Class, stand at attention! Teacher, I’m here to report to you that the class size is thirty-five, three are absent, namely Kiss, Faragó, Satunyek, thirty-two are present. Class, at ease, sit down. Today’s homework was to read the state structure of the Habsburgs, up to the first paragraph on page sixty-seven. Pardon me, I apologize, Principal, please don’t be upset with me, I didn’t say hello because I didn’t see you, Principal. I’m not lying, Mom! I’m not raising my voice, just telling you that I’m not lying. I’m not yelling. I’m not talking back at all. Since the Hungarian orders couldn’t free themselves from Werbőczy’s Opus Tripartitum approach even in the 18th century, they became increasingly unfit for modern governance. Homework: 1) Characterize the important social and economic changes of the era. 2) The class structure of the feudal society after the Battle of Mohács. 3) The relationship between the Hungarian nobility and the Habsburgs. I would like to apply to the Faculty of Humanities. I will now open the general meeting. Let’s sing a marching song! Why would I like to apply to the Faculty of Humanities? I would like to apply to the Faculty of Humanities because I have wanted to be a teacher ever since I was a small child. My mother’s brother, Uncle Feri, has told me a lot about what it’s like to be a teacher, because he’s a teacher. I will begin the review and discussion of the film Fish on the Shore. The film explores the problems of modern life. The creators used the tools of realism to portray the main character. The message of the movie: We can’t give up hope even in difficult situations. What is redundant is pointless. This is a very important basic truth from one of the prominent figures of the French Enlightenment. I would have expected a secretary of a self-development group to know this. It’s part of common knowledge. (Part of common knowledge, strictly speaking.) Now, on the occasion of our high school commencement, on behalf of my peers, I would like to thank our teachers and the principal for their hard work, which we will always remember. We’re standing here at these moments, nearly moved to tears, about to enter the real world. Thank you very much for lunch, the fried chicken was delicious! Gaudeamus igitur. Kati, don’t leave, I need you! I need only you, please understand. Did I get a letter? Anna, don’t leave, I need you! Júlia, I’m waiting for your return, I miss you, and I need you! I think my entrance exam went reasonably well. Did I get a letter? I think my entrance exam went extremely well. PURPOSE OF YOUR TRIP: tourism. EXPECTED LENGTH: 14 days. WHERE: GDR. GOAL: My goal is to travel to many places and meet people. I’d like to visit the socialist German Democratic Republic because, on the one hand, I’d like to refresh my German language skills, and on the other hand, I’ve never been there. This would make an old dream of mine come true. Júlia Sós, 22/B Eötvös Street, Budapest. I’m thinking about you a lot here in Berlin. I’ll be home on the twenty-fourth. If by any chance you’ve changed your mind, give me a call, you know the number. Rose, you have a pretty name. I like everything here. Du bist schön! Doch! Write to me! Schreibe mir. I had a great time in Germany. Oh, yes, Berlin is a very interesting city. I did see it. That, too. Did anybody call me on the telephone? Did I get a letter? When did it come? From the university? Please don’t cry, Mom, not everything is lost yet. I’d like to appeal your 8195646/E order, according to which my application for admission is rejected due to lack of space, although I have achieved the required score for admission. Please take into consideration that I have wanted to be a teacher ever since I was a small child. My mother’s brother, Uncle Feri, has told me a lot about what it’s like to be a teacher, because he’s a teacher. Literature means the most to me, and I’m actively engaged in it. I’m a member of the Organization of Young Communists, and I’ve already done a lot of volunteer work. I was a member of senior management in high school. Did I get a letter? Mr. Lajos, I came here because I wasn’t admitted to university due to lack of space. We did appeal, and I thought I could ask you, Mr. Lajos, to help us. You must know someone here in the Ministry of Education who could put in a good word for me. Did anybody call me on the telephone? Uncle Feri, I’d love it if you could ask around for me. I know you have influential friends at the Department of Education, Uncle Feri. Dad, go see Mr. Jenő! Ági, may I walk you home? Mom, please don’t cry. The appeal was rejected, and that’s it. No worries, they’ll accept me next year. Something will happen. Why do I want to be a printer’s apprentice? I want to be a printer’s apprentice because I’m actively engaged in literature, and I’m interested in how a book is made, technically speaking. You’re right, Comrade Foreman, I’ll do it. I’ll fix it. Of course I have wanted to be a printer ever since I was a small child, Comrade Team Leader. Ági, come meet me in front of the printing house! Let’s go to the movies, if you also want to. Mom, may I please have twenty forints? Ten, then. I’m done, Comrade Chief Foreman. I don’t have any problems, Comrade Chief Engineer. I’m satisfied with everything. The food at the cafeteria is decent. Did I get a letter? Why would I like to be admitted to the Faculty of Political Science and Law? I’d like to go to the Faculty of Political Science and Law because I’m interested in a legal career. My father is a lawyer, and he told me a lot about legal work. I used to want to go to the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences to become a teacher, but I no longer want to be a teacher. I’d rather be a lawyer. No, the reason why I didn’t apply for the second time to the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences is not because I ran out of courage and was afraid of another failure. No, it wasn’t because of that. Dad, just to be on the safe side, please go see Mr. Jenő! I’m looking for the Comrade Editor in Chief. Is he in? It’s about a short story. My father went to the hospital, and I’m going to visit him today. My father got admitted to the hospital because something is wrong with his heart. I’ll definitely go in today, or tomorrow at the latest. Dad, you’ll see, you’ll be able to come home a week from now! Mom, may I have ten forints? The written and oral entrance exam went reasonably well. Did I get a letter? The entrance exam went extremely well! Truly, it did. I’m not saying this as a consolation, believe me, Dad. I’m waiting for the results. I’m sitting on pins and needles. Standing. Lying down. I got accepted! I got accepted! Viva! Hurray! I’m really happy that I can finally be a university student. Ági, don’t leave, I need you! I’m really really really happy that I can finally be a university student, but before that I still have to do eleven months of military service. I’m waiting for my draft card. I hate to wait! Did I get a letter? Hello! Yes, I’d like to talk to my mother. Mom, please be strong! We must go to the hospital right away. Mom, please don’t cry, not here, you can cry at home. Wipe your face. We cherish his memory. Did I get a letter? Comrade Sergeant, I’m here to report that no special incident occurred during my term of service. I understand. At ease, military unit. Comrade Major, I’d like to request a leave starting at the thirteenth hour on the twenty-fifth of this month until the twenty-fourth hour on the twenty-sixth. On the day of my military discharge, on behalf of my comrades, I thank our superiors for their hard work, which we will always remember. Mom, may I have a ten-forint bill? A five, then. University is completely different from high school. This is now real life, in its original form. I’m looking for the Comrade Editor in Chief. He’s not in? When will he be in? The topics to be developed for the Hungarian legal history seminar are as follows: 1) Characterize the important social and economic changes of the era. 2) The class structure of the feudal society from 1526 to 1600. 3) Rights of certain orders in Habsburg Hungary. Why would I like to be an author? I’d like to be an author, so that I can do something for the benefit of humanity. Ever since I was a small child—
Translator’s Note:
“My Redundant Sentences” is a timeless piece in which the author wishes to show readers what it felt like to be a high school student in Hungary in the late sixties. The air was heavy with clichés and slogans of socialist ideology that students despised, even when they occasionally seemed acceptable. For example, in all the classrooms, above the blackboard, there was this quote by Lenin: “Learn, learn, learn.” Students, however, identified the generation of their parents with the existing system, so the typical generational rebellion against parents was also more or less identified with the resistance against the political system of the era. It was in the wake of all this that Miklós Vámos, a high school student at the time, wrote this rebellious piece as a form of self-expression. He purposely left out harsher political slogans, yet he still couldn’t get it published in his school newspaper—it was rejected for political and ideological reasons.
Shortly afterward, when Vámos was still a high school senior and also an apprentice at a printing house, his first collection of short stories was accepted by Új Írás (New Writing, a prominent literary and arts journal founded in 1961). Coincidentally, a few months later, along with other short writings of his, “My Redundant Sentences” also got published in the same journal and has been in print ever since in various short story collections. Its publication was such a success that young actors, galvanized by a constant need to rebel against oppression, learned it and recited it at various performances, and once even on national television. Censorship conditions at the time were like a fishing net: sometimes slightly larger fish managed to get through. In “Fish on the Shore,” mentioned in this story and published in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Vámos alludes to this mysterious and deceiving nature of socialism.
Per the author’s admission, belonging to a younger generation that sought to think freely rather than languish in ideology was exhilarating. Young people had the courage to push back against a society that was not conducive to free thinking and human flourishing. It would of course be another two decades before the fall of the Iron Curtain.
With its parodic style, “My Redundant Sentences” offered a fitting and clever way to criticize the then socialist regime that ruled with an iron fist and created an environment steeped in poverty and authoritarian control. Unfortunately, this sensitive topic remains a relatable and somewhat universal theme that resonates across time, language, and culture. The story starts off with the mandatory reporting to the teacher by the hetes, who was responsible for noting attendance, keeping the blackboard clean, and handling other mundane chores for a week. Everyday struggles and tough choices about professions or higher educational institutions (many of which often didn’t let students in for political reasons) are all molded into this short piece, sprinkled with micro travelogues, references to fleeting romances, and attempts at finding loopholes in the system. Readers are given insight into the year during which the protagonist faces numerous difficulties and is in constant turmoil over his decisions. The recurring question “Did I get a letter?” represents one of those academic pressure points. Overall, each seemingly simple and repetitious sentence conveys an underlying anxiety about hopes and dreams for the future under the banner of socialism.
As I reflect on translating this piece, it becomes increasingly obvious that there is more to the story than meets the eye. In addition to keeping this dense narrative simple and concise, I particularly enjoyed rendering the old-fashioned honorifics into English. The word “comrade” was added to nearly every title back then. “Comrade Chief Editor” and the like admittedly sound a bit dusty and ironically redundant, but their use was standard practice.
Miklós Vámos is a Hungarian writer who has had over forty books published, many of them in multiple languages. His most successful book is The Book of Fathers, which has been translated into nearly thirty languages. Vámos’s ancestors on his father’s side were Jews who perished in the Holocaust. Fortunately, his father, a member of a penitentiary march battalion, survived. In an effort to save himself from his chaotic heritage, he turned to writing novels. His selected writings have appeared in various publications, including Asymptote, theForward, Hungarian Literature Online, The New York Times, and Tablet.
Ági Bori originally hails from Hungary, and she has lived in the United States for more than thirty years. In addition to translating between Hungarian and English, her favorite avocation is reading Russian short stories in the original. Her translations and writings are available or forthcoming in 3:AM, Apofenie, Asymptote, The Baffler, B O D Y, the Forward, Hopscotch Translation, Hungarian Literature Online, Litro Magazine, Maudlin House, The Rumpus, Tablet, Trafika Europe, Turkoslavia, and elsewhere. She is a translation editor at the Los Angeles Review.
Mom is waiting for you to return So what if she already went to your funeral Waiting for you while watching over us waiting for the day she won’t have to wait any longer Lights, rings, liquor, little chocolates, my sister and me— now and then she rummages through drawers, opens cupboards, light switches, little bottles, our skulls to see if we’ve been burned, caught mold, fever, rust or worms She counts us, switches us around, gets disappointed Things were nicer before, she mumbles puts us back the way we were, by alphabetical order, height, year of birth each time of course we don’t fit like before She tries us on her middle finger, her ears, palate, backbone, throat then returns us to the boxes, side by side, there in the dark— so much darkness inside me that I keep forgetting, am I a little chocolate, a wristband, or a child made of platinum or praline, and when, more or less, will I expire
Suffixes Cover the Wounds
You said they’ll get bigger so I didn’t ask again I believed that one day I’d stop being all scrunched up that one day the syllables will stretch out, become more gaping All my innards got tiny, my limbs shriveled up little eyes, little hands, little hugs, little kisses to mommy. How boring I learned just how far to go when pledging with force I measure the earth I easily calculated length times width times not too tall I said to myself they can’t not grow any bigger like the young of some fluffy animal So I waited for them to grow into something, by a centimeter, a gram, a liter, decibel, foot or degree into something obnoxious at least To move with a longer shadow, make a ruckus, to become so immeasurable I won’t have to count anymore You never told me not to wait for the diminutives
In My Family House
The vultures gathered on the balcony are sharpening their beaks and claws against the railing Hey, careful, you’ll get all rusty, who can we fear if something happens to you? They’re waiting for us to come out to devour us They want your liver, my carotids, our optic nerves and clitorises They don’t know we won’t do them that favor that we can endure locked up in here eating one another
Translator’s Note:
What immediately attracted me to the poems in Niki Chalkiadaki’s little cannibals—three of which appear in this issue of ANMLY—was the child’s voice, its originality and depth. The poems that voice articulates throughout that slender volume offer a unique perspective for modern Greek letters, and in their range and complexity, strike a stance that feels brazen even for contemporary poetry in general. So much is called into question by the seemingly—yet obviously not—innocent speaker, as the oxymoronic title suggests. A young girl struggling to figure out why and how she’s supposedly female, where her father is, why her mother won’t allow any male presence in the house (so much so that even male kittens would get eaten), why she gets everything wrong at school, why even the language she’s supposed to be learning there forces her into binary choices she can’t relate to. Why even kids’ songs and fairy tales traumatize her and threaten the small sense of self she’s managed to come up with. There were numerous challenges in unraveling the young-girl Greek of little cannibals and re-weaving it into reader-friendly English. One such challenge was the frequent references to children’s playground songs, the Greek elementary education system and Greek Orthodox rituals. But by far the most difficult was the young speaker’s reliance on and rebellion against modern Greek grammar and syntax, which she feels keeps forcing her into something she’s not, even as it—in the way she uses it—enables her to navigate the trauma, dismay and wonder of the world she finds herself in. All of which suggests that Iittle cannibals is first and foremost about survival.
With family roots from Crete, Niki Chalkiadaki was born in Trikala and studied Greek literature and linguistics at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She completed a Master’s in creative writing at the University of Western Macedonia in Florina and is currently working on a second Master’s in performing arts. In 2013, her debut collection on my back with fever (Mandragoras, 2012) won the best first book award at the National Symposium of Patra and was short-listed for the Greek National Award for Poetry. Her third collection little cannibals (Mandragoras, 2022)—which includes the poems translated here—explores “a tender, terrifying, animalistic space where boundaries between real and imaginary are blurred.”
Don Schofield lives in Thessaloniki, Greece. His most recent poetry collections are In Lands Imagination Favors (Dos Madres Press, 2014) and The Flow of Wonder (Kelsay Books, 2018). He is a recipient of, among other awards, the 2005 Allen Ginsberg Award (US) and the 2010 John D. Criticos Prize (UK). His poems and translations have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Greek National Translation Award. His memoir, From the Cyclops Cave, is just out from Open Books Press. don-schofield.com.
It is the edge of town and the horizon is flat, it is a plain, its grasses crunch with cold under Dan’s feet, his fingers are blue, he is heading north and a cloud comes from his mouth. The afternoon is almost over, a warmthless light brightens the left side of his face.
Marie sits back against her house, arms crossed, she sees Dan, who is still so far away, who comes closer, he cuts through the air.
A third person is there.
Kazimir is heading south, the sun’s coolness brightens him too, he makes the frost crunch, and his ears are red. Dan stops in front of him, he lifts his hands to show his fingers, Kazimir has never seen fingers so blue, he then bites his lips between his teeth, he shows his ears which are very red, he points to them with his index fingers.
The bluest fingers opposite the reddest ears.
Then both turn toward Marie, they walk toward her, they pass close by her, but just before they go on, toward their separate homes, right before they disappear, they tell her that everything breaks on the ground, that everything which cracks turns into rays, they tell her that it takes eyes to see them.
cloud of dust
The warehouse is straight ahead, covered in gray metal, warehouse metal, it is a metallic sight. Air moves by, but air is not visible. And right in the middle of the warehouse, a door, also made of metal, a door that cannot open without its key, that will not open without a turn of its handle, it is a red door which shines, a door which the sun shows all the red reflections of.
Midnight was eight hours earlier.
A car approaches, its sound is at first quieter than the other sounds, then it becomes louder, the car being so close, the car now being stopped outside the door, it is a light-blue car, lighter than all the skies there are.
The steering wheel is held by two hands at the end of two arms, two arms covered in a white fabric, then a gray fabric, a gray with nothing metallic about it. The steering wheel is held by someone, who looks into the distance, at eye level, horizontal like no other level.
His right hand turns the key counterclockwise and everything stops under the hood, the six cylinders do not move at all anymore, if they keep doing nothing for long enough their temperature will fall to freezing. His left hand leaves the wheel, it finds the door handle and pulls, he steps out fully, into the air, he feels the hardness of the ground, presses down on it through his two shoe soles.
He opens the red door.
Inside, a voice says: Sam, you cannot come in here anymore, nothing else can ever turn under your key, we will change the locks, so that you, Sam, can never do anything else here, so that you cannot come here anymore.
Sam then throws his keys as hard as he can toward the voice in the warehouse, he leaves, he stands with his back to the open door, and he says something very softly: all the concrete in the world will be broken, and with its fire the sun’s rays will burn the rest.
That is all he says.
He gets back into his car, he starts it, he accelerates to spin the wheels as fast as they will go, they make a cloud of dust, and then there is a loud bang, it is the sound of the car against a concrete wall. In the entire city, there is only one wall that stands in the middle of a street, this one, which Greg walks around every day on his way to school.
The car is broken everywhere, it is distorted, the wall is not, and Sam is dead.
Greg saw it all from the start, he was the only one to see it all, he heard it all too.
Greg nears the car now, and because he comes closer he ends up in front of Sam, he sees his head, which is broken, smashed against the broken windshield, where red blood flows. Greg has never seen anything like it, he has never seen so much blood.
Suddenly, light stops entering Greg’s eyes and he falls to the ground.
Moments later his eyes open again, he sees the day, he is lying on the dusty ground next to Sam, under a gray cloud of smoke passing over the sky.
spread
The room is full of children. All of their attention is focused on the person calling each of their names, one by one. But one child does not hear his, he is in the very middle of the room, since 8:05 a.m. he has heard nothing but the sound of waves, he hears the same sound as inside a shell. The voice repeats his name, Greg, and repeats it again, then says: you, get up now, stand over there, stare at the wall, you can go back to your seat when you answer. The voice speaks to Greg but he keeps doing nothing, which is all he can do, all he does is breathe, and even this could stop, he could hold his breath forever.
Lili is sitting next to Greg, she elbows his ribs, which should make him cry out in pain but he does not cry out, all he does is silently screw up his face and twist his mouth. Lili sees Greg grimace and feels her own mouth twisting, she then stares at the wide blackboard in front of her so as not to look at Greg, but her grimace does not go away.
It is Miss Isa’s voice calling the names, she finishes her list, everyone answered except for Greg and Lili, she forgets that they exist. Then she starts to read a story as loud as she can, the story of some animals who break their jug while collecting eggs scattered along the ground, eggs which cannot enter into any vessel nor any other hollow body meant to carry them anymore, and the animals look at the pieces of broken jug, they say that porcelain is not stone and that the difference is in the debris, since shards of porcelain shine while shards of stone do not reflect.
Greg cannot hear any of this, all he hears is waves, all he hears is the shells of his ears. And next to him, Lili and some others start to hear as if in shells too, they feel dizzy, their vision is blurry, and things are not things anymore. There is a limit around Greg and four other children, it separates dizziness and the absence of dizziness.
Miss Isa talks about a bird now, she says that everyone should know, that everyone must have already heard of it, and that everyone will recognize the branch, the cheese and the red creature that lives on the ground. Yes, everyone knew but none can tell her what is happening anymore, what happens next. There is no sound, no arm raises, no head nods, nothing.
The whole room is Greg, he is sitting in the middle and is sitting everywhere, the limit is gone, dizziness fills the classroom.
None answer Miss Isa and she sits.
Then a few more words, she says that Max is absent, or else he is very hard to see, present but invisible, she goes on about Max the oddball, about Max the little weirdo, and that is all she says, she does not move anymore, she is behind her desk, her arms on top of it and laid flat on it. She is still, she is Greg, the whole room is Greg, he is all the way into the walls, into the passing time, he is every second and every speck of dust in the room.
And it goes on like this until the bell rings, which is the same as every day, but which is usually a knife that cuts them off. Today it is nothing, because nothing and no one does anything at all or moves even a little, the bell has nothing to cut off and no one understands that class is over because there is nothing to end.
All the children stay seated, Miss Isa stays seated, and Greg is still everywhere, he is and will continue to be, there can be nothing else for now, nothing except for hearing waves.
wind blows
In the west of the city is the industrial park, the gray-metal building park, it is where the vacant lot is.
One of these buildings has a red door, there are tire marks on the dusty pavement out front, they end at a wall, and on this wall is another mark. What could a wall be doing in the middle of the street, why only build a wall.
Some liquid has spread along the road, it is engine oil, and oil is viscous, it is slick and very hard to remove from any surface, sand must be applied and well, and this oil has been covered with sand, since no one wants to walk on pure viscosity.
Olga does not care about the oil or the wall. She is here for only one reason, she came to throw her plane into the wind. Her plane is light, it is made of little wood pieces on the inside and thin orange plastic outside.
In this city the wind is everywhere, it blows hardest in vacant lots because there is nothing to stop it, it pushes bodies from every direction.
The wind lifts what is too light to stay on the ground, much higher than the tallest buildings in the city of heights.
Olga is not afraid of the wind, so she plants her feet in the dirt of the vacant lot and throws her plane, it pierces the air, turns, glides behind her, it has already risen dozens of feet high, become a speck, it circles above the building with the red door, it is a wood and plastic eagle.
All eagles have prey except this one.
Icy wind can cut skin, Olga’s face is full of scrapes but her eyes are full of sunshine.
The plane is back over her head, it is very high, it is a little orange cross against the blue. It turns in wide circles, Olga loves when her plane flies, she loves the vacant lot.
But then she sees her plane suddenly fall in a long arc, it slides down the air without turning, it lands gently and comes to a stop in the middle of the vacant lot.
She picks it up and throws it as hard as she can, it flies a very short straight flight and lands again.
Nothing else whips against Olga’s skin, her hair does not move anymore, she knows what is happening: it is the disappearance of the wind.
This disappearance is a silence that can be spoken in.
At school, in the city of heights, they learn that all vacant lots are full of wind and that the opposite does not exist.
But today the opposite does exist.
Olga picks up her plane and goes home, it is dinner time, she sits in front of her plate of mash, she tells her parents that the wind fell to the ground today and will never rise to the air again.
Her parents turn to each other, they say that the day has come, as it was written in the book, the one which everyone owns. There are twenty-five thousand people here, there are more than twenty-five thousand books.
This is the book of the city, it explains how the world works.
It is made of lines that meet and never bounce back, every line is absorbed by what it meets, from there another line forms and goes off in a straight line, until it meets something else, which absorbs it and this thing forms another line, and so on.
This is all there is to know about absorption, since it is a matter of little microscopic particles that combine with the lines.
These lines are the substance of the world.
This substance is called the great radiation.
The book also describes events. One day, an illness like the plague was to come, it came. One day, this illness was to disappear, it disappeared. Later, grasshoppers were to eat the fields, they did.
There are also mistakes. It was written that one day the wind was to blow hard enough to kill everyone, but this day never came. And because nothing written about the wind has happened yet everyone assumed that the book was always wrong about it, everyone assumed that the wind would never end.
But today, the wind stopped
Olga’s mother is not eating, she flips through the book for the part about the wind, she reads that when the wind ends the sky will stop moving, that in the blue sky there will be a single white cloud and that outside the city limits the sky will change as always.
Olga and her parents open the window, they stick their head outside, they look at the sky, they see the cloud.
And everyone in their building has their head out their window, and so do the neighbors across the street.
In the book there is an image of a cloud, it is this exact same cloud.
Olga turns to her mother who tells her that today is the day, she turns to her father who tells her the same thing.
But already no one knows what else to say about the cloud, everyone looks at one another, everyone gestures with their eyebrows, gestures with their mouth, they turn their head, but no one has anything left to say.
Above Olga, a man shouts loudly for attention, then he says that the air is not the wind, that there is still air but this air will become hard to breathe, so hard to breathe that they will have to leave the city.
None answer, the windows close, it is cold outside, very cold with a bit of frost, the vacant lot crunched under Olga’s feet. Now her plane will hang on her bedroom wall, it will not fly very high anymore, not without a motor, but Olga does not know what a plane motor looks like, she only knows about propellers.
She was in Greg’s class for the first silence.
She was in the vacant lot for the second silence.
Everyone knows: silences are never the same.
This one does not prevent speech but does cause fatigue, the whole building yawns, the whole city wants to sleep, but it is still early, it is only 7:45 p.m. and yet there has never been such fatigue. As was written in the book of the city: the absence of wind will cause the most intense fatigue, an unlived day will follow, the year will only have three hundred and sixty-four days, it will be the shortest of any year.
Olga goes to bed, her parents do too, as does the whole city, the whole city feels tired and now everyone is in bed.
passage
For a long time, Lise has not left home.
She is scared.
That is what she says.
She lives at the edge of the city, she has been watching the house across the street since morning.
This house is half in the city of heights, half in the other city whose name is not worth mentioning.
For a letter to be delivered here, it must be addressed to both cities, otherwise it will be lost.
Decades ago, a couple built this house, its exterior is tiled entirely in blue, in little sky-blue tiles, little tiles from old swimming pools.
The two people who built this house each came from one of the cities, and neither wanted to leave theirs, they would say: I was born in this city and I will sleep in it forever. And the other would answer: me too.
But they wanted to spend their life together, so they built their house across the two cities, it is split in half by the city limit, which runs straight down the middle of their bed.
Both of them died twenty-five years ago. Their child would not live alone in the house, he did not think he could, there had to be two to live there.
The house was sold.
Pam and Sam bought it.
People always ask Pam: what city are you from? And same for Sam. They answer: both cities. They say: our address is double, and what happens to one, happens inversely to the other.
Today, if Pam looks out one window, she would see a beautiful sky, so beautiful that it is blue. If she looks out another window, she would see a terrible storm.
And Lise, across the street, can see on one side of the limit one half of a house that is normal, and on the other side one half of a house that is caught in the storm. She also sees Pam pacing from one side of the house to the other, her face in one window, then in another, and so on.
Every house that Lise has ever seen has a roof covered in shingles, but all the shingles are almost gone from half of this house, they are torn off, they are lifted into the air then fall to the ground where they break, on top of cars which they dent, they would fall on peoples’ heads if people went outside, they would kill those people with their speed and their weight.
Because of the missing shingles, water pours into the house with the little blue pool tiles, and this water does not stay in just one part, nothing stops it from spreading to the other half of the house, it flows across the floor.
Lise does not see Pam pacing anymore, now she sees her step into the city of heights, water flows outside when she opens the front door. The city of heights is flooded by the city next door because a passage runs through this house from one city to the other, it is the special house, it is the only house in the city that can do this, it is the only house that is two but one, the only house where the rain from one city can run into the other, it is the house with the little blue tiles.
It is the pool-house.
Lise worries that half of the house will be carried away in a tornado, lifted into the sky like a bird, flying faster than a plane, and that when the tornado stops, the house will fall so fast that when it hits the ground it will explode, will shower across the ground like a pool filled with dynamite, she thinks that the streets will smell like chlorine, and Lise loves the smell of chlorine, it is her favorite smell, but because she is scared she cannot go to the pool anymore, Lise can only take twenty steps down the street before she gets scared, and twenty steps for Lise makes thirty feet.
But Lise does not see a tornado, because there is none, half of the house does not lift off, it just keeps losing its shingles, water is still pouring in through the roof and flowing out through the front door.
Pam stands outside, under the blue-sky city, she holds a photo of Sam.
She watches the water flow, the street which was once so dry is now covered in a thin layer of water, Pam jumps on it with both feet, she jumps and jumps again, by jumping she makes miniature rain showers which fall inches above the ground, it is the only kind of rain that requires neither umbrella nor hood.
Pam shouts that it is raining in the city, shouts that the wind will return thanks to her house with the little blue pool tiles.
It is true, the pool-house is a secret passage for the water and inside water there is always wind, Lise opens her window to tell Pam.
Lise shuts the window, she has never spoken to Pam before and now she starts to tremble, she shuts the curtains, she waits, she checks the clock, it is 1:00 p.m., minutes pass, it is now 1:15 p.m.
It has been fifteen minutes, Lise has fifteen colored pencils in her pencil case, she has fifteen marbles, she has a fifteen-thousand-piece puzzle, she has fifteen thousand puzzle pieces.
It is now 1:20 p.m., she looks between the curtains, through a gap the exact size of her eye, she sees Pam in the middle of the road, Pam lifts a hand to say hello.
Lise shuts the curtains again.
She counts to fifteen, she opens the curtains again, Pam is pressed against the window, she shouts: open up or else I will break your window with this. She lifts her hand to reveal a hammer.
Lise backs into a corner of the room, she is against the wall, she cannot move anymore, the hammer strikes and the window breaks, she sees shards of glass drop below the curtain, the hammer drops too, and in climbs Pam.
She goes up to Lise and says: careful, there is glass in your room, I came to tell you, your bare feet cannot step on shards of glass because skin is soft, skin is a million times softer than glass, only one small piece and the blood will flow, and you do not want a pool of blood in your home, so stay off the floor, stand on a chair, stay on the chair long enough, and once the glass has disappeared you can get down, then come see me across the street and I will show you how to break windows, I will show you real fear.
Pam does not wait for an answer, she leaves the room through the window.
Lise has almost stopped breathing entirely, she listened to everything Pam said, she waits on the chair with a colored pencil in her right hand, she snaps it in two and throws the pieces to the ground.
A colored pencil is either used, or it is broken.
Lise does not use her colored pencils.
Pam is back home, she looks around her house. Unless she does something it will end up growing mold, fungus will eat through the walls and everything will crumble. So she starts pushing the rest of the water toward the front door, she pushes with her hands, she is on her knees, and she chases out the water, she tries.
This is not so easy so Pam decides to cast a spell: water, you are nothing but wet sky, out you go the same way you came, get out of my house little liquid, out of my sight army of droplets, may the warm and dry replace the cold and damp.
If the spell works, the floor will dry on its own in less than a minute.
If the spell does not work, it will not dry.
She waits a minute, her watch keeps very good time, one of the three hands moves ahead once every second, she counts sixty.
The floor has not dried at all.
She will have to keep pushing the water with her hands, but she is not kneeling anymore, she has lost all her strength and lies on her back on the floor, water seeps through her clothes and to her skin. She also feels the wind coming from the other city, it blows through the roof, it moves around her, the wind is so fine that it fits between the floor and her back, which is more frozen than frost.
Lise does not see any of this, how could she see through the walls.
Someone sitting on a chair cannot go through walls.
Nobody can.
Pam feels the other city’s rays around her, they bounce off the walls, off the floor and ceiling, they go out the door.
The rays rumble longly, even if Pam is too tired to look at her watch she can tell a length of time.
All at once everything stops rumbling.
The storm is over.
The rays start to soften.
Lise climbs down from her chair, she puts on her shoes to go to the window without cutting her feet. She sees the cloud traveling across the blue sky, and sees other clouds entering the city.
The small cloud moves in one direction, the others move in the opposite direction, the smallest cloud disappears into all the others.
Through her broken window, Lise feels the wind on her face and in her hair.
Wind that would make snow fall if it were up in the clouds.
Lise’s neighbor appears, she always sees him go out at 1:55 p.m., he has a yellow hat on, he has his hands in his pockets, he stands in the street, he looks toward the neighboring city. The first flake lands on the bill of his hat, and then more, and his hat quickly turns white.
It is Tuesday, it is 2:00 p.m., it is snowing, Lise is cold, glass shards do not cut her shoes, a colored pencil is broken, the pool-house is wet, Pam lies on her back in the midst of the rays, half of the roof is missing, snow is falling, it settles inside Pam’s house, the sky is moving once again, there is wind, it should not have come, it came all the same.
state of things
The cities are very quickly covered with snow.
It attracts attention but causes all to be forgotten, it conceals what has happened, hides the days.
Places full of debris are covered just the same as those with none.
The snow’s rays are strongest.
But snow disappears.
The air and the dirt can pull it away.
There is no debris in the city of heights, but there are things to hide, because the sky was still, because the wind went away and came back.
There is nothing left to say, it is not to be spoken of anymore.
None of this is visible now but is locked inside everyone.
All will remember the sky and the storm.
When the snow has disappeared the city limits will reappear.
Debris on one side.
None on the other.
The stopped sky will return as memories.
It has not left them.
The wind can stop at any time. From now on something must be asked every day: does it still whip things into faces, does it still stir dead leaves and hair.
What happens, even only once, could repeat.
Something that disappears can always return, there are no disappearances.
last look
The plain’s grasses are covered in snow, they have their color, it is the color green, but white is all there is, it is an entire horizon of green grass under the white of snow.
Not one blade of grass has disappeared.
Marie is sitting, her hands rested one on top of the other, she wears gray gloves, a gray scarf, a black velvet coat, a black t-shirt, black pants.
She looks at the sun which is directly in front of her, it is rising, it is orange as the snow, it is white but orange. Marie feels this disk of light settle somewhere inside her, she closes her eyes, she still sees the disk of light.
The light fades, then disappears, and she opens her eyes.
She speaks for the horizon: you are big and flat, so far away that the distance between us does not exist.
Marie knows the horizon, she knows how to say what it is.
But the horizon is something that cannot hear what is said.
Every morning, she says a few things to it anyway, she stays seated afterward, just to hear nothing.
She sees Dan and Kazimir, they walk together in the plain every morning and evening, then they go their separate ways, even in the full sun they are never blinded by the light, because there is brightness more intense than the day’s.
They leave.
The plain is all that is left, and if watched for long enough and from far enough away one might make out the transparency that hangs over it, and in this transparency there is all that exists, all that dies, and all that is born.
Translator’s Note
Adrien Lafille’s stories operate within their own defined limits and do not call upon what is external to them. His style is minimalist, it is rhythmic yet stilted in a way that heightens the incantatory and enigmatic nature of his prose. I like to think of Lafille’s work as falling somewhere in the Venn space of Heraclitus, David Lynch, and Gertrude Stein. Poetic and philosophically-charged, Lafille’s second novel, la transparence (The Transparency), may be summarized in one word: estranging.
In broad strokes, The Transparency can be divided into two distinct parts: 1) a character witnesses a tragic accident and falls silent, perhaps bottling within himself a trauma which nonetheless emanates from him and spreads (i.e. the silence), first throughout his classroom to his peers and then across the entire city; and 2) the city’s sky freezes in place, englobing all the characters under a second silence: the silence of the sky. These two parts make up this polyphonic novel’s thirty-two chapters. Each is a node: a (nearly) self-contained portrait of one or more characters—of their habits, actions, interactions, in a place at once strange and familiar, set within the limits (for the most part, at least) of a city at times cloistered and at others boundless.
The “city of heights” is, in fact, very much a character of its own (one that contains all the other characters within a multiplicity): not only is it acted upon by its inhabitants, but it, in turn, acts upon them with a violence and tenderness of its own. As Lafille details the commonplace elements of this city—its water, grass, wind, trees, branches, concrete, etc.—down to their most infinitesimal parts—rays, sounds, particles—the extraordinary appears at every turn, creating a tapestry of converging and diverging potentialities. In his second novel, Lafille creates a world of floating and plural relations; a world governed by an omnipresent transparency.
While my translation of these seven chapters cannot capture the full range of habits, actions, sensations, etc. that make up The Transparency, I hope it gives readers a taste of Lafille’s unique style. It is, however, important to note that the style of this piece is largely an invention of translation. One might quickly notice the complete—and, to some, perhaps nagging—lack of contractions throughout. French does not contract as English does, which makes this quirk something that was found in translation. This is a stylistic choice I’ve made that was almost purely intuitive, a matter of knowing-feeling that often arises when poring saccadically over parallel source and translation. To my ear, this choice helps to echo the prose-poetic simplicity in Lafille’s work. It is this, Lafille’s crystalline rhythm, that produces a kind of transparency of its own, a kind of silence of its own (the silent transparency of the universe?).
Adrien Lafille was born in 1986 in the Paris region, where he now lives and works. He has a master’s degree in philosophy from Paris Nanterre University. Before his most recent publications with Éditions Corti, Le feu extérieur (2024) and La maladie de l’eau (2026), he published two novels with Éditions Vanloo, milieu (2021) and la transparence (2022). Along with Anaël Castelein, he is the co-author of :kappa: (2022), published by Rrose éditions. He also regularly publishes in journals, and edited one called Confiture.
Dawson Ford Campbell lives in Vancouver, Canada. He received his master’s degree in Translation Studies from Concordia University in 2022. Dawson translates literature from France and from Quebec, for which he was awarded an emerging translators mentorship from ALTA in 2025. His work has appeared in carte blanche, World Poetry Review, and Hopscotch Translation.
Der Engel stemmt mit den Trompetenstößen die Steine auf-, und sie, in parallelen Entschlüssen, strecken sich nach ihren Seelen, die Oben stehn, geordnet nach den Größen
Fragment (also: scrap, shard, splinter, remnant) [of] a resurrection (rebirth, rising, literally: on-creation/up-creation)
The angel lifts (stems, presses) with the trumpet-blasts (-blows, -bursts) the stones (rocks, pieces, pits) up-/on-/off- [with “stemmt”: prying/prize open, force open, lever up], and they/she, in parallel (simultaneous, at the same time, analogous, similar) decisions (resolutions, resolve, determination) [*very similar word to decryption, deciphering, unscrambling], stretch (lengthen, elongate, maybe: reach) [themselves, can be included in verb form for “stretch”] for (towards, after, by, over to) their souls/spirits, that/who/which above (overhead, aloft, upward, upstairs) [*noun form] stand/are, arranged (sorted, organized, ordered, put in order, disentangled, unraveled, arrayed, tabulated) after (by, according to, towards, for, past) the/their size (largeness, height, value, dimensions, volume, magnitude, heft)
Fragment on a Resurrection
Trumpet blast: & the angels pry back the stones — in perfect unison, all stretch themselves taut toward their souls, hovering above, sorted according to size
Fragment (also: scrap, shard, splinter, remnant) [of] a resurrection (rebirth, rising, literally: on-creation/up-creation)
The angel lifts (stems, presses) with the trumpet-blasts (-blows, -bursts) the stones (rocks, pieces, pits) up-/on-/off- [with “stemmt”: prying/prize open, force open, lever up], and they/she, in parallel (simultaneous, at the same time, analogous, similar) decisions (resolutions, resolve, determination) [*very similar word to decryption, deciphering, unscrambling], stretch (lengthen, elongate, maybe: reach) [themselves, can be included in verb form for “stretch”] for (towards, after, by, over to) their souls/spirits, that/who/which above (overhead, aloft, upward, upstairs) [*noun form] stand/are, arranged (sorted, organized, ordered, put in order, disentangled, unraveled, arrayed, tabulated) after (by, according to, towards, for, past) the/their size (largeness, height, value, dimensions, volume, magnitude, heft)
Scrap of Re-creation
Angel, with the blast of its trumpet, forces open the rock-door. And they: in parallel purpose, will themselves longer to reach their own souls, there, overhead, ordered according to worth
Fragment (also: scrap, shard, splinter, remnant) [of] a resurrection (rebirth, rising, literally: on- creation/up-creation)
The angel lifts (stems, presses) with the trumpet-blasts (-blows, -bursts) the stones (rocks, pieces, pits) up-/on-/off- [with “stemmt”: prying/prize open, force open, lever up], and they/she, in parallel (simultaneous, at the same time, analogous, similar) decisions (resolutions, resolve, determination) [*very similar word to decryption, deciphering, unscrambling], stretch (lengthen, elongate, maybe: reach) [themselves, can be included in verb form for “stretch”] for (towards, after, by, over to) their souls/spirits, that/who/which above (overhead, aloft, upward, upstairs) [*noun form] stand/are, arranged (sorted, organized, ordered, put in order, disentangled, unraveled, arrayed, tabulated) after (by, according to, towards, for, past) the/their size (largeness, height, value, dimensions, volume, magnitude, heft)
Remnant, a Rising
The angel with the air of its trumpet lifts the pieces up — and they move as one, the many reaching out toward their souls, waiting upstairs, arrayed by height, by heft
Fragment (also: scrap, shard, splinter, remnant) [of] a resurrection (rebirth, rising, literally: on-creation/up-creation)
The angel lifts (stems, presses) with the trumpet-blasts (-blows, -bursts) the stones (rocks, pieces, pits) up-/on-/off- [with “stemmt”: prying/prize open, force open, lever up], and they/she, in parallel (simultaneous, at the same time, analogous, similar) decisions (resolutions, resolve, determination) [*very similar word to decryption, deciphering, unscrambling], stretch (lengthen, elongate, maybe: reach) [themselves, can be included in verb form for “stretch”] for (towards, after, by, over to) their souls/spirits, that/who/which above (overhead, aloft, upward, upstairs) [*noun form] stand/are, arranged (sorted, organized, ordered, put in order, disentangled, unraveled, arrayed, tabulated) after (by, according to, towards, for, past) the/their size (largeness, height, value, dimensions, volume, magnitude, heft)
Shard. A Rebirth.
Breath of the far-world plays across the stones. Opens them. And they all make the same decision. Stretch out for the souls they held. Floating in the open now. Sorted by size.
Fragment (also: scrap, shard, splinter, remnant) [of] a resurrection (rebirth, rising, literally: on-creation/up-creation)
The angel lifts (stems, presses) with the trumpet-blasts (-blows, -bursts) the stones (rocks, pieces, pits) up-/on-/off- [with “stemmt”: prying/prize open, force open, lever up], and they/she, in parallel (simultaneous, at the same time, analogous, similar) decisions (resolutions, resolve, determination) [*very similar word to decryption, deciphering, unscrambling], stretch (lengthen, elongate, maybe: reach) [themselves, can be included in verb form for “stretch”] for (towards, after, by, over to) their souls/spirits, that/who/which above (overhead, aloft, upward, upstairs) [*noun form] stand/are, arranged (sorted, organized, ordered, put in order, disentangled, unraveled, arrayed, tabulated) after (by, according to, towards, for, past) the/their size (largeness, height, value, dimensions, volume, magnitude, heft)
Fragment of a Resurrection
Voice of the universe trumpets away the stones —, and they all, at once, know what to do, know to raise themselves to meet their risen souls, waiting, there, where they go
Translator’s Note
Translation is a process of erasure. The work of translation necessitates a choosing of certain linguistic and semantic paths over others, picking a route from source language to target language and erasing the other possibilities. Some translators are aiming for this effect—to make the translation feel so “natural” in the target language that a reader doesn’t register any latent or suppressed or erased alternate possibilities. But there are other translators who attempt to highlight or acknowledge the presence of those possibilities in the text, by refusing to make the text “behave” in the target language, by letting the difficulty, the impossibility, of perfect or natural translation vibrate across the page and the reader’s mind.
These vibrations, these possibilities, are most legible in the middle material of the translator: the trots and the rough drafts born from them. The trot, a literal word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase translation, can help the translator get a basic sense of the shape and movement of a text, even while it may not yet be legible structurally or idiomatically in the target language. This kind of middle material is used most often by translators who don’t have a native or fluent knowledge of the source text, but may also be used by translators more generally as a first pass tool, which can then be modified and adapted to capture the poetry, lyricism, and shades of meaning that aren’t apparent in a literal translation.
As a non-native German speaker—and truly, a student of German language when I began translating Rilke—I was aware always [immer: forever, constantly, at all times, the whole time] of the possibilities of the text, of ones I could read and make sense of, and ones I was certainly missing without a much deeper understanding of the language. My trots then, were matrices of possibility, often acknowledging patterns, multiplicities, versions, idioms, questions, reminders, incompatibilities, and unknowns, as I encountered them in the text. They were and are alive things, creatures [Kreatur: creation, critter, wretch] writhing with an overflow of words, too many to capture in any one poem. I have a soft spot for these hybrid intermediate texts, Frankenstein’s monsters hidden from the light, unfit for reading the way the finished translation purports to be.
This kind of trot is immensely rich, overflowing [strömen: streaming, gushing, spilling over] with linguistic opportunity, with semantic too-muchness. “Iterations on a Fragment” is my attempt to play inside that rich space, to see what a version of Rilke’s poem, and a version of translation itself, might look like when it more explicitly names the fullness, the many-ness of the interstice between source language and target language. Where else can that fullness send me? What other routes can I take towards meaning? What conversations can Rilke and I continue to have in the open [Freie: open space, outside, beyond] between our languages, our times, and our worlds?
Rainer Maria Rilke(1875–1926) was an Austrian poet and novelist. He is considered one of the most significant figures in German literature, and one of the most important poets of the 20th century. He is best known for his major works, the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, as well as his posthumously published collection of correspondence, Letters to a Young Poet.
Sionnain Buckley is a writer, translator, and visual artist based in Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Poet Lore, Wigleaf, and others, and was selected for Best Spiritual Literature 2024. Her translations of Rainer Maria Rilke have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review and Samovar. She holds an MFA in fiction from The Ohio State University, and has received fellowship support for her work from the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Adirondack Center for Writing. More of her work can be found at sionnainbuckley.com.
Hey, when I saw you off into that alley where you vanished, scuttling past the steel gates, a flurry wet my hat. All those feelings, like hot mist from the street vendor’s buns, whirling, whirling, they dampened the misty-eyed alleyways and threw themselves into the bleak morning.
It had been some time. I liked listening to her voice in the dark, a language studded with dark gleaming minerals. Bitterness sprinting up my nose, messy fists threatened to burst out of my chest. My anxious ears, always raining, always pouring, always waiting for the gold ray of some strong will to shoot me clean through.
Hey, they call this Year 8012. Foreheads rot quickly after eating too many lies. Tyranny rotates its delicate wrists— I see you, scuttling from this end to that end of the year on the train platform, against the thinning lamplight and the crowd.
The more a person clenches failure in a fist, the more dignity bleeds vividly out of them. Someone once said: “raise a toast to liberty”. In the snow white of one’s eye, those urgent cries are scattering… Still that scuttling, legs running up a breeze, a breeze snuffs out those cold, aching ears. And so you see me, always going backwards. Going backwards into a single tear at the edge of your rapidly blinking eye.
Originally published in Shige Yuekan (Poetry Monthly, the New Youth Issue, placement 10.037, 2019).
New Jersey
The ground trembles with thin light. Before cracking open its shell the sky is a giant egg that incubates a day’s worth of colors. Just before daybreak, rebar and concrete entwine into valleys before our eyes and stand as a black and white shan shui painting.
Light’s brush has yet to ignite all those dazzling hues. Be it five star hotels or business buildings, shopping mall or swimming pool, all are humbled by the shortage of human touch. Our nest has also become spacious the exhaustion from day-to-day reincarnations buttresses our Jing Ting Mountain layer-by-layer.
It’s nice, moments like this even though there’s the guilt of delaying tomorrow, the hours rise like waters under the levee steadily coveting me. There’s also the small joy in the occasional ripples.
We call this place “New Jersey”. Neither of us have actually been there. In this high-rise building, people are assigned four-digit door plates. I clutch the marble belonging to us tightly, it is so small. What soaks into the root of our tongues may just be the kind of distance that comes with dreaming. Like the wine mailed from Japan, “Haku Shu” I don’t even know if that’s a place or a name.
On the seventeenth floor, Moroccan carpets spread all over the balcony. We’ve saved up some faraway incense and reforged them. “I fell in love with you watching Casablanca…” So many things happen at once, a hawk darts by those papers buried in my subconscious, when my breath lands on your airport tarmac.
Light’s musical pitch climbs higher dark shadows silently increase in density the landings of daylight’s flight are always unnerving. We are like translucent rivers shakily melting into one.
You love me, at the tail end of the day, this is the string tied around my waist. You remember. When the satellites are done with work, this is the epilogue of the day. Drowsiness ushers in the dawn our nourishment.
Originally published in ding-ding-fing! (Issue 13, page 43, June 2023).
Translator’s Note:
The pen name of the poet Geng Yao 更杳 (b.1992, they/them) refers to the echoing drums of ancient Chinese timekeepers as they call out the late-night hour—“Geng Yao” is thus a name where both characters ought to be read as one combined unit. When I first read Geng Yao’s works, I was struck by their distinct voice. Composed in simplified Mandarin, the most common language used in mainland China, Geng Yao’s poetic language is, nonetheless, quite different from everyday speech or the speech-like pace one may find in many contemporary Chinese lyrical poems. In these intensely hybrid poems, dense neologisms are deftly tuned to the cadence of popular catchphrases, mystical symbols emanate from the detailed descriptions of concrete objects. While these poems are often complex and compact, they also ring with a visceral earnestness. As I read more, I discovered that Geng Yao frequently writes in response to political and cultural crises: from the #MeToo movement’s introduction into the Sinophone literary world, to the impact of the brutal, exam-driven education system on young people, to the traumatic reverberations of the COVID-19 pandemic—important topics that I thought were too taboo, sensitive or complex to be wrestled with in publicly circulated poetry in China. I realize now that part of why Geng Yao’s voice is so striking to me is because they strive to write about things and feelings for which ready language rarely exists. The Chinese Geng Yao weaves together is, through necessity and through their own refusal to be insincere, an invention of their own. In my translations, then, I also tried my best to resurrect in English that exhilarating strangeness and intimacy that I felt when reading the Chinese. I cherished the jagged, alien density of the originals and did not want to obscure the fact that my works are translations grasping constantly towards something outside themselves; I hope that the tenderness in these poems will nonetheless breathe through.
“Year 8012” was one such work. The poem responds to the mass arrests of Chinese student and labor organizers in the aftermath of the 2018 Jasic labor dispute, a seminal moment in the contemporary Chinese labor movement. The quote “raise a toast to liberty” is originally from “A Song to Encourage Feminism” by late 19th century Chinese feminist revolutionary Qiu Jin; the line became popular among contemporary Chinese feminists, including a key organizer in the Jasic incident who adopted it as her social media tagline. The poem’s title, which rearranges the year “2018” to the number “8012,” refers to a popular gesture on Chinese social media for netizens to comment on the absurdity of real-life occurrences. Incidentally, 2018 was when the #MeToo movement entered mainstream discourse in mainland China; this was also the year Geng Yao committed to being an activist for LGBTQ+ rights despite mounting social pressure against such issues.
I met Geng Yao in person for the first time roughly eight months after I first read their poems on my phone in Chicago; they handed me the spare keys to their apartment in Guangzhou on that same night. Their lovingly decorated studio apartment was a narrow cell in a 40-floor, beehive-like complex located in Panyu District, an industrial area on the outskirts of glamorous, metropolitan Guangzhou. I discovered only after I left Guangzhou that this apartment was the basis for the poem “New Jersey”. That apartment and this poem are both incredibly dear to me.
During my stay, Geng Yao and I met up in the many burgeoning alternative spaces and artist studios across the city, and I was folded into a community of artists and activists that I had previously only glimpsed through their work. My tentative hope as a reader proved to be true: Geng Yao’s craft and aesthetics as an artist are part of and develop with their practice and politics as a member of these ongoing networks. Many of Geng Yao’s poems were written for and about their friends and comrades—those who passed away, those who disappeared, and those who are still staying despite it all.
I struggled to write this translator’s note, mostly because these two poems—which, to me at least, represent so much of the vivid and precious feelings of being part of the Guangzhou communities—had taken up bittersweet new meanings since I first sent my translations to ANMLY. Geng Yao moved out of the apartment that inspired “New Jersey” last year. An important online public account for organizing was suddenly and permanently banned due to “irresistible force” in February. A cherished underground gathering space in Guangzhou had to abruptly cease operations just this weekend in March. Numerous queer-friendly spaces and sympathetic bookstores in the region have also been relentlessly targeted in the past weeks. Geng Yao and I marveled at the strangeness of seeing “Year 8012”, a poem that seems so grounded in a specific Chinese historical context, find a new home in an English language magazine and make its way to a broader readership at this particular moment. As I listen to the news in America, Geng Yao’s phrase “always raining, always pouring” often comes to mind. In the introduction to a fellow Guangzhou artist’s work, Geng Yao writes: “in these turbulent times, we should not be ashamed to admit that we are trembling.”
We perk up our cold ears in this thunderstorm, listening for those urgent, scattering cries.
Geng Yao 更杳 (they/them) is a Chinese poet, artist, activist, and researcher based in Guangzhou. Working across poetry, installation, and performance, they trace fragile entanglements between bodies, materials, and environments, attending to what persists, leaks, and resists containment. Informed by queer ways of sensing and committed to social and ecological justice, their works gesture towards not-yet-fully-realized modes of living and relating. They are the founder of the art collectives Pukou Factory and Lava Lake. Their first poetry collection is forthcoming with Showwe Press (Taiwan, 2026). Recent works appear in Ground Sea (te editions, 2025) and Ming Pao (Hong Kong).
Ban Yan Profile Photo
Ban Yan 斑焰 (she/her) is a translator and poet currently based in Chicago. Her languages are Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. Her works and translations are featured or forthcoming in Mouse Magazine, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere.
Fierce warrior faces loomed out of the night. The blood-stained warriors were painted on a fan-shaped paper lantern as tall as a house, the parade float that we were pulling along.
‘Ya-re, ya-re, ya-re, ya,’ a man shouted into a megaphone.
The other kids all around me yelled it back. Shrill flutes mixed with booming taiko drums and jagara gongs; the music would trail off when there were bends in the road or power lines overhead, but the same chant was repeated over and over.
It’s the Neputa Festival.
In Tsugaru, for one week in August, the Neputa floats are pulled across the green fields. This one’s a small town festival, not as famous as the one in Hirosaki.
Eri was holding a rope tied to the Neputa float, and she looked back over her shoulder at me. ‘Satomi, are your feet okay?’ The way she said ‘okay’ sounded more like ‘onkay’.
‘Bit tired but okay.’
Eri’s in year three, same as me, so she must be eight or nine. I met her yesterday but we got along. Her mum and little brother were walking in the parade too. She has a baby sister as well. Eri’s so confident being a big sister, she looks after the baby and everything. She doesn’t know me that well but she looks out for me too. She was wearing a lemon-coloured summer kimono with ajisai flowers on it, sashed with a pale green obi.
Yesterday she told me to make sure to wear good shoes for the Neputa festival, because we’d walk for ages.
Now she explained that last summer, she’d worn new shoes to match her obi to walk in the parade, got blisters and had to miss two days of the festival. Her baby sister had just been born and her shoes were the last thing on her mum’s mind.
‘Babies are cute, but they’re a lot of work,’ Eri said with a knowledgeable air, then turned back to the front to call out ‘ya-re, ya-re, ya-re, ya!’ Next year, she’d be in year four, and then she’d be allowed to join the musicians. She’d told me they’d been practising for months, meeting up after dinner. She looked so proud, standing straight and tall. Her hair was neatly braided and rolled into two buns that sat just below her ears. I wondered if her mum did her hair for her.
The big Neputa floats glowed with light, and the grownups in the parade had lanterns, but when we walked out into the countryside, rice paddies as far as I could see, the dark got really thick. I hadn’t noticed it walking through streets with houses, but there were hardly any streetlights out here, and the night felt so heavy, way different from Kawasaki. I looked down at my feet and a paddy canal was just ten steps away. The croaking of frogs was closing in. Grandma and Junko had told me that somewhere round here lived a massive frog lord. What did he rule over, out here in the dark? He might sniff me out, because I’m not from here, and drag me down in the mud. My breath came faster and I wanted to go home. Why did they make me walk around at night in this place way up north, where the way everyone talked and the streetlights were all different?
*
Threat-ed pree-term lay-bour.
In my mum’s tummy there was another baby. This time, it stayed and it was growing well, but after eight months, Mum started bleeding and had to go back to the baby doctor. I only had school in the morning that day, so I skipped it and went to the hospital with her.
When Mum came back from behind the curtain, the doctor with bushy white hair was looking at the screen. ‘You should stay here and rest,’ he said.
Mum’s been to this hospital for baby problems loads of times. Every time she’d stay for a couple of days, so I thought this time would be the same.
‘Satomi, I’ve got to stay in the hospital for a while, the doctor says.’
‘Uh-huh. I heard him say that.’
‘I want your little brother born in good health.’
‘Uh-huh. I know.’
‘Satomi, will you be okay if I’m not around?’ Mum’s always calm and gentle, but she can be a crybaby. She looked like she was going to cry but she kept blinking.
Dad teased her that her ‘discussions’ weren’t discussions, they were ‘announcements’. Obviously I couldn’t say I wouldn’t be okay. And I’d survive. Dad’s food is so-so (bit too salty), but he’s fun, so he’d take me somewhere on the weekends, and I could hang out with my friends at the holiday kids club. ‘I’ll be fine.’
I never thought I’d be stuck at my grandparents’ place for the whole summer holiday. Mum said that Dad was a systems engineer so he could work from home if his boss said yes. If I didn’t go and visit Mum, she’d be lonely and she’d cry all alone. She had such a big belly and she had to stay in bed.
‘It’s safer to keep baby in your belly until 39 weeks, if possible,’ the doctor told Mum.
Then the doctor said to me, ‘I bet baby just can’t wait to meet his sweet big sister.’ He was being nice about why my little brother wanted out.
Junko is my dad’s little sister. She used to live in Tokyo until a few years ago. She’s twenty-something, and she said, ‘Don’t you dare call me auntie,’ so I call her Junko. She took me to Disneyland and the Tokyo Skytree. She used to have a boyfriend, and he lived with her, but then he moved out, and she moved back in with her parents in Aomori. Junko used to say ‘Aomori’ the same way I do, the Tokyo way—‘Aah-mori’—but now she says it ‘A – o – mo – ri’, like they do here in Tsugaru.
Junko’s a nurse at the hospital, so she was working mornings while I was there. Grandma was so busy looking after Grandad, who was going to have an operation, and me staying was an extra hassle for them. I blamed my dad. He had dumped me at his parents’ place at an awkward time for them without a second thought. I’m already nine—I was born in May. I’d even explained to Dad that in the summer holidays, I could walk to the kids club all by myself, come back home at 5pm, fry up a bit of meat, cook the rice and wait for him to get back, and I’d be fine with that, but he didn’t listen.
Just before 1pm, after we finished the lunch Grandma made, Junko came back from work, and Grandma left to go and see Grandad in hospital.
‘How’s your homework going?’ Junko asked. She took the clingfilm off her lunch and started to shovel it down.
‘I’ve got about ten more pages of summer holiday homework to go.’
‘From the first of the month, you’ll be busy with Neputa, so you should get that done fast.’
I remembered that ‘should’ didn’t mean ‘must’ in Tsugaru dialect: it was more of a friendly ‘let’s do that’. When I first got here, Junko always used standard Japanese, but she was slipping into Tsugaru dialect when she talked to me.
‘Naofumi really loves the Neputa Festival,’ she said. She explained that when my dad, Naofumi, was a little boy, he’d organised a Kids Neputa and he was always the life of the party.
‘The neighbourhood kids made smaller parade floats that could be pulled by three or four kids,’ Junko said. ‘They paraded them around in a kids-only version, separate to the big Neputa Festivals held by each district. They went door to door, shouting, ‘Come lookit Neputa,’ and asking for spare change.’
‘Kinda like Halloween?’
Junko laughed. ‘I guess they both have scary pictures.’
Two days ago, after we went to visit Grandad in the hospital, we went to Tsugaru-han Neputa Village in Hirosaki City. There were lots of huge Neputa floats and traditional Tsugaru crafts. There was a man playing a Tsugaru shamisen and I’d never heard that before. It was completely different to the electric guitar Dad played when he’d been drinking: it gave me a tingle down the spine, like cracking open the door of a big old abandoned house. As the shamisen twanged on, I whispered in Junko’s ear, ‘Makes me feel kinda cold,’ and she whispered back, ‘This is music that can fight off heavy snowfall.’ I had no idea what she meant by that. When I talk to Junko something’s always a bit off, I don’t know why, but she looks happy to be living in Aomori. Her cheeks are rounder, she’s more easy-going and she laughs more loudly than when she lived in Tokyo.
At the part where the giant Neputa floats are on display, visitors can have a go playing the festival drums. Junko handed me the long thin drum sticks. The sticks were bendier than I thought. It was tricky to hit the drum with the bendy sticks hard enough to get much sound out of it. I bashed away as hard as I could, and the staff joined in on hand-held jagara gongs and flute.
‘Miss, you’re good, really good,’ a lady praised me until I felt uncomfortable, and Junko said, with a proud grin, ‘She has Aomori blood in her veins.’
She kept calling me ‘her niece from Tokyo’, even though Kawasaki is in Kanagawa Prefecture. When I asked her why, she just said, ‘For people who live here, anyone from the Kanto region is from Tokyo.’
*
‘My niece is here from Tokyo. Mmhm, Naofumi’s wife is about to have a baby. Mm, threatened preterm labour. She’s been in hospital all this time, but she’s in her final month. Should be all right. So he wanted the little one to go in the Neputa parade. Really? That’d be great! ’Cause I’ll be on pick up duty.’
After Junko finally got off the phone, she took me to Eri’s house to say hello.
Eri’s dad is the boss of the Neputa Festival here. I didn’t know what she meant by ‘go in the Neputa parade’, but Eri’s mum said, ‘Did you bring a summer kimono? If not, I’ll borrow one from my family.’
Before I figured out what was going on, I was signed up to be in the festival parade.
‘It’s onkay, I’ve got one I used to wear when I was her age.’ Junko thanked Eri’s family, beaming.
Grandma helped me into the yukata that used to be Junko’s, and I followed Eri’s advice and wore trainers, not zori or sandals, to walk for miles on country roads. Junko wasn’t joining the parade because she had other plans. The yukata had big blue yo-yos and goldfish on a white background, with a bright red obi. It was way different to the one Eri was wearing, and I felt self-conscious, but Eri’s mum said, ‘It’s so cute how the goldfish look like traditional goldfish lanterns.’
*
‘Ya-re, ya-re, ya-re, ya!’ Eri’s father led the chant with a megaphone. The children shouted ‘ya-re, ya-re, ya-re, ya!’ back at him, but I couldn’t make myself join in.
‘Ya-re, ya-re, ya is a better chant than yā-ya-dō, don’t you think?’ Eri started chatting to me—maybe she noticed how I’d gone quiet. I had no idea what yā-ya-dō was, but I tried to smile at her. We must’ve been walking for over an hour and I was tired. Eri said that when we went round the next corner up ahead, which wasn’t that far away, we’d see the Neputa hut we started from, and the parade would finish there for the day.
I hoped Mum was okay. She and Dad said it was ‘for the baby’s sake.’ I tried to care more about my little brother but I couldn’t really. I didn’t know what his face looked like, what kind of kid he was or anything about him. But if I said so, they’d think I was bad, so I never told anyone and buried it deep. The truth was, I worried about Mum the most, more than the baby, more than myself too. I didn’t mind being an only child, I wasn’t lonely, but Mum still said she wanted to give me the chance to be a big sister. Mum’s so stubborn, once she makes up her mind to do a thing she’ll do it. Every time she came back from hospital, I’d hear her sobbing in the room next door in the middle of the night. In the living room, Dad turned up the TV and drank more beers than usual. I would lie in bed grinding my teeth—I didn’t want a ‘sibling’ that made Mum cry.
The last time I saw Mum, in her hospital room, was on the 24th of July, just before I got on the bullet train to go to Aomori.
Junko came all the way to Kawasaki to visit her in hospital. Mum had a tube stuck in her hand, and when she heaved herself to sit up in bed, her belly looked like it was literally about to burst. I pushed up her pyjama top to see and there were kind of like cracks around her belly button and her veins were sticking out.
‘I’ll start using the oil Junko gave me today,’ she said, pulling her top back down.
Mum and Junko chatted until it was time to go.
‘You two will get to meet each other soon.’ Mum rubbed her belly with one hand, the hand with the tube in it, and stroked my hair with the other. She looked a bit more awake now. ‘Junko, thank you so much for looking after Satomi.’
*
Suddenly, the big drums at the back of the procession thundered out all at once, like a grand finale. I wondered if the drummers took turns. All the grownups began to shout happily and jump around. The racket was so loud it could reach my mother’s belly and my baby brother would go berserk. It was so powerful. But it’s not good for the baby to come early. It’s not good.
‘Naofumi!’
Someone had the same name as my dad. The parade was about to wrap up, and everyone was getting tired. The powerful drums fired us up again, like the ritual water given to sumo wrestlers before they fight. I whipped around and saw a familiar, tall man in shirtsleeves, beating a taiko drum with all his might. He nodded toward us. ‘Satomiii!’
‘Dad…’ I stared at him.
‘Is that your dad, Satomi?’ Eri was surprised too.
‘So he came on the evening bullet train without letting Satomi know.’ Eri’s mum smiled.
Dad handed the drum sticks to someone else and ran toward us. He swung me up in his arms, saying my name again, and gave me a peck on the cheek.
I wanted to say, ‘Your beard’s too scratchy,’ but I burst out crying.
‘Naofumi, don’t make your daughter cry,’ someone mocked.
‘What you mean? She’s shedding tears of joy at the sight of my handsome face,’ he shot back in Tsugaru dialect, and then said to me in standard Japanese, ‘Satomi, did I give you a shock?’
My dad, with his beery breath, could easily switch like that, but in both dialects what he said was beside the point. Grumpily I butted my head into his chest. He couldn’t see what was going on with me, and it was really annoying sometimes. He didn’t get how I felt or how Mum felt, he just swept us all up in his good vibes.
‘Satomi’s been so worried about her mum, she’s been bottling it up.’ Eri’s mum was dabbing at my eyes.
‘Come lookit the Neputa,’ he said. Without worrying about me, he ran around behind the float, still holding me in his arms, and rushed over to various people he knew. ‘Lookit my lil’ daughter!’
On the back of the Neputa float was painted a picture of a graceful woman, very different to the warriors on the front. Her head was tilted to the side, like she was tired. The woman was as pale and slender as if she came straight from a folk tale, wearing light blue. The blue reminded me of Mum’s favourite pyjamas. When will I see Mum again? My eyes twinged again, right in the corners, and I buried my face in Dad’s chest.
Eri’s dad shouted, ‘Neputa no mondoriko!’
The flute music changed and the drums slowed down a bit. It sounded like it would all be over for the day soon.
‘When we get to the Neputa hut, you’ll get some snacks and juice. Beer for me!’ Dad was enjoying his first festival in ages. ‘Your mum wants to come along too—next year it’ll be the four of us.’
When I looked up, he winked at me and made a face like the warriors on the floats.
‘Naofumi, lend us a hand?’ Lots of people were calling my dad.
‘Let me down,’ I told him. I shook off his arms and ran straight toward Eri. I was going to be a big sister.
¹ Tsugaru dialect: daijōbu sounds more like daijonbu. ² beshi
When Tamaki Senomoto first shared this story with me in June 2025, I immediately wanted to attempt a translation, although I knew it wouldn’t be easy. It spoke to me as a proud uplifting of Tsugaru dialect and tradition, as well as an authentic, wholesome insight into family life, while presenting a complex challenge for translation. There were difficulties on many fronts: recreating its use of dialect, conveying cultural aspects a reader may not be familiar with, and capturing the voice of its nine-year-old protagonist. I had previously undertaken a series of short story translations set in different prefectures of Japan (2020-22), under the aegis of the Japan Cultural Expo, which spurred me on to tackle this story, set in Aomori Prefecture.
Tsugaru-ben, which is an endangered dialect spoken in the Tsugaru region of western Aomori Prefecture (northern Tōhoku), is famously one of the most difficult for non-speakers to understand; historically this has led to prejudice and marginalisation. It uses heavy contractions, voices consonants that go unvoiced in standard Japanese, has a strong nasal quality and uses a distinctive intonation and rhythm that Japanese speakers have compared to French. Aomori Prefecture has a rich literary history and present, which includes a vernacular movement which began in the 20th century; a full discussion of this is beyond the scope of this note.
Where possible, the Tsugaru-ben found in the dialogue is reflected in English-language pronunciations (e.g. ‘onkay’ for ‘okay’) and by shortening standard expressions (e.g. ‘What you mean?’) to give a more direct sense of its variation. We felt that alternate strategies for translating dialect were less suitable, such as substituting an ‘equivalent’ English-language dialect (e.g. Doric), which would conjure up the spirit of a location widely removed in place/time from Tsugaru in northern Japan, or inventing a fictional dialect out of whole cloth.
The translation was completed in close collaboration with Senomoto, using a shared document and emailing back and forth: as a result, with the author’s permission, many aspects were made more explicit in English in order to be accessible. These range from minor glosses, where an English word is added to the original Japanese word (e.g. ‘jagara gongs’, ‘ajisai flowers’, ‘sashed with a pale green obi’) to in-text explanations of festival floats and traditions, and an extra sentence at the very end to capture the meaning of the story for an English-language reader, who would otherwise likely be confused, whereas in Japanese the implication is clear and it is more elegant to leave this unsaid.
Other aspects alluded to may be impossible to grasp without some familiarity with the region in question. For example, the history of Tsugaru shamisen, pioneered by the master Chikuzan Takahashi, who created an original way of playing despite his blindness, his poverty and the efforts required to survive the severe climate with its heavy snowfalls. The struggles he experienced living in Tsugaru were expressed in his music; a music which has been compared to jazz.
We hope that this translation will expose more readers to the unique cultural vibrancy of the Tsugaru region.
Tamaki Senomoto (瀬本 環) is a writer and poet from Aomori, Japan. She showcases the rich diversity of Tsugaru dialect in prose, one of the most distinctive and difficult dialects of Japan, which is at risk of disappearing. Her work draws on the inner life of families and Tōhoku tradition, along with a deep love for American literature, French cinema and roots music.
Sharni Wilson is an Aotearoa New Zealand writer of fiction and a Japanese-to-English literary translator. She is a three-time graduate of the British Centre for Literary Translation Summer School. In 2020, she was a finalist for Lunch Ticket’s Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts.
BACK TO ISSUE
