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Two Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik

May 25, 2022 Dispatches

Translated from the Spanish by ILAN STAVANS

Mexico City, Mexico

Translator’s Note

Translation is home. Whenever I travel, I seek it either by reading translations, or by translating as a grounding exercise. Lately I have been translating into English poems from Jewish Latin American poets, specifically works by conversos or those written in Yiddish and Ladino by immigrants and their offspring. And—in a room of her own—Alejandra Pizarnik, whose life makes me think of Emily Dickinson. I recreated these two poems while visiting my mother, who has been suffering from Alzheimer’s. Pizarnik distills the fibers of existence so as to reveal the madness that palpitates underneath. Her poetry is contagious. The toughest part is to convey her silences. I wish I had met her.

—Ilan Stavans

Friday Reads: May 2022

May 20, 2022 Reviews

Curated by ELLY HONG

Issue 23 of The Common features work by a wide array of writers from across the globe. Take a look at some of the writing that has inspired them in this month’s round of Friday Reads.

My Grandmother’s Radio

May 19, 2022 Fiction

By CAREY BARAKA

Every day at four, my grandmother listened to the radio, as her enemies died around her one by one. The disembodied voice on the radio shared in her delight, singing to the next world those who had departed us.

New to Liberty: A Conversation with DeMisty D. Bellinger

May 16, 2022 Interviews

DeMISTY D. BELLINGER interviewed by AMY REARDON

One of the best things about interviewing the poet, professor, and novelist DeMisty D. Bellinger, Ph.D., is how she drops a book recommendation into every answer. Another is the transparent manner in which she speaks of her work: her writing is so intentional that the scenes and characters seem to crawl inside the reader and live there. Once seen, the characters in Bellinger’s debut novel cannot be unseen. Released on April 19, 2022, by Unnamed Press, New to Liberty tells the stories of Sissily, Nella, and Greta, three lives sewn together by Dust Bowl-era Kansas, tragedy, and their own longings. Amy Reardon and DeMisty Bellinger spoke via phone and discussed whose experience gets centered in literature, how to give voice to the unvoiced, and Bellinger’s desire to write from questions to figure out how the world works.

Podcast: Nathan Jordan Poole on “Idlewild”

May 13, 2022 Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

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Transcript: Nathan Jordan Poole Podcast.

Nathan Jordan Poole speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Idlewild,” which appears in The Common’s new spring issue. In this conversation, Nathan talks about doing seasonal work at Christmas tree farms, the workers from all walks of life he met there, and how those experiences and those people helped to inspire this story. He also discusses his writing and revision process, his story collections and future projects, and why he chooses to write unromantically about rural life.

In the Fog

May 12, 2022 Fiction, Translation

By ADA NEGRI

Translated from Italian by LAURA MASINI, CHONA MENDOZA, and LINDA WORRELL

Story appears in both English and Italian below.

Translators’ Note:

“In the Fog” is taken from Le Solitarie (1917), Ada Negri’s first collection of stories, astute portraits of marginalized women struggling with poverty, exploitation and loneliness. Raimonda is a young woman who was horribly disfigured by a fire in her childhood. Only in the dense and murky fog of Milan, her face concealed by a “nebulous mass of vapors,” does she feel free.

We decided to work together at the close of a week-long Italian translation workshop at the British Centre for Literary Translation and we chose this story because we were captivated by Negri’s richly evocative prose. Much of our lively collaboration, helped along by Tuscan reds, seppie in zimino, minestra di fagioli and lesso rifatto, took place in Lucca and Florence.

—Linda Worrell, Chona Mendoza, Laura Masini

Baguettes

May 11, 2022 Dispatches, Podcasts & Audio

By JAMES STAIG

This piece is an audio recording. A transcript appears below.

Hummingbird Tantra

May 2, 2022 Issue 23, Issue 23 Poetry, Poetry

By CORRIE WILLIAMSON

Everybody wants to let go, but how do you let go if you
don’t hold things?

—Daniel Odier, Tantric Quest

Red draws their tiny eye, and every hummingbird
feeder you can buy blooms a plastic, stoic
ruby, effigy of flower, tadasana of red. Already
they have eaten me out of sugar, but forgetful today

Idlewild

May 2, 2022 Fiction, Issue 23, Issue 23 Fiction

By NATHAN JORDAN POOLE

December evenings, his wife and daughter would linger at the kitchen window to watch the deer come down their switchbacks. There was a stand of chinkapins. The deer would prize the nuts from the urchin-shaped husks. He can see his wife leaning over the sink. His daughter on a stool beside her.

He once cherished this time of year. Days of red sumac and rime, days when the rock walls along the mountain parkway bared swags of gray ice. The rhododendron would curl up like tubes, near blue. Everything on the hillsides would be exposed, including the deer. He sees them standing there still, two images of each other across time, their red aprons on, matching bows at the back of their waists, watching the deer. Such a small, true pleasure, to watch something wild and vulnerable. He rides along the parkway, heading home, knowing his wife and daughter will not be there. He watches the roadbed for ice, for rocks that broke free in the first hard frost. It’s an old habit, the way a parent drives, wary of any threat.

The Woman in the Well

May 2, 2022 Essays, Issue 23, Issue 23 Essays

By ANU KUMAR

For nearly two years of my life, I lived with a ghost. It was when my father, a civil servant, was posted in Sambalpur, a now forgotten town in northern Odisha, a state in India’s east. Newspapers then, and even now, always added the descriptor “India’s poorest state” whenever Odisha made the headlines. This happened in the late 1980s, when several hunger-related deaths were reported in a tribal-dominated district in the state’s west, and a decade later, after an Australian missionary was burnt to death, along with his two sons, by a group led by a Hindu fanatic.