Category: AP37

Eternal Grace Is Never Clear

1932-1933                  the Great Famine
in Soviet Ukraine                    five million people dead.
84 years later              at the commemorative ceremony
Poroshenko in front of the starved girl’s statue
knelt down with grace.

He didn’t offer flowers,
but a bouquet of wheat,
some apples               berries.
He probably knew       only hunger
flowered                      in the girl’s world.

I remember what my grandfather, long gone, said:
wheat can speak         but not everyone can hear it,
which means               life’s a blind road.
Eternal grace is never clear.

Those who’ve passed away
have always been here;
always tranquility’s light remains.

永恒的恩情并不昭明

1932年至1933年
乌克兰大饥荒              饿死五百万人
八十四年后                 纪念仪式上
波罗申科在饿死的女孩铜像前
深深跪下

他敬献的不是鲜花
而是一把饱满的麦穗
一些苹果         浆果
他大概知道      少女的世界里
再也没有鲜花              只有饥饿

我想起死去多年的爷爷说过
麦穗是会开口的          但并不让每个人听见
意思是             日子是条盲道
永恒的恩情并不昭明

那些逝去的人
他们一直都在
一直只留下永明的宁静

 

The Sea Is Buried with A Dead Poet

Following the waves’ sound    I come to this water.
A man who’s never been to the sea       
knows most about what the sea is burying.
The sea cannot be extinguished           but it can be polluted.
Like the history of modern civilization               it contains evidence of being fucked.

This vast sea            
bearer of  steel              labor                Adidas Originals         to the other side.
Once it delivered the blue-eyed gunboats,
filled with our ancestors’ black powder canons.
Now     it buries a poet            and his below the assembly line youth.
The soul, imprisoned for his first 24 years                 is here.
Lizhi, are you free? 

I start from Suiyang,    take a ride,
arrive at Zunyi Airport,            fly to Shenzhen in the Big Mac Beetle.
I rushed to this sea under the scorching sun, no one in sight.
Over the years            I’ve seen too many withered youth
in marshes      in mountains               on their way to breezes and the bright moon.
Youth or poetry           neither moved by the filth and blue of the sea.
I’m here           to complete some part of my life’s journey,
to see how seagulls fly through a cold June day.

Where the sea meets the sky
there are hidden islands.
It’s said that’s where, for some years, the gods lived.
Now     they’re rowing the industrial sampan boat
past palm trees,          tall       fluttering near the sea.
This rotating                fish-mongering wall clock’s     been out of alignment for many years.

这大海葬着立志

循着涛声         我来到这片水域
一个没有到过大海的人
更加清楚大海埋葬着什么
大海不能拆迁              但可以脏污
像一部现代文明史       布满交媾的痕迹

这苍茫的大海
向彼岸输送过钢铁       劳工     阿迪达斯的代工鞋子
也迎来过蓝眼睛的坚船利炮
炮膛填充着我们祖先的火药
如今     它埋葬着一位诗人       和他低于机台的青春
那二十四年被禁锢的灵魂        在这里
是否得到了自由？

我从绥阳起身              搭乘顺风车
赶到遵义机场              再搭乘巨无霸的甲壳虫飞往深圳
我不避烈日地赶到这一方大海并不为看望谁
这些年             我看见了太多凋谢的青春
或谢于大泽      或谢于高山      或凋谢于去往清风明月的路上
青春或诗歌      从来无动于大海的肮脏与蔚蓝
我来     不过是完成此生路程的某些部分
看海鸥怎样飞过六月寒冷的一天

在海天相接处
有隐隐的小岛
据说某些年里曾住着神仙
如今     住着工业的舢板
临海的棕榈树              高大     招展
这转动的         鱼汛的挂钟      已失准多年

Translators’ Note:

These two poems illustrate Nianxi Chen’s opportunities as he moved from laboring in China’s mines to becoming the Labor Poet Laureate in 2016. With this honor, Chen was invited to travel nationally and internationally and these poems reflect experiences away from his life as a migrant worker.  In “Eternal Grace is Never Clear” we find a surprising connection Nianxi made in 2017 to actions taken by the 5th president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko. Readers can view an image Nianxi likely saw on the news as he related to experiences of poverty and hunger around the world.  Nianxi wrote: “This poem describes my feelings and thoughts when I passed by a vegetable market one day. The market triggered my memories of many things. The thoughts about Poroshenko and the Great Famine in Ukraine come from a picture on the Internet. The scene is a commemoration event in Ukraine. Human hunger and disaster are the same. Equally unforgettable.”

“The Sea is Buried with A Dead Poet” was written to memorize Lizhi Xu, a poet and worker who jumped to his death at Foxconn factory at the young age of 24. His ashes were scattered in the sea.  Nianxi wrote, “In 2019, I went to Shenzhen to participate in a literary event and went to the seaside alone to pay homage to this talented poet who died young. The poem also contains my own life and destiny, as well as my helplessness and sigh for an era. What I strive for in poetry is that it be concise but not simple. A drop of water reflects the sea.“

As poets and scholars in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) it has been our great honor to collaborate on translations of these fine poems.  Kuo Zhang introduced Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor to poet Nianxi Chen and his unique voice to represent a life full of labor and hardship as a miner in one of the most desolate areas in China. Working on the first English translation of his work, we were moved by Nianxi’s personal hardships as a mine blaster as well as the depth of his reflections on the great precarity of the human condition. As his co-workers lost limbs and lives, Nianxi suffered hearing loss and black lung disease, using a barrel of explosives after work as a writing table. His poetry showcases the depth of intelligence and persistence that can arise from one of the many darkest corners in the world. 

 

Nianxi Chen, born in 1970 at Danfeng, Shannxi Province, began writing poems in 1990. In 1999, he left his hometown and labored 16 years as a miner. In 2015, discontinued mining work due to occupational disease. In 2016, he was awarded the Laureate Worker Poet Prize.  His poetry and life were featured in a 2018 documentary entitled Demolition Work about migrant worker poets in China.  His book, Records of Explosion (Taibai Wenyi Press) provides lyrical documentation of the hidden costs behind China’s financial boom.  Translations of Chen’s poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Rattle, Plume, and Pedestal Magazines.

Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia, is the author of Imperfect Tense (poems), and five scholarly books in education. Winner of NEA Big Read Grants, the Beckman award for Professors Who Inspire, and a Fulbright for nine-month study of adult Spanish language acquisition in Oaxaca Mexico, she’s served for over ten years as poetry editor for Anthropology & Humanism, judging the ethnographic poetry competition. Her poems and essays have appeared in Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Women’s Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, Barrow Street, and many other literary and scholarly homes. melisacahnmanntaylor.com.

Kuo Zhang is a faculty member in Teacher Education at Siena College and received her PhD in TESOL & World Language Education at the University of Georgia. She has a bilingual book of poetry in Chinese and English, Broadleaves (Shenyang Press). Her poem, “One Child Policy” was awarded second place in the 2012 Society for Humanistic Anthropology (SHA) Poetry Competition held by the American Anthropological Association. Her poems have appeared in The Roadrunner Review, Lily Poetry Review, Bone Bouquet, DoveTales, North Dakota Quarterly, Literary Mama, Mom Egg Review, Adanna Literary Journal, Raising Mothers, MUTHA Magazine, and Anthropology and Humanism.

 

 BACK TO ISSUE

 BACK TO FOLIO

The kitchen table

I place before you this phantom image of my childhood, a sweater vest, patched trousers, a crooked-collared shirt, a smile (wide as a stork’s wing), olives without meat, cheese heavy with mold, jelly with no fruit, a half-empty jar of nutella, my mother’s half-full cup of coffee, the quarter for my school snack, a tin of snuff (the absentmindedness of my father). there ought to be more on this table (propped with beer coasters), but I will leave it at that, the rest is the work of this poem

still as water / wary as wood is of fire / I remained hidden / in the depths of the well / under a heavy crust

I place before you this late pubescent fragment, place an adolesence in your lap. don’t try to tame it, to wash it, to comb its hair, to understand. let the circus animal behind these words howl. lay it down on the window sill, it needs to sleep, and dream, it needs to fashion the whisper of maple leaves with its paws. leave it be, it is worn from recounting, from walking through all the chambers of this palace, from the dueling voices that burrow through this poetry journal. the smell of burned toast will lead you there

in the hands of the living I am now open / peeled with the knife of time’s polyphony! / every word becomes a test of courage / every glance a narrowing of your eyes

I place a curse on these words (skin flourished with tattoos) and leave it there, I set about crafting the wings of the kite, my father says … I’ll come back, promise …

you will bind my hands / sew my mouth closed / but this heart / that sobs behind life / thirsts for naked fingers and toes / you can never sooth it again / now that it has sold itself 

 

The epic of Hera

She lay down under the pine
and gave birth to me
with my umbilical cord she was blindfolded
the afterbirth streamed through blades of grass
all the way down to our doorstep
she rested her head on the ivory
she numbed her pain with the vernix
and lay like an injured mare
under this pine tree

every night my father left his wife / every night in her fury she wanted to tear him limb from limb, he returned after she fell asleep / she slept soundly spent from crying tired to the bone / every night the radio cries with songs of home / I lie in bed with a chalky fever / for a bid of lust she was impregnated, for a pretty dress, for a faraway land, for a bridal veil without a wedding

she bore me and then her death began
now I am the accursed fruit of her ravaged garden
the razor slit in her milky skin
I am the one, the bow, the arrow, the court, and the executioner
failure itself, the betrayal, the victim
the unintelligible voice

every night she arrives with her blindfolded eyes / climbs from the coach, given over to an unknown destination / every night we fall asleep to these acts / one cries, the other flees, no one finds a home / every night I write poems to rouse my thoughts / slink past tracks, past cheap brothels, absorbed in my world / because every night my father left my mother / every night in her fury she wanted to tear him limb from limb / now I know, everyone should fear their own birth

she bore me, then her death began
she drank the three thousand year old poison of motherhood
and lay herself down under the pine
I am the ivory beneath her head
the guard at her doorstep
the razor and the stitches across her wound
mother, forgive me
I have completed my work

 

Translator’s Note:

Silence is a phantom. It seeps through windows, slips through pores, fills tiny and vast rooms, unnoticed perhaps until a child goes to the breakfast table and everything on it reminds of what is not there, loved ones whose care is apparent in absence, whose love is expressed in the jars and tins of loneliness, everything half full, half empty. And the devastating recognition by the child, grown to adulthood, that he was unintentionally culpable, that as loved as he was, he was a silencer too by his mere presence, that “no one finds a home” where economic issues dictate the household. These two poems by German poet, Dinçer Güçyeter, move in this space of emptiness: a child at a table populated by symbols of family, and a mother whose individuality ceases with the birth of that child, and finally as time continues, with a poet instilled with “dueling voices that burrow through this poetry journal.”

I myself was what used to be called a “latchkey child” in 1970s lingo until so many children “came home to an empty house” that the buzzword rendered itself irrelevant. I remember wishing my mother were home to make me an after-school snack and at the same time feeling capable at meeting my own needs, in a kind of conflicted lonely independence that carries through into my ever advancing adulthood. Never once though did I consider what effect my mere presence had on my mother in such a concrete fashion. Güçyeter’s desire, urge, imperative to speak out on both counts, to reenact the scenes of silence are a vehicle for both indictment and remorse, representing attempts perhaps to exorcise the phantom.

The poetry collection these come from, titled My Prince, I am the Ghetto, is a multi-modal lyric collage grounded in the poet’s autobiography. In excavations of memory and depictions of social realities for Germans of all ethnicities, dialog pervades every poem, every poetic cycle, every altered image, every theme the book addresses. Like in “The Kitchen Table” and “The Epic of Hera,” many poems in the collection are made up of two or three parts, each voice and gaze in conversation with its phantom self, just as the world they are revealing has an acknowledged surface and an undercurrent of silence. Güçyeter does the talking for both sides, until perhaps the day when the phantoms come back to the metaphorical table in physical form and real-world dialog happens. 

 

Dinçer Güçyeter grew up as the son of a barkeeper and a blue-collar worker. He went to night school to finish his high school diploma. From 1996 to 2000, he trained to be a tool and die maker. Occasionally, he worked in the food service industry. In 2012, Güçyeter founded Elif Verlag, a publishing house focused on poetry, financed by his part-time job as a forklift driver. His latest poetry collection, Mein Prinz, ich bin das Ghetto, won the Peter Huchel Prize in 2022. His first novel, Unser Deutschlandmärchen, was published in the fall of 2022 by Mikrotext.

Caroline Wilcox Reul is the translator of In the morning we are glass, by Andra Schwarz (Zephyr Press, 2021) and Who Lives by Elisabeth Borchers (Tavern Books, 2017), both from the German. Her translations have appeared in the PEN Poetry Series, The Los Angeles Review, Exchanges, Waxwing, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Columbia Journal, and others.

 

 BACK TO ISSUE

 BACK TO FOLIO

Pandora’s Box Blues

Things are not often what they appear to be    

this box 

for example, 

whose script advertises 

                                    250 FRESH EGGS

In reality contains

40 dust-ridden books 

boasting 

in their turns

thousands of pages

or rather

millions of words 

which must settle into

verses in heaps of meters

like arranging a room’s furniture, 

until everything finds its ideal place: 

the exact point for encountering the universe.

To instate the semblance of an order

everything dons its name as armor 

giving the world certainty and consistency 

(from ambiguous “a” all the way to “z”). 

What if everything were a fleeting order, 

chaos but in a different manner 

for populating the closet with frying pans, 

planting shrubs or ties in kitchens, 

or making the literary Hydra’s heads grow? 

What if every box

is Pandora’s box,

a nest where a language

can hatch fresh eggs? 

 

Pandora’s Box Blues

Las cosas no suelen ser lo que aparentan:

esa caja, 

por ejemplo,

cuya leyenda anuncia

                                    250 HUEVOS FRESCOS

contiene en realidad

40 libros polvorientos

que ostentan 

a su vez

miles de páginas,

o sea,

millones de palabras

que en versos de múltiples medidas

habrá que acomodar,

como se mueven los muebles de una sala,

hasta encontrar el sitio ideal de cada cosa,

el punto exacto en que transcurre su universo.

Cada cosa acorazada por su nombre

para instaurar un orden aparente

(desde la ambigua A hasta la zeta)

y dar al mundo certeza y consistencia.

¿Y si todo fuera un orden transitorio,

el caos pero de un modo diferente,

para poblar de sartenes los roperos

para sembrar en las cocinas arbustos o corbatas

o hacer crecer cabezas a la hidra del librero?

¿Si cada caja es

la caja de Pandora,

el nido en que un lenguaje 

empolla huevos frescos?

 

Supplication against the Rooster

Enemy of sleep 
Rival of dreamers. 

You herald 
the gray backstage,
the light’s atole
advancing, thickening
and everything spoils in the stiffness
of eight gravestone columns.
Foolish soup
mondongo, revoltijo 
the thick broth in which we come back to life 

Master of restlessness: 
leave the bed where lovers sleep
the cloud where Mariana breathes 
far from this world.

Lord of insomnia: 
you and your ilk reign over 
the basilisk and the cockatrice.
don’t be a beast. 
grant us some rest.  

Give us at least a while 
five more minutes
delay the morning 
cease your singing!
Chicken hearted
third-rate feathered tenor 
Shut your beak!   

 

Plegaria contra el gallo

Enemigo del sueño,
rival de los que sueñan.

Lo que anuncias:
entretelones de grisura,
el atole de la luz
que avanza espesa
y todo lo corrompe en el rigor
de sus ocho columnas lapidarias.
La sopa boba, 
el mondongo, el revoltijo:
el caldo gordo en que volvemos a la vida.

Patrón de la vigilia:
aléjate del lecho en que duermen los amantes
y de la nube en que respira
Marianna ajena al mundo.

Señor de los desvelos:
tú que prohíjas en tu estirpe
al basilisco y al cocatrix,
no seas bestia,
concédenos reposo.

Regálanos al menos otro rato,
cinco minutos más,
retrasa la mañana.
Detén tu canto,
corazón de pollo,
Emplumado tenor de poca monta,
¡cierra el pico!

 

Translator’s Note:

The element that I continue to find most striking about Cabrera’s poetry is his ability to put concepts, experiences, and works of art from seemingly different universes (that is to say parts of the world, traditions, languages, and levels of social prestige) into dialogue with one another. In the two poems included here, everyday occurrences, like the crowing of a rooster or a stack of books being placed in a box labelled as eggs, serve as gateways for a range of emotions from metalinguistic and metaliterary reflection to existential angst. In each poem, ordinary domestic life (like arranging furniture while moving or waking up in the morning) engages in conversations with mythology, philosophy, religion, and linguistics. 

In addition to Cabrera’s wide breadth of conceptual dialogues, his poems are also extremely well-crafted and detailed. In my translation of “Pandora’s Box Blues,” I evoke Cabrera’s rhyme scheme at times, while deviating from it in some sections. Specifically, I maintain the rhyme scheme when the poem shows how language can be used to establish order, and I drift away from the rhyme scheme when the poem shows how language can also create chaos. In “Supplication against the Rooster,” I highlight the elevated register and humorous tone of the poem. In addition to the juxtaposition of unlikely ideas and references, Cabrera’s humor is another one of my favorite elements in his poems. 

 

Víctor Cabrera is a poet and editor originally from Arriaga in the Chiapas State of Mexico. He is the author of many volumes of poetry including Signos de traslado (2007), Wide Screen (2009), Un jardín arrasado de cenizas (2014), and Mística del hastío (2017). Cabrera edited and wrote the introduction to the collected edition David Huerta: Poesía moderna (2019). Cabrera is a recipient of the Fondo National para la Cultura y los Artes (FONCA) scholarship. He works as an editor for the university press (Dirección general de publicaciones) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). 

James Richie holds a Master of Arts in Language, Literature, and Translation from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His translations have appeared in the Journal of Italian Translation, Four Centuries: Russian Poetry in Translation, and [Sic] a Journal of Literature, Culture, and Literary Translation. His academic writing has appeared in Translation Review and Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, and Culture. He is currently pursuing his PhD with the Department of Comparative Humanities at the University of Louisville. 

 

 BACK TO ISSUE

 BACK TO FOLIO

The Offering

We got our report cards back last night. Apparently, the teacher had called you in for a talk. You stepped into the schoolyard dressed in the general’s uniform – the tall papakha hat made of astrakhan fur, the stiff navy overcoat, and the epaulets with tassels hanging off your shoulders. The sixth-grade girls were swooning onto the cement while I watched you with vile indifference, clenching my teeth on a koulouri bagel, the sesame kind that disgusts you. Show no respect, I promised myself, Absolutely no nostalgia, I will not run to him, I’ve held my breath for six months, will not cave in the finale, I swore, where I pinky-promised my own heart. I took a bite of the koulouri as big as your throat and stuffed my mouth with sesame so you’d be repulsed but also think, Fuck Volga and all of Lake Baikal, I want her, even with all that sesame. You marched closer and closer but wouldn’t arrive, with every stride you grew by a head and I shrunk by two. Finally, you loomed over me, your golden Brandenburg buttons shining so bright I was blinded, but I played it cool, turned my back to you and started up the stairs, swaying my ass in your face because I could sense you were hell-bent, a brewing storm.

The poor teacher bowed to you like a slave and you blessed him with a pat on the back like a horse you had broken and brutalized. He offered you a piece of paper with trembling hands and retreated slightly so the crossfire wouldn’t catch him. You looked at it, looked at it, looked at it, looked at me, I looked at you, you looked at it again, I gave you a smile (whoops), you swelled, cleared your throat, concentrated, I pretended to concentrate, you looked at me and told him:

“Fine.”

The poor teacher exhaled.

“As you can perceive,” he said, wiping his sweaty forehead, “we didn’t accomplish very much this semester. To apply even more precision in my meaning, Mr. General, we hit rock bottom. All the progressions and developments we had gained in previous years have gone straight to hell. Compare and contrast, if you please. Behold last semester’s perfect 10s. Now observe how the forlorn 10s have been orphaned from their 1s. We’re talking about a mass uno-cide here. All that remains are these utterly round 0s, particularly in the fundamental prowesses required of a modern lady: Independence, Ambition, Etiquette and Charm! Six months ago, who could have foreseen this occurrence occurring for our young lady? The epitome of moxie at this institution, our champion in the crusade against the patriarchy, the undisputable frontrunner in the National Competition of Competitiveness. We’re talking about a colossal calamity here. The young lady has not successfully generated a thing for months now. She states she doesn’t trust words anymore. She states that words are – forgive me, Mr. General, this is her phrasing – Giant whores. She says, What have words ever done for me? Her productive output has been eviscerated, her professionalism irrevocably impaired. She disregards one deadline after the other, blaming the full moon or the ‘southerly wind’ blowing in. She infuriates whoever she encounters, insists on the futility of everything, flaunts her exhaustion. She compulsively employs the phrase Fuck it, not to mention the phrase – verbatim, Mr. General, verbatim – Suck my balls, which she supplements at times with a graphic gesture. What is more, she requested an exemption from the course on Self-Actualization, presenting a stack of freelancing invoices as her entire argument. So I inquire to you, good Mr. General, to what do you attribute these sudden changes in our young mademoiselle?”

You didn’t look at me – instead, you bowed your head, heavy with guilt. As if you were addressing me, you parted your lips and murmured:

“I’m sorry. I’ve been away.”

A true gentleman. You didn’t rat me out. You didn’t say the self-possessed cunt exiled me. You didn’t say Miss Sataness rebelled all over the weight of my back. You didn’t tell him the rebellion had failed and ruined her, the moron. You took full responsibility. Apologized. You were away at the frontier, you explained. In Manchuria. After that, imprisoned by the Reds in Ekaterinograd. You would’ve loved to have supervised me but couldn’t. You went through a lot, dot dot dot… Unbuttoning your shirt, you revealed the wound on your chest I inflicted at that musty bar in Mani last year. The poor teacher gasped in the face of your manly courage. When you closed your shirt, I could breathe again… You promised him this wouldn’t happen again, promised improvement. Once again, sorry. The poor teacher attempted to kiss your hand, but you swatted him off with your famous noblesse and exited the classroom, harrowed but ever tall. I slipped the poor teacher the 10 euros he deserved (it would’ve been 50, like we agreed, if he had said, “Please, take care of her, your hands are the hands that need to nurture her,” but he didn’t).

You grabbed my arm and yanked me, furious, down the stairs. We crossed the schoolyard, hand-in-arm, stepping over the corpses of girls charmed to death, until we reached the sidewalk by the street and you dropped my hand, as if it wasn’t yours anymore. As soon as we turned the corner, you stopped, looked to me, and quietly said:

“What am I going to do with you? That’s all I have.”

Behind you, an SUV raced by at full speed, and as it veered the corner I wished it would flip over and crush us. No luck. You’ve got a battalion of men to keep alive, you said, you can’t send them all to hell for me. You have responsibilities, obligations, horses, ideologies, behests from the Tzar, a sick sister. You didn’t expect this from me. Where were my perfect 10s? That’s why you tripped and fell in love with me—because I didn’t need anyone. That’s what you said, and I saw the shame sinking in as you let it slip out.

I looked at you, looked at you, looked at you. You were ashamed. I took out a pair of small scissors and started tearing off your distinctions and medals, the insignia, the epaulets with the tassels hanging off your shoulders. You didn’t react, only looked left and right to confirm nobody was watching, that we weren’t becoming a spectacle. You performed your famous patience, the act of the great martyr, finally left with a jacket full of holes and a few bleeding cuts, but still, you neither flinched nor complained. I slapped you hard and you didn’t blink an eye, kneed you hard but you didn’t give me the satisfaction of folding in two. You just stood there, motionless, waiting for the storm to pass. Then, I began digging a hole like a rabid dog around your feet to bury you alive, falling inside as I dug deeper. Once the hole was up to your throat, I stopped, now eye-level with the ground, the hole eating me whole. You then hooked me under my armpits, lifted me from this upright grave, like a premature kitten from the litter, and set me on the ground in front of your face. “Feel better?” you said.

Unflinching I looked right at you and saw the blade of your sword casting a spear of light onto my throat, an offering to the gods of this world to save your battalion. I bowed my head, so that the metal could slice the meat of my flesh without effort. You love me, you said, but this must be done, I’m sorry. I nodded, bowing my head even lower because the blade had only hit my bone and it needed more strength than the strength you had. “I believe in you, you are strong. Next semester, you will have 10s again,” I heard you murmur while my head was falling – thud – on the ground.

I picked up my 0s, my books, the trophies from your uniform, and turned to leave. Then came the girls – the wives, the daughters, the secretaries, the dociles — they wrapped you in their coats, took your temperature, kissed you on the forehead, wiped the sweat from your brow, and chanted: “Shhhh, Mr. General, calm down, it’s over, don’t fatigue yourself any longer, unwind in our hands, rest here.” They bandaged your wounds with their hair, sneered at me as I walked away. For a long time as I drifted, I could smell the burning carcasses slaughtered in your honor – man, honorable father, courageous, above and beyond the call of duty, savior of the battalion, the saint who slayed the dragon. I was going and going, dragging myself with my hands, my knees, my teeth, crying bile and spitting ashes. Kids on the street giggled with glee, the order of the world had been restored, charred flesh having relieved the stomachs of your concerned congregation. Mr. General, I didn’t know what to do with myself either, nor did I have any choice but to keep walking and—though slaughtered by your hands, or rather exactly because of it—to excel once again.

 

Translator’s Note:

Inside is a short story called το σφάγιο (2019), translated as “The Offering.” The Greek title, meaning “the sacrifice,” is a neuter noun in Greek, evoking an objectification or animal-ification of the subject. The author, Alexandra K*, invents neologisms, plays with temporality, and creates a complex and confusing central relationship between the narrator and Mr. General.

Alexandra K*’s impact in Greek culture ignites from the biting intellectual and erotic maneuvers her writing takes through the nature of heterosexual relationships within the patriarchal order. In part, her work explores the dichotomies assigned to limit women’s behavior in patriarchy and the way complex womanhood causes tension between women and men, women and society, women and themselves.

In translating this piece, I considered how to preserve the surrealist world-building created by Alexandra in the Greek, which is essential to how the axis between women and men operates. The irreverent tone of the work, composed through moments of confusion and humor, provides a dreamscape where the logical and illogical meet and mesh, exposing the play between gender and power as the farce that it can be.

Moments where new words or novel images are invented in the Greek decidedly required the most tender attention from this translator. Such instances include when the narrator “pinky-promised [her] own heart;” when she digs a hole with her hands that swallows Mr. General and her whole; when the poor teacher discusses the “uno-cide” which has caused the narrator’s grades to go from 10s to 0s in classes like “Independence, Ambition, Etiquette and Charm.” These parts bring the reader as close to the narrator as possible. They indoctrinate without apology the audience into her way of perceiving reality, in all that makes it ridiculous. I chose to embrace invention. Leaning into the tension between dreaming and reality, I allowed the space between the two states to exist on a razor’s edge, instead of trying to tease them apart. This tension demonstrates what is at stake for the narrator, who is teetering on the edge of two paths.

 “The Offering” describes the journey from teetering to severing, literally, when she bows her head for decapitation, cutting ties with Mr. General, and thus, this version of the world, which was constructed according to her relationship with him. Though it is painful, though she does not know where she is going, she now has no “choice but to keep walking and—though slaughtered by [his] hands, or rather exactly because of it—to excel once again.” By resisting clarity and honoring what is surprising, a relationship between reader and text blooms wherein reader is trusted to unravel the details and discern the dynamics at play. “The Offering” offers new language to consider what is already ridiculous by daring to reconstruct what is already constructed: gendered roles and the power they yield.

 

Alexandra K* (Corfu, 1985) is an author, playwright, and screenwriter based in Athens. Focusing on issues of gender and class, and experimenting heavily with language and form, her work has been described as irreverent, uncanny, and “disturbingly honest.” She was a writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa International Writing Program (’21) and has been repeatedly commissioned by the Greek National Opera, the National Broadcasting Company, the Athens-Epidaurus Festival, and the National Theatre of Greece. Her most recent commissions from the latter two institutions, respectively, include milk, blood (after Euripides’ Medea) and Revolutionary Ways to Clean Your Swimming Pool, which has been widely translated and received a EURODRAM award. She’s a regular contributor in Vogue Greece and teaches Creative Writing workshops at the University of Western Macedonia. She published the best-selling novel How Sea Urchins Kiss in 2017,and her latest book, Mother Mary Smoking in the Bathroom, a short story collection published in May 2023, became an instant #1 bestseller in Greece.

Hannah Kent is a translator, poet, and performing artist from Key West, FL. She earned an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa for her work translating ancient Greek poets and philosophers, during which time she also served as an editor and communications expert with the translation journal Ancient Exchanges. She was a team leader and political canvasser in New Hampshire for the 2022 primary elections, and now she’s based in New York City, ghostwriting memoirs and autobiographies. Find her @pol_udora.

 

 BACK TO ISSUE

 BACK TO FOLIO