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Just an incredibly beautiful collection from one of Italy's most important poets. I love dual language editions of books and Archipelago has managed to present these translations with such generosity. The honor the poet as well as the translator and let me tell you, Geoffrey Brock has done a masterful job here. Some of the works are so slight they are like delicate snowflakes full of nuance and emotional weight and somehow Brock skillfully conveys them in English.

I fell in love with the poems in this book and somehow reading a few times through didn't seem like enough to take them in. I'll need to revisit often, which is no chore. Here's one I keep thinking about:

Memory

When
the night is about to vanish
just before spring
and hardly
anyone's around

The dark color
of grief
gathers over Paris
and on the edge
of a bridge
I consider
the immense silence
of a slender
girl

And our
maladies
meld
and as if carried off
we stay

Lokvica, September 28, 1916

In my very humble opinion The Dead Man>Madame Edwarda>My Mother though I'm sure others will disagree. I found My Mother to be a slog, which is very unusual in my experience with Bataille. Here he shows his admiration for Gide's style and pulls back on his detailed writing. It almost felt as though he was trying to be polite, which is not a good thing. As a set of narratives that showcase Bataille's philosophical development these are exceptional. What is also clear is that he knew how to pull from his own life and use details from his biography to structure emotional through lines useful for tracking the kind of interiority he wanted to display in his characters.

It is possible I had a tough time with My Mother simply bc it is so incredibly vulnerable and it evoked a reaction in me. It has been nicer to think about after than it was to read. Not that I was offended but like with Bergman's films or Strindberg's plays sometimes the psychic violence being depicted is just too strong and I need a little distance to see it well.

3.5 stars

At their best these poems fuse a certain cleverness with the undeniable language of loss during periods or areas of transition.

dreaming language

my small tongue dreams up
a land where it builds nests of words
to swarm out over the borders
that are not its own. it wants
to outgrow itself, to glide through distant
spirit path of water or gas,
to dive down to deep sea vents,
to have a term for every phenomenon
and its dubious shadows, to inhabit
those who speak and write it
as shimmering populations of words, to lay
its larvae in their pores. my language
wants to be unbridled and large, it wants
to leave behind the fears that occupy it,
all those stories, dark and bright,
in which its worth and weight
is questioned. only when it dreams
does it soar, supple and light,
by its very nature nearly song.

Haderlap writes in German but she was born into the Slovenian-speaking minority of Carinthia. So clearly the borders of language and identity and violence are where her work comes alive. At least that's how I felt about these poems.

I will say, however, that quite a few of these bounced off of me. They felt overly intellectual, cold, and disconnected. That might be an intended effect or it might be something untranslatable, I don't know.

One of the most affecting poetry books I have read in a while. Also very accessible, for anyone who worries poetry just isn't for them. The craft work in these poems is exceptional and nearly invisible for the reader. I had to re-read some of them several times just to figure out how they worked so powerfully. The first read some of them were just magical. Like, they magically wetted my eyes and made me think of my mortality all day.

Here's one of my favorites:

Taking My Old Dog Out to Pee before Bed

Zeke's hips are too ground down
to lift a leg, so he just stands there. We both
just stand, looking into the darkness.
The moon silvers his thinning fur.
Orion strides across the heavens, his own dog
trotting at his heel. And a great live oak reaches over
from the neighbor's yard, dense black limbs
silhouetted against a paler sky. Single voluptuous
remnant of forests. Can a tree be lonely?
Zeke tips up his muzzle, scent streaming
through two hundred million olfactory cells
as he reads the illuminated manuscript of night-
raccoons prowling down the street, who's in heat
or just out for a stroll. Handsome still,
he reminds me of an aging movie star with his striking
white eyebrows and square jaw. He always
had an urbane elegance, a gentleman
who could carry off satin lapels and a silver-tipped cane.
Tonight an ambulance wails. Someone not so far away
is frightened, in pain, trying to live or trying to die.
And then it's quiet again. No birds. No wind.
We don't speak. We just wait, alive together,
until one of us turns back to the door
and the other follows.


This poem really moved me. So much that I sought out Ellen Bass' twitter account just to see if she had posted any photos of Zeke. I was not disappointed. Well, a little disappointed. RIP to that handsome little guy.

Stop everything you are doing and read this book.

Written in 1947 but only translated into English last year (2021) the English speaking world has absolutely slept on Rafael Bernal and this needs to change. This is the story of a broken, desperate drunk losing himself in the jungles of Chiapas until one day, after a period of sobriety, he discovers how to learn the language of mosquitos. He terms it the Mosquil language and sets out to write its first dictionary using a custom flute. What he discovers once he starts to communicate with the mosquitos, however, is daaaaaark. Part science fiction story, part eco-fiction (the first, I believe), part horror story, part adventure story, and all literary (themes of colonialism, globalism, political corruption, and environmentalism, etc) this is 148 pages of narrative you just can't miss out on. I honestly can't believe what I just read.

I'm not sure what kind of promotional budget New Directions can give a book like this but I'm sure it isn't enough, especially for a book I will now recommend, confidently, to any kind of reader I know. It has that kind of cross-over appeal. Read this book!

Well well well if it isn't one of the finest stories I've ever read just waiting for me to arrive. I adored Gonzalez's Difficult Light but I flinched before picking up another by him (bc I am a coward and feared it would be sad or sadder than that excellent book. A very silly reason). This is a crushingly beautiful work and unfolds with a powerful blend of yearning and inevitability. I love so many things about this book, from the intelligent use of narrators to craft the story's themes to the hour by hour structure instead of chapter numbers, but my favorite thing is the sheer balls Gonzalez has to pitch a novel as a cross between King Lear and The Old Man and the Sea... and then to pull it off! Much credit deserves to go to Andrea Rosenberg, who also translated Difficult Light. She has combined the vernacular and the lyrical so smoothly here and really done incredible work bringing this novel to English.

I could go on and on. I haven't even mentioned how powerful the themes resonated with me or how I learned so much about perspective in crafting a story, or how each character is approached with vulnerability and yet each one stays unerringly true to themselves. This is a masterful novel and one I encourage anyone to pick up.

Things are starting to come into focus the more I gain some context. This is an incredible novel and one I will surely (necessarily) return to. The poetry of Sartre's Nausea (with plenty left over) and the philosophical criterion of Bataille's Accursed Share all wrapped into prose as craft worthy as any by Gide. A gorgeous dream of consciousness and the limits of being.

A taste:

He was seized, kneaded by intelligible hands, bitten by a vital tooth; he entered with his living body into the anonymous shapes of words, giving his substance to them, establishing their relationships, offering his being to the word "to be". For hours he remained motionless, with, from time to time, the word "eyes" in place of his eyes: he was inert, captivated and unveiled. And even later when, having abandoned himself and, contemplating his book, he recognized himself with disgust in the form of the text he was reading, he retained the thought that (while, perched upon his shoulders, the word He and the word I were beginning their carnage) there remained within his person which was already deprived of its senses obscure words, disembodied souls and angles of words, which were exploring him deeply.

And then there's me, slip sliding away into Blanchot.

3.5

A writer's writer in that what dazzled me was the scrapbook of narrative techniques Cárdenas employed, presumably, to more deeply access the emotional underpinnings of his work: the painful loss of youth, innocence/experience, the great loss of country, and even the loss of hope. Unfortunately, along with his bursts of creativity, Cárdenas also displays some big "I am very smart" energy. Even if I sympathize I still rolled my eyes more than a few times. There are moments reading this when one feels the author resisting his vulnerability so intensely he is willing to push the reader away hard. Whole chapters, for example, are presented in untranslated Spanish. Please.

But this is a debut novel, which means it points in a direction the author wants to go. He certainly loves Bolaño and his puppy dog imitation felt like affection, not hackery: a new writer placing himself in a specific corner of dinner table conversation. Well good for him. There is certainly enough promise in this novel that I will read more of his work. I think it's worth reading for fans of experimental literature, too. Cárdenas may not be inventing anything new but with this debut he has confidently placed himself in an admirable category... and he belongs there.