By LIZA KATZ DUNCAN
The Jersey Shore, NJ, USA
During the Drought
During the drought, we traded water
for wine. Let our plants wither, stopped
doing laundry. Learned to shudder
at the smell of fire. Hoped
it was just some asshole with a chiminea. Every
impostor cloud was suspect: steam rising
Translated from the German by MELODY MAKEDA LEDWON
Translator’s Note
“I need you to translate my book. You’re the person I would ask,” Simoné said to me as we sat on a panel about intersectionality and translation at the Translationale Berlin in the winter of 2023. We laughed briefly at how she had managed to weave this translation proposal into her response to a question about challenges in the German translation industry. Honored, intrigued, a bit nervous, I accepted.
Messer, Zungen, written primarily in German, explores how the erasure of Black people and people of color from the culture of remembrance within the Cape Coloured community in South Africa, also known as Camissa, is intimately tied to their displacement from ancestral lands and historic communal sites. Resisting racial violence, reclaiming memory, history and language therefore involves both returning to lost places and being resilient in hostile spaces. I found the role of language in this context particularly fascinating. The characters speak, remember, and experience their worlds in multiple languages, including Sesotho, English and Afrikaans, creating a mosaic of languages. In my initial draft of “Choir” and “Motherness,” I focused on how to recreate this rich tapestry of language in translation. As I began to revise, and consult with SGL and several colleagues, I concluded that it was most important to respect the characters’ language choices. Above all, I sought to capture the commonplace reality of multilingual worlds and communities. SGL adeptly portrays these realities in her novel without explaining them or making them more palatable to an imagined external audience. In contrast to the original, where passages written in English stand out, in the translation they seamlessly blend into the main language of the text, resulting in a new language mosaic.
—Melody Makeda Ledwon
By BEN TAMBURRI
Photo courtesy of author
Baileys Harbor, WI
Baileys Harbor has always felt like a place that is eternally old, eternally in the past. It is a destination for quiet summers on the Wisconsin peninsula, where the insignia of range lights and lighthouses decorate the bathroom of every home, and Dala horses wreath the doors. It was the place of my youth, even if it was only for a week each year. As a kid, when my family visited, I felt at home among the retired condo-dwellers.
Poems and sculptures by LISA ASAGI
This is a conversation with whales, clay, and poetry.
A wonderment with whales began in a childhood alivened by the early days of the Save the Whales movement and stories from my father of mysterious encounters on overnight boating trips. This fascination resurfaced seven years ago when I found myself working with my hands—clay sculpture and stand-up paddling led to long overdue reconnections with both earth and sea. Research deepened my curiosity: before the centuries of whaling, very different kinds of relationships existed between whales and humans. Here in the 21st century, what’s possible? These pieces are part of an ongoing series of rememberings, imaginings, longings, and offerings.
— Lisa Asagi
Photo courtesy of author
Herod, Illinois
There are two Gardens of the Gods, but the one in Southern Illinois fit our budget. On the drive down from Iowa City, we listen to podcasts about Norse and Greek mythology to fill the twins’ heads with ideas of magic, with the hope that they might complain less about the hiking. From their car seats, they point out farms with broken corn stalks and a Burger King, making the argument that we must still be in Iowa. Even though we’ve traveled six hours, their six-year-old brains haven’t yet connected time and distance. But I’ve been in the Midwest long enough to know the difference between the farms around a college town and farms around a farming town. And if I wasn’t wisened to it, the signage would teach me soon enough. Traveling through rest stops and restaurants puts us on edge. We make the outline of an average family with a couple of feral kids, if people don’t linger too long in their gaze.
Curated by KEI LIM
This month’s picks span extraordinary circumstances, yet tug at the rather ordinary, or perhaps most relatable, of emotions. AFTON MONTGOMERY recommends an investigative nonfiction book that interrogates people’s relationships to forever chemicals, VICTORIA KELLY recommends the 2024 Booker Prize Winner that abandons plot and follows a 24-hour period of astronauts orbiting Earth, and MONIKA CASSEL recommends a docupoetics collection that weaves the emotional aftermath of the Vietnam War with the defiance of women throughout history and literature.
By PHOEBE HYDE
The family are in the kitchen waiting to eat as the enemy soldiers approach the house. It’s already dark, and the man and child are restless at the table, waiting for the woman to pronounce the eggs set. She’s an excellent and exacting cook who will not be rushed. As the soldiers step onto the porch outside, the grandmother distracts the child with a joke: what did the rooster say to the wolf? and in the pause before the punchline, the first knock on the door falls—boom—and explodes—boomboomboomboom!
By JIM SHEPARD
The Reading Life is a special 15th-anniversary essay series reflecting on close reading and re-reading, written by The Common’s Editorial Board.
I always thought that one of the quieter sadnesses of my father’s life—and there were plenty of noisy ones, even given that everyone, myself included, acknowledged that he was a delight to be around—was his relationship to his own education and to reading itself. Shep—everyone including his kids and his wife called him Shep—only got as far as high school before World War II intervened, and then worked at Sikorsky Aircraft, a company that built helicopters, after returning home. He’d flown ground attack missions in Burma as a dorsal turret gunner in a B-25 and resupply missions as a cargo officer in a C-47 through the Himalayas to China, and the latter missions, referred to as going ‘over the hump’ in flyboy speak, were so lethal that the aircraft and crews suffered a twenty percent loss rate. When he got home, he needed to decompress, what I now realize was his version of PTSD. His account of the seven or eight postwar months in which he just lay around worrying his mother—the details of which always seemed to me to eerily echo Hemingway’s great short story “Soldier’s Home”—always included as a sad self-indictment, “I thought I might read, but I never had the concentration for it.”
By AYA LABANIEH
Anaheim, California, dreaming of Damascus, Syria — a place I have not been able to visit since the war began in 2011.
I had a dizzying dream last night. I picked up the phone, and called my grandma—my mom’s mom, the woman who raised me. She was laughing—I told her something about what I had been going through, I don’t remember what. I was being candid in a way that would be unthinkable in the real world; maybe I even told her about the ugly breakup with R. The warm acceptance on the other line astounded me. “Why don’t I call you more often?” I asked her.
“Wallah tayteh, I miss you, you should tell me everything.”
Phillis Levin (left) and Diane Mehta (right)
DIANE MEHTA and PHILLIS LEVIN’s conversation took place over the course of weeks—over daily phone calls and long emails, meals when they were in the same place, and a weekend in the Connecticut countryside. Though what appears below can only be fragments of their full exchange, the two poets—both previous contributors to The Common—share what they draw from each other’s work, and the work of others, exploring the pleasures of language, geometric movement, formal constraint, and expressing multiple perspectives in poems.
This interview includes recordings of many of the poems mentioned, read by the author.
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