Winter 2022

The Winter Issue | 2022

March 12, 2022

Poetry by Nelly Sachs, Josef Kučera, Mark Scroggins, and Tim Postovit. Fiction by Marek Šindelka, Elena Alexieva, Duncan Robertson, and Daša Drndić. Interviews with Alan Bilton, Tatiana Tîbuleac, and Joshua Weiner. An essay by Marina Porras. Reviews of Flight and Metamorphosis by Nelly Sachs, translated by Joshua Weiner; Dream of a Journey: Selected Poems by Kateřina Rudčenková, translated by Alexandra Büchler; and My Seven Lives by Agneša Kalinová, translated by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood. Reviews of other new translations in our Books in Brief.

The Winter Issue | 2022

March 12, 2022

Poetry by Nelly Sachs, Josef Kučera, Mark Scroggins, and Tim Postovit. Fiction by Marek Šindelka, Elena Alexieva, Duncan Robertson, and Daša Drndić. Interviews with Alan Bilton, Tatiana Tîbuleac, and Joshua Weiner. An essay by Marina Porras. Reviews of Flight and Metamorphosis by Nelly Sachs, translated by Joshua Weiner; Dream of a Journey: Selected Poems by Kateřina Rudčenková, translated by Alexandra Büchler; and My Seven Lives by Agneša Kalinová, translated by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood. Reviews of other new translations in our Books in Brief.

Flight and Metamorphosis by Nelly Sachs | Friday Pick

These poems explore the changes wrought by flight as in fleeing from, forced travel, emigration, leaving with no guarantee you will return, sometimes knowing you won’t.

Tim Postovit

I was the last place on the planet / where astronauts slept / my last customers were the planet’s / last people

My Seven Lives by Agneša Kalinová | Friday Pick

My Seven Lives tells a story of 20th century Central Europe through the voice of Slovak journalist Agneša Kalinová.

Translating Nelly Sachs: An interview with Joshua Weiner

“The biggest challenge of translating Sachs into English, for me, had to do with tracking the movement of her mind in the forming of a poem.”

Nelly Sachs

Which vein burst / to offer the holy geometry of yearning / a homeland in your eyes?

Daša Drndić

I discovered a lot of secrets, a lot of combinations, dark, political, religious, ideological, personal, to do with chess; spying, double and triple secret agents from all camps, secret police involved in dirty activities.

Dream of a Journey: Selected Poems by Kateřina Rudčenková | Friday Pick

Dream of a Journey: Selected Poems, brings to readers of English the first full-length volume of poems by Czech poet Kateřina Rudčenková.

Duncan Robertson

One of those things most difficult to convey about the special conditions in which we lived was the visegradišag: that everything, buying bread, recycling, riding the tram, came with a surreal associated cost that was impossible to anticipate …

An interview with Tatiana Tîbuleac

For some of us, language is a struggle, part of the resistance, a flagship, a war, sometimes even a pillar of an identity.

Mark Scroggins

Mark Scroggins

That thing you forgot to do last year / has turned out to be important.

Marina Porras

They are women who want to look into the mirror and be satisfied with their reflection. Envy is born when you look into the mirror and don’t like what you see there. Everything about this sin begins with the eyes.

Josef Kučera

There was a rippling pond and the croaking of frogs / and various birds anas crecca, / there was the tingling of sand on the Borecké Rocks / and the cracking of pinecones

Dante

Books in Brief | Friday Pick

Herewith a fresh selection of our favorite recent poetry, fiction, and biography in translation from Ukrainian, Hungarian, Czech, and Italian.

Elena Alexieva

For a moment, she wondered where all dead birds go when they die, which probably happens every minute of every hour, so really, birds should be falling from the sky not just from time to time, but raining down constantly …

The Russian Connection: an interview with Alan Bilton

The Russian Civil War was a truly terrible event in terms of awful acts of atrocious violence, but there’s also a weird sense of farce about this, of history being played at the wrong speed.

Marek Šindelka

A girl boarded the train. Actually, she was no longer a girl, because she was about thirty. But there was something in her behaviour and her appearance which suggested that, body aside, she was still a girl.