(Acropolis Museum)

Cut clean from the rump, the tail tosses
and vanishes. What remains: the muscles
in the leg, where thigh attaches to flank
and tendons pull from body. The hide,
sanded and shaved. Red rises in the withers,
flushes the skin with a veined, streaky finish.
Eyes gleam like rabbits’ through the fetlock,
what remains: a leg, fractured in four,
fused and balanced on the hoof’s edge.

For about twenty years, into the mid-1970s, Brecht’s theatre achieved something like iconic status, partly due to the impact of two Berliner Ensemble productions at the International Theatre Festival in Paris: Mother Courage in 1954; in 1955, and markedly different, The Caucasian Chalk Circle. One more sombre and realist in performance, the other more parabolic and comic, both told emotionally compelling stories of “ordinary” lives endangered, or crushed, in large events. A dispassionate eye focused contemporary crises by means of historical and cultural distancing.

— EXCERPT FROM “Those Savages — That’s Us”
BY Antony Tatlow

Between visits to a sanatorium to treat a mysterious illness, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote about four hundred poems in French. During these last four years of his life, he resided mostly in a stone tower called Muzot in a wine-growing region of the French-speaking Switzerland, the Valais. It was in fact at the desk facing a window in that isolated tower where Rilke completed what is still his most well-known and often-translated work, the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. It was a doubly important moment: Rilke himself recognized those poems as his greatest achievement, and it followed an excruciating decade of silence during which he felt unable to produce what he wanted to write.

— EXCERPT FROM A Passage Opens: Translating Rainer Maria Rilke
BY Susanne Petermann

In French, an éphéméride is a tear-off calendar, the kind found on many office desks; it also refers to the history of a given day. For example, the éphéméride of June 10 for an American reader includes Judy Garland’s birthday, Janis Joplin’s first live concert, and Benjamin Franklin’s famous kite-flying experiment in a lightning storm. Given these definitions, it is not surprising that Dupuy-Dunier’s project in this, her fourteenth collection, is to offer a poem for every day of the year — including leap years.

— EXCERPT FROM Chantal Dupuy-Dunier:
Caress the Essence of Experience
BY Darla Himeles

We are eight in all, careening in an unventilated box along dirt roads above the Geiseltalsee, the Hostage Valley Lake, a former brown coal mine and Germany’s largest artificial body of water. Our tour guide, Herr Hossfeld, whom I call Hoss, would suggest we go swimming in the 423 million cubic meters of cool water below were it not still illegal to do so. Even then, we would have to scramble over two fences and cross a rocky beach. Trouble is, the Hostage Valley Lake is behind schedule.

— EXCERPT FROM Hostage Valley: Hubris and Humility
at Germany’s Largest Man-made Lake
BY Steven Matthew Brown

Recently a friend of mine — a poet of great enthusiasms and strong opinions — was touting James Dickey’s “The Sheep Child” to the skies. For him, it represents the single great achievement of Dickey’s career, eclipsing all his other writings to stand alone as an example of what a poet can do — but almost never does — if he is lucky enough, and the stars align, and the moment of poetic magic has finally arrived after a lifetime of dutiful obeisance to the Muse.

— EXCERPT FROM Constantly Risking Absurdity and Death:
The Poetry of James Dickey
BY Kurt Brown

On lazy Sunday mornings I loved to spy through the window as Grandma Marija tucked a stray, red lock under her wide-brimmed feather hat and buttoned up her coat. She’d open the gate across the street and walk down the Volijak hill towards the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In those tricky socialist years when few openly confessed to being religious, Grandma Marija flaunted her devotion. Grandma Marija attended services every day even though the church was at the other end of town. Townspeople often saw her talking with the nuns from the nearby convent.

— EXCERPT FROM Grandma Marija’s Ghost
BY Jozefina Cutura

In terms of “understanding familiarity and distance,” I’m referring, on a basic level, to the perennial issue of poets who, when translating, are unable to create anything but slightly imperfect copies of themselves. Holding a text up to a mirror is not literary translation. It is a form of global colonialism where either the ego or an ear deafened from proximity to the messenger stifles the work from making any real transition. The stanzas all become English, but it’s the same English regardless of the source poet.

— EXCERPT FROM Entering Another Literature:
Christopher Mattison on Russian, Chinese,
and Hong Kong Literature in Translation
BY Greta Aart AND Christopher Mattison

Who knows if it was nature or nurture? Whether it was their DNA or their interest in books, both of my parents had such a gigantic influence on my writing that it’s impossible to imagine my life path had I grown up in a different family. I was surrounded by shelves that held 7,000 books; my brother and I built castles from our father’s 22-volume set of Trollope; our parents both read to us; the Fadiman dinner-table conversations were larded with long words and literary references.

— EXCERPT FROM Castles out of Books:
A Conversation with Anne Fadiman
BY Sally Molini AND Anne Fadiman

Long before the town of Mijas in southern Spain became a lure for tourists and home to the largest golf resort in the country, a man named Emilio led a quiet life there. He rented a room in a steep unpaved street that led straight into the mountains. Emilio’s grief dug a deep moat around him. He shunned company. Then fled it. He wandered throughout Andalucia… There was a library in the town (a small one, of course), and he was its caretaker. “Librarian,” he claimed, “is too grand a word for what I am.” He lived alone though had been married once. It had ended, after only a few months, when the flu pandemic infamously named after his country killed his young bride. Luisa had just turned eighteen. Emilio’s grief dug a deep moat around him. He shunned company. Then fled it. He wandered throughout Andalucia and found employment as a farm labourer (olives, oranges). In Seville he bought a map of Spain and located the dots he’d visited. With a sharpened pencil he connected them. His eye lingered over mountain chains and coastlines.

— EXCERPT FROM The Interpretation of Dreams
BY J.M. Villaverde