December 15, 2022 Poetry The Blackstairs Mountains By Colm Tóibín Illustration by Na Kim. In the new Winter issue of The Paris Review, Belinda McKeon interviews the writer Colm Tóibín, author of ten novels, two books of short stories, and several collections of essays and journalism. Tóibín also writes poetry—“When I was twelve,” he tells McKeon, “I started writing poems every day, every evening. Not only that but I followed poetry as somebody else of that age might follow sport”—and we are pleased to publish one of his recent poems here. The Morris Minor cautiously took the turns And, behind us, the Morris 1000, driven by my aunt, Who never really learned to work a clutch. I remember the bleakness, the sheer rise, As though the incline had been Cut precisely and then polished clean, And also the whistle of the wind As I grudgingly climbed Mount Leinster. All of us, in fact, trudged most of the way up, With my uncle carrying a pair Of binoculars borrowed from Peter Hayes Who owned a pub in Court Street. Read More
December 14, 2022 Rereading “Security in the Void”: Rereading Ernst Jünger By Jessi Jezewska Stevens Ernst Jünger (second from right), via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. 1. Some people live more history than others: born in Heidelberg in 1895, the German literary giant Ernst Jünger survived a stint in the French Foreign Legion, the rise of the Third Reich, two world wars, fourteen flesh wounds, the death of his son (likely executed for treason by the SS), the partition of Germany, and its reunification, before his death at the remarkable age of 102. Perhaps no historical rupture had a greater influence on his thinking, however, than the rise of industrialized warfare across both world wars. A soldier as much as a writer, Jünger memorably declared in his diaries in 1943 that “ancient chivalry is dead; wars are waged by technicians.” Articulating the consequences of this transformation became the central obsession of his work. Read More
December 13, 2022 A Letter from the Editor Letter from the Review’s New Poetry Editor By Srikanth Reddy As a new member of the Review’s team, it gives me great pleasure to bring you several equally new contributors in our new Winter issue. Some are celebrated literary artists, some are emerging voices, and others fall somewhere in between. Perhaps the most lofty among them is William of Aquitaine, also known as the Duke of Aquitaine and Gascony and the Count of Poitou—the earliest troubadour whose work survives today. For all his lands and eleventh-century titles, there’s a slapstick vibe to this unwitting contributor’s bio that I can’t help but find endearing. Excommunicated not once but twice, and flagrant in his affairs and intrigues, William survived more ups and downs than most modern politicians could ever pull off, and in Lisa Robertson’s agile translation, he speaks to us from the end of his earthly tether: “I, William, have world-fatigue,” he sighs across the centuries. Read More
December 9, 2022 Dispatch At Proust Weekend: The Madeleine Event By Olivia Kan-Sperling Over the course of Villa Albertine’s Proust Weekend, a series of talks, workshops, and readings celebrating the forthcoming English translation of the last volume of the Recherche and the centenary of Proust’s death, I ate more cakes per diem than usual: on Sunday afternoon, a miniature pistachio financier, a Lego-shaped and moss-textured cake that reminded me of the enormous chartreuse muffins at my college cafeteria; on Saturday morning, a crisp, disc-like, almond-sliver-sprinkled shortbread cookie with a hole, which reminded me of a Chinese coin; and, on Friday night, at a holiday party, a dish of Reddi-wip and sour cream studded with canned mandarin slices and maraschino cherries apparently called ambrosia salad. It reminded me of the music video for Katy Perry’s “California Gurls.” But these were really only preliminary research exercises for the episode in which Proust Weekend was to culminate: a “Proust-inspired madeleine event with surprise guests”! Read More
December 8, 2022 On Sports What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Goals? By Jonathan Wilson The U.S.-Wales Men’s World Cup Match and Opening Ceremony in Doha, Qatar, on November 21, 2022. State Department photo by Ronny Przysucha, Public Domain. Not long after Argentina lost in a stunning upset to Saudi Arabia and hardly anyone outside the losing country was crying, I read a new book, Dark Goals: How History’s Worst Tyrants Have Used and Abused the Game of Soccer, by the sports journalist Luciano Wernicke. Evita, I learned, once tried to fix a game between two Buenos Aires teams, Banfield and Racing, first by force of will and, when that failed, by offering a bribe to Racing’s goalkeeper: he could become mayor of his hometown. Of course, that kind of behavior is behind us (FIFA? Bribes? Are you kidding?), although government pressure and reward still hover on soccer’s periphery: Emmanuel Macron famously called Kylian Mbappé the best player in the current tournament, and urged him not to move from Paris Saint-Germain to Real Madrid, because, he said, “France needs you.” After the Saudi victory, a national holiday was declared in the oil-rich kingdom, all amusement parks were free, and citizens could enjoy their favorite rides for as long as they wished. In Qatar, outside interference of another kind was exposed when it came to light that those bouncing, joyful, muscle-bound, tattooed Qatar supporters in identical maroon T-shirts were actually faux fans imported from Lebanon and elsewhere, all-expenses-paid. They had been trained in patriotic Qatari chants. Meanwhile, the Ghana Football Association appealed to a higher power and urged two days of fasting and prayer nationwide to give its team the necessary boost. This sounds quite reasonable; there’s been an awful lot of skyward finger-pointing and prostrations of thanks by players after they score a goal. Someone’s deity is clearly playing a part. No one, to be clear, ever thanks God for a loss. Read More
December 8, 2022 Poetry The Leap By Dan Beachy-Quick Starling. Photograph by Raman Kumar, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 4.0. The poet Agha Shahid Ali died of brain cancer in Amherst, Massachusetts, a world away from the beloved Kashmir of his childhood, twenty-one years ago today. The title of the book he published that year, Rooms Are Never Finished, testifies to the unfinished work of a writer whose life ended too soon, at the age of fifty-two. In his first poem published in The Paris Review, “Snow on the Desert,” Ali wrote about another singer interrupted mid-performance: in New Delhi one night as Begum Akhtar sang, the lights went out. It was perhaps during the Bangladesh War, perhaps there were sirens, air-raid warnings. But the audience, hushed, did not stir. The microphone was dead, but she went on singing, and her voice was coming from far away, as if she had already died. Ali, too, continued to sing after darkness had fallen, with the posthumous publication of his landmark collection of ghazals, Call Me Ishmael Tonight, in 2003. Few poets have done so much to further our contemporary appreciation of the ghazal—an ancient Arabic verse form that’s shaped the historical course of classical Persian and modern Indian poetry over many centuries. What Ali once called the ghazal’s “ravishing disunities” have been adopted by American poets from Daniel Hall to Reginald Dwayne Betts, Patricia Smith, and countless young writers in introductory poetry workshops today. I teach the poems of Call Me Ishmael Tonight, including “A Ghazal for Michael Palmer,” to my students every year. Though I never met Ali, it’s a way of remembering him. I learn something new from his poetry whenever I revisit it, and on the anniversary of his death, we’re fortunate enough to share a new ghazal by one of Ali’s own former students, the poet Daniel Beachy-Quick, in memory of the “The mind / Love rushes through.” —Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy, poetry editor Read More