March 4, 2022 Poetry The One Who Happened By Xi Chuan Illustration by Thomas Colligan. He happened to hear the world was square, like the square table at home that could be used for eating or playing cards on. He happened to hear that the emperor is made so by divine right, but he was just a commoner so that’s nothing. He happened to have not heard of Hitler; that guy with a little mustache avoided him for nineteen years. He happened to have not heard of the Cultural Revolution, and looked at himself in the mirror in a positive light. Read More
March 3, 2022 The Review’s Review Vesna By The Paris Review Ukrainian ethno band DakhaBrakha on its concert in Lviv. Photo by Lyudmyla Dobrynina, Creative Commons license via Wikimedia Commons. I have been thinking often of the 2017 anthology Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, edited by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky. The collection includes nine poems by Lyuba Yakimchuk, who grew up in Luhansk, one of the regions taken by Russia-backed separatists in 2014. Her poems of that period bear witness to the decomposition of a country, a region, an identity, and language itself. Her words break apart under the pressure of violence: “my friends are hostages / and I can’t reach them, I can’t do netsk / to pull them out of the basements.” Now Yakimchuk is in Kyiv, working to help defend the capital as Russian shells fall. When the invasion began, she was already trained in military-style first aid and well stocked with supplies; she donated much of her store of gasoline to the local Territorial Defense Forces for Molotov cocktails. She has been documenting her experience on social media and in frequent interviews. Read More
March 2, 2022 First Person Against Any Intrusion: Writing to Gwen John By Celia Paul Santa Monica, 2019, oil on canvas, 40 x 48″. Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro. February 14, 2019 Santa Monica, California Dearest Gwen, I know this letter to you is an artifice. I know you are dead and that I’m alive and that no usual communication is possible between us but, as my mother used to say, “Time is a strange substance,” and who knows really, with our time-bound comprehension of the world, whether there might be some channel by which we can speak to each other, if we only knew how: like tuning a radio so that the crackling sound of the airwaves is slipstreamed into words. Maybe the sound of surf, or of rushing water, is actually the echoes of voices that have been similarly distorted through time. I don’t suppose this is true, and you don’t either. But I do feel mysteriously connected to you. Read More
March 1, 2022 Redux Redux: Be My Camera By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. When Edward Hirsch spoke to Susan Sontag, in between her trips to Sarajevo, for a 1995 Art of Fiction interview, he noted that her work seemed “haunted by war.” She said, “I could answer that a writer is someone who pays attention to the world.” This week, we’re rereading a poem by Claribel Alegria and a story by Nadine Gordimer, looking back at a portfolio of the writer Ryszard Kapuściński’s photographs, watching the news, and considering what it means to pay attention. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. INTERVIEW The Art of Fiction No. 143 Susan Sontag I suppose it could seem odd to travel to a war, and not just in one’s imagination—even if I do come from a family of travelers. My father, who was a fur trader in northern China, died there during the Japanese invasion—I was five. I remember hearing about “world war” in September 1939, entering elementary school, where my best friend in the class was a Spanish Civil War refugee. I remember panicking on December 7, 1941. And one of the first pieces of language I ever pondered over was “for the duration”—as in “there’s no butter for the duration.” I recall savoring the oddity, and the optimism, of that phrase. From issue no. 137 (Winter 1995) Read More
February 26, 2022 This Week’s Reading In Odesa: Recommended Reading By Ilya Kaminsky Potemkin Steps, Odesa, Ukraine. Photograph by Dave Proffer. “Buried in a human neck, a bullet looks like an eye, sewn in, / an eye looking back at one’s fate.” So writes the Russian-language Ukrainian poet Ludmila Khersonsky, born in Odesa. Now, President Putin claims he is sending troops to Ukraine in order to protect Russian speakers. What does Ludmila think about Putin? A small gray person cancels this twenty-first century, adjusts his country’s clocks for the winter war. Putin is sending troops, and the West is watching as Ukrainian soldiers, and even just young civilians, take up guns in the streets to oppose him. There is no one else to help them. I’m rereading Ludmila: The whole soldier doesn’t suffer— it’s just the legs, the arms, just blowing snow just meager rain. The whole soldier shrugs off hurt— it’s just missile systems … Just thunder, lightning, just dreadful losses, just the day with a dented helmet, just God, who doesn’t protect. I first met Ludmila in Odesa in 1993. She tried to teach me English. I was a terrible student. These days, she writes to me to say that she hears explosions outside her windows. She is placing batches of newspapers on the windowsills, to fortify them. She is writing poems. Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press). His awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writer’s Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, Lannan Foundation’s Fellowship, and the NEA Fellowship. His poems regularly appear in Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Read his poem “From ‘Last Will and Testament’” in our Winter 2018 issue. The translations of poems used here are by Olga Livshin and Andrew Janco, Valzhyna Mort, and Katherine E. Young.
February 24, 2022 The Review’s Review Real-Time Historicization By The Paris Review The K’alyaan Totem Pole of the Tlingit Kiks.ádi Clan, erected to commemorate those lost in the 1804 Battle of Sitka; photograph by Robert A. Estremo, copyright © 2005. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. This week, as Russia formally invaded Ukraine, I thought of the Battle of Sitka, another military operation Russia initiated against a smaller autonomous stronghold, in this case the Kiks.ádi, a clan of the Indigenous American Tlingit people. I learned of the battle in Vanessa Veselka’s essay “The Fort of Young Saplings,” which was published by The Atavist in 2014 (I’d recommend the version printed in their Love and Ruin anthology). Both the Kiks.ádi and the Russians claim that they won the battle. Veselka’s essay investigates the problems this battle raises regarding historicization, the interpretation of events, and national identity formation. (She also questions whether a crucial Tlingit tactic of the Battle of Sitka influenced General Mikhail Kutuzov’s withdrawal from Moscow during the War of 1812, a series of events Tolstoy dramatized in War and Peace.) Read More