Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic
Translated by Kirsten Lodge
Artwork by Sascha Schneider
Twisted Spoon Press ($21.50)

by Jeff Alford

First published in 1900 and hailed as a fundamental work of Czech Decadence, Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic’s A Gothic Soul is an essential volume of anxiety-riddled philosophy—one to shelve prominently alongside comparable masterworks like Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground and Camus’s The Stranger. Steeped in suffering, the narrator of A Gothic Soul calls himself the “last scion of a venerable chivalric family” and drifts between melancholic feelings of nihilism, faithlessness (in both God and society), and anti-nationalism. Devastatingly, the narrator makes continuous attempts to fill these newly discovered voids within him: he discounts God but hopes to discover a creed with which he can connect; he disconnects himself from society only to project the potential of friendship and love upon strangers he sees. Throughout A Gothic Soul, “life clamors around him but brings him neither joy nor torment:” the narrator seeks a way to connect his soul to the world, unaware that his mantle of gloom may be exactly what’s keeping him from enlightenment. As Karásek explains in his forward, “fear of himself . . . is what pushes the hero to escape from himself, to flee from himself, that is what spurs him on and shatters his piece of mind, and the impossibility of escaping himself is what destroys him.”

“This psychological problem,” continues Karásek, “replaces the plot and storyline found in other novels.” This is a surprisingly succinct explanation for such complicated prose. A Gothic Soul expands in a fever dream of abstract ideas: in one moment, the narrator bemoans his incongruence with God, and pages later he’s erected an empty church, in his mind, and lurks among the gilded icons. But inevitably, he denounces the place: “you have preached mortification and asceticism,” he tells the church. “You have terrified the world with the gaunt faces of martyrs, instead of delighting it with a smile.” He tries to find solace in these new hypothetical environs, but, like all the narrator’s flights of whimsy, his dreams of “a distant metropolis” crumble in as inquisitive and delirious a haze as they were built.

A Gothic Soul wrestles with emotion and hopelessness in a way that maintains a remarkable relevance more than a hundred years after its original publication. Early-twentieth-century malaise is a well-worn theme in European literature of that era, but Karásek transcends his contemporaries by creating a mind in desperate need of waking up from that sorrow; in so doing he finds a harrowing emotional resonance in his narrator’s depression, one that powerfully reflects today’s darkly mantled society. “In addition to this life,” Karásek’s narrator “led another, which he carefully concealed from everyone. It was a life of doubts and fantastic phantoms.” Of course, this “second life” is problematic, but Karásek writes of it in a way that understands the need to withdraw, and by doing so shows like-minded readers that they’re not alone:

Sometimes he would be overwhelmed by such melancholy that he would weep in secret without even knowing why. Then he would give himself over again to extraordinary hopes. It was as though everything in the world had an alluring magic for him. He knew that at some point a life of beautiful dreams and beautiful reality would begin, a golden, exquisite life like a work of art, a proud jewel, covered with precious stones.

Despite the narrator’s restlessness and the “impossibility of escaping himself,” there’s hope among those fantastic phantoms. If withdrawing into that second life reveals the “alluring magic” of what the world could become, perhaps that recession is a necessary step towards personal clarity.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016

Collected Poems
Rainer Brambach
Translated by Esther Kinsky
Seagull Books ($21)

Seasonal Time Change
Michael Kruger
Translated by Joseph Given
Seagull Books ($21)

by Peter McDonald

Founded in 1982 in Kolkata (Calcutta), India, Seagull Books publishes work in English by authors from around the world, specializing in African, French, German, Swiss, and Italian writers in particular. They also offer a rich selection of writings from Middle Eastern authors in diaspora who have emigrated to Europe, usually under threat of imprisonment or worse. While senior editorial credits go to the Seagull staff in India, the books themselves are translated by exceptional scholars from around the world, then are printed and bound in the United States. The enchanting artwork of the dust jackets, often created by students at the Seagull School of Publishing in India, makes their books even more distinctive. While the dust jackets of the two books covered in this review are perhaps less riveting than most, their muted and quiet design lend themselves perfectly to the direct and unadorned poems of the respective poets within.

Michael Kruger and Rainer Brambach are both German-speaking poets, and though born a generation apart, and in temperament and upbringing utterly dissimilar, they still share a sensibility toward their craft that is remarkably concise, unadorned, and bitingly candid. Several of their poems are so similar in tone and brevity, were they to quietly get legs and take a seat in the other’s book, most English-speaking readers would never notice the sleight.

Kruger, born in Wittgendorf, Saxony during World War II of middle-class parents, grew up in Berlin—first under allied bombing, then during partition as post-war Germany split in two. Kruger has been a regular on the German literary and publishing scene in Munich since the 1960s. Now retired, his distinguished career as chief literary scion at Carl Hanser Verlag and as editor of the literary magazine Akzente place him at the heart of modern German letters. He has written extensively, and been interviewed often, on a topic dear to him: the prospects of publishing in the digital age. He is vociferous in championing German publishing in all formats.

Seasonal Time Change: Selected Poems, Kruger’s latest book to be translated and published in English, presents almost exclusively short poems in which the beauty and iniquities of nature often mirror the unvarnished ironies of human endeavor, and is an accessible, excellent introduction to Kruger’s poetry for an American readership. Most poems in Seasonal Time Change are well under a page, precise in image, deft, witty, and wryly jaundiced in their view of the poet’s world caught between a desultory urban idyll and nature’s unsentimental image. Take these lines from the opening poem “My Desk in Allmanshausen”:

In the house beside mine, just up the hill,
lived Mussolini’s foreign minister
before he was captured and taken to Italy and
hanged.
And further on was Hilter’s favourite poet,
Hanns Johst, whose words were obviously
inspired here.
I look at cows, squirrels and horses;
at the open window I hear the distant Autobahn.
No one’s forcing anyone
To accuse humanity of doing good.

We can only marvel at Kruger’s sly inversion of the trope of humanity’s goodness with the shadow of Hitler and Mussolini up the road as mnemonics to humanity’s horror. As if in response to his own quiet reflections of such a past, Kruger echoes the theme in his poem “Twilight:” “Farewell lurks in every footprint. / You have to get in line, / into the queue of pebbles at the lakeside, / for the sake of a higher justice.”

By contrast, Brambach, born of a poor piano tuner and a mother who took in washing, lived most of his life as a recluse, working as a gardener and day laborer. He had little to no formal schooling and though he actively shunned literary recognition throughout his career, he was still well read and invariably curious about the literary trends of the day. Born in 1917 in greater Basel on the German side of the Upper Rhine, he was horrified as a teenager in the 1930s by the rise of Nazism. Barely a month after his conscription into the Wehrmacht in 1939, he fled Germany, crossing the Rhine by footbridge to surrender himself as a prisoner of conscience. He spent the war in internment and when released at war’s end, Brambach made Switzerland his adopted home, living outside Basel until his death in 1983.

Brambach’s published output is modest; only two bound volumes of poetry in his native tongue are in the library catalog. Timely then that this Collected Poems comes to us as the first volume in translation to fully present this worthy poet to an English-speaking audience. While largely forgotten on the international scene today, in Switzerland Brambach remains an important literary figure much admired for his often melancholic, always insightful little poems that present the bucolic landscapes of his adopted country in disquieting light. Concise they may be, but they leave room on the page for the mind to linger in contemplation. Here is “Dog Days” in its entirety:

Slowly the wells are running dry
The stray dogs are looking for water
The spice seller is nodding off in his shop vault
Nobody is buying pepper
Outside the knife grinder’s leisurely turning his wheel
He chases the dogs away without a sound
He observes the seller
He waits
This is the time of sharpened blades.

Brambach’s keen eye for the simple image, as here, often betrays an unease with the world that can seem at times to perch motionless like a bird of prey on the still point of his poems, only to fall with talons upon the unwary reader. Here it is, a lazy late summer day, a knife grinder at leisure, stone wheel turning . . . still he waits in this disturbing “time of sharpened blades.” We might ask the obvious: Waits for what? In “Caution Should Be Called For” Brambach posits another profound question: “What pushes you to write poetry? . . . the ravens will come back—black preachers / without oil in their voices.” One gets immediately the uneasy melancholia of his life’s work.

Both poets, it could be argued, share a recognition that each in his separate birth year came into a world at war; a realization, too, that their homeland putatively and literally started both conflagrations. Throughout, it is as if each in his inimitable way deals with this dark heritage by coming to his poetry with guilt by association, attempting to make amends in their small poems for a world gone astray. “Unfaithful letters,” says Kruger in the poem “Nights on the Terrace:” “cannot distinguish / between Heaven and Earth. / You can still hear the world / above the closed books.” These tomes may well be those of Germany’s own garrulous history weighing heavily, such that he, like Brambach, seems determined to write a new world into existence above the closed sheaves of the past. Perhaps in agreement, Brambach’s last untitled poem of the collection states: “Never put to paper and yet unforgotten . . . our childhood years, they won’t come back.”

Much of the praise for these fine books in English must go to Brambach’s translator Esther Kinsky and Kruger’s translator Joseph Given; they have captured in a foreign tongue the native German with poise and precision. Seagull Books, too, is to be commended for its fine command of book-making, design, and for its perspicacity in publishing worthy world authors to a largely new English-speaking audience.

Click here to purchase Collected Poems at your local independent bookstore

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016

Meagan Brothers
Three Rooms Press ($15.95)

by Jay Besemer

What makes us love who and what we love? What makes us who we are? Do our loves make us who we are?

In Weird Girl and What’s His Name, Meagan Brothers’s crisp, compassionate novel for young adults, all of these questions are explored from various character perspectives, not least those of the two protagonists. Lula and Rory are high school juniors in a midsize town in the southern U.S. They are passionate fans of the X-Files, among other sci-fi mythspaces, and so inseparable that they are frequently mistaken as a romantic couple, even by their families. But their relationship doesn’t exactly fit into that sort of box; Rory is gay, and although he is out to Lula, she secretly nurses the notion that eventually he will take their obvious love into a more physical and socially legible realm.

Things become unstable when Lula discovers some things Rory has been keeping from her. These are vital plot points, which I won’t expose here, but the discovery of these communicative omissions on Rory’s part tips Lula into panic, as they emerge in the context of some struggles of her own. Lula and Rory’s failure to communicate catalyzes the young woman’s cross-country flight, at the end of which she hopes to find her mother. She succeeds, eventually, but the experience is not what she wanted it to be. No one waves a magic wand, validates her existence and lovability, and fixes her. Like the rest of us, she must learn how to do that for herself.

Communication failures and blocks figure heavily in the overall story, manifesting in plausible and varied ways within several character relationships. Yet there’s a great validating force at work in this book. One amazingly well handled area is the portrayal of Lula’s mom, an actor who chose not to raise her daughter herself. Lula’s experience of this choice is honored; she feels it as a rejection, and thinks of her mother as selfish in that regard. But it does not feel as though the author herself agrees with her character, which is refreshing. Brothers’ treatment of all her characters seems similarly fair-minded, giving them depth and complexity—even Rory’s mother, an alcoholic whose homophobic rage results in Rory’s expulsion from his home. Her behavior is not excusable, but will certainly be recognizable to many readers, and her own suffering is obvious.

Through her journey Lula comes to understand that her own desire is fluid (or at least is not entirely dependent on physical attributes or gender), but she can’t quite believe she’s good enough for anyone else:

“Deep down, I want . . . I want somebody who sees me. I mean, really sees me. Sees everything I am, even all the horrible things I am. My dirty mouth and my stupid X-Files action figures and my total failure at graduating from high school and my messed-up mom and my crazy grandparents. I just want somebody who sees all that but . . . loves me anyway.”

This desire and this insecurity are so strong, so basic to everyday human self-doubt, that their direct portrayal is vital here. Similar compassion and accuracy is present in the way sexual identity is folded into the overall calibration of selfhood that is so very important to young people. Rory and Lula aren’t who they are because they are gay, questioning, queer or whatever. The things that happen to them, and the choices they make, are not reduced to some artificial causal relationship that casts sexual identity as a personality determinant rather than one element of self. These kids are complex people: vulnerable and brave, stubborn and giving. Indeed, the complexity of personality, identity and desire is a very present theme here, and the characters themselves often engage it. Here’s a great example, as Lula and a friend, Seth, discuss the mysterious allure of various fandoms:

Seth paused, kneeling on his carpet. He shook his head. ‘Why do we love this stuff?”
“What, music?”
“Anything! Why do we love anything?”

Lula’s rich answer is a bit later in the conversation:

“Like, why do any of us become obsessed with the stuff we become obsessed with? The stuff that kind of defines who we are. Is it some kind of destiny, or more like a flash of inspiration?”

We need to love as much as we need to be loved. No matter who we are, we seek the experience of joy, and the inexplicable resonance or validation of whatever gives us joy, whether it’s Star Trek, Indian food, stock car racing, or water ballet. That’s why mockery or dismissal of these touchstones can feel so threatening.

This is not a “gay book for teens.” It’s a book inclusive of teen readers—yes, queer teens and geeky teens—many of whom will recognize themselves and their challenges in its pages. Adult readers will certainly recognize themselves in this book as well, from many different angles and in many different phases of life. We can all gain some insight from Sam Lidell, English teacher extraordinaire:

“ . . . if you haven’t figured it out by now, then let me assure you, Lula—nobody’s normal. And pretty much everybody you meet in life is trying to figure out how to be a so-called ‘normal person.’ As if it’s some fixed point that you reach, like zero degrees Celsius. But everybody’s just who they are. Weird, flawed, good at some things, bad at others. There’s no one single person who’s doing everything right all the time. Trust me on that. There is no such thing as normal.”

This is part of the compassionate work of Weird Girl and What’s His Name. It’s a story in which nobody really “gets it right”—except, paradoxically, by blundering along and living anyway, in spite of all that so-called failure.

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Fabiano Alborghetti
Translated by Marco Sonzogni
Guernica Editions ($20)

by Graziano Krätli

Current events and crime news keep feeding fiction and creative nonfiction alike, but remain difficult to digest in poetry. This is not because of any real or presumed affinities between “news style” and other forms of “ordinary writing,” but simply because some “currencies” are easier to circulate and circumvent in prose than in verse. This is why Fabiano Alborghetti’s two fine collections to date, L’opposta riva (The Opposite Shore, 2006 and 2013) and Registro dei fragili. 43 canti (2009; Directory of the Vulnerable) represent almost an anomaly, if not a challenge, in the world of contemporary Italian poetry. The anomaly consists largely in the poet’s adoption of a voice (or voices) other than his own, in the process divesting himself of his poetic persona to invest in the cultural and linguistic expropriations (and reappropriations) that such borrowed voices represent, whether they belong to the tattered margins or the dead center of society. Making such adoptive voices redemptive is a high-risk investment, and it is more so for a poet than for a prose writer.

In L’opposta riva, the voiceless are sixty-three illegal immigrants from the Balkans, North and West Africa, whose names, ages, and origins are listed at the end of the book (unless they appear simply as “unknown,” which makes their voicelessness even more crying). The many forms of displacement, dispossession, and violation they embody were recorded by Alborghetti during the three years he lived at various immigrant camps around Milan (while working, of all places, at a luxury hotel). Immigration, its causes, hopes, and consequences, have been explored before, in poetry and prose, by a number of contemporary Italian writers, notably Eraldo Affinati and Erri De Luca. What makes Alborghetti’s book unique is the way in which its borrowed voices (and their own second-language idiosyncrasies) shape a distinct poetic idiom, creating an elevated style in which classical resonances and literary erudition are shined through the prism of broken linguistic and human material.

A somewhat similar kind of ethnographic field work informs Directory of the Vulnerable, Alborghetti’s next collection and his first to appear in English. (The publisher is planning to bring out a translation of L’opposta riva sometime between the end of 2016 and mid-2017). Prompted by a murder case occurred in 2006, the poet turned his attention from the Other—the dispossessed, displaced, undocumented alien—to his own fellow citizens, the affluent and alienated suburban middle class to whom aliens (legal or illegal) are but another docu-soap they watch on television. Instead of visiting immigrant camps, talking to their residents, and listening to their stories and pleas, Alborghetti took a stealthier approach, infiltrating “different family groups, noting their behaviours, the dialogues, the different relations that govern the physical, oral and moral behaviour of a family.” He followed them “in the shopping centres, the boutiques, the restaurants . . . spied on them among the stalls of a market or [from] behind the hedges of private gardens, listening and taking notes.” These field notes allowed him to insinuate himself imaginatively in the private lives and minds of his two protagonists, and to ventriloquize their growing estrangement from each other.

The facts are faceless enough that they could have happened in any industrial society. A woman trapped in a dead-end marriage kills her young and only son, whose birth had ended her dream of becoming a fashion model. The murder is never mentioned in the book, or only indirectly through the smoke screen of media interviews, expert debates, and the comments “of those who are right because they were there.” What interests Alborghetti is neither the reality of the facts nor the probability of their causes, but the complex universe represented by the inner and outer lives of his protagonists, the husband and wife whose ambitions, expectations, frustrations, and obsessions are typical of a late capitalist society driven by hyper-consumerism, self-gratification, and celebrity worship. In sum, all the rich, contradictory, and hard-to-define dark matter that feeds a writer’s imagination but is normally off limits to the journalist and the scientist.

The book is divided in three parts and forty-three cantos, each one consisting of a variable number of unrhymed tercets and ending with a single line. The first thirty-seven cantos (“Pictures at an Exhibition”) trace the downward path of the couple through various stages of separation, each picture duly framed by a specific location or situation: the restaurant, the gym, the backyard barbecue, the beach, the dining room, the living room, and of course the bedroom, both marital and extramarital. The second and third sections consist of three cantos each and deal with the aftermath of the tragedy, the sordid and short-lived media attention (“Judicial Theses”), and the return of the quiet after the dust is settled (“Directory of the Vulnerable”). The progression is contrapuntal, the rhythm unrelenting, the pace fast and feverish. The dynamic potential of the three-line construction is enhanced by the frequent use of repetition, assonance and alliteration.

The resulting lines, in Italian, convey most effectively the peculiar attitudes of the protagonists, often with the fastidious pointedness of a tongue-twister (“Poi la spesa si contava controllando lo scontrino” and, a few lines later, “Lo scontrino controllava fermo fisso a lato cassa.” They also represent a translator’s nightmare, as no amount of lexical or semantic competence will produce a satisfactory equivalent, either in English or any other language. The best a translator can hope and strive for, instead, is a satisfactory compromise—a version that is competent and compelling at the same time, combining a thorough understanding of the original and a sharp rendition of it in the target language. Unfortunately, this is achieved only partially and sporadically by the version under review. Translator Marco Sonzogni, although clearly aware of the challenge presented by the original and its “almost hypnotic rhythm,” tends to follow it too closely and trustfully, thus giving us lines that rarely retain the mordant conciseness and the vibrant energy of the original, but that are consistently longer and heavier, often sluggish and occasionally dull. This is also due to the awkward choice of certain words and expressions, which depart from the original for no apparent reason. Consider, for example, the first of the two lines quoted above, which is rendered

Next the bill for the shopping gets checked,
checked that nothing’s being charged in error;
the check-out operator is up to it, ringing up items you haven’t bought

While possibly justified by the fact that the translator is based in New Zealand, the use of “bill” instead of “receipt” for the Italian scontrino, and of “check-out operator” instead of “cashier” for cassiera, does not help retain the rhythm of the original; on the contrary, the repetition of “checked,” “checked” and “check-out” sounds rather toneless if compared to “si contava controllando lo scontrino.” Similar examples may be found in virtually any canto of the book.

It was Pound who said that “a translation must be more concise than the original,” and who tried to live up to his pronouncement with his versions of classical Chinese, Anglo-Saxon, Provençal, and medieval Italian poetry. In reality, the practice of turning a text, especially a poetic text, from one language into another tends to add rather than subtract, regardless of what the source and target languages are; and what is added is often redundant and occasionally irrelevant, if not detrimental to the overall understanding of the text. This is to a great extent inevitable and frequently attributed to the lure of the original, its power to mesmerize and captivate (in the original sense of “take captive”) with its lexical and syntactic peculiarities, its rhythmic aspects, its layers of meaning. Each text is a labyrinth and a riddle, and the spell it casts upon the reader is considerably more dangerous if he or she doubles as translator. In order to resist the power of seduction of the text and break its spell, such a translator must take control of its authority and—hard as it sounds—practice systematic, or at least selective authoricide. (Isn’t the translator’s an Oedipal condition anyway?) Facing this dilemma, Alborghetti’s translator took a more accommodating approach, producing a version that is deferential rather than distinctive, and often prosaic without being necessarily faithful, as an attentive bilingual reader will be able to see.

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Grace Cavalieri
Scarith / New Academia Publishing ($24)

by Daniela Gioseffi

In the prelude to her new memoir, Grace Cavalieri says “I love reviewing other people’s books. I love interviewing others on the radio about their work. I love transforming words into poetry. Yet this personal writing seems hard. For some reason when Ken said this book had to be written, it became a favor to him. Since his death . . . .” Cavalieri’s late husband Kenneth Flynn, a retired Captain of the U.S. Navy and a noted sculptor of large metal works, is often mentioned in this memoir: the couple knew each other since Cavalieri was in high school, and they raised four daughters together over the span of their lives.

Early in her career, Cavalieri served as Assistant Director of Daytime Children’s Programming for PBS, and was involved with the production of the long-lived show Sesame Street. She once produced a skit with the beloved character Big Bird at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among other adventures while at PBS. The many anecdotes in her memoir make for interesting reading, often full of humorous happenings.

An articulate and graceful writer of nearly thirty books and twenty-six plays, Cavalieri has also interviewed nearly every contemporary American poet of note on her Library of Congress radio show, The Poet and the Poem. She’s interviewed every Poet Laureate of the country, as well as reviewed hundreds of poetry books in her column in the Washington Independent Review of Books. Her memoir, therefore, chronicles a career in literary arts and media by one of America's most knowledgeable and involved literary figures. Cavalieri has made a significant contribution to disseminating American letters to the public, and this book is the story of her life in literary art. It contains amusing tales of her encounters with poets as well as theatrical personalities that have peopled her life.

Several chapters tell of her own plays, which have been produced in Baltimore, North and South Carolina, San Francisco, Colorado, New York, and at many other off-Broadway theatres of the country. She explains her play Pinecrest Rest Haven, concerning an old folks' home where “Mr. and Mrs. P were married and shared the same memories but did not remember each other; and so, fell in love and hate, every day, again and again. That sort of ironic wit permeates the memoir.

The memoir takes its title from a lyric in a comic song by Jerome Kern in the musical Show Boat, which ends: “If some gentleman would talk with reason / I would cancel all next season. / Life upon the wicked stage / Ain't nothin' for a girl!” The playwright has certainly had her successes with her twenty-six works for the stage, and some surprisingly fateful tribulations caused by feckless fate—as, for example, the New York opening of her play Anna Nicole: Blond Glory, based on the sensational and tragic life of Anna Nicole Smith, which failed to complete its run because of Hurricane Sandy. Or the time a terrorist bomber caused a huge traffic snarl in Washington, D.C. the night her play Quilting the Sun, about the life of African American quilt artist Harriet Powers, opened at The Smithsonian.

Much of the life of the poet and playwright was inspired by her husband’s belief in her and his encouragement of her art. Ken figures greatly in this memoir written after his passing, and it’s much because of his presence in her memory that this book of her adventurous life in art was written. No doubt her beloved husband would be proud of the memoir he inspired.

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