January 23, 2025 Document James Baldwin in Istanbul By Osman Can Yerebakan At the peak of his literary fame, James Baldwin yearned for seclusion. He found it in Istanbul, where he lived on and off between 1961 and 1971. Baldwin was suffering from writer’s block when he arrived in the Bosporus-divided city thirteen years after settling in Paris. Soon after, he completed Another Country, a manuscript that had long been haunting him. In Istanbul, the author found the time and inspiration for some of his career-defining works, and he later wrote about the city in an unfinished novel. He also made friends, among them Sedat Pakay, a young engineering student and amateur photographer who was twenty years his junior. The pair met through a mutual friend at a party in 1964. The younger man, then a member of his university’s photography club, offered to shadow Baldwin with his camera. Baldwin accepted. Over the next several years, Pakay accompanied Baldwin as he wandered across Istanbul, producing a series of photographs as well as an eleven-minute-long film, James Baldwin: From Another Place (1973), that document Baldwin’s time in the city. Pakay’s photographs of Baldwin are currently on view in Turkey Saved My Life: Baldwin in Istanbul, 1961–1971, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library. The show was organized by Atesh M. Gundogdu, the publishing director of the website Artspeak NYC, along with the library’s Cora Fisher and Lászlo Jakab Orsós, and it occurs in the middle of what would have been Baldwin’s one hundredth year. (He died in 1987, at the age of sixty-three.) The pictures displayed narrate Baldwin’s unlikely bond with a young man from Turkey who had a discerning lens. From 1966 to 1968, Pakay lived in the United States, where he had enrolled in an M.F.A. program in photography at the Yale School of Art. During this time, he kept up a correspondence with Baldwin. Today, Pakay’s letters are in the collection of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The archive is a donation from Pakay’s widow, Kathy, and their son Timur. Below are six photographs from Turkey Saved My Life, which runs through March 15, 2025. Baldwin working on his novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, 1965. Read More
January 22, 2025 On Poetry Prof. Dr. A. I. in Conversation with Tadeusz Dąbrowski By Piotr Czerski Tadeusz Dąbrowski on stage at the Shakespeare Theatre in Gdansk, Poland. After the poet Tadeusz Dąbrowski’s latest book, W metaforze (In metaphor), was published in Polish last year, he wanted to conduct an experiment. Dąbrowski’s collection of short essays, illustrated by Henryk Cześnik, analyzes a hundred or so metaphors drawn from the poems of Adam Mickiewicz, Czesław Miłosz, Adam Zagajewski, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Seamus Heaney, and Nelly Sachs, among others. Rather than be interviewed about the project by another writer, Dąbrowski decided he wanted to speak to an artificial intelligence, live, in front of an audience. This posed some technical challenges. While conversational AI platforms like ChatGPT have become both more sophisticated and popular in recent years, no public-facing software existed that could conduct a live interview. Piotr Czerski, a programmer and fellow poet, agreed to design a custom system for the event—a nontrivial task. His final “Prof. Dr. A. I.” Frankensteins (1) Google Cloud Speech-to-Text (to “hear” Dąbrowski’s spoken answers and convert them into text), (2) a large language model (LLM), specifically Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet (to generate questions in response to Dąbrowski’s answers), and (3) ElevenLabs’s AI Voice Generator (to read aloud the interview questions). The LLM had been fed the contents of Dąbrowski’s book and a series of prompts, written by Czerski, on which it modeled its interview questions. Several moments in the conversation were intentionally designed by Czerski—like the inclusion of an Easter egg (you’ll see!) and the system’s breakdown at the end of the twenty-minute event—but the rest of the conversation was generated in real time at Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre. The resulting interview—originally conducted in Polish and here translated into English by Claude 3.5 Sonnet (which was given a prompt to preserve the original tone of voice)—is thoughtful and wide-ranging. Dąbrowski and Prof. Dr. A. I. discuss, among other things, individual poets’ access to the universal and the power of poetry to disturb our relationship to language. They touch on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Blanchot, and Gaston Bachelard along the way. There were a couple of hiccups, as when Prof. Dr. A. I. included stage directions in its speech; when it concluded a joke with the word laughter, the audience did, in fact, laugh. Read More
January 20, 2025 First Person My Cat Mii By Mayumi Inaba Photograph by Revolution will, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. It was the end of summer, 1977. At least I think it was late summer. I found a cat, a little ball of fluff. A teeny-tiny baby kitten. Her face was the size of a coin, and was split by her huge wide-open mouth as she hung suspended in the dark. She was stuck inside the fence of a junior high school on the banks of the Tamagawa River in the Y. neighborhood of Fuchū City in western Tokyo. In which direction was the wind blowing that night? It was most likely a gentle breeze blowing up to my house from the river. I’d followed her cries as they carried on this breeze. At first, I searched the gaps in the hedge around my house and among the weeds of the empty plots on my street. But her cries were coming from high up, not low down. I looked up and suddenly saw a little white dot. The large expanse of the school grounds was shrouded in the dim light. Before me was a high fence separating the road and the school. Somebody must have shoved the kitten into the fence. She was hanging so high up that even on tiptoe I could barely reach her as she clung on for dear life. She had sharp, pointy ears, innocent glistening eyes, and a pink slit of a mouth, and she was puffing her body up as much as she could to stop herself from falling, looking down at me fearfully. It was obvious that she hadn’t dropped there out of nowhere or climbed up by herself, but had been put there deliberately, out of malice or mischief. “Come with me …” Read More
January 17, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Emily Osborne on “Cruel Loss of Sons” By Emily Osborne An early draft of a stanza of “Cruel Loss of Sons.” For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. A selection from Emily Osborne’s translation of Egill Skallagrímsson’s “Cruel Loss of Sons” appears in our new Winter issue, no. 250. What was the challenge of this particular translation? The poetry of the Icelandic and Norwegian skalds, or poets, from the Viking Age—the late eighth to mid-eleventh century C.E.—is notoriously challenging to translate. It was composed orally and passed down orally for generations before being written down in manuscripts. As a result, in the extant manuscripts and runic fragments found on sticks that preserve the poetry, we find variations in redactions, illegible or illogical word choices made by scribes, and frequent references to obscure myths and cultural traditions. Simply understanding a skaldic poem requires a fair amount of background scholarship. The skaldic practice of using compound kennings, in which metaphors and symbols are substituted for regular nouns, adds another layer of complexity. For instance, in this poem, Egill calls his head the “wagon of thought,” his mouth the “word-temple,” and Odin the “maker of bog-malt.” Above and beyond gleaning the literal meaning of words, a translator must also be able to understand the frequent and surprising tone shifts that add shades of insinuation or emotion. Statements that seem illogical could be ironic or expressing litotes. In “Cruel Loss of Sons,” I found it particularly difficult to interpret Egill’s tone when he speaks of his strained relationship with his patron god, Odin, and the other gods after the death of his sons. In lines such as these, the emotions communicated are ambiguous: “I was on good terms / with the spear-god, / trusted in him, / tokened my loyalty, / until that trainer / of triumphs, champion / of chariots, cut cords / of closeness with me”; and “I’d scuffle with / the sea-god’s girl.” Is the poet indicating betrayal? Sorrow? Defiance? Incredulity? Anger? Self-deprecation? Absurdity? When translating, it can be hard to avoid pinning down the tone too neatly. My task with this poem was to allow grief to carve out its own emotional track. Read More
January 15, 2025 Diaries Spanish Journals By Catherine Lacey Photograph by Catherine Lacey. I kept this notebook during my first intensive period of studying Spanish in Oaxaca in November of 2022. I didn’t know then that this study would soon be interrupted by almost two years in New York. As I looked through it more recently, it became clear how cheerfully deranged the early days of learning a new language appear from even the slightest distance. I am, you are, he is, we are, they are. I am a student. I am a writer. He is Mexican. She is a pilot. I was stupid. She was a pilot I was a marathoner until my accident. Yesterday was Monday. I am not accustomed to it. I am tired. I am happy. I am learning Spanish. That woman is never angry. Where are your friends? The soup is very hot. They are afraid of my cat! Why? I don’t know. They have to do the shopping today. We have to go home. I have to work now. I have to see him this afternoon. Read More
January 14, 2025 The Review’s Review Glimmer: In Siena By Cynthia Zarin Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Annunciation, 1344, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The last time I was in Siena there was an earthquake. The first time I was nineteen. My boyfriend, who had already graduated from college, had been in Italy most of the year, in Perugia. The plan was to take an intensive course in Italian—he wanted to read Dante—but then he discovered a passion for painting. Could it have been the day after I arrived that we took the train from Perugia to Siena? Even now, from Perugia, one changes train twice, first in Terontola, and then at Chiusi-Chianciano Terme, a station that decades later would become familiar, arriving in the Val D’Orcia from Rome, and where one afternoon we sat deathly ill in the station bar, beset by what—an ability to go on? But then everything was new. In Umbria, the landscape is mist and the hills are often in shadow, the luminous inner life is a long let-out breath, but as the train trundles into the province of Siena, the light sharpens like a scalpel, and the shadows disappear. The usual bustle at the station. Then, a stone’s throw from the Duomo and the Piazza del Campo—which erupts in July with the running of the horses in the Palio—the Pinacoteca Nazionale is housed in two adjacent palazzos. On four floors, it holds the most important collection of Sienese paintings in the world. The core of the collection was assembled by two abbots, Giuseppe Ciaccheri and Luigi de Angelis, painting by painting, between 1750 and 1810. They knew, somehow, that these unfashionable, strange, mystical, transfixing pictures, which hovered between Byzantine art and abstraction, painted in the margins of the history of art, many salvaged from triptychs and altarpieces that had been sold, dismantled, or lost, were worth saving. On that first visit the galleries were nearly empty. I had been brought up on twentieth-century painting—my grandfather had taken me on Saturday mornings to what was then called the Modern, but I had very little idea of painting as narrative. The only picture I knew that had the quality of continually happening in time was Picasso’s Guernica. But that is another story. Here in Siena was one chapter after another of a different story: the Annunciation, the Madonna and child, miraculous episodes, the Cross, the eternally mystifying Second Coming, the Assumption. There were the perplexing lives of the saints. Each figure was aglimmer, as if these narratives were continually occurring, unfolding even then as we looked on. My own understanding of these stories was limited—it amounted to being taken to see the Christmas windows on Fifth Avenue and listening to my father sing carols in the car. But I knew, even as I arrived from that distance, that these paintings from the trecento were ones to which from now on my attention would be directed. Later, when my first child was born—who grew up to become a painter—one of the first places I took her was to see the Italian paintings at the Met, where she fixed her eyes on the gold light. Read More