Where
Do We Come From...?
Launch Double Issue I & II,
Autumn/Winter 2002
Eighteen writers -
from Nobel nominees to relative newcomers on the international stage -
join in a search for origins. Childhood games, the horrors of war and arts
of love, geographies of the imagination... their responses are as varied
as Enlargement Europe itself.
Features: Romanian
Women Poets and a photo-essay, Romanian Trains.
Some highlights:
-
Zilahy and Velickovic on the end of the former Yugoslavia;
- new prose poem
from Kaplinski;
- Prokopiev and Tar: scenes from village life;
- extracts from
Belsevica's bestselling autobiographical novel;
- contemporary love stories
from Poland, Bulgaria, FRY.
In this issue:
Vizma Belsevica, Cevat Çapan, Magda Carneci, Natasza Goerke, Georgi
Gospodinov, Ioana Ieronim, Jaan Kaplinski, Vojislav Karanovic, Iosif
Kiraly, Marija Knezevic, Diana Manole, Aleksandar Prokopiev, Milan
Richter, Ondrej Stefanko, Sándor Tar, Nenad Velickovic, Tomas Venclova,
Péter Zilahy.
ISSN 1478-5005
226pp. October 2002
Excerpts
Aleksandar Prokopiev
(Macedonia)
Ethica
Anthropofagon
1. Always be
hungry! Then you'll become like each other.
2. Treat him
or her like a pancake. Smear with honey, cherry jam, peanut butter,
chocolate. Taste as s/he wants to be tasted.
3. Give him
or her a little metal box, decorated with your initials, containing
your index finger without a ring or your ear with an earring. S/he
will be enormously satisfied by this gesture, as if you'd given the
last rose or a new time-travel machine.
4. Be
gourmands. In every mouthful find something of yourself. Chew
sincerely and you become necessary to each other.
5. Imagine!
Searching for food really is as exciting as eating. Be falcon and
chick, wolf and lamb, lioness and stag. The role of prey will change
with the weather: when it's hot you'll be the victim; when it's
rainy, she will be.
6. Improve
appearances! Use lace, velvet, silk or mohair: inspired by the
refinement of French hedonists. Their deepest drive is to bring
together spring water and ripe cheese; decay and pink skin fresh
from the bath. The smell of incense could be as brutal as a god
biting into an over-ripe pear.
7. Make
jokes! Write a suicide note and put it in an envelope. Next,
ravenously eat a miniature marzipan replica of yourself (or it could
be made of jelly or blancmange). Then, nonchalantly, rip open the
envelope and read your testament: "I donate my body and soul to
culinary progress."
8. Romance
dies on an empty stomach. But to be stuffed is banal, makes you
lethargic and punctures fantasies. Every day tickle your appetite
but never overfill your stomach. Always be hungry!
Translated
by the author with Fiona Sampson
Ioana
Ieronim (Romania)
March
To Clara
a day
suspended like a miracle between seasons
a sparrow clinging with thin feet to a branch
- an error
attracts you -
drawn by its
irresistible gravity
you're going to bruise yourself against life (so they tell you)
against the void
Translated
by the author
Magda
Carneci (Romania)
Flashgun.
Snap. Slow Developing
We lay
stretched out on beds, immaculate white surfaces
on which somebody had strewn photographs helter-skelter
snapshots of us false, sensual photos
strewn carelessly on couches
on beds
on the floor,
we lay where we were thrown, looking out the windows at the city
they kept taking photos of us
every second
heaps of photos as we lay
at rest on beds, looking out the window and discussing
beauty in heaps
this great happening surrounding us
they were
continually photographing our dull, dirty room,
the beds, immaculate white surfaces, the stubbed-out cigarette butts
dropped on the floor
in heaps and we were so tired
continuously
photographed
reclining among wet and glossy rivers
of photos.
I asked them
whether everything looked beautiful to them whether beauty
existed everywhere
in the heaps in this hodgepodge
of sprawled bodies and white beds
cigarette butts
the dull, dirty
room
looking out the window they laughed
and changed a used roll
for fresh film
finer grained, more sensitive everything could be
could have been beautiful so beautiful
the dull, dark room
the
cigarettes
beds
wastepaper basket rain spouts
the great happening
the gutters along the streets remote suburbs
higgledy-piggledy,
isolated
the scrap heaps
dirt are all photogenic virtual negatives
that look
so good in pictures.
Then do all
scraps make sense? I asked them
as they went about
fixing us on film
lying indolently on beds looking out
the windows the heaps
crying, fainting
they laughed and laughed
everything has expression expression
they answered
this bare, dirty room
the desolate clouds
the scrap heaps
these are pure expression of what? of whom?
I asked
of expression itself
they answered
putting in a fresh roll of much
more
sensitive film
the whole world is expression
an image
an image that’s an eyeful of images heaps
crammed full of these and other images
images upon images
of whom? for whom? I asked again and again just image
they said
a boundless image an immense photograph
and their flashguns kept going off blinding us
a photo
in black-and-white or colour? I asked
letting myself be photographed
continually not daring to move at all
a photo
they replied
focusing a new spotlight a million-watt reflector bulb
and in its intensity my hands turned pale
translucent
spectral.
What about
us? What about us? I asked and what about the railway stations
and planes
the rock-hard pyramids
the heaps upon heaps
of paintings, music, books the constellations
the teeming cities?
You are -
they said undeveloped chemical emulsion
and then they put in a fresh roll
of even more sensitive film a
photo of what? I repeated dissolving
- a photo
of a much bigger photograph.
We stayed
fixed on beds immaculate wet white surfaces
we stay in the photos and wait
for somebody to come
to raise us up
to plunge us into the zinc basin of strong cold acids
to develop us
to fix us in poses or expose us
to an even stronger
light
a purer light to fog us
to blind us
and destroy us at last
these dark old negatives
beauty
the great happening
to save the earth
or make it vanish.
Translated
by Adam J. Sorkin with the author
Péter
Zilahy (Hungary)
from: The
Last Window Giraffe Picture Book
In Belgrade,
time is measured in faces. After a week I begin to recognize faces.
After a year I'd recognize everyone. Everyone who has a face also
has time. Watches are worn as ornaments, the hands form an angle to
match the mood of the wearer. If I stay on the street, I can't be
late. The time of the demonstration can be read from the faces. You
look at someone and you know: it's time. Neither of you will get
there at the appointed hour, but you meet somewhere else where you
wouldn't have met had you been on time. In Belgrade time is no
longer measured by the stars. People look each other in the eye.
They merry-go-round in the raining confetti. A chain reaction of
faces in an activated explosion. Belgrade faces are incendiary,
quick to flare up. Invisibility is not an option, the masses of
Belgrade are not faceless. Out of any two faces, one is always you.
Serzhan is a cheeky grin. The people of Belgrade part with the past
cheerfully. The shared naughtiness and mischief. Farting, belching,
whistle-blowing, horn-tooting. The old dear standing next to me is
shouting her head off. She knows she's free to. Watches have become
historically redundant. Down with time which has no face!
The window
giraffe was a picture book from which we learned to read when we
didn't know how. I could read already, but I had to learn it anyway,
because that's what school's for. The window giraffe revealed the
world to us in alphabetical order. Everything had its rhyme and
reason, both symbolic and everyday. We learned from it that the sun
rises in the east, that our hearts are on the left, that the Great
October Revolution was in November, and that light comes through the
window even when it's closed. The window giraffe was full of
seven-headed dragons, fairies, devils and princes, and told us they
do not exist. I remember four kinds of dragons that do not exist,
and also three princes. Syllable by syllable, the window giraffe
taught us to read between the lines. It was taken as much for
granted as the teddy-bear on TV before bedtime. Nobody thought of
questioning it. The window giraffe was the window giraffe. The
window giraffe is my childhood, the changing room, the P.E. class,
and growing all the time, an age before a better age, the soft
dictatorship, my homework, my innocence, my generation. The window
giraffe is a book, and I was one of its characters. Twenty years
later, when asked, I realized that the first and last words, the
alpha and omega, are window and giraffe.1
Yes. The window is the beginning, light comes through the window,
the giraffe is the end of endlessness, surrealism, flaming giraffes,
we will live for ever! A lexicon which contains what's been left
out.
Paris has its
own window giraffe. I saw it on a postcard. It's called the
I-fell-tower. Zsófi Brünner sent it after she defected with her
parents to France, and was now studying from a French alphabet book.
The I-fell-tower has a long neck, four legs, and an awful lot of
windows. It is both window and giraffe, and its name sounds good
too, excitement and promise in one, the promise of a sudden leap,
the final break from a worm's eye view, which the express elevator
inside degrades into a question of technology. Zsófi looked a bit
like a giraffe herself, except she didn't have a window or an
express elevator inside. The express elevator was in my throat when
she tip-toed over to my desk on her matchstick legs and let me smell
her scented rubber. I spent the whole night in an ecstasy of
syllable-practice. The letters came towards me like cats' eyes on a
dark road. The next day, Zsófi defected. Our headmaster told us
they had to leave unexpectedly. He could have said "cut off in
their prime", the way our Party leaders go. The scented rubber
left an un-erasable mark on my heart. Later we found out it hadn't
been a holiday at all, when she sent the I-fell-tower as a
substitute for herself, which was just like the window giraffe,
except it made some sense, provided you could read between the
lines.
The police
are running in the opposite direction, we run past each other. They
beat up a couple of passers-by on the other side of the square, then
stand around, at a loss. An over-zealous riot policeman rubs out the
graffiti of a gallows with his rubber stick. Underneath in red:
Slobo, you pig, you will hang!
Translated by
the author
1
A.N.: In Hungarian, "window" is ablak, and
"giraffe" is zsiráf
Take my word for it.
|
