Tag Archives: Fall 2023

The Nightmare Man

J.H. Markert
Crooked Lane Books ($19.99)

In J.H. Markert’s The Nightmare Man, a serial killer called The Scarecrow terrorizes the fictional town of Crooked Tree. He is so called because of his habit of posing as a scarecrow in his victims’ cornfields. When they approach to investigate, he runs away. This continues for the next two days, until he catches them as they approach. His modus operandi derives entirely from a horror novel written by the protagonist, Ben Bookman, a citizen of Crooked Tree. The lead police investigator, Detective Mills, suspects Ben of being The Scarecrow; his distrust of Ben is strengthened by the disappearance of Ben’s brother thirteen years ago, which Mills also investigated. It remains an unsolved case.

Engaging vignettes end each chapter; each one is narrated from the point-of-view of one character, giving us a glimpse into their life. Compared to the main story, the vignettes contain less dialogue and more exposition; without conversations to break up description, the writing flows more smoothly, and Markert’s talent for character building shines.

Markert also successfully imbues each character with a distinctive manner of speech. We become so familiar with each of the character’s voices that if their names were omitted from a conversation, we would still be able to identify them by their unique diction. One character who shines in dialogue is Ben’s nine-year-old daughter, Bri, who expresses innocence and astuteness at the same time. When she converses with another character, she defines herself against them, developing not only her own individuality, but also theirs. And since dialogue dominates The Nightmare Man, this refinement of their personalities occurs over and over, such that by the end of the novel, each character is fully fleshed out.

With powerful characterization surrounding a central mystery, The Nightmare Man is an entertaining read for horror and suspense fans.

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Book Review, Fiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

In Myth and Paint: An Interview with Mary Jo Bang

by Tiffany Troy

A Film in Which I Play Everyone (Graywolf Press, $17), Mary Jo Bang’s new collection of poems, draws from David Bowie’s fever-dream of directing a film in which he simultaneously plays all the characters. Bang’s vast cast of characters—fictional, mythological, historical—are tasked with the same daily assignment, which is to make sense of a world where one feels like a perpetual outsider. These deeply observed poems explore what it is to find oneself trapped in a role—that of Daphne or Sisyphus, Ophelia or Hamlet—and discover that the only escape is through self-knowledge and imagination.

Mary Jo Bang has published eight previous books of poetry, including A Doll for Throwing (Graywolf Press, 2017), called “a haunting exploration of a past world whose terrors still ring true today” by Ms. Magazine, and Elegy (Graywolf Press, 2009), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; in the past decade she has also published acclaimed new translations of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio that update these classics into a lyrical, twenty-first century idiom. She teaches at Washington University in Saint Louis.

Tiffany Troy: How does the opening poem “From Another Approach” open the door to this collection?

Mary Jo Bang: I think what felt right about letting that poem “open the door” was that it begins in media res. You could say that all poems begin by plunging the reader “into the midst of things,” if “things” equal the poet’s ongoing obsessions and preoccupations. That poem was written in November of 2020 during the first year of the pandemic when my life, like the lives of most people, was freighted with anxiety about what was happening—given the pandemic and, additionally, the socio-political situation in the country and across the world. Shut up inside alone for months, it sometimes felt that the boundaries between the world and the self were becoming even more porous than usual.

TT: Absolutely. To me that first poem also touches on how the poet’s obsessions and preoccupations find their way into the collection—namely, a keen observation of the “line between the two blues, water // and sky, you and I,” and the feelings beneath what can be captured on film. Would you like to speak about how the title of your book, which is drawn from a statement David Bowie made, shaped your approach?

MJB: I’m not sure how I came across the Bowie quote, but when I read it, I immediately thought, what an apt description of the lyric poem—a film where all the characters are played by the poet. It has to be that way since there’s no one else there, only the poet and the blank piece of paper. Most of us agree that the lyric-I is a construct, but I began to see how everyone else in the poem is a construct as well. That “you” or “her” or “them,” the mother, the sister, David Bowie—they’re all characters in the movie that plays in your head and which you translate into text. The result appears to represent your way of thinking and your way of using language, but no matter how close the details are to your biographical life, within the confines of the poem, there is no “real,” only useful fictions that reveal your attempt to represent some aspect of yourself that may or may not reflect a reader’s experience of being in the world.

TT: Yes, and framing as a construct appears frequently, whether on the level of language or in the poems’ concerns. For instance, in asking “Why you are you and I am I,” the lyrical “I” and the addressee, the “you,” are subjects as well as objects. Likewise, the collection examines film culture and social expectations that enforce the performance of gender roles and identities (“toxic masculinity told her stepfather / it was safe to drive across water”). What does your notion of the lyric poem as a stage set do for you as the poet?

MJB: Treating the poem as a vignette or a scene from a movie allowed me to conceptually be in two places at once. I could create a speaker to serve as a character moving around on a set, speaking the lines I’d written for her, and at the same time, stand at a remove and comment on what it must be like to act and speak and think like her. It’s a type of dissociation—but one that mirrors the dissociative experience of being hypervigilant in a world where one often feels alien. And if you identify as a woman, and especially a queer woman, that world is also dangerous.

TT: The duality that you describe is very well done. I also love how the poems allow us to look inside the interiority of a character whose scripted performance may be very different from how the actor actually feels about the role.

MJB: I’m afraid the actor playing the role has no feelings about the role they’ve been assigned. They only do what I tell them to do and say what I tell them to say! Which reminds me of an interview I once read where someone asked Tom Perotta if he could go to lunch with any one of his characters, which one would it be—his answer was that he could go to lunch with any of his characters any time he wished to!

There is no impermeable barrier between the character and the author. The characters in these poems are different from me, the poet, in some ways—I’ve never been turned into a tree, for example, as Daphne was—but in other ways, we share some knowledge, she and I, and that’s why she’s in the poem, and why I’m playing her. Running away from Apollo, who won’t take no for an answer, and near the point of total exhaustion, she appeals to her father, the river god, to save her, and he obliges by turning her into a tree. Personally, I don’t feel like that is the type of help she might have been asking for! In fact, it cruelly makes permanent her perceived rigidity—her refusal to give up her virginity to Apollo—and now she is forced to be forever passive while Apollo gets to worship her leaves and use them to make his laurel wreaths. I don’t see the justice in that! And she’s been silenced, which is simply another way of being held down.

TT: You’ve written and translated several poetry collections. Was your process creating this book different from previous books?

MJB: In terms of process, it’s difficult to compare any two books. Some of my books have had a mechanism that tied the poems together. The Bride of E, for example, is an abecedarian collection where the letters of the alphabet provoked individual poems into being. In The Eye Like a Strange Balloon, each poem is an ekphrastic response to an artwork. In some ways, these poems are a bit like those in Elegy, which deals with grief, and a bit like those in Louise in Love, where I was explicit in my use of fictional characters. The title of this book is the only unequivocal gesture to the notion of fiction but that film (in which I play everyone) could also be a documentary. Or a hybrid docudrama. Or even a mockumentary!

TT: The degree of genre-bending achieved in the collection is reflected in the characters that take center stage: there’s Daphne, of course, in a distinctly mythological space. Then there’s Adam and Eve, Mistress Mary of nursery-rhyme fame, and the still photographer and the movie set doctor. The poems themselves carry further allusions, to Alice in Wonderland, for instance, or to Charles Lamb’s writings, which is another layer of interpretation, in which the real and the fictional blend and coexist. The poem “I Could Have Been Better” has quite a few people in it, from vastly different realms. Could you talk about how the poem is using them?

MJB: There are quite a few people there, I see that now! There’s the I, who’s lamenting her flaws and their consequences, which leads her to those two famous signifiers of error and disastrous aftermath, Adam who’s first, so alphabetically A, and Eve. Eve then morphs into Lucy, the fossil skeleton of a woman found in 1974 in Ethiopia, whose remains are believed to be at least 3 million years old, which is near the beginning of being human. She was found in a river basin area at the foot of the Ethiopian mountains, one of which becomes the steep hill up which Sisyphus, another icon of eternal punishment, is being forced to keep pushing a boulder, which cruelly rolls down the hill as soon as it reaches the top. That takes the speaker to a moment when a policewoman, following the procedure of checking on someone to whom they have just telephoned the news of a death, arrives to ask whether she’s okay. She’s not. The death, a consequence that’s clearly beyond repair, sends the speaker to the “bed [she] was born in,” conceived there by a flawed Adam and Eve. Against the tally of errors and horrific after-effects, the only consolation is that one has loved and was loved.

The poem then takes us to “another country”—an echo of the lines in Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, which were quoted in an earlier poem (Part I of “Four Boxes of Everything”)—

“The undiscovered country . . .
puzzles the will, / And makes us rather bear
those ills we have / Than fly to others
that we know not of?”

The ellipses obscure Hamlet’s description of the undiscovered country as the one “from whose bourn / No traveler returns”—i.e., death. The speaker obviously did come back but left some part of herself behind. The woman to whom the speaker wanted to say, “I love you”—but can’t, because love is tied to the death—takes us to Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, where the goddess of love, having been born as a fully grown woman, is seen arriving on a half-shell to a shore edged by windblown reeds. Venus holds her long hair over the place where, if she were Eve, a fig leaf would be. While the speaker would like to see “something change,” it can’t. Like Eve’s catastrophe, the speaker’s catastrophe is changeless. Venus won’t change either, because she’s trapped in myth and paint.

TT: The idea of the speaker “tracing each second back / to a biblical beginning” and being all right but only if you “discount” the present recalls Sisyphus’s unending “same daily / assignment” where the disastrous errors and linked punishment gets continually reenacted in the memory. Counting and numbers are recurring motifs not only in this poem but in the collection overall. How did you organize the poems into five sections?

MJB: My students frequently ask me about how to put a manuscript together, and I tell them all the ways that have been suggested to me, beginning with my teacher Lucie Brock-Broido’s advice, which was to first choose how many sections you want, but never more than four. When I asked why that limit, she said, “more than four is just… fussy!” I never questioned her wisdom, but when it came to arranging the poems in this manuscript, I was at a total loss. So, I did what another poet once told me he did, which was to give the manuscript to a poet friend and let them arrange it. I gave this manuscript to Timothy Donnelly, and he came up with the five sections—based, I believe, on the idea of a five-act play, suggested by the presence of Hamlet in the epigraph and in several of the poems. When he returned it to me, I found I had to move some of the poems around and flip the order of two of the sections, but at least I now had what felt like a scaffold. And the five sections felt useful and not at all fussy!

TT: What was it about five sections that felt useful?

MJB: In many of these poems, the speaker is seen in the midst of trying to make sense of the world while, at the same time, questioning how it is that one makes sense. How does the brain work; how does experience, especially formative events that to others may seem trivial, interact with the body and its hardwired brain? And how does all of that get further enmeshed with the social order into which one is tossed at birth? The speaker seems intent on piecing that together—not in the hope of determining causality, that’s not possible—but to somehow escape the weight of the continual rumination and the sense of detachment produced by it. There’s an intensity to that psychological accounting; the section breaks, I hope, provide some relief from that inquisition. And some periodic, if only temporary, resolve.

TT: I admire that intensity in your work! Section breaks provide a reprieve from the persona’s inquisition, and line breaks achieve that reprieve on a microlevel. For instance, in “How It Will Feel Months from Now,” one of my favorite poems, the sight of the pink sliver of the sky, the sound of the opera singer’s high notes, and the yearning for the sky through time are described with exactitude and formal mastery. I enjoy the music of “The keys keep making the piano be” and the way it morphs into “As long as I have sight, I’ll see” in the following stanza.

Could you speak about the forms you deploy in the collection? Does the poem find its form or vice versa? Most poems in the collection are consistent in line length.

MJB: I use the line to measure out sound—alliteration, assonance, rhyme—and content, which sometimes takes the form of story-telling—this happened, this happened, this / happened. At other times, the content is meant to imitate interior monologue. Over the course of this manuscript, the line began to reflect the speaker’s characteristic speech (and thought) patterns. We all have a way of speaking, an idiolect, that is recognizably our own. It’s also possible that I adapted my line length to Dante’s since I was writing these poems while I was translating Purgatorio.

In terms of form, most of the poems are arranged in stanzas, a convention I find difficult to resist! I find stanzas to be visually satisfying. I do try to be sensitive to poems that don’t want to be broken and that work best as a block form, but they almost have to insist before I give in to that arrangement! There is a certain deliberateness with stanzas, an argument that this is exactly how things should be. It’s of course a fallacy because there are any number of ways the poem can be arranged. The first poems of this manuscript were originally written as 13-line prose blocks, a carry-over from the poems in A Doll for Throwing (Graywolf Press, 2017), which had all been arranged in justified prose blocks to echo the Bauhaus aesthetic, since the poems were in dialogue with that movement and particularly with Lucia Moholy, who photographed the buildings and products that came out of the workshops. With these poems, however, after a while, I began to miss writing in lines, and I went back and re-lineated all of those early poems. For me, a collection finds its own way. It may start out as one thing and end as something totally different. It’s only after I’ve written a number of individual poems that they begin to seem like parts of a whole.

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Interview

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

The Bomb

The Weapon That Changed the World

Didier Alcante and Laurent-Frédéric Bollée
Illustrated by Denis Rodier
Translated by Ivanka T. Hahenberger
Abrams ComicArts ($29.99)

by John Bradley

“In the beginning, there was nothing. But in this nothing . . . was everything!” So begins this graphic book on the development of the first atomic bombs. Not only is the Biblical opening a surprise, but the speaker here is the element uranium, who offers other such chilling comments in this well-researched (with a selected bibliography) and expansive (459 pages) volume, which concludes with the U.S. bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Although a history of the bomb might sound like an odd fit for a graphic book, the three authors—with Alcante and Bollée providing the research and writing and Rodier the artwork—make the medium seem ideal. The book feels like a storyboard for a film, given its use of varied locations (Africa, Norway, Japan, Germany, and the U.S.), a vast cast (short biographies of the central figures are included at the back of the book), and intrigue, complete with a scientist-spy. The authors must be commended for their extensive research into the development of the bomb, especially as regards the story of the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, the first scientist to see the potential of splitting the atom—it was he who pushed the U.S. to develop an atomic bomb before the Nazis did, though once the weapon neared completion, Szilard did everything he could to stop its use. He foresaw a nuclear arms race, as well as the moral stain of the U.S. being the first nation to rain such hell on cities filled with civilians. On many occasions in the book, Szilard and General Leslie Grove, in charge of the Manhattan Project, argue passionately. By foregrounding the story of Szilard, the authors weave into the narrative a moral dimension sometimes missing in historical accounts of the bomb that view it more as a scientific breakthrough.

Another thread in the saga that is often missing in much of U.S. nuclear history is the secret testing done on civilians. One such individual was Ebb Cade, an African-American worker at the Oak Ridge facility. Driving to work one morning, on March 24, 1945, Cade accidentally drove off the road. When he woke, he found himself in a hospital with a host of injuries. “We’re going to take good care of you, Mr. Cade,” an anonymous doctor tells him. “You can trust us.” Later, this same doctor injects Cade with an unknown shot. The reader soon discovers that this “human product,” as the officials call Mr. Cade, was injected with plutonium, though he was never asked if he consented to be involved in an experiment to learn about the effect of plutonium on the human body, nor was he informed later. The officials casually discuss how Cade lost fifteen teeth due to the shot, but this is quickly rationalized—“He suffers from acute gum inflammation anyway”—before they offer the ultimate excuse: “But it was in the interest of science!” The book includes one other “human product” who is injected with plutonium, but there were many others. Eileen Welsome’s book The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War (Dial Press) broke this story for the first time in 1999, and Alcante and Dodier make effective use of Welsome’s research.

Not only is the text of The Bomb engaging—and translated so well by Ivanka T. Hahenberger it feels as if it was written in English—but the illustrations keep the eye engaged as well. Bollée, who has published dozens of graphic novels in his native France, provides the expected “BOOOM” and “SCHBAM!!,” but the artwork shows great variety and versatility in technique. At one point we see a nightmare had by Klaus Fuchs, who spied on the Manhattan Project for the Russians; the hallucinatory style of the art here deftly conveys the terror of Fuchs’s dream. The depictions of bodies in Hiroshima set aflame by the atomic bomb are also vividly disturbing—as they should be.

While a graphic book might not be the first choice of a reader who wants a detailed history of the creation of the atomic bomb, The Bomb would be a good place to start for those who want a stirring and factually accurate (except for the creation of a Japanese family in Hiroshima) account. And should anyone think that our atomic history no longer concerns us, consider the words of uranium that close the book: “And so, you think this is the end of my story? What if it’s only the beginning?”

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Book Review, Graphic Novel & Comics Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Motherfield

Julia Cimafiejeva
Translated by Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib
Deep Vellum ($18.95)

by Jessica Johnson

The first collection available in English by Belarusian poet, translator, and editor Julia Cimafiejeva, Motherfield begins with approximately thirty pages of the author’s year-long protest diary, composed in English during a mass uprising around the 2020 presidential election in Belarus; authoritarian leader Alexandr Lukashenko, in power since 1994, retained it in elections the E.U. deemed illegitimate. Cimafiejeva’s poems, translated from Belarusian by the impressive team of Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib, follow the diary, concluding with a single poem composed in English.

The diary feels written for the gaze of readers outside the events, possibly as a record in case something happens to the author. For some American readers, it will hold flashes of recognition—particularly the difficult feelings that come from continuing literary life and experiencing respites of comfort and safety during a political crisis—as well as an abundance of chilling occurrences that don’t (yet) happen here (for example, widespread internet outages as a government tactic).

Offering historical, political, and personal context to the poems that follow it, the diary is an activist’s account, but it is also a poet’s account; some of its moves and images linger and react with the poems’ more distilled elements. Of the dubious polling station where she will cast her vote, Cimafiejeva writes, “Every election day in Lukashenka’s Belarus has turned into a demonstration of the cheap and vulgar aesthetics of his power.” Her description settles on a

teenage girl in a pseudo-folk costume with a wreath on her head . . . singing about her love for the Motherland, passionately clenching a microphone. Her Russian song checks off the golden wheat fields, the big blue lakes, and the slender white storks flying over our heads. She sings that we all live safely and peacefully in our beloved Belarus.

Here Cimafiejeva shows the propagandist’s Russian-language vision of the Motherland, one that the poems will meaningfully subvert to include ecological disaster, disconnection, and stifled expression. Cimafiejeva was born in 1981 in a region of Belarus that became part of the Chernobyl zone during her childhood. Her poetry develops, often through extended metaphor, a concept of bleak, devastated embodiment with disrupted relationships between past and future, land and people, people and language.

In the opening poem, “The Stone of Fear,” the speaker’s inheritance is “a trust fund / of fear” in the form of a stone. The stone is mute and without memory, “an eternally slow-growing / embryo.” To nurse it, its inheritors must “unlearn” how to breathe, “how to say what needs to be said.” In place of nurture and natural cycles of rebirth, Cimafiejeva finds intergenerational reproduction of something wrong.

While ecological devastation, absence of language, and reproductive bodies feature in the metaphors that drive many of these poems, references to Chernobyl also appear more literally. In “Rocking the Devil,” children swing their feet at a bus stop bench; it begins to rain and the girls stick out their tongues, but no one knows the raindrops are “disastrous,” that they’ve already permeated the scene’s vibrant flora. When the bus takes the girls away, the trees wave goodbye. Similarly, “1986” is written from the perspective of a “we” who had to leave houses, crops, and graves. Strangers dismantle their homes and what remains of their lives in the ancestral village; when they come back to visit, the land does not forgive them.

If the diary operates in one register of documentary, the poems work in others, but several moments in the poems call back to the diary. “My First City, Zhlobin” portrays a steel-producing town as a body that nurtures ruin:

I fear your children, Zhlobin,
the steel-cast children
of Zhlobin
nursed by the factory’s
smoggy tits.

The speaker here, fed on the factory’s black milk, emits rust, whereas the body in Cimafiejeva’s diary observation “I feel safe inside the body of a crowd”—the body of people gathered in protest, sharing water and food and generally looking after each other—can be read as a counterpoint to the blighted bodies of the poems.

Also thought-provoking is the diary entry for October 17-18, when Cimafiejeva and her husband, a novelist, are at a literary festival launching their books. He draws a crowd, but she doesn’t. She writes, “My new poetry book was published a few days before the election. It was the worst time: no one is interested in a tiny poetry book when the main news is deaths, beatings, and detentions. But there is no other time.” This moment highlights the question of poetry’s connection to lived and recorded history, a question enacted again by the arrangement of the book itself.

That arrangement comes to a crescendo with “My European Poem,” which closes the book. It speaks to the possibility of being read by an international audience and being placed among writers working in less challenging political conditions. Of Belarusian history, Cimafiejeva writes,

When I tell it in English,
I want to pretend that I am you,
That I don’t have that painful experience
Of constant protesting and constant failing,
That nasty feeling of frustration and dismay.

In the end the speaker keeps a “beaten hope” that “builds its nest / On my roof and sings / In Belarusian.” This poem, unlike others, is dated: August 5, 2020, just before the election, before the crackdown, before the president remained, again, in power. The beginning is at the end, enacting the cyclical nature of the “beaten hope” the poem names.

Yet if Motherfield’s final poem relies on the protest diary for context, the poems that precede it—their images of wordlessness, thwarted regeneration, and ecological catastrophe—give the book its depth, and announce Julia Cimafiejeva as a poet that English language readers will want to follow in the future.

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Book Review, Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Nachoem M. Wijnberg

Nachoem M. Wijnberg
Translated by David Colmer
New York Review Books ($18)

by Thomas Moody

Walking on the beach he gets an idea
and immediately guesses its incorrectness
—“Method”

Nachoem M. Wijnberg’s poetry possesses the disconcerting quality of being at once extraordinarily strange and very close to the feeling of life as it is actually lived. Wijnberg brings the world close to us (and it is a sweeping world he attends to: religious and philosophical investigations, encounters with historical figures, and domestic affairs of the most trivial nature) by being exact about the indecisiveness of the human will and by favoring the processes of our understanding of experience over the particulars of experience itself. Take “Letter to the Corinthians”:

Awareness of the world as well as ourselves
is as difficult for us as self-awareness for fish or foxes
although they in their behavior take their own existence
into account as we do the existence of the world.

These poems deal with the obstacles we face in “taking into account . . . the existence of the world”: the incompatibility of desires, the misapplication of attention, the strangeness of the other (particularly when the other is familiar), and the oddity of the revealed self. Here’s the opening to “Replying”:

Starting with what is the same for everyone

or can be (can everyone come over here),
looking at oneself and leaving out what reminds
one of oneself
to be able to say what can be said

without waiting until the same thing has been said in reply.

Understanding and loving, so that one of the two
can rest while the other watches.
Having the courage to say when no one is there:

how I wanted to live is incomprehensible to me
but maybe not to everyone.

Wijnberg is a professor of business studies at the University of Amsterdam; value systems, and our attempts to ascribe them coherently, are recurring themes throughout his poetry (“Continuing with what I do, recognizing what might be important enough to / justify putting everything I have into it — both of those are brave, aren’t they?”). Over the course of the twenty volumes collected here, from 1989’s The Simulation of Creation to 2022’s Naming Names, there is arguably little in the way of formal inventiveness—we are presented with songs, jokes, parables and ghazals—however, Wijnberg’s approach doesn’t require new forms to astonish; his singular voice makes existing forms seem new.

This is due partly to Wijnberg’s casual poetic register, which flattens any hierarchy of concepts and abolishes the mind’s value rankings of the quotidian and the profound. “Power and Knowledge and Justice,” a meditation on the existence of God, reduces the divine to a doorman “who does have power / over you but not much, and you can take a lot of it away by walking off and / standing somewhere else.” The poem opens:

Imagine there is someone far away who has almost no power but loves us—
our existence matters to him and he wants to know as much as possible about
each of us.
Or else he could have power but has set the condition that he only wants to
know that much if he doesn’t have to have power.
If you have had a lot of power, you can never give it back entirely, you still
know something about how it works.

Such cursory language unmoors us; it reproduces the disorientation we experience when thinking about such enigmatic concepts. Much of this is achieved through Wijnberg’s syntax, which employs a bewildering repetition of pronouns (especially “it”) with their exact referents often difficult to determine, as well as run-on sentences and other devices to produce complex layers of meaning. Take, for instance, the short poem “What an Actor the World Has Lost in You”:

An actor on another actor: he turned from left to right and stopped, at the
same time gesturing with his hand.
Being an actor was unbearably lonely if no one noticed him doing it, the chill
from its beauty went right through me.
Someone who always comes in too early or too late comes in like that, a bad
actor can do it now and then, only a very good actor can do it all the time.
They are acting and they go on for too long or stop suddenly and you can see
they’re glad to be allowed to stop.

We are never entirely certain what any of the four “its” are. The poem seems to turn on the line “Someone who always comes in too early or too late comes in like that,” but Wijnberg leaves us unsure as to which of the referents in the previous lines “that” refers to. This uncertainty destabilizes us as readers, but it replicates our understanding of the world as we experience it, and the accompanying feelings of surprise, confusion, and disorientation. To create such ambiguity through simplicity is Wijnberg’s greatest talent as a poet.

Increasing this uncertainty is the way the logic of many of these poems progress. Wijnberg’s associations often have no obvious point of contrast or connection; his declarative sentences are always slightly askew and his statements are just shy of making sense—close enough to be intelligible, far away enough to be obscure: “A poem must be about something; otherwise no one can say / if the poem is superfluous if it is about him. // What can he say, what is in his heart: a poem if one is bigger than the other, / disappointed if it is not a good poem.” His poems register the large impact of small differences.

They also make innovative use of those things we normally associate with poetic effect. Wijnberg’s rare similes are paradoxical in nature: “like wanting to fight / far above your weight, / but not against someone else”; “More reason to assume / someone is the Messiah / when he arrives / like someone politely leaving / at the earliest possible moment.” He also has an obvious talent for aphorism—“Where words mean something, Ghalib’s are law”; “No one knows what desire is until Ghalib says something about it. / He reads the history of the world and when he is finished, he says what is / missing”—though he rarely utilizes it, perhaps because this kind of rhetoric tends to take the reader out of the poem, or make us realize we are in a poem, devolving the feeling of lived experience into literature about it.

Perhaps it is fitting that one of Wijnberg’s most convincing and effective modes is that of the parable. Take “Laziness and Patience,” which echoes the Biblical story of the prodigal son:

The three sons of the father who says that when he dies,
The entire inheritance will go to the laziest son.
A judge has to find out which of the sons is the laziest.
The first son says: I go quiet when I think someone loves me.
That’s not bad, especially the haste, like someone
who has come to tell someone they don’t love them.
The second son says: my father has worked hard his whole life
to say that the inheritance goes to the laziest son
and that it’s up to a judge to find out which son
is laziest. If it was more I know what I’d do,
says the third son to the woman he spends the inheritance with
in just one night. The woman tells the judge.
The judge asks the son: how did you know that she was the woman
who would tell me about it?

Auden wrote that anyone who attempts to interpret a parable only ends up revealing themselves, but Wijnberg’s poetry compels us to try by asking us to find our bearings in disorientation. Here as elsewhere we might conclude that Modernity, with its pitch of distraction, its savagery masked in convenience, and its slogan- and corporate argot-riddled double-speak, forces us into constantly making sense of the world through the nonsensical. Confusion is our natural state, Wijnberg’s poetry confirms, and where we find meaning.

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Book Review, Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

The End of Reality

How Four Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto

Jonathan Taplin
PublicAffairs ($30)

by Doug MacLeod

Jonathan Taplin takes on two roles—cynic and hardcore realist—in his newest book, The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto. Taplin sees the United States as going down a dangerous road of what he calls “techno-determinism,” which he argues has been sold to a naïve public by four anarcho-libertarian technocrats. These four men—Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen—promise projects that will “deliver us a bright future”: Web3, cryptocurrency, human life on Mars, and transhumanism. Taplin’s billionaire subjects propose that what is best for the world is not only the creation of new worlds and digitized economies but also the merging of technology and human life, disregarding the moral, political, and economic dangers that have already developed due to our avarice and incessant need for immortality.

Taplin expertly picks apart each of these self-appointed saviors and their Frankenstein’s monsters of modern technocracy—while also, for a lack of a better analogy, slapping readers across the face like Cher does to Nicholas Cage in Moonstruck: “Snap out of it!” While partisan in his prose, he retains a relatively objective tone by displaying facts without overt judgement—and by taking the history of propaganda as his context. Taplin acknowledges that the bamboozle has been going on since the days of Hitler and Goebbels, so he directs his disdain forward, at what he sees as its modern legacies: Trumpism, neoliberalism, the politico-media complex, and businessmen who exploit democracy’s gaps for personal gain. If the American public seems to follow these charlatans blindly, Taplin explains, it is because of an ideology of individualism and its barriers to collective understanding. Knowing this, writes Taplin, “all four Technocrats have constructed their companies in a way that stymies the ordinary feedback hoops that help leaders course correct.” Ultimately, he argues, the American experiment is disintegrating to a propaganda machine created by dictators in politics and technology—much like the Weimar Republic did in the early 1930s, but with a modern inflection: Technological advancements, the new face of power grabs, are designed to cause chaos to the point of disorientation and surrender.

How can Americans escape the hyper-unreal morass engineered by Big Tech to ensure unwavering loyalty to a transhuman enterprise? Taplin states that Americans need to resist rather than submit, and create a new age of realism devoted to a regenerative economy that place importance on cooperation, participation, responsibility, and innovation. Reality is right in front of us, Taplin urges, and it is filled with poverty, homelessness, illiteracy, xenophobia, misogyny, white supremacy, food insecurity, violence, and other problems that flashy, profit-focused inventions can’t fix: “Technocrats have no solutions to real problems; in fact they exacerbate them by draining money for ill-conceived space ventures or fomenting discord that gets in the way of solutions.”

As a coda, proof of Taplin’s statement recently materialized with the tragic death of five people who spent $250,000 apiece to see the Titanic’s steel skeleton; their vessel was supposed to have been “unsinkable,” yet cost-saving shortcuts in its design spelled doom. Taplin may be a cynic, but his argument in The End of Reality is valid and sobering.

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Book Review, Nonfiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Trusting Your Own Bad Eye: An Interview with David Jauss

by Benjamin Woodard

Born in Minnesota in 1951, David Jauss is the author of four collections of stories: Black Maps (University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), Crimes of Passion (Dzanc Books, 2014), Glossolalia: New & Selected Stories (Press 53, 2013), and Nice People: New & Selected Stories II (Press 53, 2017). He has published two poetry collections—You Are Not Here (Fleur-de-Lis, 2002) and Improvising Rivers (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1995)—and has edited several anthologies, including the craft collection Words Overflown by Stars (Story Press, 2009). His writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories and has won the O. Henry Award and two Pushcart Prizes.

Alone with All That Could Happen: On Writing Fiction (Press 53, $29.95), a collection of craft essays by Jauss, was originally published by Writer’s Digest in 2008. Recently, Jauss released a revised and expanded version of the book, adding in new examples and a brand-new essay on plot structure. Tackling point of view, story collection organization, epiphanies in fiction, and more, the collection is a gift for writers everywhere—a craft book that speaks deeply about technique while offering perspectives that sometimes push against tropes sold by instructors for decades. Once I got my hands on this new edition, I knew I wanted to talk with Jauss about what went into these essays, as well as how the book fits into our current climate of creativity battling AI art.

Benjamin Woodard: What inspired you to revisit these essays, and have any of your ideas shifted since the book’s first publication?

David Jauss: The main reason I wanted to revise and expand the book was to improve my essay on point of view. I can’t tell you how many writers have told me—in person, in letters, in emails, and Facebook posts—that it’s far and away the best essay on POV they’ve ever read. One writer even called it “instantly canonical.” But POV is a slippery, complicated subject, and the more I read and thought about it, the more I realized I’d made some mistakes in the original version of the essay. Also, in the fourteen years that the first version of Alone with All That Could Happen was in print, I came across numerous examples that would better illustrate the various POV techniques I discuss.

I also wanted to update my essay “Autobiographobia” to address the bugaboo of cultural appropriation, which has become an increasingly controversial issue since the first edition appeared, and I wanted to add an essay on plot and structure, two subjects I felt were conspicuously missing from the first version. There are dozens of cuts, additions, updates, and changes in all the essays, but the POV essay is the most altered. The fact that it took me fourteen years to revise it to my satisfaction is proof that the original version was anything but “instantly canonical.” I hope the new version is closer to deserving that kind of praise.

BW: I will join the chorus in praising your essay on POV. It breaks down point of view techniques in ways that are easy to digest and appreciate. I have read and reread that essay, and it has spun me off to reevaluate some of my own writing. While talking about various updates, you mention adding to “Autobiographobia,” which discusses, among other things, moving away from the old chestnut, “Write what you know.” Have you experienced any pushback on this essay when it comes to the idea of writing outside of one’s culture and experience, and can you speak to whether there is a limitation one might face when writing in such a manner?

DJ: I have no doubt that many—maybe even most—fiction writers today believe writing about people whose culture and experience differ from theirs is “cultural appropriation,” a violation of the “copyright” those people have on their culture and experience, but no one has criticized my essay—at least not so far. My essay argues that writing about people whose age, gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, religion, politics, culture, and experiences differ from ours is a positive thing, just as reading about such people is. Indeed, I’d argue that it just may be the most important reason to write fiction.

What people call “cultural appropriation,” I—and most writers throughout literary history—would call “imagination.” As I say in my essay, I agree with Sherwood Anderson, who said, “the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others” and therefore bridges divisions between people. I see writing about “the other” as an empathetic act, a desire to understand other people and see and experience life as they see and experience it. Obviously, if you write about others merely to attack them and assert your superiority, that’s despicable and the fiction that results can only be reprehensible. And even if our intentions are good, we may of course wind up doing a bad job of imagining someone who’s different from ourselves, and if so, we should take our lumps from readers and critics and try to do better the next time. What we shouldn’t do is give up the empathetic attempt to imagine our way into the minds and hearts of others. We shouldn’t be content to “stay in our lane” and write only what we know.

If you don’t trust me, or Sherwood Anderson, maybe you’ll trust Toni Morrison. When she was teaching creative writing at Princeton, she always began the semester by telling her students to forget the conventional advice to “write what you know.” Instead, she said, “Think of somebody you don’t know. What about a Mexican waitress in the Rio Grande who can barely speak English? Or what about a Grande Madame in Paris?” We can’t entirely ignore our own culture and experience when we write—that’s impossible—but clearly Morrison believed, with Grace Paley, that we should write from what we know into what we don’t know. Just as reading a wide variety of fiction expands our understanding of other people, and of ourselves, so too does writing fiction about a wide variety of our fellow humans.

BW: Your answer keys into one of the elements I find most impressive in the book—that being the sheer number of quotes and examples from other writers and thinkers that appear in each essay to support your points. You mentioned earlier the desire to add in new passages while constructing this expanded version of the text, and on a nuts-and-bolts level, I wonder if you could talk some about building these essays. I kind of imagine a file cabinet full of passages that you’ve gathered over the years. Really, though, how did, say, the new essay on plot structure come together?

DJ: All of my essays were originally delivered as lectures at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and it was my custom during each residency to choose a subject to explore for the next residency’s lecture. Often, the subjects of my upcoming lectures were suggested by something in my current residency’s workshop. For example, in one workshop, nine out of the twelve students turned in stories told in the present tense—sometimes to good effect and sometimes not—so I decided to write my next lecture on the advantages and disadvantages of present-tense narration. In another workshop, several students turned in stories that ended with high-octane epiphanies, so I chose epiphanies as my next residency’s topic. The examples I used for my lectures were taken primarily from whatever I was reading that semester.

When I collected the essays in the first edition of the book, however, I added numerous examples that I’d come across since I initially wrote the lectures. And in the new version of the book, I added many examples that I accumulated during the fourteen years since the publication of the first version. I also added numerous quotations about fiction from writers far wiser than I am. Ever since I started studying the craft of fiction fifty-some years ago, I’ve been typing up advice and insights from writers I admire, and although I don’t have a “file cabinet full” of them, I have accumulated nearly 1,000 pages of brilliant quotations that I’ve drawn from in writing my essays.

“Beyond Plot: Structuring Fiction” is the only essay that I wrote specifically for the new edition, but the idea for it began much like the others. A student in one of my VCFA workshops mentioned that he couldn’t understand why Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” was considered such a great story when, in his opinion, it was plotless. So I hit on the idea of writing an essay that compared and contrasted the structure of O’Brien’s story with the structure of Ha Jin’s marvelous story “Saboteur,” which has the same kind of conventional causal plot—a causes b which causes c, etc.—that “The Things They Carried” has but presents its events in chronological order. Ha Jin’s story is divided into five sections—the first introduces the story’s conflict, the next three complicate that conflict, the fourth brings the conflict to a climax, and the fifth presents the resolution. In “Saboteur,” the plot and the structure coincide. In “The Things They Carried,” they don’t—and given O’Brien’s subject and theme, they shouldn’t.

Plot is a far more complicated subject than most craft books suggest, and causality is not the only organizing principle for a plot. I’ve written a much more comprehensive essay about different organizing principles—and therefore different kinds of plots—that will appear in my next craft book, Words Made Flesh, which is due out from Press 53 next spring.

BW: I look forward to checking it out! It’s exciting to hear that more craft writing is coming from you, particularly amidst constant chatter about artificial intelligence and storytelling. It seems to me that strong stories require nuance that a program cannot replicate, but maybe that’s just my own naïveté showing itself. Have you thought about this subject at all? If so, do you think it is logical to fear algorithms when it comes to the stories we consume?

DJ: Today I watched a YouTube video of John Lennon singing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” Lennon never covered that song, of course, nor did he (or would he) don Major Tom’s space helmet for an MTV-style video. The video was created by AI. If I hadn’t known that fact in advance, I might have been fooled into thinking someone had discovered a previously unknown tape of Lennon recording Bowie’s song. So yes, I do think it’s logical to fear AI. If it can bring Lennon back from the dead to sing a song he never sang, it can certainly generate Hemingway stories, and given that Hemingway’s actual stories would be the source of the AI-generated stories, I think at least some of the fake stories could have the kind of nuance that we associate with bona fide Hemingway stories. If so, an unscrupulous publisher (and that’s not an oxymoron) could pass the AI stories off as legitimate “long-lost” works.

Even if a publisher made it clear upfront that this “new” book of Hemingway stories was created by AI, would we really want AI-generated Hemingway stories to take up shelf space in bookstores and compete not only with Hemingway’s actual stories but with everybody else’s actual stories? And much as I hate to say it, I believe they would compete. There’s already a strong market for fan fiction—witness the retellings and spinoffs of Pride and Prejudice that appear with Old Faithful-like regularity every few months—and I suspect the fans of Austen fan fiction would be just as willing to read an AI-generated version of the Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy saga. And I suspect there could also be a market for stories “in the manner of” many other much-loved authors.

And here’s another reason to fear AI: since AI of necessity uses what already exists in order to create something “new,” lawyers could have a heyday with copyright infringement suits. As I see it, anything that could possibly create a new revenue stream for lawyers is something well deserving of our fear.

BW: You spoke earlier about how many of your essays blossomed from experiences in the classroom and workshop. After writing (and revising) these and other essays, as well as teaching and editing for decades, is there one go-to piece of advice that you might offer someone just starting out when it comes to the craft of fiction?

DJ: If I were limited to only one piece of advice, it would be the obvious one: read your ass off. We learn how to write mostly via a kind of osmosis, unconsciously absorbing the writing lessons novels and stories teach us, and the more you read, the more you’ll learn. But there are a couple of other pieces of advice I feel compelled to add to this all-important one.

First, as the Russian proverb says, “Don’t trust your brother, trust your own bad eye.” Even if you know your brother has your best interests at heart, and even if you know you don’t see your own work as clearly as you should, you ultimately have to trust yourself, not your teachers, friends, or family. And not the authors of craft books, either, especially those whose advice tends to be prescriptive rather than descriptive. You need to discover the vast panorama of techniques and strategies that are available to fiction writers, so you can choose the ones that feel most appropriate to the characters and story you’re creating.

Second, as every boxer knows, if you step into the ring, you’re going to get hit—and often, and hard. To become a writer, you’ll need to weather a lot of criticism and rejection, both from others and—most painfully—from yourself. As the long-time editor Gerald Howard once said, a writer’s life consists of repeatedly vacillating between two contradictory thoughts: “It’s just not worth it” and “Don’t give up.” Do whatever you can to make “Don’t give up” win by a knockout.

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Interview

Enheduana

The Complete Poems of the World's First Author

Sophus Helle
Yale University Press ($30)

by Pierre Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte

Pierre Joris: It is excellent to have Sophus Helle’s new collection of translations of texts attributed to the Sumerian poet Enheduana framed by a very insightful series of essays. He points to her importance today as the “world’s first known author,” whose poems also include a “complex and self-reflective account of authorship, as she depicts herself stepping into literary history.” Under that light she can be seen as a post-modern—thus totally contemporary—author, despite the fact that she lived around 2300 BC! Though even more interesting is how Helle sums up her themes, all of which are also highly relevant today: “exile, social disruption, the power of storytelling, gender roles, the devastation of war, and the terrifying forces of nature.”

If I remember correctly, the first place we came across one of those Sumerian poems was in Jerome Rothenberg’s anthology Technicians of the Sacred (University of California Press, 1985). There Jerry reproduced a translation he worked on (via a literal translation of the Sumerian by Betty Meador and Renata Leggit) of a poem called “The Vulva Song of Inanna,” without mentioning its possible author, Enheduana. You immediately took to this poem and included it in your performance work. Can you speak to the importance of this text for you?

Nicole Peyrafitte: This is how it went for me: I was interested in feminine representations that would directly address the vulva and you pointed me to “The Vulva Song of Inanna,” in Technicians. This text blew my mind and I started looking deeper into this Inana* character, who sounded totally unleashed—and unleashed she was and still is for me!

But let’s be very clear—and it is important because there is a lot of confusion about this—“The Vulva Song of Inanna” is not attributed to Enheduana, nor is “Inanna’s Descent to the Nether World.” “The Vulva Song of Inanna” comes from another collection of tablets often referred to as “the Sacred Marriage.” Betty Meador worked with Jerry on this translation for Technicians, and later published Inanna Lady of the Largest Heart, Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna (University of Texas Press, 2000), and in the acknowledgments of this book,she mentions she began translating Sumerian Sacred Marriage Hymns in collaboration with J.R.

By the way, a recent review of the Barbie film, titled “Barbie is the New Inanna,” compares Barbie’s quest and travel to the human world with Inana’s descent into the netherworld. The reviewer, Meg Elison, makes an interesting point in the online magazine “The Wild Hunt,” though she too was a bit fussy about authorship of those two poems, as she attributes them to Enheduana. I have seen this conflation often made by popular culture stories inspired by Inana; it is not a big deal, but now we have info like this incredibly well done and accessible book to help us appreciate the depth of the complexities of this culture that lasted many thousands of years.

So yes! It was immediately important; Inana resonated deeply. She was full of paradoxes, irreverences, uninhibited. The way she sang and celebrated her vulva was so liberating. The con/fusion between vulva and vagina had always bothered me. I had already been thinking of the vulva in terms of a hidden face, and as vestibule to the vagina. In some prehistoric caves, like the one at Gargas, both representations are present.

As for Enheduana, it was you who got into this material via a book you found in the mid 1990s that got you fascinated by the linguistic intricacies of Sumerian—also mentioned by Helle when he explains the Sumerian dialect called “Emesal (literally, ‘thin tongue’), which in literary texts is spoken only by goddesses. . . . [and] associated with the female gender.” I, on the other hand, was looking into the material translated and studied by Samuel Noah Kramer and his French associate Jean Bottéro. It was exhilarating to discover this complex culture, and it was so refreshing and empowering to be able to read four-thousand-year old, pre-monotheistic material where women had autonomy, with, on top of their pantheon, a female deity that would go to hell, steal the “me’s,” the powers of other gods, and sing the plowing of her vulva loud and clear!

Kramer was the first to translate this material in the late 1930s. Material had been excavated in the late nineteenth century, but the decipherment of Sumerian—which is neither a Semitic nor an Indo-European language—was difficult and time-consuming. As Kramer put it in Sumerian Mythology (Harper Torchbooks, 1961): “The very name Sumer was erased from the minds and memory of man for over two thousand years.”

Besides the vulva song, the other text I was truly fascinated by was “Inanna’s descent to the netherworld.” Though none of these texts are part of the corpus attributed to Enheduana, she most certainly drew both literary and political inspiration from them. We are pretty sure she had read or heard all these stories and was fully aware of Inana’s importance in that part of the world her father King Sargon had conquered. Just for context, the Nippur excavation unearthed some 30,000 tablets, mostly in Sumerian, and ninety-five percent of which are of an economic character.

PJ: I first came across “Inanna’s descent to the netherworld” in Charles Olson’s The Chiasma, or Lectures in the New Sciences of Man, where he proposes the need to study a group of women he links back to what he calls “Cro-Magnon” culture and forward to the next cultural complex, the Greeks, pitching Inana’s descent as the opposite of Orpheus’s, etc. But we’re getting too far away—although the various ways we both came to those Sumerian texts is enlightening, too, showing the complexity of the situation. And this is also important because Helle’s book clears up much of these matters and is an excellent way into this very complex domain in which information is continuously shifting as new material is discovered and as new insights are gained into a very complex language and culture.

NP: Yes, indeed, the depth of the essays is impressive! They move from the historical to the political, from the question of authorship to that of translation, and address how all these layers play into each other—a true tour de force that gives many tools to contextualize Enheduana from then to today.

PJ: Though at this point, a wide range of more general books on Sumer and Sumerian literature is available, which enables Helle to focus on this figure and the questions she raises. There are also good websites where you can get info about all matters Sumerian, such as: https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/. Also mentioned by Helle, the second episode of the podcast series Ishtar Diaries, featuring the Iraqi American poet Dunya Mikhail (now living in exile in these States) speaking about her relation to Enheduana and the latter’s influence on her work: https://soundcloud.com/columbiaglobalcenters/in-praise-of-ishtar?in=columbiaglobalcenters/sets/ishtar-diaries.

NP: One of the core interests of the book is the proposition that here we have the first named author we know of. Even if this proposition may raise questions, Helle is clear: “Regardless, the fact that the ancient scribes saw Enheduana as the author of these poems is significant . . . The idea of authorship, the notion that a poetic text could be traced back to a named and identifiable individual rather than to a collective and anonymous tradition was born when these hymns were ascribed to Enheduana, and that is true regardless of whether the attribution was correct.”

PJ: Indeed, there probably were, before her and elsewhere in the world, named poet-authors, whose work and identity completely escapes us. Still, it is interesting to think that we now know of an author, a woman, who is way earlier than good old “Homer,” whoever he was, if he even existed as a person, and who in the Western-civ tradition is pitched as the first and greatest of poets. No place here for details, but we need a translation of Raoul Schrott’s book, Homers Heimat (Homer’s Homeland), which shows how, whoever Homer was, the Iliad, rather than the brand-new poem inaugurating this new Greek “high culture,” is in fact linked to and even derived from Assyrian and other Middle Eastern models. At any rate, fascinating as all this is, it will have to remain hazy to a great extent; the book under hand is however very helpful in a number of ways.

NP: Helle raises all kinds of complexities and controversies such as, did she really write all those texts attributed to her or not? But recently as we visited the excellent show at the Morgan Library “She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, 3400-2000 BC”; it was interesting to listen and talk to visitors and hear how Enheduana is immediately mythologized into “the first woman poet ever,” a figure of pure genius to be admired and adored without looking further into her historical situation—

PJ: —Yes, a sort of absolute origin—and thus Enheduana gets reduced to just another myth—

NP: —Everybody immediately puts her on a pedestal and that’s not right, that’s not what she is. We have proof that Inana qua deity to be worshipped, as well as the poems and stories about her, go back at least 2,000 years before Enheduana. Essential also to see Enheduana’s total appropriation of an earlier culture as she was sent to Ur by her father, the Akkadian conquerer-king and empire founder Sargon, and as far as we know, she had to first learn Sumerian, both the language and the culture, in order to do her job as priestess to Inana and simultaneously as the political head of that city-state.

So, yes, give Enheduana the credit due her, but see her in the light of who she actually is and what she did—and here, Helle’s book is much better informed and richer in setting the context. In the essay “Enheduana’s World” he writes: “Enheduana lived through one of the most turbulent periods in the history if the ancient Near East. . . . her family was at the heart of it. . . . cities were caught in a web of conflicts, peace pacts, and exchanges of goods and ideas, but each was its own political entity. . . . Then came Enheduana’s father, Sargon of Akkad. He united the cities under one rule, creating the first known empire.”

PJ: I of course find it very exciting to think that she, the “first female author” thus wrote in her second language, a language that wasn’t her mother-tongue! And so, if Jerry Rothenberg and I get to finish another anthology we have in mind, Blows Against the Mother-Tongue, a world-wide survey of poets who wrote in their second or third languages, Enheduana would of course open that book. Now in today’s terms, there then also arises the specter of cultural appropriation . . .

NP: Well, it is possible that she did know some Sumerian, because in those days, cultures in adjacent “countries” were probably more porous than we think. Instead of imposing her religion, smartly enough she adopts and uses the locally established religion—though as a woman, of course, she might very well have been seduced and felt totally empowered by the figure of Inana.

PJ: Yes, one could suggest that the figure of a powerful goddess must have been very attractive to her, a deity that was not only the goddess of love and sex, but also that of war and chaos, and who turns out to be maybe the major god-figure of that area for centuries to come, as the Acadian, then Assyrian, then Babylonian figure of Ishtar.

NP: Both the Hymn to and the Exaltation of Inana prove that Ehneduana has done her research and was rewriting that earlier material for her own purposes, be they personal, ritual or political—

PJ: —and here we may actually use another Olsonianism, though rather than making that word into “his-story” we can say “her-story”—

NP: —The tablets that predated her informed her and/or her scribes’ writings. As we mentioned the corpus is huge, it goes from myth of origins to wars and ecological disasters, to love and its rituals.

PJ: From a purely literary p.o.v. it seems that the oeuvre we can attribute to Enheduana qua author consists essentially of two poems plus a set of hymns—the first and most celebrated being “The Exaltation of Inana”—and Helle shows how this is a poem as much about its author than about the goddess and details the reasons why this is important: The priestess has to make sure the goddess has power over the land so that she, her priestess, also can have and hold power, and she has to do this via the power of the poem. As Helle puts it: “In a sense, the Exaltation is a poem about itself, about whether Enheduana will succeed in elevating Inana, overcoming her loss of eloquence, and so saving her own life.” The second is the so-called “Hymn to Inana,” a longish poem which Helle reproduces with the expanse of its missing sections indicated (many tablets were broken or lost) showing the fragmentariness of the work as it has come down to us.

NP: The Hymn, or what we have of it, is very interesting because it shows the complexity of Inana: her mighty power over the main gods, her sympathy for the less fortunate, and her protection of women (as in “and build a home / for the women, to / fill it with goods”), while at the same time she is certainly not perfect—an aspect that is usually anathema to the idea of a supreme godhead’s character.

PJ: How do you see / hear / sense—both qua poet and performance artist—Helle’s translations in comparison to the older ones?

NP: So far these translations are my favorites. They are tight, have great rhythm, and are stripped of “literary embellishments.” All the things I learn from you about what a good translation needs!

PJ: Let’s just give one example. Here is a section from Meador’s translation of The Hymn to Inana (first column), juxtaposed with Helle’s version (second column):

fighting is her play
she never tires of it
she goes out running
strapping on her sandals
a whirlwind warrior
bound on a twister
she tears the king’s robe
dust-dry south wind
sweeps at her bidding
leaves in its trail
breast-beating despair
lioness Inanna
crouched in a reed thicket
leaps to slash the fearless
mountain wildcat
prowling the roads
shows wet fangs
gnashes her teeth
wild bull queen
mistress of brawn
boldly strong
no one dares turn away

Her joy is to
speed up conflict
and combat: ever
restless she straps
on her sandals. She
splits the blazing,
furious storm, the
whirlwind billows
around her as if
it were a dress.
Her touches bring
despair: the south
wind. . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Sitting on leashed
lions, Inana tears
apart those who
feel no fear of her.
Like a leopard of
the mountains, she
bursts onto the road
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Queen, huge aurochs!
Fierce in her might,
no one turns to fight
her. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Meador does have its qualities, it reads well, but the tightness of Helle’s lines (it would be interesting to know how or if those line-breaks correspond to indications on the tablets) feels less lyrically contrived, and if they don’t seem as melodically flowing, that may well have to do with his attempt to render the Sumerian as literally as possible (using, for example “aurochs” rather than the generic “bull” informs us of the age of the poem, because the aurochs is by now an extinct species). Also indicating the missing parts, i.e., unreadable or broken off parts, of the tablets (something used to great effect by Armand Schwerner in the poems of The Tablets), makes us aware of the actual, physical substratum of the text, thus keeping the poem linked to its double origin, especially its second age—that of the Babylonian scribes’ clay copies. Rather than trying to restore a lost original, Helle’s version allows us to stay aware of the level of translation the poems incarnate.

NP and PJ: Stephen Orgel argues in his recent The Invention of Shakespeare (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) that “no version of a Shakespeare play is ever a final version,” because texts are always under construction, showing that even as recent and massively studied an author and oeuvre as Shakespeare(‘s) is never fixed or absolute but always in the process of being translated and retranslated (all language and writing, one of us has written elsewhere, are translations ab initio). This is certainly also true of Enheduana’s work.

To close, let us take note of Helle’s rare (for a scholar) conviction that the work presented in his book is in no way final. For him, “the translations given in this book are necessarily temporary,” because, he is sure “within the next decade the philological interpretation for Enheduana’s poetry will probably change, because it is always changing, and updated translations will have to be produced.” Which is an exciting prospect. As Helle puts it: “In her third life, Enheduana is still in the process of being born.”

Footnotes:

*Unless we are referring to a book title by another author, we will be using the spelling of Inana and Enheduana with one “n” only, as suggested by Sophus Helle.

** http://www.holladaypaganism.com/goddesses/cyclopedia/l/LE-HEV-H.HTM#return

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