Category — Literary

 

Editor’s note:  On March 24th, at the Know Theater in Binghamton, N.Y., a group of poets, writers and kindred spirits came together for a multi-national, multi-lingual session to read and discuss their impressions of life at the beginning of the 21st Century. From about noon Saturday until after ten that evening, dozens of presenters, family, friends and students shared viewpoints, ideas and work, in exchange for the opportunity to be both listened to and heard. This special mid-issue post opens the window on an experience that will not soon be forgotten by its participants. It’s also an invitation to be there when this nucleus of hope that people from all corners can co-exist gracefully blossoms again next spring for a third Binghamton International Literature Festival. 

The following work appeared in the Crossroads program and is published with permission of the organizer (Mario Moroni) and participants. The poem by Diego Trelles Paz appears in another online magazine, and is not available for reprinting. Two original poems you see below were sent scanned in PDF because of the language format (Hakak’s in Persian and Hassanal’s in Bengali). 

 

POETRY AND FICTION

 

HASSANAL ABDULLAH/BANGLADESH

 

WITH A LITTLE CASH

If I have a little cash, I will open an art shop
My modernist call
Will raise echo and journey
To corners of places not reached before.
Let a few days pass by
If I have a little cash, I will wash your
soft feet with spring water.

If I have some money, I will buy the giant sky –

Wandering all day on its floor
Birds will wake me up
And they will again put me easily to asleep.
The world will find my hands in its own
If the crooked line of restlessness
Is wiped away. With some money
I will spend my time listening to the bees.

Faraway conversations:
No longer talking from wire-to-wire
No more wasting of sinew.
Bangladesh, take not of it,
I will rest my head upon your breast
And sleep all night in tranquility
When I have just a little cash.

Translated from Bengali by Nazrul Islam Naz

Hassanal Abdullah, an author of 23 books including 12 collections of poetry, was born in Gopalgonj, Bangladesh. He immigrated to New York in 1990, and earned his Bachelor and Masters in mathematics at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He is now a high school math teacher and the Coordinator of the Union Square Business Academy at Washington Irving High School. He edits a bilingual poetry quarterly, Shabdaguchha. His poetry, in original Bengali text and in English translation, has been published in many countries of the world.  Abdullah has introduced a new way of writing sonnets, where the rhyming scheme is abcdabc efgdefg, with a seven-line stanza pattern. He calls them “Swatantra Sonnets.” A poet of the post-modern era, Hassanal Abdullah, also wrote a 314-page epic, Nakhatra O Manusar Prochhad (Anyana, 2007),  where he illustrated relations between Human Beings and the Universe. His Selected Poems (Anyana, 2010) in Bengali was published in Dhaka. In addition, he translated Charles Baudelaire, Stanley Kunitz, Anna Akmatova, Nicanor Parra, Wislawa Szymborska, Gerald Stern, and many other poets from all over the world into Bengali and 32 Bangladeshi poets into English.

 

 

STANLEY H. BARKAN/U.S.A.

 

NAMING THE BIRDS

Tired of naming cattle & fish,

Adam turned to the birds.

“Raven,” he said;

then “dove,”

prophetically,

these first creatures of the air

who’d be symbols in a later time

of rain and flood and rainbow.

Of the birds who would

sing at dawn and dusk

he had little interest;

so Eve decided to try

her onomastic skill.

“Nightingale,” she whispered.

“Ibis, heron, flamingo,

parrot, peacock, tanager,”

mystery, grace, magnificence

of thought, motion, and design.

It took a woman

to properly name

the birds of Paradise.

 

Stanley H. Barkan is the editor/publisher of the Cross-Cultural Review Series of World Literature and Art, that has, to date, produced some 400 titles in 50 different languages. His own work has been published in 15 collections, several of them bilingual (Bulgarian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Sicilian).  His latest are, Strange Seasons, a poetry and photoart collaboration with Russian artist, Mark Polyakov (2007) and ABC of Fruits and Vegetables (2012), both published by AngoBoy in Sofia, Bulgaria.  He was the 1991 New York City’s Poetry Teacher of the Year (awarded by Poets House and the Board of Education) and the 1996 winner of the Poor Richard’s Award, “The Best of the Small Presses” (awarded by the Small Press Center), for “25 years of high quality publishing.”  In May 2006, he was invited by Peter Thabit Jones, editor of The Seventh Quarry, to be the first solo featured poet at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea, Wales.  He lives and works with his artist wife, Bebe, in Merrick, Long Island.

 

 

SULTAN CATTO/TURKEY

MAZERETIM NEYDY?

Uyumamıştı. Susuz ve aç olan gözleri

uzun zamandır zerre kadar uyku tatmamışlardı.
Kendini bir Mısır mumyası gibi hisseden kız
iki bin senedir gözleri açık bekliyordu.
Uykusuz geçen saatlerini bir

‘quipu’nun düğümleriyle sayıyordu.
Kafası formullerle dolu, formül batağına dönmüş,
oradan oraya, ellerinde ağırlıklarla,
hislerini kayaların ağırlıklarıyla karşılaştırıyordu.
Geceler avuç içlerinde yanıyordu.
tutkulu ateşler kalbinde parıldıyordu.
Natchez insanlarının topraklarındaki ebediyen yanan
tükenmek bilmeyen ateş gibi.
Ruhundaki şiddetli rüzgarlar

yel değirmenlerini harekete geçirmişti.
Sessizlikle başlayan her şey
şimdi bir boşluğa doğru sürükleniyordu.
Onun için hiç bir anlam ifade etmiyordu büyüyen evren.
Cevaplar, çözümler istiyordu.
Hemen şimdi bir son vermek istiyordu bu genişlemeye.

Vücudundaki damar sayısı kadar olan
altmış iki yerde sabitlenecek şekilde
kozmolojik sürekliliği durdurmuştu.
Akordu bozulmuş, sorunlu bir enstrümandı bugün.

Artık bütün dünyası iki kelimenin arasında öylece asılı duruyordu.
Kendisi, aradaki boşluktu. Dile gelmemiş her şeydi.
Bir kedinin mırıltısıydı. Sıcak bir süttü.
Bir dere kadar okunaksızdı.
Sapsarı lamalar onun altın sarısı otlağında otlanıyorlardı.
İki rakam arasındaki sessizlikti o,

Onları birbirine bağlayan, sorularla dolu, apağır,
yıkılıp altındaki sulara dökülmek üzere olan saydam bir köprüydü.
Rakamlara kollarını açmış bir şekilde kenetlenmişti.
Rakamlar arasındaki aşktı.
Onları bırakıp gitmeden önce kanatlarını açmaya ihtiyacı vardı.
Kanatlarını açmadan önce,

ilk kez uçan bir kuşun ne düşündüğü üzerine kafa yordu.
Tekrarlayan ritmler ve ahenksiz sesler

kafasında uyuşturucu bir duruma sebep oluyordu.
Ruhu dans ediyordu.
Ateşliydi. Yanıyordu.
Vücudunda yüksek derecede,
kimyasal bileşimleri bileşenlerine ayrılıyordu.
Ruhunun dökük duvarlarında asılmış resimlerde yağmur yağıyordu.
Hafif yağmur damlaları yüzüne vurdukça titriyordu.
Gözlerimin önünde çoğalıyordu.
Sağ el bileğinde bir lastik bant vardı,

üzerine hemen ince bir gömlek geçirdi

ve zihnimin derinliklerinden dışarı doğru adım attı.
Bir bahar rüyası gibi zihninde canlanan düşünceler,

dünyasından bir çiğ tanesi gibi, hiç iz bırakmadan

yok olup gidiyordu.
Kanatları açılmaya başlamıştı.
Bir kereviz tohumuydu.
Eczacının biri onu bir sakinleştirici olarak veya

diğer ilaçlarının tadını gizlemek için kullanabilirdi.
Çok soğukkanlıydı.

Hem de çok.
Camdan ruhum yüksek derecelerde erimek yerine

kristal porselene dönüşüyordu.
Bazı muazzam bedenler gibi,
bendeki mevsim değişikliğini etkiliyordu.
Çok soğukkanlıydı.
Aklımı kaybetmek üzereydim.
Parabolik yörüngelerde yaşıyordum.
Yaşadığım dünya gibi ben de 13,7 milyar yıldır uyumamıştım.
Monet’i ressam yapan şey çiçeklerdi.

Peki ya benim mazeretim neydi?

 

WHAT WAS MY EXCUSE?

She was awake. Her eyes, thirsty and hungry,
had not tasted sleep in a long time.
Feeling like an Egyptian mummy,
she’s been waiting with open eyes for two thousand years.
She was counting the sleepless hours with knotted strings of quipu.
Her head filled with formulas, bed of formulas,
she was walking around with scales in her arms,
weighing her feelings against rocks.
Nights were burning in her palms. Fires were blazing in her heart,
like the perpetual fire forever burning in the temples of the Nachez people.
Prodigious winds in her soul had brought the windmills into motion.
Everything that had begun in silence was now moving towards the void.
Expanding universe was of no use to her. She wanted answers, solutions.
She wanted to put an end to that expansion now. She had mesmerized
the cosmological constant to be fixed to sixty-two places,
corresponding to the number of veins in her body.
She was a complicated instrument out of tune today.
Today her entire universe was suspended between two words.
She was the space in between. She was everything that had gone unsaid.
She was the cat’s murmur. She was the hot milk. She was as blind as a river.
Golden llamas were grazing on her golden grass.
She was the silence between two numbers, the transparent natural bridge tying them,
a bridge heavy with so many questions, about to collapse into waters below.
She was attached to them with extended arms.
She was the love in between.
Before she let go, she needed to grow wings.
Before growing wings, she was pondering, what does a bird flying for the first time think?
Repetitive rhythms and dissonant tones were inducing a hypnotic state in her.
Her soul was dancing.
She was hot. She was burning.
Chemical compounds were breaking up into their constituents
at high temperatures within her body.
It was raining in the pictures hanging on her soul’s peeling walls.
She was trembling as the soft rain was running down her face.
She was multiplying herself in my eyes. A rubber band on her right wrist,
she had just put on a light shirt and stepped out onto my mind’s terrace.
Thoughts that had come like a spring dream were slowly vanishing from her world,
like a morning dew, leaving no trace.
Her wings had started to grow.

She was the celery seed. A pharmacist would have used her as a sedative or
to disguise the flavor of other drugs.  She was cool.
Very cool.
My glass soul, instead of melting, was converting to crystalline ceramic
at high temperatures.
Like certain astronomical bodies, she was affecting the changes of the seasons within me.
She was cool.
I was going nuts. I was living on parabolic paths. Like my universe,
I hadn’t slept in 13.7 billion years.
It was flowers that had made Monet a painter.
What was my excuse?
Translated from Turkish by Neslihan Tok

 

Sultan Catto is a professor of theoretical physics at the CUNY Graduate School and at the Rockefeller University, and was the Executive Officer of the PhD program at the City University of New York Graduate School. Together with internationally renowned scientists, Nobel Laureates and Fields Medalists in mathematics, he is on several international advisory boards. He has also been writing and giving poetry readings for several years. Some of his poems are published in literary journals, such as Yale Poets, The Seventh Quarry (Wales),  Bhosphorus, (Turkey),   Paterson Literary Review,  and Long Island Sounds  (USA), as well as in anthologies—Noches de Cornelia: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and  (forthcoming in 2012)  bilingually  in Korean Expatriate Literature and Bridging the Water: An International Poetry Anthology.  His first poetry book, Under the Shadows of Your Falling Words, was published bilingually by Editions Godot (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2008

 

MICHAEL FOLDES/U.S.A.

 

FROM: “FORT LEE POEMS”

THINGS WITH SHARP EDGES

I woke up this morning and it was Tuesday.

The large pattern of loneliness settled in

On my head and body like a parachute

Snapped tight by four hands, and full of air.

 

I didn’t want to think about last night.

There are better things to do with money

Than bribe the gendarmes to give you back

Your car. By law it’s a flat fee for everyone,

But it’s a bigger hit to him who don’t have it.

 

The fog was lifting fast from the valley;

I could clearly hear the traffic on Route 4.

The mountains in the distance my wife

Said I couldn’t see were hidden in mist,

But later, when the sky turned silver, when

Some blue began to show through, they

Appeared, disappointingly dull and serrated,

Shadowy humps on the moveable ledge where

Heaven leaves off and earth begins.
Later on I took a walk around the block,

A quiet, peaceful walk in the park,

The stranger who just moved in

But didn’t really live there, quite yet.

 

Michael Foldes has a B.A. in anthropology from The Ohio State University. He has been an editor, contributor and publisher of magazines, newspapers and chapbooks since the early 1970s, including a stint as editor and columnist with Gannett’s newspapers in Binghamton, New York, for more than a decade. He is the founder (2004) and managing editor of Ragazine.CC, the online magazine of art, information and entertainment (http://ragazine.cc); was lead editor on the first edition of the PSMA’s “Handbook of Standardized Terminology for the Power Sources Industry”, and, for more than 25 years has worked as a sales executive in the electronics industry. Foldes and his wife Margot have three children. He commutes between metro New York and Greater Binghamton. His book “Sleeping Dogs: A true story of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping”, is forthcoming from Split Oak Press, and is available online at Kindle, Nook, Apple and other e-book stores.

 

 

MAHMOOD KARIMI-HAKAK/IRAN

 

 

TOMORROW

What will happen to you tomorrow?

Tomorrow when my friends and comrades
go with love
to decorate the cold earth
with their warm blood once again,

tomorrow when you paint your face
with blood from “Those who walk the path of love”*
so the eyes of betrayal and ignorance
do not glimpse fear
seeing your pale face,

tomorrow when my country’s dry earth
will be quenched
with the blood of its people,

tomorrow when again the hand of lies, deceit and vanity
stretches out
of the senile, ugly, old man’s sleeve
to squeeze
shamelessly and unabashedly
your msooth, delicate throat

tomorow when in every back alleyway
men, women,young, old,
with heads bent to the ground
weeping tears of lost memories,

tomorrow at dawn without ad oub
from the alleyways of my childhood
blood will flood seeping allt he way to the desert.

Tomorrow
will my brothers and sisters
executed long ago
awaken from twenty years of sleep
to receive your innocent bodies
in their embrace?

 

English translation by: Mahmood Karimi-Kakak and Bill Wolak 

Mahmood Karimi-Hakak is a poet, author, translator, theatre and film artist who has created 50 stage and screen plays in U.S., Europe and his native Iran. He is the recipient of a number of awards including Outstanding Foreign Film (Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, 1995), Critics’ Choice (Fajr International Theatre Festival, 1999), Fulbright (2009-10) and Raymond Kennedy (2005). His literary credits include five plays, two books of poetry, numerous articles, interviews and translations in both English and Persian, including Your Lover’s Beloved: 51 Ghazals by Hafez and Love Emergencies (both with Bill Wolak). His latest Film, The Glass Wall documents a desired dialogue between Palestinian and Israeli artists. A Professor of Creative Arts at Siena College, Karimi-Hakak has taught at CCNY, SMU and TU as well as at universities in Europe and Iran. mhakak@siena.edu

 

MARIA MAZZIOTTI GILLAN/U.S.A.

 

SPIKE HEELS

In the 1950s, I wore spike heels.

They were very high, but I was thin then,

 

didn’t wobble. I walked through hours

at my job, my high heels twinkly

 

as Dorothy’s red slippers with pointy toes,

heels in every possible color, sling-backs

 

and pumps, the clickety-clack of them

on pavement making me feel

 

as sophisticated as Marilyn Monroe. Older now,

my heels have gone lower and lower,

 

reduced to sandals with Velcro straps to hold

my triple E-feet. I still watch women

 

striding in their spike heels, and wish

for one minute that I could go back

 

to the days when I could walk

with such grace, look with longing

 

at this marker of beauty, as though

I were still sixteen and not this woman

 

I’ve become, pounding through life

on confident feet.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is a recipient of the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, and the 2008 American Book Award for her book, All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions). Her latest book is What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009 (Guernica Editions, 2010), and she has a book forthcoming on September 15, 2012, The Place I Call Home (New York Quarterly Press).  She is the Founder /Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. She is also Director of the Creative Writing Program and Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY.  She has published fourteen books of poetry and, with her daughter Jennifer, she is co-editor of four anthologies.

 

 

 

IFEANY A. MENKITI/NIGERIA

 

Excerpt from:

THEY WILL RISE

the body of Europe

but an elongation

of the body of Africa

and you talk of ancestors

and I say: Lucy is

up there in heaven

smiling at all of us

 

that this business of the mitochondria,             

it is not a tale by an old wife;                            

and the talk about a deoxy

in a ribonucleic merger

how can it be about an acid

when it has juju written

all over it?

some deep mystery sprung

from the soil of this Africa

 

& the mystery is not yet done-

 

how such a knowledge, it belongs

to a class of things not written down;

 

which it would make no sense

to write down;

 

the elders, did they not say

that there are things, a da na

ede ede na akwukwo?

things that will break the scribe’s pen

should the scribe insist

on writing them down?

 

that when we are born

there comes a time

when we see the end

of our earthly days

 

but that some among us

when they die

they appear to be

merely asleep

 

hence the meaning of that song:

 

mmuo-oma m’lolu n’obu ula

a maro-m n’obu onwu—

angel that you thought was asleep

not knowing it was death

 

Reprinted from Of Altair, the Bright Light

 (Earthwinds Editions. 2005)  by Ifeanyi A. Menkiti

Ifeanyi A. Menkiti was born in Onitsha, Nigeria.  He has taught philosophy at Wellesley College for more than 35 years.  He is the author of four collections of poetry, Affirmations (1971), The Jubilation of Falling Bodies (1978), and Of Altair, the Bright Light (2005), and Before a Common Soil (2007). Other poems have appeared in journals and periodicals, such as the Sewanee Review, Ploughshares, New Directions, The Massachusetts Review, Stony Brook, Southwest Review, and the African journals: Okike, Transition, and Nigeria Magazine.  In 1975, he was honored with a fellowship in poetry from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, followed in 1978 by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.  He is presently the owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square, the oldest continuous all poetry bookstore in the United States. This year, 2012, the store celebrates its 85th anniversary, having been founded in 1927.

 

 

OSDANY MORALES/CUBA

 

LA CASA DEL SOL NACIENTE

Billy Bill y Jo-jo crecieron juntos, tomados de la mano —la de ella pequeña, fría y traslúcida como una rana, la de él áspera y pétrea como un pegote de barro seco— mientras atravesaban un interminable campo de trigo. Todas las mañanas veían pasar el tren rumbo a las minas de oro y más tarde lo veían volver en dirección a los pozos de petróleo. Estos destinos, Billy Bill los conocía de oídas: era hijo del barbero del pueblo y en su terraza los clientes melenudos discutían sobre los dos extremos de la línea del tren. Vienen cargados de oro los vagones, le susurraba Billy Bill a Jo-jo cuando en la tarde se tumbaban en la colina a mirar el paso del tren hacia el Norte. Vienen cargados de petróleo los vagones, respondía Jo-jo cuando en la mañana se tumbaban en la colina a mirar el paso del tren hacia el Sur. Ella vivía con su padre en un chalet de madera a un extremo del pueblo, y su ocupación era recoger los huevos de una escuadra de diez ocas que marchaban todo el día con el cuello tieso, escandalizadas por cómo el padre alcohólico trataba a la hija. Jo-jo tenía un solo vestido y al ponerse el sol lo lavaba para que pareciera limpio al siguiente día, de modo que en la noche siempre andaba desnuda. Se cuidaba de no cruzarse con el padre al anochecer y pasaba todo el tiempo encerrada en su habitación, pero una primavera Jo-jo creció, custodiando sus ocas. He crecido, Billy Bill, le dijo al oído mientras despedían los vagones hacia el Sur. He crecido y mi padre me hará su mujer esta misma noche. Entonces Billy Bill con sus manos de barro le sacó el único vestido que le conocía, y Jo-jo comenzó a tantear con sus dedos húmedos los botones huidizos de la ropa de hombre. Sobre los rieles oxidados no cruzaron vagones. Una bandada de aves negras se escurrió por el cielo en silencio. Al llegar al chalet de madera el padre la esperaba, haciendo rodar sobre la mesa una botella vacía. Jo-jo intentó subir la escalera cuando él la siguió, la alcanzó y le rompió el vestido. Ella no gritó, apartó como pudo los brazos del padre y trató de llegar hasta su habitación. Lo más que logró fue abrir la puerta. Detrás de ésta aguardaba Billy Bill. He crecido, Jo-jo, le dijo antes de golpear al padre en el rostro. El borracho rodó escaleras abajo y cuando su cabeza alcanzó la madera del último peldaño murió. He crecido, Jo-jo, ya nadie podrá hacerte daño, dijo Billy Bill antes de arrastrar el cuerpo. Lo repitió por última vez antes de darle sepultura en el patio. Las gotas de lluvia perforaban en el barro y ellos volvieron a revolcarse en el suelo, desnudos y sucios. Las ocas, como paraguas amontonados, se guarecían de los espectros de la madrugada. Me marcharé en el próximo tren, dijo Billy Bill. Vienen cargados de petróleo los vagones, dijo ella. Haré una fortuna y regresaré por ti, Jo-jo. Te esperaré hasta que muera la última de las ocas, Billy Bill. Si no has vuelto para ese entonces quiere decir que no hay fortuna en las minas de oro ni en los pozos de petróleo, y yo iré a buscarte.

Las ocas, una por una, fueron muriendo.

La primera, atragantada con una espiga de trigo.

Una teja del establo cayó sobre la segunda y la mató al instante.

La tercera murió de un infarto que le abrió el corazón en dos mitades.

La cuarta amaneció con el pico surcado de hormigas rojas.

La quinta y la sexta fueron robadas.

La séptima oca puso un huevo negro y pesado como una roca antes de expirar.

La octava quedó atrapada en un mantel tendido, luego de dar tres vueltas ciegas se estranguló.

La novena oca aleteó en un extremo del patio, echó una corta carrera y alzó el vuelo hasta perderse en el cielo sin nubes.

Cuando alrededor del chalet se paseaba una sola oca, una mano de mujer se acerca y acaricia la cabeza del ave como si se apoyara en un bastón. Le extiende el cuello blanco y emplumado sobre el piso de madera de la terraza y lo cercena con un cuchillo de cocina. En la mañana, su silueta a lo lejos atraviesa los campos dorados, rumbo a un tren que no se detiene.

Chocando con varias personas, como si no las viera, un hombre con sombrero de paño y enormes gafas entra en el bar. Se recuesta de medio lado en un tramo vacío de la barra. La canción resulta conocida, pero disimulada tras otra melodía, como descubrir The house of the rising sun en un registro aún más descorazonado. La cantante es una mujer estirada que muestra los pechos a su público, aunque estos no se le ven porque la luz sale del fondo y sólo es posible definir su contorno. También luce un sombrero de paño. Al terminar la canción alguien pide un aplauso para Jo-jo, que es ella. Se quita el sombrero y lo ajusta en sus pechos, de modo que queda suspendido y no deja ver mucho más. Otro grita que devuelva el sombrero a su sitio. Mientras se asoma al borde del escenario, donde le ofrecen billetes que ella permite deslizar en las ligas de sus muslos, responde que volverá a descubrirse cuando alguno sea capaz de adivinar la frase de la noche. Muchos vocean lo primero que les viene a la mente, otros encuentran la oportunidad de blasfemar contra Dios. El hombre de la barra bruñe un arrugado billete de un dólar y apartando a aquellos que ocupan la primera fila se acerca a Jo-jo. Ella le alarga una pierna cuando él exige: En el sombrero. Jo-jo silba: ¡Tenemos un ganador! ¿Cuál es tu nombre, ganador? Billy, dice el hombre. ¡Un aplauso para Billy, el ganador!, grita el mismo que ha pedido un aplauso para Jo-jo. Ella se saca el sombrero y se lo ofrece volteado. Billy, el ganador, suelta su billete, que cae lentamente como una pluma de oca. Mira el busto de Jo-jo y sonríe, y en sus gafas enormes se repiten los pechos de la cantante. Espérame al fondo, dice ella, hoy es tu noche de suerte. Billy, el ganador, sale del bar, echa a andar una camioneta amarilla y da un indeciso rodeo como si tardara en descubrir cuál es el fondo. Frena, por fin, levantando una polvareda con forma de anacrónico caballito de mar que no tarda en disiparse en el paisaje de neumáticos viejos, cajas de cerveza amontonadas, fantasmagóricos cactus sin pareja. Mientras espera improvisa una melodía con los dedos en el volante. Jo-jo asoma por la ventanilla, otra vez lleva los pechos atrapados en el sombrero. Billy, el ganador, se saca el suyo y lo cuelga en la cabeza de Jo-jo. Se quita las gafas y las larga en la guantera. El rostro de Billy, el ganador, hace juego con su camioneta. La barba mal recortada y dispersa, que no alcanza a ocultar las arrugas, una ceja incompleta, se le pueden contar más de doce cicatrices. ¿A quién le has prestado tu cara?, dice Jo-jo. Es el viento de la carretera. Vienes de muy lejos entonces. Vengo de cerca, pero hago el mismo recorrido varias veces al día. Billy, el ganador, dice ella, hace unos años llegué a este sitio buscando a un hombre como tú. Jo-jo, la cantante, tu historia me interesa menos que la posición de tu sombrero. Sube, te llevo hasta el pueblo. Todavía me quedan dos rondas de canciones tristes esta noche. ¿Sabes cuánto vale el sombrero que ahora cuelga en tu cabeza? No más que mis gemelas. Sólo son un par de tetas, Jo-jo, la cantante, no las sobrevalores, y tampoco les llames gemelas, las encontrarías bastante diferentes si pudieras observarlas desde otro ángulo. Vamos, prometo pasar el detector de mentiras durante el viaje y así sabrás si soy o no tu hombre. Iluminada por el único reflector que funciona, Jo-jo cruza por delante de la camioneta amarilla. Billy, el ganador, la ve sostener los dos sombreros como si paseara sobre una cuerda floja y cada uno le ofreciera equilibrio. La camioneta, trémula, avanza con su luz tuerta lijando la carretera. Cuando era joven, dice Jo-jo, vine hasta aquí detrás de un hombre. ¿Qué te hace pensar que puedo ser yo? No digo que seas tú, suelo premiar a todos los Billy que encuentro a mi paso. Pero Billy no es mi verdadero nombre, Jo-jo, la cantante. Me llamo William Moss, y créeme que hace un buen tiempo que no pronuncio ese nombre completo. Jo-jo aparta una lágrima mirando la oscuridad de su ventanilla donde palpita un viento devastador. ¿Cómo llegaste a este sitio, William Moss, alias Billy, el ganador? En tren, Jo-jo, como todo el mundo. ¿Creías que aquí estaban las minas de oro? Nunca oí hablar de eso, vine porque a los quince años un tren me envió de una sacudida. Pues yo llegué siguiendo al hombre que mató a mi padre. Me costó poco tiempo enterarme de que podía ganar algo en el bar, allí me bautizaron con el nombre de Jo-jo, como muchas otras Jo-jo que estuvieron antes y otras que estarán cuando mis gemelas cumplan su misión en este mundo. ¿Y cómo te llamas, Jo-jo? Kim, Kim Jones. Es un bonito nombre, Kim Jones. Lo es. Me encantaba usarlo antes. Y a este hombre, a Billy, ¿para qué lo buscas? Creo que para matarlo. Yo puedo ayudarte a buscarlo. Y qué pide a cambio, Billy, el ganador. Que me ayudes a dar con una mujer que dejé atrás, cuando era joven. Suena bastante parejo. Lo es, Jo-jo, la cantante, es muy parejo. Ambos miran la carretera, que parece no tener fin.

Vienen cargados de oro los vagones, Jo-jo.

Vienen cargados de petróleo los vagones, Billy Bill.

 

_____________________________

THE HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN

Billy Bill and Jo-Jo grew up together, holding hands (hers were small, cold and translucent like a frog; his, rough and stony like a clump of dry mud) as they walked through an endless wheat field. Every morning they would watch the train on its way to the gold mine and later watch it go back towards the oil well. Billy Bill had heard of these destinations —he was the son of the town’s barber and in his deck the long haired costumers discussed the two ends of the train line. They come back filled with gold, the wagons do, Billy Bill would whisper into Jo-Jo’s ear when in the afternoon they lay down on the hill to watch the passing of the train going North. They come back filled with oil, the wagons do, Jo-Jo would answer when in the morning they lay down on the hill to watch the passing of the train going South. She lived with her father in a wooden cottage at one end of the town, and her occupation consisted of picking up the eggs from a squad of geese that marched all day with their necks stiff, shocked at the way the alcoholic father treated his daughter. Jo-Jo had only one dress and when the sun set she would wash it so that it would seem clean the next day, therefore she was always naked at night. She took good care not to meet her father at nightfall and kept herself locked in her room, but one spring Jo-Jo grew up, watching over her geese. I’ve grown Billy Bill, she whispered into his ear while they waved the wagons goodbye heading South. I’ve grown and my father will make me his woman this very night. Then Billy Bill, using his muddy hands, tore the only dress he knew of hers, and Jo-Jo began to feel with her humid fingers the elusive buttons of men’s clothing. No wagon passed over the rusty rails. A flock of black birds slipped away in silence. When she got back to the wooden cottage her father was waiting for her, rolling an empty bottle on the table. Jo-Jo tried to climb the stairs when he followed her, caught her and split her dress. She did not scream, but moved away as best she could from her father’s arms and tried to reach her room. She only got as far as opening the door. Behind it awaited Billy Bill. I’ve grown, Jo-Jo, he said to her before hitting the father in the face. The drunkard rolled down the stairs, and when his head hit the wood of the last step he died. I’ve grown, Jo-Jo, no one will be able to harm you now, said Billy Bill before dragging the body. He repeated this one last time before burying it in the yard. Drops of rain perforated the mud and again they rolled around in the ground, naked and dirty. The geese, like piled up umbrellas, took shelter from the daybreak specters. I’ll leave on the next train, said Billy Bill. They come filled with oil, the wagons do, she said.  I’ll make a fortune and come back for you, Jo-Jo. I’ll wait for you until the last one of the geese dies, Billy Bill. If you haven’t returned by then, it means that there’s no fortune in the gold mines nor in the oil wells, and I’ll go find you.

The geese began to die, one by one.

The first choked on an ear of wheat.

A tile from the stable fell on the second one and killed it instantly.

The third died of a heart attack and its heart was split into two halves.

The fourth was found with its beak furrowed with red ants.

The fifth and the sixth were stolen.

The seventh laid a black egg, heavy as a rock, before expiring.

The eighth was caught in a hanging tablecloth —after three blind spins it strangled itself.

The ninth goose flapped its wings at one end of the yard, ran a short race and took off until it disappeared in the cloudless sky.

When a single goose paced up and down the cottage, a female hand approaches and caresses the bird’s head as if it were leaning on a cane. It extends the white feathered neck on the deck’s wooden floor and cuts it off with a kitchen knife. In the morning, its silhouette traverses the golden fields in the distance, heading for a train that does not stop.

Bumping into several people, as if he were incapable of seeing them, a man with a cloth hat and an enormous pair of glasses walks into the bar. He leans halfway over an empty stretch of the bar. The song turns out to be familiar, but concealed behind a different tune, like discovering The House of the Rising Sun in an even more disheartened register. The singer is a tight woman who shows her breasts to the audience, although they can’t see them because the light is coming from the back and it is only possible to define their outline. She also wears a cloth hat. When the song ends someone shouts for a round of applause for Jo-Jo, which is her name. She takes the hat off and puts it on her breasts, so that the hat is left suspended and does not reveal much more. Someone else shouts that she return the hat to its original place. While she leans on the edge of the stage, where she is offered bills that she allows to be slipped in her garters, she answers that she will uncover herself again when one of them is able to find out tonight’s phrase. Many shout whatever comes to their minds; others find an opportunity to blaspheme against God. The man at the bar burnishes a crumpled dollar bill, and moving aside those in the front row, approaches Jo-Jo. She holds out a leg when he demands: In the hat. She whistles: We have a winner! What’s your name, winner? Billy, the man says. A round of applause for Billy the Winner!, shouts the same guy that asked for a round of applause for Jo-Jo. She takes off the hat and offers it to him turned around. Billy the Winner lets go of his bill, which falls slowly like a goose feather. He looks at Jo-Jo’s bust and smiles, and in his enormous glasses the singer’s breasts are duplicated. Wait for me at the back, she says, tonight’s your lucky night. Billy the Winner comes out of the bar, starts a yellow pickup truck, and makes an indecisive detour, as if he were taking a long time finding out where the back might be. At last he brakes, raising a cloud of dust that has the shape of an anachronistic seahorse that doesn’t take long to dissipate into the landscape of old tires, piled up cases of beer, phantasmagoric coupleless cactus. While he waits he improvises a tune with his fingers on the wheel. Jo-Jo appears at the window, again the breasts caught in the hat. Billy the Winner takes off his, and hangs it on Jo-Jo’s head. He takes off the glasses and puts them in the glove compartment. Billy the Winner’s face matches his pickup truck. The poorly trimmed and scattered beard, not enough to conceal the wrinkles; an incomplete eye brow; more than twelve scars to be counted. Who have you been lending your face to? says Jo-Jo. It is the wind from the highway. You’ve come a long way, then. I come from around, but I cover the same route several times a day. Billy the Winner, she says, a few years ago I came to this place looking for a man like you. Jo-Jo the Singer, I’m less interested in your story than I am in the position of your hat. Come on in, I’ll drive you into town. No, I still have two rounds of sad songs left tonight. The hat that hangs on your head, you know how much it’s worth? No more than my twins. They’re just a couple of tits, Jo-Jo the Singer, don’t overestimate them, and don’t call them twins either, you would find them quite different if you could observe them from another angle. Come on, I promise to pass the lie detector along the way and then you’ll know if I’m your man or not. Lit up by the only working headlight, Jo-Jo crosses in front of the yellow pickup truck. Billy the Winner sees her hold the two hats as if she were walking on a tightrope and each one offered her equilibrium. The pickup truck, trembling, advances with its one-eyed light, sanding down the highway. When I was young, says Jo-Jo, I came all the way here looking for a man. What makes you think that it can be me? I’m not saying it’s you, I usually reward all the Billies I find in my path. But Billy’s not my real name, Jo-Jo the Singer. My name is William Moss, and believe me when I tell you that it’s been a long time since I last pronounced that name fully. Jo-Jo removes a tear looking at the darkness of her window, where a devastating wind throbs. How did you get to this place, William Moss, aka Billy the Winner? On a train, Jo-Jo, like everyone else. Did you think that the gold mines were here? Never heard of that, I came here because when I was fifteen a train jerked me out. Well I got here following the man that killed my father. It took me little time to find out that I could earn something at the bar, where they gave me the name of Jo-Jo, like so many other Jo-Jo’s that were before me, and others that will be when my twins have carried out their mission in this world.  And what’s your name, Jo-Jo? Kim, Kim Jones. That’s a pretty name, Kim Jones. It is. I loved to use it back then. And this man, this Billy, why are you looking him for him? To kill him, I think. I can help you find him. And what does Billy the Winner ask in return. That you help me find a woman that I left behind when I was young. Sounds fair enough. It is, Jo-Jo the singer; it’s quite fair. They both looked at the highway, which seemed endless.

They come filled with gold, the wagons do, Jo-Jo.

They come filled with oil, the wagons do, Billy Bill.

 

Translated from Spanish by Francisco Díaz Klaassen

Osdany Morales (Nueva Paz, 1981) is a Cuban author. His first book, a collection of short stories, Minucionas puertas estrechas (Ediciones Unión, 2007), earned the David award. In 2008 he won the International Prize for Fiction Casa de Teatro, in the Dominican Republic. In the fall of 2011 he finished his second book, Papyrus, which recently was awarded with the prestigious Alejo Carpentier Award 2012, in Cuba. His fiction works have been included in anthologies about new Cuban literature, such as Maneras de narrar (2006), Los que cuentan (2008) and La fiamma in boca (2009). His stories have appeared in magazines El Cuentero (Cuba), El Perro (Mexico) and Quimera (Spain). Currently, supported by a Banco de Santander Fellowship, he is doing an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish at NYU.

 

 

MARIO MORONI/ITALY

 

SALUTARE UN PADRE

 

A volte il silenzio parla, pronuncia cose enormi, perfino qui dall’altra parte dell’Atlantico, in scene che sembrano familiari, ma che invece vanno guardate con gran riverenza, solennità. Come quando vènti leggeri rifiutano di tacere e riportano indietro lineamenti delle cose, delle mani. La vita di un uomo è segnata da linee confuse, gesti degli anni, ed ancora silenzi, altri silenzi, gesti tracciati nell’aria, anche qui dall’altra parte dell’Atlantico.

Non c’è mai abbastanza tempo per salutare un padre. Non bastano cartoline ed altri messaggi, non bastano le parole appena pronunciate, non bastano anni ed anni. Il semplice congedo è solo un attimo, è lo sprazzo mattutino, ma non basta, nemmeno quello basta. Soprattutto dopo il ventisette settembre, dopo che i pensieri sono andati e la bocca si chiude. La morte è un abbandono? E’ una forma di partenza? Qualcuno se lo chiede, anzi tutti se lo chiedono, anche se non lo ammettono. E’ una dispersione della materia, un ritorno alla terra? Anzi, è un allontanamento, ma da dove e per dove? Ma no, per molti invece è la fine di un inseguimento.

Prima o poi il silenzio ci raggiunge, ci tocca. Sai come avviene? Te lo confesso: c’e’ un mucchio di gente che parla in tono familiare, traffico intorno, rumore delle cose. Poi poco a poco si spengono le luci, si abbassano i volumi, il silenzio s’avvicina, arriva da lontano, da qualche punto che abbiamo lasciato indietro, nascosto. Poco a poco ci raggiunge, infine ci tocca. E’ lì che nasce un profondo rispetto per il silenzio, perché è la fase ultima, l’ultimo stadio: in silenzio e al buio, è la condizione più vicina a quella della morte. La vita è chiaroscuri, solarità, luci varie, intermittenti, alti e bassi, passioni e delusioni, ronzii, ma la morte, la morte no, è solo silenzio nel buio.

Ora la scena cambia, in una stanza, al buio, il silenzio è rotto da una voce, da due voci. Le due voci si cercano, s’intuiscono, un’aria calma nell’assenza di respiro. Ritornano luoghi amati, sfiorati dalle dita, ora un segnale:

Prima voce: “Verso l’unica morte si va instancabili, fatti per morire.”

Seconda voce:” Sì, programmati per morire, anzi nati per il preciso scopo di morire.”

Prima voce: “Sì, è buffo, verso l’unica morte possibile.”

Seconda voce: “E qual è l’unica morte possibile?”

Prima voce: “Ma è la morte stessa, ce n’è una sola, o sbaglio?”
Seconda voce: “Allora la vita è un progressivo allontanamento dalle cose della vita in direzione della morte?”

Prima voce: “Certo, ma ce ne sono di cose da vedere durante il tragitto, che poi è una lenta declinazione, sì che ce ne sono: suoni, voci di madri e gesti riflessi sull’acqua, azioni bloccate in una serie di fotografie, quelle del mare, della vacanza. Migliaia di foto che imprigionano il passato, è l’unico modo per non farlo scappare, tranne che poi le foto ingialliscono, come quelle dei vent’anni, le foto di gruppo, quelle dei parenti.”
Seconda voce: “Sì, le foto di gruppo, quelle della scuola, siamo vivi lì, guardiamo al futuro, anzi sembriamo volerci arrivare al più presto, quasi correre verso il futuro”.

Prima voce: “Certo rimangono vaghi ricordi, come quelli degli errori commessi, ma anche versi come questi:

danzare con i vestiti nuovi

danzare sul mare di sera

danzare, danzare e sognare

 

Seconda voce: “Che cosa sono, da dove vengono?”

Prima voce: “Sono canti, cantilene, cantari, cantate, in attesa di giovani donne. Senti, una volta a Bruxelles, con un dente cariato, al freddo, ho visto un’alba strana, alle otto di mattina era ancora buio, poi poco a poco è nata una luce. Era l’inverno nordico. Ma a che serve ricordarlo?”

Seconda voce: “Ma sì, a che serve? Ma allora a che serve tutto il resto, i destini incrociati, l’orgoglio giovanile, se poi ci si allontana, leggermente, ogni giorno di più, stabilmente, sai qual è l’unica cosa certa in tutta questa storia?

Prima voce: “No, qual è?”
Seconda voce: “E’ che il tempo passa, questo è certo, e continua a passare, come dire: trascorre, bella parola, sembra come in una vacanza: trascorrere giorni lieti in vacanza.”

Prima voce: “Ora è tardi, cambiamo scena, non so dove sei esattamente, ma ti sento stanco.”

Seconda voce: “Sì, spostiamoci da qui”.

Ora la scena è quella di un viaggio, viaggio attraverso varie lingue, forse paesi mai visti, in anni lontani. Ma senza bocca per chiamare, senza lingua per parlare. E’ un viaggio per mare? E’ un viaggio per terra? Senza occhi per vedere, senza orecchie per sentire. Che viaggio è? Che ora è? Me lo chiedo, se lo chiedono, nel corso dei vari destini, delle varie destinazioni. Partenze in anticipo, in orario, in ritardo, mezzi di trasporto appena arrivati, appena partiti. A volte si è in anticipo, a volte in ritardo, sulle cose, sugli sguardi degli altri, negli appuntamenti. Ma a volte si è in orario, ecco è quello il momento che segna l’equilibrio. Si è in orario con gli sguardi degli altri, si è arrivati al momento giusto: un figlio che guarda negli occhi suo padre, un padre che guarda negli occhi suo figlio. Si è appena in tempo per certi appuntamenti. Si è soli senza saperlo, si è in compagnia senza saperlo. Si parte sempre, alla fine, prima o poi. Una partenza è in attesa per tutti, chiuso ogni gesto, chiusa ogni memoria. Abbiamo avuto un padre, siamo diventati padri, i nostri figli diventeranno padri e madri, i figli dei loro figli diventeranno padri e madri. Sempre presenti, partiti per sempre.

 

___________________________________

 

FAREWELL TO A FATHER

Sometimes silence speaks, pronounces vast things, even here on the other side of the Atlantic, in scenes that seem familiar, but instead need to be viewed with great reverence, solemnity. As when light winds refuse to be hushed and bring back the outlines of things, of hands. A man’s life is marked by muddled lines, the years’ gestures, silences and more silences, gestures traced in the air, even here on the other side of the Atlantic.

There is never enough time to say good-bye to one’s father. Postcards and other messages aren’t enough, the words just spoken aren’t enough, years and years aren’t enough. The simple good-bye takes only a moment, it’s a morning cloudburst, but it’s not enough, not even that. Especially after September the twenty-seventh, after the thoughts have flown and the mouth closes. Is death a desertion? Is it a leave-taking? Someone wonders, indeed everyone wonders, even if they don’t admit it. Is it a dispersal of matter, a return to earth? It is, rather, a departure, but from where and to where? But no, for many it’s the end of a hunt.

Sooner or later silence reaches us, touches us. Do you know how it happens? I confess: a lot of people speak in familiar tones, traffic around them, the sounds of things. Then little by little the lights go out, the volume is lowered, silence draws near, arrives from far off, from some place we left behind, hidden. Little by little it reaches us, finally touches us. A deep respect for silence is born there, because it’s the last phase, the last stage: in silence and dark our condition is closest to death. Life is chiaroscuros, sunshine, changing lights, intermittent, high and low, passions and delusions, rumblings, but death, no, it’s only silence and darkness.

Now the scene changes to a room, in the dark, the silence is broken by a voice, by two voices. The two voices look for each other, intuit each other, a still air in the absence of breath. Beloved places come back, brushed by fingertips, then a signal:

First Voice: “Toward one death we go tirelessly, born to die.”

Second Voice: “Yes, born to die, even born for the very purpose of dying.”

First Voice: “Yes, it’s funny, toward the one possible death.”

Second Voice: “And what is the one possible death?”

First Voice: “It’s death itself, there is only one, isn’t there?”

Second Voice: “Then life is a progressive departure from living things in the direction of death?

First Voice: “Sure, but there are things to see on the trip, which is a slow path downward, yes, there are things to see: sounds, mothers’ voices, and gestures reflected in water, actions caught in a series of snapshots, scenes of the beach, of vacations. Thousands of photos imprisoning the past is the one way to keep it from getting away, except that the photos yellow, like those of one’s twenties, the group photos, one’s relatives.”

Second Voice: “Yes, the group photos, the school photos, we’re alive in them, we look toward the future, we seem to want to get there as fast as possible, almost running toward the future.”

First Voice: “Vague memories are left, like those of mistakes we made, but even verses like these:

dancing in new clothes

dancing on the sea in the evening

dancing, dancing and dreaming”
Second Voice: “What are they, where do they come from?”

First Voice: “They’re songs, lullabies, sung waiting for young women. Listen, once in Bruxelles, with an aching tooth, I saw a strange dawn, at eight in the morning it was still dark, then little by little the light was born. It was the northern winter. But what use is remembering it?”

Second Voice: “Yes, what use? But then what use is the rest, the crossed destinies, the youthful pride, if then everything goes off, lightly, further and further each day, steadily, do you know the only sure thing in this whole story?”

First Voice: “No, what is it?”

Second Voice: “That time passes, that’s for sure, and keeps passing, that is to say, elapses, nice word, like a vacation: happy days elapsed on vacation.”

First Voice: “Now it’s late, let’s change the scene; I don’t know where you are exactly, but you sound tired.”

Second Voice: “Yes, let’s get out of here.”

Now the scene is that of a journey, a trip through various languages, perhaps countries never seen, in distant years. But without a mouth for crying out, a tongue for speaking. Is it a sea voyage? Is it a land voyage? Without eyes for seeing, without ears for listening. What journey is it? What time is it? I wonder, they wonder, in the course of their various destinies, their various destinations. Early departures, on-time ones, late ones, the means of transport having just arrived, just departed. Sometimes we’re early, sometimes late, for things, for others’ gazes, for appointments. But sometimes we’re on time, okay, that’s the moment that signs the balance. We’re on time for the others’ gazes, we arrived at the right moment: a son who looks in his father’s eyes, a father who looks in his son’s eyes. We arrive just in time for some appointments. We are alone without knowing it, we are together without knowing it. We always leave in the end, sooner or later. A departure awaited by everyone, every gesture turned off, every memory closed. We had a father, we became fathers, our children become fathers and mothers, their children will become fathers and mothers. Having always arrived, always departed.

 

Translated from Italian by Olivia Holmes

Mario Moroni was born in Italy in 1955. He moved to the United States in 1989. He has taught at Yale University, the University of Memphis, Colby College, he currently teaches Italian at Binghamton University.  Mario Moroni has published seven volumes of poetry, one of poetic prose, and a DVD of poems, images, and electronic music in collaboration with composer Jon Hallstrom. In 1989 he was awarded the Lorenzo Montano prize for poetry. His poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies of contemporary poetry. As a critic, Mario Moroni has published three volumes and has co-edited three collections of essays on modern and contemporary Italian and European literature and culture.

 

 ______________

DIEGO TRELLES PAZ/PERU

 

Diego Trelles Paz was born in Lima, Perú, in 1977. He is the author of a short story collection, Hudson, el redentor [Hudson, the Redemeer] (Lima, 2001), and a novel, El círculo de los escritores asesinos [The Circle of the Murderous Writers] (Barcelona, 2005). His stories and articles have appeared in N+1, The White Review, Paterson Literary Review, Revista ñ, Babelia, Sibila, among others. He is a professor in Binghamton University, SUNY, and the editor of El futuro no es nuestro [The Future Is Not Ours] (2009) an anthology of short stories by young Latin American writers that has been published in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Panama, Hungary, Peru, and will be released in USA by University of Rochester’s Open Letter in 2012.

 

________________________ 

 

VANTZETI VASSILEV/BULGARIA

 

ПЪТУВАНИЯ до БИНГАМТЪН

Когато ми казаха, че ще пътувам до Бингамтън,  на лицето ми грейна самодоволна усмивка. Ами да, аз бях посещавал градчето често. Или казано възторжено: „Аз съм горд спонсор на двама колежани на СУНИ!” От тези няколко пътувания първото и последното се откройват релефно спрямо останалите.

Бях сам родител на двама сина и пътувах с по-възрастния към щатския колеж в Бингамтън. Имахме само една кола. От къде пари за втора? Само преди година бях получил гражданство. Синът ми бе в първата десетка на „Уолтър Панас Скул” и бе получил 4 стипендии, но само една от тях, на СиБа Гайги му донесе 1500 долара. Бе приет и в Ню Йорк Университи и Фордам, но парите ми не стигаха, затова срещу разочарования му поглед изрекох най- силния си аргумент, с който разполагах: „Универитетът в Бингамтън е сред първите 10 от щатските в Америка! Виж, АйБиЕм е основана тука!”, а когато паркирахме в студенсткото градче възкликнах: ”Защо не мога да се върна в студентските години и да бъда тук!”. АрЕйа, студентка от по-горен курс, като разбра, че съм родител и ще се шляйкам безцелно из кемпъса, ме покани да вляза на подготвителната лекция, която изнасяше на новодошлите. Бях единственият родител. „Редът е такъв, изискванията са такива!”- редеше приспивателно АрЕйката, но когато от устата й се отрони думата „секс”, дрямката ми се изпари.

Наострих уши. „На таблото до вратата на моя офис има три презерватива: бял, син и розов! Не се смущавайте, елате и си поискайте, когато ви дотрябват! Не е задължително! Безопасният секс е препоръчителен!” Почуствах се неловко. Погледнах боязливо около мен: децата, да, наистина, те всичките можеха да бъдат мои деца, слушаха безразлично. „Правете секс само в собствените си стаи! Виждате ли скамейката на терасата отсреща?”- пръстът й сочеше една от терасите, разположени срещу офиса й. „Миналата година двойка студенти правиха представление! Изхвърлиха ги веднага!” Изби ме студена пот. Ставаше въпрос за …орал секс.

Неволно се върнах в мойта младост. Такъв кемпъс нямахме. Преподаваха ни в сгради на бивши казарми. АрЕй? Какво пък е това? В тийн-годините баща ми упорито ми натрапваше „Половият въпрос” на д-р Август Форел, където професорът настойчиво съветваше да не мастурбираме. После добави: „Има леки жени, които може да ти лепнат някоя венерическа болест!” И накрая оформи родителския си съвет по сексуалните въпроси:” Търси твоята любов! Не лъжи момичетата! Но не бързай да се жениш преди да си завършил!” Едно поколение разлика, през която през вратите на тайнството бе нахълтала публичност.

Нарекох това пътуване :”предпазители в три цвята като национален флаг”.   Пътувах няколко пъти годишно до Бингамтън, първо заради моя син, после и за друг студент, който спонсорирах. Последното ми пътуване нарекох :”Няколко метра тоалетна хартия”. Не бе за добро и бе спешно. Сега ще ви разкажа защо.

Моят студент се бе озовал в затвора. Светкавично прекосяване на щата със стипчивия привкус на неприятно преживяване в устата, справка в полицията, копие от рапорта на полицията на ареста, бърза ориентация в адвокатския биснес на града, наемане на препоръчания адвокат, плащане на сумата за да бъде освободен под гаранция, пътуване до затвора и освобождаване!

В студентската му квартира изслушахме разказа му. Предишната вечер се бе отбил в някакъв бар, бе ударил няколко уискита на гладен стомах и прибирайки се по пътя към дома си, бе ритнал порта на частен дом. „Портата”- казваше полицейския рапорт – „е сериозно повредена и собствениците искат обезщетение от 3,000 долара.” Освен това нарушителят много често споменавал майка си. Много от детайлите не помнеше. Припомняше ги полицейският рапорт. Накрая, сконфузено, но с хитра усмивка извади малко роло тоалетна хартия. Разви го бавно. Разделени от перфорацията на страници, подобно на книга, отделните късове бяха запълнени със ситни букви, сякаш човекът, който бе ги изписал се бе стремял да не пропилее и най-малкото пространство. Затворът, условията, полицаите, охраната, разпитите, черното момче в съседната килия, затворено невинно. Всичко това бе записано на тия няколко ярда тоалетна хартия. Може би началото на една писателска кариера.

Адвокатът ни получи хонорара си, но остана разочарован, че не можа да разбере от полицейския рапорт защо клиентът му бе споменавал думата „майка”. Попита ме няколко пъти. Отговорих му, че моят студент не си спомня, но бях отгатнал, че той е крещял:”Мамка Ви капиталистическа!” Беше левичар. С оскъдните средства с които живееше, аз бих станал и ултра левичар.

Отидох да видя портата. Аз бих я поправил и за 200 долара.

И двамата ми студента завършиха успешно. Вторият се придвижва от ляво на дясно и е някъде по средата. Няма да се изненадам, ако някой ден прочета заглавие: „Записки от затвора върху тоалетна хартия”.

 

 ________________________

TRAVELS TO BINGHAMTON

When I was told that I would be traveling to Binghamton a smug smile came to my face. Oh yes, I had visited it often. Or to say it more enthusiastically: “I’m the proud sponsor of two college students of SUNY!”. Of these few trips the first and last separate themselves drastically from the rest. I myself, a single parent of two sons, was traveling with the older one to the campus of SUNY. We only had one car. Where would we get the money for a second one? I had just become a citizen a year before. My son was in the top ten graduates of Walter Panas High School and was the recipient of four scholarships, but only one of them, gave him $1,500. He was admitted by NYU and Fordham, but since I didn’t have enough money, I could only answer the look on his face, filled with disappointment, with the strongest argument I could come up with: “Binghamton is one of the top ten in The States! Look, even IBM was founded here.” And when we parked in the lot of the campus, I exclaimed: ”If only I could return to my college years and be here!” The resident assistant (RA), a student in an upper class, who discovered that I was the only parent and that I would walk around aimlessly on campus, invited me to participate in the lecture for freshmen that she was holding for them. “These are the rules, those are the requirements” uttered the RA-girl in a lulling voice.  But, when the word “sex” came out of her mouth, my nap was disrupted. I pricked up my ears. “On the board, next to the door of my office, there are three condoms—a white one, a blue one, and a pink one. Don’t be embarrassed, come and ask for one when you need it. It’s not required! Safe sex is to be recommended!” I felt weird. I looked around me uneasily— the kids were listening with indifference. “Have sex only in your own rooms! Do you see the bench on the terrace over there?”— her finger was pointing to one of the terraces across from her office. “Last year a couple gave a show. They were thrown out immediately!”. I broke out in cold sweat . . . they were having oral sex.

Without meaning to, I went back to my youth. We didn’t have such a campus. They used to teach us in a former army barracks. Resident Assistant—What the hell is that? In my teens my father used to persistently push “The Topic of Sex” of Dr. August Forell, in which the Professor insisted in recommending that we should not masturbate. Then he added: “There are slutty women who can gift you with a venereal disease.” Afterwards, he formulated his parental advice on the topic of sex: “Look for your true love. Don’t fool girls. However, don’t rush to get married before you graduate.”

A generational difference, during which the doors of secrecy had opened to the eye of the public.

I called this trip “Condoms in Three Colors as a National Flag.”  I traveled a few times a year to Binghamton, at first because of my son, then for a student, whom I already mentioned, whom I sponsored. I called my last trip “A Few Yards of Toilet Paper.” It wasn’t something positive, but it was urgent. I will now tell you why.

My student found himself in prison. Crossing the state like lightning, with a bad taste in the mouth, caused by an unpleasant experience, an inquiry in the police station, a copy of the police report of the arrest, a quick orientation of the available lawyers in the city, hiring of the recommended attorney, payment of the bail money so he could be freed under a guarantee, traveling to the prison, and finally getting him free.

We heard his story in his student apartment. He had gone to a bar the night before, had a couple of whiskeys on an empty stomach, and on his way home had kicked in the door of a private home. The police report said: ”The door is badly damaged and the owners are asking for retribution of $3,000. In addition, the perpetrator mentioned his mother very often. He didn’t remember many details. The police report was reminding him of some of them. At the end, embarrassed, but with a sly smile he took out a small roll of toilet paper. He unrolled it slowly. The separate sheets were full of small letters, as if the guy who had written them, had tried not to waste even the smallest space. The jail, the conditions, the policemen, the guard, the questioning, the black guy in the next cell who was put in jail even though innocent, all of these was written on these few yards of toilet paper. It was perhaps the beginning of a writer’s career.

The attorney got his fees, but he was disappointed that he couldn’t figure out from the police report why his client had been mentioning the word “mother.” He asked me a few times. I told him that my student didn’t remember, but I had guessed that he had been screaming, “You capitalist mother!”  He was a leftist. If I lived on the limited means that he was living on, I would have become an extreme leftist!

I went to see the door. I could fix it for $200.

Both of my students graduated successfully. The second one moved from the left to the right and now is in the middle. I wouldn’t be surprised if some day I would read “Notes From Prison on a Toilet Paper.”

 

Translated from Bulgarian by the author

Vantzeti Vassilev, born in 1945 in Radomir, Bulgaria. He earned a PhD in chemical engineering in Sofia. He immigrated in 1988 and has lived in New York since 1989. He worked for the New York Department of Environmental Protection. He is the author of  The Seeds of Fear (1991), a novel based on autobiographical data describing life in Bulgaria for the past 50 years and the absurdities that result from totalitarian society. A portion of the novel describes the lives of prisoners held without sentence in Belene, the infamous concentration camp in Bulgaria. These stories were told firsthand to the author by the prisoners. The novel was presented at the 20th Annual International Arts Festival 1991 of Cross-Cultural Communications in  New York. His second novel, The Trains of Roma, was published in 2006. The book was presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2009. His third book, Short Stories from NYPL, was published in 2011.

 

JOE WEIL/U.S.A.

ACADEMIA

You are nothing

you are

nothing you

are

nothing if not that bright glint

of semen

or is that  seagull on the horizon?

Distinguished by the sibilants of excellence:

 

the bright ivory tusk that gores you

 

brings you down to mix the blood of your thigh

with the dust or is that some other story?

 

Oh yes. You were digressing.

 

It is another story: it will not fit in with the works published section

 

it comes out of the sun and makes you squint, makes you

vomit up your dead, as if you were a sea of

qualifying adjectives:

 

They will tell you this poem is too obscure.

 

You are angry. You never meant to be. There is

the grey man – over there

he is mistranslated, and the red woman over there

who is misread, and every one is guarded

 

as if the boar were already prowling the quad

 

it’s eloquent achievements skewered high up

on its tusks.

 

Joe Weil is currently a lecturer in the creative writing department at Binghamton University. He has published three full-length books of poetry as well as three chap books, the latest of which is The Plumber’s Apprentice, New York Quarterly press. He is also active as an editor (formerly editor of Ragazine, currently of MAggy), and promoter of poetry. For a year he was publisher of Monk books and produced three chaps, one by the Pulitzer Prize winner, Mark Strand. Weil has a book of poems and photographs done with his friend, the artist Marco Munoz, as well as an e book of sonnets. After a long break, he has begun to compose music again.

 

__________________________

Crossroads included a special event, so to speak, the reading of Stanley Kunitz’s poem “The Layers” in English, and then in several translations. Among the translations was one by Dr. John Smelcer in the native Ahtna, a disappearing native Alaskan language. Both the English original and Smelcer’s translation are reprinted here. Many thanks to “the other Stanley” (Barkan) for facilitating the multi-lingual reading of the poem.

THE LAYERS

I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle

not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

“Live in the layers,

not on the litter.”

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.

Stanley Kunitz

 

 

Nen’tah Dzi

Stanley Kunitz’s “The Layers” translated into

 the Ahtna Athabaskan language of Alaska

by John E. Smelcer

 

Sii ghayaał dez’aan,

sedze’ eldaan’,

‘eł sii cic’uunen,

hwna eldaan’ ‘ida’

sii ‘estayteltaen stadelnen.

Sii ‘aen cit’aa’ak’e,

daak ‘aen sił’aa

tse tiye’ niłkanazilae

xuk’a t’uu yuuł,

sii ‘aen kayax kudghił’iitden

niłyihghatses ts’en yabaaghe

‘eł kon’ c’et’

c’aa kuk’tl’aa ninesk’ae,

k’edze’ tsiin ceyiige’

t’ak k’e ts’enla’ des.

Sii tsii gha denaey

yii sii gheli ts’aat,

‘eł denaey nadestaan!

Xaa c’asule’ ciz’aani uts’e kat’aen

ye dghos’itkay stadelnen?

Łts’ii niyaan

kon’ laedze’ ‘iita latsiin,

uyiits’ kulaele da’a k’edze’,

ts’iic unaen ghizet.

Sii nakeltaen, sii nakeltaen,

neniic uyighiyaa duuhwk’etle,

kae łaltsicdze’ tiye’

ndaa sii daetl’,

‘eł ‘aal ts’es k’e ten caax.

Yii tets t’uut’,

hwna yanlaey na’aay

‘el sii ghayaał tah tlaegge’,

yanlaey naes zaegge’ yanihwdinitaan:

“Ikae zdaa nen’tah dzi, c’eye’ ke’ łaets.”

Sii hwyaa lae ts’aan,

cu gutse eldaan’

yii giligak cu’ts’endze’

lae da’a stsesi.

Sii c’eye’ tl’aa cu’ts’endze’.

 

 _____________________

 

 

Thirty Years Later:

A Conversation on John Gardner

With John Smelcer
Contributing Editor 

This year marks the 30^th commemoration of John Gardner’s tragic motorcycle accident. Poet, playwright, translator, medievalist, he is the author of such novels as Nickel Mountain, Mickelsson’s Ghosts, The Sunlight Dialogues, and October Light, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976. His Grendel, now a classic, is a magnificent retelling of Beowulf from the monster’s point of view. Widely regarded as one of the best teachers of creative writing in America, Gardner was the author of numerous books on craft and literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction, On Becoming a Novelist, Moral Fiction, and The Forms of Fiction. In this candid conversation, Joel Gardner talks about his father with John Smelcer, Ragazine’s contributing editor and founder/co-judge of the “John Gardner Prize for Playwriting”.

 

JS:       I knew your father from our letters. In the decade before emails and the internet, we had a friendship in the old epistolary tradition. In 1982, I was an undergraduate at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, some 4,000 miles northwest of Binghamton, New York, where John was then teaching. I wanted to be a writer, and I heard that John Gardner was one of the best creative writing teachers in America. I recall having seen him once on the The Dick Cavett Show. His slender Grendel amazed me. Having read Beowulf in junior high school, I loved his bold retelling. He taught me the importance of point of view and voice. From that summer up until his untimely death in September, we exchanged a series of letters on craft. He also guided my summer reading. I remember at the time he was working on his seminal The Art of Fiction. We “discussed” the overriding importance of Coleridge’s “vivid and continuous dream” in fiction writing, especially in the novel. Some of our “conversation” ended up almost word-for-word in the book when it was posthumously published a year or so later. In the twenty-plus years that I’ve been teaching English, I’ve always used his books on craft in my creative writing courses. It’s often said how generous John was with his time. I wasn’t even a student at his university, and yet he expended postage and effort to teach me from afar. Our friendship connected my life to Binghamton University in ways I could never have foreseen at the time.

JG:      Dad was indeed a generous teacher. He was one of the few people I’ve ever heard of who would read and comment on the work of writers outside the formal atmosphere of the workshop or classroom. It was not uncommon for him to ask for manuscripts from people who reached out to him with a letter or a phone call, and—where he sensed there was a willingness to learn—he was very generous and would provide feedback and encouragement, whether in the form of correspondence or critique. He was an incredibly perceptive reader, and he absorbed and retained material almost whole on a first reading. One of the things he shared with me is that he felt very lucky to have read all these stories and novels by students and colleagues, many of which might not ever appear in print. He felt his experience of literature was richer for having all that hopeful (though not always successful) fiction in his head. But how is it after three decades, you ended up teaching creative writing at the same university where my dad used to teach?

JS:       In 2004, my book Without Reservation won the Milt Kessler Prize for a book of poetry published in a given year by an American poet over 40. I was invited to visit Binghamton University to speak to classes about creative writing and to read from the book. Two years later, the university offered me a generous fellowship to earn a Ph.D. in English and creative writing. For the past five years, I’ve roamed the same halls and taught in the same classrooms as your father, whose presence is still felt on campus. For instance, the room of the university’s literary magazine, Harper’s Palate, is named the John Gardner Room. I earned the degree last spring and was given the opportunity to teach in the department this year.

JG:      As long as you’ve been in Binghamton, you must have a lot of friends and colleagues who were also friends of my father, right? Jan Quackenbush comes to mind. You may also be acquainted with Liz Rosenberg and Susan Thornton. Is Bernie Rosenthal still with the department?

JS:       I’ve met Liz at a few readings, but as far as I know I’ve never met Susan or Bernie. In a strange coincidence, I knew Jan before I came to Binghamton. He and I were both teaching in Wilkes University’s low-residency MA/MFA creative writing program along with Norman Mailer’s son, Michael. I met Jan in the fall of 2004 after someone introduced us, saying that he had been a close friend of your father’s ever since your dad came to Binghamton in the late 1970s. With our mutual connection, we became good friends. He used to take me everywhere your dad used to haunt, even the exact place where John wrecked his motorcycle on that fateful September day in 1982. Jan used to ride with your dad, cruising the backroads from Binghamton to Montrose and Susquehanna, stopping by Jan’s little farmhouse for lunch and a beer. Although Wikipedia suggests that alcohol was the cause of your father’s death, Jan says that there was a dog that used to live at the house right at the bend in the road and that the damn thing always ran out to chase them whenever they motored by. Jan once said that he believes the dog probably ran out in front of John, who tried to avoid it and wrecked instead. I’ve ridden my motorcycle past that spot a few times, and I can see how it could have happened exactly like that. Jan gave me the leather jacket he used to wear when he rode with John. I recently wrote a poem about riding with your dad:

RIDING WITH JOHN GARDNER

I only knew Gardner from our letters.

But ever since I moved to the same town and haunt

the same university halls, I have this recurring dream:

We’re riding motorcycles on the backroads of New York

and Pennsylvania on our way to Susquehanna or Montrose.

It’s summer and we’re a couple of badass poets in black leather

& cool mirrored shades.

 

But then Grendel rides up on a hardtail Harley —

his shaggy fur ablaze in the sun, the road behind him aflame.

He pulls alongside, points a clawed finger, glares a gore-dangling grin,

strops a yellow fang with a blistered tongue, rattles his head and bellows,

before he runs us off the road and gorges on our grisly carnage.

 

The dream always ends the same.

  * * * 

I hope your father would approve. You once asked me which of your dad’s books is my favorite. Hands down it’s Grendel. I loved it from the first page with the obstinate goat with his hanging balls standing on the rocky crag. I remember telling your father thirty years ago that I wanted to do something similar with Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. As you know, I finished that novel a few years ago, and you were nice enough to read it and offer a few words for the dustcover. But his The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist are never far from reach. Of all your dad’s books, which are your favorites and why?

JG:      I love the poem. Probably the first book of my father’s that I really fell in love with was The Sunlight Dialogues. I was young the first time I read it — it had just come out —but it was a big, powerful book, and the story grabbed me. I could see so much of my father’s early life in Batavia in it (The Hodges being very much modeled on the extended Gardner family) that it served as a bridge to a past, a family archeology that I was only distantly a part of. But it was also the magic of the book, not just the stunts the Sunlight Man pulls off, but some of the effects, like the Esther chapter that begins by cutting straight into her stream of consciousness. And of course the plot was rich, multi-layered, profluent — though I wouldn’t have had the word for it then. Nickel Mountain is also a favorite, but for very different reasons. This book (October Light has the same quality, but in a more celebratory way) captures a man alone in the world coming to terms with a world that’s very different from what he believes is right and just. In Nickel Mountain, there is a gorgeous wedding scene, in Callie’s POV, that just knocks your socks off. There is something just so compelling about this monstrous man, Henry Soames, who runs a diner on a road over a mountain to and from more or less nowhere that feels truly like the despair any of us feels when we’re stuck, and we don’t know what to do about it. I love the generosity of the book, the love in its pages. The scene of the birth in the hospital in the snowstorm is pretty mystical.

I had a hand in Mickelsson’s Ghosts, not just by virtue of the pictures I took for the book, but because I came into my dad’s study one day with a handful of wallpaper from a back room he was remodeling in that house on Coleridge Road into a dining room. There were five or six or seven different layers of wallpaper, each seeming to indicate a different use for the room in past times. That scene is in the book somewhere, Mickelsson seeing all the different kinds of wallpaper when remodeling the fictional room, but it’s also the genesis of the book, or at least so Dad told me when he started writing it. MG is a big, complex, feisty and supernatural journey. It seems both a lot more grounded in realism and a lot more shaded with occult weirdness than any of Dad’s other works. I like that about it, but again, there is some tour-de-force writing in there, a whole chapter which takes place in Mickelsson’s mind while he’s driving, for one. By the end of the chapter, you are so in the vivid scene, that you are shocked and thrilled when you find yourself riding with Mickelsson, then shocked and thrilled again when you hit the end of the chapter and find yourself holding a book in your hand, that you’ve actually just been reading the whole time. Spooky stuff, even without the witches and the ghosts.

I pretty much love all of the books, but I haven’t grown to love The Wreckage of Agathon. I haven’t really even given it a fair shake. It is such an ugly book to read, at least the first hundred pages or so, that I could never get past the opening. Truth be told, I’ve never gone back to finish it. Maybe one of these days. Some of the short fiction is magnificent. The King’s Indian works as a whole like a great marvelous ship, with each story bursting with a different kind of life and magic: The New Jerusalem indeed! There are so many intricate things going on in so many of those stories, I pick it up every few years just to be reminded how good a story can be. I feel that way about the stories in The Art of Living, too, but the wildness and the range of Dad’s voice in the earlier collection is just so ambitious. You heft the book in your hand, and you can taste the gunpowder. I’m reading Jason and Medeia right now. It’s muscular and strange, and I can’t help thinking it wouldn’t take much to turn it into a gorgeous animated movie, though you’d have to cut a lot of the story. But it would be ravishing.

JS:       This raises an interesting question. I have two daughters, and I often wonder if they’ll read my books, and if so, what will they learn about me as a person? So much of who I am is on every page of every book, story, or poem I’ve ever written. Will they come to know me more from reading my books? And when I am gone from this earth, will reading my work reconnect them to me momentarily? At such instances, will I live again? Is there much of your father in his books? These are questions I think you are better suited to answer.

JG:      What your daughters learn about who you are as a person depends a lot, of course, on the kind of writer that you are. I think it goes without saying that if you approach writing with the kind of integrity and fierce belief in the power of story and poem to effect change and bring about a better world—as my father believed and advocated—there is no question your daughters will come to know you better through your writing. But there are two other consequences that are even more interesting. First, it is almost certain that you’ll be a different, better and more present parent to your daughters by virtue of the work you do as a writer. Part of the change that writing with seriousness and integrity brings about is almost imperceptible, gradual, but real growth in self-knowledge and character. Secondly, what writing does — and here we can drag out the real meaning of what my father meant by “moral” fiction — is it provides the reader with subtle shadings and an ear to the fine tuning of a character’s decisions in dramatic situations, and that leads right back to the source (you, the author), revealing not just who you as a writer are, but how you think, react and reflect, what you value and how you fight to protect those values, including your loved ones. So your daughters (and I realize this is Thing Three) will also see a better version of themselves in what you write, not just explicitly, as when you tilt aspects of them into characters or thinly veil situations lifted from real life, but in the example of your very mode of thought and love. For that’s where all of this is really leading: the kind of writing we’re talking about is Love. And love, written, is a powerful and enduring source of comfort and strength. I feel it every time I happen into a bookstore, and I can reach out and touch the binding of one of my father’s books, Nickel Mountain especially. Or The Art of Living, which is a very love-driven collection. “Redemption” is itself a powerful and dangerous act of love and forgiveness, though of course it was hard for Dad’s parents to see it in this light.

JS:       Speaking of On Moral Fiction, I think Gore Vidal, Barth, and other critics of the book got it all wrong. I spoke to Updike about it (we had a heated debate), but he eventually agreed that all good novelists must write true, as Hemingway so often admonished. Cormac McCarthy says that all great writing is about life and death. I think you do a good job of clarifying what your father meant (and which I agree wholeheartedly). I’d like to return to Caliban for a moment. My wife says that there is a lot of me in my portrayal of Caliban. I created him to be earthy and elemental and brutish. He farts, snorts, burps, picks his nose, scratches his groins . . . a typical male, if you ask me. Do you think there’s any of your father’s personality in his portrayal of Grendel? Would you say he was obstinate, stubborn, or a rebel against authority (like Grendel)? Your dad must have had a blast breathing life into his monster.

JG:      There’s no question my father identified with the monster — and yes, John, he enjoyed playing the role of any of the characters he was writing, inhabiting the character — but he also used the character of Grendel as a foil, a fictive stand-in to test his ideas about art and life, what makes us human, and what it is not to be human. There is also certainly something of my father in his Grendel (and something of his mother in Grendel’s mother, when you get down to it): he felt monstrous — capable of being a monster, possibly believed he was part monster — after killing his brother as a child. My father knew for a fact there was an abyss, and he pretty much knew right where the edge was. He’d been there, so that — and all things monstrous associated with the abyss — was to him familiar territory. But as a foil, he’s holding Grendel up as an example of what we would all be — any of us — without culture and community. In no way is the monster, Grendel, ever a hero, and yet he does go on the prototypical hero’s journey. The monster is also a test (as you know) of Sartrean existentialism. It turns out that existentialism is all well and good if you are sitting at a café table on the sidewalk all day, smoking French cigarettes, but it isn’t such a good model for living. I remember when my father was working on The Wreckage of Agathon. Now there was a burping, farting, ass-grabbing, drunken madman, all right. And that’s exactly how I remember my father behaving back in the early seventies. I’ll admit his inhabiting that character really put me off reading the book.

You ask about obstinate, stubborn, whether John Gardner was, or whether he was a rebel? He was a fire-breathing monster of a cause on two wheels, hell-bent to change the world, to make it better. He was Tolystoyan in his approach to writing and teaching, and he expected us to read, to learn, to think through the kinds of elaborate and fully complex moral circumstances his characters had to slog through so that we would be better equipped to make the best decisions we’re capable of in life. And that’s finally what he meant at that last Bread Loaf when he admonished the crowd in the Little Theater that “. . . [I]f you’re not writing politically, you’re not writing.” So rebel? I’d say yes. Sometimes an ugly one, but for all the right reasons. And yes, you as Caliban: I can see that. Caliban and Grendel riding into the sunset, lobbing fictional and poetic bombs into the meek and modest crowds feeling so good about themselves because they went to church on Sunday.

JS:       The final question is the easiest. Like your father, you are a motorcyclist. What’s your ride nowadays? I ride a black and chrome 2008 Yamaha V-Star Midnight Special. Sweet!

JG:      You are right there. My first motorcycle was a 1975 BMW R65, a 650 cc boxer that was a great introduction to motorcycling, very gentlemanly. Now I ride a K1200RS, a very elegant machine, well-balanced and capable — especially for distance touring — but not always so gentlemanly.

 

About Joel Gardner:

Joel Gardner was born in Chico, California. He is currently producing a feature-length documentary on John Gardner, SUNLIGHT MAN, and with his wife, Catie Camp, he writes and produces video for educational institutions and non-profit organizations. He currently lives in Newton, Massachusetts, where his two sons are in high school. His website is campgardner.com.

 

About the interviewer:

John Smelcer is a contributing editor to Ragazine. You can read more about him in “About Us”.

Photos courtesy of Joel Gardner.

Dragging the Monster out from the Closet:

Beowulf and the English Literary Tradition

An interview with Seth Lerer

by John Smelcer

 

Seth Lerer is one of the world’s foremost scholars of Medieval and Renaissance studies and Old and Middle English grammar and pronunciation, having studied at Oxford in the Faculty of English shortly after the death of its star faculty member, J. R. R. Tolkien. He is the author of numerous articles and books on the subject, including Inventing English and the award-winning Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter. His The History of the English Language is a popular lecture series produced by The Teaching Company. Professor Lerer has taught at numerous universities, including Princeton and Stanford, where he was the Avalon Foundation Professor. He is currently Dean of Arts and Humanities and Distinguished Professor of Literature at UC-San Diego. John Smelcer, who also studied at Oxford,  is the author of numerous books on mythology.

 

JS:   I remember it was 1977, and Elvis had been dead for only a few months. I was an eighth grader in junior high school in Fairbanks, Alaska. I must have been fourteen. One day, after reading some book that bored me to death, the teacher handed out a slender book called Beowulf. Little could I have suspected that the course of my life changed at that moment. Beowulf opened my mind to literature for the first time. Here was an ancient story of epic adventure with strong-armed, sword-wielding heroes, a treasure-hording dragon, dark foreboding castles with even darker halls . . . things that went bump in the night. There was even a terrible, shaggy, torso-and-limb-ripping monster unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I was in love. The story gripped my imagination. Naturally, there was no accompanying Old English text. The story had been rendered into prose only, and I suspect, edited for junior high school readers. Oblivious to its original form and language, I must have read it half a dozen times that year.

SL:   I also first read Beowulf in junior high. I had been exiled to the library for some infraction (probably passing love notes in math class), and I pulled a copy off a shelf, attracted by the glittering cover. It was really a children’s edition, but it had amazing illustrations: Grendel strode across the pages, dripping with blood, his skin an electric green. I remembered how the names, even in the dumbed-down prose translation, sounded like incantations: Wealhtheow, Hrothgar, Unferth. The translation also gave the flavor of the Anglo-Saxon, with its short, monosyllabic words and its attempts at alliteration. A few years later, in high school, we read the old Burton Raffel translation, and I then trooped off to the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh to get a copy of a facing page, Anglo-Saxon/Modern English edition. I sat up nights reading the text aloud, trying to get a feel for the language and the phrasing. I listened to the recording, made in the 1950s, of the Swedish born, Yale Professor Helge Kokeritz, who read selected passages in an accent that crackled like icicles in the sun. In college, I studied Old English, writing an honors thesis on the kenning: the noun metaphorical pattern that was so characteristic of early Germanic poetry. Phrases such as “road of the whale” (for “the sea”), “God’s candle” (for “the sun”), and so on gripped me. I translated passages whole, trying for effect. And then, I did two years of graduate work at Oxford, where I studied with students of J. R. R. Tolkien and learned all the minutiae of the language. I listened to lectures by Oxford dons who still peppered their recitations with reflections on the second world war. I remember an entire hour devoted to the specifics of the arm hold that Beowulf exerted on Grendel. As I learned more and more about the language, my excitement only grew, and I came to realize that the poem is less about heroics and adventure than it is about the words we use to tell the tales. The real hero of the poem, it seemed to me, was the poet himself: the voice of the narrator who tells us all to listen to his words (his opening word, “Hwaet!” really means “What!” or “Listen!” or even “Hey there!”). Scenes that amazed me were those with the “scop,” the poet in the king’s hall who tells stories of creation and adventure. And then there is the moment when Beowulf himself returns to Hygelac’s court, 2000 or so lines into the poem, and retells the story that we’ve all just heard, and adds new details (like Grendel having a monstrous glove) and becomes his own best poet.

 JS:   I also passed love notes during class. Her name was Clancy. I’ve read Raffel’s translation. Indeed, I wanted to ask you which translation is your favorite. I’m partial to Frederick Rebsamen and Seamus Heaney, who I edited and published in Rosebud fifteen years ago. To me, both scholars did a fine job of adhering to musicality of the poem, the sense of cadence and meter. There is something astonishing about the intensity of the Old English half-line, how its compressed feet and short phrases build drama and tension in a way that is both mesmerizing and even a bit relentless. Do we know if there were musical interludes or caesuras (pauses) in the oral presentation of sagas like this to ease the somewhat muscular onslaught of this verse and let the listener come up for air? I suspect so. Silence is often used to build dramatic moments. Or was this a verse form whose drama had to be leveraged to its fullest to entrance a mead hall audience of its day?

SL:   Right now, Heaney’s is my favorite translation. Partly, it’s because he captures the tone and drama. Partly, too, it’s because he has such a brilliant and evocative critical introduction to his work. He reflects on the nature of language in his own childhood, and he calls attention to the way that story-telling is not only about creating a sense of adventure but also about creating a sense of authority, of respect, of power in traditional, family-oriented societies. Scholarly friends of mine respect Heaney, but they think very highly of Roy Liuzza’s translation, too. It’s somewhat more literal and it benefits from a rich philological knowledge by a true professional scholar. What both translations are able to do, however, is create that important sense of suspense that the Old English half-line generates. There’s a lot of scholarly and critical debate about the “musicality” of the Old English poetry: was music used as an accompaniment (for example, a harp of the kind found in the famous Sutton Hoo burial); would music have served as an interlude or break; were the lines themselves sung or chanted in some way? I think it may have been Mozart who said something like, “music is what interrupts silence”; or something to the effect that music exists only in relation to silence — that is, that the meaning of musical phrasing lies in the rests or pauses in the melodic line. I think the same is true of poetry and of early Germanic verse in particular. The rhythms of the poetry ask for pause. Indeed there is a sense that Beowulf itself is a poem that begins with the breaking of silences: Hwaet breaks the silence that precedes it; and, for Grendel in the wilderness, it is the sound of Hrothgar’s celebrations that drives him crazy. In J. R. R. Tolkien’s brilliant phrasing, “Grendel is maddened by the sound of harps.” Words for “silence” are everywhere in the poem, and the drama of the narrative often hinges on having the poet call attention to the silence that precedes a great speech. In a sense, you could say that one of the themes of Beowulf is that what makes us human is sound itself: music, poetry, story-telling. Poetry has meaning because it breaks the silence. At the poem’s end, Beowulf’s fame lives on precisely because others will tell tales of him. The last word of the poem is lof-geornost, “most worthy of praise”.

JS:   In the conclusion of “Beowulf and the Critics,” Tolkien says, “[Beowulf] is now itself to us ancient; and yet its maker was telling us of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote. So that if the funeral of Beowulf moved once like an echo of an ancient dirge, it is to us as a memory brought over the hills, an echo of an echo. There is not much poetry in the world that has this effect” (“B” manuscript). Speaking of Grendel . . . for the past four years, I’ve been teaching at Binghamton University in the same department where John Gardner taught medieval literature. As you know, Gardner wrote Grendel, a magnificent recasting of Beowulf from the monster’s point of view. I loved that book from the first pages with the obstinate goat and its hanging balls. It rekindled my love of Beowulf. In the months before he died in a tragic motorcycle accident on his way to campus, Gardner personally encouraged me to study and create literature — advice that I took to heart.

SL:   I vividly remember reading Gardner’s Grendel my freshman year in college. It’s a brilliant work of imaginative scholarly fiction. Gardner was one of the most original medievalists of the twentieth century, and his creative work and scholarly production needs to be reassessed.

JS:   I agree. Gardner succeeded in making Grendel into a sympathetic character, especially the last words of the dying monster, “Poor Grendel.” In the fall of 1997, Ted Hughes and I co-wrote a poem about Grendel over pints in a pub in Guildford, England. “Beowraven” was written in alternating lines, a line by me followed by a line by Hughes. The poem appeared in, Raven Speaks, a small book of my poetry that Hughes published later that year.

BEOWRAVEN

Raven wanted a pet
so he slogged into a fen
fashioned a fanglorious beast
from filth and slime and muck
named it Grendel
stropped its wicked claws and teeth
stroked its mudruckled fur
then pointed
at Hrothgar’s unwary keep|
commanded
“Fetch!”

& the gorged and grisly creature
always returned
with a heap of bones

 

SL:  I love the poem. It reminds me of some of Hughes’s “Crow” poems (with Raven standing in for Crow). Like the best of Hughes, it brings together a sensitivity to the sounds of vernacular English with a sophisticated understanding of literary allusion. So many monosyllables in the poem: pet, fen, beast, teeth, fur, fetch, bones. And then, the lurid polysyllables: “fanglorious”    (a brilliant coinage); “mudruckled” (worthy of Hopkins). In fact, one of the great things about it is the way that it makes the word “fetch” sound so much more horrid than it really is: a blend, now resonant, of fen, beast, muck, grisly — all the hard fricatives of fear.

JS:   I’ll never forget the fun we had in the pub that night. It was one of those moments you wished would never end. Rosebud’s Editor-in-Chief, Rod Clark, asked me to bring up the question of the prejudice against horror as literature in contemporary American literature. In Beowulf and the Epic Tradition (1961), William Lawrence best encapsulates Beowulf’s plot as “a wonder-tale in which the hero Beowulf puts an end to the ravages of the demon Grendel, who for twelve years has haunted the hall of Hrothgar, King of Denmark, killing and eating Hrothgar’s warriors. Later, Beowulf slays Grendel’s dam and, in old age, he fights against a dragon that has attacked his people” (19). Sword-wielding heroes, mead-halls, monsters and fire-spewing dragons. This is the stuff of the first and longest heroic epic in the English literary tradition, and yet in American literary history (and to a certain degree in England) there is an inherent prejudice against horror and fantasy as being inferior forms of literature. In Europe, for example, there is much more respect for Edgar Allan Poe than there is in the United States. Yet this historical prejudice of much American criticism ignores the fact that some of our greatest English literature is drenched in horror and full of high fantasy. How can we account for this attitude?

SL:   Indeed, one of the things that Gardner truly got about early English literature was its fascination with the horrible and the fantastic. I think that part of the long-standing American resistance to the horror and fantastic comes from the Puritan tradition. By this, I don’t mean simply a “puritanical” resistance to certain forms of the imagination. Instead, what I really mean is the double focus on realistic detail and salvational narrative. The English novel begins in crosshairs of that focus: Robinson Crusoe is, as readers have long known, a great Puritan novel, in that it builds its narrative out of a close personal attention to detail. It is this Puritan attention to detail that dovetailed with the legacy of John Locke—a philosophical legacy that focused on attention to particulars and an empirical understanding of knowledge. Ian Watt wrote many years ago, in his landmark book The Rise of the Novel, that what Defoe and Swift and their contemporaries recognized was that “the plot had to be acted out by particular people in particular circumstances, rather than, as had been common in the past, by general human types against a background . . . determined by convention.” What the modern, English-language novel did was displace romance, fantasy, and horror: all genres that drew their power from conventions and types, rather than by particulars. I think the legacy of this eighteenth-century set of ideas lies in the Anglo-American resistance to horror and high fantasy.

JS:   But then Tolkien comes along and drags the monsters back out from the closet.

SL:   Precisely. It took someone like Tolkien in the 1930s to restore the monsters to the centrality of Beowulf. And it is no accident that Tolkien saw in early English literature in general aspects of fantasy and fairy tale. One of the great moments, for me as a scholar, in Tolkien’s writing is not in his criticism but in his letter of application for the job of Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. Writing in 1925, he recounts that, while teaching at Leeds University, he was very successful in building enrollments in historical linguistics and medieval studies. “Philology,” he wrote, “indeed, appears to have lost for these students its connotations of terror if not of mystery.” For Tolkien, and for many modern teachers, our job is to make difficult work seem less terrifying than it appears to be. But, as Tolkien well knew, we should not lose sight of the true mystery in literature. If Beowulf does anything to its readers, it should terrify them.

 

About the interview:

This interview previously appeared in Rosebud. It is reprinted here with permission.

 

 

“…she is creating the narrative,

so why should she pretend otherwise?”

 

By Kristin Thiel

Kristin Thiel: That’s an interesting head shot of you for this book—did you want to connect your young-adult years to this book’s characters?

Cris Mazza: I wanted to connect to Hester’s line “College doesn’t play any role in her tale. To my chagrin, it does in mine.” I wanted to put it up front and “out there” that I was in part using some of my experiences and impressions from those years. I’d wanted to put on the cover “this novel is one third true” and let the reader discern which third. But, as it happens, a memoir will follow this novel, so the photo took care of the representation for the novel.

Q: The cover photo, of two people, appears to be several photos but really is one image shifted slightly for each repetition. In all but one version, the full identity of both people is hidden—in that one distinct version, the woman is fully shown and the man’s head has been cropped out. I’m interested in that decision for a couple of reasons. One, it seems to refer to how women are usually the ones reduced to disparate body parts in media images.

CM: The photo has many kinds of illusions. One is that, quite accidentally, the “pose” (which wasn’t staged) looks a little like the way a hunter holds up his dead deer’s head for the trophy photo. It also is a reverse image of Hester’s “position” when she goes to talk to the Mexican prostitute. Lastly, the closed-eyed look on the female’s face is the same content way a dog might relax when it’s being stroked. Ironically, that illusion also evokes something in the book: the wistful longings of girls.

Q: Too, the title seems to emphasize the male characters—the title’s not something like, The Various Girls We’ve Been for Men.

CM: Ha! Maybe that’s my next novel.

Q: What can you say about the cover images and the title? (Especially on the former, I realize that’s often more of a publisher, than author, choice, but in this case, with such an indie press, I thought you likely had more involvement.)

CM: I chose the cover image and the title. The design of how to use the cover image was done by a professional designer. The title was one of those things that when you have it, the book “comes together” more in your mind. The affair with the sixteen-year-old, the would-be affair with the master-teacher, the experiences with her mentor and his nemesis, her husband and lover, and then the men who visit the girls in the field. They all only knew these women as girls . . . in whatever way you want to use the term girl.

Q: It’s strange to read any novel and then find out that parts of it were previously published elsewhere as stand-alone pieces, but this novel is particularly layered, and I’m wondering some things about that. How’d you choose what to excerpt?

CM: Whatever seemed to be able to be self-sufficient . . . so most often it’s something in the first third, or at least the first half. I also cobbled stuff together: one of the letters to Dan mixed with another scene. I do the same thing for readings, paste together two or three short sections that somehow make a whole.

Q: Was the novel already a novel, in your mind or in reality, when you published these individual sections,  or did a longer piece develop out of these smaller parts?

CM: No, the book was already a novel when each of those excerpts were removed and published.

Q: I’d love to hear about your choice and execution of structure, or framework for this novel, your mix of the chronological and the narrative format.

You go back and forth in time – most specific events happen in the late 1970s and early 2000s – but there’s usually (except for Heather’s story) a clear awareness that the reader’s guide is the twenty-first-century adult Hester, as in the description of Tom Hoffman’s outfit: “He was 70s porn-star chic. But of course the first time I saw him was before anyone knew there was a porn-star look, a look everyone would recognize as such by the late 90s. [ . . . ] A guy who would have done his howling and making-out to The Dave Clark Five [ . . . ], and someday would be one of those who wore a slim grey ponytail [ . . . ] Later installed his Bronco with [ . . . ]” (15).

CM: That is a result of my using a very self-conscious first-person narrator—as I think they all should be! She is acutely aware of when (the present date) she is creating the narrative, so why should she pretend otherwise? When she describes a clothing style or piece of office equipment, of course she knows how outlandish or antiquated it is at the time she’s narrating, and of course the passage of time has affected her way of describing that kind of hair or clothing. She probably couldn’t describe a hairstyle the way she might have thirty years ago; I know I couldn’t, other than to say “we must have thought it looked cool.” Our view of things (and how we describe them) is always how we view it now, and “now” is developed by time-passage. To provide the way styles, etc. were viewed “back then” is a memory exercise. In first-person narrative, to pretend the narrator still has the same views and opinions, or remembers her former perspectives without them being warped or altered by time, would be fake. That’s why a first-person narrator who isn’t aware of (and narrating in) the present time — giving the narrative a palpable feel of whatever the time-distance is — is, to me, a misuse and misunderstanding of the technique.

I also tried to make this duality — how I saw it then versus how I see it now in my memory — have a tangibility. For example, when Hester goes back to visit her mentor and sees that George Bush calendar on his wall. Her memories would not have described him as a person who would have such a thing. So Hester as narrator now can’t quite just narrate him the way she perceived him twenty-five years ago.

Q: And your narrator, Hester, tells this book through a variety of forms: “standard” first-person narration, letters she’s writing in present day to the contemporary versions of teachers she knew in the ’70s; typed journal entries/notes she kept in the ’70s; real newspaper articles; imagined magazine features; and there are even pull quotes throughout the narration, from the narration, as though this whole book were a magazine article.

CM: The pull-quotes are my publisher’s idea. A brilliant touch, giving that journalistic feel to a “failed-journalist’s” book. Oh, and you forgot to list one: a third-person account, written by Hester, when she imagines the sixteen-year-old’s affair with the English teacher and puts herself in the far background as “the student-teacher.” I just use what seems organic at the time. The whole book started as a letter to my former master-teacher, which I never sent. I used the notes he kept for me when I was his student teacher, as well as the journal I kept. I made changes as necessary, but used them to capture the feel of how differently a written voice in a journal sounds – you rarely explain things completely in a journal, and twenty-five years later you might not know what you were talking about because only the emotions and reactions are recorded, not the actual scene, setting, or conflict.

Q: Hester gives a few clues about who her audience of readers is: “us,” “women”; people who were sitting “in a courtroom with that senseless, senile expression” (258). She calls what she’s writing “this document” (63). What more can you tell us about Hester’s audience and intention?

CM: Wait, the person in the courtroom with “that senseless, senile expression” is only Dan Wood!

As long as Hester is keenly aware that she’s working on “a document,” she is always aware that it may, someday, have readers. I suppose that’s as far as the specific audience goes. You can surely extend the “us” to mean any woman reading the book, but in my mind, and hers, being aware of writing a book is in and of itself an awareness that the words are directed toward an audience, some audience, someday, somewhere. Hester predicts “liberal protests” and tries to beat her critics to the punch . . . That’s the beauty of self-conscious first-person narration: it is free to digress and ponder itself.

Q: As a reader, I felt an anxiety/tension, as I would reading a thriller or murder mystery, at several times throughout the book, not just at the parts one might guess could provoke anticipation. What parts do that for you — as you were writing them and now as you reread them?

CM: I don’t suppose I provoke the same kind of anticipation in myself (even not knowing until two thirds into the book what might happen at the end). But if anticipation — or surprise, or some form of it — did happen, it was when I was writing Hester’s third-person rendition of the sixteen-year-old’s affair with the English teacher. Keeping that narrative under the purview of it being “from Hester” was not as much of a challenge by that point in the book, because I knew her, and could vicariously play her, including writing something as she would write it. But what would happen in that section — how it would be dramatic and yet not sensationalized, how I would show what I intended and yet keep both characters within some kind of “sympathetic” range, created a surprising outcome: I discovered how the situation could have damaged both characters, and it was beneath the stereotyped reasons society condemns it.

Q: You do link media exposure to, celebration/glorification of, sex with at least some level of the sexual anxiety or even dysfunction that a lot of people have. There is a debate around that, of course, outside this book, so I’d like you to share more thoughts on that.

CM: Simply this: People (especially women) who don’t or haven’t had the sublime sexual experiences that media / culture suggest that everybody has at their disposal carry this, alone, as a secret shame, wondering what is to blame. Some people blame others, many blame themselves. It can be an all-consuming anxiety. It affects how you value yourself, as well as how you perceive other human behavior, whether healthy, misguided, confused, or evil.

Q: One of the scenes that I could really picture as I read it was Hester’s first description of assisting Pryor, how she “recorded the kinds of notes Pryor needed to know later, prompted him in a nearly inaudible whisper when he forgot” (12). It got me to wondering about the times your role was “to listen to his asides, the things he wanted to say but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say,” of which you must have some — as a woman, and as a woman writer, in particular.

CM: As I was developing as a writer, in college, I did have employment as a clerical aide for a music professor. He was a fairly young man (although “older and wiser” than me) and new in the university, struggling with the mixture of egos and agendas that confuse collegiality among colleagues, especially in a performance-based field. I was someone he talked to, barely noticing that he was working things out himself. Years later, when I’d experienced that same kind of atmosphere myself, I could look back and see what he was encountering, what tools he had to deal with it that I took longer to develop. To this day I don’t know what made him confide in me as much as he did — sometimes in the guise of “teaching” me about how people work (he knew I was a developing writer). But it was a relationship that defied definition, which is why it belonged in this novel.

Q: At one point, Hester says the archived paper that she’s looking through “feels sweaty” (51). That’s a great description, and I see it meaning at least a couple of things, in Hester’s case. What documents have felt sweaty to you lately?

CM: When I first moved from California to the Midwest (it was in August), I remember how any paper felt wet to me, just because of the humidity. So I imagined someone’s emotions creating a feeling of “humidity,” which might make flipping through the pages of an old notebook feel damp. It seems opposite of what old, fragile paper might feel like. Sometimes the pages of my old journals feel thicker, not brittle, because of the abundance of smudgy pencil writing, so it looks as though it would have that humid feeling.

Q: How do you define feminism? It’s an oft-discussed question, but it’s also one that seems to have many answers, or at least many accepted answers, so that sometimes the answer is that the term is useless. (For what it’s worth, I disagree that there are many definitions and that the term is useless.) This book is feminist in ways that I think would surprise a lot of people, based on what they consider feminism. Would you talk about that a little?

CM: “I’m for women’s rights,” say college students, “but I’m not a feminist.” What does this mean? Is it like liberals who prefer to be called progressives because the former term started being used as a pejorative? Or is it like, “I’m for worker rights, but I don’t favor unions”? Feminism is a little like a union, in that it aims to protect women’s rights, status, and living conditions. But, unlike a union (or maybe I’m wrong about this), feminism works by educating. There may be feminist groups who will do the lawsuits and protests, but feminism itself, I think, seeks to educate. And one thing I hope feminism is interested in is not just “what is the problem?” but how women have contributed to the overall “problem.” How society and culture taught women to contribute to the problem, but how some women, no matter how smart, can’t break that cycle. Here’s feminism’s image problem: Ask a well-known political cartoonist to draw “a feminist.” If ninety out of one hundred people recognize what that person has drawn, then we need to do something to make sure we don’t all come in one stripe, that resentment and blame and playing-the-victim aren’t our only cry.

 

About the interviewer:

Kristin Thiel is senior editor and director of community engagement at Indigo Editing & Publications, reviews books regularly, and has fiction forthcoming in Men Undressed: Women Writers on the Male Sexual Experience (Other Voices Books/Dzanc Books), for which Cris Mazza wrote the introductory essay. (Jim Dorenkamp Photo, Copyright 2010.)

 

Writer from the Far North

“… Alaska’s modern-day Jack London”

Introduction:

John Elvis Smelcer is one of the founding editors, and poetry editor, of Rosebud magazine, about to release its 50^th consecutive quarterly issue in March. Outgoing, energetic and broadly informed, he is the author of some 40 books, hundreds of articles in scores of publications around the world, and thousands of poems. Smelcer is a Clifford D. Clark Fellow in  English  at Binghamton University in upstate New York. As this issue was ‘going to press’, Smelcer received notice that his new book, Alaskan, in print for only 10 days, won the gold medal for fiction in the 2o11 eLit Awards for the very best ebooks in America. The following interview by e-mail exchange took place in February and March 2011.

— Mike Foldes

 

Q: When did you get started writing? What was the spark that set you off?

JES: My mother might say I began writing as a seven or eight year old. I wrote a long, 30-page story about elves stealing Christmas way back around 1970 or ’71. I even illustrated it. My mom kept it, and gave it back to me some years ago. I’ve always loved a story (who doesn’t?).  But I get letters from people all the time who say they started writing as a child. Heck, we all did. The real question is, when did I decide that instead of reading good literature, I would create it? I didn’t really start writing seriously until the early 1980s when John Gardner and James Michener encouraged me. Michener even encouraged me to double-major in English (I was an anthropology major only at the time). My writing didn’t really kick into gear until the late 1980s.

Q: There was a strong movement of permissiveness in the field of higher education some time ago that may persist even now where professors allowed their students to write anything in any manner without much feedback about what  students “should” or “shouldn’t” do to accomplish a certain objective in their writing. The permissiveness came across as a reluctance on the teachers’ parts to influence students to follow in their footsteps, or to assume their style of writing, vs. allowing the student to venture off on their own – like baby turtles struggling to the edge of the sea to Think or Swim. What do you look for in your students’ writing, and just how much do you tell them what they might do to “improve”?

JES: I know of many great writer-teachers who told students it was “Their way or the highway.” One great Iowa-workshop professor comes to mind. It’s a dual-edged sword. On the one hand, I don’t want a student to write the way I do (or the way anyone else does, for that matter). But on the other hand, many students flounder as writers, persisting in defending their right to “write in their own style,” which is sophomoric and unpublishable. As teachers, isn’t it part of our function to guide inexperienced writers toward good writing practices? I know a professor of creative writing who taught for thirty years. At his retirement, he told me, “I’ve graduated an Army of creative writers with MFAs and not one of them ever went on to really become a writer.” Too many graduate students graduate writing exactly the way they did when they began. Don’t students deserve our honest feedback, even when it seems at first to be discouraging news? Don’t we grow from our mistakes?

Q: You write in a lot of different genres. Do you have a favorite, or one that comes more naturally than another?

JPS: It’s funny. I think of myself first as a poet, but that always sounds like saying you’re unemployed. So, nowadays, if someone asks me what I do, I reply, “I’m a novelist.” That seems to impress. However, I always teach students that of all literary genres, we seem to uphold poetry at the pinnacle, which, to my way of thinking is absolutely correct.

Q:What do you think or find is at the core of your writing technique? Does it take you a long time to get into the right frame of mind to write? Do you give yourself, what do they call them, prompts, to get you started?

JES: They say that most writers should create some kind of writing environment, a routine of some sorts. Stephen King, for instance, sits down at his computer at a certain time and for a certain duration, regardless of whether he is productive or not. For me, I go to a coffee house every morning at about the same time. It’s a four minute walk. By the time I sit down, I’m ready to write. It’s a kind of Pavlovian conditioning: “I have successfully written in this place in the past; I shall do so again today.”

Q: How did you happen to know Michener and Gardner? Geographically, weren’t they worlds apart?

JES: My friendship with Michener and Gardner came about in the same semester. I was an undergraduate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where Michener was at the time researching for what later became a world bestseller titled “Alaska”. Though many decades older than me, we became friends, taking lunch together often at the cafeteria in the Wood Center. He read my stories and encouraged me to keep writing. He also gave me a copy of Gardner’s “The Art of Fiction”. During the semester before John Gardner died in a tragic motorcycle accident, I mailed him some of my stories (and some poems) and, in classic Gardner fashion, he generously provided feedback. It was largely because of that connection that I came to Binghamton. Nowadays, I’m friends with his son, Joel, about the same age as I am.

Q: You have an unusual ability to close the six degrees of separation down to two or three. What is it that has enabled you to meet so many people, cover so much ground, and still find time to teach?

JES: As poetry editor and co-publisher of Rosebud magazine, as co-judge of the National Poetry Book Award for a decade, and as guest editor at other journals and magazines, I have communicated with many, many writers. To be honest, I estimate that I have read over 400,000 poems directly submitted to me in the past two decades!

Q: John, you’re the keeper of the fire, so to speak, of the language and culture of your aboriginal forebears. Your accomplishments exhibit a love of life in its many facets that is beyond the realm of understanding for most of us. Where do you get the drive and energy to pursue so many different avenues? Would it be accurate to say what you have done and are doing is a best effort to preserve the history, the heritage, and the memory, of a people?

JES: I’m one of the last dozen or so speakers on Earth of the Ahtna language of Alaska, one of the world’s most endangered languages. Over more than two decades, every elder who spoke pretty much any degree of Ahtna collectively instructed me until I became a living repository of the language. With the help of all those elders, I compiled and published “The Ahtna Noun Dictionary and Pronunciation Guide” in 1998. It is the reason I live. Daily, weekly to be sure, I wake up remembering not only a word some elder taught me, but I can vividly recall the exact moment, hear their voice, smell the moose nose soup simmering on their stove top. Expanding the dictionary with such words is a never-ending process. It will never be finished. The dictionary can be viewed at www.johnsmelcer.com (click on dictionaries). Besides the language, I have done a great deal to document and preserve our culture, especially our traditional myths and stories. I want to leave something behind so others can know the part of our culture that I grew up knowing. Because the handful of other speakers of Ahtna are in their late 70s, 80s, and 90s, I will be the last speaker left within a few years.

Q: What do you say to people who question the authenticity of your heritage, or lineage?

JES: To answer such questions, I have bravely posted official tribal and Bureau of Indian Affairs documents on my website. Just last fall, The Ahtna Heritage Foundation sent me a letter in which they thanked me for my continued efforts to preserve our Ahtna language. Indeed, for late 1995 until May 1998, I served as the tribally appointed executive director of that worthy foundation. At the end of my service, the late Ahtna Traditional Chief, Harry Johns, held a special ceremony in Copper Center to designate me a traditional culture bearer, a term usually reserved for elders with immense cultural knowledge. He even presented me with the chieftain beads of the late Chief Jim McKinley. One of the greatest honors of my life was to have served my tribe and to have worked with every living speaker to compile the “Ahtna Noun Dictionary and Pronunciation Guide”.

Q: You mention your brother James “was tormented by years of abuse and despair and shame”. What do you see as the differences between him and you that led him into depression and suicide, while you, with a Caucasian mother, went on against great odds to gain an honored place among the Ahtna people, earn several advanced college degrees, write dozens of books, and, generally speaking, find success as it is widely defined in the Western world?

JES: Do you think it’s okay to re-route this question? Even after 23 years, I don’t talk about my brother’s death. The hurt never goes away.

Q: Your book, “The Edge of Nowhere”, was recognized in the UK as one of The Best Books for 2010, and by Frank McCourt as having  ”More psychological depth than Robinson Crusoe.” Briefly, what prompted the book, and how long did it take you to write it?

JPS: Edge is doing very well in the English-speaking world outside the US. About 23 years ago, my brother, James Ernest (I called him Ernie) and I went deer and black bear hunting in Prince William Sound. On the first day our boat sank, leaving us marooned on one of the hundreds of islands in the Sound. We survived for a week on whatever we could find: raw mussels and clams, berries, and we caught a salmon, which we ate raw (think sushi). I took that nugget of a story and ran with it, increasing the time, adding a dog, and adding other elements such as dealing with grief and estrangement. A recent radio review in England called it the challenger to Robinson Crusoe’s place in the genre. Cool!

Q: Many people have written about the Yukon/Klondike, notably Jack London and Robert Service. Rod Clark has written that “John Smelcer is by far the best writer to come out of Alaska since Jack London,”  and W. P. Kinsella, author of the movie Field of Dreams, wrote that you are “Alaska’s modern day Jack London.” What do you see of these writers in yourself, and what influence did their experiences or styles have on you, and on your writing?

JES: It’s ironic. Jack London is always considered the greatest Alaskan writer for his novels such as “The Call of the Wild” and as well as his short stories, but London never really lived in Alaska. He lived (briefly) in Yukon Territory, Canada. But his stories of man against the unyielding nature of the far north have influenced my own work, especially in my novels, “The Trap”, “The Great Death”, “Edge of Nowhere”, and in my recent short story collection, “Alaskan”. If I am the contemporary Jack London, then I am honored. London is still one of the best-selling authors in the world. I wish I would be so lucky.

______________________________

About Rosebud:

Celebrating its 50th issue, Rosebud magazine is one of the nation’s premeire literary journals, distributed internationally on the shelves of over 1,700 Barnes & Nobles and Borders bookstores in the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The Boston Globe once called it “the best literary quarterly in America.” Click on www.rsbd.net to learn more

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