Jon Vaugh

Superbionics Sequence

Jon Vaughn was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Art History from the University of Saskatchewan. In addition to visual art, Vaughn is also involved in a range of other creative pursuits including curation, design, screen-printing, music performance and production, and publishing. A noted electronic and experimental musician, Vaughn’s hybrid of illustration, painting and collage shares the complexity and diversity layered in his ‘musique concrete’ inspired compositions. Teasing at both abstract art and comic book graphcism, his visual practice balances projects for both the printed page and white cube. His work as has been exhibited, performed, and distributed across Canada (Saskatoon, Regina, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Moncton, North Bay, Sechelt) and internationally (England, France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Sweden, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Latvia, Argentina, Bulgaria, Germany, Japan, China and the United States).

 

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Simon Moreton

Northern Star

Simon Moreton lives in Bristol, UK with his wife and cat. He makes a zine called ‘Minor Leagues’, which is full of comics, writing, stories and drawings. It is about things that have been happening. His comics have been published by Uncivilized Books, Avery Hill, Kilgore Books and Retrofit Comics.

 

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Kelsey Wroten

Crimes Preview

Kelsey Wroten is an illustrator and cartoonist born in Kansas City and currently living in Brooklyn. She has worked with clients such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Vice. Her graphic novel called Cannonball is being released through Uncivilized Books in Spring 2019. See more of her work online at www.kelseywroten.com and on instagram @jukeboxcomix

 

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Malachi Lily

The Boar King

Malachi Lily is a shapeshifting, nonbinary, black poet, artist, curator, and moth. They connect to the Collective Unconscious via energy work, Active Imagination, mysticism, myth, magick, folklore, and fairy tales. This channelling takes the form of visual art, performance art, curation, journalism, or poetry. Their art and literature combats our addiction to instant gratification and toxic individualism, as well as resonates Light energy. www.maggielily.com
@theholyhawkmoth

 

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Keren Katz

CAMERA OBSCURA

Keren Katz is a Tel Aviv based cartoonist, collector and the non-fictitious half of The Katz Sisters Duo. She also practices performative, interactive and collaborative storytelling marathons in odd locations, and is part of The Humdrum Comics Collective. She enjoys making comics about unrequited love in surreal settings like in her debut book, The Academic Hour (Secret Acres, 2017).

 

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Mary Jane White translating Marina Tsvetaeva

THE TWO OF US

1

There are rhymes in this world:
Uncouple them — and it falls apart.
Homer, you were blind as a bat.
Night — over your craggy head.

Night — your rhapsodic cloak,
Night — over your eyes — a curtain.
Would any sighted person separate
Helen from Achilles?

Helen. Achilles.
Name a more consonant sound.
Yes, against chaos
The world is built

On consonances, that, if uncoupled,
Take revenge (built on consent!)
Upon the infidelity of women
Take revenge — by burning Troy!

Rhapsodist, you were blind as a bat:
Scattered treasure, as if it were junk.
There are rhymes — in that world
That were chosen. That will collapse

This one — if you uncouple them. What needs
Holding in rhyme? Helen, growing older!
. . . Achaea’s finest man!
The sweetest woman of Sparta!

Alone in the rustle of a myrtle
Forest, in a cithara’s dream:
“Helen. Achilles:
A broken pair.”

30 June 1924

2

It’s no given, that strong with strong
Come to be joined in this world.
Here’s how Siegfried and Brunhilda missed each other,
And settled the matter of their marriage with a sword.

United in mutual hatred
— Like buffaloes! — rock face — to rock face.
He rose from the marriage bed, unrecognized,
And unidentified — she slept.

Apart — even in the marriage bed —
Apart — even balled into a fist —
Apart — even in the language of double-entendre —
Late and apart — that’s our marriage!

There’s an older instance:
The Amazon taken down like a lion —
Here’s how they missed each other: the son of Thetis
And a daughter of Ares: Achilles

And Penthesilea.
O remember — how from below
She gazed up! an unhorsed rider’s
Gaze! not from Olympus, — out the muck
She gazed up — imperious nevertheless!

And, because of that, afterwards, his one
Desire was: to take her to wife out of darkness.
It’s no given, that equal — will meet with equal . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Here’s how we — come to miss each other.

3 July 1924

3

In a world, where everyone
Is stunted and in a lather,
I know — one
Equal to me.

In a world, where we
Want for so much,
I know — one
Strong as me.

In a world, where everything —
Is ivy and mold,
I know: one
You — equal in essence

To me.

3 July 1924

AN ISLAND

There’s an island. Wrested from the Nereids
By an underground heave.
Virgin ground. Which no one
Has yet mapped or opened up.

Fringed with ferns and hidden
In sea-foam. — The way? Some passage?
I just know: it’s still unclaimed
Anywhere, except in your

Columbian eyes. Two palms:
Clarity! — That vanishes. — At the stroke
Of a condor . . .
(In the sleeping-car
— That’s enough — about islands!)

An hour’s, maybe — a week’s
Sailing (if I can manage it — a year!)
I just know: it’s still unclaimed
Anywhere, except in the latitudes

Of the future . . .

5 July 1924

UNDER A SHAWL

Sealed, like the mouth of an oracle —
Your mouth, augers for many.
Woman, what have you concealed from the guards
Between your tongue and the roof of your mouth?

Looking into the ages, not with your eyes
But with their sockets, like brimming cauldrons!
Woman, what sort of pit have you dug
And roofed over with turf?

No idol with even a hundred heathen
Temples — could be more imperious.
Woman, what have you pulled out of the fire
Of languor and one-night stands?

Woman, you spread yourself in secret, like a shawl,
In a shawl, like a secret, you linger.
Set apart — like a single surviving
Spruce on a misted summit.

It seems I question you as a dead
Soul, who has sipped at the root . . .
Woman, what do you have beneath your shawl?
— The future!

8 November 1924

* * *

All by herself — Helen gazes over the rooftops
Of Troy! In her stunned pupils
Four provinces lie drained of blood
And hope for a hundred centuries.

All by herself — Helen acknowledges
The nuptial slaughter: her nakedness
Stripped four Arabys of all sultriness
And five oceans of their pearls.

All by herself, Helen — waits to unclasp
Her hands! — but marvels at the swarm
Of heirs to the throne left homeless
And their forefathers, rushing into battle.

All by herself, Helen — can’t depend on the appeal
Of her lips! — but marvels at the ditch
Piled with heirs to the throne:
At the end of a hundred familial lines.

But no, it’s not Helen! Not that twice-taken
Predator, that pestilential drought.
What a treasure house lies squandered
By you, who look us in the eye — the way

Not even Helen at this splendid banquet
Dare look her slaves in the eye:
Much less the gods. — “A land left unmanned
By a foreign woman! Still grovels — at her feet!”

11 November 1924

* * *

I sang like arrows and eels,
Racing underfoot
With the sound of riven satin.
— I sang! — and a wholly padded wall
Could not restrain me
Nor could the world.
Because I tore one
Gift from the gods: flight!

I sang like arrows.
The body?
Was not my concern!

8 November 1924

* * *

A blizzard sweeps the floors.
All explosion and rift! —

And on my colorful cheerful scarf —
Tears of sharp salt,
Pearls coarsely ground.

19 November 1924

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION FOR MARINA TSVETAEVA

These eight translations are all of short and stunning lyrics found toward the end of Tsvetaeva’s final lyric collection, After Russia (Paris 1928), here in new translation for the first time in forty years.

The collection itself was written entirely in exile, in Berlin and Prague, with these particular lyrics being written toward the end of her stay in Prague. Iosif Pourterman then published the collection in Paris—not through the publishing house to which he was connected, but by private subscription—this, despite Tsvetaeva’s well-established reputation throughout the early 1920’s in both Russia and the West.

As Tsvetaeva’s biographer, the late Dr. Simon Karlinsky describes it:

“This involved the poet in the time-consuming and humiliating business of mailing out the subscription forms, since the size of the printing was not decided until the number of subscribers was ascertained.”1

Plus ça changeplus c’est la même chose.

Nevertheless, Karlinsky judges this lightly subscribed, barely-noticed publication to be “the most mature and perfect of her collections.”2

“The mature poet of After Russia had come a long way . . . . Now her points of reference are Homer, Ovid, the Nibelungenlied, Shakespeare, Racine and Goethe.  She remains in this collection her own passionate and rebellious self, but she is now also capable of a detachment that is almost Olympian.”3

The references in The Two of Us, 1, 2 and 3, An Island, and All by herself—Helen gazes over the rooftops exemplify Karlinsky’s observation, while the unique, near-speaking voice of Under a Shawl, I sang like arrows and eels, and A blizzard sweeps the floors exemplify Tsvetaeva’s troublingly-careless sense of herself as an orphan, a near-refugee.

Based upon a handwritten note on one manuscript copy, noted by her devoted textual editor, the late Alexander Sumerkin, we know The Two of Us, 1, 2 and 3 are addressed by Tsvetaeva most personally to Boris Pasternak.  She seems to have thought of the two of them as a broken pair, separated as the two poets were by her exile in the West, his continuing to live in the USSR, and their existing marriages to others. 

It is my great privilege as her translator here to bring this sample of Tsvetaeva’s last collection back to light, and into English.

“The book that by rights should have secured her greatest triumph sank with very few ripples. One could still see copies of the original edition of After Russia gathering dust on the shelves of back rooms of Russian bookstores in Paris and New York as late as the 1950s.”4

My thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for a translation fellowship in 1985 which led to over thirty years of engagement with Tsvetaeva as a poet.  These translations are made under license from Russica Publishers, Inc., 799 Broadway, New York, N. Y., from their five-volume Russian language edition of Tsvetaeva’s work, edited by the late Alexander Sumerkin.

_______

1Simon Karlinsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, The Woman, her World and her Poetry, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge 1985), p. 185.

2Ibid, p. 188.

3Ibid, p. 187.

4Ibid, p. 188.

Mary Jane White, MFA Iowa Writers’ Workshop, NEA Fellowships (in poetry and translation). Tsvetaeva translations: Starry Sky to Starry Sky (1988); New Year’s, an elegy for Rilke (Adastra Press 2007); Poem of the Hill (The New England Review); Poem of the End (The Hudson Review), reprinted in Poets Translate Poets, (Syracuse 2013)        

                                                                                                                                                                     

Marina Tsvetaeva (1982-1941), admired by Joseph Brodsky: “Well, if you are talking about the twentieth century, I’ll give you a list of poets. Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva (and she is the greatest one, in my view. The greatest poet in the twentieth century was a woman).”

 

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Kelsi Vanada translating Álvaro Lasso

Six poems from Izquierda Unida [United Left]

Alto Perú

For a time the party was a movement that believed in violence. Everyone at school spoke of taking up arms, of finding surrealist poets to assassinate in the jungle. The slogan was stay aware in the face of the drug companies. So they got dressed, grabbed speakers, and marched off to the labyrinth with heads held high. When they arrived, they found no human beings. Their weapons were melting away, they got diarrhea, started to crawl around. As if they’d been tricked, they cried till they lost all speech. And the mothers of the combatants helicoptered in, annoyed, with flyswatters; they called roll and, undeterred, took them home.

We’ve All Been Hit Before

When that building in Tarata exploded, the kids from Surquillo ran toward the light. We knew who’d done it, but we wanted to see what the darkness the news channels were reporting on was like. The police blocked our way, but we still managed to stuff some loot into our pockets. When we got home, we had the odd sensation that our country’s inequalities had disappeared, and we bought candles so our parents wouldn’t give us the belt.

The Disappearance of the Peruvian State

I was kicked out of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics for believing in a third-world god. My mother had already fulfilled every requirement: she grasped the logic of the fire that never goes out, even passed the atheism class. Everything was in order so we could stay.

My mother and her little cosmonaut.

But the great dogmas began to fall, brick by brick, above our heads. That was when they moved me to Peru. I used to think the system was the same, the opaque colors were the same, the drunks sprawled along the sidewalks were the same. Everything but my exotic third-world god, the most serious one at the party: my little dictator in a guayabera.

Mulas

«Writing verse is like painting still lives», he’d tell me, in his bushy doctor’s mustache: it’s just an exercise, an obsolete love I’ll never give up.

I always dreamed about stabbing him in the back as he wrote. It’s what I longed for when his eyelids grew heavy: to penetrate his soft milky buttocks, wrinkled like my grandfather’s skin, until I broke him, until he couldn’t even finish his little riddles.

My humble spouse could never make love when he wrote. It was yet another unspoken rule between us. For writing he used a chair, the only one in the whole high-ceilinged room, and he’d lay pencil and paper on an equally solitary table. A simple injunction: I had to go.

Viagem ao principio do mundo

I’m one of those people who doesn’t have a country of origin. I had a neighbor who thought he could find my passport at the top of a tree. But all he found was a peaceful view of his future wife hanging his future son’s clothes out to dry. The clothes went from big to small, and from his perch, my neighbor attained an enlightened perspective. When that’s over with, I ring the future mother’s doorbell and ask to borrow a little money.

The Publishing Industry

I install a 50-watt bulb with some difficulty and, with everything lit up, see that the room’s full of signs. Terrified, I rush outside. A cloud has conducted a small but precise shadow over our heads.

The children sit down to discuss what will become of the fair. They’ve been informed of the applicability of being adults, the applicability of money, the applicability of the cloud described in the paragraph above. A child notices another child disguised as a mother, and ironically a cord lowers to just within reach of his hand so he can detonate a little bell across the whole sky.

Translator’s Note:

When Álvaro Lasso and I first discussed these poems, he explained that as a twice-published poet, and as founder and editor of the Peruvian independent small press Estruendomudo, he was tired of reading and writing poetry as he knew it. Izquierda Unida (Celacanto 2015, republished by La Bella Varsovia 2016) collects what he considers his rejection of that former poetry, in favor of something “pop”—writing that draws from the movies and music of the contemporary imagination. Written in dense, short, cinematic prose blocks, these poems enact the ideas of revolution, idealism, and, ultimately, failure of the coalition Izquierda Unida in Peru in the 1980s. Their main character is Lasso himself in his many roles throughout his life: immigrant (he was relocated to Peru as an infant from Azerbaijan), child, adult, laborer, publisher, lover, consumer of culture.
These poems were a delightful challenge to translate because they are so precisely balanced tonally. While the sentences appear fairly short and simple, they make full use of imagistic and multivalent words. One example is a scene in which Lasso, as a child, hides under the bed while his aunt and uncle engage in sexual play above him. He uses the term “se derrite” (literally, “she melts”) to describe his aunt’s experience, as he hears it. In the short space of these poems, syntactical repetition is often key. Short, irregular bursts of quoted speech also punctuate the poems, and to provide a similar visual punch, seemed to me best left in the carrot brackets used by Lasso in the Spanish: « ». Swirls of other languages (Portuguese, Russian) reflect Lasso’s multicultural background, but in a more negative sense also add to a general confusion felt by most of the characters in the poems. Pervading these poems is a flat and implacable approach to the future, a sense of foreboding, a frenzied desire to record and recollect and assign meaning in the face of a violent, unforgiving world.

Photograph by Nicolás Giussani

Kelsi Vanada is from Colorado and holds MFAs in Poetry (Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 2016) and Literary Translation (University of Iowa, 2017). She translates from Spanish and Swedish, and her poems and translations have been published most recently in Columbia Poetry Review, EuropeNow, Asymptote, and Prelude. She was a 2016 ALTA Travel Fellow and works as Program Manager of ALTA. Her first translation, The Eligible Age by Berta García Faet, was published by Song Bridge Press in 2018.


Álvaro Lasso was born in Baku, Republic of Azerbaijan, in 1982. At ten months old, he was relocated to Peru; he studied Hispanic Literature at Peru’s Pontificia Universidad Católica. He founded the poetry festival Novissima verba (2001–2006), the poetry magazine Odumodneurtse! (2003-2006), and the Libromóvil project (2011–2015). He is both founder and editor of Estruendomudo, one of the most important independent publishing companies in Latin America since 2004. Lasso has published Dos niñas de Egon Schiele [Egon Schiele’s Girls] (2006), The Astrud Gilberto Album (2010), and Izquierda Unida [United Left] (2015), republished in Spain by La Bella Varsovia in 2016. He lives in Santiago, Chile, where he opened an office of Estruendomudo.

 

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Paul Sohar translating Zoltán Böszörményi

INVENTORY (LELTÁR)

“The inventory’s done.” Nothing more. Whitewashed wall.
Croupier in ceaseless winter. Stake piled on stake.
Two crickets fiddling. That’s all.

The kettle’s empty in the kitchen. Suppers incinerate.
Book, booze, nothing doing, blue skunk cabbage, blue.
Muddy city gate.

My freshly pressed shirt. Give it to you off my back.
I’ll put them to sleep, should doubts attack.
You’re true stuff. Nothing. Just enough.

** ** ** **

Huge, Yellow Fairy Tales (Nagy sárga meséket)

I’m rounding up a herd of nerves,
huge, yellow tales: my childhood,
the cadet keeps running
with a howling olive-branch flag in his hand
and playing with an air gun near my heart.

The anxious two-year-old
creates a smile oasis
like a freshly opened gift package
and defeats the huge yellow fairy tales:
he confiscates my childhood,
my toy horsewhip
and, shrugging his shoulder,

he whacks my nerves into docile
domestic stock.

** ** ** **

GLEAM SLIVER  (Fényszilank) 

A horde of butterflies taking off.
For a moment of truth a breath is enough.
Overused molds. Maybe sins.
On its see-through spots, fever begins.
Its sac is damp and melts like tulle.
The fragrant glaze holds on to the morning shine.
No joke, no confession coerced.
No boundaries.
Silence and passion are so many quarries,
but there’s no one to share them with you.
On a flimsy twig a wee little bird.
Its beaks open and close, its eyes slivers of gleam.
It takes off, but where to?
The brash century takes a seat.
And shuts your mouth for you.

** ** ** **

The Dust of my Existence (Létem pora)

A void inside me urges me on to great things,
I’ve become the crow’s nest of zealous words.
Weakness holds out the fulfillment of strength.
It halts. It comes to life in creative works.

The void is fertile. I’ve seen huge fires die,
the lava of volcanoes come to belly crawl.
Light is hungry, straw flame, an icon, deity.
There’s a spirit I in invisible loyalty.

Emptiness is all, it raised me as I am,
the time on my knees is Scythian.
Prodigal nonexistence is eyeing me,
I’m a dispersed cloud, failure and success;
my guard is the iron hand of nothingness.
The dust of my existence washed out to sea.

** ** ** **

Introduction to Zoltán Böszörményi’s Poetry

Most poets can be best described by the environment that formed them, but what can you say about Zoltán Böszörményi, who largely formed his own environment? He was born Transylvanian-Hungarian in Romania where Hungarians form a barely tolerated ethnic minority, where it would have been much easier for him to accept the majority identity and all the advantages that came with it. Yet, he chose to identify himself as a Hungarian and nourish his mind on Hungarian history and cultural heritage, a choice that eventually had a definitive role in his poetic consciousness. However, shortly after publishing his first volume of poetry, he was hauled into the dreaded State Security headquarters for an overnight stay in an interrogation room before he was let go with a warning to stay away from his circle of poets. Seeing no future for himself in communist dictatorship he fled to Austria, to eventually find a new home in Canada. There was no persecution there but little demand for his Hungarian poetry. After a rocky start and with great effort he worked himself up from a position as hotel janitor to car salesman while learning English and philosophy at York University, finally landing a job with an advertizing agency. There was little time for poetry; this was a period of opening up to a new world and a wider perspective for his mind. Soon he took advantage of another historical situation to take another tack; in 1989 communism collapsed, and Böszörményi went back to Romania. Using his business experience he started a Hungarian publishing firm, putting out a weekly newspaper, a quarterly literary journal and books of prose and poetry. He was also able to restart his writing career, adding prose to his poetry; his adventurous escape and varied experiences in the Western World combined with his knowledge of the contemporary intellectual currents of Central Europe gave him plenty of material and inspiration as well. As his publishing venture got off the ground he was able to divide his time between the two sides of the Atlantic and concentrate on his writing. His work creates a world of its own by sifting words in an effort to find the meaning of life, like gold diggers sift through dirt to find riches. Thus his poetry, while it is Hungarian in language and cultural influences, can be best described as cosmopolitan in the positive sense of it: being open to the ideas and the intellectual ferment of the world and concerning itself with the world of reality out there. This also explains its eclectic nature when it comes to form; the voice remains authentic going from free verse to rhymed poetry as the mood or the theme requires. He speaks five languages, Romanian, Hungarian, German, English and French, but he can best express himself in his mother tongue, Hungarian. And poetry is not just a form of expression but a way of life, at least for true poets.

Paul Sohar has been writing and publishing in every genre, including seventeen volumes of translations, the latest being Silver Pirouettes, Gyorgy Faludy’s poetry (Ragged Sky Press, Princeton, 2017). His own poetry: Homing Poems (Iniquity Press, 2006) and The Wayward Orchard, a Wordrunner Press Prize winner (2011). Other awards: first prize in the 2012 Lincoln Poets Society contest, and a second prize from RI Writers Circle contest (2014). Translation prizes: the Irodalmi Jelen Translation Prize (2014), Toth Arpád Translation Prize and the Janus Pannonius Lifetime Achievement Award (both in 2016, Budapest, Hungary). Magazine credits include Agni, Gargoyle, Kenyon Review, Rattle, Poetry Salzburg Review, and Seneca Review.

Zoltán Böszörményi (1953-), a Romanian-Hungarian poet and novelist, was born and educated in the Transylvanian-Hungarian area of Romania, but as a young poet he moved to Canada where he graduated from York University. After the fall of communism he went back to Romania to resume his literary career. He has published two novels in Sohar’s English translation: Far from Nothing (Exile Editions, Canada, 2006) and The Club at Eddie’s Bar (Phaeton Press, Ireland, 2013). His novel “The Refugee” just came out in Berlin in German translation. Now he is working with Sohar on a selection of his poems in English translation: The Conscience of Trees

 

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