July 10, 2024 On Translation Five Mixed Metaphors for Translation By Daisy Rockwell Drawing by Daisy Rockwell. The Lego Metaphor, Part One I once saw a Lego metaphor for translation. On some online forum somewhere. I liked it, but it was slightly off, and then I forgot it. So I had to make up a new one. I’ve thought of a few versions. I’m still trying to get it right. Here is one version: Imagine (if you will) that you have purchased the Hogwarts Castle Lego set. You have given up the dining room table for this project. You get about three-quarters of the way through. Then a dog, or a cat, or maybe just A lurching adult Bumps into it. Broken! Read More
July 9, 2024 Eat Your Words Cooking Peppermint Chiffon Pie with Flannery O’Connor By Valerie Stivers Photograph by Erica MacLean. Flannery O’Connor’s favorite meal at the Sanford House restaurant in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she lunched regularly with her mother, was fried shrimp and peppermint chiffon pie. O’Connor, after a diagnosis of lupus brought her home to Milledgeville in 1951, led a life in a farmhouse outside of town with her domineering mother, Regina, that bore some resemblance to a nun’s. Every morning started with Catholic Mass followed by cornflakes and a thermos of coffee in her spinster bedroom while she wrote for three hours. The writing time, she said, was her “filet mignon.” Otherwise it seems she found most pleasures, especially the physical kind, to be base. In her fiction an amorous girl goes up to the hayloft with a man and gets her wooden leg stolen in the story “Good Country People.” Two girls make themselves hot, bothered and ridiculous laughing over a nun’s claim that their bodies are “a temple of the Holy Ghost” in a story of that name. And yet somehow O’Connor’s lunch order—which captured my imagination when I read about it in Brad Gooch’s biography, Flannery—sounds paradoxically, well, pleasurable. Read More
July 8, 2024 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Kim Hyesoon and Cindy Juyoung Ok on “Person Walking Backward” By Kim Hyesoon and Cindy Juyoung Ok Achat1999, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Kim Hyesoon’s poem “Person Walking Backward,” translated by Cindy Juyoung Ok, appears in our new Summer issue, no. 248. Here, we asked Kim and Ok to reflect on their work. 1. Kim Hyesoon How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? This poem began during an interview. The poet who came to interview me asked, “What do you think about Korean poetry these days?” I answered, “I think Korean poetry these days is like a dog running on the highway.” There is a dog inside my poem. This dog living in “Person Walking Backward” is eternally digging through the “pile of garbage” of the present. The poem is a poem about time, two types of time. Continuous time and frozen time. The dog’s time and my life’s time. The poem’s time and my time. Dying’s time and living’s time. Each is the possibility of being to one another. Read More
July 5, 2024 Categories The Nine Ways: On the Enneagram By Jacob Rubin Light through stained glass. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CCO 2.0. When I was a boy, the most obvious thing, in almost any situation, seemed to be something that wasn’t named. This unspoken thing usually had to do with desires or strong emotions that appeared to run under people’s words. In a stained glass window, the least striking element is often the very scene being depicted. People could have that quality when I was little, resembling stencils marbled with glowing hues. Where did their hidden longings end? Where did mine begin? Read More
July 3, 2024 Poetry Rorschach By Diana Garza Islas Rorschach plate that originally appeared in Psychodiagnostik by Hermann Rorschach (1921). Public domain. Two monkeys with wings defecate suspending a ballerina whose skull is split. Her tutu reveals thighs from the fifties, toned. Their hands are on her poor wounded head; she has no feet. One of the monkeys, the one on the left, has a badly defined jawline. The woman has a perforated abdomen. Two cartoon Polish men high-five. Their legs and their heads are red, to accentuate the fact that their heads are like socks. Their eyes are like their mouths, almost smiling at their mischief. They betray a body pact. Two bald women with upturned noses, alien eyes, and prominent oval breasts. The separation between torso and hip through a knee and high heels propping up either two gardeners watering or two amphibians. On either side, fetuses in placenta or ghosts with their fingers to their lips, and with ribbons, evidently red, around their necks. Read More
July 2, 2024 Dinner Parties The Host By Alana Pockros I took the day off work to cook. Dad wore my apron and made the charoset and complained about how long it took to cut that many apples. Mom told me the soup tasted like nothing and made me go to Key Food to buy Better Than Bouillon. They were visiting New York to see my new apartment for the first time. Mom had always been in charge of preparing this meal when I was growing up, but for the first time, the tables were turned: I was hosting and we were eating at my house. She was older and more disabled now, which meant she could no longer use her hands to chop carrots and celery and fresh dill. So instead, she sat on a cane chair at the kitchen table she had just bought me from West Elm, tossing directions my way like a ringmaster. Read More