Chrysippus laughed so hard
at a donkey who ate all his figs
that he died. Melville said Death
winked at him with the left eye.
By KHALED SAMEH
Translated by WIAM EL-TAMAMI
1.
As I sit here in the Hashemite Plaza, I am surrounded by noise—visual, auditory—coming at me from all directions. This grand forum attached to the Roman Theatre has now become a breathing space for hundreds of thousands of residents of East Amman and the surrounding governorates. Some come here for recreational reasons, to get together, or to make a living. There are many other reasons why people come to this square, reasons that are not unique to Amman and that are found in most cities around the world. There are pimps and sex workers (heterosexual and homosexual); children being exploited in different ways; dealers of hashish and other drugs—along with various other things that Ammanis would include in their long list of taboo topics.
By BERTRAND LAVERDURE
Translated by SLP
Poems appear below in English and the original French.
Translator’s note
I stumbled on these poems, fairly literally, in a bookstore in Québec.
I immediately recognized the hyper-connected world M. Bertrand Laverdure writes of—the new networks of pop culture and politicians and internet also familiar to me as an American, and the older networks of gargantuan trees, shaky trees, trees above streams and children playing and park benches and promotional flyers and guidewires. I recognized the surreality of his world. Of the double-address, where each poem is an epistle both to a specific tree with a clear local history, and to figures from cartoons (Skeletor), film (Poltergeist), myth (Penelope), classic literature (Gatsby), and more. The surreality where each tree and literary figure is also “a jpeg,” and where plugging devices into outlets, or each other, mirrors trees (the French word for plugged in is “branché”).
Some of The Common’s Arabic fiction contributors, MARYAM DAJANI, ESTABRAQ AHMAD, and ISHRAGA MUSTAFA HAMID, made virtual appearances at the Sant Jordi Book Festival last week! The hybrid celebration, sponsored by the eponymous Sant Jordi in New York, is held annually in New York City to raise awareness of literature in translation, and pays homage to the famous Sant Jordi Book Festival in Barcelona, where the streets are lined with bookstands and flower stalls in honor of “the St. Valentine’s day of Catalonia.” The Farragut Fund for Catalan Culture in the United States sponsors the festival and is led by MARY ANN NEWMAN, a renowned Catalan translator and contributor to TC’s Issue 28 portfolio of Catalan women’s literature in translation.
It might be too late to grab a book and a rose, but you can get a feel for the beautiful festival by checking out the readings of Dajani, Ahmad, and Hamid’s stories below—which includes a sneak peek at our Issue 29 Amman portfolio, launching next week!
In this month’s poetry feature, ZACK STRAIT talks with RICHARD SIKEN about influences, confrontation, readers, accountability, sacrifice, balance, surface beauty, deep meaning, writing, and Waffle House.
By MICHELLE DE KRETSER
Reviewed by AMBER RUTH PAULEN
One of the brilliances of Michelle de Kretser’s newest novel Theory and Practice is how the author lassoes life’s “messy truths” into a neat and slim book. To do so, de Kretser asks many questions at once: How does shame lead to silence? Why write? What to feel when an idol falls from grace? How do you break free from your mother (the Woolfmother included)? How do class and race determine your place in the world? What to do when life doesn’t fit your ideas about it? Additionally, de Kretser remains flexible in form: fiction blends with essayistic, academic, and autobiographical elements. Even the cover of the Australian edition features a young de Kretser, as if to say, this book might be about things that have actually happened. With so much going on, it might seem like the book would fall apart, but it is a concise and searing portrait of what it’s like to be alive in a certain place and time and body.
Curated by SAM SPRATFORD
The long New England winter is finally thawing, and here at The Common, we’re gearing up to launch our newest print issue! Issue 29 is full of poetry and prose by both familiar and new TC contributors, and a colorful, multimedia portfolio from Amman, Jordan. To tide you over, Issue 29 contributors DAVID LEHMAN and NATHANIEL PERRY share some of their recent inspirations, and ABBIE KIEFER recommends a poetry collection full of the spirit of spring.
Henry James’ short works; recommended by Issue 29 contributor David Lehman
I’ve been reading or rereading Henry James’s stories about writers and artists: “The Real Thing,” “The Lesson the Master,” “The Death of the Lion,” “The Tree of Knowledge,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” “The Aspern Papers,” et al. His sentences are labyrinthine, and you soon realize how little happens in a story; the ratio of verbiage to action is as high as the price-earnings ratio of a high-flying semiconductor firm. Yet we keep reading, not only for the syntactical journey but for the author’s subtle understanding of the artist’s psyche—and the thousand natural and artificial shocks that flesh and brain are heir to.
Author’s Note:
Cold War divided Berlin haunted me growing up because it was a place where history was unavoidably visible, and when I lived there for two-and-a-half years as a student in the 1990s, I was always watching and trying to document the city’s rapid changes after the Wall fell. In 2022 a cousin found an advertisement on Ebay from circa 1939 that showed images of the Potsdamer Platz S-Bahn station from my great-grandfather’s glass factory in Waldenburg (now Wałbrzych, Poland). I’m still processing what it means to have my family history connected to a place that is a central, broken image of Berlin and so crucial to the imagination of the Cold War, particularly at a time when we in the U.S. are (or should be) thinking about what the world looks like when democracy yields to authoritarianism.
Photo courtesy of author.
Berlin, Germany
Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, April 1939
We were successful in securing major commissions—for the Reichsbahn–
underground station Potsdamer Platz and Anhalter–Bahnhof—and in
fulfilling them on time. Such large-scale projects are crucial for breaking
fresh ground for sales of Opaxit glass.
—Annual Report of the Schlesische Spiegelglas Manufaktur
Carl Tielsch G.m.b.H., 1938
JEHANNE DUBROW is the author of ten poetry collections and three books of creative nonfiction. After twenty years in the U.S. Navy, her husband recently completed his tenure as an officer, and this transformation led Jehanne to write Civilians, the final book in her military spouse trilogy, a sequence that began with the publication of Stateside in 2010 and continued with Dots & Dashes in 2017.
Novelist, poet, and Marine veteran spouse VICTORIA KELLY sat down with Jehanne to discuss Civilians, which confronts pressing questions about marriage, transitions, love, and war. Though they have known each other virtually for over a decade—as two members of the very small literary community of military spouse writers—this was the first time they connected face-to-face.
Victoria Kelly (VK): Your new book Civilians is the final volume in your trilogy about the experience of being a modern military spouse. Can you give us some background on your family’s experience with the military?
Jehanne Dubrow (JD): I’m the daughter of two U.S. Foreign Service Officers. I grew up in American embassies overseas. To be a diplomat is to be a civil servant; so, I thought I understood—through my parents’ work—what it means to serve.
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