by Timothy Walsh

Kazakhstan is an ancient land with a fascinating culture little known in the West. Even though it is the ninth-largest country in the world, few Americans can place it on a map. It is where humans first domesticated the horse and the genetic homeland of all our cultivated varieties of apples. It is also a place with a rich literary heritage largely unknown outside its borders.

Along with the rest of Soviet Central Asia, Kazakhstan was kept closed off from the Western world during the long night of the Russian occupation. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a few writers were “discovered” by the West—Chingiz Aitmatov from Kyrgystan, Hamid Ismailov from Uzbekistan—but this only scratched the surface of the deep literary ore running through this storied crossroads of the world, where once the fabled Silk Road had been the main cultural and commercial link between East and West.

Now comes Talasbek Asemkulov’s A Life at Noon (Three String Books, $29.95), translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega. Astoundingly, this is the first post-Soviet novel from Kazakhstan to be translated into English, but it is an inspired choice. Originally written in 2003 in Kazakh, it was translated into Russian last year by the author’s wife, Zira Naurzbayeva, and now at last into English. Asemkulov died in 2014, but his novel stands as a lasting monument to his art, both literary and musical.

A Life at Noon tells the story of Azhigerei as he grows up in a rural aul in the 1960s, a time when the traditional Kazakh culture of steppe nomads was in danger of completely dying out due to the often brutal and disastrous policies of the Soviet regime. Even if you know nothing about Central Asia or Kazakhstan, Asemkulov will quickly pull you into this spellbinding tale, whether riding out with Azhigerei on horseback into the mysterious and life-giving steppe or sitting in the felt-carpeted comfort of a yurt on a summer night, sipping hot tea while listening to beguiling music.

This is also the coming-of-age story of an artist, as young Azhigerei is tutored by his father, Sabyt, to become a master player of the dombra, the ancient national instrument of Kazakhstan. In lucid, haunting scenes we see Azhigerei listening to old men’s stories by firelight, suffering through the first bittersweet pangs of young love, and losing himself as he plays an intricate kuy, the dombra in his hands turned into an instrument of revelation as he feels some higher power playing through him.

This is not a sugar-coated novel—there are chilling stories of Soviet atrocities and scenes of mindless brutality—but there are also moments of almost mystical beauty and poetry. And Fairweather-Vega’s translation preserves Asemkulov’s vigorous and lucid prose. Unlike some Kazakh writers who can tend to prolixity, Asemkulov’s writing is spare and tight, painting vivid pictures of the Kazakh countryside or characters in a few deft strokes. Fairweather-Vega renders all this in a natural idiomatic English free of footnotes or glossary, preserving occasional Kazakh words that are best left untranslated (kamcha, jigit, barymtash, shanyrak) since the reader can figure out their meanings in context.

A Life at Noon is mainly Azhigerei’s and Sabyt’s story, but it is also the story of dozens of other vivid characters, both living and dead—and in this way it becomes the story of Kazakhstan itself. Integral to this novel is the act of storytelling, of tales told by wise old aqsaqals in yurts over endless cups of tea (or vodka). There are vivid stories of the Russian occupation, Bolshevik death squads, Stalin’s forced collectivization of this proud nomadic people, the confiscation of livestock and the resulting starvation of millions. These stories are tragic, but there are also stories of earlier times—of thriving auls, years of plenty, and legendary dombra competitions at festivals.

As we follow Azhigerei through his early teens, the novel’s other interwoven stories gradually and masterfully construct a vivid portrait of the Kazakh people and culture over the last two hundred years. Through it all, it is music, the unique, lyrically percussive voice of the dombra, that knits things together. The dombra speaks through sound and melody, but it is also a storytelling instrument—its repertoire of kuys (virtuoso instrumental compositions) as consciously programmatic as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons or Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.

In this way, Azhigerei’s story and the stories the dombra tells through his dexterous fingers culminate in increasingly profound meditations on what it means to be human in a world where love must give way to grief, bliss to tragedy and death. The tradition of virtuoso instrumentalists playing the dombra was almost extinguished by Stalin and the Soviet regime, but it survived in people like Sabyt and Azhigerei—and in Asemkulov himself. Besides being an accomplished novelist and screenwriter, Asemkulov was a master dombra player, a true kuyishi, one of the few able to pass on the authentic secrets of the old masters (and therefore perhaps the only person who could have written such a book).

As Sabyt explains at one point, after laboriously reconstructing a lost kuy, playing the dombra for days on end until he succeeds, “That kuy vanished long ago. When I caught that small piece of it, I spent a few days drawing it out of the other world.” This novel feels exactly like that—drawn out of the other world by an artist uniquely qualified for the task.

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Serendipitously, coinciding with the publication of the Asemkulov novel comes the groundbreaking anthology Contemporary Kazakh Literature: Prose, which contains a short story by Asemkulov that functions as a fitting sequel to the novel. (The anthology, published by Cambridge University Press in partnership with the National Bureau of Translations, is available as a free pdf download.)

“The Old Kuyishi” picks up with Azhigerei a few years later when he’s beginning his obligatory military service. On leave, he’s returning home when he runs into Zuman, a fellow dombra player, now an alcoholic and down on his luck. Azigherei is disappointed, but Zuman unexpectedly informs Azigherei of an even greater kuyishi who has dropped out of sight and who, if still alive, has many secrets to impart. And so Azigherei goes off on a new quest.

There are many other riches in this anthology, including ten or twelve absolute gems translated into English for the first time, from Sherkhan Murtaza’s traditional story, almost a folktale, to Didar Amantay’s disaffected postmodern sketch that reads something like a Jean Cocteau script.

The alphabet came late to the Kazakh language. Although an Arabic script had been used for centuries to write Kazakh, among the people the ancient traditions of oral storytelling and the singing of historical epics were the main forms of cultural transmission well into the twentieth century. Even today, the zhirau (singers of epic poetry), akyn (improvising oral poets), and sal-seri (shaman-like trickster poet-singers) are still revered. In 1929, a Latin alphabet was introduced, which was changed to Cyrillic in 1940 to better unify the far-flung corners of the Soviet Union. (Kazakh will change back to the Latin alphabet by 2025.)

With the growth of cities in Kazakhstan (not a prominent feature of its nomadic past) came printing presses, newspapers, magazines, and books. The storytelling instinct so strong in Kazakh culture soon burst forth in these new written forms, opening the floodgates on a steady stream of literary efforts, including a surprising number of thick historical epics and weighty trilogies spanning centuries.

Sadly, many of the most talented Kazakh writers from this early period were executed in the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s—Beimbet Maylin and Saken Seyfullin among them. This anthology picks up with the next generation of writers, born in the 1930s and later. Many of their stories are, for obvious reasons, heavily influenced by Russian literature, particularly Chekhov—but this is not a bad thing, considering that most of twentieth-century short story writing around the world has been influenced by Chekhov, the master of the modern short story.

Consider Kalikhan Yskak’s “A Quiet Autumn,” one of the real treasures in this anthology. Here, Yskak deftly fuses elements from the ancient Kazakh storytelling tradition with lessons learned from Chekhov and other Russian writers like Turgenev. The result is something both unusual and original. Yskak’s sympathies are plainly for the pre-Soviet times when the Kazakh people lived in harmony with nature, but the beginning of the story—when the protagonist, Kasym, encounters a former love by chance on a forest road—is Yskak’s subtle homage to Chekhov, whose short story “The Huntsman” begins in precisely the same way.

There are many other gems in this collection—such as Dulat Isabekov’s “Growing Pains,” which begins in tragedy, then surprisingly morphs into a slow-burn comedy; or Marhabat Baigut’s fascinating “The Kazakhs of Hamburg,” focusing on the sizeable German population forcibly resettled in Kazakhstan by Stalin; or Sayin Muratbekov’s unforgettably poignant “The Scent of Wormwood.”

While it is true that twentieth-century Kazakh literature is heavily dominated by men, it is still surprising that of the thirty authors in this anthology, only two are women. Why the anthology doesn’t include other notable women writers like Sharbanu Kumarova or Altynash Dzhaganova is a puzzle and a disappointment.

The anthology does include Rosa Mukanova’s celebrated story “The Image of the Eternal Child” (translated elsewhere as “Leyla’s Prayer”), which deals with the horrifying legacy of the Russian nuclear testing program in the dreaded “Polygon” area of eastern Kazakhstan. Here, over 450 nuclear tests were carried out between 1949 and 1989, and hundreds of thousands of Kazakh villagers were purposely exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation and fallout.

In this haunting story, which reads something like a cross between a parable and a dark fairy tale, the disfigured girl, Leila, finds that her only friend is the moon—and the compassionate moon consciously watches over her while lamenting the degradation and destruction let loose on the land.

A few of the stories in the Cambridge anthology are real clunkers, weighed down by heavy doses of Soviet social realism and heavy-handed moralism. One might also quibble with editorial decisions, including the use of the “ISO 9 Standard” for Romanizing Cyrillic characters, which results in words burdened with inscrutable diacritical marks, unpronounceable to most English speakers who are not phonologists.

More questionable is the organizational principle of the anthology, where the authors are simply presented chronologically by date of birth. This is a missed opportunity—it would have been far better to present the stories so that the readers’ familiarity with Kazakh culture and history gradually builds, since some stories are much more dependent on this than others (and as it is, some of the weakest stories come in the first ten.)

With this in mind, here are the stories I would most recommend, ordered so that they build on and complement each other more organically:

1. “A Quiet Autumn,” Kalikhan Yskak
2. “Grandmother’s Samovar,” Didakhmet Ashimkhanuly
3. “The Kazakhs of Hamburg” Marhabat Baigut
4. “The Old Kujsi,” Talasbek Asemkulov
5. “Kerbugy” Oralkhan Bokey
6. “The Smell of Wormwood,” Sayin Muratbekov
7. “The Song,” Sofy Smatayev
8. “Growing Pains,” Dulat Isabekov
9. “Bojtumar,” Sherkhan Murtaza
10. “The Nest of the White Cranes,” Nurgali Oraz
11. “The Image of the Eternal Child,” Roza Mukanova
12. “Pygmalion of the Backwoods,” Dauren Quat

From there, you can wander through the rest of this essential and wide-ranging anthology, from Tolen Abdik’s “The Battlefield of Sanity,” with its hints of Kafka, Bulgakov, and Dostoevsky, to Kabdesh Zhumadilov’s quietly tragic “A Beggar Man.”

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Prior to this Cambridge anthology of contemporary Kazakh prose (there is also a companion volume of poetry), Cognella Academic Publishing released two anthologies of Kazakh literature—the only others available in English translation. First came The Stories of the Great Steppe (edited by Rafis Abazov, translated by Sergey Levchin and Ilya Bernshtein, $69.95) in 2013 followed by Summer Evening, Prairie Night, Land of Golden Wheat (edited by Rafis Abazov, translated by Sergey Levchin, $72.95) in 2016. Both are ably edited by Rafis Abazov and include valuable introductions. The main drawback of these otherwise recommendable anthologies is their steep price (and reasonably priced used copies are difficult to find).

Stories of the Great Steppe focuses on Kazakh literature since World War II and includes a number of notable writers not included in the Cambridge anthology. Summer Evening, on the other hand, spans all of modern Kazakh literature, beginning with the great poet Abai. It includes many short stories and prose excerpts from the earlier generations of writers, including Mukhtar Auezov, as well as more recent stories like Altynash Dzhagonova’s memorable “Anima, Wolves, and the End of the World.”

All of these anthologies are gifts to the English-speaking reader. But really, if you want to fall in love with Kazakh literature, start with Asemkulov’s A Life at Noon, then use it as a bridge to the wider pool of contemporary Kazakh voices.

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Wendell Berry
Selected with an Introduction by Paul Kingsnorth
Counterpoint ($16.95)

by Robert Zaller

Wendell Berry, at eighty-five, is as close to a prophet as America has produced in the past half century. The scion of a farm family in the hardscrabble country of Henry County, Kentucky, he began a literary career in the 1960s that he envisaged at first in the conventional terms of the period: study, travel, and make your name in New York. It wasn’t a formula for prophecy. America’s preceding prophetic figure, the poet Robinson Jeffers, had only recently died; once famous, he was virtually forgotten at the time of his death. Jeffers, too, had entertained conventional literary ambitions, but he found the ground for a radical social critique in the rugged landscape of the central California coast, where life could be “purged,” as he put it, of the “ephemeral accretions” of modern living.

Berry didn’t find a new place for himself, but rediscovered the ancestral one he’d left and that called him back. On July 4, 1965—a date perhaps consciously chosen—he moved back to his home town, Port Royal, bought land, and went back to farming. He taught, too, at the University of Kentucky, but eventually committed himself to the twin occupations of farming and writing. More than forty books resulted, divided more or less equally among poetry, fiction, and essays. All express a common vision, deepening with the years but developed from an original root: the perception that the good life must be lived in the care and cultivation of the soil, the weathers, and the bounties of a natural place.

This vision had a certain idyllic quality when Jeffers described it half a century earlier in a rapidly urbanizing America. By Berry’s time, it would have appeared to most hopelessly obsolete. Industrialized agriculture had all but destroyed the independent small farmer, today an essentially extinct species. Hired labor working giant farms devoted to monoculture covered the country, linked to great cities in a vast interlocking network of production, distribution, and consumption. The idea, as Jeffers had suggested, of a world in which “Men were riding after cattle, or plowing the headland . . . as they [had] done for thousands of years,” seemed no more plausible than bringing back Homer. And if anything were needed to clinch the point, the ’60s experiment of back-to-nature communes showed how distant a practical engagement with the land had become.

Berry had to ponder his decision when he made it, and he has been pondering it, with the much larger significations it acquired for him, ever since. If the land that had been bred into him called him back, it was land that, as he now saw with adult eyes, had been “diminished” by those who, having killed or driven off its original possessors, had abused and eroded it, despoiling its forests, poisoning its rivers, and depleting its soil. Berry thus found himself returned not to something comfortable and familiar, but to the scene of a crime—a crime his own forebears had participated in. If he was to live worthily in it, he would have to leave his own small patch of it at least modestly better than he found it. Only in so doing would he acquire the moral basis to write for himself and address others.

Thoreau had written about Walden Pond, and then left it. Jeffers wrote about his beloved coast, built a house, and planted trees. Neither man was a farmer, and neither, except in a literary sense, attempted to live off the land. Wendell Berry has been distinctive if not unique in insisting that one must get one’s hands literally dirty in order to write. He makes the point, clearly if indirectly, in an early essay, “Some Thoughts on Citizenship and Conscience in Honor of Don Pratt”: “No matter how sophisticated and complex and powerful our institutions, we are still exactly as dependent on the earth as the earthworms. To cease to know this, and to fail to act upon the knowledge, is to begin to die the death of a broken machine.”

The opposition of the natural and the mechanical would be, for Berry as for other conservationists, a fundamental trope. The mechanical is the abstract; it flattens what it cannot categorize. The land, as a living, organic entity that with its creatures, human and wild, encompass the cycles of growth and decay that define it, can only be damaged and ultimately destroyed—rendered incapable of fertility and nurturance—if subjected to the machine. To be sure, humans need tools to farm, and farms to live if they are to settle meaningfully. Tools that acquire gears are machines, and these are not, in and of themselves, inimical to the land, at least up to a point. Beyond that, however, it is the machine that drives the farmer, and what its functioning imposes makes it the master rather than the servant. When this condition insinuates itself as a mindset, it can swiftly assume control of human society as such. Humans are deceived by this into believing that it is they who are in control of an everything they call “nature,” which through a wizardly effect called technology they may subject to their wishes.

When this process is extended to the most essential requirement of daily living, the production of food, and that in turn to the discipline of an extensive and rationalized market system, agribusiness replaces farming, with its concomitant results of soil depletion, animal confinement and mechanized slaughter, and the toxification of earth, air, and water. On a sufficient scale, the species loss and pollution this produces wreaks havoc, not only on what we call the environment but on the human spirit itself. Berry came early to this conclusion, but also, as he admits, slowly. Wishing to convert a steep hillside on his property to pasturage, he hired a bulldozer to clear its woods and create a pond that would provide a water supply. A wet winter caused a landslide that ruined the pond. Forcing nature from its course had done damage, and yielded no profit. Later, in expanding the farm, Berry had arrived at a point where a tractor seemed inevitable. Thinking the matter through, he decided to invest in a team of horses instead. The idea might have seemed quixotic, but it worked, and proved even more practical in dealing with steep ground and bad weather.

Berry thus arrived at a principle suitable to his purposes: that where traditional methods could do the job, perhaps more slowly but with less disturbance to natural balances, they were preferable to mechanical ones. He extended this principle to his other occupation, writing. In a brief essay that touched a nerve among literary colleagues, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” he declared that he did and would write only with a pen or pencil, using natural light. This was partly a statement: the presumptive labor-saving of the computer did not make for better writing, but it did involve expense, energy and material consumption, difficulty of repair, and planned obsolescence. Moreover, to write as a critic of wasteful technology with an instrument that was itself an example of it was, in the absence of necessity or improvement of result, an act of bad faith in an activity that demanded good faith above all. (Berry did use a manual typewriter for readying final copy.)

Struck by the adverse reaction to his essay by fellow writers, Berry coined the term “technological fundamentalism” to describe the attitude that technological change as such was both inevitable and desirable. Behind this, he decried a sense of helplessness before the profit-driven forces behind such change, whose ideological compensation lay in identifying with them as manifesting human power and grandeur, the subjection of nature to a collective project. But the collectivity was false and the project an illusion because, as Berry says in “The Total Economy,” all responsibility is ultimately individual and the consequence of permitting others to decide for us—whether they be corporations, governments, or those in their pay—is that “the human household or economy is [now] in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature.” The term “household” is deliberately chosen, for what Berry wants us to appreciate is that nature itself is a tapestry of local ecosystems just as society is of individual families and communities. Thus, as he notes,

The “environmental crisis” is no such thing; it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an “environmental crisis” because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, the God-given, world.

The adjuration is as much ethical as political, and it is this that makes Berry a prophet in the tradition of Thoreau and Jeffers, rather than merely a critic. There is nothing here of the large political and economic forces that shape our lives and limit our choices, let alone of those in Third World poverty constrained by necessity to add more than their quota to ecological degradation and loss. Nor is there any suggestion of how to resist concrete social evils beyond the civil disobedience prescribed by Thoreau and emulated by Berry.

Berry is well aware of who the villains are and how they operate, but he doesn’t call them out as a muckraker would because he does not wish to let the rest of us off the hook. The closest he comes to specification is in “Two Minds,” written in 2001 in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center. The “two minds” Berry stipulates are the Rational and the Sympathetic. The latter is one which, briefly defined, is “to be considerate of whatever is present”; that is, respectful of that which Berry calls “God-given,” the world as what precedes us. The former sees what is present as what may be transformed, regardless of its natural integrity. Its epitome, for Berry, was the World Trade Center, whose purpose was to harvest as much of the world’s wealth as possible for the powerful few. It was, consequently, a “no-place” that existed only to strip-mine actual ones. Its fall, as with that of the Tower of Babel to which Berry likens it, was predicated in its very existence, regardless of the specific event that would bring it about.

To speak thusly of 9/11 in its immediate aftermath was bold indeed, and although Berry has rarely been one to raise his voice, the accents of Jeremiah are clear here. At the same time, he never hectors, and his sense of our general predicament always grows out of personal experience. Unsurprisingly, the theme of homecoming is critical to his vision of rectification. As he points out, it is the perdurable theme of our greatest literature, from Scripture to The Odyssey to Shakespeare; it is our most ancient wisdom. It is also, as he tirelessly reminds us, the wisdom we have increasingly lost or rejected. As he says in “The Work of Local Culture,” “Our society, on the whole, has forgotten or repudiated the theme of return.” Home is no longer the meaning of the story or the conclusion of the adventure, but simply the place to be left. Return is defeat.

What Berry wants to suggest is that such an idea, cast as an imperative, is at odds with who we are as a part of nature. Nature is in essence continuity and return—and on our planet, gifted with life, the processes that sustain the biosphere that houses us. We have come over the past several centuries to doubt its hospitality, and to view it, through the inverted lens of evolutionary theory and the post-Copernican one of cosmic catastrophism, as fearful, inimical, predatory. We do not trust it, and regard as fools those who do. We cannot—yet—flee it, but we dream of controlling it, and technology is our magical instrument. It is magical because we believe it can do anything and make us the master of everything, except itself. We thus alienate ourselves from the world and from each other.

Is there, then, any realistic hope to change the downward spiral we seem to have submitted ourselves to? More than thirty years ago, Berry answered thusly in “The Work of Local Culture”:

I still believe that a change for the better is possible, but I confess that my belief is partly hope and partly faith. No one who hopes for improvement should fail to see and respect the signs that we may be approaching some sort of historical waterfall, past which we will not, by changing our minds, be able to change anything else. We know that at any time an ecological or a technological or a political event that we will have allowed may remove from us the power to make change and leave us with the mere necessity to submit to it.

Sixteen years later, Berry put the case more peremptorily in “Compromise, Hell!”:

We are destroying our country—I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.

Prophets should grow louder as the need to be heard increases. They should also point a way, as Berry has done in how he has lived his own life as well as in the words he has written. It isn’t the way all of us need or can walk in; there are different ways of getting home, and there are ways to explore too that enrich us. But we may have had no steadier guide in our time.

Culled from more than a dozen books, The World-Ending Fire has been thoughtfully assembled by Paul Kingsnorth, and serves as an excellent introduction to Berry’s thought. Woven back and forth chronologically over a span of more than four decades, it shows at once the range, evolution, and continuity of his vision, and if, as Berry himself concedes, there is a certain repetition in it, it is because prophets do repeat themselves. Kingsnorth himself is the cofounder of the so-called Dark Mountain Project, a consortium of British writers and artists concerned with finding new pathways in what they describe as an age of “ecocide.” Berry is cited in the group’s manifesto, but its name refers specifically to a passage in Jeffers’s “Rearmament,” a poem that presaged World War II, and he is invoked repeatedly as its master spirit. What Jeffers himself, an arch-skeptic of group enterprises, would have made of this is a question. Thoreau, too, might have smiled. But the conversation they began remains imperative.

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Selected Poems and Translations
of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Selected by Vidyan Ravinthiran
New York Review of Books ($18)

by Graziano Krätli

The premature deaths of Eunice De Souza in 2017 and Meena Alexander one year later have significantly thinned the ranks of anglophone Indian poetry, depriving the world of two major women writers whose birth dates straddled 1947, the watershed year of Indian independence. Born that same year, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra stands out as a poet from that generation whose work continues to find new publishing venues and engage new readers, both in India and abroad.

The latest and most prestigious of these is the NYRB Poets series, now thirty titles strong, which features authors from around the world and includes such names as Apollinaire, Dante, Osip Mandelstam, Henri Michaux, Silvina Ocampo, and Walt Whitman. Until Mehrotra joined these ranks, the only other Indian was A.K. Ramanujan (1929-93), whose contribution showcased his achievement as translator of classical Tamil poetry rather than as poet in his own right. Mehrotra has also appeared in the NYRB pantheon as a translator—in his case of the fifteenth-century bhakti poet Kabir, whose irreverent and provocative songs Mehrotra rejuvenated in a version that tops those of many illustrious predecessors (Robert Bly, Pound, and Tagore included). Indeed, for originality and inventiveness, the selection from Songs of Kabir (2011) outshines the other translations featured in the book under review, including versions from the first- and second-century Prākrit of The Absent Traveller (originally published in 1991), and from twentieth-century Hindi (Suryakant Tripathi “Nirala,” Vinod Kumar Shukla, Mangalesh Dabral), Bengali (Shakti Chattopadhyay), and Gujarati (Pavankumar Jain).

As Vidyan Ravinthiran explains in his editorial note, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra: Selected Poems and Translations draws from two previous volumes of Mehrotra’s collected poems, one published by Penguin (India) in 2014 and the other by Giramondo (Australia) in 2016. Compared with either of them, this book includes a substantial amount of new work, namely a translation, an elegy for Eunice De Souza, a poem inspired by the tragic death of the poet’s sister, and the sixty-page long sequence “Daughters of Jacob Bridge.” Overall, Ravinthiran’s scrupulous and discerning selection has produced a book that shows, more clearly than a collected edition, Mehrotra’s development and refinement over the past half-century.

Such a process begins in the late 1960s, with a style that is subtly affected by post-war Surrealism and protest poetry, influences that Ravinthiran’s inclusion of two uncollected poems from 1972-74 makes explicit. The second in particular, “Ballad of the Black Feringhee,” is reminiscent of Ginsberg’s “America” in the litany of blunt statements that the poet directs at his own country (“India I was born in the year of your independence,” “India where’s my horoscope,” etc.). By the time Mehrotra published his first collection, however, these influences had been tamed and woven into a richer tapestry, as the five poems from Nine Enclosures (1976) show clearly. The antiquarian extravaganza of “The Sale” reveals a penchant for enumeration, referencing, and cataloging that also emerges from “Songs of the Good Surrealist,” “Index of First Lines,” “Continuities,” and later poems. If we consider the descriptive and normative functions of lists, inventories, maps, and other instruments of colonial rule, Mehrotra’s use of the Surrealistic technique of incongruous and provocative juxtaposition (famously envisioned by Lautréamont as the “chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table”) undermines and subverts the taxonomic order implied in these poems.

A similar subversive tendency, although supported by different means, characterizes Mehrotra’s descriptive and narrative poems (and most of Mehrotra’s poems are descriptive or narrative to a degree), where a punctilious, evocative visualization (“the air, dry and silvery / At the entrance, is moist and sea-green, furry / To the touch,” from “The Roys”) often leads to a destabilizing or unsettling close. In the most condensed example of this manner (“January,” from Mehrotra’s second collection, Distance in Statute Miles, 1982), a deft camerawork takes the reader from the exterior to the interior of a life in just four telegraphic lines:

The gate wide open; chairs on the lawn;
Circular verandas; a narrow kitchen;
High-ceilinged rooms; arches; alcoves; skylights.
My house luminous; my day burnt to ash.

In his best poems, Mehrotra proves to be a master storyteller with a peculiar taste for the uncanny; this is what makes his poetry a constant pleasure for the reader and an endless, delightful challenge for the critic. Images or impressions from the poet’s past or from his readings, kindled by close observation, often interact kaleidoscopically to convey the eerie impression of a life lived in the flesh as well as in the mind, of which the “house” and the “library” are apt and interchangeable representations. “We belong to the houses we live in” is the spectral, closing line of a poem that begins “Who remembers my dentist father / Now that even his patients are dead” (“Hoopoe”). And “Borges,” an invocation to the muse of all literary writers (“Insomnia brings lucidity, / And a borrowed voice sets the true one / Free”) ends not surprisingly with a call to “lead me . . . to the labyrinth of the earthly / Library.”

Similarly, “The House” invokes various literary landscapes (Grimms' fairy tales, Victorian murder mystery, the golden age of Hindi cinema, and modern psychological thrillers) to evoke—or dissimulate—a very personal memory. Employing the same visual technique featured in “January,” the poem progresses from an exterior view, a stone cottage in the middle of a forest, to an interior suggesting abandonment and decay. Here, however, the striking element is not the bats in the rafters, or their “dung on the floor,” but a dentist’s coat hanging from a nail and “smelling pleasantly / Of chloroform.” The reader has no sooner started asking some obvious questions (why would a dentist practice in the wilderness, and what makes the smell of chloroform pleasant?) than a different imagery raises new questions. Do the muddy sandals, the smoky eyes, and the dentist’s coat belong to the same man who, in the final couplet, “passes before me / In the cheval-glass”? An exquisite example of Empsonian ambiguity, the image combines the occurrence of a phenomenon and its phantasmagorical residue by means of the expression “passes before,” whose spatial and temporal meaning suggests, simultaneously, an apparition passing in front of the poet (i.e., between him and the mirror), and a father preceding his son through the looking-glass (and onto the otherworld).

This thorough and exhaustive selection may not gain Mehrotra’s poetry “a worldwide audience,” as its editor understandably hopes, but it has the potential for securing this major Indian poet an enthusiastic and devoted North American readership.

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by James P. Lenfestey

While removing books from shelves to repaint our family living room a few weeks ago, I rediscovered what was my mother’s copy of a 1956 edition of The Book of Tea. Mother was a skilled gardener and flower arranger; I saved the book from her collection for its beautiful design and feel, but had never read it. I decided I would mail it to a new friend to give to his friend, a traveling tea master—but first I sat down to glance at its contents. I slid the book from its sleeve wrapped with Japanese paper, a light moss green. My fingertips glanced along the woven silk binding to the wrapped Japanese paperboard covers, the creamy endpapers, the almost stiff pages, the inkbrush illustrations. All these drew me slowly into Kakuzo’s succinct descriptions of a two-tradition/two-continent history of philosophy, poetry, art, botany, religion, architecture, tea ceremony practice and flower arranging art, which ended only with the satisfying sadness of completion after several mornings alone with his thoughts.

The book’s stillness and understanding, useful in 1906 and after two World Wars, seem to me helpful now in coping with the unfolding dimensions of our Age of Climate Crisis and now of COVID-19. The quotations below were especially arresting to me, texts I have set beneath each chapter heading centered in boldface, as in the original. Enjoy—best perhaps with seven cups of tea.

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THE CUP OF HUMANITY

Teaism is a cult founded upon the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence.

. . . when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs of our quenchless search for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup. Mankind has done worse.

Why not consecrate us to the queen of the Camelias, and revel in the warm steam of sympathy that flows from her altar? In the liquid amber within the ivory-porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius, the piquancy of Laotze, the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni himself.

Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.

Let us stop the continents from hurling epigrams at each other, and be sadder if not wiser by the mutual gain of half a hemisphere. We have developed along different lines, but there is no reason why one should not supplement the other.

The East and West, like two dragons tossed in a sea of ferment, in vain strive to regain the jewel of life . . . Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.

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THE SCHOOLS OF TEA

Tea is a work of art and needs a master hand to bring out its noblest qualities.

With Luwuh in the middle of the eighth century we have the first apostle of tea. He was born in an age when Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism were seeking mutual synthesis. The pantheistic symbolism of the time was urging one to mirror the Universal in the Particular. Luwuh, a poet, saw in the tea service the same harmony and order which reigned through all things.

Lotung, a T’ang poet, wrote of the 7 cups . . . The first cup moistens my lips and throat, the second cup breaks my loneliness; the third searches my barren entrails but finds therein five thousand volumes of odd ideographs. The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration – all the wrong of life passes away through my pores. At the fifth cup I am purified; the sixth cup calls me to the realm of the immortals. The seventh cup—ah, but I could take no more! I only feel the breath of cool wind that rises in my sleeves.

Among the Buddhists, the southern Zen sect, which incorporated so much of Taoist doctrines, formulated an elaborate ritual of tea. . . . It was this Zen ritual which finally developed into the Tea-ceremony of Japan in the 15th century.

The tea-room was an oasis in the dreary waste of existence where weary travelers could meet to drink from the common spring of art appreciation.

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TAOISM AND ZENNISM

Teaism was Taoism in disguise.

Translation is always a treason, and as a Ming author observed, can at its best be only the reverse side of a brocade — all the threads are there, but not the subtlety of color or design. But after all, what great doctrine is there which is easy to expound? The ancient sages . . . spoke in paradoxes, for they were afraid of uttering half-truths. They began by talking like fools, and ended by making the hearer wise.

The Tao is in the passage rather than the Path. It is the spirit of cosmic change. . . . It recoils upon itself like the dragon, the beloved symbol of the Taoists. It folds and unfolds as do the clouds.

Chinese historians have always spoken of Taoism as “the art of being in the world,” for It deals with the present . . . The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.

Taoism accepts the mundane as it is and, unlike the Confucians and the Buddhists, tries to find beauty in our world of worry and woe.

In art the importance of the same [Taoist] principle is illustrated by the value of suggestion. In leaving something unsaid the beholder is given a chance to complete the idea and thus a great masterpiece irresistibly rivets your attention until you seem to become actually a part of it. A vacuum is there for you to enter and fill up to the full measure of your aesthetic emotion.

One Zen master defined Zen as the art of feeling the polar star in the southern sky.

To the transcendental insight of the Zen, words were but an incumbrance to thought . . . . the whole idea of Teaism is the result of this Zen conception of greatness in the smallest incidents of life. Taoism furnished the basis of aesthetic ideals, Zennism made them practical.

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THE TEA ROOM

The Abode of Fancy. The Abode of Vacancy. The Abode of the Unsymmetrical.

The simplicity and purity of the tea-room resulted from emulation of the Zen monastery. . . .

. . . the roji, the garden path that leads from the machiai to the tea-room, signified the first stage of illumination – the passage into self-illumination. The roji was intended to break connection with the outside world, and to produce a fresh sensation conducive to the full enjoyment of aestheticism in the tea-room itself.

What Rikiu demanded was not cleanliness alone, but the beautiful and the natural too.

Zennism, with the Buddhist theory of evanescence and its demands of the mastery of spirit over matter, recognized the house only as a temporary refuge for the body. The body itself was but a hut in the wilderness, a flimsy shelter made by tying together the grasses that grew around – when these ceased to be bound together they again became resolved into the original waste.

Art, to be fully appreciated, must be true to contemporaneous life. It is not that we should ignore the claims of posterity, but that we should try to assimilate them into our consciousness.

In the tea-room the fear of repetition is a constant presence.

The simplicity of the tea-room and its freedom from vulgarity make it truly a sanctuary against the vexations of the outer world.

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ART APPRECIATION

Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colours; the pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece.

The masters are immortal because their love and fears live in us over and over. It is rather the soul, than the hand, the man than the technique, which appeals to us, – the more human the call the deeper our response.

Nothing is more hallowing that the union of kindred spirits in art. At the moment of meeting the art lover transcends himself. At once he is and is not. He catches a glimpse of Infinity but words cannot voice his delight, for his eye has no tongue. Freed from the fetters of matter, his spirit moves in the rhythm of things. It is thus that art is akin to religion and ennobles mankind. It is this which makes a masterpiece something sacred.

It is much to be regretted that so much of the apparent enthusiasm of art in the present day has no foundation in real feeling.

We are destroying art in destroying the beautiful in life. Would that some great wizard might from the stem of society shape a mighty harp whose strings would resound to the touch of genius.

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FLOWERS

In joy or in sadness, flowers are our constant friends. . . . We have even attempted to speak in the language of flowers . . . It frightens one to conceive of a world bereft of their presence.

When we are laid low in the dust it is they who linger in sorrow over our graves.

. . . the supreme idol, ourselves! Our god is great, and money is his Prophet! We devastate nature in order to make sacrifice to him. We boast that we have conquered Matter and forget that it is Matter that has enslaved us. What atrocities do we not perpetrate in the name of culture and refinement!

Tell me, gentle flowers, teardrops of the stars standing in the garden, nodding your heads to the bees as they sing of the dew and the sunbeams, are you aware of the fearful doom that awaits you?

Why were the flowers born so beautiful yet so hapless? . . . The only flower known to have wings is the butterfly; all others stand helpless before the destroyer.

The ideal lover of flowers is he who visits them in their native haunts, like Taoyuen-ming who sat before a broken bamboo fence in converse with the wild Chrysanthemum.

Change is the only Eternal – why not as welcome Death as Life?

The tea-master deems his duty ended with the selection of the flowers, and leaves them to tell their own story.

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TEA-MASTERS

In religion the Future is behind us. In art the Present is eternal.

He only who has lived with beauty can die beautifully.

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THE BOOK OF TEA, by Okakura Kakuzo, Charles E. Tuttle Company, Rutland, Vermont–Tokyo, Japan, ©1956. Originally published in 1906. Illustrations at head of each chapter taken from ink drawings of Sesshu (1420-1506), the greatest of Japanese painters in the same Zen tradition that inspired the tea ceremony. Typography and book design by Kaoru Ogimi. Printed in Japan.

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Michael Blumlein
Tor ($15.99)

by Ryder W. Miller

Longer, by the late San Francisco Bay Area writer Michael Blumlein, offers a fantastic journey to both the stars and to places in the heart. An award-winning writer, Blumlein also worked in the medical field, and though there is medical terminology and some SF jargon in Longer, this last work is filled with the wonder many have come to expect from classic science fiction.

Cav and his wife Gunjita work for a large pharmaceutical company and are on assignment in space. They both have “juved,” which gives them the opportunity to grow young again—back to their twenties—but there is a limit to how many times they are allowed to do this. Meanwhile, something very old and alien has been discovered, an extraterrestrial object that just might tell us something about our place in the universe.

The book is a fun read for those who like stories set in space; it is also replete with social themes. Cav and Gunjita’s interracial marriage provides Blumlein an opportunity to explore many subjects, but Longer is not a diatribe about race or class or injustice. Instead it is about love, science, and wonder, which in fact may be a welcome change for some readers. Not being able to journey to the stars is one of the biggest disappointments of modern times, though it is overshadowed by humanity’s continuing propensity for war and misdistribution of wealth and resources—which has kept some contemporary science fiction writers more earthbound than in days past.

Despite its big and classic themes, Longer is relevant and at times even lyrical, as when Blumlein writes, “He stood in the cupola, gazing at the Milky Way, observing in himself the balance between what he saw and what he felt, between the sensation of cold and his perception of the sensation, and in the latter the balance between awe and terror, which shifted as all things shifted, and which he had experienced his whole life when gazing at the stars and the infinity of space.” Sadly there will be no more from this award-winning writer, but there is a lot he has left that will take us to the future.

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INTERVIEWS

Money is a Country: An Interview with Emily St. John Mandel
Station Eleven author Emily St. John Mandel discusses her new novel, The Glass Hotel, which is partly based on the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. Interviewed by Allan Vorda.

All and Always Balance
Kyle Harvey and Jeff Alessandrelli in Conversation
Two poets discuss their work, their community, integrity of self, and the challenges of being a creator in this world.

STORIES OF SELF

Ongoing Arguments with Sarah Manguso
by Scott F. Parker
The river of narrative time isn’t the water but the movement: Sarah Manguso delves into the value of the diary in the final installment of Stories of Self.

Twilight of the Selves: A Walk with David Shields
by Scott F. Parker
Take a walk with the polyvocal David Shields in this, the second in a three-part author conversation series called Stories of Self.

Skepticism and Charitability: A Coffee with Dessa
by Scott F. Parker
We are pleased to present a three-part author conversation series, Stories of Self. Today’s subject is "the Bertrand Russell of hip-hop" herself, Dessa.

FEATURES

The Riches of Kazakh Literature, Part Two: Poetry
by Timothy Walsh
Kazakh poetry is not something new on the world stage; even though it has not gotten the recognition it deserves in the West, it is a poetry with deep roots that predates the founding of the United States by a millennium or so.

The Riches of Kazakh Literature, Part One: Fiction
by Timothy Walsh
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a few Kazakh writers were “discovered” by the West—but this only scratched the surface of the deep literary ore running through this storied crossroads of the world.

Reflections on The Book of Tea, by Okakura Kakuzo, 1906
by James P. Lenfestey
As the coronavirus crisis unfolds, James P. Lenfestey finds wisdom in a 1906 work dedicated to tea.

MIXED GENRE

About Repulsion
Annelyse Gelman and Jason Grier
About Repulsion, an EP by Annelyse Gelman and Jason Grier, is a diaphanous six-track exploration of power dynamics, the intersection of the quotidian and the profound, and the way in which technology creates a fragmented existence with edges of clarity and isolation. Reviewed by Ellen Boyette

POETRY REVIEWS

In Her Feminine Sign
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Written both in Arabic and English, Dunya Mikhail’s In Her Feminine Sign creates a dialogue between East and West and a reflection of the Iraqi poet's exile. Reviewed by Julia Stein

Frayed Light
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Berg’s poems presents a personal story beyond and behind the news: the experiences of a young man who grew up in a West Bank settlement and served as a combat soldier before becoming a poet and bibliotherapist. Reviewed by Gwen Ackerman

Utopia Pipe Dream Memory
Anna Gurton-Wachter
Gurton-Wachter’s debut collection, Utopia Pipe Dream Memory, is a feminist affirmation of the multivocality of writing, the force of artistic communities, and the visionary as aesthetic principle. Reviewed by Isabel Sobral Campos

Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman
Bob Kaufman
Edited by Neeli Cherkovski, Raymond Foye, and Tate Swindell
Kaufman’s work is lush, romantic, and surreal, informed by jazz and by love and by the gritty milieu of a post-World War II San Francisco. Reviewed by Christopher Luna

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra: Selected Poems and Translations
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
One of the most celebrated Indian poets gets a coveted NYRB volume which includes not only his own poetry, but essential translations of ancient Indian verse. Reviewed by Graziano Krätli

NONFICTION REVIEWS

Figuring
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Astonishing in heft (almost 600 pages), in scope (lives, works, and milieu of selected European and American scientists, artists, and public intellectuals), and in articulation (attending as much to language and imaginative association as biographical fact), Maria Popova's Figuring is an ode to the quality of astonishment itself. Reviewed by Cindra Halm

Diane di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions
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This academic study highlights the poetic work of an important literary figure, one who found her own voice and path and serves as an admirable model for all artists. Reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan

The Beautiful Ones
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Culled from the late musician’s vast archive, The Beautiful Ones is a testament to Prince’s talent and vulnerability. Reviewed by Tatiana Ryckman

Love, Icebox: Letters from John Cage to Merce Cunningham
Edited by Laura Kuhn
A handsomely produced book, Love, Icebox consists of unashamedly personal letters that Cage posted to his future life partner, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, in the early 1940s. Reviewed by Richard Kostelanetz

The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry
Selected with an Introduction by Paul Kingsnorth
Wendell Berry
Culled from more than a dozen books, The World-Ending Fire has been thoughtfully assembled by Paul Kingsnorth, and serves as an excellent introduction to Berry’s thought. Reviewed by Robert Zaller

FICTION REVIEWS

His Father’s Disease: Stories
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The ten stories in Aruni Kashyap’s His Father’s Disease discuss the struggles of finding community and acceptance, whether as a result of sexuality, relocation, or cultural misunderstandings. Reviewed by Michael MacBride

Subduction
Kristen Millares Young
In this debut novel, Kristen Millares Young explores the layers of community encountered by her cipher of a protagonist, who views the society of Neah Bay with the eye of a detached anthropologist. Reviewed by Douglas Cole

Longer
Michael Blumlein
Longer, by the late San Francisco Bay Area writer Michael Blumlein, offers a fantastic journey to both the stars and to places in the heart. Reviewed by Ryder W. Miller

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2020 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2020