A staircase: if you cared to know, where and how it continues … two window frames stand in the way, and they are essential to the whole composition. From a city you think you know, or at least, you’ve made use of as an image. Simply the name
would serve as a reminder of a story that speaks of the centre, the establishment, melting away on all sides. In the background, façades that are perhaps only pasted on, glued onto an interior that was, in turn, the backdrop to a soliloquy … we are speculating; we switch off the radio and inspect the vertical lines of windows, from bottom to top, where a vacant, grey surface begins. The next question, and it’s what comes now in the running-order … it always gets faster and faster, even if the staircase is still the staircase.
So, from the top. The window frames stand around, and if nothing else happens there remains a stock of simulations. Without instruction we do not act, and then there must still be time, long enough, to stand up on the step, on the flight of stairs.
Autumn story
A drawing, or perhaps just a scribble … I had tried to give the old, drooping pear tree some kind of support. But the bracing of pencil strokes failed. Now, for a few days, the fog has prevailed here, and today it has made it impossible to see anything at all. It has been like this for years, structures, frosts, owls in flight, September wars.
Translator’s Note:
Given his 1000 page Collected Poems (Suhrkamp, 2022), it’s remarkable that Jürgen Becker’s work has been so little translated into English. The translator’s difficulties tend not to lie not in his word choices (Becker plainly describes, he states), but, to some degree, in his cultural references, and, primarily, in dealing with his style of montage-composition, his commitment to ‘the apparently incidental’. The poem ‘City you think you know’ is particularly interesting from this point of view as it draws on pictorial art by Rango Bohne (who was Becker’s wife). In her practice, he found a blending or combinative technique at work which he (has said) he often practiced in his writing to produce a collage-like linking of disparate, contrasting elements, such as motifs of landscapes, architectural structures, window views, groups of figures. As a result, Becker’s porous verse contains multitudes: perspectives, voices, inner and outer events, photos, maps, postcards, news, weather reports. In the act of translation, it can be hard to flex (as it were), to permit these into English, and I have had to learn to trust Becker’s arrangements of them into long, semi-colon linked passages, utterly remote from conventional ‘lyric’. Though perhaps not such a characteristic work (in its brevity!) but in a phrase from these poems that captures something essential about Becker’s oeuvre ‘Autumn story’ concludes with, ‘It has been like this for years, / structures, frosts, owls in flight, September wars.’ As to his life, Becker grew up in Thuringia, Germany, which, following World War II, found itself in the Soviet occupation zone, later the GDR. However, by that time, the family had re-located to (then) West Germany, and, after the reunification of the two Germanies in 1990, he would often return to these remembered childhood landscapes and write about them. These two poems were published in his 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium.
Jürgen Becker was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1932 and died there in 2024. He is the author of over thirty books—including drama, fiction, and poetry—all published by Suhrkamp, Germany’s premier publisher. He has won numerous prizes, including the Heinrich Böll Prize, the Uwe Johnson Prize, the Hermann Lenz Prize, and the Georg Büchner Prize, the highest honour a German-language author can receive.
Martyn Crucefix is a poet and translator. He is the author of seven original collections of poetry, most recently Between a Drowning Man (Salt, 2023) and Cargo of Limbs (Hercules Editions, 2019). His translations of Peter Huchel’s These Numbered Days (Shearsman, 2019) won the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize in 2020. His translations of essays by Lutz Seiler, In Case of Loss, is published by And Other Stories (2023). His translations of Rilke selected poems, Change Your Life, is published by Pushkin Press (2024). Blog and website at martyncrucefix.com.
The students of Grade Two Section Perseverance of Sta. Presincula Academy seemed harmless and ordinary. It was their honor, under the gaze of the merciful Mrs. Sinistra, to erase the writings on the blackboard before and after each class. Every recess, everyone (except, of course, those who didn’t have the money) would crave the custard candies, chocolates, and rice crispies that the principal sold for cheap. The girls would happily cut their paper dolls, while the boys would sneakily explore the secrets of life behind the custodian’s house.
If the children were asked what they want to be when they grow up, a lot of them would say, “I want to be a doctor to help the sick,” or “I want to be a lawyer to defend the poor.” But in the deepest corner of their minds (and this they wouldn’t admit to anyone), what they really wanted was to be the principal (or the director, or even the owner) of Sta. Presincula Academy.
They’ve never seen their teachers go home at the end of the day. So they thought that they all must be living there in the school grounds.
“Maybe they’re studying too when we’re not around.”
“But who teaches them?”
“Who else—the principal!”
“So the principal lives here too?”
“What do you think, dummy.”
“So that must be why they know about everything…”
“No, stupid. They’re still studying about everything, of course. But everything we know, they already know. So that thing you all do behind the custodian’s house, the Madam knows about it too.”
And in time, even the things the children still didn’t know, the Madam would’ve already known too. She was about to catch up with them, and get ahead of them even, and the mere thought of it terrified the children.
But everything was about to change. Because one day, when some of them once again didn’t bring their monthly donation of floor wax to the school, Mrs. Sinistra wanted to discuss in class the difference between a house and a home. She was hoping to etch on the students’ minds that their classroom was not just a house but a home they have to keep tidy and beautiful.
“What is a house and what is a home, and how are the two different?” she began. She scanned the room to find the face of the student who hasn’t brought floor wax for three months.
“You, Leticia,” she called out.
“Madam, a house—” the student paused to think. “A house is a place where people eat, live, and play.” The young girl was somehow pleased with her own answer, especially with those last three verbs—live, eat, and play.
“And what about a home?”
The girl couldn’t answer. So she was called to the front and asked to write A house is not a home on the board for a hundred times.
Mrs. Sinistra’s vocabulary was difficult, Ido thought as he picked his nose. Like metaphors, he thought. And he remembered his poet neighbor who taught him the words vocabulary and metaphor.
“Madam,” Froilan raised his hand. “Sister Mary Jo said, the house could either have or not have love. But a home needs to have love. That means a house might not have anyone living in it. But a home needs people inside it. When no one’s in it, it isn’t a home, it’s just a house.”
“Ah, very good,” praised Mrs. Sinistra, even though she thought that the nun could’ve taught them a little bit more. Nevertheless, she could already use the boy’s answer to finally move to the subject of floor wax.
“Madam.” Another child who also hasn’t brought the required floor wax for quite sometime raised his hand.
“Yes, Lino?”
“Can you tell us what abaloryo means?”
The teacher didn’t expect the question, and she was sure it had a malicious intent. Her face briefly showed surprise, but only for a very brief while. But that look of surprise on her face was something the children would never get off their minds because they’d always remember it.
Mrs. Sinistra felt her table, looking for her stick, as a swarm of bees seemed to suddenly came from nowhere, buzzing loudly inside her head.
“Keep quiet! Keep quiet!” she shouted, hitting the table with her stick, though no one made a noise other than Leticia, with the tingling sound of chalk on the blackboard. The whole class was quiet because they now had the same question as Lino, and they were all eager to hear their teacher’s answer.
Mrs. Sinistra sat down and looked up at the ceiling. Aab, aba, abaka, abakada, abahin, abala… She sifted through the rolodex in her head. A-ba. Like a swelling belly. Lor-yo. Like a release from this. Abaloryo. Not human, nor animal.
Toribio thought that it must be a bird sent by God, singing Abaloryo! Abaloryo! after the evening vesper. Anabelle wrote the word in her notebook, drawing flowers around it: roses, gumamelas, gladiolas. She thought of coloring her drawing and putting it in a frame, then giving it to her beloved father. Meanwhile, Bona teared up a little, remembering her dead sister whose name was Loreta Rosario.
“Where did you get that word?” Mrs. Sinistra asked Lino, still shooing away the bees in her head with the stick.
Lino still had his hand raised even after asking his question. It was the first time he has done so in class, so his seatmate even had to lower his hand for him. “I found it in a book, Madam.”
Mrs. Sinistra was about to ask which book when Froilan raised his hand again.
“Madam, I heard that word once from my grandpa, when his spirit haunted his own wake.” When he realized that no one believed him, Froilan simply carried on with a barrage of questions. “But Madam, what is abaloryo? Is it a word in English or Filipino? And how is it different from a house and home?”
“All right, all right,” the Madam let out a deep sigh. She finally gave up. “Let us all find out what abaloryo means. So now, that will be your assignment,” she ended, the bees still buzzing in her head.
That morning, no one volunteered to erase the writings on the blackboard. Leticia’s writings remained there until the next day. (And though these would also be eventually erased, some say they’d still reappear on the board especially after it rains and the chalks are all wet.)
That same morning, no one also bought custard candies, chocolates, and rice crispies from the principal’s office. So the principal was quick to call a meeting to discuss the poverty in their school and how it could be resolved soon.
After classes, no one loitered around. No one lingered on the streets to play with tin cans, to run around, to chase one another. No one turned on the TV in their homes. No one even waited in front of their houses for the passing of the ice cream vendor. All the children stayed inside, flipping through their dictionaries. And those who didn’t have one went to those who did.
One of the houses they visited was Lino’s. His family had an English-Filipino Filipino-English dictionary left behind by an American missionary because it was too heavy for his luggage. Several neighbors tried convincing the family to let them borrow the dictionary and bring it home for a day or two. But Lino’s mother would always refuse. Because just like that night, even from the kitchen sink, she closely watched her son by the light of a lamp searching through the thick book, oblivious to the mosquitos going in and out of his ears.
“Lino, memorize everything written there (whatever’s written there) as early as now, so you’ll grow up smart,” the mother told her son.
The next day, all the children had new words for Mrs. Sinistra. Romulo asked what braggadocio means and how to use it in a sentence. Prima asked about the mala-’s she found: malakolohiya, malagihay, malagunlong, and malainibay. Mrs. Sinistra wanted to add to the list her own set of words: malala, malamlam, malarya, and malas. Leticia asked what summum bonum means and how is jure divino different from deo volente. The teacher still hadn’t answered any of the questions when five more children raised their hands.
“Keep quiet! Keep quiet!” Mrs. Sinistra told them off, hitting the table with her stick. The Madam hit the table a little harder today because she wanted to be as vicious as she felt her students were by raising their hands at once. “Keep quiet! Keep quiet!” she went on, even as she laid in bed that night.
But instead of keeping quiet, the children decided to come up with their own rules. Every day from then on, they’d bring a new word to the class. And whoever brings a word that Mrs. Sinistra already knew would get a punishment. They would be the one to stay in the classroom during recess to comb out the lice and pick out the dead and white strands of hair off their teacher’s head. Because of these rules, no goody two shoes has since stayed in the classroom to serve their teacher. And so the lice and the dead and white strands of hair multiplied on Mrs. Sinistra’s head fast. “Where are you, my children,” she’d often say, making sure they hear her call whenever they passed by without even turning to look through the window of their room.
One day, when all that was left on the Madam’s head were dead and white strands of hair, she went to class with a smile on her face. Behind her, the Quasimodo Mang Igna, the school custodian, followed. He carried a big and thick book they had probably found in the garage (which they really did, as we will see in a bit). Mang Igna carefully put it down on the Madam’s table.
“Children, gather around. I have a surprise for all of you,” Mrs. Sinistra announced to the children, shooing Mang Igna away. Mrs. Sinistra was too excited that morning that she forgot the early morning prayer and daily health and hygiene inspection before starting the class.
“Gather around,” she said again.
The children obliged, standing up to go to their teacher’s table. Some did stay in their seats, as they thought Mrs. Sinistra was about to sell their school’s official papers, official pencils, and official crayons (just like how the principal sold the offical custard candies, official chocolates, and official rice crispies in her office).
“Do you know what this is?” the teacher said, pointing to the book on her table. With its width and thickness, it might as well be the Book of Life that lists the names of those who are holy and those who are evil. A rough gray cloth, or perhaps it had a different color that just turned gray in time, wrapped its hard cover, gnawed and chewed on by rats. Loose ends of fibers hung from the spine and corners of the book.
“This is a scrapbook,” the teacher went on. The children were surprised that Mrs. Sinistra answered her own question. Because only moments earlier, they didn’t know what to do. If they made a guess and gave a wrong answer, she might end up pinching their ears. But if they said, No, Madam, we’re sorry but we don’t know, that also wouldn’t be good, because in their classroom, they were never allowed to say I don’t know.
“And do you know what a scrapbook is?” the teacher asked again. And to answer her own question once more (because she also knew that only she could answer it), she opened the scrapbook somewhere in the middle.
The children were amazed with what they saw. The pages were clean! Despite its thickness, the book turned out to be empty. The paper was turning yellow, blending with the rust-colored stains on the margins.
Some of the students got excited. They thought that this might finally be the book that Mrs. Sinistra would ask them to read from then on. Meanwhile, others were suspicious, thinking this must be a trap somehow. They believed that their teacher was about to get back at them for all the strange words they previously asked her.
“Madam, what is it for?” Pipito dared to ask, even though he had the smallest voice in the class.
“Children, last night, God gave me this idea in a dream. Don’t you all love words? You’re all so in love with words, yes? So now, why don’t we start writing our own dictionary?”
But how? Do they have to pay for anything? And how much? The eyes surrounding Mrs. Sinistra had so many questions. They all wanted to ask Why, but the teacher would often get annoyed with such a question.
“Bring a new word to school every day. Share it to the rest of the class by writing it here on our scrapbook.” The teacher patted the book to make sure that they all understood where they should direct their new words from then on. “We shall call this our class pet project. Let’s all say it again one more time—our class pet project.”
At first, the children were hesitant to go near the scrapbook. The Madam placed it on a shelf near her table. And so for a time, the scrapbook and Mrs. Sinistra seemed to be one.
But in the next few days, someone noticed that the first page finally had something written on it. Everyone was shocked because they saw the haunting handwriting of their classmate: a house is not a home.
But this only encouraged others to write something themselves. Ido wrote his new word: alatwat. Meaning, “the echo of another echo.” He heard it from his poet neighboor, who was looking then for a word to rhyme with watawat (meaning, “flag”).
They never agreed that everyone should have a word beginning with the letter a, so Emilio wrote the word yutyot. Meaning, “the shaking or jerking of something.” All of his classmates, especially the boys, giggled. Since that day, they called him Emilio Yutyot.
Some wrote down words from English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, French, Latin, etc. But the Visayan Bona added the most words out of everyone. Words she claimed to have come all the way from across the sea.
They also wrote down words they were called in the streets or sometimes in their own homes. Words like letse, hayop, demonyo, lintik, and putang ina. They even had a long discussion whose mother was this putang ina, and if there’s a putang ina, how come there’s no putang ama, putang ate, putang kuya, putang lolo, and putang lola so they could all be together as one happy family. So they added all of these to their dictionary. They decided that the mother shouldn’t be alone in being a puta.
Because they could write anything in their scrapbook, they wrote down the words they’d often hear the adults say when they fool around but which they themselves weren’t allowed to say out loud. Words like pekpek, uten, kiki, titi, hilat, hindot, etc.
Some also added words they came up with to name things they thought still didn’t have any name. For example, what do you call an ice cream that has dripped and melted on the ground? Or a belt when it is being used to hit someone? Edmund came up with the word isplanksrrripdagbladag. According to him, this was the noise that cats make when they walk on tin roofs.
Others, instead of writing the meaning of their words, drew it. Some painted while others pasted cut-outs. Some wrote poems, riddles, and songs. Some even wrote entire biographies for their words.
While other students in the school were busy playing trading cards and rubber bands, the entire Grade Two Section Perseverance was obsessed with their dictionary project. Every day, more words were added to the scrapbook. Only few pages to go and they would have completely filled it up.
They finally stopped pestering Mrs. Sinistra. The teacher should have been happy with the dictionary, but she was not. The truth was, she felt annoyed whenever she saw it. The book lay quietly on the shelf, but it always reminded her of the things that her students knew but she herself did not. And as she taught her classes, its presence felt like that of another teacher in the classroom. The teacher whom the students trusted more, listened to more.
Her children picked up such a really weird hobby, Mrs. Sinistra thought. It didn’t seem to suit their young age. And what if their parents complained? What should she do with the dictionary whose very idea she herself came up with? She remembered how just the other day, after an entire afternoon of rain, termites swarmed the old shelf where the dictionary lay. But before the insects could even reach the book, the children had already killed them all with their bare hands. Not a single termite survived. Mrs. Sinistra shuddered from what she saw. She would never admit it to herself, but she felt a flash of fear from the children she was teaching.
For her peace of mind, Mrs. Sinistra talked to the school priest about it. The priest didn’t believe in malignant spirits, but he believed that a ritual could help ease people’s minds. He agreed to bless their classroom. But he was going to do it in the afternoon, once the students had all gone home.
When he arrived, the priest wore a plain polo shirt and an old pair of jeans. Not a habit as Mrs. Sinistra had expected. It was already five in the afternoon when they began to pray. There were only three of them in the room, the priest, the teacher, and the custodian.
Nothing terrifying happened. No strong wind blew out the lit candles. No door nor window closed on its own. And no object, big or small, flew around, which was just how Mrs. Sinsitra imagined it would go. That afternoon passed just like any other afternoon, except from then on, Leticia’s handwriting stopped showing itself on the blackboard, on the walls, and on every other surface where one could write.
“Do not fear,” the priest advised her before finally leaving. And it was exactly what Mrs. Sinistra did.
The next day, the scrapbook was no longer on the shelf. The students looked for it in every corner of their classroom but failed to find it.
“There’s only one person who could’ve stolen it,” John Jorge said. And there’s really only one person they had in mind—their classmate Ade. Why Ade? Well for one, she hasn’t come to school, so she must be guilty. And then, she’d always ask them for a piece of paper instead of buying from Mrs. Sinistra. Sometimes, she’d even ask them for food. She probably wanted to keep the dictionary for herself because they didn’t have one at home, but she was also probably too shy to admit it.
So they decided that later that afternoon, they would all go to Ade’s house. It was their chance to finally be like the heroes in the movie Kontra Bandido (1986).
Mrs. Sinistra told them off. She reminded her students that it’s not good to blame someone without any proof.
The Madam wasn’t the least bit angry when she scolded them. In fact, she even smiled at them. When she finally sat down after her sermon, the Madam was still smiling. It was the second time the children saw their teacher smile for that long. They could still remember the only other time she did.
The teacher went quiet for a while to savor the relief she felt. Her birthday was coming up, she remembered. Why not invite the students to her house? She’d definitely do that, she decided. So on that day, the students were also about to learn that their teacher didn’t really live in the school grounds.
Where the scrapbook ended up is an entirely different story. The truth was, it was simply returned to its old place, there in the garage, back with other junk. It also went back to its old purpose—as a rest for the custodian Mang Igna’s feet.
It was Mang Igna’s sole pleasure to lean back on his chair and rest his feet like a king on the scrapbook. But of course, he’d only do it after he was done with everything he had to do each day.
The scrapbook was comfortable a footrest. Whenever the old man’s soles itched, he’d simply rub them on its rough cover. It was as if he had found his own foot scratcher. His bunions would also often want to feel the smooth and soft pages of the book. And once the paper grew warm from all the rubbing of his feet, his toes would turn the book to another page.
Mang Igna wondered one thing about the scrapbook: its owner. On its first page, a child’s handwriting could be read: Anacleto Simeon Seguno, Second Grade. But Mang Igna didn’t know how to read. He even had to call a student to read it for him. It was then that the students of the Academy learned that Mang Igna couldn’t read. And so it became yet another of his flaws. The dark hunchback turned out to be illiterate too! Surely, he also didn’t know how to write and count. And if he happened to be able to count, there’s no way he could count up to a hundred.
But when he finally learned the name of the scrapbook’s owner, the old man often thought about him. Who was this Anacleto? Probably an old student of the Academy. But he’d been working at the Academy for so long, and he’d never met a single Anacleto. Maybe he studied there for a very brief time. But how come he only wrote his name and grade on the scrapbook? Why didn’t he write anything else on it? Maybe he got shy or was somehow embarrased? But what stopped him? Or who? But this Anacleto, he must be rich, no? Mang Igna knew that only the children of the rich could ever have a book as big and thick as this.
As he thought more and more about Anacleto, the more the unknown child became fully formed in his head. Until he grew a face, and then a body of his own. Until he could talk to the old man at night, when there’s no one else in the school. Thanks to the scrapbook, Mang Igna now had someone to talk to.
When Mrs. Sinistra ordered Mang Igna to bring the scrapbook to her class, he grew restless. Anacleto threw a fit every night, just as a rich kid would. Meanwhile, the old man felt a pang of regret. Because aside from being his footrest, the book also served as the pillow under his head. Out of all the old books hoarded in the garage, it was the thickest, and so the perfect one to be his pillow. And for each night he laid with it, the scrapbook gave him long sleep and sweet dreams.
But that was before, when the scrapbook used to be a peaceful companion. Aside from its owner’s name and grade level, it had nothing else written on it. It was quiet as it was empty. But when Mrs. Sinistra returned the scrapbook, the old man saw how it has been mistreated. How the teacher let anyone write anything on it, draw whatever on it. But what could he do? He was just a custodian. He could only erase graffiti on walls. Graffiti was the kind of writing he grew up with, not just the ones on walls, but even on supposedly decent signboards and books. It began, Mang Igna could recall, the first time he tried to learn how to read. The a-e-i-o-u that the teacher dictacted so clearly became e-o-a-u-i for him. Sometimes, the letters would group themselves accordingly, like little soldiers lining up. All the e’s would form a column of their own, and so did the other letters. And how could he learn to read if the e’s wouldn’t go with other letters, only with their fellow e’s, just like the other letters did?
The first time he tried to read the word daga, only the letter d remained on the page, while the rest ran off like rats upon seeing a cat.
Even his own name confused him. He often asked himself if he was called Mang Igna because he was a Rafael Ignacio or an Ignacio Rafael.
So his teacher decided that he’d never learn how to read. His teacher couldn’t understand his case. And as expected, he didn’t learn to read any better. Because his book had already been torn up by his frustrated teacher. So his parents decided that he should just stop going to school altogether. That he should just help them with farming instead. There in the fields, where there’d be no letters to confuse his head.
But what was he doing then in the school? Did he just come there for a job? Maybe he still hoped that for the last time, he could still learn. And at his age…
“Can you read this for me, my friend?” he asked Anacleto, whom he could make out in the last rays of the sun. He saw the child slowly came in through the door.
The young boy was surprised. But he obliged and asked for the book. When Mang Igna handed it to him, the old man heard some giggling by the window. When he turned to look, he saw a few boys watching, as if mocking him. He recognized their faces. They were all Mrs. Sinistra’s students. He grabbed the child before him by the collar. He snatched the book from his hands. The boy quick ran outside, laughing.
Mang Igna followed to face the children. “You’ll never get this book!” he shouted at them. They all ran away. One day, they’d return, Mang Igna knew. They’d never stop pestering him. He also knew that there could only be one owner of the scrapbook. Either Anacleto or Mrs. Sinistra’s students. But never him.
So the next day, the old man did what he thought he would never do. He sold the scrapbook to the collector of bottles and newspapers, who would sell it on to a junkshop.
The story of the scrapbook would have ended there, but on his way to the junkshop, the collector chanced upon a group of vegetable vendors. They had just harvested squash and would be sending them all the way to Manila the following day, and so they needed something to wrap the vegetables with. And so, the vendors bought the scrapbook from the collector, who sold it per kilo.
The five men placed their baskets of squash right there and then, by the side of the road. They all sat down on the grass. One of them took out the squash from the baskets. Another tore out pages from the book. Two of them wrapped the vegetables in paper, while the last one put the covered squash back into the baskets. They all chattered as they worked. They believed that the noisier they were, the quicker their hands worked.
The one who tore out the pages couldn’t help but read, even in bits, what he was holding. The others realized that their work was slowing down because they kept running out of paper. But instead of elbowing their companion, asking him to hurry, they joined him in reading, grabbing a piece of paper for themselves.
Their hands continued to work. But their eyes were nailed on the ground, where they placed their pieces of paper. Aside from their eyes, they also read with their mouths, whispering each word out loud. It was how they all learned to read as a child, and no one taught them otherwise.
They passed around each piece of paper before wrapping it on a squash, then put the covered vegetable back into a basket. They even took out the ones they previously finished, just so they could read the pages they missed. This was how their work turned out that day, not minding their squash being exposed to sunlight for a long while.
It was already late in the afternoon when they finished working. The scrapbook was already empty when they stopped. Not a single piece of paper went to waste. The remaining hard cover, one of them used to shield himself from the sun.
When the man who tore the pages went home, he found his five-year-old eldest child. And just like any other day, he found him staring at a wall.
“Papa!” He was suddenly excited when he saw his father. “Earlier I was chased by a tugi-tugi,” he happily reported.
The father didn’t furrow his brows. For the first time, in his head, he understood what the child said.
Translator’s Note:
Just as its first line describes the students as “seem[ingly] harmless and ordinary,” Allan Derain’s short story hides a dark discourse about power underneath its veneer of lightness and comedy. The specific site of the struggle—namely, a scrapbook-turned-dictionary—is a crucial object, as it harkens back to the long colonial history of the Philippines. Dictionaries served as an important tool for the Spanish friars in the 16th century to convert the natives to Catholicism. When the Americans came in the early 20th century, they also became a symbol for being civilized, with the new colonizers establishing a public education with American English as its most sinister core, a system that persists to this day. And so, in the story, when the children begin to create a dictionary in their own terms, there certainly lies the temptation to take this as an allegory regarding Philippine vernaculars revolting against structures of power established during the long history of colonialisms in the country. But, at the same time, considering with how it concludes, the story also appears to propose a different critique altogether regarding literacy, and perhaps literature itself, one that refuses such simple binaries.
As a translator, as much as my practice of rendering works in the vernacular to English permits the rest of the world in to my particular world that is the Philippines, I also believe in the responsibility of the readers to meet us halfway. And so, in translating Derain’s story, I decided to leave most of the new words the students brought to class untranslated, just as how they were in the original, without any hint on their definitions. After all, how easy it is to go type them on Google, and the rabbit hole that the readers are likely to find themselves in, just like the buzzing bees Mrs. Sinistra hears in her head, is just another part of the story.
Allan N. Derain is a writer, visual artist, and teacher. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning Aswanglaut (ADMU Press, 2021), The Next Great Tagalog Novel at Iba pang Kuwento (UP Press, 2019), and Ang Banal na Aklat ng mga Kumag (Anvil, 2014). His latest novel Pamimintana sa Pintong Rosas Budget Hotel is forthcoming from Vibal Foundation, and his first book of critical essays Ang Landas Palabas ng Nobela is forthcoming from ADMU Press. He currently teaches creative writing, art appreciation, and Filipino literature at the Departments of Filipino and Fine Arts at the Ateneo de Manila University.
Christian Jil R. Benitez is a Filipino poet, scholar, and translator currently pursuing his PhD in comparative literature at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. He also teaches at the Department of Filipino at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. His first book, Isang Dalumat ng Panahon (ADMU Press, 2022), received the Philippine National Book Award for literary criticism and cultural studies. His English translation of Jaya Jacobo’s Arasahas: Poems from the Tropics was recently published by PAWA Press and Paloma Press. Read more of his works at christianbenitez.carrd.co.
The shore of the day by then on the edge of the finger shifted the boat surging rips open the other side of the lake the reflections are not some reflections some bent phosphorescent things under the water like the head of the sleeper sunken and bare follows the light of his distorted visions, speaking
The dinghy fades in the erased night coastal sands arise again to the bed—here he sleeps a ground without his feet without an eye to see there—no need, deafness. some trees on the shore flick off brawny crabs, microbic wolves while their hands lace with the branches of the sleeper
Their elasticated needles pass through the buttocks’ skin and ravage his back the ploughing ripples through the sleeper’s mid five or six serpents undulate below the ribs where quiver dorsal fins muscles float in the wind and throughout the leap sails the trembling of the tractor in the spine of the sleeper
—will he know in the end what got going across his back? —who knows to where these gums in this agitated bay plunge or dwindle? —against what defends him?
Alone the sleeper enters into it to his loss because there they come, the hands which pluck out and the sleeper plucked, they are going to draw him near before bursting with laughter scattering their teeth anatomic rosary become again vertebrae—having him finished to fling the skeleton on a bank which is not the shore but the antechamber of someone amidst-adjoint-bays where reigns neither sun nor moon nor link between them nor reception—boudoir of the shadows exists not in the house from where the moment is ever once again he hopes to unescape himself come back to the dinghy but to be patient there away once more hoping to extend his hand to the day.
MARCHE DANS UN MONSTRE MARCH INTO A MONSTER
Man-a-bark abandon the toys of your progress in the silt of the lake the track rises plunges without being heard the bell sounds from the struts of the ship! Man-a-bark, of the sea embrace the snake and give your hand to the monster.
Follow him like your shadow among deserted streets scrubbed by gusts cut from seawater the tolling wind purged from the air wears you away offshore cries a madman in the negative the hooks whistle! Leap into the monster’s skin! Nor the words that your diving suit holding this bird breath silenced.
Long ago the stars bedded the sea in the salt of your blood the future of their pollen well at the rate of your monster you won’t have time to put on your space suit.
Now march into your monster march! Rove in your seven-league boots! Your soles circling around yourself yourself lost on an island a siren in your head onwards your monster! walk with it! Without showing it is invisible like me.
Translator’s Note:
I came across Franck Gourdien’s book Qui Vive in a wonderful bookshop in Marseille, called L’Histoire de l’œil, which has a packed contemporary poetry section.
The two translated poems, “Who goes there” and “Step into a monster” demonstrate the stretching surreality of his poetry. The first, “Qui Vive” in the orginal, is both a map and body, taking in an unconscious, interior landscape. This corporeal space grows and mutates; simultaneously it tries to identify itself and plot a trajectory. This is suggested in the first line, “The shore of the day by then on the edge of the finger/ shifted/ the boat surging rips open the other side of the lake.” We move into increasing uncanny territory whilst remaining the conscious observer.
“Step into a monster / Marche dans un monster” is an invocation to action that at the same time dissolves the rational will. Evolving from “Who goes there,” the poem is a complete dissolution to our origins, “Long ago the stars/ bedded the sea /in the salt of your blood.” I enjoyed trying to translate the phrase “Homme-barque” and wanted to keep the suggestion of the command, “embarque.” In the end, I stayed quite close to the original with “Man-a-barque” and hopefully have kept the orality and peremptory tone with the added ‘a.’
Franck Gourdien’s poems lead us through the unconscious, warping perception with a musicality that echoes interiorly. With elements of Rimbaud, his poems connect surreal mental states with a lyricism that goes beyond natural and unnatural, achieving a kind of feral quality. Implicitly, there is an ecological dimension. He presents a psyche living and suffering in a distorted nature of its own making. The two poems translated come from Qui Vive (2017), published by La Barque. It is his first collection of poetry and another is due to be published this year. Photo by Courtois Stéphane.
Tom Tulloh is a translator from nearly all the cardinal points of London, but now lives in Marseille. Recent work includes three translated poems in Noria revue and a short story by Jean-Luc Raharimanana in Your Impossible Voice.
The Taste of White Chocolate With Flecks of Freeze-Dried Strawberries
About loss, relief, days filled with mysteries and the taste of black sesame. I mark sashiko in watercolour, whichever way the stitch goes. Against the pale cotton background. In the recesses of summer nights. I live in the distance, I live with my defeat, quietly, limiting sugar, white flour, all kinds of fools.
And you?
You talk about daphnia, threads rippling just above the water, the penetrating green which begets mould, a raid coming from the ocean, waning ground picked up by waves, stones appearing out of nowhere. Wild beaches with no path, no seam.
We go through cycles, we pass each other in collections, between letters. And you say you dreamed it all, the west coast the taste of smoked fish, the oyster festival hidden behind paper masks.
Speculations
for my son
I’m on a bus to pick up my son, in the past I had no son, no whaling dreams no evening dress. I didn’t need any memories to write until things turned black or faded in the sun.
I didn’t have to disguise myself to be open about gender and submarines. About nuclear explosions at the bottom of the ocean. Summer is turning pale. In the folds of books sand is crunching, ginkgo leaves are going dry. A living fossil
shimmers between the tree branches pierced by an arrow. As well as the smell of hot springs, I do not recognise muffled voices. I get out soundlessly, I curse the day.
Maybe I’ll try to make some Irish stew. Butter the pretzels, top up the water in the coffeemaker. In the evening we drink wine, someone says they know me well. Read between the lines. Rack their brains, tell jokes try gestures, retrieve, do some tricks.
Translator’s Note:
I’ve been following Margo Południak’s creative journey for a long while now. She is a very talented poet, but also a visual artist, photographer, graphic designer, and book designer. Simply speaking, whatever she touches, she turns into gold.
We met online, through a mutual Facebook friend, and remained in contact for years, but last year marked a rather special moment when we finally met in person. It was one of those meetings when you feel like everything immediately clicks into place, as if you’ve known the person forever.
Reading Margo’s poetry gives me a similar feeling: of quiet recognition, of looking in the mirror, of the “a-ha!” moment. Translating her poems only amplifies this feeling further. What I also love about the process is the fact that Margo, who has lived in Ireland for a good few years now, speaks very good English herself, so while discussing translation solutions and ideas, we can go quite deep into the conversation. In the end it’s always about weighing the options, carefully choosing the right term or phrase, looking at the syntax and deciding whether it hits the mark or not. If the translator and the author can discuss it on equal terms, it makes the whole translation process pure magic. Translating Margo’s poems was that for me.
Małgorzata (Margo) Południak is a poet, graphic designer, book designer, photographer, and artist. Since 2012, she has lived in Ireland, but she writes in Polish. She was nominated for several poetry prizes in Poland, and is widely published in literary magazines. So far, she has published six poetry collections, the most recent one being Pierwszy milion nocy (The First Million Night, FONT, 2024). She has also taken part in numerous exhibitions of photography, graphics, and typography.
Anna Blasiak is a poet, translator, and managing editor of the European Literature Network (ELN). She has translated over 50 books from English into Polish, and some fiction and poetry from Polish into English. She has published two bilingual poetry and photography books (with Lisa Kalloo), most recently Deliverance / Rozpętanie, as well as the book-length interview Lili.Lili Stern-Pohlmann in conversation in Anna Blasiak. She regularly reviews books in translation for the ELN, where she also runs a monthly poetry column “Poetry Travels,” and a blog devoted to Polish literature, “The Polka.” She is one of the editors of Babiniec Literacki. annablasiak.com. Photo by Lisa Kalloo.
After Composition in Yellow, Black and White (1949)
Without warning dodging winter’s seeking something to place against some sherbet sharp as an anguish, though I still relate deflating in its own syrup. Here, portal radiating like struck gold, merry girders, plastered in bashful your geometry, cuniform, silver presses flat against the ceiling. and candy cigarette. Ominous underside you reach. Restraint can sharpen glee; against wineglass’ singing rim. The high enough to feel my hair’s tall attention. choke, making me have a throat, so quicksilver whippet, lapidary browbone, coast, how could they not be. I plumper jelly in the mounting heat, slithering down the seasons. Breakpoint, you circumference me and mark my against the door, black lozenge of never as high as I’d hoped: not lifeguard, lofty as a heron, I covet foot hair slathered in warm gelatine, duck- like the aftermath of rain, definite as a treble clef. Life is a bad place to leave so I’ll be a good boy and stay becoming. touch would be a cheap facsimile for the Butterscotch me in symmetry; teach me palate, heel. Show me how hunger tastes know lilac. Pin me down on voyeur’s where my thighs braid with pretty’s memory— everything in me unruled, currents breaking all over.
blanketing temperaments— tongue, electrified violet, fluorescence— becoming, everything gone isosceles, most to the nectarine looking at summer’s door, a am fenced in by joy’s smiles. I am sundrunk on balloon who strange gravity Bitter little liquorice allsort of cloud below eyelid where the high pitch of your finger pitch of your finger close The lines of you making me much coarser than theirs, petalled with girls on the specimen, cheeks rendered
knifepoint, height quiddity, long as a arch and beak, slick
your guarantees, Your lines so irrepressible pleasure only eyes can take. how colour feels against lash, to shadow. How my knuckles vinyl seat, dammed
Dylan McNulty-Holmes is a writer and editor who lives in Berlin. He is the author of the chapbook Survivalism for Hedonists (Querencia Press, 2023), and the longform digital poem Half a Million Mothers, which was shortlisted for the 2022 New Media Writing Prize. His writing has been made into a T-shirt, commissioned by a trade union and read at worker protests in Jakarta, and translated into five languages. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he’s been featured in journals including Split Lip, DIAGRAM, Puerto del Sol, Magma, and The New Welsh Review. Find him at dylanmcnultyholmes.com.
Gullets blowing out prayers to grow gills Paddling limbs have become wet wings too weak for ascension
Shore is beneath the flood And the people have to drown to get to land
Faith, diluted, snorkeled in soggy tongues Hyponatremia bodies and submarined homes
Breathless trees; soaked vegetables Flushed zoo; marinated apes in the cold arms of water
In the center of the city, a mosque holds its crescent above the flood Begging God for liberation
From this damning cleanse Lord, if this be another Genesis
From whose tongue will the prophecy drift? The city is gorged and heavy with its tears
The people are filtering into the fringes in fishboats. Awaiting the sun
To burn out the flood and warm their homes And they’ll flock back with thirsty feet and hungry lungs
to tell the tale— How they have become Almijiris in their own city
This poem, a miserable riddle. Tell me, How a city of water can be deserted? Tell me, how a flood can be burned?
Agboola Tariq A., Swan II, is a poet & he studies Law at the University of Ibadan. His writing explores self / identity and space. His works are featured or forthcoming at Lucent Dreaming, ANMLY, Aké Review, SoFloPoJo, Variety Pack, Fiery Scribe Review, Olumo Review, Overtly Lit, & elsewhere. He won the Blessing Kolajo Poetry Prize ‘24, 1st runner-up Fireflies Prize ‘24, and a SprinNG 2024 Fellow. He is on X @Agboola_Tariq_A.
Tear after tear, wound after wound. My life leaks away like water from a tap. It’ll end with the drop of the last day. It’ll come back with the pure power of the rain. Dolphin. Tap
One day we met and later we sought one another out on other days. And we’d found–by the screams louder than everybody else’s. Then there was a walk and I left my footprints on the snow, on the cobbles, on the poles, on the streetlights, and you and your sisters watched. There were three of you and together we were Chekhov and his play. Then we parted our ways to meet again, but this time with consciousness. And to count time– tear after tear, wound after wound,
minute after minute. We were getting closer. We met to banish undead from the streets and then walked the same streets down. We stayed all alone. With no prying eyes got married and multiple obstacles seemed to us just a “cost-of-production.” And we sat down in our tiny room that was a bedroom and a kitchen to us. But once you now notice how so long my life leaks away like water from a tap
and for us it gets too cramped. We read to each other in hopes to lose ourselves; you talked about politics and I did on Marx and we tried to find the common ground. We got our kids; I started to cover you from the cold with my coat less and less. Then you remembered your diploma from the US and decided to come back there, settle in Palo Alto. I don’t cause a trouble and stay alone with the kids. You know that even if this dream doesn’t come true it’ll end with the drop of the last day,
not sooner or later. From California we communicate over the Internet and to you the howls of snow and wind are something unheard of–it all reminds a quite air alert. Finally, you come back disappointed and together we belatedly raise our kids hoping to outrace the time. We teach our kids the words but not their meanings so that afterwards they would not judge us for our past transgressions but for future ones. And once they’re grown we file for divorce and bet on our life, on the fact that it’ll come back with the pure power of the rain.
Sometime in 2021 Berlin
Anton Lushankin is a (visual) poet, writer, playwright, and translator, born in Kyiv and, since the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War, resides in his hometown. His work appeared in multiple publications including TAB Journal, orangepeel, Cream City Review, Lenticular Lit, and Teiresian. He has too many ideas to really be able to manage them properly, but currently he’s finishing M.Sc. in Architecture, while working on a closet musical DIG!!! LAZARUS DIG!!! (based on the eponymous album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), a memoir-in-essays about the Russo-Ukrainian War, and a multitude of short stories. He’s on Instagram.
A. I dedicate this book to you, 1. friends and family members 2. wrenched into the aftermath 3. of yet another of my romantic-relationships’ 4. calamities, 5. catastrophes, 6. crap outs, 7. pass outs, 8. cave ins, 9. folds, 10. woes, 11. waterloos, 12. wrecks, 13. smashups, 14. discomfitures, 15. distresses, 16. holy messes, 17. disintegrations, 18. and ruins. 19. Your shoulders dampen with my tears, 20. tire as they support my undoing. 21. Your heads ache after you press cell phones a. (for much too long) b. to your ears as I weep. B. You, my dedicated. My 1. faithful, 2. constant, 3. steadfast, 4. dutiful, 5. devoted, 6. true-blue, 7. altruistic, 8. and not deterred. C. You, whose lives I disrupt 1. like a wasp dive-bombing 2. your family barbeques. D. I dedicate this book to you 1. who cannot understand why 2. anyone would not love 3. me forever.
II. Preface
A. I glance over my shoulder B. at three divorces. 1. Shabby now, 2. they drag from my heels and trail 3. tattered retrospection. 4. Admitting so many failed marriages 5. as I date (at 72, the word 6. works only in italics), 7. my fists clench 8. beneath restaurant tables a. (my steady breathing b. well-practiced), 9. as I listen to men confess 10. their own three a. or four b. or five marital flops. D. Nevertheless, I’ve lived 1. alone, unattached, most of my past 2. eighteen years 3. and done just fine, E. thank you. F. Still, no wedded relationships, 1. or any relationships, have lasted longer 2. than seventeen years—(husband #2)— 3. a short time in relation to the span 4. of any adulthood. a. Some people find they feel b. altogether happy c. when living on their own. 5. But, I do not. G. Nights I’m kept awake 1. the cosmos blinks 2. bright outside the bedroom window, my bedside 3. music-shuffle insists 4. “The Summer Knows,” 5. Earl Klugh’s seducing, 6. solo, jazz guitar, 7. and my torment 8. pulsates through my head. 9. Sometimes, I’m sadly clumsy and topple 10. over divots, because, 11. whenever it wants, loneliness decides 12. to tee up, take a few swings. a. (Increasingly hazardous b. as osteoporosis plunders c. my bones.) H. Damp days insist 1. I spill to someone a. (to no one) 3. thirsty for my minutiae—Shit! 4. The dog peed inside. 5. Again! And, 6. Can you believe 7. I bought pomegranates? 8. We both know I can’t 9. de-seed them. I. Empty, I thirst 1. for someone else’s trivia— 2. The car’s breaks 3. still squeak. And, My daughter 4. needs me to repair 5. her TV. Can you believe she 6. thinks I can fix TV’s? 7. Balancing supply and demand 8. somehow stabilizing. J. Where I love you 1. doesn’t live 2. out loud, silence lays 3. lonely siege. K. I want to find someone 1. with whom to grow 2. old(er). With whom to share 3. my life. L. The problem is, at times M. it has seemed possible.
III. Epigraph
A. “Across the room B. the 2020 presidential election results C. blared from the TV. Then D. his voice shattered E. her attention. 1. ‘You’re not interested in me anymore?’ she finally asked. a. ‘You’ve been acting like you love me? b. And not said a word? c. And, it’s been happening for weeks?’ 2. He nodded. Then he disappeared 3. out the front door. That’s 4. how she remembers 5. it, anyway. F. She fed him the words. 1. Then he left 2. letting her believe 3. they were his. G. And so, 1. that’s exactly 2. what she did believe.” —The Bad-Breakup Book
IV. Table of Contents
A. As it turns out, B. I was premature C. believing I had what D. it takes to write the contents E. and, therefore, F. the Table of Contents. G. How could I H. clarify, I. reconcile, J. unzip, K. tackle, L. bring off, M. cut off, N. knock off, O. rule, L. wrangle, M. bully, N. steer, O. incorporate, P. dominate, Q. embody, R. embrace, S. elucidate, T. cope with, U. and/or crack? V. To do it justice would unveil W. the essence, 1. of the making 2. and the breaking of love. Z. Completion of the contents of chapters AA. might become possible 1. in a month, 2. Or a year. 3. Or two.
V. Acknowledgements
A. I acknowledge this (partial) book B. would not have been possible C. were it not for the child 1. lurking inside my lover’s 2. adult body, D. my obvious lack 1. of forgiveness 2. for this final flaw, E. and my inability 1. to forgive 2. his capacity a. for fooling me. G. He (must have) eclipsed his disagreement 1. about my (who knows?) 2. with prolonged kisses 3. delivered at my bedside, laced 4. with first-morning coffee 5. since my stomach can’t suffer caffeine, H. and cloaked 1. his shock 2. of my (will-forever-be-unknown) 3. with his gentle hand behind my head, a. drawing my mouth b. to his, letting our tongues and then c. hands wander, I. and obscured 1. his regret of my (fill-in-the-blank) 2. with his bare feet a. seeking mine under covers, b. cuddling my toes c. with his until sleep came d. between us J. He must have masked 1. his disappointment 2. of my (he’d-never-tell) with what he did say— a. you’re gorgeous, I can’t get enough b. of you, c. your writing is brilliant, d. we will grow e. old(er) together. K. And, his boredom L. with my (whatever), 1. concealed with some fine fucking M. I attest to this project 1. (not) prevailing 2. owing to my lover’s desire 3. to share his life (before and) throughout 4. the initial 5. eleven months of the pandemic 6. while discovering, learning, 7. realizing and recognizing, together. 8. While also negotiating, a. sanitizing, sanitizing, sanitizing, b. and entertaining (each other)— i. indoor badminton, ii. dining-table tennis, iii. hearts, cribbage, iv. Streaming (binging) TV— thrillers, sitcoms, standup, and jazz. v. Inventing Italian nicknames— vi. (Alessia Ravioli Geltini). vii. Buying inflatable kayaks, viii. kayaking, ix. fucking, x. baking bagels (from scratch), xi. laughing, xii. jigsawing xiii. more fucking, xiv. and lots more laughing. c. I recognize the (unlikely) completion d. of this wanna-be book e. is due to my lover (the bastard), Giovani, f. walking out during A World-Wide Pandemic, g. leaving me with no (naked) h. face-to-face, as well as no physical i. contact with Every j. Single Person k. In The World. N. Were it not for 1. my necessity to be right, 2. my indiscreet, unhappy glances, 3. my depressions, 4. my mania, 5. my anxiety, 6. my constant writing, 7. my conviction that talking 8. is always the cure 9. adding to my necessity for winning debates) O. I acknowledge the bones P. of the Bad-Breakup Book would not exist 1. without my fractured compassion 2. and obvious animosity. 3. Also, my lover’s itty- bitty heart, 4. its pumping a pretense 5. for promise.
VI. Afterword
A. This book came B. to (not fully) be as the result of C. the assignment from my teacher (Richard Froude), D. to use Renee Gladman’s essay, E. “The Order of Time,” (Journal #110, 2020, e-flux), F. as inspiration. I was taken by Gladman’s G. thread where she mentions waiting for afterwords H. written by authors I. for their already-published books J. while also meandering K. through personal perplexities— 1. how the cosmos embodies 2. the past, the “lockdown mind” 3. and the challenge of helping people find what 4. they’re looking for. L. Gladman (even) contemplates 1. “…how a lockdown mind 2. would find 3. love.” 4. (My universe lightyears 5. from relating.) M. And addressing another 1. Black Lives Matter insight— 2. an incalculable change— 3. white people 4. pulling out “crusty books” 5. by black authors 6. to recommend to other 7. white people, the unimaginable 15. dismantling of the Minneapolis police 16. and more black 17. and brown 18. bodies lying dead. 19. She sees the impossibility of reflecting 20. on now. N. My fragile frame bearing 1. world-wide pandemic, 2. I strained against crusty 3. shame 4. my bones cracking 5. against hard truths within our racism— 6. rancid and systemic. O. Yet, I sat 1. with my singular 2. suffering. 1. My something 2. particular. 3. Something 4. Renee Gladman would 5. not contemplate 6. in an essay (I don’t 7. think), still, 10. mine (sadly) 11. universal, 12. while acutely 13. (I-felt-in- 14. my-bones), 15. puny. P. But, I considered my Q. barefaced tragedy, and, R. afterward resolved— 1. afterwords 2. are 3. inescapable. S. I, too, had been living 1. in the aftermath, 2. aftershock, 3. after-effects, 4. residuum, 5. repercussion, 6. backwash, 7. backlash, 8. impact, 9. ramification, 10. residual, 11. hangover, 12. flak, 13. fallout, 14. blow off, 15. consequence 16. can of worms. T. All things considered 1. (or not), my 2. skeleton holds, 3. and heart 4. breaks 5. and 6. breaks again.
VII. Epilogue
A. And now. B. Now, C. I wonder 1. if these pages are too, 2. too absurd? D. Now E. I want to know, 1. how long will it take 2. before I find it bearable 3. to write this 4. heartbreak? F. And now, G. I can’t stand not knowing H. if I will grow I. old, 1. not alone, 2. but old (brittle) 3. without-a-partner. J. Because I’m now 72 K. which leaves ten years L. (fifteen with facetious optimism) M. to share 1. time and space with 2. someone intimately. N. And now, 1. I will phone 2. my kind-hearted a. friends b. and family.1
1 To meet with in person 1. preferably outdoors, or, 2. if a part of my family or 3. close-knit group, and 4. all vaccinated, in someone’s 5. home.
Wedding #1. White dress and veil. Foreign faces filling a synagogue chapel— my father’s guests. Nineteen, neoteric, unseasoned. Escaping, I sparkle. Thirty months of memories packed into cardboard boxes, we still like each other. (Had we confused liking with loving?) We hold each other. Our cheeks wet.
his words whirl a mask holds my happy face in place can’t feel its slick plastic as it slinks by
* I wasn’t alone.
* my man and I shared much in common.
* My man and I pursued fresh fun.
* I laughed.
* I was loved.
* I loved.
* I was left.
Recognizing The Fucker Giovanni
Positive affirmations (at times, lies) hang around my house.
An imprint. A branding. Residual memories cling— Ghosts of reflections.
I grew up and live in Denver, CO and am a 73-year-old, retired public school teacher who began writing at 55. My rhino-thick skin has been an advantage in both pursuits. I write nonfiction to share my truths about living as an old(er) woman, and my work can be found in Iron Horse Literary Review, Broad Street Magazine, Superstition Review, Nashville Review, and others. I published my memoir, Reckless Steps Toward Sanity (University of New Mexico Press), at age 67 and find myself hoping my daughter never writes her own. I can be found at judithsaragelt.com
For my friends (and neighbors) in Iowa: Ben, Anya, Hope, Laura, Echo, Sarah, Jennifer, Abby, Keenan, Nils, Dallin, Derick, Tyler, Brittney, Allana, and Becca, with love and gratitude
“Weary or bitter or bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.” —Marilynne Robinson, Home
“There were several roads near by, but it did not take her long to find the one paved with yellow bricks. Within a short time she was walking briskly toward the Emerald City, her silver shoes tinkling merrily on the hard, yellow road-bed. The sun shone bright and the birds sang sweetly, and Dorothy did not feel nearly so bad as you might think a little girl would who had been suddenly whisked away from her own country and set down in the midst of a strange land.” —L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
I’ve never been to Iowa before, and yet something about the place feels like home as soon as I set foot outside the air-conditioned Cedar Rapids Airport and a hot wave of humid Midwestern August air slams into me. The feeling is simultaneously comforting and unsettling, as déjà vus usually are.
At first, I attribute the sensation to exhaustion from the long journey and a sign of oncoming jetlag, but before I get a chance to fully unpack it, Ben pulls up and picks me up. The feeling persists during our drive into Iowa City, rushing in through the open windows together with the hot air and swirling around the car. We’re headed to Ben’s apartment—I’m taking over his lease and will be living there for the next two years. In just a few days, he’ll be off to Bulgaria on a Fulbright, and staying at my place in Sofia. We make a joke about how we’re swapping lives. But it’s no joke.
Ben parks in front of 725 East College Street and, as we unload my suitcases from the car, I look up and down the tree-lined Midwestern street—rows of houses on both sides, freshly mowed front lawns in front of them, wide paved sidewalks between the lawns and the street—and it finally hits me. It’s not a déjà vu—it’s a déjà vécu. Nineteen years ago, probably almost to the day, having just arrived from Bulgaria, I was unloading my suitcases on a tree-lined Midwestern street just like this one, but in St. Paul, Minnesota, only a couple of hundred miles north of here. It was the first time I was setting foot in the US, as a bright-eyed eighteen-year-old about to start college.
Now, almost two decades later, I’m back in the Midwest and about to start school again. This time around, the school in question is actually an MFA program, I’m probably a little less bright-eyed and certainly a lot less terrified.
Before the semester starts, I’m invited to a welcome event by a lake on the edge of Iowa City. Laura, a new friend from my program, picks me up, so we can drive over together. For a brief second, when she puts the venue’s address into Google Maps, I think I’m hallucinating, but then realize the name of the boulevard we’re after is McCollister, and not Macalester, which is the name of the college I went to in St. Paul. After we arrive, as we make our way over to the venue’s main building, I look up and see, flying overhead, an enormous flock of what Laura tells me are white pelicans, on their way from Minnesota to Mexico. The image of the birds, migrating from their summer home to their winter one, imprints on my mind, and the strangely comforting thought of them flying south in the fall, then back north in the spring, year after year, stays with me for a long time afterward.
Back when I was an undergraduate student, so much about my life in the US seemed new and strange that I very much felt like I was living in a foreign country. Now that I’ve come back, many of those very same things feel cozy and familiar. Most of them are so ordinary, they hardly seem worth mentioning: the shape of light switches and the way they feel between my fingers when I turn them on and off, for instance, or the smell of laundry after it comes out of the dryer, the ringing signal when I make a phone call, the screech and slam of the screen door to the back porch, the taste of blueberry pancakes with maple syrup on weekends, the wide open late-summer skies at sunset, or the distant sound of freight trains in the middle of the night.
These sights, sounds, smells, and sensations continue to accumulate over the following days and weeks, and they keep adding to my feeling of having returned to a familiar place. A couple of months after my arrival, I’m walking by the golden-domed Old Capitol building in the middle of campus, which is just a few minutes away from my apartment, when a newly installed sign of enormous yellow letters stops me in my tracks. It says HOMECOMING. Although I know it’s referring to an American university tradition featuring marching bands, parades, and football games that I feel no connection to, I can’t help but think that in some way, the sign is also for me, that in some inadvertent way it is also commemorating my own sense of having come home.
But besides the comfort brought on by my daily encounters with familiar tastes, noises, scents, and sights, there is also something else, something much more profound, that makes Iowa City feel like home. Back when I was a college student at Macalester, my daily existence was carried out almost entirely in English, which at the time still felt like a relatively new, still foreign language I’d only learned recently. During those four years of college, I would often spend weeks, and sometimes even months, without writing, reading, or even uttering anything in Bulgarian, except for the very occasional, very quick—because they were so expensive—phone calls with my parents and the only slightly more frequent, homesick-ridden emails with family and friends, written in Bulgarian but with Latin letters (Mnogo mi lipsvate!). Cyrillic keyboards used to be impossibly difficult to install.
This time around, however, Bulgarian is very much an integral part of the fabric of my daily life in Iowa. To some extent, because I now can—and do—make free unlimited phone calls to family and exchange regular instant messages with friends back in Sofia. But more importantly it’s because, as a student in the Translation Workshop, I’m constantly engaging with the Bulgarian language, reading it closely, thinking about, exploring and discussing its intricacies, working on bringing it into English. By this point, nearly two decades later, my relationship to English, my so-called “target language,” has also evolved significantly—it’s worked its way up to an equal, though not quite symmetrical, footing with my Bulgarian, and it often takes precedence in my thoughts, reveries, and reflexes. Switching between the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets has become as effortless and instantaneous as pressing the Globe key on the keyboard, both literally and metaphorically. It gradually dawns on me that it’s precisely this dual existence, this daily practice of living actively and fully in both languages, regardless of my physical location on the actual globe, that feels like home.
Perhaps as a bizarre but natural extension of all this, I also discover it’s possible to feel at home and homesick¹ at the same time. The realization strikes me during the spring of my first year in Iowa City, while I’m browsing around Artifacts, one of my favorite shops in town. Although its selection of antiques is enviably diverse, ranging from an undated porcelain statuette of Saint Christopher made in Italy to Moroccan rugs from the ’70s and everything in between, I’m nevertheless taken aback when I stumble upon a framed print of Sofia’s most recognizable landmark—the golden-domed Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. A fifteen-minute walk from my apartment, it looms large and squat in the very center of Sofia, where the roads are paved in the yellow cobblestones, which have become another major symbol of the city, although in the print they appear covered in snow.
The print is the kind of predictable, ubiquitous souvenir sold in every tourist shop around Sofia and the sort of kitschy artwork I’d immediately, and snobbishly, dismiss if I encountered it back in Bulgaria. But here—in a musty, cluttered shop 5,340 miles, an ocean, and a continent and a half away—it’s all I can do to not immediately buy it and hang it over the writing desk in my Iowa apartment. Twenty-five dollars for a piece of home seems like a steal.
A similarly irrational feeling arises in me a couple of months later, as I board the plane at Cedar Rapids Airport to fly back to Sofia for the summer. I feel as though I’m leaving home and—paradoxically, at the very same time—heading home. It makes me think of the pelicans I saw in the fall—they’ve probably just made their way from Mexico back to Minnesota, without, I imagine, much concern about which of the two places is their “real” home. As if I need to be hit over the head even harder, my neighbor Anya has given me a book to read on the long series of flights and layovers connecting America’s Midwest to Europe’s East: it’s a novel by Marilynne Robinson, who taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for 25 years, until just a couple of years ago. The book is called Home. By the time I reach Sofia, I’ve devoured it.
The fictional Iowa town of Gilead in the novel has nothing in common with the real-life Bulgarian capital of Sofia, just as I hardly have anything in common with the character of Glory who “returns home with a broken heart and a turbulent past.” And yet, something about the description of her (and her siblings’) homecoming resonates with how I’ve previously felt (and, as it turns out, will feel) about going back to Sofia: “The town seemed different to her, now that she had returned there to live. She was thoroughly used to Gilead as the subject and scene of nostalgic memory. How all the brothers and sisters [ . . .] had loved to come home, and how ready they always were to leave again. How dear the old place and the old stories were to them, and how far abroad they had scattered. The past was a very fine thing, in its place. But her returning now, to stay, as her father said, had turned memory portentous. To have it overrun its bounds this way and become present and possibly future, too—they all knew this was a thing to be regretted.”
At that point, though, there is nothing for me to regret—not yet, anyway, since I’m only returning to Sofia for the summer and considerations like those described by Robinson are either behind me, or, as I will eventually discover, ahead of me.
But the home-themed leitmotif also extends into my sojourn, as temporary as it may be. My arrival in Sofia coincides with the official launch of a project I’ve been involved with from a distance, entailing the installation around the city of a dozen or so benches shaped like the Cyrillic letters that don’t have typographic equivalents in the Latin alphabet. Each bench is accompanied by a poem that in some way relates to its corresponding letter, and over the past few months in Iowa, I’ve been working on translating some of the poems into English. It’s an endeavor that seems doomed to fail by its very essence—since the very thing at the center of each poem doesn’t even exist in the receiving language—but that doesn’t mean I haven’t given it the proverbial old college try. Some of the resulting translations are, in my opinion at least, rather successful; others, admittedly less so.
One of the poems, by Krassimira Djissova, is originally called “Дом,” which is pronounced almost like “dome” and literally means “home”—and so “Home” is how I decide to render the title in English. I’m satisfied with my decision until I see the bench that goes with the poem in person, on a side path right by the famous yellow cobblestones, and the deficiency of my translation becomes quite apparent. In contrast to the H of “Home,” which doesn’t resemble a house by any stretch of the imagination², the letter Д, especially when four-dimensional and made of wood, looks like a miniature house with a slanted roof.
In retrospect, it occurs to me that a possible solution may have been to come up with an English title that contains the same root as the Bulgarian word дом (and, not incidentally, the English “dome”), which is obviously borrowed from domus, the Latin word meaning “house,” “home,” or “native place.” So—to the guaranteed outrage of some conservative readers—a better choice, conceptually if not semantically, may have been to translate the poem’s title as “Domicile,” or some other related English word containing the domus root (“domestic,” “domain,” and even “condominium” come to mind). This approach would have had a couple of advantages. Firstly, although typographically different, the Cyrillic Д and the Latin D share the same sound—already a small feat. A second, less obvious but just as important, consideration is that the letter D, like its Cyrillic “equivalent,” has a shape that could also be likened to a dome, albeit a sideways one, or—with a bit of imagination—even to the kind of home we all dwell in for up to nine months before coming out into the world.
The letters D and Д are, in theory at least, as incongruous and mutually illegible as the cities of Iowa City and Sofia. But in practice, I feel equally (though not identically) at home in both cities, just as I’m able to read both letters with equal confidence and employ both languages to which they belong with equal (un)ease. And yet, as I see it, the Bulgarian letter has a significant advantage over its Latin doppelgänger. While D resembles a sideways dome or the “roof” of the womb we can never return to, the letter Д—thanks to the two descenders that extend below its roof-like top part—looks like a house that can walk. Also known as “feet,” these descenders seem like the perfect embodiment of (the possibility for) mobility, which has become an essential element in how I’ve come to understand, define, and experience the concept of home over the years: as something fundamentally movable; something that can travel, relocate, be at two places at once; something I can leave and then return to; something that even when fixed in a single place contains fragments of other places.³
Eventually, my program in Iowa ends, and I do return to Sofia and its very own yellow cobblestones (which, rather tellingly, turn out to have actually come from elsewhere⁴).
Just a few months later, though, I get the chance to go back to Iowa City for Thanksgiving. I see old friends, visit old haunts (including a long browse at Artifacts), even get to do laundry and ride around town on a bike that my friend Abby has lent me—and at first, it all feels like another homecoming.
But on my second or third night in town, on my way to Laura’s house for dinner, I bike past my old place on 725 East College Street. There’s something uncanny—unheimlich, or literally “‘un-homely,” as they say in German—about seeing the lights in the windows of my old apartment are on, though I’m no longer living there. I realize that the place—the apartment, but also the town, and by extension even the Midwest and the US as a whole—is no longer a home, and I’ve now reverted to being a guest. Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.
On my desk back in Sofia, where I’m now sitting and writing this, I keep a snow globe with an Iowa tornado. It’s the kind of kitschy souvenir I’d usually snobbishly dismiss, but this one has great sentimental value. It’s a gift from my friend Becca who gave it to me as a keepsake to remind me of the time we got evacuated from a bar in downtown Iowa City because of an approaching tornado. Inside the snow globe’s sphere is a house swept up in a tornado, and whenever I look at it, it always makes me think of Dorothy of Oz. As a child and a young adult, the idea of having my home swept up and finding myself “set in the midst of a strange land” used to seem terrifying. Over the years, however, it has grown not just significantly less scary, but even, and increasingly so, quite appealing. Unlike Dorothy, for whom “there’s no place like home,” I’ve come to discover that there can be, have been, and probably will be a few places that to me do feel very much like home(s). And just so I don’t forget this, next to the snow globe on my desk I keep a paperweight that also has a globe in it, but that one depicts the world.
¹ The word “homesickness” is a calque of the German Heimweh (from Heim, meaning “home,” and Weh, meaning “woe” or pain”), which is usually used in the phrase “krank von [meaning, “sick with”] Heimweh.” The word for the phenomenon in Bulgarian—носталгия (nostálgiya)—is borrowed from the compound coined in 1688 by the Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer who combined the Greek words νόστος (nóstos), meaning “homecoming” (which— unsurprisingly—was used by Homer in The Odyssey) and ἄλγος (álgos), meaning “sorrow” or “despair.” (Interestingly, the meaning of the related adjective νόστιμος (nóstimos) evolved, so that in modern Greek, it signifies “tasty,” “delicious,” or “cute.”)
² What the letter H does resemble is a ladder, and—if anyone cares to notice—it acts as quite a nice visual for the poem’s opening line, which in my translation reads: “The staircase to the last floor ends in mid-air.”
³ Coincidentally, one of the most intriguing characters in Slavic folklore, the crone known as Baba Yaga, lives in a house on legs (chicken legs, to be more specific). A BBC article about an anthology of stories dedicated to her (“Baba Yaga: The greatest ‘wicked witch’ of all?”) highlights the character’s duality and moral ambiguity, describing her “sometimes as an almost-heroine, sometimes as a villain.” One of the contributors to the anthology, the author Yi Izzy Yu, sees Baba Yaga as a proto-feminist icon that “challenges conceptual categories at every turn. Even her home is both house and chicken, making her, yes, housebound in a sense, but not in any way ‘tied down.’” Needless to say, I can relate.
⁴ Although the yellow cobblestones have become one of Sofia’s most recognizable symbols, they were in fact—and rather tellingly!—cast in Budapest, then imported to Bulgaria and installed over the capital’s central boulevards at the beginning of the 20th century.
Ekaterina Petrova is a literary translator, bilingual nonfiction writer, and amateur photographer. Her collection of travel essays, Thingseeker: 44 (Un)Usual Objects from Near and Far was published in 2021. Her work has appeared in Bulgarian and English-language publications, including Asymptote, Words Without Borders, and European Literature Network. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. Currently based in Sofia, she practices and occasionally teaches translation, writes a column on fascinating etymologies for the Bulgarian independent media Toest, and is at work on a collection of essays and photographs, titled Here & Elsewhere, about travelling, translation, and belonging.
While I’m scrolling on TikTok, I often become surrounded by this feeling of unease. My For You Page will narrow in on something so specific that it will make me almost nauseous. Recently, I came across a video of one of my old friends from college that I haven’t spoken to in a while. I did not follow them on the app and had denied TikTok access to my contacts long ago.
As the video starts, they say, I’m going to be ranking some of my old college outfits. The first picture pops up on the screen, and it’s a picture with me. I am staring at my own body. We are standing next to each other, at a denim-on-denim party. We are both head to toe in denim, posing. We look extremely nineteen.
The experience shocked me, more than I expected, to be absentmindedly scrolling through my phone, and then suddenly being confronted by a picture of myself. My For You Page delivered the ultimate personalization. It got so close to me that it became me. The rest of the video consisted of pictures of parties I had attended, pictures in my old dorm room. I was asked to view myself and my life as I would any other kind of content.
Some days, I enjoy the ease TikTok seems to be able to show me videos catered to my interest. But when it can find my image and send it back to me, is when I begin to get this feeling, as if I’m being not only observed but also understood. But who, exactly, is looking at me? And how do they know me so well?
*
I like to think of myself as a discerning and rational person. But I often find myself almost instinctively looking to the media on my phone to answer questions about myself, watching YouTube tarot readers, TikTok astrologers, or Instagram therapists with clipboards in hand, ready to diagnose. If this video found you it’s meant for you and if you do these three things you might have ADHD and these are the five signs you might secretly be queer. I’ve heard friends and influencers say that TikTok knew they were gay before they did, or that TikTok knew they were autistic before they got diagnosed.
This phenomenon has a name: Algorithmic Conspirituality. In the research paper “In FYP We Trust: The Divine Force of Algorithmic Conspirituality.” They say that the term “captures occasions when people find personal, often revelatory connections to content algorithmically recommended to them on social media and explain these connections as a kind of algorithmically mediated cosmic intervention.”
This is evident in how we describe the content that the algorithm prescribes us. Often people will talk about how they are on ‘gay TikTok,’ ‘NYC TikTok,’ ‘ADHD TikTok.’ These different ‘sides’ of TikTok are often spoken about as if there is some sort of pride in the sorting that the algorithm has done. As if the algorithm has not just sorted content to show you, but is in fact also, sorting you as a person into an important and defined category.
*
It’s obvious now that these algorithms have material effects on the course of people’s lives and beliefs. When I’m walking down the street in New York, I can see it. Everyone has let their algorithm dress them. I know what TikTok that girl copied her outfit from. The tall boots, boxer shorts, slick back bun, hoop earrings. Last year it was Urban Outfitters, corset top, Addias Sambas. Next year, it will provide us with a different uniform. There is almost a religious aspect to this, the way the algorithm provides us with rules to live by, a frame with which to shape our life. Instead of looking to religion to learn how to eat, talk, dress, we can now gaze into our phones.
*
My first ever memory is being four years old and at church. I was sitting on a rug with a group of other small children. I was handed a bible and asked to read a passage.
The problem was, of course, that I was a toddler and I did not know how to read. I think I had just freshly learned the alphabet. I looked down at the words in front of me, God’s word, and I could not make sense of them.
That imprint of God has always stayed with me. That there was something sort of inaccessible or intangible about God. That God’s power was in some way wrapped up in the fact that I did not understand him totally.
When I stopped believing in God as a teenager, I tried to fill the religion-shaped hole for a long time. But I think the internet was the only thing that came close to filling that void for me. It gives me that same feeling; the feeling that I’m in the presence of something greater than myself, something that knows information I don’t. It’s not just that the mathematics behind the algorithms are beyond my comprehension. Misunderstanding can often feel mythical, if you frame it correctly.
An interaction with the internet can often parallel an interaction with the sublime; it mimics the experience of being alone without feeling alone. It mimics the feeling of being understood by something distinctly unhuman.
*
This belief that the algorithm is guiding us towards our true selves and our futures is, of course, not without consequences. Most glaring when looking at the history of algorithms pushing people towards various forms of alt-right radicalization.
In episode 145 of the podcast “Reply All,” New York Times Tech Columnist Kevin Roose discusses something called “The Gangnam Style problem.” When YouTube first launched the ‘recommended videos’ feature it was designed to lead users towards more popular content. “The Gangnam Style problem” was the observation that if you watched enough recommended videos, you would always end up at the Gangnam Style music video because it was the most popular video at the time, no matter where you started. You begin your YouTube journey watching videos of watching Drag Race recaps or cats knocking glasses off tables or Monster Truck Rallies, but eventually, there you would land, watching the Gangnam Style music video again and again.
YoutTube realized that this wasn’t the best method for maintaining user watch time. Roose said, “In 2015, YouTube makes another huge change to their algorithm. They’re trying to fix the Gangnam Style problem. And they do that by tweaking the algorithm in a whole bunch of different ways. So now, the algorithm starts recommending videos to people that they’ve never heard of, often, videos more niche than what they’re watching.”
One of the consequences of this algorithm change was that it moved people to the fringes. If someone started out watching a video that was mildly conspiratorial, the next video would be even more so. A user could start out watching a video explaining a conspiracy theory about the moon landing, and end up watching a video about Q Anon or Sandy Hook denial. Roose said, “this is how previously obscure conspiracy theorists, racists, etcetera suddenly started getting a ton of new traffic from YouTube.”
*
Even if it isn’t as something as pointedly horrific as alt-right radicalization, the algorithm is still guiding you towards parting with two crucial things: your time and your money. With TikTok shop, Amazon affiliate links, influencer brand deals, scrolling through your phone can feel like walking through one long advertisement. I’ve found myself convinced that I absolutely need a new item, until pausing for a moment and realizing it would be utterly useless, that it is nothing more than a piece of plastic.
And even if you have lost nothing other than your attention, you have lost something precious.
*
I was talking to my friend over a drink when I asked her what her screen time had been that day. Mine had just surpassed six hours, and I was feeling embarrassed over my excessiveness. And I wanted to know if this kind of excessiveness was normal. My friend scrolled into her phone and responded casually and frankly, twenty-four hours.
A full twenty-four hours? I repeated back to her. We both laughed. She realized that she had just misread the number. That had been her total for the week.
Even though it was just a mistake, I couldn’t stop thinking about the exchange. I thought it pointed to something, that perhaps it could be possible to believe, even if for a second, that we could literally spend a full day on our phone.
*
I was born in 1997, I remember when the internet made a sound, when you could not be on the internet and talk on the phone at the same time. But perhaps most importantly, the internet of my childhood stayed in one place. There was the family computer that stayed in the basement, and when you wanted to log on, you had to descend down the stairs and visit it, like a friend.
And the internet also seemed to have an end. Even as a teen on Tumblr, I remember scrolling to the bottom of my dashboard. And sure you could refresh, but you could also, reach the bottom, a bottom.
As I have grown into an adult, the internet has grown into an endless and ever-present entity. I could scroll on TikTok, seemingly, for the rest of my life if I wanted to. I could live my whole existence simply looking, absorbing what my phone has to offer. The internet has become a confusing mix of both smaller and larger, in that it now could fit in your hand while also containing a kind of infinity.
The progression is slow, incremental. And now we are left, sliding into our pockets–something larger than ourselves.
Nora Rose Tomas is a queer writer and poet based in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA from Columbia University. You can follow her on Instagram @dr_sappho.
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