June 25, 2020 Inside the Issue The Untranslatable By The Paris Review The poetry in the Summer 2020 issue hails from Portugal, Uruguay, Iran, France, India, China, Lithuania, and the United States. To celebrate the range of this work, we asked the translators responsible for bringing these poems to our pages to explain a particular challenge they faced in the process of translation. As Margaret Jull Costa says in her Art of Translation interview, “There’s something so very intimate about poetry and about the process of translating it.” The following essays in miniature attest to this delicacy. Translating from a Romance language (Portuguese) to a Germanic one (English) always involves the choice of how Latinate to sound. The English language derives both from Latin and German and often offers two words for every idea. One can say “Holy Spirit” or “Holy Ghost,” “sacred” or “holy,” as Jorge Luis Borges reminds us, and most words representing abstract ideas stem from the Latin while the majority of words exemplifying concrete ideas come from the Saxon. In a newspaper article, the choice may be irrelevant; in a poem, the choice matters. One such instance in our translations of António Osório is the noun serpente, which may be rendered as serpent (from Latin) or snake (from Proto-Germanic). In the poem “Crater of the Beginning,” we chose the former, whereas in “The Circus,” we opted for the latter. In “Crater of the Beginning,” the serpent is a mythological symbol in the biblical sense, so it is obviously the tempter in the book of Genesis that best fits the translation. In modern English, the word snake gradually replaced serpent in popular use, so we considered snake the more appropriate noun in “The Circus,” given the poem’s modern-day context. Our choice of the monosyllabic word snake also accomplishes three things: it renders the sense of immediacy, it fills the reader’s imagination with circus-related stunts, and it acts out onomatopoetically the hissing sound (the sn- consonant cluster) of the limbless, scaly, elongate reptile. Finally, the Portuguese verb estava (meaning “was”) in the last line of “The Circus” provides another example of the Latin-versus-Germanic choice. Unlike English, the Portuguese language has two separate verbs for to be: ser and estar. If we were to succeed in transmitting the intensity of the poem’s final image, we needed an alternative to the ordinary meaning of estava. We needed a muscular verb capable of specifying the seductive nature of the scene. By opting for the verb stand to refer to the position of the snake, we conferred strong physicality to an otherwise lukewarm verb, and we let its presence assume an upward movement within the poem itself, as if it would spiral up through the preceding lines of the poem and subsume it all into itself. In addition, the sibilant consonants (snake and stand) enact the hiss, which in turn enhances the uneasiness, thus making vivid what is only latent in the Portuguese. —Patricio Ferrari and Susan Margaret Brown, translators of António Osório’s “Crater of the Beginning,” “September,” and “The Circus” Read More
June 24, 2020 Arts & Culture Reimagining Black Futures By Sasha Bonét On Lorna Simpson and the Black imaginative practice of collage Lorna Simpson, Walk with me, 2020 (© Lorna Simpson; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth; Photo: James Wang) “The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.” –Toni Morrison, Beloved While the usual world order that we once knew has been halted by the COVID-19 global pandemic, Black people continue to be lynched. Two of them were recorded and shared for the world to witness. I wanted to protect my daughter from the harm of watching a Black man take his last breath, but the news looped these images around our living room. I reached over to cover my daughter’s eyes just as my mother used to during sex scenes in films, to shield me from the inevitable. She peeked through the crevices between my fingers, just as I had as a child. She climbed into my lap and we wept, silently. She wanted to know why they hate us so much and I wanted to know if the repetition would ever cease. Since seeing Ahmaud Arbery murdered, each day after homeschool, my daughter and I meet on the living room floor with images that I’ve found and copied from my father’s photo albums as we quarantine at his home in Texas. There are the faces of my grandmother and her sisters in the country standing grounded and barefoot on dirt roads, my face as a girl racing against the Houston heat to consume a melting ice cream cone in nothing but my panties, moments of Black joy captured in faces that I do not know but recognize all the same. We cut these faces out and put them in the wild on mountaintops, in gardens where they exchange breath with the trees, and in the sky. Using faces of the past, my daughter and I become the architects of Black futures. The practice of collaging has carried me through this grief-heavy quarantine, a meditative motion on nights when I cannot sleep. Lorna Simpson, Construction, 2020 (© Lorna Simpson; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth; Photo: James Wang) Collaging is a historical practice of Black imagination. It has helped us to envision unfathomable futures in the face of violence and uncertainty. It has been a creative way to love each other even though we haven’t been shown care, to express the depths of our experiences even when no one ever asked how we felt, to give evidence to all the things unseen. This is much like the work of Spiral, an art collective formed in the sixties, whose members included the recently departed Emma Amos and the late Romare Bearden. For Spiral, collaging served as visual representation of Black quotidian life. It deconstructed internalized white-supremacist stereotypes of Blackness, providing momentum to the civil rights movement. Read More
June 24, 2020 First Person Seeing the Country’s Shadows on My White Husband’s Face By Margaret Wilkerson Sexton A Black woman friend who also has a white husband confesses at the height of the George Floyd protests: “Times like these, I don’t know why I’m with a white man.” “That’s a thought I’ve had,” I say. Black people are fighting white supremacy with a force unlike any I’ve seen in my lifetime. This time, the fight hits more personal, too. I had trouble being around white people at the onset of it; my rage was too thick. In my own house, it feels disloyal not to assume the battle lines. It’s like I’m stunting the cause of my life through affiliations that subvert it—most centrally, my husband. At night, sleeping beside him, I feel the guilt of betraying my people, of betraying myself. More than that, I feel lonely. There is a balm for this sort of collective pain my people are experiencing. We have been supplying it to each other for centuries. In conversations with my Black women friends, I have felt soothed not by any one thing they’ve said, but by the gentle power of their complete understanding. And then I go home where I can’t help but see the country’s shadows in my husband’s face. Let me back up. My husband is woke. He’s a senior director of diversity, inclusion, and belonging for a prominent tech company. He frequents protests more than I do, often with our children. He’s quick to correct microaggressions when he notices them. He’s viewed by many in our community as an accomplice who understands the history and weight of white supremacy, the perspectives of Black people fighting for equality, and the relevant corrections that might begin to upend generations of injustice. I am prouder of him than I can say. Nevertheless, he’s a privileged white man: he’s been given the benefit of the doubt in schools, in the workplace, and just on the street for thirty-eight years. The comfort that comes from being appraised in that way can’t be overstated. It’s evident in the way he carries himself, the tone of voice he uses, the rights he assumes. Sometimes I read him as entitled. How could he not be? Our country has raised him that way. Read More
June 23, 2020 Redux Redux: When They Could Have Been Anything 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. George Saunders. Photo: Chloe Aftel. Courtesy of George Saunders. This week, we’re thinking about fatherhood and Father’s Day. Read on for George Saunders’s Art of Fiction interview, Jonathan Escoffery’s story “Under the Ackee Tree,” and Louise Erdrich’s poem “Birth.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more. George Saunders, The Art of Fiction No. 245 Issue no. 231 (Winter 2019) INTERVIEWER Do you think you’d be a different writer if you hadn’t had children? SAUNDERS For sure. I’m not sure I would have ever published anything. Before we had our kids, I was a decent person, kind of habitually, but nothing felt morally urgent. Then the kids came, and everything suddenly mattered. The world had a moral charge. If I love these guys so much, it stands to reason that every other person in the world has somebody who loves them just as much—or they should have someone who loves them as much. The world was full of consequence. That which helps what you love is good, that which hurts it is bad, and even a small hurt is significant. You see somebody come into the world, tiny and brand new and blameless, and you’re like, That person deserves the best. So, by implication, everybody deserves the best. Read More
June 23, 2020 Arts & Culture On Translationese By Masatsugu Ono Haruki Murakami and Kenzaburo Oe. Murakami photo: © Elena Seibert. I clearly remember the vivid colors of the two books—one red, the other green—that a high school classmate of mine was reading between periods. It was 1987 or 1988, and my new school was in a provincial city in Oita, Japan. This quiet, introspective classmate was one of the first handful of students from the city to be kind enough to talk to me. I was from a small fishing village that didn’t even have a bookstore, and having come from a junior high school with fewer than forty students, I was intimidated by how he already had clear taste in music and literature. I can’t remember if he mentioned—in his always nearly inaudible voice—the title of the two-volume novel or the author’s name. What I do remember is that he seemed engrossed in the book, and that less than a year later, his life was taken: his mother’s partner killed her before turning to the boy. The next time I encountered those books was after I moved to Tokyo for university. I came across a large stack of them right by the entrance of one of the city’s largest bookstores. They were the two parts of Haruki Murakami’s novel Noruwei no mori (Norwegian Wood). I was already familiar with him as a master of short essays. My landlady had the bad (or good?) habit of reading books in the bathroom, and Murakami’s essays were among her favorites. One day, she handed me a collection she had finished. In these essays, he writes about literature and music and even cooking in such a natural way that it feels as though he’s addressing the reader personally. Something delightful and friendly in his style fascinated me (it’s a shame that those early essays of his haven’t been published in English). I couldn’t say how exactly, but I immediately felt that his style was different from other contemporary Japanese writers I had read. Probably because one of my professors (who was from Belgium) had translated it into French, A Wild Sheep Chase was the first of Murakami’s novels I read. And I soon found myself reading through them all. Read More
June 23, 2020 First Person We Picked the Wrong Side By Neel Patel When I was in the sixth grade, I met a girl named Nicole. Nicole was a good student; she was polite to teachers. She was in the gifted program, a group of students handpicked for their exceptional promise. I was not in the gifted program. When my mother found out I had not been chosen, she became furious. She wanted to know why I was not worthy and how I might prove otherwise. I suppose this was her mistake—she assumed I was better than I actually was. Over time, Nicole and I became friends. We sat next to each other in class and gossiped during lunch. We watched horror movies on weekends. When boys made fun of me for being queer, she jumped to my defense. If I hadn’t been paying attention in class—which was often—she passed me her notes. Sometimes I imagined what it was like to be Nicole, with her spotless record, her enviable grades. I imagined what her teachers said during parent-teacher conferences, all the glowing, effusive praise. It must have been the opposite of what they said during mine. I talked too much. I didn’t pay attention. My homework was always late. Sometimes I said I had turned in an assignment when really I had not. I would complete the assignment later and step on it with my shoes—this gave it the effect of some mysterious trauma—and drop it on the floor by my teacher’s desk, as if it was her fault she had lost it and not mine. I was diabolical. I impersonated my father to call myself out of school. I cut class and went to the mall. I intercepted the mail to hide my grades. I pretended to be good when I was not. Nicole didn’t do those things. She didn’t have to cover her tracks; her steps were always measured, taken with great care. “Why can’t you use your brains for good?” My mother once complained. “Just look at Nicole.” I spoke of Nicole often, how smart she was and how good her grades were, how she wanted to become a doctor just like my dad. “Wow,” my parents would say, masking their own disappointment in me. “Look at that.” While Nicole was graduating from medical school, I was still unsure of my place in the world, aware of the expectations I had failed to meet. Because Nicole was everything I was supposed to be, the opportunities I had squandered, the chances I’d let slip. In a way, my failure was similar to her success; they both came as a surprise. Because I’m a South Asian. And Nicole is Black. To say I never saw Nicole’s Blackness would be a lie. To say I never heard the narrative of Blackness in America would be an even bigger one. Though we didn’t speak of race often, I knew what my parents had been told about Black people in America. It was on the news, in movies, tucked into conversations at the table. A story of danger. Fear. I had witnessed car doors locking, purses being hugged. I had heard white people describe an unpleasant encounter with someone before saying “she was Black,” as if this was what they had meant to say all along. The danger of Blackness was their central thesis. They supported it at every turn. I had heard these stories, had grown weary of these stories, had fallen victim to these stories myself. I knew what my mother meant when she said, “Just look at Nicole.” I also knew why I talked about her achievements so much at home: her race was the subtext. I wanted to show that she was good. * When I was young, my father had been watching the news in the doctors’ lounge with a white doctor when a crime was reported. The suspect was Black. The white doctor shook his head. “See that?” he said, turning to my father. “We should have never brought them here.” Read More