Absinthe Recommends

Absinthe recommends the Arts and Ideas podcast from the BBC. Recently the German filmmaker Wim Wenders was interviewed and spoke about his return to Europe after living in the U.S. for many years. The novels Day In Day Out by Terezia Mora (translated by Michael Henry Heim) and The Book of Words by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Susan Bernofsky). Irving Singer writes about Ingmar Bergman in Ingmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher. Check out the winner of the Foreign-language Academy Award The Lives of Others, directed by Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck and the Danish film After the Wedding, directed by Susanne Bier.

A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN; LIFE, DEATH & GRACE PALEY

A few months ago Grace Paley died. I met her only once and had always hoped I might have the good fortune to meet her again. That one time was in 1986 at a barbeque in Vermont one summer evening, and to the annoyance of the hosts and other guests, I hogged her company far longer than was polite. Why she allowed me to do so I do not know, for I can only imagine it was uncomfortable to hear me lengthily gushing at her ear trying to articulate the pleasure her stories had given me, how particularly her story “Faith in a Tree” had encouraged me. She would have been 64 years old that evening, my age now; at 42, I perceived her as elderly. But wise. And she radiated something warm and kind and smiling. In any event, she was kind enough not to turn her back and flee, to allow me my one opportunity to celebrate her.

She was not quite 85 when she died, and The New Yorker in December of 2007 published a poem of hers about death which takes my breath away each time I read it. Until reading that poem, the statements about death which have most satisfied my own perception of the inevitable end we cannot quite conceive have been ancient ones – from Chaucer and Gilgamesh:

There is the house where people sit in darkness;
dust is their food and clay their meat.
they are clothed like birds with wings for covering,
they see no light, they sit in darkness…the house of dust.”
-The Epic of Gilgamesh (tr N. K. Sandars)

and

What is this world? What asketh man to have?
Now with his love, now in his colde grave,
Allone, withouten any compaignye.
Fare wel, my swete…
-Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Knight’s Tale,” lines 2776-80

Now, however, I add Grace Paley’s breath-taking expression of the end awaiting us all – because somehow it takes the cold loneliness of that end and makes it an embrace of another, of the one you most love, a last embrace in words:

One Day
One day
one of us
will be lost
to the other

this has been
talked about but
lightly turning
away shyness this
business of con-
fronting the
preference for
survival

my mother said the
children are grown we
are both so sick let us
die together my father
replied no no you
will be well he lied

of course I
want you in the world
whether I’m in it or
not your spirit
I probably mean

there is always
something to say in
the end speaking
without breath one
of us will be lost
to the other

-Grace Paley


Against the poems of death, of course, there are the ones of life. Grace Paley’s marvelous story “Faith in a Tree” has always – since I first read it in New American Review number one from 1967 – been such a confirmation of the determination to live and be happy, and I keep it in my heart alongside two others – one from antiquity, one from the mid-20th century.

The former is, again, from Gilgamesh, the words of the divine ale-wife challenging the hero’s ambition to find eternity:

Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh, where do you roam?
Why do you come here, wandering these pastures
In search of the wind?
The life you seek you shall not find,
When the gods created mankind,
Death for mankind they held in mind,
Life they kept inside their hands.
You, Gilgamesh, fill your belly,
Make merry by day and by night.
Of each day make a feast of rejoicing,
Day and night dance and play!
Let your garments be sparkling fresh,
Thy head be washed; bathe thou in water,
Pay heed to the little one that reaches for your hand,
Delight your spouse with your embrace
And rejoice in hers.
For this, too, is the lot of mankind!

And finally there is this exchange between Caligula and his advisor Cherea in Albert Camus’s play, Caligula, which sums up most simply and profoundly, to my mind, the choice that lies before us:

Caligula: Men die, and they are not happy.
Cherea : Yes, but I choose to live and to be happy.


Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy


See also www.copenhagenquartet.com for information on four independent novels about the souls and seasons of Copenhagen, each written in a different style and set in a different season and which can be read independently of one another or together in any order desired: Kerrigan's Copenhagen, A Love Story, which is a novel disguised as a guide to the bars of Copenhagen, each chapter unfolding in a different serving house; Bluett's Blue Hours, a noir tale about the deep dark of Copenhagen winter and the seamier sides of life in this beautiful capital; Greene's Summer, about a Chilean torture survivor who comes to Copenhagen to be treated in a torture rehabilitation center and meets a Danish woman who has herself survived a violent marriage; and Danish Fall, a satire about 12 people connected to a Danish firm which is being downsized. And on the website www.thomasekennedy.com you are invited to see film clips from a documentary video of the Copenhagen novels and find information about Kennedy’s 2007 books of fiction, A Passion in the Desert and Cast Upon the Day, as well as the forthcoming essay 2008 essay collections: Riding the Dog: A Look back at America and Writers on the Job: 20 Tales of the Nonwriting Life (co-edited with Walter Cummins)

Edith Grossman

Check out the recent article on Spanish-language translator Edith Grossman in Bookforum here.

I have a small but interesting connection to Grossman: She co-translated, along with Allen Ginsburg, a chapbook of the work of Carlos Edmundo de Ory, a Spanish poet whose work I've been translating. Though the chapbook was printed, it was never distributed; it was deemed to have too many problems by the publisher and most of the copies were destroyed. Only a handful of copies still exist (I was fortunate to obtain one a couple of years ago in Spain from Jaume Pont, an Ory scholar). Grossman herself has never seen the edition (I need to at least send her a photocopied version), and no one I've spoken to at the Allen Ginsburg trust had any notion of its existence.

Absinthe at AWP

Absinthe: New European Writing will be at AWP in New York this week and we look forward to seeing many of you. We're sharing table 447 at the Bookfair with our good friends from Dzanc Books.

If you're not registered for AWP you can still stop by the Bookfair on Saturday, February 2nd as it will be open to the general public on that day.

Subscribe and Receive Three Years for the Price of Two

Until February 29th, 2008 you can subscribe to Absinthe: New European Writing for two years (or extend your subscription) for only $20* and receive an additional year (two issues) FREE! That’s three years (six issues) for only $20.*

You can subscribe using Paypal here or send a check for $20 to:

Absinthe
P.O. Box 2297
Farmington Hills, MI 48333-2297


*$50 for non-US subscribers

Absinthe/Oakland University Festival of European Film and Writing

The first Absinthe/Oakland University Festival of European Film and Writing will be held on May 9-10, 2008 in Rochester, MI. More details will follow very soon.

A Taste of Italian Poetry

We're a little late with this but in the December issue of Poetry magazine Geoffrey Brock provides an introduction to contemporary Italian poetry, discussing some of the similarities and differences in the development of Italian and American poetry, and presents the work of nearly a dozen Italian poets, including Franco Fortini, Patrizia Valduga, and Fabio Pusterla.

(The same issue also includes two poems by Fiona Sampson who appeared in Absinthe #3.)

One Hundred Years of Loneliness

Gregory Rabassa is one of the twentieth century's great translators, and his translation of Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad is a masterpiece. Nevertheless, I've always had a problem with the novel's title in translation, One Hundred Years of Solitude. The word "soledad" means loneliness as well as solitude, and all you have to do is read the novel to see that it's clearly about loneliness as opposed to solitude. It should be titled One Hundred Years of Loneliness or, better yet, A Hundred Years of Loneliness. Has anyone else observed or commented on this? I wonder if the title was chosen by Rabassa, García Márquez, or the publisher (Rabassa was present at the ALTA conference in Dallas last November, though I didn't have the chance to speak to him). In any case, I'm sure it is far too entrenched to be changed with any future editions.

Articles of Note

Perhaps you've already seen these but on this last day of 2007 I thought I'd briefly mention some interesting articles I've read in the last month or so. TIME Magazine wrote about the death of French culture and Bernard-Henri Lévy responds in the Guardian. An essay by George Saunders on the Russian writer Daniil Kharms in the New York Times. Alissa Valles discusses her translation of the collected poems of Zbigniew Herbert in the Boston Review and W. Martin contributes a review of the work. And a number of articles at signandsight.com: Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko on Europe's need to understand the buried history of Ukraine, a discussion of recent literary successes from the Urals, a feature on the Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu, and an article on the new wave of films from Romania.

Euro Pop Trash

I've written below of the influence that Dostoevsky and Ingmar Bergman had on the creation of Absinthe: New European Writing but perhaps I should fess up to the influence of all the '80s Brit pop I listened to. And, to be honest, it didn't stop in the '80s with Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, Tears for Fears, etc. Just last month the guys from Birmingham, Duran Duran, released a new album (sorry for the anachronism)--Red Carpet Massacre--that was partially produced by Timbaland and Justin Timberlake. As might be expected by the presence of the two Timbs, Red Carpet Massacre has some tunes that could keep the bodies moving in the NYC and LA nightclubs (and, yes, in the Absinthe office ... thankfully no YouTube videos will be showing up). Perhaps Simon LeBon was drinking absinthe (or reading Absinthe) when he penned the deep lyrics to the chorus for the song "Tempted": That is gonna tempt you/ oh yeah/ like you know it's meant to/ oh yeah/ devil gonna tempt you/ oh yeah/ how much do you want to?