December 19, 2017 At Work An Interview with Kerri Pierce By Joel Pinckney The Faroe Islands. Jóanes Nielsen’s novel, The Brahmadells, is one of the first books to be translated into English from Faroese, the native language of the Faroe Islands, an archipelago of eighteen islands situated in the North Atlantic Ocean between Iceland and Norway. Its capital, Tórshavn, which figures prominently in the novel, has around twenty thousand inhabitants, making it one of the smallest capitals in the world—and the Islands’ native language, Faroese, only has around sixty thousand native speakers. Nielsen’s novel was translated by Kerri Pierce and published last month by Open Letter. This roving tale of the history of those small and remote islands tells a story both intimate, tracing the complex familial legacy of the Brahmadells and other families over several generations, and general, weaving historical documents and characters into its narrative thread. It is a captivating and enlightening immersion into a place most readers will find unfamiliar. Kerri Pierce and I spoke by phone earlier this month. Pierce’s translation marks the eighth language from which she has translated, though talking with her, one would never know. She was humble and unassuming, and she spoke of her voracious appetite for translating new languages as one might speak of learning to cook a new dish, or adding half a mile to one’s jogging routine. We discussed how she stumbled into translating, and the value of translated literature. Read More
December 18, 2017 Arts & Culture Puerto Rico Sketchbook: There Are Dead in the Fields By Molly Crabapple In November, the artist and writer Molly Crabapple spent a week in Puerto Rico documenting grassroots efforts by communities to rebuild after Hurricane Maria. Here are excerpts from her sketchbook. © Molly Crabapple Maria passed and they said “Puerto Rico, se levanta!” We’re gonna see. We’re gonna see. A cantastoria is a vagabond fusion of art and music, so old it turns up all over the world. In each set, a performer displays an illustrated scroll, then, while pointing to each image with a stick, tells a story in song. The cantastoria first developed in India as a way for itinerant performers to bring the legends of gods from door to door. By the time it hit Central Europe in the sixteenth century, it had mutated away from its sacred roots into a wandering carny show of sex, crime, and political sedition. After the hurricane, the Puerto Rican puppetry collective Papel Machete created a new cantastoria: Solidarity and Survival for our Liberation. Estefanía Rivera painted the scroll; Isamar Abreu and Agustín Muñoz wrote the script. Muñoz, Sugeily Rodriguez Lebron, and Rocio Natasha Cancel piled into the Papel Machete van with their instruments and art and drove to the mutual-aid centers that had sprung up after Maria, and after neighborhoods realized that no help would come from the authorities. In fifteen centros, one each day, they unfurled their scroll in front of the lines of Puerto Ricans waiting for their arroz con pollo, and they began to sing. Read More
December 18, 2017 Arts & Culture Ten Aphorisms from the Russian Revolution By Marina Tsvetaeva Marina Tsvetaeva Marina Tsvetaeva is one of Russia’s most acclaimed twentieth-century poets. She was born in Moscow, in 1892, to a classicist father and a pianist mother. She published her first book of poems at the age of seventeen. She lived through, and wrote about, the Russian Revolution and the Moscow famine that followed. In 1922, Tsvetaeva and her husband, Sergei Efron, along with two of their children, fled Russia. They lived in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin, and Prague. In 1939, they returned to Moscow, and two years later, in 1941, her husband and daughter were arrested on espionage charges. Her husband was executed and her daughter imprisoned. Tsvetaeva does not seem to have known that her husband was a spy: when the police interrogated her, she read them French translations of her poetry and responded to their questions with such confusion that the police concluded that she was deranged. Tsvetaeva and her son were evacuated to Yelabuga, where, in August of 1941, Tsvetaeva committed suicide. These aphoristic phrases are taken from the diaries and notebooks she kept while living in Moscow between 1917 and 1922: Read More
December 18, 2017 On History An Intimate History of America By Clint Smith Arthur Rothstein, Girl at Gee’s Bend, Alabama, 1937. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. As we walked through the National Museum of African American History and Culture, I pushed my grandfather in a wheelchair he had reluctantly agreed to sit in. He is a proud man who also knows that his knees aren’t what they once were—that years of high school and college football had long accelerated the deterioration of his aging joints. We got into an elevator that brought us down to the bottom level of the museum, where visitors begin their journey with displays that outline the earliest years of black life in this country. We made our way through the exhibitions that document the state-sanctioned violence black people experienced over the course of generations, pausing to study the images and take in their explanations: How, even after the Civil War, the Black Codes in South Carolina made it so that grown men had to get written permission from white employers simply to be able to walk down the street in peace. How in Louisiana a black woman’s body, by law, was not her own. How in Mississippi an interracial marriage would put a noose around your neck the moment the vows left your lips. The history of racial violence in our country is both omnipresent and unspoken. It is a smog that surrounds us that few will admit is there. But to walk through these early exhibitions was to be told that the smog is not your imagination—my imagination—that it is real, regardless of how vehemently some will deny it. With family recently visiting Washington, D.C., from out of town, my wife and I took my parents and my paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather to the museum. I had been there once before and was struck by a single institution’s remarkable ability to capture so much of black America’s complex relationship—tumultuous, inspiring—with this country and how so many of the exhibitions complicated various accounts of American history that are misrepresented in our broader social discourse. Every monument or homage to Thomas Jefferson I have come across, for example, presents him singularly as the nation’s intellectual founding father and as a paragon of our collective ideals. At this museum, his statue stands before towers of bricks, each bearing the name of a person Jefferson enslaved, some of them his own children. In the exhibitions on the civil rights movement, the museum has made a thoughtful and purposeful effort to document the work of women in the crusade for equal rights, many of whom are often erased from discussions of civil rights work in our American-history textbooks. Exhibitions like these invested me in the museum not only because they tell the story of black America but because they insist that the story of black America is indeed the story of America itself. America’s economy cannot be disentangled from the free labor that built it, just as America’s culture cannot be unbound from the black artists who cultivated it. Read More
December 15, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sohyang, Sacred Deer, and Steamers By The Paris Review Rowan Ricardo Phillips. Photo by Sue Kwon. Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s poem “The Peacock,” in The Paris Review’s Winter issue, begins with the line, “Music for when the music is over.” It’s how he defines a poem and it’s a phrase that appears as the title of a piece in his 2012 collection, The Ground. Musical is exactly what the poems in this collection are. The language flows and skips within and between lines, pausing on occasion to cycle through refrains, so gracefully that you are nearly stunned when you remind yourself that the words are unaided by instruments. They are in many ways mythic, making characters of Orpheus, Eurydice, and Dante, as well as the poet himself. But don’t be put off by the nominal associations with the realm of the dead; these poems are very much alive with sensuality and they exist in Phillips’s physical world, which includes Harlem, the West Indies, and Barcelona. This collection is charged with urgency, which is signaled at the start, in the final lines of the first poem: “Tonight I touched the tattooed skin of the building I was born in / And because tonight is curing the beginning let me through. / And everywhere was blurring halogen. Love the place that / welcomed you.” —Lauren Kane My girlfriend likes to poke fun at my family for resembling the cast of a wholesome sitcom. She claims that our fluffy dogs and our deep love for one another make us seem like we just marched off the set of 7th Heaven or some other toothless WB trash. Her points are valid. Our adoption of the Icelandic tradition Jolabokaflod (roughly translated: Christmas book flood) lends significant weight to her argument. As I understand it, Jolabokaflod is a tradition borne out of a paper ration in Iceland during World War II that involves exchanging books as gifts on Christmas Eve and then immediately sitting down to read said books. My family did this for the first time last year, when I received Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, but I screwed up and didn’t start the book on the twenty-fourth. I still haven’t. This year will be different. What better way to spend the evening before the holiday chaos, before the shuffle of extended family and the flurry of wrapping-paper scraps, than to nestle in with a new book? “’Twas the night before Christmas / when all through the house / every Ransom was reading / curled up on a couch.” —Brian Ransom Read More
December 15, 2017 Eat Your Words Cooking with Chinua Achebe By Valerie Stivers This is the sixth installment of Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words column. My winding path as a reader has led me to a personal specialty in Nigerian literature. I know about the country’s civil war from 1967 to 1970, its languages and ethnic groups, its Harmattan winds and mellifluous names. I can name-drop hipster cafes in Lagos, where I have been only in fiction. My first love was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, but my random late-night Internet searches for her biography and interviews turned me on to others, to Chigozie Obioma, to the feminist expatriate Buchi Emecheta, and finally to the éminence grise Chinua Achebe (1930–2013). Achebe was one of the founding fathers of post-colonial African fiction, a writer who worked in opposition to the racist literature of his British-educated youth. Achebe’s essay critiquing Heart of Darkness, written in 1975, was a revolutionary event in Conrad studies, and to this day he’s one of the most-lionized of all African writers. Achebe had a keen eye for social organization, which means he writes a lot about food. In his 1956 classic, Things Fall Apart, yam farming is the lifeline of the village, the size of a man’s harvest determines his status, and his multiple wives each make him a soup to go with his evening foo-foo, a pounded yam dish. How is foo-foo made? Is it good? If I were the wife of a polygamous yam farmer and competitive about my cooking—which of course I would be—would my soup be the best one on the evening’s table? Or would I be like Nwayieke, a woman in the village “notorious for her late cooking,” the sound of whose wooden mortar and pestle is “part of the night.” Naturally, I want to know. Read More