February 21, 2017 Inside the Issue The Fern Cat By Audrey Harris On Translating Amparo Dávila’s “Moses and Gaspar.” Remedios Varo, El gato helecho (The fern cat) (detail), 1957, oil on Masonite. Amparo Dávila was born in 1928—a fated year in Mexican letters, it also heralded the arrival of Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Ibarguëngoitia, Inés Arredondo, Enriqueta Ochoa, and Carlos Valdés—in the poetically named town of Pinos, in the state of Zacatecas. In interviews, Dávila has stressed the importance of her childhood in her formation as a writer, particularly the loss of her younger brother, who died in infancy. Her earliest memories are of her father’s library; she harbors a special fondness for his leather-bound copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, illustrated by Gustave Doré, which she read and reread even though its images of the infernal circles of hell and fearsome demons terrified her. She also recalls watching dead bodies driven in carts past her house; the surrounding towns had no cemeteries, and the dead had to be transported to her town for burial. The sight of the corpses, sometimes barely covered by sheets, left an indelible impression in her mind and, in turn, her fiction, which visits frequently with the specter of death. For someone like me, who grew up delighting in the ghost stories of Edith Wharton and the gothic illustrations of Edward Gorey, translating Dávila offers a delicious challenge. Entering the world of one of her stories is like walking back in time to the dark and lonely world of Pinos, a semideserted mining town “filled with wind and shadows,” as she described it to Elena Poniatowska in a 1957 interview; it is to witness the corpse-laden carts rattling by and to feel the yawning absence of a lost brother. It is also to experience a golden day in a garden in Guanajuato, when, as a young woman, Dávila quoted a passage from Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince to the exalted Mexican novelist Alfonso Reyes; enchanted, he invited her to visit him in the capital, where she became his assistant. Dávila still resides in Mexico City. She writes in a library whose shelves brim with books by her favorite authors, among them Kafka, Hesse, Paz, and Rulfo, as well as by those with whom she most identifies: Borges, Bioy Casares, Quiroga, and Cortázar (with whom she kept up a literary correspondence and friendship for many years). Read More
February 14, 2017 Inside the Issue The Crying Cat By Matthew Gleeson Amparo Dávila’s translator discovers the truth behind her fiction. Amparo Dávila. The stories of the Mexican author Amparo Dávila intrude on “external reality” in unnerving ways. To illustrate, I’ll offer a personal tale: my brush with her story “Moses and Gaspar,” which appears in the Winter issue of The Paris Review. Last fall, when Audrey Harris and I were at work on the translation, I visited a friend who was moving house in Oaxaca. We’d packed some of her books into boxes and paused, at twilight, to sit down for dinner at a table in a large half-covered patio. My friend said that her two cats sensed the upcoming move and had become agitated. At that moment, we saw that one of them—a big marmalade cat, an intelligent and communicative fellow—was crouched at the far end of the tabletop. In the meager glow of the single bulb that lit the growing gloom, the cat began to cry soundlessly: tears filled his eyes and dripped onto the edge of the table and the floor below, while he stared into space. “See?” said my friend. “He knows we’re moving.” It was an uncanny, inexplicable scene. Cats are emotionally sensitive to changes, I know—I’ve heard cats cry, moan, yowl in distress—but never had I seen one mourn in a way that seemed so peculiarly, exclusively, jarringly human. I went home that night to find a new round of corrections on “Moses and Gaspar” in my inbox. Read More
February 3, 2017 Inside the Issue Drawing and Imagining By Caitlin Love Alasdair Gray’s paintings, like his books, are marked by both fable and reality. Alasdair Gray, Small Boy Sleeping (Stuart Maclean), 1970, ink drawing with watercolor and acrylic on board. With every one of our Writers at Work interviews, we include a manuscript page, giving a glimpse into writers’ approaches to editing and revision. On the page that accompanies Alasdair Gray’s interview in our Winter 2016 issue, there are two drawings: a hooded man in profile, and a den of snakes rising happily out of a pyramid. The man’s face has been expertly hatched, and the snakes seem to have been doodled by a cheerful hand. They complement Gray’s dense, looping handwriting on, in this case, a draft of Lanark: A Life in Four Books—a monumental, six-hundred-page work published in 1981, and the first of Gray’s landmark novels of Scottish contemporary experience. As that manuscript page suggests, Gray’s work as an artist is integrated into his writing. After graduating from the Glasgow School of Art in 1957, he worked as a painter and muralist for nearly twenty-five years before publishing Lanark. When he signed on with his longtime publisher, Canongate, they gave him a remarkable degree of creative control over his books. Illustrations, cover design, frontispieces—they’re all designed by Gray. Read More
February 2, 2017 Inside the Issue Angels and Administration: An Interview with Alexander Kluge By Ben Lerner Our Winter issue features fiction by Alexander Kluge: “In Medieval Angelology, There Are Nine Orders of Snow,” twenty-two stories on some lines from Ben Lerner’s The Lichtenberg Figures. Kluge made a rare trip to New York a few months ago, appearing in conversation with Lerner at the Goethe-Institut and at Princeton. Afterward, they talked over sushi. The interview below is excerpted from their conversation. They continue to send poems and prose back and forth to each other. LERNER The current issue of The Paris Review includes stories you wrote in response to The Lichtenberg Figures, my first book of poems. How did you encounter the book? KLUGE A coworker found the bilingual German translation. He said, Here’s a book you cannot buy anymore. The title is The Lichtenberg Figures. He knew that I was very interested in Lichtenberg, particularly The Waste Books. Your book costs seventy-eight euros because it’s out of print. German publishing houses always prefer fiction to poetry. Lyrics are concentrated forms. It’s a much better way to express yourself. In all these deserts of information we need some oasis, and that’s what the lyric is. LERNER And so how do you think about your short prose forms in relation to lyric poetry? KLUGE My language is not as beautiful as lyrics. This is something that you have to know how to do. Poets are diamond polishers. But there are also collectors of raw diamonds—I am a good archaeologist. Read More
December 19, 2016 Inside the Issue The Moviegoer: An Interview with Fanny Howe By William Corbett Fanny Howe. Photo: Cybele Knowles. Our Winter issue features a poem by Fanny Howe, whose latest book, The Needle’s Eye, came out in October. At seventy-six, Howe has published sixteen books of poetry, fourteen works of fiction, and three collections of essays. On top of that, she’s a filmmaker—earlier this year, she debuted two new short films at a lecture called Acts of Mercy at the CUNY Graduate Center. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in an apartment she’s dubbed “the brick womb.” Her longtime friend William Corbett went to Boston to interview her about her life and work; an excerpt of this interview appears below. —The Editors INTERVIEWER Samuel Beckett was your mother’s childhood friend. What were your encounters with him like? HOWE My senior year in high school, my father sent me to France, my great dream. I was signed up for a French-immersion course just outside of Paris in Sèvres. I felt trapped and so, on the second night, I went out with my bag and the gardener helped me climb over the wall. I got to the train station and in to Paris. I had one name, Mr. Beckett and a phone number. I called him and he came right away and helped me find a cheap hotel. He looked after me and walked me around the city until a friend arrived, as planned, from America. Read More
December 14, 2016 Inside the Issue Mario Carreño and Concrete Cuba By Caitlin Love The story behind our Winter cover. The cover of our Winter 2016 issue features Sin título, composición (Untitled, composition), a muted, geometric painting from 1956 by the Cuban artist Mario Carreño. Its quiet oranges, somber reds, and deep-sea blues are held within measured rectangles, triangles, and squares. In the top right, a red curve rests on an ocher block like an accent. Sin título hearkens back to the abstract covers the Review favored through the sixties and into the seventies, featuring the work of artists such as Günter Fruhtrunk and Geneviève Claisse. Sin título was on display last February in David Zwirner’s exhibition “Concrete Cuba,” which showcased eleven artists from 1950s Havana. The artists, formally known as Los Diez Pintores Concretos, converged to articulate historical “concrete art within a Cuban context,” as Abigail McEwan writes in the show’s catalogue. The form favored “a mathematical, mechanical construction.” Some paintings, like Loló Soldevilla’s, look like planetary studies, with globular shapes snaking after one another. Mario Carreño held an outsize position in this community. He positioned himself as an early theorist of the movement by working on the magazine Noticias de arte, writing articles such as “Morality in Abstract Painting,” in which he introduced Cuban Concretism as “an aesthetic corollary of the historical and spiritual needs of our time.” Read More