“RIEN N’ARRIVE ni comme on l’espère, ni comme on le craint”: thus does the Holocaust survivor Jean Améry begin his celebrated anatomy of torture, citing Proust. “Nothing actually happens as we hope it will, nor as we fear it will.” For most folks, I imagine, this was not their first association when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, though it was mine. Améry clarifies his claim: it’s not that torture exceeds our imagination (“it’s not a quantitative question”); actual torture isn’t...
I think I should have retired at least ten years ago. My older sister Lucy announced her plans to retire, effective immediately, on the second anniversary of her husband’s death from dementia. She said it gave her the boost she desperately needed after her shock and grief refused to lift.
Summer Intern Aviva Palencia interviews translator Aga Gabor da Silva, winner of our annual Chametzky Translation Prize for her translation of Ewa Lipska’s “Can Always Happen” from its original Polish. Published in our Spring 2021 issue, Gabor da Silva’s masterfully translates this poem about longing for one’s country of origin. A transcript of this interview is available here.
Aviva also conducted an interview with Diana Senechal, who received an honorable mention. A transcript of this interview is available here.
AGNIESZKA (AGA) GABOR DA SILVA graduated from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she studied Lusophone Literatures and Cultures. Aga also holds a Master of Arts in English Literature and Linguistics from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Her translations have appeared in Lunch Ticket, ANMLY, and Columbia Journal.
DIANA SENECHAL is the 2011 winner of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities and author of Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (2012) and Mind over Memes: PassiveListening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies (2018). Her translations of Tomas Venclova’s poetry have appeared in Winter Dialogue (1997) and The Junction (2008); her translations of Hungarian literature have appeared in Literary Matters, Literary Imagination,The Satirist, Massachusetts Review, Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, and The Continental Literary Magazine. "Scissors" is included in the collection Always Different: Poems of Memory (Deep Vellum, 2022), her translation of Gyula Jenei's Mindig más (2018). She teaches English and civilization at Varga Katalin Secondary School in Szolnok, Hungary.
AVIVA PALENCIA is an intern at the Massachusetts Review with a specialization in translation. As of 2022, she holds a B.A. in Linguistics, a B.A. in Spanish, and a certificate in Translation and Interpreting Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. From 2021 to 2022, she was an assistant at the UMass Translation Center and did English-Spanish translation projects for the Just Words Translation and Interpreting Cooperative.
“We are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest [...] the teachings of Thoreau are alive today, indeed, they are more alive today than ever before.”
—REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. (MR 4.1, Autumn 1962)
For years, Sue and I would collapse into hysterics if one of us said "Stuttgart." We didn't have to say "Mercedes factory" or "bedroom" or "Mom." Just "Stuttgart" was enough to set us off, —from "Stuttgart Revisited," Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote. If I skip over earnest grammar school doggerel, high school self-conscious (and earnest) attempts, college (still earnest, still (more)-self-conscious) glimmerings, then the poem I mark as my first is “64 Panoramic Way,” the first poem (but not the oldest) in my first book, Taken from the River. I wrote it in graduate school and the title...
When I was small like a selfish idea I would pick pieces of his hair off my smooth girl-body swollen in the dark places where he had become light —from "Triptych," Volume 63, Issue 3 (Fall 2022)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote. After a long hiatus from writing after high school, I took it up again when I was 33. The first piece I wrote was an excerpt in what will soon be my memoir, although I didn’t know it at the time because I was about to die. My illness got me into writing again though, and writing in part saved my life.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now? I have been a longtime admirer of Donna Tartt’s The...
I try and go back to the bottom of the placid blue lake, or maybe the storm’s calm eye. This is how I bargain for your love in my mind, like a child. —from "Chiaroscuro after Caravaggio’s Paul," Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote. In 5th grade my local newspaper had a poetry contest. I remember sitting in my backyard and writing a poem about the beach. I still remember the opening lines: “The foamy waves lap the shore/ the salty breeze in my face/ seagulls fly toward their home/ and me, just standing there.” I don’t remember the rest of the poem, but knowing my 5th grade self, I’m sure it was existential....
Fifty-nine hours before dying, Hermann Ploucquet greets the postman in the doorway. There is a letter from his mother and another from his friend, the physicist Hippolyte Fizeau, but none from Her Majesty, Queen Victoria. No doubt he pretended not to be disappointed, and I can imagine him chatting with the postman about his gardens. —from "Skin Walking," Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote. In elementary school I remember writing and illustrating a story about a boy who discovers a broken thread of sunlight on the playground and takes it home. He feeds it, bathes it, plays with it, tries to use it to climb to heaven. My parents saved all kinds of junk from my school days, but sadly...
“We came to think of it as our painting: two figures Embracing in a corrugated field, its patina of sunlight And stroked grasses beside the soot-stacks of factories, Their stern faces flat as prisons. Plumes of smoke Unravelling the shirt of sky.” —from “Factories at Clichy,” Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote. In college, I wrote a poem titled “The Painter,” and it was one of the first I tried that felt as though it truly arrived: it grew from my fascination with artists' relation to their subject matter. I was a scholarship student, working various odd jobs. Serving as a life-model for artists was one of the least arduous...
