Yuli Gugolev was born in Moscow in 1964. He is a translator and the author of two books of poetry: Polnoe: Sobranie sochineniy (Complete: Collected Works; Moscow: OGI, 2000), and Komandirovochnye predpisaniya (Official Instructions; Moscow: Novoe izdatelstvo, 2006), which won the Moscow Count prize for 2007. In 2008, Gugolev was one of three poets invited to give a series of bilingual readings around the United States sponsored by the NEA and the Poetry Foundation in conjunction with the release of Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology from Dalkey Archives. He works in the regional division of the International Commission of the Red Cross in the Russian Federation.
Pakistan | Short Fiction | Urdu
January, 2010Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-55) is perhaps the best-known Modernist fiction writer in South Asia. His stories won him censure during his lifetime, including five trials for writing obscene material (in each instance he was acquitted). Since his death, his fiction has been widely cited by South Asian writers and his border stories have been used in classrooms to help students come to some understanding of the atrocities that took place during the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. His stories that take place in Bombay offer another view of the times—full of the characters of pulp fiction, they depict a seedy world of opportunity, ambiguous morals, and cosmopolitan energy. His evocative use of the colloquial (and swear words), as well as his often abrupt and ambiguous conclusions, can be seen as attempts to destabilize the prim sense of morality that dominated the subcontinent's social sphere during his lifetime.
Avrom Sutzkever, who died on January 20, 2010 at the age of 96, was the greatest postwar Yiddish poet, a prophetic survivor whose fate paralleled the tragedies and joys of Jews in the twentieth century. Raised in the brief but intense literary flowering of Vilna, he melted the printing plates of the city's most famous press into bullets for the guns of ghetto fighters. He witnessed the ghetto's destruction, helped to salvage the remains of the city's Jewish treasures, testified at Nuremberg, and immigrated to Israel, where he was at the center of rapidly waning high Yiddish literary culture. He founded and edited for some four decades the premier Yiddish literary magazine, Di Goldene Keyt. His poems depict his life not autobiographically, but auto-epically.
The dove of the Ode serves as a spiritual mentor to the boy-poet. The poem ends with the impassioned declaration of a secular-literary neomessianist: "Build, build the temple, build it with the sense of the sun!" It is a measure of the complexity of Sutzkever's Jewish poetics that he calls it a templ (a rarely used word in Yiddish), not a beyt-hamikdash. The third temple will be nothing at all like the first two.
Boris Karloff is the pen name of Dov-Ber Kerler, the polylingual and peripatetic son of the refusenik Yiddish poet Yosef Kerler. The two Kerlers are probably the only father-son team in postwar Yiddish poetry. The younger Kerler is known for his poetic and Yiddishist heterodoxy, his wit, and his openness to young talent. He is a scholar of Yiddish literary history at Indiana University.
Yonia Fain's odyssey is also emblematic of recent Jewish history. Born in Russia in 1914, he fled to Vilna, where he studied art and decided to be a painter. In 1939, the Soviets occupied the city; he fled again to Warsaw but was captured and imprisoned by the Soviets. He escaped to Japan via Siberia in 1941; the Japanese deported him to Shanghai, where he spent the rest of the war. After liberation he went to Mexico City, where he worked on murals with Diego Rivera. He has lived and painted in New York since 1953, publishing two books of poetry (the latest in 2008) and one book of short stories. His preoccupations are bleak and unsparing but offer the possibility of resurrection.
Poetry | Russian | United States
December, 2009Marina Temkina was born in Leningrad in 1948 and emigrated to New York City in 1978. She has published four books of poetry in Russian: Chasti chast' (A Part of A Part), V obratnom napravlenii (In Reverse), Kalancha (Watchtower), and Canto Immigranto. Temkina's first book in English, WHAT DO YOU WANT? (just out from Ugly Duckling Presse) consists of several texts made for installations or as part of handmade artist's books, and two poems translated from Russian (by Vladislav Davidzon and Alexander Stessin) accompanied by installation images and original drawings by the author. Many of her other poems have been translated by Alfred Corn. She is a past recipient of an NEA grant and a Charles H. Revson Fellowship on the Future of New York at Columbia University.
Alexei Khvostenko (1940-2004) deserves a larger, "literary" audience, but his "outsider" status is unlikely to be reversed posthumously and outside the Russian context, requiring an appreciation of him as a multi-artist (poet, singer/bard, collagist/sculptor) and an awareness of his immense popularity as a persona non grata during the exhilarating cultural moment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Soviet status quo was still in place but the liberating/decadent influences of the West had flooded in. Suspector (literally: "he who suspects") is the title poem of Khvostenko's first samizdat book (1965) at the height of the Khruschev "thaw” which was to be shortly followed by the suppression and stagnation of the Brezhnev years. These words were revolutionary, eliciting the disproportionate response from the authorities that made the Russian outsider bards Pop Icons. Khvost (his nickname means "Tail”) lived in Paris after his 1977 expulsion from the USSR.
Additional translations of Bei Dao's poetry by Clayton Eshleman and Lucas Klein may be found in Bookslut (September 2009); Jacket (Issue 38); and Jerome Rothenberg's Poems and Poetics blog (October 2, 2009). A set also will appear in a forthcoming issue of New American Writing.
All of the poems have been translated and published with the permission of the author.
Earlier translations of the four poems presented here appear in Landscape Over Zero (New Directions, 1996; translated by David Hinton and Yanbing Chen).
Novel (excerpts) | Spanish | Venezuela
December, 2009Described by Álvaro Mutis as “Latin America’s best-kept secret,” Juan Sánchez Peláez was born in Altagracia de Orituco in 1922. He attended university in Chile in the 1940s, where he was associated with the radical surrealist group Mandrágora. He lived in Paris in the 1950s, and in 1969, he was a Fellow at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, after which he lived in New York City for two years. He worked as a teacher, journalist, and diplomat in Venezuela, Colombia, France, and the United States. Between 1951 and 1989, he released seven collections of poetry. In 1975, he was awarded Venezuela’s highest literary prize, the Premio Nacional de Literatura. Juan Sánchez Peláez died in Caracas in November of 2003. A definitive edition of his work, Obra poética (Lumen, 2004), was published in Barcelona, Spain after his death.
Pakistan | Short Fiction | Urdu
October, 2009Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-55) is perhaps the best-known Modernist fiction writer in South Asia. His stories won him censure during his lifetime, including five trials for writing obscene material (in each instance he was acquitted). Since his death, his fiction has been widely cited by South Asian writers and his border stories have been used in classrooms to help students come to some understanding of the atrocities that took place during the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. His stories that take place in Bombay offer another view of the times—full of the characters of pulp fiction, they depict a seedy world of opportunity, ambiguous morals, and cosmopolitan energy. His evocative use of the colloquial (and swear words), as well as his often abrupt and ambiguous conclusions, can be seen as attempts to destabilize the prim sense of morality that dominated the subcontinent's social sphere during his lifetime.
Argentina | Novel (excerpt) | Spanish
October, 2009Ursula's Dream is a multi-layered construction, a coded journey that redefines the rules of the epic genre. Any outline of the plot would be misleading, since María Negroni’s method is to question the distinction between dream or vision and historical, fictional, and legendary reality, while refusing to respect the limits of chronology. The medieval histories of Ursula that inspired this thoroughly contemporary novel recount the life of a young woman near the end of the first millennium. Heiress to the throne of Cornwall, in order to escape immediate marriage to a suitor and on the advice of an angel, she lays down three conditions: that her suitor be baptized, that she be supplied with eleven ships and eleven maidens to command them, and that she be given three years to make a pilgrimage to Rome. Ursula—according to the many surviving versions of her life—made the pilgrimage with her companions and was killed before her return. Accounts of her death differ; perhaps she died at the hands of Attila the Hun, perhaps her vengeful suitor pursued and killed her.
On the whole, the novel follows these legendary events, depicting Ursula’s youth at the court of Cornwall and the arrival of the suitor’s messengers, then introducing her companions and narrating the progress of their journey while incorporating the characters—from bishops to minnesingers—that they meet along the way. There are debates, crises, and defections among the women, a plot of sorts. Yet the question of Ursula's death remains unresolved. The larger action of the novel takes place out of time, as Ursula’s Dream continually departs from the linear, through apparitions and presentiments, embodying figures from other realms of reality: some who died before the pilgrimage began and others who were to live—and write—of her in future centuries.
Expressing the polyphony of inner life through female voices, the novel reveals the depth and risk of feminine experience in a world controlled by patriarchal institutions. Its concerns are millenary: the confrontation with death, time, love, historical circumstances, and destiny. In endowing them with a contemporary perspective, Ursula’s Dream rediscovers for its readers the spiritual quest that gives a deeper meaning to the epic gesture.
Arabic | Kuwait | Short Fiction
October, 2009The narrator of the short story “Behind a Latched Window” is a female school assistant in Kuwait. She describes her experiences during Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait (August 2, 1990 to February 26, 1991) from behind her latched window. While trying to calm her elderly mother, the terrified narrator observes the arrival of Iraqi tanks and soldiers in front of her house. Although at first she finds fault with her fellow citizens for not putting up a fight, she herself, despite her conservative social views, finds herself becoming part of a vibrant Kuwaiti resistance movement. The hallucinatory ending may reflect dramatic events outside her window or inside her own mind.
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