Volume 52, Issue 1
Front Cover by Whitfield Lovell
Kin VI (Nobody), 2008
CONTÉ CRAYON ON PAPER WITH ATTACHED WOODEN CHAIN
30 X 22 1/2 X 7/8
“HEAVE THE LOG!” Though the origins of the final word are obscure, the history of the command is not. “Log” in this sense came into the languae just when Hawkyns, Ralegh, and that whole motley herd were reading Hakluyt, dreaming of treasure, and trafficking in lives. From the ship’s stern, a seaman would throw the logge into the sea—a line tied to one end, weights fastened to the other. A second sailor would unreel the rope—its length marked by knots at every seven fathoms—as the ship sped away. When a sandglass emptied, the reel was stopped, the logg-line retrieved, and the knots summed up. Knots, a nautical measure of speed. William Falconer’s Universal Dictionary of the Marine (1780) notes, “It is usual to heave the log once every hour in ships of war.”
From the early modern period, when the gods first fled and the world was forever disenchanted, our poets have done no less. What is it to write, if not to cast one’s mark into the heaving oceanic tumult? Taking one’s measure from there, as if the globe didn’t spin, didn’t turn on its wheel, as if the universe itself weren’t fleeing from us, in every possible direction. Unlike the warship, however, the poet gives us the universe, not just our relative location in it. Just so, in this issue, we begin with a panoply of traveloues: Amy Leach’s glorious jaunt into hebephrenic menagerie, Sabina Murray’s wormhole in Wanderjahren, the resurrected rage of Aimé Césaire, Quim Monzó shooting Swiss legend full of holes, the cool calculations of Mike Freeman. But who are we to play favorites? Yours is the only logbook that matters.
Whichever turns are taken, the artistry of Whitfield Lovell will undoubtedly stun you in your tracks. MR is proud to welcome these bold beautiful black faces into our pages; for us, Lovell’s invitation to personal, familial, and historical meditation is also a reminder of our own history as a publication, and a call for reengagement in the movement today. We are equally proud of Kevin Quashie’s invitation to you to pause, to linger on these intricate compostions. Lovell’s pairings of faces and found objects are visualized metaphor, meant to carry us beyond our received ideas.
If we can’t change, we’re already dead. And yet, on beyond the blinkered immortality of adolescence, we confront—too soon, always too soon—the one frontier marked with a one-way sign. All the more wondrous, then, the poet who dares chop her axe into that frozen sea. And here we must mention Meena Alexander’s salute to Agha Shahid Ali, Pravinsinh Chavda’s deciphering of ritual in “Lines on the Wall,” and, most certainly, the inspiring “Tenacity” of Douglas Bauer. Spring, in New England at least, is the shortest of seasons, and winter the longest.
One final form of apartheid is addressed as this issue comes to its clsoe. Neither existential nor racial, the “two cultures” divide—between the sciences and the arts—dates from the same era that brough English pirates to African and American shores. Today, we hear a great deal of chatter about ramping up USian educaiton in math, in the sciences. Let’s not question, for the moment, the wisdom—in this “Sputnik moment”— of encouraging cold warrior enthusiasm in the name of better pedagogy. Let us say only that MR will not hesitate to stand up for the humanities, or for humanity. The single and singular point which this first number of our fifty-second year best illustrates is that, in today’s world, poetry is the one true religion, in the oldest, etymological sense of the word (either re-legere “to read, again and again,” or, more likely, re-legāre, “to tie again, to bind together”). Those other pretenders, divided against themselves, will not stand.
It is no chance occurrence that each contributor to our technoscience bloc binds science and art together, bridging the Great Divide. Nor should it surprise that these authors write in three different languaes, represent five different countries, and work in a still greater number of fields (including biochemistry, computer science, graphic art, history, and human rights). One is even Parisian, an alum of that Univesity which, back in the early thirteenth century, may have started it all.
So of course we’re interested in the Poe-to-Powers arc of science writing. It shouldn’t be forgotten, after all, that the Massachusetts Review is a Five College production. Since 1959, it had been the business of these editors to bring the disciplines together, to offer a speaker’s corner, and to write for readers who are interested in simply everything. It is true that the very idea of ūniversitās smacks of hubris. Yet the defiant cast of one’s mark, the spinning of a reel that takes our measure, may also be a beautiful thing. It may even be a poem. Nothing better, then, to close this issue than Ashbery’s sparkling translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations. A landmark.
for the editors
Table of Contents
I. Travel Logs
The Safari, an essay by Amy Leach
The Nubian Vultures Have the Floor, a poem by Aimé Césaire,,translated by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman
Howling, a poem by Aimé Césaire, translated by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman
Periplus, a story by Sabina Murray
Babel Diary, a poem by Brian Culhane
Helvetian Freedoms, a story by Quim Monzó, translated by Peter Bush
At the Checkpoint to Sleep, a poem by Henk Rossouw
Cowboy, a story by Kim Chinquee
Boundary 5 (Warheads), a poem by Salgado Maranhão, translated by Alexis Levitin
Resuming the Count, an essay by Mike Freeman
Mourning I, a poem by Bruce Snider
Something Flown, a poem by Patty Crane
More Than You Know, artwork by Whitfield Lovell, with essay by Kevin Quashie
II. Memento Mori
You, A Shadow, a poem by Heather Madden
On Indian Road, a poem by Meena Alexander
Lines on the Wall, a story by Pravinsinh Chavda, translated by Mira Desai
En Route to Bangladesh, Another Crisis of Faith, a poem by Tarfia Faizullah
Parting Words, an essay by John Nelson
Tenacity, an essay by Douglas Bauer
A Final Brooklyn, a story by Brion Dulac
Thifting, a poem by Angela Sorby
III. Le Parti Pris Des Choses
The Song of the Railroad Crossing Barrier, a story by Otar Dovzhenko, translated by Patrick Corness
Tesla, Portrait Among the Masks, a novel excerpt by Vladimir Pištalo, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac
Report from Computerville: Virtual Walkabouts and Master Narratives, an essay by Larry Owens and Dominique
La Mono Nagra: An Analog Tale, an essay by Luke Jaeger
Mistaken, a poem by Charlotte Boulay
IV. Illuminations
Mystical, Dawn, Flowers, and Common Nocturne, four poems from Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by John Ashbery
Contributors
MEENA ALEXANDER has published six volumes of poetry, including Illiterate Heart, which won the PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk, and Quickly Changing River. She is the editor of Indian Love Poems and author of Poetics of Dislocation, Poets on Poetry Series, University of Michigan Press. She has received awards from the Guggenheim and Fulbright foundations and from the Rockefeller Foundation for a residency at Bellagio. She teaches at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.
JOHN ASHBERRY’s latest collection is Planisphere (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2009); his Collected Poems 1956 – 1987 was published by Library of America (2008). His translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations is forthcoming from Norton.
A. JAMES ARNOLD is the author of Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Harvard, 1981), the editor of Césaire’s Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946–82 (Virginia, 1990), co-translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, and the lead editor of the Paris edition of Césaire’s literary works (in progress).
DOUGLAS BAUER’s books include the novels Dexterity, The Very Air, and The Book of Famous Iowans, and the nonfiction books Prairie City, Iowa, and The Stuff of Fiction. He’s also edited two anthologies, Prime Times:Writers on Their Favorite Television Shows and Death by Pad Thai and Other Unforgettable Meals. He is currently a Professor of Literature at Bennington College.
CHARLOTTE BOULAY’s poems have appeared in Slate, Boston Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Field, among other publications. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of Michigan, she currently teaches writing at the College of New Jersey.
PETER BUSH is an award-winning literary translator who was born in Spalding, Lincolnshire, UK, and now lives in Barcelona. Previously he was Professor of Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, where he directed the British Centre for Literary Translation. He has been active in defense of the rights of literary translators as vice-president of the International Translators Federation and was founding editor of the literary translators’ journal, In Other Words.
AIMÉ CÉSAIRE(1913–2008), a member of the French Chamber of Deputies from Martinique for nearly half a century, was a forceful voice for decolonization in the 1950s. Following decolonization in Africa he authored three plays that were critical of the direction taken by the first generation of post-independence leaders. During the Second World War, however, and into the early 1950s Césaire developed a radical poetics that adapted the techniques of surrealism to an exploration of the colonized mind.The explosive poetry he produced during that decade culminated in Solar Throat Slashed (Soleil cou coupé) in 1948.The translators of the Wesleyan University Press bilingual edition have restored the collection to its original form, which has never been seen in English.
PRAVINSINH CHAVDA is an established author in Gujarati, with six short-story collections and a novel to his credit. A literary autobiography and a travelogue were recently published. A few stories have been translated into Hindi and Marathi as well. He has been a member of state civil service,Gujarat Public Service Commission, and has previously worked in the Gujarat Educational Services. He has taught for about a decade at the undergraduate level.
KIM CHINQUEE is the author of the collections Oh Baby and Pretty. She lives in Buffalo, New York.
PATRICK CORNESS was born in Newcastle under Lyme, England. He studied German and Russian language and literature, and other Slavic languages, in London, Moscow, and Prague. For thirty years he was a university teacher of applied languages, with wide experience as a translator and interpreter. Presently he is Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Translation Studies, University of Leeds. Recently published literary translations include contributions to Ukrainian Literature: a journal of translations (Toronto and New York) and Pusteblume: a journal of and about translation (Boston).
PATTY CRANE’s work has appeared or will be appearing in numerous publications, including American Letters & Commentary, Dos Passos Review, Fugue, RUNES, Spoon River Poetry Review, Comstock Review, and West Branch. She recently completed a translation of Tomas Transtromer’s collection The Sorrow Gondola, and is now back in the U.S. after three years living in the Stockholm area.
BRIAN CULHANE’s poetry has appeared widely in such journals as Hudson Review, New Republic, and Paris Review; new work is forthcoming in Sewanee Review, Harvard Review Online, Raintown Review, and elsewhere. He was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson First Book Prize for The King’s Question (Graywolf, 2008) and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Artist Trust. He lives and teaches in Seattle.
MIRA DESAI writes, works and lives in Bombay, with a day job in the pharma sector. Her translations have been featured in 91st Meridian, Indian Literature, Pratilipi, Muse India, Calque, and Brooklyn Rail, and await publication elsewhere. As a writer of fiction, she has contributed to Birmingham Arts Journal, Six Sentences, Celebrate Bandra, and the California Writers Club newsletter. She is a member of the Internet Writing Workshop.
OTAR DOVZHENKO was born in Zaporizhzhya and lived for twenty years in Dnipropetrovsk, where he graduated from the Faculty of Journalism. He has lived for the last ten years in Lviv. He is a journalist by profession and is editor of the website http://telekritika.ua/ devoted to the media.
BRION DULAC lives and teaches in western Massachusetts.
ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAC has been translating novels and nonfiction by Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian writers for the last twenty years, including work by Svetlana Broz, Slavenka Drakulic, Slobodan Selenic, Antun Soljan, Dubravka Ugresic. Her translation of David Albahari’s novel Gotz and Meyer was awarded the National Translation Award by the American Literary Translators Association in 2006. She has co-authored a textbook for the study of Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian with Ronelle Alexander, and has written a study on poet Tin Ujevic´ and his work as a literary translator. She is a recipient of an NEA translation grant.
Recent books by CLAYTON ESHLEMAN include a translation of The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo (University of California Press, 2007), The Grindstone of Rapport/A Clayton Eshleman Reader (Black Widow Press, 2008), Anticline (Black Widow Press, 2010), and Curdled Skulls, Poems of Bernard Bador (Black Widow Press, 2011). This April Black Widow will publish his co-translation with Lucas Klein of Bei Dao’s Endure, and in May Wesleyan University Press will publish his co-translation with A. James Arnold of the unexpurgated 1948 edition of Aimé Césaire’s Solar Throat Slashed. He is a professor emeritus at Eastern Michigan University.
TARFIA FAIZULLAH’s poems have appeared in Southern Review, Mid-American Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, Bellingham Review, Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, where she received a Catherine Joan and Byrne Academy of American Poets Prize. Her other honors include an AWP Intro Journals Project Award, a Ploughshares Cohen Award, a Bread Loaf Conference scholarship in poetry, and a Fulbright to conduct research in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
MIKE FREEMAN lived in Alaska for ten years. Recent publications include essays in ISLE, Gettysburg Review, and South Loop Review. He is the author of Drifting:Two Weeks on the Hudson, due to be published by the SUNY Press in November 2011.
Artist/filmmaker LUKE JAEGER grew up in Brooklyn and attended Yale University, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and Massachusetts College of Art. He and his family now live in western Massachusetts. His animated films have been shown in festivals and theaters worldwide.There is nothing in his childhood to explain his ongoing fascination with abandoned highways and desolate industrial sites.
AMY LEACH is writing a book about animals, plants, and stars, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions.
ALEXIS LEVITIN’s translations have appeared in well over two hundred literary magazines, including American Poetry Review, Evansville Review, Kenyon Review, Grand Street, New England Review, Partisan Review, Prairie Schooner, New Letters, Northwest Review, and Two-Lines. He has published thirty books of translations, including Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugénio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words (both from New Directions). He is a recipient of two NEA translation fellowships and two Fulbright Lectureships, as well as residencies at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, the European Translators Collegium in Germany, and the Rockefeller Foundation retreat at Bellagio, Italy.
WHITFIELD LOVELL received a BFA (1981) from the Cooper Union School of Art. He taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1987 to 2001 and has been a visiting artist at such institutions as Rice University (1995), the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2001), and the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia (2002). Lovell’s work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions at national venues such as the Seattle Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Originally from Pennsylvania, HEATHER MADDEN has studied creative writing at Indiana University and New Mexico State University. She received an Emerging Artist Award from the St. Botolph Club Foundation (2009) and a Literature Artist Fellowship Award from the Somerville Arts Council (2008). She’s currently employed as the managing editor of Salamander.
SALGADO MARANHÃO won Brazil’s prestigious Prêmio Jabuti in 1999 for his book Mural of the Winds. His most recent volume is The Tiger’s Fur. His collected poems will be appearing later this year. In addition to six books of poetry, he has written song lyrics and made recordings with some of Brazil’s leading jazz and pop musicians.
QUIM MONZÓ was born in Barcelona in 1952. He has been awarded the National Award, the City of Barcelona Award, the Prudenci Bertrana Award, the El Temps Award, the Lletra d’Or Prize for the best book of the year, and the Catalan Writers’ Award; he has been awarded Serra d’Or magazine’s prestigious Critics’Award four times. He has also translated numerous authors into Catalan, including Truman Capote, J. D. Salinger, and Ernest Hemingway.
SABINA MURRAY is the author of the novels Forgery, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, and Slow Burn. Her short-story collection The Caprices was the winner of the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award. She wrote the screenplay for the film Beautiful Country, which was an Independent Spirit Award Best First Screenplay nominee. She is a former Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, Bunting Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and Guggenheim Fellow. She currently directs the MFA Program at UMass. “Periplus” will be included in her new book, Tales of the New World, to be published in Spring 2011.
JOHN NELSON of Gloucester, Massachusetts, is the author of Cultivating Judgment, a sourcebook for teaching critical thinking skills. He has published fiction and essays about birds in Gettysburg Review, The Snowy Egret, and birding magazines in the U.S. and England.
After earning degrees in history and biochemistry, LARRY OWENS has forged a career reading, writing, and teaching about machines and culture, especially during the Cold War. His two favorite courses at UMass are his two-part undergraduate survey of science and technology in the western world and his grad seminar on science elsewhere and elsewhen.
VLADIMIR PIŠTALO was born in Sarajevo in 1960. He grew up in Mostar, Kraljevo, and Belgrade, studied law in Belgrade and Sarajevo, and earned his PhD in American History at the University of New Hampshire. Several of his books have been translated into other languages, and his novel Tesla, Portrait Among the Masks has appeared in Russian and Croatian editions; it is being translated into English, French, Hungarian, Slovak, Czech, Macedonian, Danish, Bulgarian, Slovenian and Japanese. Currently he is an associate professor at Becker College, teaching US and World History.
KEVIN QUASHOE teaches literature and cultural studies at Smith College. He has co-edited an anthology of contemporary African-American literature and written a book on black women and cultural theory. Currently, he is writing a book on what a concept of quiet could mean to how we think about black culture.For assistance with the essay on Whitfield Lovell, he would like to thank Aprile Gallant, Peter Riedel, and the staff at The Massachusetts Review.
Published before he turned twenty, the Illuminations of ARTHUR RIMBAUD changed the history of poetry forever. John Ashbery comments that, “If we are absolutely modern— and we are—it’s because Rimbaud commanded us to be.”
Originally from South Africa, HENK ROSSOUW is completing his MFA at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2009 he read in Times Square as one of the winners of the Poetry Society of America’s Bright Lights Big Verse contest. His work has appeared in Tin House, Threepenny Review, and online in Virginia Quarterly Review.
BRUCE SNIDER’s first book, The Year We Studied Women, won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin Press. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, PN Review, Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares, among other journals. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, he was the 2010 writerin-residence at the James Merrill House and will be writer-in-residence at the Amy Clampitt House in 2011.
ANGELA SORBY is currently a Fulbright scholar in Xiamen, China, but most of the time she’s an Associate Professor of English at Marquette University in Milwaukee. Her books are Distance Learning (New Issues, 1998), Schoolroom Poets (UPNE, 2005), and Bird Skin Coat (Wisconsin, 2009), which won the Brittingham Prize.
DOMINIQUE THIEBAUT teaches in the Department of Computer Science at Smith College. His research interests include cloud computing and data visualization. He holds two patents in processor-in-memory design, and was the cofounder of Gemicer/Brightscale,a Silicon Valley start-up based on the patents.