From my bedside table
Hélène Cixous, translated by Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers:
We must let ourselves be carried on the dream’s mane and must not wake up—something all dreamers know—while the dream is dictating the world to us. How can we do this? We must write at the dictation of our master the dream, a pencil in hand, straddling the mane at full gallop.
SD Chrostowska:
There are times I’m overcome with sadness at being confined to writing—to masking an inner speech that is ordinary and must reach you transformed. I identify with the mask, or a series of masks, created for speaking to you, and, when I do speak, I adapt myself to their range of expression. Each one is a container for my voice, which escapes as through a whistle. Each one contains my voice differently, letting it out as a different sound. This may be the only way to think of this writing. For such writing, the way of a mask may be the only way. “A mask is not primarily what it represents but what it transforms, that is to say, what it chooses not to represent. Like a myth, a mask denies as much as it affirms. It is not made solely of what it says or thinks it is saying, but of what it excludes.” So it is with masked speech—audible on the inside, then, through the writing, transformed.
Poupeh Missaghi:
How can we, as translators of these events and their narratives, find the proper language to voice them? What might the proper language be? Is there just one? Who decides what it is? Reality? Media? Politicians? Family? Friends? Restrictions? Love? Memory? How can we translate them into the closed frame of a book, of an art form, of a report, of a memorial while celebrating the life in them? How can we accommodate a reading that constantly reopens itself, rereads itself, retranslates itself based on our distance from the event, physical and emotional, spatial and temporal, based on our relationship with the event, with the world around it, with ourselves?
Cristina Rivera Garza:
El traductor no sonrió al verme pero sí estiró el brazo para darme la mano derecha. Algo dijo en mi lengua pero, al adarse cuenta de que lo entendía sólo con dificultad, optó por usar la lengua en la que hablaríamos durante el trayecto a los bosques boreales: algo que no era estrictamenta suyo ni mío, un tercer espacio, una segunda lengua común.
Aleksandra Lun, translated by Elizabeth Bryer:
“Do you think they know better? Do you think they’re best placed to know what our mother tongue is?” I sobbed, and the doctor regarded us with her impassive eyes and made a note in her notebook. “Do you think they need to assign us a concrete culture?” I kept on, now short of breath. “A clear origin? A particular language?” I let go of Ionesco’s elbow and sank my hands into my thinning hair. “Do you think that by making us fit into a rigid order, they order their own world?”
Ionesco pursed his lips and looked at me, his expression weary.
“Why do people expect authors to answer questions?”
He opened the door. “I’m an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I would be a politician.”
Josh Ruebner:
…as a country also founded on the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of its indigenous population, the United States does indeed “share values” with Israel. The US drive across the continent in the nineteenth century resulted in the forced removal of indigenous populations and their confinement to ever-shrinking “reservations” of land. The United States repeatedly broke its treaty obligations with indigenous nations to take additional land as it saw fit. What the United States did to its indigenous population, Israel continues to do to Palestinians today.
James Schuyler:
The sky eats up the trees
The newspaper comes. It
has a bellyful of bad news.
The sun is not where it was.
Nor is the moon. Once so
flat, now so round. A man
carries papers out of the
house. Which makes a small
change. I read at night.
I take the train and go
to the city. Then I come
back. Mastic Shirley,
Patchogue, Quogue. And for
all the times I’ve
stopped, hundreds, at their
stations, that’s all
I know. One has
a lumberyard. The sun
puts on its smile.
The day had a bulge
around three p.m. After,
it slips, cold and quiet,
into night. I read
in bed. And in the a.m.
put a record on to
shave to. Uptown in a
shop a man has blue
eyes that enchant. He
is friendly and inter-
esting to me, though he is
not an interesting man.
Bad news is a funny kind
of breakfast. An addict
I can scarcely eat my
daily crumble without
its bulk. I read at
night and shave when
I get up. That’s true.
Life will change and
I am part of it and
will change too. So
will you, and you, and
you, the secret—what’s
a secret?—center of
my life, your name and
voice engraved like
record grooves upon
my life, spinning its
tune between the lines
I read at night, a
graffito on the walls
of flowered paper I
see, looking up from
pages of Lady Mary
Wortley Montague or
a yellow back novel.
A quiet praise, yes
that’s it, between the
lines I read at night.
Can Xue, translated by Natascha Bruce (passage from Calvino translated by William Weaver):
Her appearance in the unpredictable blue dome of our sky never fails to arouse great waves of emotion in the souls of human beings. Sometimes she is a golden hook, other times a silver disc, always both out of reach and here in our dreams every night. Poets call her “Beauty”. She is a human creation, entwined with all our many modes of feeling, yet her pale face remains steadfastly far away—a farness that only intensifies her beauty to those of us on Earth. But what about the inexhaustible nightly yearning, the inexplicable devotion, the compulsion that arises as she draws closer, and the despair left behind when she departs? What controls this? Calvino explains poetry with poetry, and there is truly no match for the height and fullness of his passions.
At one time, according to Sir George H. Darwin, the Moon was very close to the Earth. Then the tides gradually pushed her far away…
Our poet begins by describing the structure of Creation. The Earth attracted the Moon, the Moon stirred up the tides and the tides pushed the Earth and Moon apart, gradually widening the distance between them. From ancient times until the present day, this has been the fundamental structure of human spiritual pursuit. Thus we uncover a millennia-old spiritual conundrum: Longing is proportional to distance.
Selah Saterstrom:
A raw garnet dug up from the earth appears as a piece of
burned glass and smells of warm dirt. How did this
garnet come to rest here, pinned between sky and
sea, a mineral between here and hereafter? Lines
made through the absenting of lines specter-shape into
calligraphy. And someone arrives, a dead poet, she
writes in an elegant script a melancholic poem featuring
geese, a landscape, and reflections about death. How do
the deceased live within the blurred calligraphic strokes
dependent upon whatever it was we erased? Who was
here first? The process of being read, truly read. One
day our lines appear in some other’s erasure. The garnet
speck poised between sea and sky, the unpolished
mineral of previous earths. In those earths there was
vegetation, humidity, and what we want when we want
each other most: nakedness.
Audre Lorde:
Thaw
The language of past seasons
collapses. pumpkins in spring
false labor slides like mud
off the face of ease
and whatever I turn my hand to
pales in the sun.
We will always be there to your call
the old witches said
always said at the same time
you are trapped asleep
you are speechless
perhaps you will also be
broken.
Step lightly all around us
words are cracking
off we drift
separate and syllabic
if we survive at all.
Robert Duncan:
Since we have had the telephone removed, the interrupted spirits of the household have begun again, or we hear again their story telling. In these counsels of objects, animals and ourselves, these concentrations and exfoliations of language, we have our source. When silence blooms in the house, all the paraphernalia of our existence shed the twitterings of value and reappear as heraldic devices.
There was a solitary purpose all the time, the undistracted gaze of the bee that lives for honey—a hum that we waited to hear. In this device we picture the rose, thornd; the bee, barbd; the hive, armd citadel of sweetness.
The second device is a cloud dispersing, a falling apartness in itself having no other images. Below this: clouds drifting, in which images emerge. The cloud is perhaps idelness, is a being without lineaments, a mereness of metaphor that is not sensible. This figure in writing is the poetry of Gertrude Stein. In which all the pleasures and pains of reading with none of the rewards and values. This is what we I M A G I N E her to have done. Below is the actual procession of clouds we watch where meanings appear and disappear.
The third device is a cat dreaming, which we see as dearness or nearness. His paws stretcht out so that the toes branch show he is almost awake in dreaming. He has been carelessly, confidently, cast down in sleep, so that we know he knows we are here. This cat has been drawn often by us, so, posing without imposing, curld in a chair or as if nesting himself anywhere about.
The fourth device is a tree among trees, that is, a forest which is the conversation in silence we are referring to. The tree recalls also the Ace of Spades which is a death among deaths, that is, a solitude which is the house we live in and in which our love is stored.
The fifth device is a bear dancing, muzzled or not as the designer chooses, but this means an ancient allegiance exists between joy and the kin. The sixth, the moon, which I see as the intellect as it waxes and wanes, drawing and releasing the tides of a sea we do not picture in hearing. We had only to distinguish what we belongd to from what we did not belong to to cast off all busyness and return to the work which I speak of here as a honeycomb composed of inscrutable pictures, a shield of discrete poems which may absorb or cast back all meanings, remaining undisturbed. Hence our love of René Magritte. For his paintings resemble the cells of such bees.