In the Babel of books that surround us these days, probably not many people have noticed two extraordinary books by the Polish writer Magdalena Tulli: Dreams and Stones and Moving Parts, both translated with elegant clarity by Bill Johnston. Like all great works of art, Tulli’s books create something new, something that doesn’t respond to what the reader has been conditioned to expect. To begin with, they don’t tell a story in a straightforward way; rather, they tell the story of creation itself, of what it means to create, and this is particularly true of Moving Parts, a novel reminiscent of Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author or of the French nouveau roman.

Moving Parts mixes reflections on creation with the narrative fabric itself, and this gives it a mythical dimension, though it is hard to summarize. The historical time moves back and forth between German-occupied Poland during World War II, the Cold War, the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and the present. The space also is disconcertingly unidentifiable—the setting is Poland, but the characters’ names are not necessarily Polish: there’s an African-American trumpeter named John Maybe; the tight-rope walker Mozhe and his partner Yvonne Touseulement (who is also John Maybe’s lover); a Captain in the third Reich, Feuchtmeier, and his wife; and a Jewish publisher called Fojchtmajer.

Each time the story approaches some kind of resolution, Tulli makes sure we don’t settle comfortably in it, letting us know that it could branch off in many directions. The numerous possible stories that could develop are compared to the floors of a hotel where an elevator might stop: the names of the characters appear in the computerized list of guests, and the moving parts of the elevator are compared to the mechanisms of grammar governing the story. The focus shifts constantly from a vertical dimension—the stories that develop out of the elevator’s movement—to a horizontal dimension—the stories developing in a train that moves from one station to another.

This multi-dimensional storyline is unified by the presence of the narrator, who becomes a character in his own tale. When Fojchtmajer is forced by the Nazis to leave his house, the narrator moves in—the narrator who, like all characters, has a body, a wallet, and biological needs. The story ends with his grotesque humiliation in front of a big audience: he flips over, loses his glasses, injures his nose, his pants fall down, his butt is kicked, and a crumpled ball of paper hurled from the crowd hits him. Thus Tulli’s carefully constructed world succumbs to the inescapable chaos that precedes and follows all creation.

The words of the criminally insane always bring a unique perspective. “George Letham: Physician and Murderer” is a translation of the chilling German novel that follows George Letham, a physician who is baffled by his own actions as a doctor as he studies himself as he continues his crimes. A truly intriguing and thought provoking read, the character conflicted in his interests of silence and his passion for murder leads to a unique read unlike any other. “George Letham” is expertly translated by Joel Rotenburg, a top grade pick for literary fiction collections.

from Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 84, No. 1, 2012 136-137

by Jason Weiss

Published in 1972, Prose del observatorio was unique in Cortázar’s oeuvre both for its subject and form, while remaining true to his indomitable spirit. In eighty pages, the book comprises an elusive poetic essay built from two interwoven strands, plus thirty-six photographs taken by the author a few years earlier on a trip to the maharajah Jai Singh’s observatories in Jaipur, Delhi. As a counterbalance to reflections on the starry heights, the text considers in turn the inscrutable depths where the strange life cycle of the Atlantic eel plays out. Each realm poses a challenge to science, with its need to track and define hidden patterns, and each ultimately defies the imperatives of precision instruments by asserting the integrity of all that lies beyond what can be known by the rational mind.

In fact, what attracts Cortázar to the observatories of Jaipur is less the measurement of the stars than the efforts by the eighteenth-century ruler to fathom the enigmas of astronomy. The photos depict marvelous structures, full of evocative curves and angles and openings, conceived according to some grand plan; dominating most vistas, though, are the many sets of stairs, which Jai Singh would ascend “to interrogate the sky.” The Argentine writer shows a comparably ambitious reach in weaving together the worlds of above and below, as well as laying out an imaginative space, a Möbius strip of simultaneity, where time immemorial abuts the immediate sensual present, and the fragile illusions of human certainty can be intercepted by the grace of the unforeseen. Much as he details the elaborate migration of the eel, and its widening resonance as metaphor for natural and evolutionary forces, the spark in his inquiries points always to humanity, “something that comes from music, amorous battles and seasonal rhythms…toward another understanding.”

As in most of his work through the 1960s and ‘70s, and signaling his inheritance from surrealism, Cortázar seeks “another possible profile of man.” From the outset, as rendered in Anne McLean’s elegant translation, he embraces the slipperiness of knowledge and language itself—“the sargassum of time and random semantics, a verb’s migration: discourse, this course, the Atlantic eels and the eel words.” The seemingly distinct realms of sky and sea, if not quite reciprocal mirrors, work in tandem to mark out the orbit of his thinking in this text, as they continue with their implacable and mysterious systems to penetrate not only each other but also the terrestrial life of the writer-observer who always maintained an attitude of permeability to all that surrounded him. Such was the creative principle he lived by, embodied in his notion of the fantastic: how at any moment it couldn’t enter upon daily reality. That same instinct propels him forward here, as he keeps watch for a fortuitous opening in the expected order, “touching on something that doesn’t rest on the senses, a breach in succession.” Through that opening the new man—humankind spring from its stale habits—may establish “a field of contact” which reconciles disparate modes of being. Cortázar’s book offers us a start, articulating a constellation of its own from previously unexplored connections.

Jason Weiss’s latest book is Always in Trouble: An Oral History of ESP-Disk’, the Most Outrageous Record Label in America.

Shape Notes: On “Fossil Sky” by David Hinton

Reading David Hinton’s poem “Fossil Sky” is no simple matter. This “lyrical map,” as the author calls it, spirals its way around a 54 square-inch sheet of paper. There’s no up or down, no left or right or beginning or end—following the poet’s train of thought entails twisting the paper, or yourself, to follow the sinuous lines of print like tracks across a wilderness of white space.

The first time I read “Fossil Sky,” I spread it out on a bed. The second time, I lay it on the grass, which seems more appropriate to the poem’s imagery of field and sky. But my cat decides to use the poster-sheet as a blind from which to attack me, and besides, the grass is getting dewy. Draping “Fossil Sky” across a patio table, I wonder if I can ever be sure I’ve read the whole thing. Without the usual orientation points, it’s hard to know when you’re “done” with a poem. And maybe that’s Hinton’s point.

“In 1988, I remember my wife and I looking at this big star map we had spread out on the floor,” Hinton says in the living room of his East Calais home. “And it just struck me: I could write a poem like this. But it took 14 years to figure out how to do it.” He ended up designing “Fossil Sky” using the graphics program FreeHand 4 on his 10-year-old computer. What is the poem a map of, exactly? Hinton suggests that it’s the human mind. “Poetry, for me, at its deepest level is about consciousness,” he says. “Consciousness is spatial, and inside it is the flow of language, which is linear” —like the lines on the page.

If Hinton’s description of consciousness recalls the Zen Buddhist notion of “empty mind mirroring the world,” it’s no coincidence—he earns his bread translating classical Chinese poetry and philosophy. In 1997 he received a Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets for his renderings of Li Po and two other poets.

Although “Fossil Sky,” put out by Archipelago Books this April, is the first verse of his own he’s published, Hinton says that poetry originally led him to translation and not the other way around. “Chinese philosophy always made a lot of sense to me,” he explains, citing the impact of Chinese literature on 20th-century American poets like Ezra Pound and Kenneth Rexroth. Graduate study in Chinese at Cornell led Hinton to a two-year stay in Taiwan. Later he found himself translating poets he admired, like Tu Fu, whose power he thought vanished in dry scholarly renderings.

Still, when it came time to return to his own verse, Hinton tried to avoid creating “Chinese-sounding poems.” As he tells it, “I wanted to do something that came out of that world-view that seemed accurate and deep to me, but that was also innovative and added something to poetry.”

“Fossil Sky” describes a landscape: the south of France, where Hinton spent a grant year in 1998-’99 with his wife, poet Jody Gladding, and their daughter. But it’s a portrait we receive in fragments—a tatter of sky here, of water there, with images of bright summer fields blurring into ones of frost and “the wordless ink-dark clarities snow brings to lakewater.”

Hinton compares this to the way people “slowly build up ideas over time. I used to tend to write on walks. So you go out for a walk, and maybe something happens, you see a bird or something and maybe you have this idea, and you go out for another walk and add something to it. It’s this slow accretion.”

While most lyric poems present the finished, polished product of a “slow accretion” of thoughts, Hinton says he aimed in “Fossil Sky” to recreate “this whole more immediate life-experience, so you can sort of wander around in it“—again, like a map. He stresses that there’s no “right” way to read the poem. “If somebody comes to it with some intelligence and assuming that they’re empowered, whatever happens is the right thing.”

Wandering around in “Fossil Sky” is a bit like navigating a maze that has no center and no exit. Starting from one of the poem’s six “entry points,” you may come to a fork where it’s up to you how to continue the thought. You may meet a crossword-puzzle-style intersection of two sentences, or a sentence that simply frays out into white space, like thoughts as you doze. While the poem definitely isn’t “meaningless”—as one Internet reviewer puts it—its meanings can be hard to pin down.

Take, for instance, a pathway where we read what sounds a lot like a thesis statement: “The particular is meaningless… against the fierce and ancient abstractions driving human history.”

“Aha!” we may think. “Hinton’s talking about us puny humans being dwarfed by the universal.” The stream of conscious-ness that follows seems to support this idea, juxtaposing the image of a “long-legged skitterish cricket”—a puny creature if there ever was one —with glimpses of the timeless, terrifying night sky. “[L]ooking out from earth, we gaze back through starlit time to its very beginnings,” writes Hinton.

“But the long view is a mirror,” we read as we follow the spiral—words that later repeat themselves. And the cricket keeps popping up, too, its importunate summer chirp interrupting the Deep Thoughts about origins and eternity. Mirroring the world, the poem mirrors itself in these repeated phrases and motifs. And it suggests that the “particular”—the puny cricket, or the “I” who some-times narrates the poem—isn’t so meaningless after all. Maybe the “long view” always leads us back to our own backyard.

“Fossil Sky” has presented Hinton with some unique challenges—for instance, how do you give a public reading of a poem with no beginning or end? For appearances at various New England colleges and universities, he and Gladding worked out a solution: Give the floor to the audience. Five people come up one by one and read pieces of “Fossil Sky,” starting wherever they want. If they accidentally cover the same ground, “it still sounds different,” says Hinton.

Hinton isn’t done experimenting with funny-shaped lit. For his next project, he’s staying “outside of the book” with a translation of the medieval female Chinese poet Su Hwi, which takes the form of a grid.

“It’s fun to have this different relationship to language,” Hinton says of “Fossil Sky.“ “You can get outside of it and move it around.”

The CircaËte, or Snake Eagle, endemic to the CÈvennes, subsists entirely on snakes, especially the grass snake (according to Oiseaux.net). A reader of David Hinton’s Fossil Sky will learn this in the notes glossing the name of a bird, whose cries of “pkeer pkeer” punctuate the poem. The “jacket” blurb tells us that the poem, which “distills a year of walks taken near the poet’s home,” was written “during a period of time he spent in southern France.”

The poem comes folded up exactly like a map, spreads across a huge “page” measuring roughly four feet square, and is bounded by a thin blue circle (radius of about 26 inches). The myriad “lines” squiggle across it like ant trials or the cracks in a heated tortoise shell. (The author appears to have made use of the “Bezier paths” tool in layout software.) At first glance, the reader might think s/he is looking at a “map” of the poet’s walks near his home in the CÈvennes. (Did the poet trace his lines over the trails marked on his topographical map?) There is no clear indication where the poem “starts” and where it “finishes.” At what appears to be roughly the center of the blue circle, we begin to read, “Tracing spring’s return for weeks before hearing an old friend far away died in late winter.” This “trail” continues for three more winding phrases of similar length, separated by triple spaces—reflections on familiarity and “earth’s elemental indifference.” It crosses three other trails, including the head of another trail that begins “A thin scree of light pollen hisses on the clear glacial lake . . . ”

While it might be tempting to think this “center” of the sphere represents the location of the poet’s home, since three other trails issue from that spot, there are many other such centers on the map, constituted by three or four emerging lines, appearing to gravitate together like chromosomes under a microscope. This pattern of centers and wandering peripheries gives the whole a pleasantly random yet harmonious aspect. Furthermore, isolated phrases—“The no beckons,” “wings shimmering,” “a roof,” “hear waves”—and words—“oxygen,” “carbon,” “laughing,” an onomatopoetic “pKeeerr”—spray off the ends of lines in a way that indicates, in some respects at least, the mimesis and expressivity of a calligramme rather than cartographic projection.

One also wonders about the compositional method, in relation to walking: were the lines and stanzas for this poem culled from notes kept while walking? Or just after walks? Did the poet plot his lines while contemplating a map of his walks? Or were they otherwise “recollected in tranquility”? Were the lines composed with an aleatoric procedure such as Richard Tuttle’s wire release sculptures?

Is the poem “projective,” in the Olsonian sense, a work of “open” form or “composition by field”? Does it, at all points, “go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares”? There is a feeling of tracery, as if the poem might have been composed beforehand and then each section “set” into a long bezier curve, with extra spaces for the line breaks, and capital letters indicating new stanzas, as in the following:

We’re more sky than anything else
more sights and sounds forgotten and lost
but light forgets it all perfectly:

Frost-glazed grasses shimmer
shuddering under faint breezes
slowly turning meltwater dark

Frost heavier down along the shoreline
promising the wordless
ink-dark clarities snow brings to lake-water

It’s cold and frost-melt wet
and I’ll soon remember nothing about this routine walk

Perhaps I should have stayed home:
a roof
a fire
a family

But there are other forms of shelter:
Boundless sky
cocoon light
whisper snow

Is it more than an arrangement, to have this set along a squiggling, intermittent line? Either way, it does seem that the exploitation of new typesetting technology, to draw out, bend and pluck stanzas (as when the six short phrases in the last two “stanzas“ fly off in different directions like sparks, birds or droplets), and the layering of these drawn-out stanzas, within the poem’s blue horizon, to create something like a simultaneous network, rather than linear “message,” initiates an entirely different experience for the reader.

The large format is both overwhelming and accessible in one glance. The intermittent spaces (that I have interpreted as “stanza” breaks) allow one to pick up, or drop, the reading of any given line at multiple points. And sometimes the line, like a mineral seam, disappears for quite a ways, to get picked up only later by the carefully tracking eye. Sometimes a line splits into several branches, or several lines combine into one. And, occasionally, lines loop back as if to swallow their tails, or cross back over themselves, as if to delimit a “closed area”—reinforcing that uncertain “weren’t we here before?” feeling. Finally, on one occasion, at least (when “You might pile such ruins up into a borie and light a candle” intersects with “A mourning candle burns down into shallows”) two different lines share the same word (“candle”) so that the reader suddenly is faced with a fork in the “track.” (“Borie,” according to an author’s note, is a dome-shaped shelter built without mortar from stones gathered in the fields, traditional to the farmlands of Provence since the neolithic.) At the word “candle” two tracks suddenly become four—an experience familiar to anyone who’s hiked goat trails. As in such a maze, or hive, there’s seemingly an infinite number of tracks to follow, poems to read.

The further the walker gets from home the more s/he is asked to reflect on “other forms of shelter,” on what it might mean to be “sheltered” by sky, light, snow; similarly, we might ask what shelters the poem, once removed from the book? Where Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems“contains” its infinitude within the closed form of the sonnet, Hinton chooses to bound his forking composition with the simple, yet hermeneutically loaded, gesture of a blue circle. (Hommage to Richard Long?) The careful yet seemingly random distribution of the lines, the visual element of the composition that aims to please the unifying glance as much as the particulate examination, “extends” the “content” of Hinton’s meditations on nature, transience, home, mortality and the “long view” of old age (“early crickets pitched too high for aging ears”):

We cannot say the lake cares, cannot say it doesn’t
Yes, the particular is meaningless

. . .

long-legged, skitterish, sunning
motionless on the warm stone ruins, a cricket
startles away

. . .

The long view is a mirror . . .
sight leaving earth’s every instance perfectly itself

Fossil Sky calls into question the supposed “nonlinearity” of projectivist compositions (in, say, works by Olson, Eigner, Howe), which, compared to this work, still seem ruled by a left-to-right and top-to-bottom reading grid. Its large format also exceeds the measures of most digital work. And what a spin on proprioception: the poem’s snaking lines curve “upside down” so that you have to twist your head around to keep reading—or, as a blurb on the cover-fold suggests, put the poem on the floor, get down on your hands and knees and crawl around it.

The poem is full of transcendental observations (“Lit gold lining the parched whorl of broom’s empty seedpods”) yet it is not romantic:

Exhausted after three days tending a sick family
I set out to gather fresh rose-hips among mountains forgetting them
selves in turn now
and too tired even for a lazy walk through this afternoon’s weave of all
that was or ever will be here
I meet mountain peaks on their own terms
sentinels of indifference deep in their vast histories

Literary-philosophical sources for the discipline of “forgetting” this poem seems to urge, and for its nominalism of particulars, will no doubt be found in the works of the Chinese mountain poets Hinton is an accomplished translator of, or in Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior. But the openings of the form can lead to “extra-literary” uses: keep it on your wall, pick out a line at random and zoom in for a moment’s thought or bit of advice. (In this sense it does work like the Chinese diviner’s heated tortoise shell.) Furthermore, the recurrent CircaËte and the never-ending form almost serve to turn the reader into a “Snake hawk”: is this the hawk’s eye view of the poet’s walks?

The long view is also a mirror: watch out —when you begin to take the poem in, like the CircaËte you may find yourself digesting the head of your prey while you are still swallowing the tail.

“The Turkish Ulysses. . . . Tanpinar’s great novel also unfolds over 24-hours, but in Istanbul on the eve of World War II. Turkey is torn between East and West just as Mümtaz, an orphan and aspiring writer of historical fiction, is torn between a decaying tradition and his love for the older, divorced Nuran, whose failings and attractions are entirely modern.”

Originally published in 1949, Tanpinar’s sweeping literary masterpiece is a love story of his native Turkey and of the flesh. As Turkish culture shifts from its traditional roots to a more modernized society in the 1930s, protagonist Mümtaz seeks to preserve the past. After his parents’ untimely death, he becomes a devotee of Turkish literature under the tutelage of his cousin and mentor, Ihsan. Mümtaz is “like a figure in a novel, confronted by tragedy at a young age, ensuring that its effects would always afflict him” and perhaps that is why he chooses to focus on a disappearing past. He soon falls in love with Nuran, an unattainable woman with a complicated background. Mümtaz believes that his love for Nuran will be enough to save them both from the changing times and protect them from disaster. Tanpinar’s lyricism and resonant plot will leave U.S. readers wondering why they’ve had to wait so long to read this exquisite novel.