For the last 10 days I have been touring through Italy giving workshops at universities where Dutch is being taught. I was surprised to hear that there are five Italian cities where you can study Dutch: Naples, Rome, Bologna, Padua and Trieste. I have been to all of these cities the last 10 days, with the exception of Bologna.

The workshops focused on literary translation and its difficulties.

In Naples the students pointed out a sentence in my second novel Silent Extras. In this sentence I use the word “rat” three times.

My Italian translator translated the first “rat” with “rat,” the second “rat” with “mouse” and the third “rat” with “small mouse.”

The students explained that word repetition in the Italian language is problematic; according to some students it is something that cannot be done in the written language.

On the one hand, I respect the choices my Italian translator made. On the other hand, it is puzzling how a rat can become a small mouse in the space of one sentence.

It leaves the author with an eerie feeling: what is happening to my books in translation when I myself cannot read the translation?

Milan Kundera famously remarked that translators always err on substantial things characteristic to the author.

During the translation workshops, I observed that most of the student translators felt the need to clarify things that might not be immediately clear to an Italian reader. I’m in favor of liberty for the translator, but when it comes to adding words or even sentences to clarify things, I hesitate.

A reader who doesn’t know the Netherlands well might not know what “Etos” is. But given the context the average reader should be able to figure out that “Etos” is the name of a drugstore.

To explain this is not necessarily a mistake, but it takes away from the rhythm of the language, which certainly in the case of literature is a crucial aspect of language.

During these 10 days I also heard that some Italian translators from the Dutch—and who knows, maybe also from other languages—have the habit of embellishing the original.

As somebody who doesn’t speak Italian, it’s hard for me to judge this habit. It might be necessary in certain cases. Of course, it’s a thin line between translating and rewriting.

Some would argue that translating is by definition a rewriting.

After these 10 days, I think that it’s a relief for this author not to understand all of the languages into which his work is translated.

Otherwise, I would lose sleep over a rat that has become a small mouse.

And now I know what to say when a journalist asks a difficult question, “Oh yes, I know what you mean, but this is something you really have to ask the translator.”

A forum for international crime fiction

Site focusing on British and other European crime fiction writers that have been published in English.

In conjunction with the London Book Fair’s acknowledgement of the ‘Arabic Book’ this year (previously mentioned in this blog), the Guardian published a forum in which it asked Arab writers and other experts on Arabic literature to list books they’d like to see translated. Among the several interesting responses that caught my eye were Sabry Hafez’s list of younger fiction writers (about whom I will devote a subsequent post), and NYU Professor Hala Halim’s comment that publishers and translators need to start thinking about translating critical and intellectual work from the region. I have been a fan of this idea for a long time, but reading Professor Halim’s statement from here in Cairo got me considering what exactly English language readers might be missing by having to consume a culture only through a few novels, stories, and books of poetry, without any exposure to the role and nature of the thinker in contemporary Arab culture.

An evening forum featuring one of Egypt’s most prominent intellectuals, Nasr Hamid Abû Zayd, the Ibn Rushd Chair and Professor of Humanism and Islam at Universiteit voor Humanistiek in Utrecht, the Netherlands, held May 3 at the American University in Cairo, gave me a piece of my answer. Abû Zayd, a former professor of Arabic at Cairo University, left Egypt voluntarily, but under siege from Islamist legal activists in the late nineties. In fact, the forum was the first time he’d spoken publicly in Egypt since 1993. It’s hard to exaggerate the excitement his appearance provoked. The only other cultural event I’ve seen that could compare to it would be the evening in the early nineties when I heard Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish read in Cairo at the annual international bookfair in a tent that hundreds of people had packed into. That night, the crowd’s tumultuousness fell to total silence the moment the poet stepped up to the microphone, and the silence held until he sat down.

Nasr Hamid Abû Zayd had just this sort of command of the hall; and in fact, he seems on his way to having almost as fanatical of a following. Abû Zayd created his reputation as a thinker through the scholarly use of hermeneutical interpretive method cum historicization in analyzing the Quran and other holy texts of Islam. Recently, his scholarly preoccupations have moved him toward consideration of discourses of authority, which he sees as a plague on Arab states, in everything from state institutions to educational systems to religious authorities. In his May 3 talk, he spoke specifically to “tahreem” of art. (The word “tahreem” means to make something forbidden, and although it normally has religious connotations, he began his remarks by emphasizing that “tahreem” also occurred in political, social and other institutional contexts.)

Although my friend and I arrived early, we still found ourselves sitting near the back. We were lucky to have seats. There were probably as many people crowded into the aisle, pressed behind the back row of chairs, and straining to hear from the open back doors, as there were people seated. At least twice, someone tried to sit in my lap to reach a tape recorder up to the speaker not far from my chair. (Both failed; it was an evening of physical as well as mental exertion for me.) Amazingly, all the sardines voluntarily kept themselves in the can for the entire two hours until the very end of the Q & A that followed his remarks. The first thing that my European houseguests asked me the next day was if anyone had attacked him during the question period. Indeed a minority of questions expressed antagonism. What really surprised though was how many of the people sitting and standing nearby, including young people who couldn’t have been in high school when Professor Abû Zayd left Egypt, were whispering supportive answers as the questions were being asked. Several things about this completely Arabophone evening stand out to me as challenging the way most Americans must imagine Egyptian cultural life. They include: the large contingent of younger attendees, the swarm of enthusiastic media that mobbed the stage at the end, the radically avant-garde way Islam and religion were discussed, and the sheer enthusiasm for ideas and the life of the mind expressed by everyone there. Broadening the outsider’s view of the cultural scene here will take a big effort fueled by imagination, patience, education, hard work…and translation.

I’ve just returned from New York where I attended the panel discussion ‘Writing Sex and Sexuality’, one of the many and varied events hosted by PEN as part of their festival of international literature. I was particularly interested in this event since my novel The Mushroom Man included some sexually explicit scenes which provoked quite a few comments from readers, and recently I had an essay on sex forthcoming in the upcoming anthology Behind The Bedroom Door until I chickened out and withdrew it. I decided that some things were precious (my real life) and that whilst I was quite happy writing fictional sex scenes, writing autobiographical sex scenes was not something I felt entirely comfortable about airing in the open.

Catherine Millet, on the other hand, author of the shocking, bestselling memoir The Sexual Life of Catherine M. does not seem to have any inhibitions about dishing the dirt. This Parisian founder and editor of the modern art magazine Art Press was one of the four panelists on the discussion, the other three being Amanda Michalopoulou, a prolific Greek author and journalist, Anja Sicking from Holland, author of The Silent Sin, and Yael Hedaya from Israel, author of the acclaimed novel Accidents. The event was skillfully moderated by Rakesh Satayl, an editor at HarperCollins and author of the forthcoming novel Blue Boy.

It was a very engaging and stimulating debate. Particularly noteworthy was to learn how significantly these authors’ ideas of sexuality as children had been influenced by books (Hedaya cited Lady’s Chatterley’s Lover and Lolita). This is in contrast, the panel agreed, with the way it is now with their own children who are rather absorbed by the internet and film. This led to the panelists articulating exactly what sex scenes in books can do that sex scenes in other media (eg film) cannot do. For example Michalopoulou mentioned the beauty of how the writer can communicate exactly what each person engaging in the sex scene is thinking, whereas in film these intimate cogitations can only be suggested. There was also some lively conversation about different nationalities’ attitude towards, and comfort about, talking about sex. Sicking made the amusing observation that cultures which were very happy speaking about it so freely and plastering it all over their media (eg Americans) were often more prudish and inhibited when it came to the actual practice of it (”if they speak about it so much they probably aren’t getting it so much”). Generally it was agreed that national stereotypes regarding sex were unhelpful. Millet mentioned that she expected her book to do really well in Italy (Italians stereotyped as being sexually uninhibited). However, the contrary proved true—it did much better in countries traditionally known to be more conservative. It was, perhaps, the panel agreed, more a generational issue, older generations being more reluctant to accept explicit language.

When the panel was opened to the floor, I asked the four writers about their experience of translation regarding sex in their works. Since they were all foreigners who were fluent in English and therefore could be decent judges, what did they make of the English translation of their writing? Had things been lost/gained in the translation of the sex scenes originally written in their native language? Hedaya gave a very encouraging answer. She said that she felt that it was actually in the English translation that she felt her sex scenes were properly expressed. She explained how modern Hebrew is a relatively new language and how the range of words to describe sex is very limited: “they are either too slutty or the vocabulary of a gynecologist.” She spoke of how it was a challenge to describe a sex scene in her native language but that in English what she meant to communicate became clear.

I left the discussion feeling that it was an hour and a half very well spent, and it also encouraged me not to shy away from explicit description of sex in my own writing—in my fiction at least. The uniqueness and beauty of fiction is its ability to enter deep into the individual’s interior world. To shy away from describing sex, which has a significance for most individuals, is to shy away from fully exploring a character. Fearless writing is the only interesting writing.

I’d just like to add a couple of thing before signing off. Two excellent articles caught my eye recently: A profile on the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany in the Sunday New York Times magazine (04.27.08), and a profile on the young Belarusian Poet Valzhyna Mort in Poets And Writers Magazine (May/June). Both are well worth a read.

Worldwide web development and the long-tail phenomenon offer new opportunities for the visibility of literary translation. Electronic translation software is to be avoided. Postcolonial and new immigrant writing benefit from cross-frontier digital exchange. And lesser known cultures and languages can become more familiar to wider audiences—Ala Al Aswany’s runaway seller The Yacoubian Building (translated by Humphrey Davies), comes to mind.

Xenophobia feeds off ignorance and prejudice. Often fueled by the arrival of new immigrants in local neighborhoods, a positive counterbalance is to make available translated fiction in local libraries; on the school curriculum; and through tours like the Children’s Bookshow. To quote George Orwell, “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

Yob culture is the antithesis of cultural exchange, and a prime example of the fundamentally racist “bloody foreigners” mindset.

Zeitgeist is moving on from Scandinavian crime writing, so what’s the Next Big Thing?

Liz Waters is the translator of Lieve Joris’s Rebels’ Hour.

I went to look for Martín even though he didn’t like for me to go all the way to the riverbank. Since it was Monday, there wasn’t anybody in the restaurant, and at seven, Mere let me leave. I took off my apron, changed my white blouse and put on a black T-shirt that had a Hard Rock café sign on it that Martín gave me when I turned seventeen, and since my high heels were killing me, I put on my red Converse. Martín didn’t wanna see me on the riverbank cuz the other pasamojados gave him hell, saying I was really hot. One time one of em told him that with a woman like me, there was no need to get in the river so much. He didn’t put up with any crap. He responded like he did when he felt threatened, with his fists and knives. If the people watching hadn’t pulled em apart in time, Martín would’ve left him cut up like a sieve. That was the reason why he spent those weeks in jail. With Mere’s help I managed to get all the paperwork done to get him out of there. He loaned me cash to pay the lawyer’s fees and, when he finally got out free, I asked him not to go back to the black bridge. I was freaked out that the other guy would wanna get revenge, but he told me that he got there first, that that was the best spot for crossing wetbacks, and if that other guy wanted shit, all the better, he’d just finish him off once and for all. Fortunately when Martín returned he didn’t run into him again, that day. Monday, the sidewalks that go from the restaurant to the riverbank were almost empty, no gringos or wetbacks. It was really hot, the stench of the puddles mixed with the smell of urine that came out of the cantinas. A man in the doorway of a cabaret was shouting to come see a show. He called out to me with a sick little voice. I didn’t pay no attention to him, but I was sure that the next day he was gonna be in the restaurant messing with me. I didn’t like that little man. He invited me to the movies, to get a beer, all over the place. He really was messed up, besides his teeth were all rotten, not like Martín who had nice little straight white ones. “Mónica!” he yelled at me, but I just walked faster, I didn’t find Martín and I asked the other pasamojados if they’d seen him. They told me he’d just crossed over. At that hour there were just a few people on the edge of the river, like they didn’t really wanna cross. I sat down under the bridge and to distract myself I started watching the clouds and the buildings of the city in front of me, really tall glass towers with tons of colors—green, blue, metallic, black—the buzzing of the cars was putting me to sleep. Suddenly I saw him appear in the train yard on the other side of the river, between the boxcars, Martín and a Migra. It looked like they were arguing. They lifted up their arms like they were gonna start whaling on each other. The Migra guy grabbed Martín by his shoulder and shook him. Me and all the people on this side were watching close to see what was gonna happen. I got real scared cuz I knew what Martín could do, but then Martín got free and squeezed out through a hole in the chain-link fence, ran down the cement slope, and got into the dirty river water that came up to his waist. Then I saw the sky was starting to get dark. “What’re you doing here?” he asked me, all pissed off when he got to where I was. I didn’t answer cuz I was waiting til he calmed down. We started walking along the riverbank through dust and debris. Martín had on his Chicago Bulls T-shirt, all soaked, not to mention his shorts. When his clothes aired out a little, we went back to Calle Acacias. It always stank like day-old grease over there, and the sidewalks were full of snot-nosed kids. We stopped at one corner to eat tortas. It struck me that the bologna tortas looked like open mouths with the tongue hanging out, cuz of the piece of meat that stuck out of the bread roll. Martín thought what I said was funny. He grabbed a torta, opened and closed the two sides of the roll like it was a mouth and he started talking with a gringo accent, “Cuidado, Martin, cuidado, better to be friends than enemies, okay?” He threw the torta into a puddle. It was about nine at night. You couldn’t buy alcohol in the stores anymore, so we went to Mere’s restaurant. I got two Coors in a paper bag. We walked a few blocks and went into the Hotel Sady, ten dollars for a room for the whole night, but we were just gonna use it for a few hours. On the way I asked him if the next day he’d take me across the river cuz I’d never been to the other side. Martín asked for a room on the third floor, the last one with a window on Calle Degollado. From there we heard the commotion in the street like a faraway hum. Catty-corner to the hotel there’s a bright sign with a rosy light, and Martín liked when its glow lit up the room. He said that he felt like he was in another place, that he even felt like a different person. I remember that night I felt his body real nice, hugged him real tight for a long time, till he pulled away from me. He drank two beers and got serious. I asked him what happened, why he imitated that Migra guy and made fun of him. He told me he had a beef with him cuz of some people that he’d tried to cross, money stuff. He said it just like that and closed his eyes. I waited till he fell asleep so I could watch him comfortably, big and strong. I felt happy with him. I liked my Martín from the very first time I saw him come into the restaurant with some other cholos, all of em really slick, with their hair pulled back, held tight in a net. When I asked what they were gonna drink, Martín answered for all of em. After I came back with their beers he asked me what time I was gonna get off work. Later he was waiting for me outside. Martín had eyelashes that curled up at the ends. He laughed with his eyes, and that made me trust him. I became his girl that same night. Afterward he told me he was a pasamojados. As time passed, as we were getting to know each other I realized that he liked weed. I didn’t like that. He made fun of me, said I was really square. I didn’t care for weed or wine, but he liked me like that. We were thinking about renting some rooms to live together, just till we went to Chicago, like wetbacks, like the poor people who cross the river with nothing but God, climb into freight train cars, hiding and waiting for hours, sometimes a whole day till finally the train moves, with them inside, suffocating hot and afraid. When Martín asked me if I wanted to leave with him, I didn’t answer. The truth is I didn’t want to travel hidden in a freight car like my dad must have done just a few days after we arrived here. My mom found a job quickly in a factory, but my dad complained that he wasn’t finding any work, till the day came that he lost hope and he told us he’d go further north. It was a Sunday when he got outta bed determined to leave. My mom and I went with him to downtown. Once we were there he wanted to go to the Cathedral first. Afterward we left him on the edge of the river with a small suitcase in his hand. It was the last time we saw him. Just remembering I got sad, made me wanna kiss Martín’s little tattooed tears next to his left eye, “one’s for the first time the police caught me, the other for when my mom died,” he told me one night when we were together. “The cobweb I’ve got on my left angel wing is from a bet I won off this real chingón friend of mine; the loser had to pay for a tattoo for the winner in the best tattoo shop in El Chuco.” When he opened his eyes, I had so many thoughts mixed up in my mind that I asked him again about the Migra guy. At first he said it wasn’t important, but I pressed him on it, and he ended up telling me. “That guy’s name is Harris,” he said. “I know him from a long ways back, almost since I’ve been in this. We started out workin real good, without no issues, but then later not no more, cuz he didn’t wanna pay me shit. He asked me for people to slave for him in El Chuco. I crossed over maids, gardeners, waiters, even a mariachi with instruments and everything. They were for his place and for his homies’ places. He paid me good, but the shit started when I took people across to go pick chile up in New Mexico, cuz I took em all the way up to the fields too, so since it was more risk for me, I asked him for more cash. He didn’t wanna pay and we got into it. Now he’s making deals with the fucker that I stabbed that time for being such a loudmouth, remember? All I want is to get my money.” He finished talking and hugged me. “Don’t freak out, Moni, it’s not the first time I’ve got issues with la Migra.” We kissed and then we felt each other again. We left the room in time for me to catch the last bus to Felipe Ángeles. That night it took a long time to fall asleep. It was always like that after sleeping with Martín. I kept thinking about him and I was worried. Finally I got to sleep after I decided that I didn’t want to go to the other side anymore. The next day I put on a necklace made of colored beads and grabbed a denim bag where I put some pants so Martín could change out of his wet shorts. I meant to invite him to the movies, but when I got to the riverbank I freaked out cuz I saw him between the boxcars arguing with the same guy. I thought Martín was gonna pull a knife on him, but after a few minutes the other guy disappeared and Martín crossed quickly to this side of the river. “Let’s get outta here, cuz I just might cut him open!” he ordered as soon as he saw me. We walked to Mere’s restaurant and had a Coke. Martín calmed down and I took advantage of the chance to tell him that I’d changed my mind. He didn’t like that, he said we’d go no matter what. It was a challenge for Martín. He told me the Migra guy was scared of him cuz he’d threatened to rat him out, besides his shift on patrol had already ended, he was sure he’d already taken off. Martín’s reasons didn’t convince me. I regretted having gone looking for him. The only thing I wanted was to disappear from there. Martín got mad at me, dragged me to the riverbank, and pushed and shoved me onto the tire tube he used as a raft. “Don’t move, it’s just a few minutes!” He pulled the tube slow so the water wouldn’t splash me. It must’ve been about three in the afternoon. The sun was still high, reflected in the muddy water. Under the bridge, women and men waited for their turn to cross over; up above, on the bridge, others with their fingers hooked on the chain-link fence looked all around. They watched me and Martín. Despite feeling scared I got excited thinking that we’d stay on the other side the rest of the day, that we were gonna walk the streets of a city unknown to me—all that thrilled me—I watched the blue sky, the Franklin Mountain, the colors of the buildings, an enormous billboard for Camel cigarettes, and below it the train boxcars. Right at that moment I heard a shot. We’d already gotten to the other bank. I could see a man was hiding between the boxcars. It was a man with the unmistakable green uniform. “What’s going on, Martín?” I asked him panicked. “Get down!” he screamed at the same time as he hid behind the tube. Another shot rang out. Martín doubled over, the dark water of the river covered him. Terrified, I screamed. I wanted to get off the tube, stand up, or do something, but my fear wouldn’t let me. I looked around for help. There wasn’t a soul under the bridge anymore, not even up above, not anywhere. I felt like everything was far away, the little kids that played in the dusty streets, my house, Mere’s restaurant, the Hotel Sady, the Cathedral, its staircase and its beggars. The last day I saw my father, I felt an intense heat in my eyes. The August sun I thought. I closed them hard and saw how much silence the river carries.

Translation of “Bajo el Puente.” From Bajo el Puente: Relatos desde la Frontera/Under the Bridge: Stories from the Border, published May 2008 by Arte Publico Press. By arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

A singer goes all over the world
impassioned or bored

In a little train or a white train
by the gulls or through the grain

A singer walks into wars and peaces
into civil wars, trench wars, trade wars
through discord or concord
a singer goes to all these places

A poet moves in the world

On the ridge spine of the elephant
into the narrows of the Hellespont

On a palanquin, in gemmy silks
she crosses glaciers in the Alps

On a cloud backed and glinting jet
into Buddhist and bright Tibet

In a car into St. Lucia
On a dark train through Galicia

Over the pampas and the flats
on American colts

She goes by river in a canoe
or props herself in the banging prow

of a pelagic freighter
or she simply rides an escalator

She brings her nose to archipelagoes
And carts her ears into Tangiers

On a dromedary across the sands
by jiggling boats, she visits lands

She goes to the tundra’s edge
on an expeditious sledge

And far from the equator’s flora
she thrills to the boreal aurora

The singer strolls through hissing crops
across the rows and by the cows

She enters her London on a bus
her Jerusalem on an ass

She goes with mailbags and pouches of the State
to open doors to eternal things

To salve the sores of human beings
is why she sings.

Translation of “El canto errante.” Translation copyright 2008 by Gabriel Gudding. All rights reserved.

Read the author’s poem “Philosophy” here.

Little spider, greet the sun. Don’t be down.
Give thanks, dear toad, that you are here.
The hairy crabs, like roses, all have thorns,
and mollusks are reminiscences of women.

Know how to be what you are:
enigmas that have taken form.
Leave responsibilities to the Norm,
who will in turn send them on to Heaven.

(Sing, cricket: the moon is lit.
And, bear?, go ahead and dance.)

Translation of “Filosofia.” Translation copyright 2008 by Gabriel Gudding. All rights reserved.

The river was as wide as a lake, a sea, or a plain. The village at the foot of distant mountains over the river would have seemed more illusory had it not been for a few green dots on the bank—lonely willow trees that brought the distant village nearer.

Water as smooth as brocade flowed with boundless dignity toward somewhere over the horizon.

The poor village on this side of the river had seventy-odd households, their shabby stone houses scattered along the slope. Yak dung cakes for fuel were drying on walls; roosters perched on the roofs crowing. A brook of meltwater from a nearby mountain wound its way through the village. At the entrance to the village was a huge pipal tree, probably planted by the first settler here. Villagers made occasional trips across the river to the co-op for a few daily goods: sugar, tea, white cotton, needles and thread.

Morning on the bank. A young man and a little girl were pushing a yak-skin raft into the water. He was her senior by more than ten years.

“Will you take me along, Brother Danzeng?” the girl demanded habitually, as she had done many times before.

“You’re too young, ” he replied in the same manner. Besides, she had to tend the goats.

“What’s the village across the river like? Is it big?”
“Yeah. ”

“Do they have headscarves in the co-op?”

“Yeah.”

“Brother Danzeng?”

“What?”

“Will you bring me a green one?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t forget.”

By then villagers had gathered on the shore, waiting to cross the river either to visit relatives or barter.

The raft was sliding away.

The little girl was still shouting, her foot in the water.

Danzeng smiled, his muscular arms and chest plying the oars strenuously—the very picture of a dauntless raftsman.

Swinging a branch, the girl slowly drove her goats up the barren hill, from where the raft seemed no bigger than a beetle. She waved to it, then sat down on a stone to muse on the green scarf—it would be eye-catching in these drab parts.

She was a lonely, quiet shepherdess, who had been orphaned when she was very young and brought up by a one-eyed old storekeeper. Like the other girls in the village, she had spent her sixteen years among livestock.

Danzeng was an orphan too, and probably for this reason he treated her like an elder brother. She often rested her chin on his knees in the evening inside his low, shabby hut by the river, and listened to the same monotonous and age-old story by the dim castor-oil light:

“… Fairy Lamu waited and waited in the forest, until one sunny day he arrived in a red cloak on a white steed—”

She would soon fall asleep. At midnight he would gently carry her back to the store.

The villagers had to rush their suppers in the those days, for at the sound of the summoning gong, they would gather in a big, smoke-filled room to listen to the Party secretary dwell on politics deep into the night, their backs and legs aching from a day’s labor.

The little girl would pillow her head on his shoulder and sleep, and when they were dismissed, he would take her to the store.

Life in the village was as monotonous as Danzeng’s story and as tedious as the meetings, punctuated only by love and youth. Young people sometimes hid in haystacks or fields for fun, or dallied in the sunshine. . . .

They held the young raftsman by the arm, asking,

“When will you have a gentle girl serve you buttered tea in your low hut?”

“My girl is too young, like an unfledged bird, ” he would answer.

But who is she? And when will my sweetheart be fledged?

Before the raftsman was even aware, his sweetheart’s eyes had begun to shine, her breasts to swell and her complexion to become ruddy. One day the storekeeper brought his raft from across the river. He was excited; the pocket of his yak-wool sweater bulged and his eyes were glazed with drink.

“Great! Everything is set.” The old man laughed heartily.

“I haven’t seen you so happy for ages, Uncle.”

“It’s a good family. All able-bodied. And they want to marry Dolma. Even I can move in with them. What else could I want?”

“Dolma is going to marry?”

“Yes, of course—Why’s this raft going round?”

She cried for no reason the day she married, doing exactly as girls were required to on such an occasion. However, when she had done, her face revealed her excitement, for across the river was her holy place. She had lived seventeen years, long enough, in this poor village, and best of all, the one-eyed old man had found her an affluent family.Probably he should have taken her to have a look across the river, the young raftsman thought, and now she was leaving forever.

She was not the only girl taking his raft to marry across the river. They had had several that year. And each time a girl married across the river, lads from the village would stand under the pipal tree in twos and threes hopelessly looking at the departing raft, their eyes dark with melancholy.

They worked hard, but the village girls married across river. Why?

Although she was getting married, everything about her was simple, except for a new dress, the first she had ever had, and a hada attached to the raft. She and the one-eyed old man were the only passengers, and had their few belongings with them.

Nevertheless the green headscarf the young raftsman had given her a year before was still on her head, and still bright green.

She hummed as she played with the water. She was very innocent.

“Brother Danzeng,” she asked, “what are those things that shine at night across the river? Are they electric lights?”

“Yeah.

“Do they hang inside rooms?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it true that you can see a needle on the ground by them?”

“You button your lip!” the raftsman flared, his face distorted, grinding his teeth.

The one-eyed old man cast him a knowing glance.

She was scared. She couldn’t work out why he was behaving so. She was very innocent.

When they drew alongside, several strangers were waiting on the otherwise deserted wharf to pick up the girl and the old man in a wagon. They had several miles to go, to a village over a ridge. With a crack of the whip, the wagon started, its wheels creaking in the sand, and now she cried, this time in earnest. She pulled the green scarf off her head and said between sobs, “Come and see me whenever you can, Brother Danzeng, please!”

The young raftsman remained by the willows, leaning on his oars. He shook his head and narrowed his eyes in agony.

“Don’t forget.” Her voice was as faint as a breeze.

After that he avoided the village. Whenever he went across the river he glanced sidelong at the distant ridge, then hoisted his gear on his back and walked upstream, leaving footprints in the sand, some deep, some shallow, so as to row back downstream.

One day several months later he found her waiting for him on the wharf.

“You’re hateful,” she accused him. “You never come to see me.” Her hair danced in disarray before her face, her dress was untidy, and the green scarf was gone.

“You’re his, each hair of your head. I can’t come.”

“But he’s a drunkard, and he beats me dreadfully.”

“The bastard!” he cursed between his teeth.

“Why didn’t you marry me?” she murmured.

“Do I have livestock and money? Under these worn-out clothes there’s only my skin.” His lips tightened when he saw the passengers all aboard.

She drew from her bosom some soft, yellow butter wrapped in lettuce leaves and gave it to him. “You don’t have much of this over there, and you’re getting thin.”

“Don’t come again, Dolma.”

“How I wish I could go back,” she sighed.

She never again came to the bank.

When the villagers no longer had to labor on infertile mountain slopes two years later, they resumed their age-old trades of making exquisite pottery and collecting mushrooms and medicinal herbs in the scrub. Along with the booming handicraft industry and sideline production came more hustle and bustle in the village.

Young lovers gathered under the pipal tree at night and by the light of a bonfire danced the age-old duixie dance, which had long sunk into oblivion.

This was no longer a poor place.

The young raftsman shipped local products across the river every day and returned with ever more dazzling household goods. He often sat on the shore lost in thought, his eyes on the glimmering lights across the river. The dark water seemed congealed and stagnant but for the ripples whirling by the bank. They were the only sign of life and motion. He sat there in the pale moonlight, accompanied by his shadow.

Was anyone telling her a story? And where was she now?

Someone across the river said she had left for the county town on training leave, and that before she left she had sat alone by the willows all night long, holding her knees. Only the young raftsman knew the reason.

Another two years passed. As life got better his raft was replaced by a motor-boat. One winter’s day he was shipping pottery packed in hay, and mushrooms and medicinal herbs in sacks. Ice at the bow broke into piece that stood on end along the sides of the boat and were tossed away by the churning water at the stern.

Dolma waited in a composed manner on a tractor, her eyes on the approaching boat.

They were alone at the wharf. They studied each other like strangers.

“You can handle tractors. Why is your hair so untidy?” he asked.

“And you’ve got a motor-boat,” she replied. “Why is your beard so long?”

Their breath froze at their mouths. Both managed a bitter, dry smile.

“Let’s get to work,” she urged, raising her hands to her mouth for warmth. Neither of them spoke during the work. They felt they had so much to say and had said it all.

They often met in this way from then on.

As the weather got warmer the willows put out buds and new leaves. One morning early in summer the young man found no tractor at the wharf. He looked across the wilderness, seeing nothing except for some trees gently waving in the breeze.

He unloaded the cargo, which he stacked neatly on the ground, then sat down and began to scrawl with a branch. Dolma, Dolma, Dolma—nothing else on the golden sand but her name.

She appeared beyond the ridge like a drunkard, sand on her face and her dress torn open at the shoulder.

“The tractor turned over.” She paused to get her breath a while, before heading for the water to wash her face.

He jumped up and followed her hurriedly to the scene of the accident, repair kit in hand.

Goats moved about far away on the mountainside. Their bleating could be heard. Where was the goatherd?

When he skirted the ridge he saw the tractor lying on its side in the sand like an injured bull, sacks scattered everywhere. He disengaged the tractor from the trailer and with the girl’s help raised the tractor on to its wheels. Dolma started the engine. Nothing was wrong, except that the tank was empty. While the girl went to the river for water, Danzeng reloaded the tractor.

Both were exhausted when the work was finally done two hours later. He lay half asleep on the sand. A mysterious fragrant breeze rose. The girl knelt by him and wiped away his sweat with her green scarf. He fixed his eyes on the scarf, which, though faded and mended, was still bright against the drab sand.

“You should have got a new one long ago,” he said, looking away.

“He gave me one, but I lost it.”

“You’re lying.”

“No, you know nothing about it.”

His chest began to heave. He held Dolma’s shoulders, turned her around and said passionately, “Listen, you have ruined me.”

“No. Don’t be like this. We’re not alone.”

She jumped up, smoothed her hair and said, “Let’s get going. We’re behind time.”

He sat beside her as she skillfully maneuvered the tractor along the bumpy road, their shoulders pressed against each other.

“How did you turn it over?” he asked.

“A pigeon was in the road. I didn’t want to be late. No, I can’t explain.” Her anger suddenly rose. “What can I do? And I’m not to blame. You cared for me, so why didn’t you say you wanted to marry me? And I was so innocent; all I wanted was to go and have a look at the co-op, the tractors and the electric lights. I came because all the other girls married across the river. You’re callous! Callous! Callous!”

She turned around still sobbing and began to pound his chest.

“Look out!” he cried. The tractor almost turned over again.

Then a silence, during which he wondered to himself, “Am I to blame?”

She cast a sidelong glance at him, then handed him a towel from her neck. “Wipe your sweat.”

He took the towel. It smelt of hay, gasoline and her warmth.

It was time to go, but neither of them wanted to be the first to start the engine.

“You go first,” he urged her.

“No, you.”

“No, you,” he insisted. “Your family will be worried.”

She opened her mouth but uttered no word. As her tractor throbbed she turned around and said dreamily with drooping eyelids, “He died of drink three years ago.”

The tractor leaped forward like a drunkard.

He felt like crying but was choked by a lump in his throat. He felt like weeping, but no tears came. All he could do was wave shakily.

It was a gorgeous morning. There was no wind at all on the river. As his boat glided across with him at the tiller, his eyes strained to the far bank, and he murmured, “I’m coming for you, to marry you.”

The tractor had long been waiting on the wharf. He jumped out of his boat impatiently before it was firmly moored, only to be greeted by a strange, pretty girl with an innocent face, who glanced at her watch and said, “She’s gone. I came instead, and I’ve been waiting over two hours.”

He stood there confused.

“What’s the matter with you? Do you mind? She was taken to Lhasa by car.”

“You’re lying.” He wouldn’t believe her.

“I swear by my mother. Dolma is a model worker. Have you ever traveled by car?”

“No.” He shook his head.

“Neither have I. You seem to be in love with her. Someone’s in love with me too.”

“Did she say anything before she left?”

“No. Oh, yes. She said she wanted to go back to her home village.”

Her home village. He narrowed his eyes and looked back. His village against the mountain across the river was no more than a white dot dancing slightly in the heat haze like something out of a fairy tale. It was her home village too.”What a wide river!” the girl exclaimed, her eyes following his.

The age-old river flowed on under the scorching sun.

Copyright Tashi Dawa. By arrangement with the author. Translation copyright Li Guoqing. All rights reserved.

Rosario Sanmiguel’s immigrant smuggler crosses over
Translated by John Pluecker

Maids, gardeners, waiters, even a mariachi with instruments and everything.

Rubén Darío on the music of poetry
Translated by Gabriel Gudding

A poet moves in the world.

Tashi Dawa’s raftsman navigates the currents of love lost
Translated by Li Guoqing

The village girls married across river.

Tashi Dawa was born in Tibet in 1959. He began his career as a stage designer at Tibetan Play Troupe in 1972; later he became a playwright for the same company.  In 1985, he became a professional writer for the Tibetan Writers Association.  He is currently a member of the Chairman Committee of the China’s Writers Association, and the Chairman of the Tibetan Writers Association and Vice Chairman of the Tibetan Cultural Union. He has received numerous literary awards for his short stories and his writing has been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Dutch and Czech. He has been published in France, Japan, and Italy.

TODAY, Thursday May 1 at 1 pm: Celebrate “BURMA: A LAND AT THE CROSSROADS” with WWB, Ian Buruma and Thant Myint-U at the 2008 PEN World Voices Festival.

Why cry
for the wingless spirit bird?
Why cry
for the honeybird?

The king attends a funeral
and dances with his eyebrows,
his naked words smelling of sand
and gunpowder.

The polluted wind
only smells of lost dreams,
some kinds of amorphous declarations
about blood mixed with dance songs.

Our royal king
smokes a tired cigarette
and eats biscuits with a fork.

He lives in volcanic tempers,
sniffing the wind for armed insurgency
in all locked places.

The king,
he wears necklaces of bullets
his lips stiff with pronouncements.

Tomorrow’s funeral
is banned,
the corpse
detained
for further
questioning.

Copyright 2008 by Chenjerai Hove. By arrangement with the author. All rights reserved.

As a writer, I have come to know that writers have the misfortune of being invited to speak on things about which they know absolutely nothing. What do I know about this magic string of words: “Hospitality knows no borders.” All I know is that millions of innocent people have been killed or died fighting to preserve those things called borders, frontiers, boundaries, some kind of barriers against your friends or enemies, even if they are only potential enemies.

Imagine a world without borders. Automatically millions of people will lose their jobs. I am talking of passport officers, immigration officers, soldiers; military factories would close, gun traders would probably have to go home. Fence makers would have nothing to fence in or out. Builders of high, defensive walls, they will be unemployed. Makers of the technology of borders, all those would have to retire to be retrained for some other useful trade. What a wonderful world!

Words are always a search for possibilities, they are fluid and they break like eggs, as my friend the poet Niyi Osundare says. Who said words are fragile? They are indeed fragile, but it has come to the notice of the world that the owners of words, the creators of these dots on paper, are more vulnerable than the word itself.

Was it the Greek philosopher Plato who poetically said poets should be banned from the republic? As far as I can see, the republic usually demands quantifiable things, bridges, roads, tall buildings, an abundance of police and security officers. The republic seems to hate words, images, metaphors.

Hence the creators of words and images find themselves as vulnerable as their creations. The republic is afraid of images to which it does not exercise control.

Control, that is the word, the power to give meaning to things, events, shapes and sizes of things, the power to name reality. Under dictatorial and suppressive regimes, “words cause itches on the private parts of the republic.”

Words name the nakedness of the emperor as it is, its beauty and its ugliness. Writers, and indeed all artists, search for new ways of naming the angels and their devils. But you see, the angels and devils of the republic happen to own the institutions of giving or depriving others of freedom in all its manifestations—freedom to create words, freedom to share them, freedom to move across borders (real or imagined), freedom to name the sound of the waves.

Sometimes I think that we, as writers, word crafters, are persecuted by mistake. How can the whole republic be so afraid of a mere mortal who does not even own a house, who owns only a mind and heart that he or she listens to? How can the republic think it will collapse if words are allowed to mushroom in the hearts and minds of the citizens?

But then I know, from experience, that in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, the word became flesh.

Before I left my cruel, beloved country in 2001, four heavily armed police officers came to arrest me. I mean heavily armed, to come to arrest a single writer. The alleged crime was that I was a drug dealer, shipping cannabis across the border to Botswana, although I had never been to that border in my life. When I successfully explained myself out of the imminent arrest, I asked the senior officer why they would bring guns to arrest a mere writer. His answer was that there was the possibility of me running away.

Then I thought, have words, poems, lyrics, become contraband? As the policemen drove away, friends could only warn: “You have asked for it again? You and your poetry are in trouble.”

In places where governments manufacture silence alongside bullets, words and those who produce them are a serious threat to national security. As Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once said: “Internal exile is always harder and more futile than any exile outside.”

Before we left home, we were already in exile, banished to prison, to borders of silence, to a forced amnesia, to a life of total insecurity. The midnight knock on our doors always exhausted us with fear. In my case, I decided to work throughout most nights until sunrise, to avoid the nightmares.

Reality is elusive, like a dream. It needs to be named. Those who have the capacity to search for new names for this elusive dream called reality are, indeed, in danger. For, after they take away our reality, they also want to take away our dreams, our visions in their total complexity.

I believe writers and other artists have the task, the duty to celebrate human joy, sadness, human folly, and the ugliness and beauty of our social and cultural aspirations. We try to celebrate the lies and truths which we tell ourselves. In other words, we fight for the right to be wrong but free.

A writer denied the right to celebrate the moon, love, flowers, hatred, and doubt is like a bird denied singing to the arrival of the flowers of spring. Such a bird dies a slow and painful death. The death of memory is the death of creativity. We are dealing with lives, with the word as a living invention whose origin we don’t even know. Human beings became human because of their capacity to name things, to name themselves, thus locate themselves in the universe. To locate ourselves thus means we create what I would dare to call a cosmovision, a vision of the harmony and disharmony of being where we are, of being human beings walking on two feet, not four.

It is only recently, not more than a hundred years ago, if I remember, that the Church of Rome allowed the ordinary people to read the Bible on their own. The high priests did not want to lose control of the word.

The republic does not want to lose control of the word. The republic is, in our troubled times, the new High Church, with the power to create prisons and handcuffs, the power to decide who goes inside those prisons and who remains outside of them.

We know that corrupt bank managers, police officers, and politicians go to jail whimpering for their freedom. The writer too goes to jail, but words have taught the writer what the others have not learnt. Words are an instrument of defiance and celebration. The corrupt businessman cries because he has been deprived of the facility to spend his money on some god-forsaken island, in bikinis and swimsuits. The corrupt policeman cries because he knows how bad it is to be inside the prison. But the writer sometimes defiantly asks the prison office locking his cell: “Why are you locking yourself out?” as one Zimbabwean asked the officer before he was declared “insane” and released.

We live in a dangerous world, especially for those who do not succumb to the things which society has been drugged into believing are normal. Excessive wealth, excessive poverty living alongside each other like sister and brother in a hate relationship. We live in a world where there are so many borders that we have been taught no to see.

A young German student studying my works asked me in a questionnaire if Africa was going to achieve the same level of grand respect for human rights as Europe. I had to politely say to him: human rights abuses are only so subtly hidden in your country that you are being told not to see them, and the tragedy is that you believe your country is a perfect example.

Indeed, we have so many borders. The most dangerous ones are those we are not not to see. Racism, economic disparities, hatred in our history books, power for the haves and ghettoes for those who produce after the hardest labor for our world. Religious fanaticism disguised as civilization, the new “crusades” of trying to convert everyone to this or that religion as if there could ever be found a society without its own religion.

For goodness sake, if I have been worshipping my god through a rock or a tree or a mosque or a cathedral, and it worked in more ways than one for thousands of years, please be polite enough to respect me and leave me alone with my gods.

A writer has to contend with the reality that there are too many Christians without Christ, too many Moslems without Prophet Mohammed. Otherwise how can we understand a powerful Christian leader who authorizes the bombing and torture of hundreds of innocent people? And every Sunday he attends church. How else can we understand a religious leader who authorizes his followers to go around beheading anyone they do not agree with? Christians without Christ, Moslems without Mohammed, as far as I can see.

As writers and artists, most of us have to try hard to sharpen our vision and use it to fight those religious distortions and absurdities. The risks are real, so we seek “hospitality” in other lands, far away from the lands which are part of our psychological, geo-emotional, linguistic and historical selves. We become nomads, living more in other countries than in our own, learning to pronounce languages which we have never dreamt we would learn.

The most painful part of exile is the sudden realization that you may not come back, the sudden removal of the possibility to return to those voices, sounds, smells and movements with which you entered the world of meaning.

As the plane takes off, you look at the trees through the window, the tarmac, the little hills where you learned to shoot the little birds with catapults, the little houses where your mother could be sitting, yearning for your return. You see them all, you hear even the sound of the wind, you hear the rippling sounds of the little stream where you swam and bathed. Then you know that you are not likely to come back for a long time.

Then you sit in a foreign land, you know only the way to the office and a few side streets. You start to learn the new names of people and things. You become a child again, learning basic things like what food to buy without being sure whether it will cause you sleepless nights or give you satisfaction. You make so many mistakes. You even buy some powder thinking it is salt when it is some obnoxious substance usually used for the laundry machine.

Yes, you are a stranger in these parts. Everything plays tricks on you. The sun rises in the wrong place. The rivers flow in the wrong direction. The most important question you rehearse to answer becomes: “Where do you come from?” as if you are an intruder in all places, at all times. And when you answer, the faces around you shrink with disgust. Then you withdraw into yourself, the borders have been erected. Nightmares every night. You are alone in a crowd, without a country.

Pain. No extra ears to pour this pain into, to share the “one hundred years of solitude,” as Gabriel García Marquez called it. You are sure that you are a candidate for the nearest mental hospital. You fear everything, even yourself.

It is the pain of longing to be where you should be, to be home. The pain of unfulfilled desire to return, to walk among the people who will call you by name at every street corner.

And when you call home, your family might not even feel free to talk to you. You discover that the whole previous week, the government newspapers, the only ones in existence, had hysterically dedicated several pages to denouncing you as “an unpatriotic coward,” “a traitor,” “a sell-out.” All the language of slander is poured on you as if you were such a powerful person that if you had remained in the country, you would have taken over the statehouse. Even your own friends, journalists and writers, suddenly discover that it makes them more popular to denounce you. They might even get a small reward from the statehouse, chairman of some commission whose function is yet to be invented.

Writers in our parts of the world are vulnerable, so our vulnerability demands the removal of borders so the weak can escape and learn to be strong again, to smile, to laugh, to walk in the sun and feel this world is a healthy home to be.

In fact, it is true that we are the lucky ones, leaving home on a plane, flying away. There are those who cross crocodile-infested rivers to escape. No one knows about them. They do not even dream of a passport. There are over three million such Zimbabweans in South Africa. There are those who drown daily in the seas trying to escape on some broken-down boat. And when they reach the place of unlimited “hospitality,” they are bundled back on the next plane, destination “home,” bitter home, where there are still other borders waiting to welcome them harshly.

Copyright Chenjerai Hove. By arrangement with the author. All rights reserved.

Ignacio Abel stopped in his tracks when, through the hubbub of Penn Station, he heard someone calling his name. Which, of course, was impossible. In his three days of waiting in New York, he’d received no phone calls and no one had come to see him. The only evidence he’d had that he still existed for anyone but himself was a telegram from a certain Professor Stevenson which had arrived that morning and a letter from his wife, mailed several months ago from the other side of the war’s front line. The telegram consisted of a brief apology for the several days of silence and a detailed series of instructions for reaching Burton College on that afternoon’s 4:00 train. The letter was a lengthy diatribe that filled and spilled off the pages, a catalog of complaints for which there was no possible solution, an endless monologue by someone who never stops talking and never listens and hasn’t noticed that everyone else has been driven from the room.

He was traveling toward a building that didn’t yet exist, in a place he’d never been before: a library whose white walls were still only lines penciled in his sketchbook, on a hill overlooking the Hudson River.

The paths his wife’s letter must have taken, from a Spanish city occupied by rebel forces to a hotel on the other side of the Atlantic, were inconceivable. The letter seemed to have followed his scent, guided by the same blind determination to denounce him that had moved the hand that wrote it and then folded the pages, sealed the envelope, and dropped it in the mailbox, knowing full well how unlikely it was that the letter would ever reach its addressee.

But now nothing at all was like the normal life of a few months earlier; the impossible had become commonplace while the ordinary certainties and dreary routines of former days had all been broken off, perhaps forever. A summer beach resort just an hour’s somnolent train ride away was as distant now as if it were on another continent. A letter that would have taken two days at most to reach Madrid was lost forever or had to cross half the world to find its recipient. All sorts of different postmarks and scribblings covered the battered envelope, which at some point was in the hands of the Red Cross in Paris and was then rejected and returned by a Madrid postal worker: Addressee unknown. The red letters written diagonally across his name and address negated Ignacio Abel’s existence and denied him his home, which he’d left barely two weeks earlier, with the anguished thought that he might never return.

He was astonished by the amount of distance that just a few days can contain, the way a person’s identity deteriorates after days spent without speaking to anyone, moving alone among strangers, in the same way that clothing wears out quickly when a man has only one suit and no more than two shirts and a single pair of shoes and hat. There may be difficulties at the border; if you have to cross by the mountains it’s best to travel light. He’d left Madrid with a valid passport and visa for the United States, and nevertheless he’d acted and felt like a fugitive. He was traveling with a legitimate aim and destination that was perfectly in keeping with his experience and professional status, but he was agonized by a deep-seated sense of being a deserter, the insecurity of one who has committed or is about to commit a fraud. At every border crossing he was seized by a fear of not finding his papers, of having his papers rejected by the police or customs officers who examined them. He had learned that personal identity is a tower too fragile to stand on its own, that documents are not always enough to confirm it, even to oneself. In some way, his passport photo already depicted another man; it had been taken in a distant and forever abolished era, the beginning of July, a few months earlier.

The memory was as detailed as the feeling of distance. But the principal difference between him and the man in the photo wasn’t the clear loss of weight or the development of a new expression at the corners of the mouth that was probably there to stay. The gaze that now stared back at him in the mirror was no longer the same as the one that had serenely confronted the camera in the photographer’s studio on the Gran Via. Since then, Ignacio Abel had seen things that his increasingly inexact double in the photograph would have been incapable of imagining. Seen things, heard words, explosions, shots, moans, animal screams emerging from human throats. He’d been awoken in the middle of the night by bombs exploding and volleys of shots, by brutal footsteps racing upstairs and a loud pounding that was, literally, death knocking at the door.

Now, far from all that, temporarily safe, he was rushing to catch a train and a voice had brought him to a halt. After so many days of not existing for anyone else, of traveling alone and walking through unfamiliar places, Ignacio Abel gave a start of emotion and panic on hearing someone call out to him in the station corridor. His conscious mind rejected the reality of such a voice at the same time as he stopped short and turned around to look for its source amid the throng of strangers. His name had been spoken behind him, very nearby, not like the shout of someone calling from afar through the din of the station, but a calm, nearby voice, almost murmuring his name in the half-light of the corridor: Ignacio, Ignacio Abel. It was a familiar voice, but he hadn’t been able to identify it: it had sounded so clear, yet he couldn’t say whether it was a man’s voice or a woman’s. He stood there immobile, his suitcase in hand, turning toward the direction he thought it had come from, and some of the passersby who were bustling around him bumped into him and then, without looking at him, emitted dry interjections he did not understand. In these strangers’ hostility, the eyes, the human gaze played no role. This was another difference from Madrid, where so often during those final days he had seen eyes that sought out his eyes with a fixed gaze that terrified him. Averting his eyes quickly was one of his new strategies for surviving.

But he was in a hurry, too, just like the men who were pushing him aside with their elbows because Ignacio Abel was now interfering with their mad dash through the station. The huge clock suspended beneath the metal arches showed the time as 3:51; the train for Rhinecliff was leaving precisely at 4:00. He’d been trying in vain to find the track for a few minutes now, confused by all the people and the metallic English words that rattled from the loudspeakers, by the great, unanimous clamor, all the sounds in the station echoing beneath the giant vault. His ear was growing accustomed to the foreign language and now made out whole phrases at random, which remained suspended in the air like visible ribbons of words: I told you we were late but you never pay attention and now we’re going to miss the train. It felt as if the words were addressed to him, slow and indecisive as he was, so awkward amid all the people.

For a few seconds he’d believed that someone was saying his name, saving him from his anonymity, fleetingly restoring a lost or canceled identity which had been increasingly remote from him ever since he left Madrid but especially after he crossed the French border and found himself in a heartless country where the war did not exist. There, the war was no longer a nearby reality or agonizing memory, but suddenly became a dream too complicated and absurd to be real. That was when they began, especially in Paris: the imaginary voices, as vivid and fleeting as the visual illusions that frequently overwhelmed him. Acoustic mirages. He’d hear a voice in the street and for a moment it seemed as though someone were calling out to him. He would catch sight of a distant figure, a silhouette through a café window, and for a second he’d be sure it was an acquaintance from Madrid. His children, who were in Spain and whom he hadn’t seen in the last three months—only a little more than an hour away by train and nevertheless as far away as if they were on the other side of a bottomless crevasse opened up by some geological cataclysm—were there in front of him, kicking around a soccer ball on a sandy path in the Luxembourg gardens. The night before leaving Madrid he’d gone to say good-bye to José Moreno Villa and found him alone and visibly aged in his unheated room in the Residencia de Estudiantes, and nevertheless he saw him, walking a few paces ahead along the Boulevard Saint-Germain the very morning he arrived in Paris, once again erect and younger, with the solid bourgeois elegance of a few months earlier, wearing one of the English wool sweaters he liked so much, his felt hat tilted jauntily to one side. A second later, as he drew closer to the person who had triggered it, the mirage would vanish and Ignacio Abel would find it hard to understand how his eyes could possibly have been so deceived: the children playing in the Luxembourg Gardens were older than his and didn’t look like them in the slightest; the man who was identical to Moreno Villa would stop in front of a shop window and turn out to have a coarse, dull-witted face and eyes with no spark of intelligence, and to be wearing a suit of undistinguished cut.

Original copyright Antonio Muñoz Molina. By arrangement with the author. Translation copyright 2008 by Esther Allen. All rights reserved.

For Tim Peltason, Debra Carbares, Anjali Prabhu, and the Newhouse Humanities Center, Wellesley College

Ben, do you know why the dreams of children are always corrupted in the mouths of adults? Why must we lose the gift of wonder and the faculty of indignation? And why do so few of us become ice-breakers or fire alarms? And yet, Ben, you gave us markers, signposts, beginnings . . . Of thought, dreams and meditation, to take away and sustain us for the rest of our lives.

We were only a group of young Berliners eager to live out in the open. For that, no need to respect bourgeois conventions. Instead, we had to swear and spit into the street, bellow in the greasy spoons and whorehouses of Old Berlin, be on the same wavelength as Paris poets and London bohemians, promise ourselves we’d pack up and leave the rotten Weimar Republic that produced more missionaries and lawyers than acrobats. We had to go, not to France where the bourgeoisie we reviled had ruled the roost since Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, but to Paris—I mean the Paris of Rimbaud and Laforgue, the Paris of inner earthquakes and bohemian years, the Paris of Montparnasse where debates fly high in the Rotonde, the Dôme, the Coupole and even the Jockey Club. No sooner had we arrived than we had to shout with Flaubert that hatred for the bourgeoisie is the beginning of wisdom, turn our backs on their cynical, prudish professors, with their monocles and shiny black shoes polished like mirrors; encased in vulgar materialism, they spend their time trying to determine whether the tomato is a fruit or a vegetable, if it should be eaten as a starter or dessert, raw or boiled, etc. Our only rule: an intense life of the mind, no matter how indolent or dissolute our real lives might turn out to be. Keep sight and hearing sharp. Keep ears whipped up by jazz and Mozart operas—music that irritates stay-at-homes with bad breath and fat bellies, not to mention businessmen who hire and fire with a vengeance. In short, live like those desert plants that have to grow in a hostile environment and need to thrust their roots deep into the clay for nourishment. Swap the patina of habit for the intoxication of novelty. Ask oneself what finally counts in a life: owning a small private house in the Marais or going on a trip to the East like Flaubert with his friend Maxime du Camp, or just running away out of erotic passion and mystic quest? A fortune from exotic wood in Gabon, or poetic fever in a garret on Rue Quincampoix, scribbling out page after page while looking lovingly at the skull inevitably wedged between the fat volumes of Dante, Rabelais and Don Quixote? Ah, the bohemian life!

Ben, isn’t your whole life a floating balloon hanging just over the bushes, waiting for the helium that would surely send it up to the star-drenched sky—the light gas of love, no doubt? I know how good you feel in Paris, especially at this time of your life; you hang out with prostitutes, stateless people and immigrants. There are loads of them. The Paris of covered passages, vanishing points and your beloved Baudelaire. The Paris of the Bibliothèque Nationale, the old library where Maurice Blanchot always has some kind words and a warm cup for you. You would sometimes meet him in a little café on Rue Mazarine. The two of you talked about Paris and architecture. “Here, architecture is not a set,” you would say, “It’s an essential character, rooted in its history, never out of the frame, nor out of danger, nor out of the reach of cannons. No matter how hard it tries to fool us, how much it melts into the landscape, welcoming and being welcomed by the Seine, mistress of the city. Moreover, it makes a point of using the dialect of the river’s gentle meanders, speaking the patois of the four seasons, resisting the fury of atmospheric pressure, arching its back under the cold of dawn and suffering under the whip of lightning.” Blanchot would nod, his mind half elsewhere.

Like that landscape, you were always guided by the mobile intuition of daydreaming, the alchemy of dreams; you even turned the cheap paper of rumor into the silk of reason. Ah Ben, you’re probably hiding it from yourself but you truly are part of that lost group, I mean those all-too-Germanized Jews who can find themselves only by going back to the deep roots of their people and returning to the land of Israel to join the masses flocking from all over to make the deserts of Palestine turn green. Haven’t you remained the German petty-bourgeois, Dr. Walter Benjamin, sometime journalist and unemployed professor, unable to write a novel about his predicament because you yourself are a character from a novel? A dull life without the novelty of springs or the adventure of waves.

If you don’t know whose brother you are, Ben, blood brother or ink brother, you do know where you come from and who your parents are. A very old European family: work and education come first. The two trays of the scale often freeze in equilibrium in their daily lives. Not in yours, ever since you set out on the quest for your own Grail—for what you call “the masterful work of art and its magical aura.” Make of it what you will. There’s nothing like going through your correspondence to get to know you. Ben, admit it: your letters and travel writings are where you reveal your whole being. There, your deepest self rises to the surface—the one you hide, erase, and sometimes persecute.

Your fleshly self, too. Receptive to the magic of the feminine continent no man can ever escape, especially if that magic is decked out in gypsy dresses, walks barefoot through the narrow streets with desire slung over its chest, subtly revealing the erogenous zones. Ah Ben, look at yourself: you should see your face! You’re experiencing a very strange sensation, a lack of something or other. A tickling in your ticker, affect rising up in you, you feel like bursting into sobs. You are flooded with pleasure, swooning before the gypsy woman. You look at her sheepishly, in silence. Like a cat contemplating a goldfish. And now you’re taking it all in: you’re recording the ample hips, the pretty curve of her thighs, the plumpness of her breasts, the flaming triangle of her fleece. You’re hallucinating in this Parisian park. You feel the power of her breasts. You size up the vigor of her loins. This girl lacks the affectations of beauty that the cosmetic industry tries to sell all over the world. She does not have a sagging neck hidden by a chic little scarf from Hermès. She lives in your hands. Her Amazon strength surprises you. Her round breasts, two balls almost, or rather, two divine artichokes. You imagine that she keeps two little humming birds warm between her legs; they will soon fly off over the Luxembourg Gardens into its apricot-colored sky, indifferent and listless. Her laugh is simple and clear as a child’s with an insolent timbre, a child utterly absorbed in her games. A laugh punctuated by the dance of the bracelets around her wrist. It would give boys sweaty hands, not to mention a singing heart.

Don’t you think, Ben, that one must say or write everything in the blunt terms our times demand? That our life expectancy must be extended by smiles or laughter? But first, this: who brought you all together on that gloomy afternoon? Who’s in charge of the warp and woof of this story? You would look for a scientific, even a sensual explanation for the intrinsic nature of love. Rumor has it you are searching for its curative properties. And you would go all the way, even if you burned your wings. Even if you consumed yourself in melancholy, or got drunk beyond all reason. Giving in to a wave of depression. Drowning in the recurrent tides of night like Vincent Van Gogh, lying for all eternity in a wheat field, and—the height of happiness—next to his brother Theo. In the little cemetery of Auvers-sur-Oise, their gravestones are huddled together, mutually protecting each other from the wind. Against the wind and against all odds, you will set out to solve the enigma in which love takes its source. Through what detours and side roads do we sometimes happen upon that source, if we’re lucky? On the way, you get wounded enough to learn the price of blood. Sorrow is a piece of luggage that you weigh as you go, liberated water overflowing its bed. So what is the meaning of our coming into the world, our existence in this world and the necessity of leaving it some day?

Translation of Sur la piste de Ben. Copyright 2008 by Abdourahman A. Waberi. By arrangement with the author. Translation copyright 2008 by David Ball and Nicole Ball. All rights reserved.

Zeus edged the bus in among the pines. No sooner did he turn off the engine than he heard the animals yapping and growling behind the canvas tarp stretched tight across the cage behind him. Taking a kick at the iron grille, he snapped, “Shut up, you rotten sons of bitches.” But his words were meant not so much for the animals, which couldn’t have possibly kept still, anyway, hungry and pumped up with amphetamines as they were, but more so to finally rouse his clients. They’d been asleep for almost a hundred and fifty miles, the man’s head drooping to the side, partly in the woman’s lap, the woman slumped against the fake leather seat and the fiberboard lining the door.

Again Zeus kicked the grille, and as he looked back at his clients he could hear the animals thirstily nudging the empty enamel vats over the riveted metal floor of the cage. The man was the first to stir, his eyes flitting about in a daze as he seemed to remember what was going on. Placing a hand on the woman’s shoulder and giving her a shake, he whispered something to her. Theirs was a lovely, melodic tongue. Zeus had no idea what it was, Armen