Indholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2017 i The Paris Review

THE TRANS LATOR A poem in translation, the young man was fond of saying, is like the dead body of a foreigner washed up on our shores. Here he usually paused to let the metaphor sink in. Some members of the audience nodded thoughtfully. I will now read from my translations of a little-known ancient Roman poet, he told them, shuffling his papers, then looking into the dark, half-empty auditorium. * The dead body refused to be still. The waves loved it too much, pushing it onto the beach, then rolling it seaward again. And so it made its way down the beach, alighting for a moment, or several moments, on the wet sand, then bobbing out among the American swimmers. * 120 foreigners in a leaking boat is too…

Oklahoma was where it all went wrong. Alex steered the juddering van to the shoulder, and, with his dog Munson howling along in the seat beside him, he cursed everything: himself, the van, the criminal usedcar salesman back in North Carolina who’d sold it to him, the forlorn stretch of road they were currently breaking down on, the distant memory of a service station forty miles back, his mother for conceiving him thirty-eight years earlier, the human race in general; also: destiny, the universe, God—everything. Smoke billowed in gouts from the hood, thick tendrils grasping through the open window. He rolled it up hard and the crank broke off in his hand. When the van finally lurched to a stop, he killed the engine and raced around the vehicle to…

PLUNDER On a day of windy transition, one season to the next, you spoke of helping your mother close her house, of the choices you had to make—what to discard, what to keep—as if it were your childhood itself waiting to be plundered. You kept a Persian rug, all reds and golds, to walk on every day, keeping the past alive under your feet; those nested Russian dolls you played with as a girl: grandmother, mother, daughter; four bentwood chairs wrenched now from their table. I listened, thinking I’d be next to try to crowd a lifetime of things into a shrinking universe of boxes. I’ve started to dismantle my life already, throwing out letters from people I remember loving, choosing among books—this one to stay, that one to go—as…

According to Walter Mosley, he wrote his first good sentence in 1986 while working as a programmer for Mobil Oil in New York City. He was thirty-four. Since then, he has published fifty-four books, in genres as varied as science fiction, erotica, and drama, and has been honored with numerous prizes, including a pen Lifetime Achievement Award, a Grammy (Best Album Notes, 2001, for Richard Pryor’s . . . And It’s Deep Too!), and the Grand Master Award, in 2016, the highest honor granted by Mystery Writers of America. He has also written a number of screenplays for film and television; he’s currently at work on a television adaptation of his book Futureland (2001) with Forest Whitaker. But Mosley is perhaps most celebrated for his crime series about the misadventures…

GINI ALHADEFF is the author of The Sun at Midday and Diary of a Djinn. She translated and edited Patrizia Cavalli’s My Poems Won’t Change the World. RAE ARMANTROUT ’s most recent books are Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001–2015 and Entanglements, a chapbook of poems in conversation with physics, published in February. PETER COLE ’s Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations is forthcoming this spring. ROBYN CRESWELL is poetry editor of The Paris Review. JEAN-RENÉ ETIENNE and LOLA RABAN-OLIVA work as a duo under the name Partel Oliva. They live in Paris. THOMAS GEBREMEDHIN is a writer and an associate editor at WSJ. Magazine. FLEUR JAEGGY is a Swiss novelist, critic, and translator. Her story collection I Am the Brother of XX will appear in English…

A manuscript page from Yalo (2002). “I had no model. I wrote like a blind man.” Elias Khoury is the foremost novelist writing in Arabic today. Born in Beirut in the fateful year of 1948, he published his second novel, Little Mountain (1977), during the opening phase of the long Lebanese civil war, in which he fought with pro-Palestinian forces against his Christian coreligionists of the Phalange. Khoury’s early work is fearlessly contemporary, addressing itself to Lebanon’s conflict even as events were unfolding. In novels such as White Masks (1981) and The Journey of Little Gandhi (1989), Khoury held up the broken mirror of his fiction to a country on the verge of falling apart. Khoury’s best-known novel is Gate of the Sun (1998), which the New York Times labeled…

TOUCHED More than a fistful of stubby green fingers pushing up through gravel. And blades, hearts, clubs cut fine figures too. Each shape particular and pushy. Each a would-be template, I say. Pick me. * I’m with the deranged. Something’s very wrong. There are masks in offices. Machines run the banks and the power company. If you aren’t my mother or my son, who are you? And if you are, why don’t you know me? THE HEDGE Unlikely, the homelife of water on fire. * Love doubling love’s approximations. * Unlikely, its nucleated quirks. Ice rinks in malls in warm climates. * These rolling carts, these registers that chirp, “Did you find everything you needed?” * Your lives are getting heavy. You hedge your breath, you think ABOVE 1 The…

An ad hoc group of ten longtime and tentative friends rents a house on the Spanish island of Formentera. They call it the Yoga House. Through tailored Pilates sessions and targeted behavior-modification techniques, they hope to remedy the deteriorated lifestyle inherent to their high-pressure, low-stakes, medium-impact jobs in the fashion industry. The power dynamics between them are surprisingly benign, and the general mood could be defined as relaxed but focused. It’s a definite requirement of the Pilates instructor that they be ready for him at nine thirty sharp every morning. The house chef deploys an equally strict diet involving fresh, locally sourced fish and “umami variations.” They drive two orange Méharis and a couple of teenagey scooters to and from the rocky beaches. Most of their daily allotted time online…

ON MEETING MR. AND MRS. ELIOT I’ll never forget the day I met The author of Prufrock and his wife. It wasn’t a big occasion, But I’ll think of it all my life. The particulars of the meeting Have faded from my mind; But I do remember Mrs. Eliot’s Hat and that she was kind. Smoothing her elegant frock of silk And little tassels of fur, She told me how Time and Newsweek Were pestering Tom and her. “Everywhere we go,” she said, “They go.” I said, “Too bad Your holiday is being spoiled.” She sighed, “It makes Tom sad.” We talked about the weather And ointments for chest and throat. The poet joined the discussion To give VapoRub his vote. The time soon came to say good-bye. “Good-bye,” the…

1919 Investment Counsel • Alfred A. Knopf • Theresa Gavin & Mark Almeida • Peggy & Keith Anderson • The Anna-Maria & Stephen Kellen Foundation • Jeff Antebi • Gale Arnold • R. Scott Asen • Debbie & Mark Attanasio • Amanda Urban & Ken Auletta • Ijeoma A. Azodo • Andre Balazs • Kyra Tirana Barry • Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos & Adam Bartos • Alexandra Styron & Edward Beason • A. William J. Becker III • Helen & William Beekman • Charlotte Beers • Mr. & Mrs. Alexandre Behring • Jessica Marshall & Peter N. Belhumeur • Robert Bell • Liz & Rod Berens • Kathryn & David Berg • Olivier Berggruen • Joan Bingham • Blaine & Tim Birchby • The Blackstone Group • Leslie Tcheyan & Monty…

You haven’t texted since Saturday, when I read Keith Waldrop’s translation of Les Fleurs du mal on a bench by whatever that tower is on the hill in Fort Greene Park until you walked up late as always and I do mean always in your dad’s army jacket and said “Hi, buddy” in a tone that told me all I needed to know, although protocol dictated that you should sit next to me and spell it out and we should hold each other and cry and then pretend everything was fine, would be fine, was someday before the final trumpet, before heat death, zero point, big rip sure to be absolutely perfectly completely probably fine. And though it wasn’t and wouldn’t be, I walked you to the G then rode…

Agnes left me five years ago. Today is Good Friday. I went to church and looked at the vestments. The one day of the year when I go to church. I stare at the vestments and hope that they’ll enter my eyes, covering them. On Good Friday, it’s as if I am possessed. I know that the vestments last longer than a day. But as far as I’m concerned, they last a day. I don’t know what they may be hiding, those magnificent, exhilarating purple vestments. I have no precise understanding of the Passion. I mean to say that I have no knowledge of the liturgy. The crucifixion is, to me, without a body. Without a soul. Without an image. I know what nails and a crown of thorns are.…

WRITING ON THE WALL We hurl ourselves over then over again into the wall of the invisible, or walk to where we think it is and run our hands along it as if it were braille to a better being— welling between all we’re nearing, now as anger, now as patter, now as weather or someone’s skin, soon as water— say, the Aegean, glaucous above an abyss within. ON GIVENNESS What if givenness isn’t enough— and the wind’s slithering along my arm is really a subtle summery alarm trying to tell me something else, and much rougher? That worth, for instance, depends on a violence of difference and therefore inevitably lies at a certain distance from the stuff of life and us? That even givenness has to be taken hold…

Harry Mathews began publishing in The Paris Review in 1962, with an excerpt from his first novel, The Conversions. After that, he gave us poems, translations, and more fiction, much of it composed according to occult mathematical formulas of his own devising. (He was, for many years, the sole American member of the experimental writers’ collective Oulipo.) From 1989 until 2003, Harry served as our Paris editor, and he remained a beloved friend of the magazine all his life. Harry died, at the age of eightysix, as this issue was going to press. The following story is excerpted from his recently completed, final novel, The Solitary Twin. This is the story (Berenice began) of one man, a “man’s man,” a professional valet and a good one. I didn’t witness most…