Poem by Taylor Dube

Echo

Unable to say my own words,
I cannot speak unless it be another's last.
I am an empty shell.
A body without a voice.

It pains me to not tell him of his beauty
To not initiate conversation
I must wait to hear the end of any speech and then recite it back
The mere sight of him caused my body to grow hot
I am overcome with the need to follow him through the woods
A fire growing deep within me as I pursue him
Spreading through my entire body
How I want to come on to him,
Accost him with endearments, tender prayers -
But Juno put upon me this curse
The inability to speak my mind
Forwardness goes against my nature now

He yells “Anyone here?”
To hear his voice makes me weak
“Here!” I answer,
Wishing I could speak my mind
Speak with lavish words
But his will have to do.
“Come!” he yells and I return it
But I don’t approach
“Why do you run away from me?” he questions, and again he hears them in my voice
“Here let us come together!” he cries out to me -
“Come! Together!” I respond.

Oh how I wish I could speak my own words to draw him to me!
I leap out of the woods, no longer hiding my face
I run swiftly to him, and embrace the neck I so desire
But he flees and cries, “Hands off! No hugs! I’ll die before you’ll have your way with me!”

My heart is broken and feel like I could collapse to the ground
But urged on by embarrassment I run to the woods
To bury my shame in the caves
My love for Narcissus is unwavering
It grows as I mourn the love I never had
My body wasted with grief for my love Narcissus

Now only my voice is left
None see me
But I am heard by all
The words of others spoken by me
A reverberation is all that I am.

photo by Zach Elston

'a modest rebellion against the tyranny of instant access'

[...] But these meandering journeys across the Internet soundscape can be taxing. The medium too easily generates anxiety in place of fulfillment, an addictive cycle of craving and malaise. No sooner has one experience begun than the thought of what else is out there intrudes.

-- from 'Infinite Playlist' by Alex Ross in The New Yorker August 10 & 17, 2009, pp. 82-83.

From the long overdue (re)readings (III)

You advance for hours and it is not clear to you whether you are already in the city's midst or still outside it. Like a lake with low shores lost in swamps, so Penthesilea spreads for miles around, a soupy city diluted in the plain; pale buildings back to back in mangy fields, among plank fences and corrugated-iron sheds. Every now and then at the edges of the street a cluster of constructions with shallow facades, very tall or very low, like a snaggle-toothed comb, seems to indicate that from there the city's texture will thicken. But you continue and you find instead other vague spaces, then a rusty suburb of workshops and warehouses, a cemetery, a carnival with a Ferris wheel, a shambles; you start down a street of scrawny shops which fades amid patches of leprous countryside.

If you ask the people you meet, "Where is Penthesilea?" they make a broad gesture which may mean "Here," or else "Farther on," or "All around you," or even "In the opposite direction."

(Italo Calvino, 'Continuous Cities 5,' Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver. Harcourt, 1974. 156-57.)

From the long overdue (re)readings (II)

Fifty years ago Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard was first turned down by Elio Vittorini at Einaudi because he considered it nostalgic, accomodationist, pessimistic, but luckily for all (well, except maybe for Lampedusa himself, who died in the meantime) the following year Giorgio Bassani took the novel for Feltrinelli (it was published in 1958). In the novel, the aging Don Fabrizio ruminates over the multiple delusions of material and political change as Sicily is wrestled into a unified Italy. A good part of the drama of the story is due to Fabrizio's enactment, in several settings, of what Luigi Pirandello had called the "sentimento del contrario" (in Felicity Firth's apt phrase, "that ironic dual perspective") in his 1908 essay "L'umorismo." Although Pirandello wasn't talking about an approach to momentous historical events, the example of Don Fabrizio shows how principled equanimity works to preserve the social fabric, to cause the least disruption, while allowing for measured change - although Don Fabrizio thinks of it as more like a slow collapse. Referring to Pirandello's "sentimento del contrario," (usually translated as "the feeling for the opposite") Felicity Firth writes that Leonardo Sciascia remarked that it demonstrated Pirandello's Sicilian provenance, "deriving from the Arab inability to separate, as the Greeks do, the tragic from the comic" ('Pirandello,' in The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, Ed. Peter Brand and Lino Pertile, 1999: 481). The perception of a convergence, or discomfiting simultaneity of the tragic and the comic, might derive from an inability to separate the two, or it might be the essence of a more holistic worldview, to borrow from another vocabulary altogether. In "Averroës' Search," the story by Jorge Luis Borges, Averroës ends up his commentary on Aristotle's categories by writing that "Aristu [Aristotle] gives the name 'tragedy' to panegyrics and the name 'comedy' to satires and anathemas. There are many admirable tragedies and comedies in the Qur'ān and the mu'allaqat of the mosque" (The Aleph and Other Stories, trans. Andrew Hurley. Penguin, 2004: 77). Then Averroës feels "sleep coming upon him, [and] he felt a chill." He vanishes and the tale ends, except for the narrator's commentary about their mutual exclusion - on one side Averroës, "bounded within the circle of Islam," and on the other the narrator, whose yarn can no longer subsist on the shreds of rumor that he has.

found object series/at the beach

'I am all of yourselves'

Read the NYT review of the new biography of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser here. Although the review's positive, it may wind up repelling potential readers of this great author because it emphasizes her extreme personality (and yet...this should draw readers to the biography...). To me, as a reader, at least of Cronicas, it's Lispector's open grappling with her own egoism & a kind of fatal egotism that makes those tales fascinating even when they may appear dull or droning on the surface. Lispector sometimes does this on purpose, and other times her despatches are haiku-like, perfectly compressed. She had a kind of static class consciousness, depicting herself, mannequin-like, as though fixed in social space, acting within a cubicle of possibility, returning on herself.

*Read the Fernanda Eberstadt review of Moser's bio here. From the NYT Book Review of 8.23.09, this piece should attract more readers to Lispector's writing, and to the biography.

From the long overdue (re)readings (I)

Death (or reference to death) makes men precious and pathetic; their ghostliness is touching; any act they perform may be their last; there is no face that is not on the verge of blurring and fading away like the faces in a dream. Everything in the world of mortals has the value of the irrecoverable and contingent. Among the Immortals, on the other hand, every act (every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, and the faithful presage of others that will repeat it in the future, ad vertiginem. There is nothing that is not as though lost between indefatigable mirrors. Nothing can occur but once, nothing is preciously in peril of being lost.

- Borges, ‘The Immortal,’ from The Aleph and Other Stories, trans. Andrew Hurley (15)

Less is less

Chad Post writes that even though everyone's saying it's really really important indie/nonprofit/university presses are cutting back on translations this year and the big publishers are publishing fewer translations as well. Read about it here.

the new edition of Free Verse is online & it includes translations of poems by Aldo Palazzeschi by Nick Benson, Camillo Sbarbaro by Paola Morgavi and Natalia Nebel, and Sandro Penna by Alexander Booth

3/2

[tolmin-grožnjan-aquilea]

Mr. & Mrs. Hide

Natalija Grgorinic and Ognjen Raden reading from their collaborative novel Mr. & Mrs. Hide, published by Spineless Books. The Croatian duo wrote the novel in English. There is a brief write-up on it here. The low-key & very intelligent presentation took place in a little park in Groznjan, w/muted background chorus of kids, jackhammers, & random barnyard noises. I have to buy the book and read it before making literary comparisons, but I was reminded a bit of Julio Cortazar's Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, a collaboration with his wife, Carol Dunlop.