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You’re waiting for a boat to appear, during — EXCERPT FROM Mask
BY Maxine Scates |
Ervin LázárBenny Bean kept craning his neck. “Something unusual is in the air,” he thought, and anxiety filled him to the core. Not so much because of the presence of the unusual thing, but because he couldn’t figure out what the unusual thing was. Perhaps radiation from a solar flare? Or a cloud of electrons that broke loose? Perhaps the aching, menacing premonition of a change in the weather? What could be in the air? Benny Bean cautiously circled his house made of tree bark, just in case his anxiety was caused not by some nasty ills, but by a simple thief lurking in the bushes, or by a fairitch hiding somewhere, or by some other small, earthly danger… — EXCERPT FROM Bab Berci és a csodanektár / |
Marco PoloMarco Polo has been my companion throughout my life. By the time I was born he was firmly ensconced in the pantheon of heroes transported to America from the European past. He was a figure from a time-space called the Middle Ages, along with Robin Hood and King Arthur, where men wore tights, fought with swords and staffs and wore funny hats. This was not a place of well-defined chronology, geography or correspondence to modern nations. It was simply after the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans and before the discovery of the New World. He was neither a noble thief nor a mystical king. Marco Polo was an adventurer and wanderer, the man who knew how large the world truly was. — EXCERPT FROM Reading The Book of Marco Polo |
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On The Sorrow of Ghosts from Vieuchange: A Novel II M. Claude A Four-Dimensional Portrait — A Sense of Life in the Living — Paris Portraits: Stories of Picasso, Matisse, Gertrude Stein, |
JapanIt’s easy to get seduced by brushed concrete or polished wood. I do it all the time. I walk down a certain street and see a new restaurant with shiny chrome and clean surfaces, and like a magnet it draws me toward the door. But after I’ve finished my frilly salad and poached salmon and cappuccino with its bunny face imprinted in the foam, I often as not go away unfulfilled. It’s the homey, hole-in-the-wall places, the ones with chipped table edges and battered serving trays, with their conviviality, sense of history, and good home cooking that keep me coming back. Haiku in translation can be as equally seductive as those polished places. Sometimes I see a fine-looking specimen, all of its articles and punctuation and capital letters stripped out, and I want to hold it in my hand like the little bauble that it is and run my fingers over its perfect surface. But later, when I look at the source haiku, I see that something is missing, some essential emotional bit has been lost. — EXCERPT FROM Musings on Buson |
FictionSome days ago, the fortuneteller told Jin that he’d see his little daughter again, while aboard a city bus. He understood she was only giving him what he asked for, a vision of hope. But Jin knew that the fortuneteller’s vision and his reality resided in completely different worlds, worlds that only our feeble words may move between. But now that the prophesied day is come, he realizes he’d dwelt partly inside the soothsayer’s vision all along, even having gone so far as to plan for the foretold day. His wife, a university biochemistry lab manager who defected from her parents’ Buddhist traditions as soon as she educated her way out from under their roof, continues to express her frustration that Jin keeps seeing this mystic healer. — EXCERPT FROM Last Stop
BY Sanaphay Rattanavong |
Presence
(Oil over acrylic on canvas, 37″ x 57″) BY Celia Rabinovitch — FROM Industrial Romance and New Paintings |
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WoeserTravel experiences in vast Tibet changed me gradually. During these travels, I slowly became intimate with Buddhism, and realized clearly how my inner world enriched itself day by day. Amdo, Ü-Tsang, Kham… I visited many places. Both as a voyager, and as a pilgrim — because in my heart, I saw the vast snowy land as a gigantic monastery of nature! Of course this was my earliest motivation for the journey. As I walked further in the vast snowy land, and paused longer, those literary sentiments were gradually replaced by a sense of history and a vocation. In other words, I, who used to only see my hometown from an aesthetics point of view, gradually began to see people and events on this land with an eye from history and reality. — EXCERPT FROM An Eye from History and Reality —
Woeser and the Story of Tibet BY Dechen Pemba AND Woeser |
Eavan BolandPoets can always choose. And the fact is, a poet writing against the grain has already chosen. They don’t need my counsel or anyone else’s. But in A Journey With Two Maps I wanted to make it clear that I don’t believe you absolutely have to choose to go with the canon or against it. The choice can’t be as stark as that. There’s an alternative — a sort of middle space, and that’s why I argued for two maps. I believe a poet can engage with the past and still have a powerful freedom in their present. — EXCERPT FROM After A Journey with Two Maps — |
D.A. PowellI became interested in poetry first through plays, then through actual poems. Then, in college, I studied with David Bromige (who had been Robert Duncan’s teaching assistant at Berkeley in the 1960s — so the Duncan lore was a part of my education as well). David gave me an extraordinary amount of support, while at the same time having a rather cavalier attitude about whether I continued or revised. He laughed at my jokes, encouraged me to send poems to magazines, and, though he certainly introduced me to lots of poetry, he let me follow my own curiosity in terms of who to read. — EXCERPT FROM Smashing Windows: |
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Nicky HarmanI think my personal approach is governed primarily by the source text, and that applies whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, prose or poetry. I’m a bit of chameleon, I suppose, in that I feel that I take on the colouring, or the mood, of the text. That’s part of my identity as a translator and it’s something that happens subconsciously, not consciously. So I would prefer to talk about how I feel about a text, rather than the approach I take to it. As for my different feelings vis à vis prose or poetry, I’m really a newcomer to poetry, but in my limited experience translating poetry gives me a feeling of concentration which is almost meditative. I love the luxury of being able to focus myself on just a few words, the layers of meaning and the rhythm. — EXCERPT FROM Translation as Self-Expression: Nicky Harman
BY Greta Aart AND Nicky Harman |
Poetry
Fiction
Music
Film
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Nonfiction Meet Me: Writers in St. Louis This is the first book I have come across that assembles conversations with writers specifically from St. Louis. It features thirteen writers in all genres, including Donald Finkel, Tess Gallagher, Ntozake Shange, Qiu Xiaolong, Jean-Claude Baker, and Gerald Early. Accompanied by poems or excerpts, and a thoughtful introduction that sets up relevant cultural contexts, these conversations are lively and well-edited. This is an accessible read that allows us insights into how St. Louis plays a role in shaping creative lives of these writers. — Greta Aart
 The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris McCullough, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, has written, in his clear and engaging style, a fast-paced, skillfully woven narrative of how the French and their history affected Americans who traveled to France from 1830 to 1900. The book contains many quick yet vibrant biographies of painters, writers, musicians, teachers, doctors, and political figures, including (to name a few) Samuel F. B. Morse, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Singer Sargent, and the courageous U.S. ambassador Elihu Washburne whose vivid diary entries describe his experiences during the Franco-Prussian War and the Siege of Paris. A lot of history comfortably packed into a great read. — Sally Molini
 Colors of Nature: Identity Gathering thirty-two essays by writers of color in America today, this anthology traces the movement between multiculturalism, ecocriticism and ecoconscious writings. Organized in four sections — “Return,” “Witness,” “Encounter” and “Praise” — the essays are forthright, sensitive, provocative and sincere. This work looks up to the large question of the Earth in relation to the American people of color without reducing itself to convenient answers, clichéd narratives, simplistic or violent activism. Accept the editor’s invitation: “Come, explore.” — Greta Aart
Art Picasso and Braque:The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912 The comparative presentation of paintings and prints by Picasso and Braque during the two cubist years of their artistic exchanges is both invigorating and refreshing in this exquisite yet comprehensive exhibition catalogue. Featuring six intelligent monographs by a team of seven curators and art critics, this book contains marvelous reproductions of Picasso and Braque, rendered in well-thought spatiality, studied color control and generous proportions. — Greta Aart
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