been deported from the small central European microstate in which they lived) and by the time he finally gets home, even his beloved Mira is gone, having married a dyke reeve and moved with him to the rapidly eroding shoreline of the Elbe estuary. Already questioning his father’s innocence in the collapse of the festival longboat, when the narrator reaches his next assignment on the Mekong River, he is certain that his father is both a heartless killer and still alive.

Five or seven or twelve cannot have made any difference to him—after all, the precise number of their victims did not bother the bomb planters and well poisoners who were, in those times, bent on drawing attention to themselves and their grand ideas in countries, tribal areas and microstates. Deaths meant fear; and fear meant open ears and open eyes. No one could fail to hear; no one could fail to see what a murderer did, even if he denied his deed.

With this crime, my father clearly wanted to defy the course of time and take himself back to overweening dreams where a lockmaster had been more, much more and more influential than the curator of an open-air museum on the White River could ever be.

The world of conflict, armies, mercenaries, and rebels within which the narrator moves in his work which has taken him to so many of the earth’s great rivers, colours his understanding of the tragic event at the Great Falls and his father’s presumed role in it. He vows to hunt him down and kill him.

This is a more focused effort than Ransmayr’s more sweeping work like Atlas of an Anxious Man, but it does highlight his broad global perspective and ability to evoke a vivid natural—or unnatural—atmosphere as his protagonist navigates the world of his present and remembered past. But the narrator is not a readily sympathetic character. He continually refers to his father as a “man of the past,” but his own refusal to accept that his fragile sister has had the audacity to marry someone else and not sit at the Great Falls waiting for him while he travelled the world, demonstrates that he too is caught in his own self-centred and, to be honest, somewhat disturbing incestuous longings. This is, of course, a fable. A dark speculative folktale. Neither the characters nor the political and environmental dimensions are fully fleshed out—but in such a fractured and volatile world, the protagonist’s insularity would be an expected coping mechanism. As such, the oddly discomfiting narrator is not only plausible, but he adds a suitably unnerving tone to the gloomy undercurrents already driving his story. And Ransmayr’s trademark spare, poetic prose adds a further chilled quality to the work.

The Lockmaster: A Short Story of Killing by Christoph Ransmayr is translated from the German by Simon Pare and published by Seagull Books.

There be monsters: Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears by László Földényi

Humans have become alienated from their own history, as they are from their own cosmic nature.
– “Mass and Spirit”

The title is irresistible. It is impossible to read it and not wonder: what is this book about? In truth, it is about many things, or rather, many ideas, but in essence they can all be understood as variations on a dichotomous theme: darkness and light. Pivotal to these inquiries is the lasting impact of post-Enlightenment thinking on a traditional understanding of metaphysics, that is, questions of being and the nature of reality. Where once religion, or belief in God, gods, or some transcendent quality of existence could be turned to in times of darkness, the Enlightenment heralded a belief in “the omnipotence of reason that illuminates all phenomena.” Yet, as László Földenyi posits in this wide-ranging collection of essays, adroitly translated by Ottilie Muzlet, darkness and light (or other similar opposites or variants) are inextricably linked—one cannot be imagined or understood without the other—but in our secularized modern age, we, in our restricted, nondivine omnipotence can find ourselves confronting our own fragility in situations where reason alone may not seem like enough to fall back on. What then?

In his explorations of this conundrum, Földenyi, a Hungarian critic, essayist and professor of art based in Budapest, entertains the ideas, experiences and tribulations of a broad cast of thinkers, writers, poets, artists, and literary figures including Elias Canetti, Heinrich von Kleist, Caspar David Friedrich, Nietzsche, Novalis, Marquis de Sade, Antonin Artaud, and many more. And, of course, the protagonists of the evocatively titled eponymous essay: Dostoyevsky and Hegel. As he examines the manner in which rationalism, and within it a constrained idea of freedom and existence, has been met by those who chafed against its confines to a greater or lesser extent, Hegel is often assigned to the role of advocate for the primacy of logic and reason—not necessarily always fairly—so he makes a regular appearance in a number of pieces. But his main starring role is as philosophical foil to a certain Russian writer exiled to Siberia.

“Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts in Tears” is a vivid exercise in imagination which takes us to Semipalatinsk in southern Siberia where Dostoyevsky was sent in 1854, to serve a period of military service following four years of forced labour. In this barren, desert environment, he lived in a sparely furnished room and made friends with the young local prosecutor, Aleksander Yegorovich Vrangel, with whom he recited poetry, discussed religion, most critically, studied the books that Vrangel was able to secure for him. There is some reason to believe that one of the authors they read together was Hegel, possibly his lectures on the philosophy of world history, either ordered from Germany or in the form of the book in which they had been gathered and published. Földényi enthusiastically admits that he is taking liberties with his assumptions, but the notion is too tempting to resist.

Dostoyevsky emerged from his years of imprisonment and exile, as a man and writer whose experience with hardship and isolation had ignited a metaphysical drive that he would go on to channel against nineteenth century Europe’s adherence to utilitarianism and rationality through his protagonists. For Hegel, history, despite its messiness and violence,  could only be properly understood as the logical, progressive march of reason. That which fails to conform—at least in terms a European mind might understand, as such Africa and Siberia—is relegated to stand outside of the historical process and to be worth no further consideration.

If the infinite and the transcendent become lost behind the finite things, then it is no longer possible to speak of freedom. God, subjugated to rationality, is not the God of freedom, but of politics, conquest, and colonization. This is the secular religion of the God of the modern age. And history—looking at it from a Hegelian point of view—is the history of secularization. Dostoyevsky might have justifiably felt that Hegel was not just ushering Siberia (and himself with it) out the door; he was trying to convince, in missionary-like fashion, all humanity to accept as historical only that which the censorship of rationality admitted as such.

In envisioning an intellectual clash between the ideals represented by Hegel, and Dostoyevsky’s own experience of life in a place deemed separate from history, under conditions he would never have known had he not been forced to leave Europe, Földényi sees the ground for the openly acknowledged spiritual transformation that the Russian underwent in Siberia, and the writer he would become.

This may be the most passionate essay in the collection, but many of the smaller, quieter pieces turn on equally intriguing ideas in an open, speculative manner. He writes, for example, about happiness and melancholy, fear and freedom, sleep and dreams. Often his intention is to push beyond a simple dichotomy, at other times he wishes to dig down into an idea through the examination of the lives and ideas of one or more individual who found themselves confronting the limitations imposed by a society dedicated to the furthering of rational ideals. Case in point, in the also cleverly titled “Kleist Dies and Dies and Dies,” Földényi unwinds Kleist’s trajectory from an enthusiastic supporter of Enlightenment ideas through an early “Kantian crisis” which shattered his faith that Truth was knowable, to an act—possibly inspired in part by Goethe’s Werther—that eclipsed any of his writing: his carefully orchestrated double suicide with Henriette Vogel on November 21, 1811.

It bears repeating: the death of Kleist is the most thoroughly documented event of his entire life. The French-Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran justifiably states that it is impossible to read even one line of Kleist without thinking of how he put an end to his own life. His suicide preceded, as it were, his life’s work.

It is tempting to consider, and Földényi obliges, how Kleist’s embrace of death, or the act of dying, might be an answer to the loss he felt in an uncertain world.

The pieces in this collection were published in their original form (some have been substantially revised) between 1990 and 2015. They are not presented chronologically, nor can they be read as one cohesive argument, not least due to the fact that times, and presumably their author’s views, change. But it is telling that the volume opens and closes with essays addressed to Elias Canetti: the first, “Mass and Spirit” written in honour of his ninetieth birth anniversary, the latter, “A Capacity for Amazement,” an examination of his seminal Crowds and Power, fifty years after its original publication in 1960. His examination of Canetti’s exploration of the universal crowd and its ambiguous role in human history is measured, at least for Földényi, against Hegel’s understanding of universal freedom as a rational ideal. For Canetti, the crowd is more than a gathering of humans, it transcends that simple notion to incorporate all natural phenomena, it is cosmic and inherently irrational. Although he may or may not be onside with all the implications of Canetti’s singular arguments, Földényi clearly admires his metaphysical energy and, as the title suggests, his capacity for amazement.

The best essays wrestle with ideas, challenge assumptions, and invite the reader to entertain possibilities, debate with them or, even better, be inspired to read further. Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel is filled with references to so many writers and works that it is impossible not to stop to look someone or something up, or pull a volume off one’s shelves. It encourages side trips down rabbit holes. And that is what is so rewarding about spending time with László Földényi and the fascinating company he keeps.

Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears by László Földényi is translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet and published by Yale University Press.

Who holds the truth? Sister Deborah by Scholastique Mukasonga

The latest work from Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga, to be released in English translation, is a novella that takes us back to 1930s Rwanda when the small, landlocked east African country was under the administrative control of Belgian authorities and the religious influence of the Catholic church. With the arrival of a group of black American evangelists, life in a small community faces unprecedented challenges to both the externally enforced regulations and the traditional norms of social conduct. When the local chief grants them permission to establish their mission on a hillside long associated with pagan rituals of the past, rumours spread and curiosity is aroused by their seemingly strange services and the enigmatic prophetess who dances, babbles in strange tongues, and appears to have miraculous healing powers. Women, in particular, are drawn to her, while the village men tend to regard her and her odd companions with distrust.

Meanwhile, the narrator of this tale, Ikirezi, is a sickly young girl mysteriously prone to endless maladies. Suspicious of the white man’s medicine, her mother applies all of the home remedies she can think—all to no avail. Ikirezi’s illnesses only grow worse. There is, she decides, but one solution:

“Tomorrow we’ll go to see Sister Deborah, she’ll be able to cure you. Tomorrow we’ll go to Niyabikenke, to the mission of the black padri.” If my father noticed our travel preparations, he exploded in fury. “You are not going to that devil’s mission. I forbid it! Didn’t you hear what our real padri said about it? They’re sorcerers from a land called America, a country that might not even exist because it’s the land of the dead, the land of the damned. They have not been baptized with good holy water. And they are black—all the real padri are white. I forbid you to drag my daughter there and offer her to the demon hiding in the head and belly of that witch you call Deborah. You can go to the devil if you like but spare my daughter.”

Ikirezi, we will later learn, is not only strengthened physically and intellectually as result of her encounters with the foreign faith healer, but she goes on to study abroad and become an anthropologist. This accounts, perhaps, for the  tone of the of the extended first section of Sister Deborah which  often relies on varying details, reports, and speculation about what might or might not have happened, resembling at times a sort of gathering and integration of field data. The narrative extends beyond that of a child’s experience, describing the conditions surrounding the settlement of the American missionaries, the black pastor’s talk of the impending return of the Savior to this very location in the heart of Africa, and Sister Deborah’s particular appeal to the womenfolk, some of whom come to understand her to be implying that the Savior will likely be a black woman who will descend from the clouds bearing a special seed that will grow and flourish to feed their families without back breaking labour, thus releasing them from the constraints imposed on them by their husbands and economic traditions. Needless to say, the men of the community, the church, and the administrative powers are unsettled by the disruptions and feminine empowerment that arises in the wake of Sister Deborah’s influence. A series of events that lead to the expulsion of the Americans and the disappearance, or possible death of the prophetess are shrouded in confusion and conflicting accounts.

A brief second part considers the possible fate of Sister Deborah and allows Ikirezi to explain how she came to be a professor based in Washington, DC, dedicated to the study of her people but oddly aware of the hands of Sister Deborah somehow guiding her. She senses she has to follow a path laid out for her. Research leads her to a shantytown in Nairobi where she finds the faith healer, now known as Mama Nganga, and turns the narrative over to her. Now, the woman at the heart of this tale, has an opportunity to tell, on her own terms, the story of her life, reaching back into her own childhood in America and forward, through the formation of the missionary project, the long journey to Rwanda, her mystical awakening, and beyond the turmoil in Niyabikenke, to the life and identity she has created for herself in Kenya.

Her own spiritual evolution, as she describes it, was filled with mystery, even as she reflects on it years later. Early on, for example, when the  mission pastor suggests that the otherworldly sounds she makes when she falls into a trance may come from an African dialect, to be understood as a sign that all the black peoples will be liberated and saved from the coming  biblical Apocalypse, she has her private interpretation:

As for me, I was prey to a strange thought that I didn’t dare confess to Reverend Marcus. It seemed to me that the spirit speaking through my mouth was not the Holy Spirit of the pastors, who was always trailing behind the Father and Son. For one thing, it spoke neither Hebrew nor Greek nor Latin, but perhaps indeed, as Marcus believed, an African tongue. The spirit that had chosen me as medium could only be an African spirit, perhaps the spirit of the black woman who had visited me during my trance. I made prayers to her; I diverted toward her the worship that the pastor celebrated for the Savior. I preciously guarded that secret in the deepest recesses of my heart.

Sister Deborah Nganga’s account is ultimately one without clear resolution. Forces run through it that neither she nor the narrator, who also feels their presence, can fully articulate. Ikirezi’s later return to Nairobi to follow up on the fate of the former faith healer is again, like the opening section, guided by rumour, informants, and speculation. This is a book that continually asks questions about truth and memory, in the context of oral history, recorded biography, and academic research. There are no firm answers: Mukasonga allows uncertainty to linger in this story that explores the challenges and varying fates experienced by African women in times of shifting social and political conditions, yet keeps the spirit—or spirits—alive.

Sister Deborah by Scholastique Mukasonga is translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti and published by Archipelago Books.

On through the dark forest: Celebration by Damir Karakaš

This taut novella opens in 1945. Above a little village, Mijo lies hidden in the woods, looking down at he house where his wife and sons live. In his yellow-brown uniform he must stay out of sight. The war is over and the soldiers of the Nazi-allied Ustaša force are now on the run or in hiding. He hopes against hope that he will someday be able to return to the little family he left behind when he was recruited into what would become an infamously brutal campaign:

He lay on the blanket that had over the last days soaked up the smell of rotten leaves and damp earth: under his thick brows he spent most of his time watching the village, then the mixed canopy above his head, noticing all the while how the colors were fading. Sometimes out of the corner of his eye he’d peek at the gleaming orb of the sun, gauging the time of day; never had time passed more slowly: he kept lying there in that one spot, sensing in his nose the sharp odor of melting resin, and all that was moving around him began to bother him: the sun, the wind, the birds that often flew low with their winged sounds over the forest.

Celebration, set in the mountainous region of Lika in central Croatia, explores the harsh realities that can lead poor, under educated individuals to embrace an ideology that appears to offer something they need and become involved in actions that they do not fully understand. There is no question that Mijo is hardened and isolated by his experiences, but in this, our initial encounter with him in the first chapter of this book, his emotions swing between anger and an idealized hope that he will be able to avoid the fate that seems almost all but inevitable.

Croatian author Damir Karakaš does not provide an elaborate historical context for the events reflected in the four short chapters that comprise Celebration, preferring to allow references to slip in through the thoughts, comments and actions of his characters.   However, in an interview for Center for the Art of Translation, he describes the people of Lika as predominantly peasant farmers and herders who were historically expected to be ready to go to war at a moment’s notice for a series of occupying forces over the years:

Croatia has always been governed by powers who exploited it. In the First World War, Croats from Lika fought, wearing the uniform of the Austro-Hungarian army, on the side of the Central Powers, against the forces of the Entente. Serbia, on the other hand, was part of the Entente, so when the Central Powers lost the war, the Yugoslav peoples were organized in a new country that the Croats were not pleased about. Croats referred to the new country as a “dungeon of peoples.” And I have to say that the Serbs did dominate the new country. Most of the generals in the army were Serbs, the leaders in the cities were also Serbs, and the government treated Croats very poorly, especially in Lika, with constant harassment, steep taxes, villagers were not allowed to keep dogs, there were even times when women were required to pay for the bullet that the constables used to kill their husbands.

This environment proved to be ideal for fertilization of the seeds of the kind of extremism promoted by the ultranationalist organization the Ustaša. With the onset of the Second World War, under the patronage of Hitler, the independent state of Croatia was formed, while the Ustaša leadership embraced Nazi ideology with a murderous enthusiasm that even shocked the German dictator himself. In Lika, recruitment was conducted through celebrations held in rural communities with plenty of free food, a festive atmosphere, and simple promises that young men living in poverty without even a pair of decent shoes would see as a chance to secure a future for their families.

After introducing Mijo, so close but unable to return to the life he longs for, Karakaš takes us back in time to explore how it is that he came to find himself in this uncertain state. He does so in tight chapters that each read like a stand-alone story—intense, densely detailed scenes that follow the characters closely, through rural landscapes of farms, forests, meadows, and mountains, over the course of no more than a day or two. In “Dogs,” dated 1935, Mijo is still living with his parents on their small farm. When a constable is attacked by a dog, the officials announce that no one is allowed to own a dog any longer. It is Mijo’s responsibility to take their poor hound into the woods to meet his fate. “Celebration,” dated 1941, follows Mijo, his girlfriend Drenka, and her brother Rude, as they make their way to the nearest larger town where a celebration is being held. The walk takes hours as they make their way through forests, meadows, and over hills. Rude, already sporting army boots, impatiently hurries them along and fretting that they will be late. The final chapter, “Father,” dated 1928, focuses on Mijo’s impoverished father struggling to imagine how he can possibly provide for his wife, four children and aging father. There is a longstanding tradition that will at least relieve him of one of those mouths to feed. It plays out in this chapter, as Mijo tags along filled with all the joy that only a child can find in the wonders of nature, oblivious to what lies ahead.

This is a small, slender volume, easily read in an afternoon, and inviting a reread to open up the references woven into what is an intensely detailed, yet spare, text. Karakaš evokes a strong sense of place, the harshness of the environment, the vast distances regularly travelled, dense woods, howling wolves, and the grinding poverty of the people. But with his characters, he  zeroes in on gestures, expressions, fragments of conversations. He says: “I am all for editing, I tighten my writing a lot, and maintain Chekhov’s principle that a writer should be frugal with words and generous in thoughts.” The multigenerational portrait he sketches in this powerful novella offers sharp insight into the formation of a soldier like Mijo from the perspective of the poor rural population he comes from—and naively imagines he might return to. It is a story applicable beyond this specific place and time, and one that only further heightens the tragedy of war.

Celebration by Damir Karakaš is translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać and published by Two Lines Press.