Nabarun Bhattacharya. Photo: Aranya Sen.

I first came across the work of Nabarun Bhattacharya (1948–2014) about a decade ago in Calcutta, after a long afternoon of wandering conversation of the kind that Bengalis call adda, a session that no doubt included numerous cups of tea, many cigarettes, much talk about books, films, and politics before peaking, in the evening, with kebabs and cheap Indian rum. These freewheeling hours of aimless mental flaneurie that make no concessions to modernity’s iron cage of productivity and self-improvement have their own usefulness. Somewhere in the course of that day, from the recommendations of my companions, I ended up buying a copy of Harbart.

The book was printed, in the manner characteristic of Bengali publishing, as an emaciated hardboard volume that resembled a pamphlet more than a hardback. Yet appearances can be deceptive, and in this case, in more ways than one. The slimness of Harbart, like the seeming fragility of its eponymous protagonist, was mere camouflage. It wasn’t a book so much as a bomb, assembled with precision and intent. It was as if Bhattacharya had meticulously gathered fragments from a broken, fractured world, wiring the parts together with language and soldering the terminals with humor, compassion, and rage—and then set the story on a timer. You can hear it ticking as you read Harbart, before the book explodes in your hands.

The target of this novel-bomb is not the reader but the complacency of the reader, and everything that has gone into making that complacency possible—the beguiling but brutal fantasies of capitalism, consumerism, and globalization; the mythologies of power that will not look at those left behind or those being reluctantly dragged along; the smug assertion, ever since the collapse of the internationalist left in the nineties, that we are living, give or take a few incidental details, in the best of all possible times. Read More

© Andreas Sterzing: David Wojnarowicz (Silence = Death), New York, 1989
Courtesy the artist and P.P.O.W. Gallery New York

For David Wojnarowicz, this decade has been a renaissance. He plays a guiding spirit in Olivia Laing’s 2016 internal travelogue, The Lonely City, and haunts the 2011 music video for Justice’s “Civilization.” In last year’s retrospective, History Keeps Me Awake at Night, the Whitney Museum reminded us that Wojnarowicz “came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, a period marked by creative energy, financial precariousness, and profound cultural changes.” We recognize that decade in our own, and, with it, Wojnarowicz’s anger. Our present is magnetized to his past. His art, as Hanya Yanagihara wrote, “reminds you that there is a distinction between cynicism and anger, because the work, while angry, is rarely bitter—bitterness is the absence of hope; anger is hope’s companion.” In truth, renaissance is a cruel word to give to someone who died at thirty-seven. But we do love him. We do need him.

Some things to know about who we are:

We are trapped in a moment of political terror. We are dangerously close to cynicism, but angry enough to have hope. We are no longer interested in compromise. Men, we agree, have had their chance. White women we can no longer trust to uphold feminism, not while they cling to white supremacy. We are antiracist and antifascist and prison abolitionists; we rejoiced when Bill Cosby received his sentence. We canceled Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, and Al Franken with equal fervor. We are uninterested in what they think.

Welcome to we: a disingenuous pronoun that both paid and unpaid pundits alike brandish without consent. I’m often guilty, too: my points are more convincing if I ventriloquize your voice alongside mine. Are we really doing this? Is this what we want? When did we decide this was okay? As usual, Adorno said it best: “To say ‘we’ and mean ‘I’ is one of the most recondite insults.” More often than not, we is an erasure, a linguistic illusion that you or I have endorsed some third person’s opinion, politics, or decisions. Deployed in politicized spaces, the subtext of we—i.e., I didn’t need to ask you—is a violation of political agency.

What’s dangerous in maligning we, however, is how badly I—a cisgender white man living in America—need to hear these voices. Often, the contemporary we is a backlash against centuries of a white cishet male monolith, which includes the we in the Constitution. It’s a backlash voiced by women, people of color, trans and nonbinary persons, and persons with disabilities. As Wesley Morris wrote for the New York Times last year, “Groups who have been previously marginalized can now see that they don’t have to remain marginalized. Spending time with work that insults or alienates them has never felt acceptable. Now they can do something about it.” Morris casts this moment as an inversion of the culture wars of the eighties and nineties, when artists like Wojnarowicz faced censorship and humiliation from the religious right. After pushing their work to extremes and waging costly legal and political campaigns—including, in Wojnarowicz’s case, the very right to survive as a queer artist—the oppressed are now closer to power than ever. “This territory,” Morris writes, “was so hard won that it must be defended at all times, at any costs. Wrongs have to be righted. They can’t affect social policy—not directly. They can, however, amend the culture.” It’s in this sense that we becomes linguistic action. We cosign or cancel speech, endorse or excoriate art, all the while presuming that any I can borrow any you. We amplifies our voices as one, an assumption of power.

While Morris’s essay is a sensitive, observant, and smart examination of ethics in contemporary art, and while I’m grateful to have read and reread it, my first impulse upon seeing its subheading (“Should art be a battleground for social justice?”) was to throw the magazine across the room and tweet something like, “Do we really need another man whispering ‘art for art’s sake’ as he pins us against the wall?” This is what our politics has done to me as a queer artist. I carry so much anger that even the threat of some man saying, Let’s not get carried away, triggers rage.

Or perhaps more exact: revenge. Read More

Lore Segal. Photo: © Adam Golfer.

“We were having a car accident—”

Lore Segal is telling me why she writes.

“I was with my family, and we were having a car accident—”

As if they were hosting a party, or embarking on a voyage. Receiving a gift. Beginning an argument. Having: the word suggests a moment that stretches, roomy enough to admit analysis.

“I thought, This is interesting … ”

Interesting is why Segal writes. Falling outside her building, or swimming up from general anesthesia, or even, as a young girl, boarding one of the very first Kindertransport trains, which whisked her and other Jewish children from Nazi-occupied territory to England, Segal has a tendency to think, Well, this is interesting. This is an adventure.

“You see,” she explains, “whenever something happens, good or bad, you feel like you’ve just found some gold. You can use this. And you know?” She fixes me with her smile. “It’s a pretty fun place to live.” Read More

Jean Giono. Photo courtesy of the author’s estate.

One summer evening at the turn of the millennium, by the edge of a field near Roussillon, an elderly farmer told me that after the devastation of World War I the local villagers replanted their truffle oaks, knowing they would have to wait at least twenty years for a harvest. But after the devastation of World War II, they despaired of planning and planting, and returned to foraging in the forests with their dogs.

Among those drafted into the Alpine infantry in late 1914 was the twenty-year-old bank clerk Jean Giono, son of an artisan cobbler and a laundress in the Haute-Provence village of Manosque. He emerged more than four years later, “soldat de deuxieme classe, sans croix de guerre.” He had suffered the battles of Eparges, Verdun (where he was one of only a handful of survivors from his regiment), Chemin des Dames, and Kemmel. During a brief interlude in England, where he underwent treatment for gas exposure, he rescued a fellow patient—a blinded English officer—when the hospital caught fire. He was awarded a British medal, his only decoration.

Giono’s autobiographical novel of 1932, Jean le Bleu, ends with this memory: “It was easy for me to go to war without much strong emotion, simply because I was young, and over all young men, a wind was blowing the scent of sails and pirates.” The war left him a fervent, lifelong pacifist, and in 1939 his antiwar activism led to a three-month imprisonment at Marseille. In 1945, at fifty, he was again imprisoned—this time accused of collaboration with the Vichy government because his writing had been published and his dramas produced during the Occupation. He was placed on a blacklist of writers. At the end of six months, he was acquitted and the public learned of his successful wartime efforts to shelter a number of victims of Nazi persecution. Read More

Natalia Ginzburg and Italo Calvino. Ginzburg photo: courtesy of Archivio Storico Einaudi. Calvino photo: courtesy of the author’s estate.

On September 21, 1947, Italo Calvino—then the twenty-four-year-old book critic for Piemonte’s L’Unitá newspaper—published a review of Natalia Ginzburg’s second novel, The Dry Heart. The review, which is presented below in English for the first time, opens with this proposal: “Natalia Ginzburg is the last woman left on earth. The rest are all men—even the female forms that can be seen moving about belong, ultimately, to this man’s world.” For a moment, if you’re familiar with Calvino’s surreal masterpiece Invisible Cities, written twenty-five years later, you feel as if you’re teetering on the edge of one of that book’s bewildering scenes—all glimpse and symbol, hallucination posing as anthropology. But no, the young writer is merely trying to find the perfect words to describe the entirely singular aesthetic of a novelist who is vexingly (to him, it would seem) female. Calvino’s review stands in the Ginzburg archives as one of the most bizarre, yet also astute, as he pinpoints the way her made-up worlds are hyperrealistic voids, her characters both humane and remote, her Minimalism dependent on small mundane artifacts, her domesticity suffocating and vast. “It’s a shame we’ll never know Ginzburg’s reaction to this review,” the Ginzburg biographer Sandra Petrignani writes, “that positioned her in a new world of fiction, modern precisely because it is ancient.”

Ginzburg is singular, and her organic, turgid, droll, intelligent Minimalism is difficult to capture with descriptives. Her writing just is. Or, as the novelist Rachel Cusk has put it, her voice “comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language. Writings from more than half a century ago read as if they have just been—in some mysterious sense—composed.” And though in his review Calvino takes pains to distinguish Ginzburg from the lacy histrionics of women’s writing (take heed, Virginia Woolf), his real point then, and for the next thirty years of their close friendship, was to absolve Ginzburg of the matter entirely: she writes like a man. Ginzburg took his judgment for what it was, a compliment.

Postwar Italian literature, arguably the country’s most fertile literary moment, was dominated by great writers—great male writers. Calvino would soon go on to become one of them, joining the ranks of Cesare Pavese, Alberto Moravia, Elio Vittorini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Primo Levi, and Carlo Levi. The last woman on earth was hardly an outsider. A principal editor at the prestigious publishing house Einaudi alongside Pavese and Calvino (who left journalism for publishing), she was at the heart of a vibrant literary scene. The intellectual lions of this world were stubbornly defined by politics above all else: they were not Jewish writers or Catholic writers, not Holocaust survivors, feminists, depressed writers, or gay writers. They were just writers. If you were to ask them to define themselves as a group, they would have answered antifascist—which would explain nothing about the literature any one of them produced.

In many ways, this school of writers was an antischool. Fiercely united, they read one another’s work, edited and published one another, vacationed and socialized together, gossiped and discussed other writers. Many more times over the years, until Calvino died suddenly of a stroke in 1985, he and Ginzburg would continue to describe each other’s work in print. In a tribute after he died, Ginzburg spoke about reading Calvino through the years. In the first short stories of his that she read, “there flowed vibrant landscapes bathed in sun, though at times the events unfolding were the events of war, of blood and death, nothing ever clouded the great light of day … his style was, from the very beginning, linear and transparent, reality exposed as mottled, variegated, a thousand colors.” Then, right before Invisible Cities, “his most beautiful book,” there was a transformation. “Gradually, the vibrant green landscapes, the glittering snow, the great light of day disappeared from his books. There emerged in his writing a different light, no longer radiant but white, not cold but utterly deserted. His sense of irony was still there but imperceptibly so. He was no longer just happy to exist … it was as if he knew that his capacity to search, excavate, contemplate had abandoned him forever.” Calvino turned his gaze elsewhere, she wrote, trying to explain Calvino’s reach for transcendence, “to the immensity of human events.”

Natalia Ginzburg was thirty years old when she met Calvino; he was twenty-three. She was already a war widow with small children, and The Dry Heart had not yet been published. He’d stopped by the Einaudi offices to pick up books to review for L’Unita. The two stood in the hallway in front of a radiator, near a couch, talking. Ginzburg wrote, “I remember the radiator perfectly, the snow falling outside, but I can’t remember what we talked about.” They probably talked about Hemingway, she thought, about the story “Hills Like White Elephants,” which, they both agreed, they “would give ten years of life to have written” themselves. They couldn’t have imagined that winter day in 1946 when they, still strangers, would soon meet their hero together. That he would sit with them around a table and give them writing tips. That Hemingway would then read Ginzburg’s books and send word that he thought “they were glorious.”  They couldn’t have imagined the friendship, the life in letters, that stretched years into the future. Below, I have translated Calvino’s 1947 review into English for the first time. —Minna Zallman Proctor Read More

More than half of my life has been lived in translation. I moved to America when I was eighteen, and although my mother tongue is Spanish, I am so fluent in English that I talk like a native speaker. When you live between languages, the conversion of meaning is an arithmetic in loss. The transference of what I want to say pours from one container into an incompatible receptacle. Inevitably, something is lost. I am used to thinking of something in Spanish, for example, which then comes out strangely in English, or cannot be said in English at all, not in the same way. I am used to being understood sufficiently, rather than fully.

I wrote my first novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, while I was working as a freelance translator and interpreter. I translated articles, wrote captions for documentaries, but the work I liked doing the most was simultaneous interpretation. That’s when two people (or one person and a roomful of people) who don’t speak the same language want to communicate and an interpreter does a real-time, live, continuous translation of what is being said without interrupting. There was a sparkling brain feeling that came with the labor of listening to someone speak in Spanish, then having my mouth open and speak English—like I was a spirit medium at the crossroads of language. I was always impressed that my brain could perform such a task, that I could listen and immediately translate, and then, while still speaking, tune out my own voice and listen again, translate again, continue to speak, following the speaker’s thoughts.

Simultaneous interpretation was just work to me—it didn’t have a role in my creative writing—until my sister got very sick.

Hers is not my story to tell, not really, so I will just say that at the time, we didn’t know if she would live. She was at an inpatient program for women with eating disorders. I slept on the floor of her apartment, which had been empty for many months, and Mami and Papi slept in her bed. The center provided an interpreter for Mami. There were speeches about girls who had survived that needed to be translated, there were meetings with doctors and nurses and psychiatrists. But everything was getting lost in translation.

My sister was sick because of PTSD and trauma, but these words did not mean anything to my mother, who believed her daughter was sick because of witchcraft. Mami was a seer from a line of faith healers. In this ancestry, physical ailments were tied to spiritual, psychic, and emotional ailments. PTSD, trauma, eating disorders—those were white people words. Our people did not get sick in this way, or if they did, we had never needed another word for what was wrong other than “suffering.” We had our own solutions. We dealt with suffering by making offerings, relying on our community. We defied suffering with joy. My sister was not interested in those cures. I did not blame her. No matter how much we danced, what we offered, how passionately we insisted on celebration, suffering always returned.

So even though the interpreter spoke with speed and diligence to Mami, telling her what was being said, it didn’t matter. As my mother tried to engage with an unfamiliar system of medicine in a language she couldn’t understand, I became acutely aware of translation’s failures.

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