Category: Okla Elliott

Okla Elliott Interviews Christopher Higgs (and Marvin K. Mooney)

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine


I first met Christopher Higgs at Ohio State University’s MFA program, where we both studied, and where we became friends. I often say that the history of literature is a history of friendships — but friendships are as much about debating each other and testing each other’s theories as they are about support. Over the years, Chris and I have certainly debated many issues and have found as many differences as we have agreements, but I can say that I have rarely met a more capable or more intelligent artist.

It was therefore with something like brotherly pride that I asked Chris for an interview to help promote his debut novel, The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney. As it turns out, he was also able to provide me with an interview with the novel’s titular character. Both interviews are included below.

I won’t waste a lot of time here talking about The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney, except to say that it is a romp in the sand, a scream in the dark, and an upthrust middle finger with a Cap’n Crunch decoder ring on it—and that it is a wonderful and strange creation.


INTERVIEW WITH MARVIN K. MOONEY

Okla Elliott: Your complete works have recently been released under the unsurprising title The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney. How complete is the book in terms of your body of work? And in what capacity did you collaborate with Chris Higgs on the project? There seems to be some confusion over what role he played, if any, in the effort. Could you elaborate please?

Marvin K. Mooney: Ain’t nobody collaborating. Chris Higgs or Christopher Higgs or Chrissy Higgs, whatever that character wants to call himself, had no hand in creating my masterpiece. He merely came along and slapped his big fat name across the otherwise beautiful cover, figuring I needed a bump of ethos or some such, which, incidentally, I did not need. But to answer your other question re: the comprehensiveness of the book vis-à-vis my oeuvre, I’d be remiss to omit the way Higgs treated me like Lish treated Carver, axing maybe 200 pages from my original manuscript, give or take. All for the good of marketability, whatever that means.  Now if you call that collaboration, then you and I are working from a different definition of the word.

OE: Chapter 5 of your book uses the number 5 as an organizing principle for the universe, at times quite arbitrarily and playfully. I am reminded of Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos, which has at its center the argument that quote traditional unquote narratives arbitrarily select certain events in order to create the illusion of order or purpose in the world (or at least in human life). Are you picking an obviously arbitrary organizational principle in Chapter 5 as an example of how all narratives do this? Or do you just like the number 5? Or both?

MKM: The number five was mother’s favorite number.  When I was a little boy she wouldn’t read me stories at nighttime. Instead, she would wake me up every morning and read to me from page five of various books from her huge secret library. I was never allowed to touch her books or look through her collection.  I never knew the titles of the books, and she never gave me any context, so I could never understand what she was reading to me. Those are some of my favorite memories.

OE: Your book includes many references to cultural theorists, philosophers, painters, and so forth. This tactic is largely seen as a no-no in contemporary fiction. Two questions then: 1) Why is there this turf war among the humanities in the US? 2) Why is it that something authors as wide-ranging as Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, Bertolt Brecht, Laurence Stern, James Joyce, Umberto Eco, etceteraetcetera have done is currently considered bad form in US fiction writing?

MKM: For the most part, contemporary American fiction is mediocre, conservative, backward thinking, and yawn-inducing.  You go to the bookshop and you see two kinds of books: the mega-blockbusters and the midlist crap. Neither of those categories are gonna embrace polyglot creativity because neither of them are Art. The former is entertainment and the latter is a particular kind of garbage: products of what I call the midlist feedback loop. Entertainment don’t need creativity because entertainment exists to reinforce prejudice. Art requires creativity because Art exists to challenge prejudice. The midlist feedback loop exists to secure academic positions in midlist production factories, i.e. MFA programs.

OE: Do you have plans to write another book any time soon?

MKM: No. Literature is now an exhausted medium.


INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTOPHER HIGGS

Okla Elliott: Okay, you have pointed out elsewhere that Kant teaches us that form is where aesthetic appreciation comes from, and therefore, you argue, content doesn’t matter. If this is the case, then why not use “traditional” content? If it truly doesn’t matter, then why do you insist on both nontraditional form and content? Could you write an avant-garde soap opera?

Christopher Higgs: These are very good questions. Very tricky. They’ve forced me to write and rewrite my response three or four times now. To address your second question first: sure, I could write an avant-garde soap opera. Ryan Trecartin has made a career of it, and to some degree David Lynch accomplished it with Twin Peaks. Like the experimental novel, the experimental soap opera would need to pose a question, such as: how far can we push the legible boundaries of this form. You see, it is a matter of intensities: I dare not say dialectic – goddamn Hegel and his ruinous ways! – wherein what constitutes the category of soap opera must retain enough integrity for it to be legible as a soap opera. You can’t just go all nutscape and expect the result to be identifiable. If your intention is to remain within the prescribed category of soap opera, you must think Derrida not Heidegger. In other words, you must think deconstruction not destruction.

With regard to your first question, I have to call your term “nontraditional content” into question. I think it’s problematic because it assumes that the novel form has traditional content, which doesn’t seem accurate to me. (Not to mention my inclination to challenge the notion of a singular tradition from which the individual talent engages, a la T.S. Eliot or whatever.) That’s why I always put the focus on form: the content in my book is the same content as is in the work of Johnny Updike, Phil Roth, Stephen King, Dan Brown, you name it. Plot, character, setting, theme, all those elements of content, are always already the same. What changes is the form, the arrangement, the way that redundant content is presented.  All writers are using the same content because all writers are using a common language.  In English, for example, we all have the same databank of words at our disposable.  What differentiates writers is the level of their ability or inability to organize that databank of words in different ways.  If you experience my arrangement of our common content as “nontraditional” then I would take that as an enormous compliment because what you are in effect saying is that my arrangement has excited the free play of your imagination and understanding, therefore bringing it back to Kant.

OE: Your book includes many references to cultural theorists, philosophers, painters, and so forth. This tactic is largely seen as a no-no in contemporary fiction. Two questions then: 1) Why is there this turf war among the humanities in the US? 2) Why is it that something authors as wide-ranging as Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, Bertolt Brecht, Laurence Stern, James Joyce, Umberto Eco, etceteraetcetera have done is currently considered bad form in US fiction writing?

CH: I think the kind of assemblage I’m doing is antithetical to mainstream contemporary American fiction because it rejects the prevailing wisdom: the myth of mimesis, the falsity of verisimilitude, the idea that truth is containable; instead, what I’m doing exposes the vast interconnectivity of various artistic and intellectual endeavors, which is especially threatening to those groups who pride themselves on specialization, consolidation, and exclusion. In this way, it takes power away from central authority (i.e. those false arbiters of what makes “good fiction”), which will inevitably lead to big frowning from those goons. Look at that list of venerable writers you’ve offered, Brecht, Sterne, Joyce, they have in common not only an inclination for interdisciplinary cross-pollination, but also an affinity for exploring the connectivity of proliferating difference. That’s dangerous shit. Power likes homogeny, not heterogeneity. Power likes clear distinctions. You start making connections outside of your designated field, breaking down borders, challenging signifiers, and all of a sudden you’re an outlaw. All of a sudden you’re banished from the tribe. Most people value their membership in the tribe too much to go challenging the conventions. Me? Not so much.

OE: The number five was mother’s favorite number. When I was a little boy she wouldn’t read me stories at nighttime. Instead, she would wake me up every morning and read to me from page five of various books from her huge secret library. I was never allowed to touch her books or look through her collection. I never knew the titles of the books, and she never gave me any context, so I could never understand what she was reading to me. Those are some of my favorite memories.

CH: Chapter Five was written for our mutual friend, Sara McKinnon, who had the idea to start an online journal dedicated to creative nonfiction, which she was gonna call FIVE. She asked me to give her something for it, but I didn’t really have anything appropriate so basically I Googled the word “five” and started seeing all these crazy associations, which I began jotting down.  Next thing you know, I had all these various factoids. So I did a little arranging and voila.

OE: What should young writers today study or do in order to improve their craft?

CH: Become intellectually polyamorous, cultivate an insatiable curiosity for knowledge and experience in as many different guises as you possibly can, question everything, always challenge, learn that failure and rejection are positive things, subscribe to at least three non-literary magazines in three completely different fields (for me, right now, it’s National Geographic, Juxtapose, and Wine Enthusiast – last year it was Seed, Esquire, and Art in America), forget politics: it has nothing to do with you and any time or energy you invest in it is wasted time and energy you could be using productively to learn and experience and create, do not choose sides, do not agree or disagree, embrace contradiction, watch cinema from as many different countries and time periods as you possibly can, seek out unclassifiable music, spend time in unfamiliar locations, expose yourself to new activities, go to the opera, go to the ballet, go to the planetarium, travel a lot, observe as much as you can, pay attention to the way people talk and the way people listen, eat strange food, watch at least one sporting event but instead of thinking about it as entertainment think about it as narrative, ABR = Always Be Researching, carry a notebook and pen at all times, remember it is more important to ask questions than give or receive answers, seek to open up and never close down, seek to seek, do not seek to find, fall in love with language, think obsessively about language, about words, about sentences, about paragraphs, about the sound of words, the weight of words, the shape of words, the look of words, the feel of words, the placement of words, and most importantly be your biggest advocate, think of yourself as a genius, think of yourself as an artist, think of yourself as a creator, do not despair, do not listen to criticism, do not believe naysayers, they are wrong, you are right, they are death and you are life, they destroy and you create, the world needs what you have to say.

OE: What new projects are you working on? How is the scholarly work you’re pursuing informing your creative work, or vice versa? In short, what can fans expect from Chris Higgs in the coming years?

CH: There’s certainly a reciprocal relationship, a kind of feedback loop, between my scholarly and creative work, where each plays off and builds upon the other. In terms of the scholarly stuff, I’m writing and thinking a lot about new ways to discuss and understand experimental writing, mapping locations of experimental intensities, ‘pataphysics, the posthuman, etcetera. In terms of creative stuff, I’m working on a top-secret experimental collaboration with two of the most significant contemporary American writers living today, which will be groundbreaking and will blow heads clean off. Individually, I’m slowly working on a nonfiction book about the history of American experimental literature, and I’m also in the beginning stages of a new novel, which I plan to work on heavily this summer.

Book Review of David R. Slavitt’s Re Verse

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Re Verse: Essays on Poetry and Poets
David R. Slavitt
Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0-8101-2084-4


David Slavitt´s Re Verse: Essays on Poetry and Poets is at once a meditation on his long and varied career, an investigation into the nature of poetry, and an homage to some of America´s finest (if not always most celebrated) poets. Slavitt has studied with or been friends with many of the biggest names in writing and publishing in the second half of the twentieth century, and for that intimate vantage point alone, this collection of essays is a must-have for every academic library, every scholar and student of American literature, and every would-be poet.

Re Verse immediately strikes the reader as well suited as a supporting text to a poetry workshop. In the reworking (with present-day, memoir-like commentary) of his Master´s Essay on Dudley Fitts (the original essay having been written for his MA at Columbia), Slavitt shows a profound understanding of how poetry works and how we learn to become poets. Slavitt writes: “You learn to write defensively, as you learn to drive defensively, always looking out for sudden wacky things those with whom you share the road are likely to do. But there is a limit beyond which caution becomes anxiety so that you can´t even get into the car.” How true. But this essay offers more than just wise, quotable catch phrases. It, and the collection as a whole, “gives the reader the tools with which to construct a canon out of the labor of thought and reading,” as Mark Rudman´s blurb on the book´s jacket claims.

Its usefulness is therefore not limited to the workshop environment, but would also serve well as a warmer companion text in advanced and intermediate American Literature courses. Daniel Mark Epstein writes of Re Verse: “David Slavitt has known some of the finest poets and teachers of the twentieth century and writes about them with delightful humor and enthusiasm. His tone is a unique blend of fireside storytelling, literary analysis, and heartfelt reflection.” In place of a jargon-laden text destined to make students who once loved literature switch their major to pre-law, Re Verse will deepen the understanding and appreciation literature fans bring to the classroom, while at the same time instructing. But Re Verse is more than mere textbook. These are personal essays as much as they are essays on literature.

It would be a lapse not to mention Slavitt´s ponderings on his own career in Re Verse. Slavitt has published some eighty-odd books in his career. He has been included in numerous anthologies (Best American, Norton, et cetera), and he has made millions writing under pseudonyms, while at the same time being respected as one of the premier literary translators. By all respects, he has had an astonishing career. Yet we find references to himself as a “minor” author, or lines such as this one, from his essay on Winfield Townley Scott, occasioned by an article Slavitt read in TLS in which Scott is dismissed as minor: “The word that stuck with me, though, was ‘minor,´ which hurt as much as anything else because it is probably true, and I have been thinking about what that means.”

There is also an undercurrent of investigating what it means to be Jewish that intermittently pops up in Re Verse. It does not define or restrict the essays in any way, but it is there. Offhanded remarks such as the claim that comedy is to the Jewish people what the Blues are to African-Americans, or the notion of the Jew as the sayer of the unspeakable (e.g. Freud speaking candidly of sex in an age that repressed sexuality, or Marx pointing out class struggles when it was uncouth to mention such things in polite company).

Slavitt can be scathing and dismissive, and often the most enjoyable pieces in this collection are ones in which he is saying what no one else will. In his essay on (against?) Harold Bloom, Slavitt aptly points out much of Bloom´s intellectual posturing. The following passage shows Slavitt´s deft, harsh dismissal of Bloom:

“His [Bloom´s] bullying classroom habits are not easy to put aside, however, and addressing us common readers he can be abruptly confrontational. I cannot otherwise explain why he would write: “My late friend Paul de Man liked to analogize the solitude of each literary text and each human death, and analogy I once protested. I had suggested to him that the more ironic trope would be to analogize each human birth to the coming into being of a poem…I did not win that critical argument because I could not persuade him of the larger human analogue; he preferred the dialectical authority of the more Heideggerian irony.’

This is pure Bloomishness, graceless, pretentious, and absurd” (p. 92).

Slavitt goes on to point out that Bloom´s “late friend” was a Nazi collaborator and that Bloom should not have been so concerned with not convincing de Man, but rather concerned that he, “in the intricacy of the engagement, […] neglected to call him a fucking collaborator, slap his face, and then do [his] best to see that he got fired.” Bloom mentions de Man with warm regard, failing to so much as acknowledge the disgrace de Man heaped upon Yale (and humanity), in a typically defiant gesture, “a show of Bloom´s refusal to be intimidated by mere evidence.”

From his heartbreaking, elegiac essay on Thomas McAfee to his friendly essay on Fred Chappell (“Ole Fred”) to his investigations into the nature and uses of depression, or his illuminations on Robert Penn Warren (under whom Slavitt studied at Yale), Re Verse never panders and never obfuscates for the sake of sounding smarter than it is. This collection is the real thing, a rare find, and probably the best book about poetry published in years.


–Okla Elliott


[The above review originally appeared in Pedestal Magazine.]

Sunday Poetry Series

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A Hot Minute

by Okla Elliott

-for S.P.

What a strange phrase.
We’ll stop by the bar for a hot minute, you say, or:
Talk with me for a hot minute.
As if what I had to say was so burning
a minute’s explosion would release it all.
Or that the seats at our favorite bar were heated
beyond comfort, guaranteeing a brief stop,
not an elongating evening with a friend’s
friends, whom we can’t stand.
As if time itself suffered a feverish longing.
Or after the bar—as the stop signs
blur by like ambulances—
and I’m facedown on your front lawn,
my eyelids flame-red membranes,
you lean over me, coaxing,
and I paw at your breasts like a blinded bear.


[This poem originally appeared in the International Poetry Review]

“Living in the Dollar-Amount Democracy” By Okla Elliott

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Living in the Dollar-Amount Democracy

by Okla Elliott

 

Depending on how cynical we are, we will admit that the US government and American culture as a whole are either mostly or entirely controlled by the heavy influence of corporations. It is no secret that we live in a market economy, and that, as the saying goes, money talks. Considering some alternatives, this is a state of affairs I can begrudgingly support—though, as a so-called ‘market socialist’ or ‘democratic socialist’ (depending on how you define those terms), I believe our system needs massive overhauling. But, in the way of -isms, I prefer (the possibilities of) our form of capitalism to outright fascism or monarchism or any form of communism that has thus far existed, and our multicultural democracy has much praiseworthy about it. I do not, however, mean to suggest that all is well in the state of the republic—not by a far, muffled cry. We have all heard of the dozens of outrages that occur monthly or weekly, to say nothing of the daily atrocities of which we never hear. What I do mean is that there’s hope in America, where there might be none in another society with a different social structure. As America becomes ever more centered around businesses, the methods of voicing our concerns change. It is no longer sufficient just to vote politically. Today, financial votes are the votes that matter most.

Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, and Gore Vidal, among others, have pointed out that there is one party in American politics, the Big Business Party. Corporate interests donate huge sums of money to aid politicians in running for office. Individuals donate money as well, but there is one major difference. Individuals tend to donate to one candidate, while corporations (via PACs, lobbyists, bundlers, etc) make it a habit to donate to both candidates. Why would they do such a thing? We’re supposed to donate money to the candidate we want to win, right? Corporations don’t care who wins so long as the winning candidate owes them a favor; therefore they make both candidates indebted to them (notice, for example, how much Goldman Sachs money went to Obama and McCain in 2008; Obama got much more than McCain, since anyone with half a brainstem and one functioning eyeball knew a Democrat was a shoe-in in ’08, but they gave McCain money too, for just in case). The moral rottenness of this and the question of whether this should even be legal are topics for another day. All we’re currently concerned with is the fact that money plays a major role in the decisions made by our government officials (no matter which party they belong to), and that our government is not entirely (at all?) on the side of small businesses or the common citizenry.

So, why did I say there was hope in such a bleak state of affairs? Because we are free to purchase—and more importantly, free not to purchase—as our hearts and consciences dictate. How many people remember when the supermarkets, which are certainly major corporations, had only one shelf dedicated to organically grown foods? Now there are entire aisles, sometimes multiple aisles, populated with soymilk, vegan cheeses, organic vegetables, and countless other such products. It is not due to kindness and a sense of moral rightness that these corporations have begun harming fewer animals and using fewer toxins in their products (though many well-known problems exist still in the production practices, but every improvement is exactly that, an improvement). These corporations were taught, due to the consistent purchase of such items, that these products would sell. I ask myself: Could we someday see collections of poetry or short stories in the checkout lane? Could we have truly organic foods there? Or clothing produced by workers in third-world countries whose rights were protected just as those of the first-world are?

My point is not that these particular products are somehow better than others (though I personally believe quite strongly that they are), but rather that an engaged demand-side economics can work. Every purchase is a total affirmation of the product purchased. By purchasing any product we are saying that we agree with the methods of production, storage, transport, handling, and sale. Though I harbor hopes that my readers share certain concerns with me, it is ultimately immaterial to my argument what interests they may have. So long as they understand that every purchase is a vote of approval. By purchasing any product ranging from pornographic magazines to McDonald’s burgers to foot powder to books of poetry, the purchaser is saying—and in a language much stronger than words—that she supports the product’s continued production and distribution in the exact ways that product is being produced and distributed. Companies, individual humans, chimpanzees, dogs, and pretty much every organism in existence will be more likely to continue a behavior that is rewarded and will be less likely to continue behavior that is reprimanded. The only reward a purchaser can give manufacturers is a purchase, and the only reprimand—a refusal to buy.

In a (largely) capitalist state like the US, our votes, like everything else, cost money. The aforementioned purchasers of organically grown foods had to pay outrageous prices for these products at first. Now the prices are coming down to a more reasonable level because more people are purchasing them, and it is therefore cost effective to sell more at a lower price. This is also true of hybrid cars, which we see more of every day. The purchase of hybrid cars is more politically charged than ever, considering the current problems in the Middle East. Is it not possible that by reducing our dependency on fossil fuels that we could avoid situations such as the current “war” on terrorism, our continued support of Middle-Eastern military groups, and the eventual need to battle these groups armed with US weapons?

If at first we have to pay extra for a product we believe in, we simply have to tell ourselves that the extra sum is the cost of our vote on this matter. If shopping at a locally owned store or at a farmer’s market is slightly more expensive, or if a small press novel is more expensive than a harlequin romance, then that difference is the cost of the vote. If we want the arts to flourish, then we must support them in the only way our society recognizes, with money. Small presses, art galleries, community theatres, and locally owned businesses of every stripe go under every day in America, and usually not for lack of verbal cheerleading. There are thousands of people who bemoan that loss, but there are too few supporters and too many opportunists who want support without giving any in return. Unless we want to see the total homogenization and commercialization of our culture, then we must, to use the cliché, put our money where our mouths are.

How many nights have I listened as friends and I racked up sizable bar tabs while discussing the sad state of literature or community theatre or what-have-you, and then thought at the end of the night that we could have each subscribed to a literary journal (or three) with the money we’d wasted? Or donated the money to Oxfam? Or to progressive candidates?

Here is an incomplete list of ways we can make our money work for progress in the US and the world:

1)      Invest in green companies.

2)      Buy locally grown food as often as possible, preferably from small farmers.

3)      Refuse to shop at chain stores or to eat at chain restaurants.

4)      Donate to members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which is where the small handful of actually progressive Democrats group together in the House and Senate.

5)      Donate to humanitarian organizations, of which there are many reliable ones, and of which many suffer from constant need of donations.

I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t other ways to effect change—e.g., volunteering time for campaigns or at soup kitchens or with Habitat for Humanity, and of course voting is essential, etc—but I am saying that in the final analysis, money matters so much in every action we take in the current system we have. There is no utility in pretending we don’t live in the society we do. We live in a dollar-amount democracy. We have a freedom and a power that are awesome, but that freedom and power imply a responsibility as well. Our political votes are one way to exercise our will as citizens upon our society, but more powerful, I believe, are our financial votes.

 

[The above piece originally appeared in a different form in Main Street Rag.]

Toward a Coherent Vision of the 20th Century—Or, Why Jorge Volpi Is My New Favorite Novelist

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine


Season of Ash

by Jorge Volpi (translated by Alfred MacAdam)

Open Letter / University of Rochester Press

ISBN: 978-1-934824-10-8


Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash is the kind of novel that reminds me why I read novels in the first place, but it’s also the kind that makes me wonder why I bother to write.  Before the end of this review, I am going to try to convince you that Volpi is a genius, that you have to buy this book, and that he’ll end up with the Nobel Prize in Literature if there is any justice in the world (which there might not be…)—but before I attempt all that, you should know who Jorge Volpi is, as he is not yet well-known to North American readers.

Jorge Volpi, born in the internationally tumultuous year of 1968 in Mexico City, has written nine novels, including one other, In Search of Klingsor, that has been translated into English and which has won prizes in Spain and France, as well as Volpi’s native Mexico.  He is one of the founders (along with Ignacio Padilla, Pedro Ángel Palou, et al) of the “Crack Movement” in Mexican literature, a movement attempting to free itself from what its members perceive as the chains of magical realism, hoping to return to the joys found in the work of, for example, Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges.  Volpi studied law at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and holds his PhD in Spanish philology from Universidad de Salamanca in Spain.  He has worked as a lawyer, a political aide, and as a scholar.  The evidence of this political/legal praxis and this scholarly knowledge certainly show up in his work, though never pedantically or gratuitously.  In the world of Spanish-language literature, he is known for his wide-ranging intelligence, the ambition of his work, his intricate plots, and a subtly dark humor.

Okay…that is an inadequate and rushed introduction to the man and his career, now on to an equally inadequate discussion of his marvelous novel.

Season of Ash opens with the infamous 1986 meltdown at Chernobyl.  (So, okay, here I have an admission: I rather disliked the first few paragraphs of the novel—so much so, in fact, I was disappointed I’d agreed to review the book, since I was worried the rest of it would be equally unpleasant.  I mention this for two reasons—to let you know I’m not such a fan of Volpi’s novel that I can’t admit its failings, and to make sure if you pick up a copy of the book, that you force past the first two pages, because after that, while there are occasional lapses of mastery, it borders on perfection.)  Here is Volpi, several pages in, at his lyric finest, personifying the radiation from the reactor’s meltdown as a monster the hopeless Soviet soldiers die trying to fight:

Wind and rain were carrying its humors toward Europe and the Pacific, its dregs were piling up in lakes, and its semen was filtering its way through the geological strata.  The monster was in no hurry.  It was patiently planning its revenge: Every baby born without legs, without a pancreas, every sterile sheep, dying cow, every rusty lung, every malignant tumor, every eaten-away brain would celebrate its revenge.

That wide narrative view—which takes in so much geography, time, and human suffering—is one of the joys throughout the novel.  The various plotlines, however, occasionally focus very closely on certain characters, the POV embedding so deeply into the consciousness of a particular character in the ensemble cast that we forget the novel spans four continents, eight decades, and over a dozen important characters (not to mention such historical figures as Joseph Stalin, Ronald Reagan, and Boris Yeltsin).  Though, now looking over the above excerpt, I see just how intricately Volpi weaves his narrative lines, how flawlessly he modulates his narrative registers; I say this because while I enjoy the excerpt by itself, it loses much (most?) of its power out of context, where we see Soviet soldiers sent to their deaths, ordered to bury the site of the incident with sand, ordered to axe to death all the animals in the region and incinerate them, all the while dying slowly or quickly of radiation poisoning.  We also are worried about the political wellbeing of the scientists involved as we read all this.  And on, and on.

Volpi’s scholarship and knowledge of international law and politics complements his novelistic powers wonderfully.  With only a few well-placed and concisely explained historico-political facts, Volpi creates unimpeachable narrative authority on such wide-ranging topics as Hungarian student movements, the Zairian French dialect, the corruption surrounding IMF funds in Africa, computer technology, mathematics, genetics, war strategy, investment banking, hippie communes in the US during the 60s, abortion procedures, depression, and more.  There seems to be nothing he doesn’t know and nothing he can’t find human tragedy and human comedy in.

This wide of a scope and this many movable parts would likely become a mess in a lesser novelist’s hands.  Volpi has, however, chosen a structure that organizes his materials without constricting them.  The novel is divided into a prelude and three acts, each act containing seven chapters.  The Prelude covers the Chernobyl incident and is set entirely in 1986.  Act I, which covers the years 1929-1985, is not chronologically ordered but rather swims around in time and plotlines, which seems unorganized but is not on closer inspection.  We learn the DNA, so to speak, of the novel in Act I, and the non-linear narrative lends itself to such a huge vision very well.  But had Volpi kept that non-linearity for the entire novel, readers would simply get lost in the wash of time and information.  And so, Act II, which covers the years 1985-1991, is ordered exactly chronologically, with each of its seven chapters covering a single year.  Act III covers 1991-2000 and returns to the non-linear structure, but by this point, we are oriented enough in the world of the novel for this not to be a problem.  And, as you can see, the overall structure of the novel takes us, in its roundabout way, from 1929 to 2000, thus giving the novel an overall sense of progression.

The two novels I was most reminded of while reading Season of Ash were Europe Central, by William T Vollmann, and 2666, by Roberto Bolaño.  Most novels would be reduced to, forgive the pun, ash by such a comparison, but Volpi’s novel not only stands up to these two masterpieces, I daresay it surpasses them.  It shows all the erudition, all the aesthetic sophistication, all the vision of a Europe Central or a 2666, yet it is considerably more readable.  In effect, it accomplishes all they do intellectually and emotionally while also being entertaining.  During the time I carried the book around with me, I was always digging it out my bag on a bus or train, just to get a few pages in; it kept me up past when I should have been asleep; it caused me to ignore invitations to parties (even ones I actually wanted to go to).

Okay…I’ll stop now with the praise.  For those who want a summary, kind of like the ones you get on the back of a book, here is the publisher’s summary from the back of the book:

Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash puts a human face on earth-shaking events of the late twentieth century: the Chernobyl disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Soviet communism and the rise of the Russian oligarchs, the cascading collapsing of developing economies, and the near-miraculous scientific advances of the Human Genome Project. A scientific investigation, a journalistic exposé, a detective novel, and a dark love story, Season of Ash is a thrilling exploration of greed and disillusionment, and a clear-eyed examination of the passions that rule our lives and make history.

So, there you have it.

In the limited space I have, I can’t go into a complete analysis of the translation, but suffice to say that Alfred MacAdam, who has translated many of Latin America’s literary giants (Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and Cortázar), has made a virtuoso performance here (though I do wonder how the Spanish title, No será la Tierra, became Season of Ash—but oddities of title changes happen all the time in translation, so we’ll just have to overlook this).  Translating genius requires itself a certain genius.  He is already well-lauded for his work as a translator, but someone needs to give this man a medal for his current effort.  I hope Volpi’s international reputation coupled with MacAdam’s academic credentials make this book a real contender for the Nobel, which would end the Eurocentrism many (Americans) complain about the prize having had in recent years.  But more importantly, it would celebrate a massive and original talent.

-Okla Elliott

[The above review was originally published, in somewhat different form, in Inside Higher Education.]

JÜRGEN BECKER

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Three Poems by Jürgen Becker

translated by Okla Elliott

Jürgen Becker was born in Köln, Germany, in 1932. He is the author of over thirty books—novels, story collections, poetry collections, and plays—all published by Germany’s premier publisher, Suhrkamp. He has won numerous prizes in Germany, including the Heinrich Böll Prize, the Uwe Johnson Prize, and the Hermann Lenz Prize, among others. Becker’s work often deals with his childhood experience of WWII and the political consequences of the postwar division of Germany.

I first discovered his work when I was a student for a year in Germany and only later decided to contact him about translating his work. I can say that spending as much time as I have with his poetry has been hugely rewarding, and there are days when I enjoy being the conduit for his work into English as much as I enjoy doing my own writing. The following three translations have all appeared in print journals (A Public Space, Absinthe, and Indiana Review, respectively). I hope they give some idea of how wide-ranging and engaging Becker’s work is.

***

In the Wind

Blackbirds, then other voices. It doesn’t stop
when it snows, when with the snow
a newness comes that is
entirely essential this morning. Or how
do you see it? I see the pear tree and how it
(the pear tree) reacts to the wind (to the
wind). This morning, yet again,
the decision fell. War
between magpies and crows, only this war,
no trappings, only this clear understanding.
Yet another voice, the next commentator; it’s all about
(yet again) the whole. Are you standing
in the garden? The you know, tsk tsk, the blackbird
warned above all else, you know, I’ll say it yet
again, in war, in the new snow, in the wind.

***

Belgian Coast

Toccata and tango; the afternoon
not bright. One hotel
weathered after another;
postcards of emigrants.
Doors, doors
are blown away by the sand,
disappear behind the sand. The calm
of anglers. Invisible England; reports
from the British transmitter, wartime.
Children run
with balls, wheels, propellers;
and paratroopers all about.

***

Oderbruch

The camera’s broken? It’s cold out,
and there are crows bigger than crows
usually are, scattering smoothly over there
across the fields.
Nothing over there. Twilight. Gold gray twilight
spreads out. A tree in Poland
is over there the lost barren tree.
Lighted and empty, the bus drives over the levee.
On the riverbank, two men with their backs
to the dam, which neither begins nor ends.
You don’t hear anything. You hear the slippage
of the floe, the circling floe. You hear
for a long time yet, later, in the dark, the drifting ice.
The camera’s broken, else why are the pictures
blurry now? Two men stood on the riverbank.

They came back. They could tell the story.

THE ART OF FAILURE: POETRY IN TRANSLATION

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[This piece previously appeared in Poet’s Market 2010 and Poet’s Market 2011.]

THE ART OF FAILURE: POETRY IN TRANSLATION

by Okla Elliott

“Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another.”—Paul Auster

Introduction

The historical importance of translation for English language poetry is undeniable. Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, invented blank verse in order to translate Virgil’s Æneid in 1554, because the Latin original was unrhymed yet metered, and no equivalent existed in English. Blank verse, brought to us by a translator’s ingenuity, allowed for Shakespeare’s plays to be written as we know them. The sonnet (sonetto or “little song” in Italian) was created by Giacomo da Lentini and enjoyed a boom among Italian poets such as Calvalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch in the mid-13th and early 14th centuries. It was not until the 16th century that sonnets began appearing in English, in translations from Italian and from French. And the list of gifts translators have brought English poetry goes on—couplets, villanelles, sestinas, and, some have argued, even free verse via attempts to translate Chinese poetry. The question now is: What is the cultural and artistic place of translation in the age of globalization?

According to a Center for Book Culture study on the number of books translated into English between 2000-2006, it’s a pretty dismal place. Most countries had fewer than one book per year translated into English, and literary heavyweights such as France, Italy, and Germany had fewer than ten books per year translated into English—and this includes novels and nonfiction as well as poetry. The percentage of books in translation tends to be estimated, by such organizations as the NEA and PEN, at about three percent of the total published in America. (Incidentally, there is an excellent blog about translation, out of the University of Rochester, called Three Percent.) Does this mean the effort of translation is hopeless or unimportant? Not necessarily.

Translation is very complex; the process, the need, and the market for it are not so easily summed up. To understand the landscape, we have to look at the differences between publishing translation as books or in journals, translating contemporary or older work, working alone or collaboratively. Likewise, the politics and ethics of translation play a role. And perhaps most importantly, the process and joys of translation need to be understood.

The Process of Translation

The primary goal of translation is to recreate the effect of the original poem in the target language (the language into which you are translating). The problem, of course, is that if the poet did her work properly in the original (or source) language, then she made use of every available trick and tactic, thus making the job of recreating the poem almost impossible. This is why Umberto Eco calls translation “the art of failure.” But while perfection is perhaps not possible, there are thousands of excellent translations in existence. So, how were they done?

You have to determine whether you want to transport the source text into the target language or transport the reader of your translation to the source culture. If you are translating, for example, a contemporary Mexican poet, and the word buñuelo appears, you have to decide whether to replace this very specific Mexican sweet bun made with orange juice with some American equivalent (a honeybun perhaps) or to simply leave the Spanish word in the English translation and hope the reader knows what a buñuelo is. A third option is to retain the Spanish word and footnote it, though footnotes can ruin the effect of a poem if there are too many of them. The general rule is to avoid them when possible. Of course, the problem with replacing a Mexican pastry with a traditional American pastry is that—forgive the pun—you damage the original flavor of the poem, though you do not run the risk of losing or confusing your reader. But both tactics lead to problems, as nearly everything in translation does. I don’t mean to suggest that a translation can’t do both. In fact, most good translations do, but each successful translation, in order to have its singular effect as the original had its singular effect, ought to privilege one effort over the other.

Depending on the source text, your level of mastery of the source language, and whether there are pre-existing translations, the first stages of working on a new translation of a poem will differ wildly. When translating Latin and Greek literature, David Slavitt uses pre-existing literal prose translations of the poems as well as his personal knowledge of Latin and Greek “to turn the prose translations back into poems.” Slavitt says, “When you translate prose, you are the original author’s clerk, but when you translate poetry, you are his partner.”

Frequently, translation is also done collaboratively. Likely the most famous contemporary duo is Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who have redone many of the Russian prose masterpieces. A notable team in poetry translation is Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro, who collaborate on translations of ancient literature. The make-up of the team is frequently a scholar of the source language/text and a poet who knows the tricks of English verse and who might have some knowledge of the source language.

But no matter your tactics or whether you work alone or with a collaborator, tough choices will have to be made. My translation of Jürgen Becker’s poem “Oderbruch,” which appeared in the Indiana Review, offers a simple example of the issues a translator runs into in nearly every line. I had translated “[g]elb graue Dämmerung” as “[g]old gray twilight” which caused the faculty member consulted about the accuracy of my translation to suggest that I change it to the more literal “[y]ellow gray twilight.” In one sense, he was right—“gelb” means “yellow.” But I felt that “gold” was close enough to the literal meaning, but it had the added poetic benefit of retaining the consonance and the number of syllables in the original. Ultimately, the poetry editors at the Indiana Review agreed with me, but not because I was unquestionably right. We were both right about how to translate the line. It was simply that I was willing to make a small sacrifice in literalness to retain the music, whereas he was willing to make a small sacrifice of the music to retain a more exact meaning. Every poem will present a dozen or more moments where the translator must sacrifice one thing for another. Only rarely does a poem submit easily to transfer into a new language/culture. That, however, is also part of the joy. Nearly every translator speaks of the joy of finding an elegant solution to a seemingly insoluble problem.

Slavitt says, “I didn’t take a Hippocratic Oath when I signed on to be a writer. I feel no obligation to the literal meaning of the text whatsoever.” It’s the pleasure of the original he is after. Does that mean Twinkies show up in Ovid? Well, fine, let it be so. Or so Slavitt says. But the business of translation is a highly contentious one, and one where opinions are unusually strong and criticisms often bitter.

One of the joys of translation is what you can learn by doing it. Slavitt went to the Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil in order to learn how to make a paragraph work in verse. Matthew Zapruder, author of The Pajamaist and translator of the Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu, reports, “I also had a sense right away that it would be a good thing for me, a poet just starting to find his way, to be inside the seriousness of the voice and the directness and implacable structure of the poems.”

Publishing Translations

The report on the market for poetry in translation is mixed. A recent New York Review of Books article points out that Iran publishes more literature in translation than the United States does—as do all European countries and most Latin American ones. That said, however, it has been my experience that original poetry and fiction are comparably hard to place in journals, whereas translation and nonfiction are much easier to place. This has, predictably, to do with the volume and quality of submissions in each genre, as well as current demand. Brett Fletcher Lauer, a poetry editor at A Public Space and an advisory editor at Columbia University’s Circumference, a journal dedicated largely to poetry in translation, offers the following theory on why translations tend to be better and therefore more likely to be accepted: “A Public Space receives a relatively small number of submissions of poetry in translation compared with the thousands of submissions of English-language poetry. That being said, the overall quality of translations submitted is very high. I’m not sure how to account for this fact.” He goes on to speculate, “The process of translating and the dedication it requires makes it so that it cannot be casual work, but, instead, a sort of over-time, and what we receive reflects this.”

“Generally journals were happy to publish the poems,” says Zapruder of his translations of Jebeleanu. “I had more difficulty publishing the book; in fact, I finished the translations in 1998, and it took almost ten years for the book to eventually come out with Coffee House Press.”

Slavitt says, “If you translate a standard classic and are lucky enough to get it adopted as a text in enough courses, it will do much better than original poetry.” But he adds, “If you translate someone who needs translating—Ausonius for instance—it’s about even [with sales of original collections of poetry].” Given the generally poor sales of poetry collections, this might not be very heartening, but it ought to be. Either a book of translation will sell about the same as an original collection or considerably better, especially if you can recast a classic poet in a new translation.

Some of the journals most supportive of poetry in translation are Absinthe, The Bitter Oleander, Circumference, Indiana Review, International Poetry Review, The Literary Review, Natural Bridge, New Letters, Poetry International, and A Public Space. There are others, of course, but these are journals that are dedicated to translation solely or that publish some translation in nearly every issue. And presses that publish translation regularly include Dalkey Archive Press, Northwestern University Press, Red Hen Press, Sheep Meadow Press, and Ugly Duckling Presse. If a new translator wants to discover what is happening in translation today, she would do well to peruse these publications.

Advice for Getting Started

If you’re a first-time translator, it is unlikely that you’ll get the rights to translate and publish the work of a major author whose work is still under copyright—e.g., Günter Grass or Pablo Neruda. Mark Smith-Soto, the editor of International Poetry Review and a poet/translator in his own right, advises that a new translator find an author who enjoys a good reputation in his/her home country but who hasn’t yet been translated into English. “If you ask a poet whether he’d like to be translated, the answer is generally going to be yes,” Smith-Soto says. And here is where the unfortunate state of literature in translation can actually be a plus. Since there is so much excellent literature that has yet to be translated, you’ll have plenty to choose from. But since you’ll be spending many hours living in the poet’s work, it’s important to find work you admire. Otherwise, what should be a joy will become a chore. Once you’ve established yourself, then the larger gigs will come.

It’s also worthwhile to have a working knowledge of translation theory, which sounds daunting but which in fact can be attained by reading two excellent books out from University of Chicago Press, The Craft of Translation and Theories of Translation, both edited by John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte. These two reasonably sized volumes will bring you from Dryden’s thinking on translation through Goethe’s and up to Gregory Rabassa’s with excellent stops at Nietzsche’s, Benjamin’s, and others’.

So, read the journals that publish translations, read these two seminal texts on the theory and craft of translation, find poetry you admire, and get to work. It’s rewarding for both the translator and for the literary culture as a whole.

IN DEFENSE OF BABEL

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IN DEFENSE OF BABEL

by Okla Elliott

During Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, he once discussed immigration by saying that we ought to be less worried about immigrants learning English and more worried about whether our children are learning Spanish. He must have known he’d wandered into unsafe territory, because he immediately began enumerating the business advantages your children would have if they were bilingual. (It is always safe in American discourse to return to how something might make money.) Obama was attacked by Democrats and Republicans alike for daring to utter the unthinkable—that Americans need to be learning foreign languages.

As I write this, I am in Montréal, a city that has achieved nearly seamless bilingualism. Depending on the neighborhood, most signs, menus, etc are written in both French and English, and you can order at most places of business in either language. I don’t mean to suggest there aren’t tensions between those who consider their mother tongue French and those who consider it English. There are. Famously so. And one of my instructors, Jessy, at the language institute where I’m studying admitted to being reluctant to read Canadian literature in English (though she also happens to be nearly fluent in English, which indicates her resistance to the language isn’t total, and she seemed embarrassed to admit to reading only francophone literature).  And Jessy isn’t alone in her ambivalence. There’s a referendum every few years for Québec to secede from the rest of Canada, but it is always defeated, and largely because of the huge population in Montréal which always votes en masse to remain part of the larger country.

But there’s the brighter, almost ideal side. You walk up Rue St Laurent, lined with hipster bars and nice restaurants, and you’ll hear the people at one table speaking in French while those at the adjacent table speak English. My favorite scene, which I’ve seen play out several times in my few weeks here, is when a group of people is speaking one language, then someone shows up who is less proficient in that language (usually an English speaker, sadly), and the group simply shifts to the new person’s language of comfort.  It’s a seamless transition, and no one is put out by it.  For lack of a better word, I always think how civilized this is.

Those people in the US who are worried that English will disappear are either willfully ignorant or just insane.  English enjoys not only the 4th largest native speaker population on the planet but is also by far the most common 2nd language learned.  I’m sorry, but every time I hear someone bemoan the rise of Spanish as a second language in the US, I hear laziness or mindless nationalism.  There is absolutely no downside to learning another language, while there are numerous upsides.

But the paranoiac fear isn’t abating. Nowhere is this made more visible than on the US-Mexico border with the fervor for fence-building and of volunteers toting shotguns, excessive in their eagerness to “defend our borders” (from what, I always wonder, hard workers with a drive for self-improvement?).  William T Vollmann’s new book, Imperial, which will be released next month, is a 1,300-page nonfiction exploration of Imperial County, California, where many immigrants who have died in the journey across the border are buried.  There’s an excellent New York Times article about Vollmann and his new book here.

But instead of seeing the ugliness nationalism can cause and instead of embracing the positive aspects of bi- and multilingualism, many Americans are doing just the opposite.  Arizona, Idaho, and Iowa have all recently passed English-only laws, and Oklahoma is poised to vote on an English-only referendum on the 2010 ballot, one which is expected to pass by a large margin.

But what are the advantages of multilingualism?, one might ask.  Aside from Obama’s aforementioned job opportunities, which certainly exist, there are the joys other languages bring.  There is nothing like being in a foreign country and speaking the language.  The experience is so much richer, I have basically foregone visiting countries whose languages in which I don’t at least have some proficiency.  Language is so often the vehicle for culture, and there is simply no way to appreciate another culture without understanding its language.

But there are more immediate ones as well. The CIA has recently been running ads in an attempt to recruit Americans with foreign language skills.  Apparently less than 20% of the CIA staff has proficiency in a foreign language.  Pause for a moment and take that in.  Less than 20% of our international intelligence gathering organ speaks a foreign language.  Mama Elliott didn’t raise no geniuses, but I see how this might be a problem.  Now, I tend to think that most of what the CIA does adds to the misery in the world, so its being hindered in any way might be good in the long run, but there is an old Polish saying: “Know the languages of your friends well, but know the languages of your enemies better.”  Here, even the security-crazed people of this country have to admit that learning Arabic, Farsi, Korean, etc might prove useful.

But I’m less interested in talk of enemies, and I would like to rephrase that Polish saying to: “Learn the languages of your enemies in order to make them your friends.”  I remember when I was an undergrad and preparing for my first academic study abroad to Germany, I was required to attend several information sessions.  At one of them, the goals of the program were laid out, and one of them was world peace.  I thought, “Huh?  How can my improving my understanding of the dative case in German alter international relations?”  The counselor explained that people are less likely to support a war against a country if they’ve lived there or speak the language, and that the kinds of cultural misunderstandings that can lead to less than diplomatic solutions can be obviated if we have enough people here who know firsthand how to navigate those cultural waters.

The advantages, both large and small, are legion.

There are many jobs in legal, technological, governmental, and medical fields that require knowledge of foreign languages.  Studies show that studying a foreign language can reduce the chances of dementia in old age, can improve children’s comprehension of their native language, and even increase a person’s IQ.  There are the interpersonal benefits.  I can’t help but notice the tens of millions of Spanish speakers in world and can’t help but be happy that I have the means to communicate with them. Likewise with French; when I look at a linguistic map of Africa, my heart fairly flutters with possibility.  There are advantages for the activist-minded, such as Habitat for Humanity, Peace Corps, Doctors without Borders, etc.

And on, and on . . .

If being in Montréal has taught me anything, it’s that bi- and multilingualism can work and can have a hugely positive effect on a culture and business community.  It’s not a perfect model, but those tend not to exist in the real world.  It is, however, a hopeful example of what certain US cities could become or already are becoming, if only we embrace it fully and encourage it with the proper institutions and attitude.


Further Reading:

The Undividing Line Between Literary and Political by Okla Elliott, 7/15/09

THE UNDIVIDING LINE BETWEEN LITERARY AND POLITICAL

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THE UNDIVIDING LINE BETWEEN LITERARY AND POLITICAL

by Okla Elliott

It has been said that poetry feeds no one, and no doubt, I have felt occasionally that reading or writing literature is merely an indulgence, one many people cannot afford. But that’s a rather limited view of how literature, the presses that publish it, and its practitioners function in the world.

In many ways, literature offers an opportunity to be political completely outside the electoral arena, something the people of this country (which has a two-party duopoly currently in place) sorely need.

Who can read a novel like The Quiet American (Graham Greene) and not rethink the Vietnam Conflict in human terms? Who can read Fox Girl (Nora Okja Keller) and not be heartbroken over how US military bases in South Korea negatively impacted the lives of the people who inhabited the camptowns around them? And, here again, in human/emotional terms, not mere numbers which lose meaning in their abstraction. Gore Vidal’s historical novels help readers to review American history from a different perspective. War memoirs personalize tragedies via the concrete and hellish details, as opposed a government’s abstractions of patriotism, freedom, or liberation which try (quite effectively) to dehumanize what is going on and thereby make it more stomachable.

That is perhaps literature’s greatest strength. It removes the easy cleanness of abstraction and introduces the muck and blood of reality into political thought. I do not mean to suggest that more rigid statistical analysis doesn’t have a very important role in politics; of course it does, as nearly everyone agrees. But literature can bring life to those numbers in a way that can motivate people to act, which our emotions are more likely to do than our intellect in most cases.

Unfortunately, however, too often writers in the United States eschew the political as beneath the dignity of high art. Not only is this a view solely held by our nation (in Europe, Africa, South America, etc, politics and art/literature quite often go hand in hand), but it is also so obviously nonsensical, I don’t see how it gained such ideological traction. Am I to believe that the lives and deaths of my fellow man are beneath the purview of art? Or that war cannot or should not produce insightful novels and poems?

But literary work doesn’t have to be openly political to perform a political or ethical function. When a middle-aged man in upstate New York reads a novel about a young girl in an impoverished Kentucky town, his knowledge of humanity is broadened as are his powers of empathy. And empathy makes us less likely to support policies that harm others.

And it’s not just the work itself that is political. There is a political aspect to the publishing and purchasing of books.

Let’s look at small presses for a moment. The term “small press” is an elusive term, as it includes presses with an all-paid staff and tens of thousands of dollars in grant support, as well as presses run by an all-volunteer staff out of someone’s apartment. But what small presses definitely are not are the huge publishing houses owned by corporations like AT&T that largely crank out books with cute cats on the cover or books that otherwise play to our basest sensibilities. Take, as an example of an excellent small press, Ugly Duckling Presse, which specializes in experimental literature and literature in translation. Experimental literature might have no overt political message, but it seeks to shake things up or offer an alternative view on human experience and thought. And translation is highly political, even when the content of what is translated is not. Every translation is an entry into another culture, an invitation to understand how people live in other parts of the world. By better understanding other cultures, it strikes me that we are more likely to respect them and therefore less likely to want to bomb the shit out of them. And, aside from the occasional blockbuster hit, most translation comes out of university presses or small presses, as well as small literary journals.

To take a cue from this blog’s name, I’ll not be merely descriptive of what literature can and does do; I’ll be prescriptive about what editors, writers, and readers ought to do (or ought to do more of), bringing us to the classic progressive question—what is to be done? First, editors need to solicit more well-crafted political writing, more translations, and more travel literature (whether it be poetry or prose, fiction or non-). Second, more writers need to be producing such work (and here I don’t mean preachy, one-dimensional stuff, but rather complex, well-crafted, multiply indicting work). Third, lovers of literature and writers (or people who hope to be writers) need to support the small press industry with subscriptions to journals and by buying books.  We also need to purchase well-written and politically sophisticated books from the major publishers to teach them in the only terms they understand (i.e., profits) to produce more books like the aforementioned Fox Girl (out from Penguin) and fewer books with cats dressed in cowboy hats or superman capes or whathaveyou.

In closing, I offer a very abbreviated list of books, journals, and presses that might be of interest. If you have any to add, please feel free to do so in the comments section below.

Books

Rising Up and Rising Down (nonfiction), by William T Vollmann; After the Lost War (poetry), by Andrew Hudgins; Disgrace (fiction), by J.M. Coetzee; This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (fiction), by Tadeusz Borowski; Salazar Blinks (fiction), by David Slavitt; Cancer Ward (fiction), by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; Our Lives Are Rivers (poetry) by Mark Smith-Soto; A Gesture Life (fiction), by Chang-Rae Lee; Selected Poems (poetry), by Marina Tsvetaeva; Death and the Maiden (drama), by Ariel Dorfman; Christopher Unborn (fiction), by Carlos Fuentes; and, again, Fox Girl (fiction), by Nora Okja Keller.

Journals

Blue Mesa Review, Circumference, Contrary, Crab Orchard Review, Hobart, Indiana Review, International Poetry Review, The Literary Review, Main Street Rag, Monthly Review, Natural Bridge, New Letters, New York Quarterly, A Public Space, and The Sun.

Presses

Copper Canyon Press, Dzanc Books, Graywolf Press, Monthly Review Press, Press 53, Red Hen Press, Seven Stories Press, and Wave Books—as well as dozens of university presses (e.g., Ohio State, LSU, Northwestern, etc).