Poetry Project Newsletter

In the Presence of Absence
Mahmoud Darwish
Trans. Sinan Antoon
(Archipelago Books, 2011)
review by Michael Allan

Appearing in 2006, just two years before his death, Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absenceemerges at the threshold of prose and poetry, offering at times memoir, lyrical meditation and self-eulogy. But to understand the book solely within the framework of Darwish’s life is to miss its rich appeal to ethical, literary, political and philosophical registers. All at once, Darwish evokes contrasts between the literal and the figural, the metaphoric and the embodied, the life, the nation and the poet, and Sinan Antoon’s remarkable translation enables the historical and philological resonance to come alive in English. “It is challenging to translocate this celebration to another language,” Antoon writes in his introduction, “but it had to be done. It is one of the most beautiful books I have read in Arabic.” In the Presence of Absence speaks with the intimacy of a whispered conversation between friends, the poet and his reader, but the power of Darwish’s words position his work as a literary monument, at the convergence of life and death, with an eye to the poetic afterlife and language.

The book is one of three extended prose poems written by Darwish and now available in English. The scholar Ibrahim Muhawi translated both Memory for Forgetfulness/Dhakirah li al-nisyan(University of California Press, 2005/1982) and more recently, Journal of an Ordinary Grief/Yawmiyyat al-huzn al-‘adi (Archipelago, 2009/1973), and Antoon’s translation completes the trilogy. In each of these three works, Darwish’s words address you, the reader, with delicate care as a fellow traveler on a journey through a world of language. At the same time, his words ring with world-historical importance and are cast against the backdrop of specific events: Beirut in 1982, Palestine after the 1967 war, and the specter of the poet’s death. Across the Arab world, Mahmoud Darwish’s name bespeaks in almost metonymic relation to the Palestinian people and to the power of language, memory, exile and poetry. And yet, for all of the explicit situations in his writings (echoes of Deir Yassin, Beirut, Tunis, Haifa and Damascus, and allusions to the contours of the Arabic language and the meter of classical Arabic odes), there is an incredible richness that saturates the pages, bleeds beyond the particularity of the Arabic language, and extends Darwish’s audience across the globe.

Separated into twenty sections, In the Presence of Absence defies simple classification and weaves into its pages a range of materials: citations of classical Arabic poets, segments composed in classical poetic meter, and poetic prose reflecting on memory, love, and longing. The book is at times lyrical in its mode of address and at times more dominantly narrative. In certain passages, Darwish reflects on the intersection of the world and words: “White letters on a blackboard inspire the awe of dawn in the countryside. Like water poured slowly into a jar that never fills, you absorbed the incomplete form and its sound together by torturing the throat and subjugating it to the power of signs and the mouth to what the eyes take in.” And at other moments, he poses questions: “I asked you: What does this mean? You said to me: Meaning might need another time to ripen in the earth’s salt. It might need another poet free of the Trojans and Greeks, a poet who gazes into an abyss from above without falling in, and the abyss becomes a lake.” The depth, scope and resonance of Darwish’s words come alive thanks to Antoon’s graceful translation. This accomplishment promises that Darwish will continue to live beyond his death, his words flourishing in the imaginations of English-language readers.

Michael Allen is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon.

 

His life story itself is the stuff of novels. Born in 1882 to a well-to-do Jewish family in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire—now the Czech Republic—Ernst Weiss spent his youth in some of central Europe’s most agreeable cities: Prague, Brno, Litomerice, and Berlin. He studied medicine in Vienna and later became a surgeon. 1912 saw Weiss take up a berth on a ship bound for India and Japan. When he returned to Europe, the storm clouds were gathering. He served with distinction as a military physician in the Great War: they awarded him the Golden Cross for bravery. Afterwards, he settled in Prague, but he didn’t want to be a doctor anymore.

Before the war, Weiss had struck up a friendship with Franz Kafka, who said of him “what an extraordinary writer he is”. Not everyone agreed: 23 publishers turned down Weiss’ first novel The Galley (1913). He moved to Berlin—where he wrote Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer—but by 1934 things were looking dangerous for central Europe’s Jews, and Weiss fled to Paris. There he lived an impoverished existence, eased by handouts from literary supporters such as Thomas Mann. In 1938, Weiss wrote The Eyewitness, his last novel, which contained a thinly veiled portrait of Hitler; a final act of defiance perhaps, for as the Nazis invaded Paris, Weiss drank poison. He died the following evening.

Astonishingly, it has taken until now for Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer to be translated into English. Joel Rotenberg has done a fine job of rendering Weiss’ snappily sardonic prose. It is presented in a handsome binding by Archipelago books. The eponymous antihero is a bacteriologist who murders his wife. He does so partly for money, partly because she repulses him, but mainly, you can’t help but feel, because he wants to spill blood. Letham is condemned to spend the rest of his life on a far distant penal colony, known only as C, where yellow fever is rampant.

It’s a distinctive and vivid work. Weiss has a remarkable facility for conjuring up chilling scenes of desolation and decay. There’s an eerie account of a doomed expedition to the North Pole that brings to mind Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. Here, the sailors are forced to give over their vessel to the insatiable horde of rats that have overrun the ship. “The ship does not understand the rodents in its belly. They merrily go on living. They are not looking for any pole. They are not interested in meteorology, not in dialects, not in Eskimo folktales, not in Christianity. Food to be taken is all that exists for them. If a weaker, good-tasting creature is alive and they can catch it, then they kill it”.

The descriptions of the yellow fever patients are a uniquely piquant mixture of cold medical terminology and visceral human suffering: “the conjunctivae were yellow, shot through with distended scarlet venules. He gave off the foul carrion-like stench that is characteristic of the disease. The tongue and oral mucosa were unspeakably raw, as though the top dermal layers had been removed with a grater, taken down to the bare meat”.

The author questions whether scientific detachment be brought to bear outside the laboratory. “I will hold up a mirror to myself. With a steady hand. With the exacting eye of a scientist” Letham explains in the book’s foreword. In reality, of course, this is a man in thrall to his passions, though he despises himself for it. This novel, it should be noted, was first published in 1931 in a Germany not yet immersed in the terrible collective mania of the Nazi era, against which reason was no match.

There’s more than a hint of Dostoevsky to the book: murderous, itchily neurotic characters, scenes of animal maltreatment and human degradation; indeed, the passages concerning the prisoners’ voyage to C are more brutal and hopeless than anything in Memoirs from the House of the Dead. And like Crime and Punishment, Georg Lethamreads in places like a thriller. But there’s none of the Russian’s religiosity: Letham looks to science for his salvation.

Freud’s influence also looms large: there are dream sequences and lengthy passages concerning formative incidents from the protagonist’s childhood. It adds up to a heady journey into the recesses of a tortured soul. But it’s the imagery that stays with you—a remarkable, haunting work. An extraordinary writer indeed.

A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, trans. from the Turkish by Erdag Göknar. Archipelago (Consortium dist.), $25 (456p) ISBN 978-0-9793330-5-7

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 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.

 

Spring Tides, the latest title from Brooklyn’s admirable Archipelago Books (specializing in literature in translation) is the quietly devastating story of comic-strip translator Teddy and his tenure on an isolated island off the coast of Quebec. Dropped there by his benevolent publisher, Teddy’s solitude is soon interrupted by a series of guests (some more welcome than others), whose successive attempts at integration into island life yield frustration and disappointment, mitigated only by the briefest moments of contentment. Published in 1978, at the height of the Quebec separatist movement, it is tempting to label Spring Tides an allegory for dysfunctional society, in which the best intentions lead to the worst results. But there is a deeper despair at work here, a species of muted sadness that can only be survived by embracing the absurd, as if the pared-down prose of early Poulin’s is a unique voice (economically rendered by Fischman, the translator of record for Quebec-lit) and this tragicomic parable of communication breakdown remains achingly relevant, 30 years later, to the disconnect of our hyper-connected modern lives.

From Joshua Cohen, The Daily Beast:

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.

 

My greatest failure as a reader is my inability to read literature in a second language. I have something of an ADD problem with languages, and have never gained fluency in any beyond English. I learned Spanish in high school, Gaelic in college, Russian in my free time, and I’m now just beginning to dabble in French. I may know enough Spanish to get me around Spain on vacation without looking like a total idiot, but I’m lucky if I can count to ten in Russian anymore without throwing in a few Gaelic numerals.

Recently I noticed just how much I was missing out on when I saw how many works by Julio Cortázar (1914 84), one of my favorite writers, have not been translated into English. Archipelago recently released the first English translation, by Anne McLean, of The Diary of Andres Fava. I was so impressed by the novella that I wanted to get in contact with McLean to talk about the work of translation and the books of the masterful Belgian-born Argentine who is so well-known by Spanish and Latin American readers, but virtually invisible to English-speaking ones.

McLean translates works mostly from South America and Spain, but Spanish is actually her fourth language, and she didn’t speak a word of it until well into her 20s. She was politically involved at the time, and had traveled to Guatemala to see the revolution first-hand.

“I didn’t really have a plan,” McLean says. “I just went traveling and spent a few months in Mexico and ended up staying in northern Guatemala for half a year, and then a bit longer than that in Nicaragua. A few months after the Sandinistas lost the elections, I came to England for a while, and used to go to Spain when my visas ran out to teach English, improve my Spanish, and get some circulation back in my toes.”

When McLean first moved to England in 1996, she saw an ad for a master’s program in “The Theory and Practice of Literary Translation.” Since earning her MA, she’s translated works by Javier Cercas, Ignacio Padilla, Carmen MartÌn Gaite and Paula Varsavsky. The authors themselves hail from a range of countries including Spain, Cuba, Argentina and Mexico. Translating works from different lands that ostensibly have a common tongue presents an interesting challenge for someone in McLean’s line of work. “There are many, many different Spanishes,” the translator says, *#8220;just as there are lots of different Englishes.”

She continues: “The variations in vocabulary and accent between, and within, Iberian and American Spanish don’t necessarily have much to do with the styles of the authors who write in them, though sometimes, of course, they do. If there’s a lot of dialogue, and especially if it’s colloquial, it’s very difficult to keep alive in translation, but it’s not necessarily more difficult to translate slang from Buenos Aires than slang from Barcelona; the tricky thing is to make it sound believable in English, but still have the characters who are speaking it sound as if they’re from Buenos Aires or Barcelona. “A few years ago I co-translated a novel called Shadow Without a Name, by Ignacio Padilla. Ignacio’s part of a group Mexican writers who, fed up with flying iguanas and thunderclaps of butterflies, deliberately set their novels in Europe and write in a sort of mid-Atlantic Spanish. My natural English is Canadian and [co-translator] Peter Bush writes in British English, so we ironed out each other’s idiosyncrasies in a way that was quite true to Ignacio’s intentions in the original.”

But McLean didn’t get her first chance at translating Cortázar until a she used a little bit of friendly harassment.

As a reader, it had taken McLean a few runs at works by Cortázar before she really got it. “I read Blow-Up and Hopscotch and We Love Glenda So Muchin the 1980s before I knew any Spanish, and I was intrigued, but I didn’t really get obsessed until I read Deshoras, probably in about 1993 or so. There’s a story in that book his last collection of short stories called ‘Pesadillas’ (‘Nightmares’) that was a breakthrough for me, because it was the first time a piece of writing in Spanish hit me with full force.”

The Harvill Press in 1998 reprinted some of Cortázar’s work in an anthology of short stories, and McLean tried to convince them to bring out more. Her perseverance paid off when a Harvill editor, Euan Cameron, eventually passed along her name to Archipelago Press in the U.S. when they were looking for a translator for The Diary of Andres Fava; the result of McLean’s effort was brought out last month.

Literature in translation may always be low-profile in bookshops, but what can lead to even greater frustration for McLean is the simple lack of appreciation for a writer who is one of her favorites.

“In decent bookshops you see Hopscotch and Blow-Up, and in really good ones, you might find a few more. But he has become an obscure author in English, which Spanish and Latin American readers find pretty hard to believe.”

“On the one hand,” she continues, “it is a great shame that more of his work isn’t in circulation in English, but it also means there are many, many readers who still have the discovery of Cortázar to look forward to, and that’s something I envy. I think a Julio renaissance is long overdue, and it could be time to look at re-translating a lot of his early stories.”

Review of The Vanishing Moon from Buffalo News

from R.D. Fohl, Buffalo News — “Coulson’s Work Mirrors Struggles of the Working Class,” a review of The Vanishing Moon

 

“I live in the city where my brother and I grew up, where we made our choices, and choices were made for us,” laments the no-longer-young narrator of Joseph Coulson’s first novel “The Vanishing Moon,” which will be published next month by New York City-based Archipelago Books. “I go to the old places to make peace with what happened there, but then memories take hold of me and I twist and turn my body, trying to keep the past at arm’s length, trying to shake it off, feeling a grip that is strong and absolute,” Coulson’s working class narrator Stephen Tollman relates. A literate, if unpublished, short story writer and chronicler of the Tollman family misfortunes from the depths of the Great Depression to the end of the 1970s, he has traded in the romantic dreams of his youth for the security of a job as an assembly line supervisor at a General Motors plant in Cleveland.

 

Novels about the struggles of working class American families are increasingly rare in the current literary marketplace, but Coulson — who lived in Buffalo while earning a Master’s degree in Writing and Poetics and a Ph.D. in American Literature at the University at Buffalo in the 1980s — has never been particularly constrained by literary fashion. In addition to three chapbooks of poetry, he has co-authored “A Saloon at the Edge of the World,” a full-length play about William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler’s disagreement over how to adapt “The Big Sleep” as a screenplay that was produced and staged in San Francisco in 1996. More recently, he has been Editorial Director, Chief of Staff, and Senior Editor of the Chicago-based Great Books Foundation, where he oversaw not only GBF’s publications, but also its community-based discussions of selected Great Books, including Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” which was the topic of a GBF-sponsored event here in Buffalo in 1999. As “The Vanishing Moon” (which has already been selected by Barnes & Noble Books for its “Discover Great New Writers” program) went to press this fall, Coulson was teaching American literature in Paris as sponsored by the University of Toronto.

 

Set against the backdrop of 20^th century American politics and popular culture, the novel follows the tribulations of three generations of Tollmans — a Cleveland, Ohio family cast into poverty, homelessness, and personal tragedy during the Depression of the 1930s. As a consequence of sacrifices made and not made, of foolish and shortsighted decisions, the family’s dislocation permanently scars and alters all its descendants.

 

More particularly, the narrative focuses on the relationship of two brothers — Phillip and Stephen — whose strikingly different responses to their father’s abandonment and the subsequent disintegration of the family leaves them full of inarticulate rage and mournful regret, respectively. Even as their lives and fortunes change in the relative prosperity following World War Two, their restiveness seems almost congenital.

 

By way of contrast, the novel introduces us to a succession of strong and fiercely independent women, including its most compelling narrative voice Katherine Lennox — a political activist turned jazz pianist who is beloved but unattainable by one brother, seduced and abandoned by the other. One evening a stranger in a tavern tells Stephen that the greatest talent of women in general is their “capacity to spend endless amounts of time with dull men. To spend it without being bored, or at least without minding that they are.” The comment echoes like a revelation to him, like an indictment of a still salvageable life.

 

For James Tollman, Phillip’s youngest son and a college-bound intellectual in the making who narrates the Viet Nam era portion of the novel, “Irony is the only faith in a fallen world,” but the house he inhabits is still ruled by retrograde emotions like guilt, fear, and self-loathing

 

Despite the use of multiple narrators and a protagonist — Phillip Tollman — constructed entirely through the accounts of others, “The Vanishing Moon” opts for a traditionalist approach that will remind readers of classic authors like Steinbeck and Zola, or perhaps such contemporary masters of wounded male pride and self-doubt as Raymond Carver and Russell Banks.

Review of The Vanishing Moon from Viviane Crystal at The Historical Novels Review