
Front Cover by Anur
Bang! 2009
Front Cover by Anur
Bang! 2009
FIFTY YEARS GO QUICK. I know this intimately—MR and I were actually born together, in the fall of 1959. But they have had their moments. Just ten years into the fray, for example, the editors of this journal published a superb anthology of essays, art, poems, and stories, Black & White in American Culture, featuring writing by Martin Luther King, W.E.B. Du Bois, Lucille Clifton, Howard Zinn, Stokely Carmichael, Toni Cade, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The collection also saluted Ralph Waldo Emerson, citing as preface his 1847 missive from the first issue of the Massachusetts Quarterly Review. "What more serious calamity can befall a people than a constitutional dulness and limitation?" Emerson wrote. "We have a bad war, many victories, each of which converts the country into an immense chanticleer; and a very insincere political opposition. This country needs to be extricated from its delirium at once." Hard not to hear Emerson as doubly relevant today, certainly no less than he was fifty years ago. And yet he, like us, retains faith in the power of the word: "A journal that would meet the real wants of this time must have a courage and power sufficient to solve the problems which the great groping society around us, stupid with perplexity, is dumbly exploring."
MR may not solve these problems, but neither will it shrink them. It is clear that what Du Bois famously called "the problem of the twentieth century" is still very much with us; indeed, the great global migrations of our own day have made new Harlems, and new color lines, across nearly every great city on earth. And yet the people of this country still learn their geography, if at all, by following the follies of our military caste. To no small degree, then, the current national delirium stems from ignorance: whatdo we really know of other places, other peoples, other perspectives? There are things which literature and the arts teach us that can be learned no other way; not least of these is another life, another world, from the inside. As a step toward extrication, and away from delirium, MR will begin its second half century by dramatically increasing the amount we publish in translation. Our government has been broadcasting The Voice of America for well over fifty years; it's high time that the country opened its ears as well as its mouth. To that end, some changes to the masthead: Edwin Gentzler, head of the Translation Center at UMass, will be joining Ellen Doré Watson as Translation Editor; Michael Thurston, professor of English and American studies at Smith College and an incorriible internationalist, will be added to the Editor ranks; and Charles M. Sennott, co-founder of the Internet news service GlobalPost.com, will be joining the review as Contributing Editor. And, beginning this year, the journal will also award annually a new literary prize for translation, the Jules Chametzky Prize to the single best translations, in prose and in poetry, published within our pages.
Jim Hicks
for the editors
Introduction, by Jim Hicks
Alfred Kazin and Norman Podhoretz,
portraits by Jules Chametzky
Psalm of Leah, a poem by Diane Gilliam
My Soul, a poem by John Allman
Shadows on Jeweled Glass, a story by Juan Jose Saer,
translated by Jim Hicks
Spreading Ash, a poem by Sandra Meek
Ex-Wives, a poem by Ira Sadoff
Saffron, an essay by Robert Kostuck
Comida tipica, a story by Mei Li Ooi
From Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie,
a poem by Joshua Harmon
The Atheists Club, a story by Philip Kobylarz
Jackpot, a story by Kelly Luce
Minnie Driver, a story by Amy Weingartner
Crazy in Love (Women and Shoes),
an essay by Cynthia Lewis
Dinner Party, a story by Sarah French
What I learned in Art School, an essay by Joy Manesiotis
Melinda Interviews, a poem by Mike Michaels
Mother's Bartok, a poem by Frannie Lindsay
Building, an essay by Michelle Disler
Insulatus, an essay by Zachary Watterson
Your People's Ways, a story by Jane E. Martin
Polaroids of Tom, an essay by Burlee Vang
A Kingdom Comes, a story by Nance Van Winckel
Waiting for Solomon, a story by Susi Wyss
Everywhere and Nowhere: A Quest for Tango
in Buenos Aires, an essay by Paige Boncher
The Approximate Placement of the Sun,
a story by Lauren Foss Goodman
Little Stick, a poem by Anne Marie Macari
Time and Language: The Trials of a Philosophical Tourist,
an essay by Frederic Will
Pantoum of the Brothel of Ruin,
a poem by Patrick Donnelly
The Nutcracker's Overbite, a story by Peter Moore
A Man from the Lord, a poem by Kirun Kapur
Beer, a poem by Lee Upton
Notes on Contributors
Until death do us part, by Anur
Consumerism is a trap, by Anur