Arthur Sze
Copper Canyon Press ($16)

by Ted Mathys

In Arthur Sze’s stunning tenth collection, he departs from previous books by adopting new formal techniques to illuminate one of his enduring themes: how to account for the simultaneity of lived events in a poetic language that is damned to unfold over time. The book opens with an untitled page consisting of a single line of verse: “Black kites with outstretched wings circle overhead—.” After each titled poem in the collection another page like this appears, with a few unrelated image-lines, each ending with an em-dash. Their content slowly accumulates into travel journal, with images suggesting South Asia. The em-dashes leap out manically from the ends of the lines as if to suggest that something is about to happen or just happened to the traveler, but the transcription process couldn’t keep pace: “A naked woman applies kohl to her right eyelid— / The limp tassels of new ashoka leaves in a tomb courtyard—.”

Buried in the acknowledgments at the end of the book is the explanation that these lines belong to a single poem, “Sarangi Music,” which was first published as a whole but here appears in segments, dispersed, and stripped of its title. “Sarangi Music” thus exists for the reader in two places at once; it is posited as an ideal construct residing somewhere else but is experienced here in flickering, periodic fragments. This is the magic of Sze’s poetry. He creates artifacts in which the profusion of each present moment can be felt viscerally if not fully understood, in which “each fragment is a whole” precisely because “Consciousness is an infinite net / in which each hanging jewel absorbs and reflects / every other.”

Like much of Sze’s work, Compass Rose is anchored by numbered, serial poems driven by paratactic images and overheard snippets of language laid down in rapid succession. Sze privileges active present tense verbs (“an owl lifts,” “kiwis hang,” “he swerves,” “surf slams,” “two planets bob”) and temporal ligatures like “while” and “as” that make the actions in his poems feel coincident rather than causal. Though Sze sometimes adopts a deeply emotional lyric “I,” more often the work is peopled with characters who are typecast by occupation—“At the lab a technician prepares a response / to a hypothetical anthrax attack”; “A healer aligns / her east and west”; “A veteran’s wince coincides / with the pang a girl feels when / she masters hooked bows in a minuet”—all of which deepens the feeling that each of us is not an inviolably unique person, but rather an actor embedded in a larger web of physical life.

This goes for the poet, too. Even as he mines his surroundings for sensuous lines of verse, Sze’s speaker seems consistently aware of the limits of human perception and our insignificance, to borrow a brutal phrase from Mao, “as far as the universe as a whole is concerned.” In many ways the book is governed by a desire to contend with this in language, to make palpable the elusive natural forces that structure the present: “If I sprinkle iron filings onto a sheet / of paper, I make visible / the magnetic lines of the moment.” Magnetic lines, state lines, nanoseconds, meteorological isobars, ultraviolet radiation—Sze’s wide aperture, observational precision, and sustained intellectual pressure transform what seems beyond the grasp of the human senses into events in language.

In the compass rose, Sze finds an elegant metaphor for this poetics. A compass rose is the figure on a compass or nautical map that depicts the cardinal directions: North, East, South, and West. In its crudest form it resembles a four-pointed star, but many designs bisect the cardinal directions into smaller units such as Northeast, East-Northeast, and so on. The more precise the observational units on a compass get, the more its lines proliferate, and the more the pointed star begins to resemble an ornate rose in bloom.

Like a compass rose, Sze’s meticulous examinations of scientific phenomena ultimately yield aesthetic rewards, and what appears at first to be plainly aesthetic, such as “the heart-shaped leaves of spring,” is often revealed to be an illusory aspect of a more complicated system in which “dark energy and dark / matter enlace this world.” Indeed, in the title poem Sze draws a parallel between this scientific-aesthetic tension and the poetic tension between literal and figurative uses of language. “What closes and is literal, / what opens and is figurative?” he writes, only to reverse the aphoristic question a few lines later: “what closes / and is figurative, what opens and is literal?” These poems vibrate in the hidden, interstitial spaces between open and closed, literal and figurative, science and art, the land and its maps, the compass and the rose.

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Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry
Edited by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
Accents Publishing ($16.95)

by Holly Karapetkova

For most Americans, Bulgaria remains a shadowy presence, a nebulous country somewhere in Eastern Europe that was part of the former Soviet Bloc. It has not attracted the same political attention as many of its neighbors, and much of its literature and culture have similarly slipped beneath the American radar. Other than a spattering of anthologies and a few collections by individual poets, Bulgarian poetry in particular remains largely unavailable in English. The Season of Delicate Hunger, a new anthology of Bulgarian poetry edited and largely translated by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer, helps to remedy this dearth, providing American readers with a refreshing glimpse of contemporary Bulgarian poets.

Stoykova-Klemer, an accomplished American poet and native Bulgarian, is the perfect vehicle for rendering the fragile body of the poem for an American audience. Not only is she acutely sensitive to the workings of Bulgarian language and culture, but she has an exceptional ear for contemporary American poetry, and her translations are so seemingly effortless that we forget we are reading translations and connect directly with the work itself.

The anthology is ambitious in scope and scale, taking on the voices of thirty-two living poets from a variety of regions, generations, and aesthetics; many of these writers are being made available in English for the first time. This wide range gives us the sense of a poetry that is as varied as the intellectual landscape of Bulgaria itself: the conversational digressions of Vladislav Hristov, the reimagined mythology of Kristin Dimitrova, the philosophical “Visions” of Kerana Angelova, the symbolist leanings of Ani Ilkov, the lyricism of Petar Tchouhov—all are present here in a single collection.

The anthology not only introduces a diverse group of contemporary Bulgarian poets to an American audience, but it also does what the editor sets out to do in the introduction: it conveys something of the Bulgarian mentality and literary sensibility. Some of the poems remind us how deeply the experiences of communism and the disappointments following its collapse are embedded in the Bulgarian consciousness. In Mirela Ivanova’s “What I Remembered, but Couldn’t Tell My Six-Year-Old Daughter, While We Were Stuck for 11 Minutes in the Elevator . . .,” the speaker thinks to herself, “I’d been stuck in the regime itself, and it felt / as if it wouldn’t end, and then I caught / the incurable inadaptability / to the bright future.” Other poems like Ekaterina Yosifova’s “You Don’t Need to Know Geography” tap into the cynicism and self-deprecating humor so prevalent in the Bulgarian psyche. When events seem out of whack in the world, a “girl ask[s]: is this map Bulgarian? / They smirked. / Everything made sense to them again.”

The anthology also includes poems that offer us a Bulgarian perspective on American society that is sometimes humorous, sometimes disconcerting, but always provocative. Vladimir Levchev’s “Justice for All,” notes ironically how “The rich man can buy a senator. / The poor man can / buy the rich man’s newspaper / and read / about the senator.” Ivan Hristov’s selection gives Americans a more humorous view of themselves, discussing an American dog “Snickers”:

Actually,
all dogs in America
are named Snickers
so it’ll be hard for you
to picture him

and a “Panera Bread” where the restaurant pager becomes “a tiny / spaceship”:

So why
am I writing
these things now?
No matter!
I just wanted
To dedicate
this poem
to everyone
who has ever thought
that such a thing
does not exist.

But while the anthology does communicate much of the Bulgarian sensibility, it reaches far beyond national boundaries and speaks directly to what it means to be human. The book contains powerful poems of loss and death, from Marin Bodakov’s intimate “Mud on My Palm,” where the speaker tells us how “with my little household shovel, / I finished burying my dad. / I wish this were a metaphor”; to Georgi Gospodinov’s pensive “Time Is a Neutron Bomb”:

Nothing will be knocked down,
the houses will stay,
the streets will stay,
the cherry tree in the yard will stay.
Only we won’t be here.
That was the lesson
about the neutron bomb.

I’ve known since then,
death is a cherry,
ripening without me.

These are poems that do not back away from the dangers and complexities of living, which a small nation at the crossroads of history— including, most recently, 500 years of Turkish rule, a communist dictatorship, and a failing democracy—cannot help but understand. Even passion and desire are marked with uncertainty, as in Aksinia Mihaylova’s untitled love poem:

thread the needle with a stronger strand
to sew up all fissures
in you and me, in the space,
the seclusion squats at the needle’s steel pinnacle,
one sleeve in your lap, the other
in my lap, hurry,
hurry, one matchstick is not enough
for the dark that will swallow us.

The pieces in the anthology startle us with their raw emotion; they show us our most vulnerable and most honest selves. In Valentin Dishev’s words,

Sometimes,
if a scream cuts through
your veins,
there is no need to look around.
Sometimes you are the blade.

Such moments make us reexamine our lives and reconsider what we thought we knew, as the best poetry always does. The poetry on these pages may be uniquely Bulgarian, but it resonates with a beauty and humanity no reader is likely to forget.

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Erika Meitner
BOA Editions ($16)

by Michele Balze

In Erika Meitner’s Copia, the abundance of language referred to in the title springs from the American landscape. From the suburbs to the decaying city of Detroit, Meitner uncovers richness of meaning in plain American language. Common objects and signage become mediums for recovering history and personal memory.

For much of the book, Meitner occupies the persona of a suburban mother who has left her itinerant youth behind. In the last section, she moves into documentary poems reflecting on the decline of Detroit. Throughout, she explores an American landscape of motel rooms and discount stores. Emphasizing the commonality of her persona, she writes:

I am a Walmart shopper, a tract-house dweller—the developments
you can see clearly from every highway in America that’s not jammed up
on farmland or pinned in by mountains. I park my car at a slant in the lot

Lawlessness underlies the banality of these surroundings, as Meitner points out by listing strange incidents that have occurred in Walmart parking lots across the country. For example:

In the Corbin Walmart parking lot a woman with a small amount of cash
was arrested for getting in and out of trucks. A man stepped out of his car
in the Columbus Walmart parking lot, and shot himself.

In the face of these occurrences, however, the employee’s gestures of kindness express a genuine spirituality that Meitner labels as mercy.

The idea that spirituality manifests itself through common things runs through Copia, suggesting richness underlies an apparently barren surface. As she writes in “Cosmogony/Progeny”:

. . . there is still
the possibility of a miracle
happening in the form of
signs & wonders, wonders

& signs: CheckCashing or
WorkWear or BeautyMart.

Meitner’s use of found language illustrates how her view of copia runs contrary to that of the young man in “Big Box Encounter,” whose letters “feature intricate vocabulary, like soporific and ennui. / Like intervening and kinetic and tumult.” Seemingly random signs resonate as what Meitner calls, in “Post-Industrialization,” “the single greatest story of American success.” Ironically, as she later points out, “The truth is / even cities / are ephemeral.” What becomes important in the face of decay is recovering the stories of the people who inhabited the city when it was alive.

Meitner does this most effectively in “All that Blue Fire,” in which she draws out the lyricism of an autoworker’s voice as he tells the story of why he came to Detroit. Through repetition and line breaks, she gives the language of a common person the quality of a blues song:

Yeah, they go on down the line
like that. Then when it get out
to another part of the line,

they lay the motor down

Here the nostalgic voice of the autoworker captures the seduction of the industry that gave Detroit life.

Earlier, in the poems “Yizker Bukh” and “Yiddishland,” Meitner explores a quest for the past in terms of her personal history. Like the later poems about Detroit, these poems about her grandmother explore the loss of culture and a struggle to recapture the past. “Yizker Bukh” begins by comparing the process of memory to sifting through the fragments of a destroyed city:

Memory is
flotsam (yes) just
below the surface
an eternal city
a heap of rubble
debris smaller
than your fist

In the face of her grandmother’s death, Meitner uses the memory of the white turban she wore to link together a chain of memories. Acknowledging the limits of recovery, she writes:

. . . O memory how much you
erased how many holes                 we punched
in your facts since who knows the stories
she never told about the camps . . .

Insignificant details provide a means for recovering personal memory, but the historical memory evades recovery. The later poem, “Yiddishland,” reinforces the larger historical and cultural import of this loss of memory by framing her grandmother’s burial service with the larger cultural loss of Yiddish language.

The documentary poems in Copia echo this desire to recover both personal and cultural history. “The Book of Dissolution” figures the decaying city of Detroit as a text that leads to an understanding of the self. It opens: “Because it is an uninhabited place, because it makes me hollow, I pried open the pages of Detroit: the houses blanked out, factories absorbed back into ghetto palms and scrub-oak, piles of tires, heaps of cement block.” Meitner strives to read the fragments of the destroyed city, going on to write that “Burn scars on cement where scrappers torched the last bits of plastic off copper wire spell out code that reveals what the world will look like when we’re gone.” Ultimately, Meitner comes to identify with the landscape, writing, “I have been unoccupied I have been foreclosed I have been vacant for a long time.” For Meitner, this emptiness implies a fullness of meaning. As she writes in “Retail Space Available,” “though this world is changing, we will remain the same: abundant and impossible to fill.”

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Philip Hoare
Melville House ($27.99)

by Ryder W. Miller

Many people feel beckoned by the ocean; there is something in the sea air that feels magical and poetic. However, because of the arduous nature of seafaring life, many people prefer to experience it via armchair travel with documentaries and books. With The Sea Inside, British author Philip Hoare takes the reader on such a journey.

The author is captivated by the ocean, and is a subscriber to the idea that human beings evolved alongside the sea:

The sea sustains and threatens us, but it is also where we came from. Some consider that the relationship is closer than we think. Callum Roberts, among other scientists, has noted that the ratio of subcutaneous fat in humans is ten times that of other primates, nearer to that of a fin whale. From an evolutionary point of view, such human blubber would make little sense for a land hunter, but it would be eminently useful for an ‘aquatic ape’ which developed by the sea.

The science may not be so great here, but it’s a very poetic concept. Although the book has an index, it is more literary than scholarly—the writing is reverential (if occasionally opaque), and addresses themes such as the metaphorical seas of human relations.

The Sea Inside is filled with references to British people, places, and events, and readers unfamiliar with the culture may not get as much from the book. As an island nation, Britain is home to some fascinating sea lore, and Hoare relates these tales so colorfully that the reader might feel seasick. In describing the ocean and its saga, Hoare addresses the spiritual and emotional as well as the scientific and historical:

. . . The Pacific is by no means a landless, uninhabited expanse. It is studded with twenty-five thousand islands, large and small, each with its own stories, of people, and animals. Their narratives crisscross the ocean in an embroidered web, drawn together in invisible lines of connection from shore to island to sea, transversed in ancient feats of navigation and migration that put our modern, computer-assisted efforts to shame. Here the remotest journeys ended; and here many began, too.

Hoare’s self-deprecating humor also keeps the book from being too grandiose, such as this passage in which he attempts to play like a dolphin:

But my body declines to act like a dolphin, and there’s as much seawater up my nose as there threatens to be in my lungs. I feel like a circus animal myself; and although the dolphins come to me of their own accord, I can’t help feeling they’d be better left alone. Exhausted, I haul myself up over the boat’s side. Sometimes it’s better to watch than to take part.

The account of the voyage is wonderful and profound, and the reader may be sad at the end of the book, when the author settles back into the familiar rather than the wild. Yet for some, this might be all the more reason to read it. A stirring book about both outer and inner depths, The Sea Inside shows that humans are intrinsically connected with the ocean.

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Jennifer Kelly
University of Illinois Press ($65)

Kelsey Irving Beson

In the introduction to In Her Own Words: Conversations with Composers in the United States, author Jennifer Kelly describes the obstacles to programming classical music by women:

As a conductor, I have found that published compositions by women can be difficult to come by, and, when located, they must be purchased because the scores do not exist in most rehearsal libraries. Although I was advocating for the importance of women composers, I found that I was not programming their music in my own concerts.

. . . without the benefit of having studied women composers as a matter of course throughout my education, I mistakenly believed that the number of talented women in music was small . . .

This lack of academic recognition (and resulting monetary support) causes the obscurity and dearth of female composers to become a self-perpetuating phenomenon. The goal of In Her Own Words, which features interviews with twenty-five female composers, is to counteract this trend by “filling voids where little to no information previously existed.” The book makes a strong case for a socially conscious music scholarship while also affirming that there is no such thing as a “typical” woman composer.

The interviews are organized to “illustrate both connection and contrast”—their arrangement simultaneously highlights the diversity of the group while encouraging the reader to draw connections across genres. Jazz conductor Maria Schneider’s interview is placed next to that of academic Augusta Read Thomas; film composer Deborah Lurie is juxtaposed with Jeanine Tesori, who writes for musical theater. The interviewees also vary widely in terms of age (from early forties through late eighties), recognition (from Pulitzer Prize-winning Jennifer Higdon to the emerging Hasu Patel), and nationality (from Svjetlana Bukvich, a refugee from the former Yugoslavia, to Libby Larson, who has spent most of her career in Minneapolis). Each interviewee also has a distinctive working style: methods discussed encompass traditional manuscript notation and technology such as ProTools. Similarly, creative strategies range from allowing the music to develop “organically” to working on several pieces at once under tight deadlines.

Perhaps most relevantly for the overarching theme of the book, there are also many dissenting opinions concerning the relevance of gender in music. All of the interviewees were posed a variation on the question of what it means to be called a woman composer, and responses range from “I think it’s kind of stupid” (Pauline Oliveros) to the affirmation that it is a “heroic struggle . . . With the wind flowing in your hair and the tattered flag in the background” (Beth Anderson). A few of the composers claim that they have never felt marginalized because of gender. Others are very vocal about the enduring persistence of sexism in the music world, and attest to the continuing relevance of women-centric projects and visible female role models.

While attitudes are diverse, there are also many concepts that run through the interviews and make the book feel cohesive. For example, across genres and age groups, many of the interviewees express enthusiasm for technology. Several are avant-garde artists that incorporate electronic elements to create progressive, challenging work involving multimedia. Film and video game composer Laura Karpman describes the computer as “an unbelievable tool. . . . I loved it from the day we met.” Another notable theme is that of new avenues for art music. In a climate in which many traditional orchestras struggle to attract patrons, concerts featuring nontraditional material such as avant-garde or video game music are popular with younger audiences and often sell out. The motif of the expanding utility of classical music is especially striking considering the stereotype of the genre as an archaic art form that changes at a glacial pace.

In Her Own Words’ most compelling idea is that women composers aren’t merely entering an established community and adapting themselves to it; rather, they are shaping it according to their own experiences and needs. In many cases, their embrace of new genres, technology, and compositional techniques seems downright revolutionary. Celebrated Welsh composer Hilary Tann is optimistic about digital dissemination’s potential to topple the form’s “pyramid structure,” saying that “the whole concert apparatus has been short-circuited” and contemporary classical music thrives “in certain people’s iPods” due to sharing technology. With lessening emphasis on traditional genre divisions and the hierarchical academy, listeners are allowed to experience art music through new venues and on their own terms. Scholars, fans, and concert programmers take note—although women composers may be marginalized, they just might be the answer to classical music’s prayers.

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Edited by Barbara Cassin
Translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood
Translated by Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathanael Stein, and Michael Syrotinski
Princeton University Press ($65)

by John Toren

The challenges of exposing the full range of meaning conveyed by even a single word can be the subject of an entire book. John Portmann’s When Bad Things Happen to Other People (Routledge, 1999), for example, explores the ins and outs of the German word shadenfreude. Robert Payne’s Hubris: A Study of Pride (Harper, 1960) focuses on the nuances of that important Greek notion. And Richard Gilman’s Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1980) follows the course of that word as, over the course of centuries, it lost its meaning and gained a new one.

In Dictionary of Untranslatables, a stable of learned women and men under the direction of editor Barbara Cassin have set themselves the task of delineating a wide range of philosophical concepts, ostensibly chosen because they lack direct equivalences outside the language in which they were coined. But few concepts are capable of being transported from the forests of Germany to the vineyards of France (for example) without being transformed in one way or another. As a result, the book contains glosses on the varied cultural interpretations of nearly every major philosophical concept that abstract thought has produced. The editors largely exclude mere idiomatic turns of phrase, and restrict their attention to prominent Indo-European languages—romance, Germanic, Slavic. Thus phrases such as séntak bangun (which means “wake with a start” in Indonesian) and shibui (Japanese for the beauty of aging) do not appear. (These and many other phrases can be found in Howard Rheingold’s much shorter and more readable They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases, published by Tarcher in 1988.)

This rigorous approach to choosing and framing entries has obvious merit. Rather than exploring, in English, a select number of broad and unwieldy themes—justice, logic, causation— the way Mortimer Adler does, for example, in The Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought (Macmillan, 1992), or following the well-worn path of philosophical schools, ancient to modern, via the stepping-stones of individual thinkers, Cassin and her crew seize upon specific terms, arranged alphabetically, and attempt to convey what they mean in their original language, and how they change as translators introduce them into new languages and traditions.

Whether intentional or not, this approach plays into the seldom acknowledged fact that in Western thought there are few durable traditions. To add to the mess, philosophers often strive to make their mark by creating neologisms and then expounding upon them at great length. The contributors to this massive dictionary seldom fully expose the defects or ambiguity of the positions they examine, but by keeping their analysis within a strictly circumscribed lexicological frame, they offer insights into a wide array of terms we’ve never heard before, and refresh our appreciation of others we thought we knew well already.

The entry for the word Essence, for example, runs to twelve pages of small but readable type, broken up by a full-page sidebar on “Porphyry’s ‘metaphysics’: Being-acting without a subject,” and a shorter one called “‘Existence’ and ‘subsistence’: The Stoic strategy.” Much of the material in the essay comes from the ancient and medieval worlds, and a good deal of it is theological. It descends to philological minutia on the order of this passage:

We must obviously wait for Candidus the Arian (known by Marius Victorinus, ca. 281/291-361) for the appearance of the feminine singular existentia, along with the abstract existentialitas, whereas in Chalcidius, in his translation and commentary of the Timaeus, existentia is still a neuter plural that refers to onta . . .

I’m not sure why that’s considered “obvious,” but it suggests how closely the authors are tracking the subtle linguistic changes that can nudge the history of thought in new directions.

For a more compelling example, consider the case of Pierre Coste, who, in 1700, translated Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding from English into French. At the time, two terms that figure prominently in Locke’s work, “the self” and “consciousness,” had no French equivalent. A lengthy sidebar in the thirteen-page entry on Consciousness describes how Coste tackled this problem by translating the English consciousness as conscience, and defended his choice by reference to the writings of his predecessor Malebranche. The entry moves on to an illuminating passage describing how Malebranche had earlier challenged Descartes’ idea that we know ourselves clearly, arguing instead that we know our own soul only very imperfectly, through feeling rather than rational reflection.

This passage may inspire readers to investigate the issue further by hunting up either Malebranches’s Recherche de la Vérité or Catherine Davies’s Conscience and Consciousness: the Idea of Self-Awareness in French Philosophical Writing from Descartes to Diderot, both of which are listed in the sidebar’s bibliography. Yet nowhere in the article are we given an explanation of what the word conscience meant to the French in the early eighteenth century. This may seem a little odd, but we must keep in mind that we’re reading entries that were originally written in French, for French readers, who approach these issues with a set of lexicological tools and assumptions quite different from the ones most English-language readers possess.

The entry on Pathos may be taken as another illustration of how a translator’s choices can bend the course of intellectual history. The author notes that there have always been two opposing views of psychic life: as an active “movement” of the mind, on the one hand, and as the passive register of external events, on the other—the mirror and the lamp, as literary theorists sometimes put it. After providing examples of this split in Greek, Latin, French, and English, the author draws our attention to Cicero’s decision to translate the Greek term pathos by the Latin perturbatio rather than morbus. In so doing, Cicero was not only challenging the long-standing Stoic notion that all passions were to be resisted; he was also attempting to revive what he considered a more sophisticated view of the human psyche offered by Plato. “Cicero took advantage of his role as a creative translator,” our guide writes, “as a fabricator of neologisms and importer of Greek notions, to refresh the philosophical memory that had faded in the Greek vocabulary.”

The story grows even more interesting when Saint Augustine arrives on the scene. He rejects Cicero’s use of perturbatio, arguing that it retains too strongly the negative connotations of the Stoic notion of passion. Augustine prefers to translate the Greek term pathos with the Latin affectus, on the grounds that while passions can often lead to sin and damnation, they are also our only path to salvation, and a sage who was never moved by anything “would be, ultimately, insensitive to good and evil.”

In the course of following such arguments, we begin to form a clearer idea of how Platonic, Stoic, and Augustinian worldviews relate to one another. More importantly, perhaps, we may begin to clarify our own opinions regarding the role passion plays in life, and the role it ought to play.

German terms occupy a prominent place in the dictionary, not surprisingly. In an essay on the French language it is observed that French translators often leave German terms of critical importance untranslated, and the same is true of quite a few English-language translations. This can leave non-German readers with only a vague idea of what Heidegger’s Dasein is, for example, or what process Hegel’s Aufheben refers to. Evidently the best example Hegel could come up with to illustrate this all-important concept of “bringing to an end while preserving and rising above” was canning fruit.

Some of the entries provide choice material for cocktail conversation. In the entry on “Care” we learn that the French have no equivalent for that expressive English word. Whether that fact harbors some deep truth about national character or is merely a fortuitous disjunction between languages remains unclear. In any case, the authors are convinced that the English word care covers a greater range of meanings than the German word sorge. It can act as a verb, as in caring for a sick cat; it can refer to a worry, as is reflected in the phrase, “She hasn’t a care in the world”; and it can refer to a feeling of affection toward something, as in “I care for you deeply.” To English-language speakers, these three senses of the word form a constellation of related but distinct meanings. How could a single French or German term encompass them all?

Commonplace English words such as Pleasure (eleven pages) and Memory (fourteen pages) no longer seem so familiar once Nietzsche and Mallarmé, Spinoza and Lacan have had their say. But the dictionary also has more than enough obscure terms in Russian, Hebrew, Arabic and other languages to keep the curious monoglot up half the night. As an example, consider the Danish term Evighed. The author begins by writing, somewhat poetically:

The majestic eternal moment freezes movement, in contrast with the eternality of the ethical Self. The abstract eternity of the idea, the object of recollection, contrasts with the concrete eternity passionately lived by the existing being stretched toward the eternal as if to the future.

We do not commonly encounter such rhapsodic definitions in a scholarly dictionary. It almost makes one want to learn Danish! The author of the entry (following Kierkegaard, of course) proceeds to differentiate between three senses of the term evighed (all of which are translated by the English work eternity).

Some entries are almost shockingly brief: Form receives only a single column, half of which in devoted to cross-references to other, related entries; and Judgment gets lumped together with Justice in a similarly brief comment. And then there are the omissions. It’s regrettable, but perhaps not surprising, that the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel’s notion of disponsibilitie, usually translated as “availability,” has fallen from favor. But how can it be that Henri Bergson’s élan vital, a phrase still in common use today, failed to make the cut?

The word historicism also lacks an entry, though three pages in the entry History are devoted to “historical knowledge, the crisis of history, and historicism.” These pages don’t adequately underscore the significance of the discovery upon which historicism is based—that history and philosophy are logically inseparable—but they do offer signposts for further investigation.

Such criticisms cannot obscure the fact that Dictionary of Untranslatables is one of the most solid, wide-ranging, and remarkable books of our time. Very few will ever read it cover to cover, but anyone who dips into it with a little background in the philosophical tradition, and a desire to learn more about what life is actually about, will be rewarded many times over for the effort.

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Mario Bellatin
Edited by Daniel Parra
Translated by Kolin Jordan
7Vientos ($19.95)

by Greg Baldino and Adrian Nelson

In the classic fuzzy logic problem, a boat undergoes a series of repairs, replacing each plank of wood one at a time until the entire boat is made of new wood. The question is asked if it is still the same boat, and if not, at what point during the repairs did it become a new one? Mario Bellatin's two novellas, collected in a flip-book edition with the original Spanish and a new English translation, address a similar question of loss and identity: How do we change in the face of loss?

The narrative in Flowers is divided into a series of linked vignettes, each named after a different flower. Haunting the stories is the drug thalidomide, an immunomodulatory drug once prescribed for morning sickness, which resulted in a generation of babies born with missing or deformed limbs. Among the recurring characters is a writer (never named, though implied at times to be an analogue of Bellatin) with a prosthetic leg decorated with jewels. Elsewhere in the wandering fragmented narrative are the troubled affairs of the “Autumn Lover,” a person who is attracted to elderly people (and dresses as one); the work of Dr. Olaf Zumfelde and his assistant Henriette Wolf, which seeks to compensate victims of the drug; the mosque that the author frequents and the dervishes therein; and the brief glimpses of others struggling to navigate a world where their sexuality, their religion, or their disability separates them in solitude. Each of these pieces of interrelated flash fiction is written in a precise and concrete style, dream diaries transcribed into police reports. This stylistic detachment allows the reader to view the players in this modular drama objectively, from all angles; there are no victims or heroes, only humans trying to live and understand their lives.

Mishima’s Illustrated Biography acts much like the second half of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, reflecting and magnifying the ideas and themes of the stories in Flowers. In no way an actual biography of the controversial Japanese author, the story begins after Mishima had committed ritual seppuku following his personal militia’s failed attempt to stage a military coup. The author—sans head—attends a university lecture on his own work, and then proceeds to carry on with his life in the company of his disciple, Masakatsu Morita. Substantially more surreal than Flowers, here the novella takes the idea of loss of limbs as metaphor to a parodic extreme, examining what happens to a life when the drive of the soul is entirely removed. The narrative works because Mishima was a real person who did indeed lose his head; it allows us to consider his life before literally losing his head without requiring an embellished backstory.

Setting aside the desire for linear narratives, the two stories open up to re-viewing the world through the eyes of those it discards or ignores, unfolding petal by petal for them. In Spanish, Bellatin's prose contains echoes of the surrealism of the other literary greats before him—Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo—but stands alone in some of the things it touches, particularly disability and sexuality. The English translation, though competent, does not quite capture the fullness of Bellatin’s natural voice. But readers not fluent in Spanish may still catch a glimpse of the world that Bellatin allows to play out: the dream-fragments that one remembers on waking, brought to the language of reason.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

The Beatles: All These Years, Vol. 1
Mark Lewisohn
Crown Archetype ($40)

by Britt Aamodt

There has never been another band like the Beatles. There have been other phenoms: Shakespeare, Mozart, Bob Dylan. But no one ever captured the buoyancy, irreverence, ambition, and group chemistry tied to a creative big bang the way the Beatles did. Not surprisingly, the public has a special relationship to the Fab Four. Perhaps that's because many still living remember when John, Paul, George, and Pete thumped the boards at the Cavern Club, or when a rejiggered Beatles—John, Paul, George, and Ringo—conquered America on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Mark Lewisohn must have an audaciousness to rival that of his legendary subjects. When the historian announced in 2003 that he was writing a Beatles biography, there must have been a collective groan. Another Beatles book? It makes you wonder how many Beatles books it takes to fill the Albert Hall. Surely, it's been filled many times over.

But here's the thing: Lewisohn's book, Tune In, is the tell-all book every Beatles fan has been waiting for. Detailed in the extreme yet extremely readable, Tune In is the first of a proposed trilogy collectively titled All These Years. The narrative begins with a genealogy of the Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starkey clans—mostly Irish, mostly poor—and their beginnings in Liverpool, which would have been struck off tourist itineraries of the day as a rough, industrial backwater.

Yet it was in this smoking seaside somewhere that four boys emerged under the cloud of war: Richard Starkey, 1940; John Lennon, 1940; Paul McCartney, 1942; George Harrison, 1943. Haley's Comet did not sear the heavens to announce their arrival; wise men bearing guitars and drums did not parachute into Liverpool. But somehow these boys from the back of beyond became the musical culmination of the 20th century. As Lewisohn points out, they were both cutting-edge groundbreakers and a commercial success.

So how did they do it? Lewisohn spends 803 pages (not counting the index) detailing the Beatles' formative years, a subject that has been covered before (in the same year even, in Larry Kane's When They Were Boys), but never quite so exhaustively or entertainingly. He also wants to set the record straight, as straight as anyone who wasn't there can. He explains in the introduction:

I've wanted a history of deep-level inquiry where the information is tested accurate, and free of airbrushing, embellishment and guesswork, written with an open mind and even hands, one that unfolds lives and events in context and without hindsight, the way they occurred, and sets the Beatles fully among their contemporaries—they never existed in isolation and were always part of musical scenes with friends and rivals, young turks together in clubs and nightclubs.

What unfolds is a cast of characters worthy of a great novel. First off, there was lusty, red-haired Julia Stanley, who was impulsive enough to marry merchant seaman Alf Lennon, bear a son, then carry on with her life and romances as if marriage and motherhood were no impediment to fun. (It helped that her husband was often gone.)

Enter Aunt Mimi, Julia's captivating, iron-fisted older sister. Mimi is often cast as the domineering woman in Lennon's early life, but she’s given a balanced treatment here. After all, as her nephew's guardian, she provided the stable, book-loving environment and middle-class upbringing Julia could not. (She was also the one who famously told Lennon he would never make a living with his guitar.)

One of the magical moments of Beatles lore is the first meeting of Lennon and McCartney at Woolton's church fete. It was June 1957, a year and one month after Paul McCartney lost his mother to cancer. He stood at the lip of the stage and listened in wonder to the lead singer of the Quarry Men as he blazed through the Del-Vikings’ "Come Go with Me," a song McCartney knew but didn't think anyone else did. If that were not enough, the Teddy Boy in the red and white shirt was ad-libbing the lyrics.

A mutual friend, Ivan Vaughan, introduced the two afterwards. The moment was ordinary but for McCartney playing Eddie Cochran’s "Twenty Flight Rock" on Lennon's guitar. Already displaying the musical prowess and versatility that would be instrumental to the Beatles' success, McCartney played his way into the Quarry Men. And it was McCartney who brought George Harrison to the group.

Harrison was the son of a homemaker and a bus driver, good solid people. Hearing "Heartbreak Hotel" in 1956 was his life-changing moment; he became the kid who would rather fantasize about guitars than pay attention in class. So it was a good thing the Beatles came along, and a better thing that they were booked into the Hamburg nightclubs, which offered steady work, beer, Preludin, and sex. Hamburg, where they played night after night for hours at a stretch, was the Beatles' finishing school. They arrived amateur musicians and left seasoned professionals.

The latecomer to the group, Ringo Starr weaves in and out of the narrative, but his story, in many ways, is the most compelling. He was the only child of Elsie Starkey, abandoned by her husband and doing what she could to support a son who spent months in and out of hospitals. As the drummer for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Starr ran into the Beatles often. They liked him. He liked them. But he didn't join the group until 1962, when he was brought in to replace Pete Best at the EMI recording sessions.

Brian Epstein, George Martin, Stuart Sutcliffe, Astrid Kirchherr, and Klaus Voormann play significant roles in a history that shows that the Beatles' success was anything but inevitable. Still, once the pieces were in place—once the Nerk Twins were writing their own songs—they were on their way to becoming “the Toppermost of the Poppermost.”

Lewisohn pauses the story at the close of 1962, with the first single ("Love Me Do") in the British charts and fame knocking at the door. Sadly, readers will have to wait six years for the sequel, but if it is this dense and rich, it will be worth every second.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

W.G. Sebald
translated by Jo Catling
Random House ($26)

by E. J. Iannelli

A Place in the Country is the posthumous and inexplicably belated English translation of a series of related essays by W.G. Sebald on influential (from the author’s autobiographical perspective, at any rate) writers and artists such as Johann Peter Hebel, Eduard Mörike, Jan Peter Tripp and Robert Walser. It was first published as a collection in Sebald’s native German in 1998, three years before his death, with the title Logis in einem Landhaus—quite literally, Lodging in a Country House, a phrase it borrows from Walser’s short story, “Kleist in Thun.”

Any review of the book inevitably takes place in the shadow of the elegantly written, insightful introduction by the book’s excellent translator and editor, Jo Catling. In those two roles, Catling has a knowledge of these six essays that is perhaps as intimate and internalized as the author himself, and she begins at the most natural point of entry, by quoting the following passage from “Le promeneur solitaire,” Sebald’s piece on Walser:

Since then I have slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time, the life of the Prussian writer Kleist with that of a Swiss author who claims to have worked as a clerk in a brewery in Thun, the echo of a pistol shot across the Wannsee with the view from a window of the Herisau asylum, Walser’s long walks with my own travels, dates of birth with dates of death, happiness with misfortune, natural history and the history of our industries, that of Heimat with that of exile.

Readers familiar with Sebald’s sui generis hybridized prose, an inextricable entwining of historical fact and literary fiction (“faction”?) accompanied by enigmatic photographs and delivered in graceful, dreamlike concatenations of clauses that drift between end-of-days fatalism and pastoral reverie, will recognize in this description one of its most memorable qualities. Indeed, it’s hard to approach A Place in the Country without reading much of the commentary as Sebald on Sebald, such as the “detours and digressions of narrative” he identifies in the “linguistic montages” of Walser’s The Robber, or the “objects in which melancholy is crystallized” that he sees in the paintings of Jan Peter Tripp, or his admiration of Gottfried Keller’s “furnishing almost all his stories with a kind of treasure chest (or Schatzkästlein), in which . . . the most improbable relics coexist side by side,” with the latter naturally supplemented by loosely related, uncaptioned black-and-white photos to illustrate the idea.

But there’s more in these half-dozen essays than the reflexive. Sebald is after all a keen observer, and he spots interesting qualities in the work of these kindred creative spirits. He draws a droll comparison between Gogol and Walser as writers, maintaining that “Both of them gradually lost the ability to keep their eye on the center of the plot, losing themselves instead in the almost compulsive contemplation of strangely unreal creations appearing on the periphery of their vision, about whose previous and future fate we never learn even the slightest thing.” The “secret” of these incidental characters, he writes, “(like that of human existence as a whole) resides in their utter superfluity.” He also praises the sociopolitical prescience of a novel like Keller’s Martin Salander and, among other things, the author’s enlightened and sympathetic portrait of Jewish traders in Der Grüne Heinrich, which shows this group demonstrating “the epitome of true tolerance: the tolerance of the oppressed, barely endured minority toward those who control the vagaries of their fate.” That phrasing, incidentally, with its tone of suppressed outrage toward injustice and inhumanity, is another familiar Sebaldian trait that does not go missing altogether in these essays.

Equally satisfying are the broader generalizations distilled into an epigrammatic turn of phrase, like the idea put forward in “J’aurais voulu que ce lac eût été l’Océan—,” the pieces on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that neither this philosopher “nor those who came after him were ever able to resolve the inherent contradiction between [a] nostalgic utopia and the inexorable march of progress toward the brink of the abyss.” He seems on unusually shaky ground, however, when arguing that art, unlike photography, “depends on polyvalence, resonance, obfuscation, and illumination—in short, the transcending of that which, according to an ineluctable law, has necessarily to be the case.” One would think that Sebald of all people would know that photography—which certainly falls under the umbrella of art—is capable of employing these devices and more to achieve that very end.

It’s worth noting that all versions of A Place in the Country are not equal. The UK version published by Hamish Hamilton is lacking in one important respect, namely, the double-page color images interspersed throughout the text. In an ideal world, these should not be two opposite facing pages but a single folded page with an unbound edge that opens outward, effectively giving the reader a three-page spread (two of a full-sized image, one of text) at a single glance. The American version, overseen by Random House’s David Ebershoff, follows the much more sensible layout of the German original, allowing the reader to imbibe Sebald’s description of, say, Keller’s partially erased Ideal Landscape with Trees while viewing it at the same time.

Formatting discrepancies aside, A Place in the Country is a welcome addition to the near-exhaustive English body of Sebald’s work. The collection offers more than enough to savor, ponder, and revisit until the appearance of Silent Catastrophes, the Anglophone counterpart to the combined essays in Beschreibung des Unglücks and Unheimliche Heimat, rumored to be slated for 2015.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014