Isak

Junot Díaz on Racism in Boston and Masculinities in Literature

 

 

Junot Díaz is making the rounds for This is How You Lose Her, which includes a thoughtful and funny discussion hosted last week by Harvard Book Store and The Boston Review. It's available to you and me through a lengthy video, and while its wholly worthwhile, I want to highlight how Díaz responds early on to a question about racism in Boston (which often shows up in his writing). It's no joke.

While racism manifests all over the place, it's layered in Boston with a particular smugness and skepticism that is difficult to point to because it's omnipresent. Of course, I have the vantage point of a former Boston resident who is white, but it was obvious enough that it undercut my ability to feel like the city could be my long-term home. Díaz points out that Boston has the lowest rate of retention for black and Latino students of any college town in the country. "People vote with their feet," he said, "... as it stands, people aren't fucking sticking around." 

Boston still cloaks itself, it still protects itself, it doesn't want to face reality ... Boston is still in this place where, 'I am skeptical that there is racism.' That is wild to me.

He goes on to tie this way of thinking to the universities' hold on the city --- the limits on what they pay City Hall, the utter protection of students -- and how it creates a split structure that leaves the people in town with...

...this really distorted local nationalism which is predicated on sports, a suspicion and an anger towards people of color and immigration, because its easier to do that than to attack the people in power who have really, kind of, taken away this city from the locals, man.

And I feel like that's what we're really talking about when we're talking about Boston. It's investment towards kinds of discourses, its investment toward this kind of townie racism, is all about its inability to address whose really got their fucking boot on their neck. It's ain't a fucking bunch of people of color in this town.

Díaz also talks about how America "speaks apocalypse." And he makes a nice mention of the underrated writer Michael Martone, as well as Krys Lee, whose book Drifting House I shimmered on about over at The Daily Beast.

In his discussion of the character of Yunior, who he 'pursues relentlessly,' Díaz talks about the large lack of literature dealing fully with masculinity.

I tend to find most maculinities that are being represented in literature tend to be very feeble and tend to be very inaccurate. And by feeble I don't mean in the sense of strong, you know, or virile but feeble in the sense that they don't seem to in any way correlate with what I've experienced and what I've seen. I think masculinity, because it's the site of enormous privilege, has obfuscatory powers, and people tend to be blinded by its kind of full dimensions, the different levels it operates on...

.... Most of the men that I read in most literatures come out sounding like -- nothing like the dudes I grew up with or worked with, yeah? They can get our crimes right but they can't get much else right. And I think that the crimes are not enough, yeah? 'Cause the intervention at the level of crime keeps the masculinity alive.

Onwards. Watch now.     

Hat tip on the video to Daniel Pritchard.

Speaking: MC Richards

 

"Well, we are political beings. We live in the world; we live in the world of politics. The inner life isn't separate from that. What is the goal of the creativity one feels — and wishes to develop and help others to develop? Is it just to make more and more pots or take more and more pictures? Is that what it's all about? I don't think so. I think that as we become more creative, we move toward a concern with social justice and compassion. That's the natural movement. We come, maybe through times of loneliness, toward experiencing the reality of another person. As we create, you might say, we are created. We move toward a deepened awareness of reality. Outwardly, we move toward social justice; inwardly we move toward compassion.

{...}

"Consider words: more and more I have come to understand that words are non-verbal. Try asking yourself where the words are before you speak them. I think we make a mistake in trying to restrict a word into something that we can read about in a dictionary. A word is a being. Writing becomes a more intimate and inspired activity when you see you're writing out of your substance, out of the mystery."

 

--- MC Richards, speaking to The Sun Magazine in 1989

 

MC (Mary Caroline) Richards was a writer, artist, and teacher. Her books include Centering In Pottery, Poetry, And The Person, The Crossing Point, and Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education In America. Richards was born in Idaho and raised in Portland. She studied at Reed College and the University of California at Berkeley, where she received her Ph.D. Richards taught at a number of places, but she is most famous for teaching at Black Mountain College starting in 1945. At Black Mountain, Richards taught writing and translated plays by Cocteau, Satie and Yeats. In 1954, she and other artists began a commune in New York called the Land, where she lived and created for ten years. According to her New York Times obituary, "Ms. Richards embraced old age with characteristic openness, writing a poem in 1997 in which she saw herself as ''living toward dying, blooming into invisibility.'' She died at age 83 in 1999.

Image credit: Black Mountain portraits

If Vladimir Nabokov Were Franz Kafka's Editor

Witness: this is Vladimir Nabokov editing the first page of his teaching copy of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. The sketches are him trying to work out exactly what Gregor, transformed, looked like. For all the revisions, Nabokov was quite fascinated by Kafka's work, as Open Culture points out: his lecture on the novella is famous enough for it to be adapted for television in 1989, starring Christopher Plummer as the Russian master. (The Metamorphosis – A Study: Nabokov on Kafka). bout this opening passage to the story, Nabokov makes other annotations. He writes, referring to the end of the first paragraph: “A regular beetle has no eyelids and cannot close its eyes—a beetle with human eyes.” And, about the passage generally:

 

In the original German there is a wonderful flowing rhythm here in this dreamy sequence of sentences. He his(sic) half-awake -- he realizes his plight without surprise, with a childish acceptance of it, and at the same time he still clings to human memories, human experience. The metamorphosis is not quite complete as yet.

 

One of Nabokov's "treasured" insights on the text: Gregor, as an insect, never uses his wings.

We shall therefore assume that Gregor has six legs, that he is an insect.

Next question: what insect? Commentators say cockroach, which of course does not make sense. A cockroach is an insect that is flat in shape with large legs, and Gregor is anything but flat: he is convex on both sides, belly and back, and his legs are small. He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing cases. In beetles these cases conceal flimsy little wings that can be expanded and then may carry the beetle for miles and miles in a blundering flight. Curiously enough, Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard covering of his back. (This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings.) 

Quite so. It is a point that seems to pick up nicely from my previous post.

 

 

Nabokov's Kafka lecture, incidentally, is included in his Lectures on Literature, which he discussed with an interviewer from The Paris Review before the collection was published. Note that he provides the novella with an English translation of the title that is not the one commonly used, even though he calls it by "The Metamorphosis" in the text of the lecture.

 

What I intend to do is publish a number of twenty-page essays on several works—Ulysses, Madame Bovary, Kafka's Transformation, Don Quixote, and others—all based on my Cornell and Harvard lectures. I remember with delight tearing apart Don Quixote, a cruel and crude old book, before six hundred students in Memorial Hall, much to the horror and embarrassment of some of my more conservative colleagues.

 

Related:

• Vladimir Nabokov's TV Interview About Lolita
• Book Review: Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
• Book Review: The Delighted States by Adam Thirlwell
• Why is Kafka So Darn Kafkaesque?
• Timely Insight

Speaking of Shame

You may remember months ago that I wrote about vulnerability and voice in a post called "Out Loud Anna." Update on those singing lessons, by the way: after coaching from a dear friend earlier this year, I'm now on to regular Monday lessons through the Detroit Community Music School! Terrifying! Which is how I know that it is the exact right thing for me to do. I've also come to make a habit of singing loudly as I bike through town, and sometimes when I am home, too. It is a wonder to begin to get used to my own voice: its funniness and unexpected force, its rawness and its newness at making the sounds I ask myself to make.

My essay turned on the thinking of Brené Brown. It is perhaps unsurprisng that Brown's exploration of vulnerability has enveloped shame as well. Shame is capable of suffocating our own hearts, to say nothing of our ability to connect with the hearts of others. It is the cold chase in our core. It provokes the choice of numbness rather than feeling.

Her talk on shame is worth sharing here, and speaking of.

 

 

 

As I share this, the sun is setting. That means that it is the wakening of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement in Jewish tradition. For all of us, wherever we find our faith and wisdom, my hope is that we will feel forgiveness and lovingkindness for our own brilliant and bloody hearts, so full of death and life. Maybe even speak it out loud.

Literary & Media Indulgences - 9/23/2012

-- "Picasso and the art of conflict." Pictured above is part of his etching in the style of comics, called "The Dream and Lie of Franco." 

-- "i like my body when it is with your / body. It is so quite new a thing. / muscles better and nerves more." Let's talk about e.e. cummings.

-- How not to write about libraries.

-- So says Ray Bradbury. Open Culture has video of him speaking about the epiphany of being alive and being in love with writing.

-- Let's go on a pub crawl with Junot Díaz. (h/t Chris M.) And did I mention how the final story in his new collection, "The Cheater's Guide to Love," just slayed me when I first read it in The New Yorker? Tears, my friend. Tears.

-- ... and can you imagine translating Junot Diaz's linguistically-hybridic fiction? The Chicago Tribune looks into just how that goes.

-- "How to read Indian: 50 essential writers in translation." Fabulous list from Nilanjana Roy.

-- Maybe some great art, and great literature, isn't meant for all of us. It might be better for it to stay home, writes Tim Parks.

-- On the rights of bad guys, with journalist David Shipler.

-- Between the (spread)sheets: designing data.

-- Vertigo: Teju Cole writes about the night he met V.S. Naipul.

-- Victor LaValle talks about gothic and fabulist fiction over at Bookslut. He also spoke with Terry Gross on "Fresh Air" about monsters.

-- Sigh. Brooklyn, again.

-- Jay Caspian Kang (who has a new novel out called The Dead Do Not Improve) writes in Grantland on "The Death of the Anna Kournikova Era." Meaning, in the era of Serena Williams, Gabby Douglas, Missy Franklin, and the US women's soccer team, media and fans are finally finding new ways to talk about women's sports. (Thank god.)

-- On the (imagined) woman reader and male anxiety, from the inimitable Jenny McPhee.

-- Ruth Franklin on identity crisis and the sweep of Zadie Smith's literary career in The New Republic.

-- Zoe Heller's brilliant and hilarious New York Review of Books essay on Naomi Wolf's new book about vaginas.

-- "The Slowest Reader," from Benjamin Percy.

-- The Africa Report names Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as one of the 50 most influential Africans.

-- Let's let Tessa Hadley read us a Nadine Gordimer story.

-- South African journalist Sifiso Mzobe won the Wole Soyinka literary prize for his first novel, Young Blood.

-- Asking questions of Alejandro Zambra's translator.

-- Peek into the diary of a mad fact-checker.

-- Why wisdom and reverence are not just for believers.

-- A comics artist raised more than $1 million for a new Tesla Museum.

-- Why doesn't your city have curbside recycling? The people want to know.

-- In response to public feedback, the renovation of the main branch of the New York Public Library will keep more books in it.

Constructing Somalia: Nuruddin Farah Will "Keep My Country Alive By Writing About It"

Somalia's state of tectonic shifts is at a particularly pivotal point right now, with a new president and constitution standing on shaky ground, and author Nuruddin Farah has only his stories to offer. This is both powerful and -- not. The Somali author, compelled into exile years ago and now living in Cape Town, told the Guardian: "No matter how the characters struggle, how can you reconstruct a country that's self-destructing continuously?"

Farah is a prolific chronicler of the Horn of Africa, hinging his fiction at the point where power shapes relationships. The 66-year-old man is also a winner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and he is frequently cited as a Nobel contender. Crossbones is the recent novel that completes his Past Imperfect trilogy. (Here's news on its release in South Africa.) Secrets opens in Mogadishu just before Somalia's civil war breaks open like a wound, while Gifts scours a wounded family history while taking its title from developed nations' aid to Somalia. Farah hasn't lived in Somalia in decades, though he traveled there often to serve as a sort of mediator between the transitional government and Islamists. But, according to the Guardian profile, "The country died inside me, and I carried it, for a long time, like a woman with a dead baby. It became the neurosis from which I write."

Somalia, he says, is "full of stories. We say, 'one sick person; a hundred doctors'. Somalia is a sick country and everyone has an opinion. Mine is one version; in a civil war, there are millions."

Kwame Anthony Appiah interviewed Farah in 2004 for Bomb Magazine. Appiah writes, by way of introduction:

He published his first novel From a Crooked Rib in London in 1970, at the age of 25, becoming, with that work, Somalia’s first novelist (though of course by no means her first great literary figure, since he was raised within a tradition of brilliant oral literature that can now circulate as audio recordings). Farah speaks not only Somali but also Italian, Arabic, Amharic, and, of course, the wonderful English of his nine novels.

Farah laughs a great deal in his conversation with Appiah. And it is with good humor that he discusses why, for all his agility with language, he has written in English for  nearly all of his career. (Paragraph break added by me.)

I chose to write in English because Somali, my mother tongue, had no orthography in those days. Now why did I not write in Arabic, Amharic, or Italian? The way it happened, a good, solid American typewriter decided that I would write in English. It was a Royal, and I adored it. I liked hearing the sound of it when I typed. And I couldn’t find a good enough typewriter in any of the other languages that I might have written in. There is another important factor: I’ve received much of my intellectual makeup in English.

Also, being a very practical person, I was aware that Amharic has far too many letters for a typewriter—it’s too complicated. Arabic was out of the question because Arabic typewriters weren’t common in our peninsula—and anyhow, Arabic was foreign to me too. Somali had no script until the fall of 1972. And soon enough, I started to write a novel in Somali, which was published serially, a chapter a week, in the only Mogadishu daily. The publication was discontinued because the censorship board people didn’t like a couple of chapters, and, silly as I am, I insisted, when asked to explain, that I would not allow the text to be cut. Fancy that! “This is art,” I argued. “You don’t explain art; you take it or leave it." So not only was the publication of my novel in Somali discontinued, but the censorship board also banned From a Crooked Rib, at that time my only published novel.

 

Image Credit: The Guardian

Ralph Waldo Emerson on John Brown's Holy War To End Slavery

On November 18, 1859, John Brown was living under a death sentence for the raid he led on a military arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, an act intended to arm slaves and help them escape the most brutal and bloody of American monstrosities. That night in late autumn, at the Tremont Temple in Boston, Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke passionately about Brown's case at a meeting of those who wanting to provide relief aid for Brown's family. (His remarks are collected in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.) The two men had been friends. Brown was a dinner guest at Emerson's Concord home when the abolitionist was in town for meetings.

In the heat of the political moment, Emerson spoke of public hunger for every detail about Brown's life, which Emerson tidily connected to the many ways we can all relate to "the hero of Harpers Ferry." Emerson told those gathered about Brown's life as a farmer, a legacy in his family that stretched back to his ancestor on the Mayflower. Emerson named the places of birth of Brown and his family, knowing location is yet another way that people can feel a personal connection to him. As he orates, he frequently titles his friend: "Captain John Brown." And he speaks of the man who would be dead by execution in two weeks as an American ideal.

For himself, (Captain John Brown) is so transparent that all men see him through. He is a man to make friends wherever on earth courage and integrity are esteemed, the rarest of heroes, a pure idealist, with no by-ends of his own.

{...]

He believes in the United States, and he conceives the only obstruction to the Union is Slavery, and for that reason, as a patriot, he works for abolition. The governor of Virginia has pronounced his eulogy in a manner that discredits the moderation of our two parties. His own speeches to the court have interested the nation in him. What magnanimity, and what innocent pleading, as of childhood! You remember his words: "If I had interfered on behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or any of their friends, parents, wives, or children, it would all have been right. But I believe that to have interfered as I have done for the despised poor, was not wrong, but right."

It is easy to see what a favorite he will be with history, which plays such pranks with temporary reputations.

Quite prescient indeed. Consider, for example, artist Jacob Lawrence's "Legend of John Brown" series, or the John Brown Museum in Kansas, or the John Brown Wax Museum in West Virginia, or the John Brown House Museum in Rhode Island, or Pennsylvania's John Brown Farm, Tannery, & Museum, which you will find on John Brown Road. The Harpers Ferry raid also figures into Marilynne Robinson's novel, Gilead. His is a story, it seems, that we love to tell.

Emerson goes on, speaking of the mismatch between bureaucracy and idealism.

Nothing can resist the sympathy which all elevated minds must feel with Brown, and through them the whole civilized world: and if he must suffer, he must drag official gentlemen into an immortality most undesirable, of which they have already some disagreeable forebodings. Indeed, it is the reductio ad absurdum of Slavery, when the governor of Virginia is forced to hang a man whom he declares to be a man of the most integrity, truthfulness and courage he has ever met. Is that the kind of man the gallows is built for?

{...}

I said John Brown was an idealist. He believed in his ideas to that extent that he existed to put them all into action; he said 'he did not believe in moral suasion, he believed in putting the thing through.' He saw how deceptive the forms are. We fancy, in Massachusetts, that we are free; yet it seems the government is quite unreliable. Great wealth, great population, men of talent in the executive, on the bench -- all the forms right -- and yet, life and freedom are not safe. Why? Because the judges rely on the forms, and do not, like John Brown, use their eyes to see the facts behind the forms. They assume that the United States can protect its witness or its prisoner.

The great transcendentalist works up some bile, speaking of the differing applications of justice in Massachusetts and in Utah and in Kansas, and he excoriates the uselessness of honoring judges as "venerable and learned" if they cannot ultimately protect the life and freedom of citizens -- to the point where Emerson suggests that "at a pinch, they are no more use than idiots. After a mischance they wring their hands, but they had better never been born." These seem awfully brutal words for a man of the nonviolent persuasion, and I believe it relays the emotion Emerson felt about Brown's case.

A Vermont judge, Hutchinson, who has the Declaration of Independence in his heart; a Wisconsin judge, who knows the laws are for the protection of citizens against kidnappers, is worth a court-house full of lawyers so idolatrous of forms as to let go the substance.

And then, moments later, Emerson cuts off the fire. He walks off the stage with a gracious gesture at the work to be done.

But I am detaining the meeting on matters which others understand better. I hope, then, that in administering relief to John Brown's family, we shall remember all those whom his fate concerns, all who are in sympathy with him, and not forget to aid him in the best way, by securing freedom and independence in Massachusetts.

John Brown hanged on December 2, 1858. Emerson would speak about him again, this time in a speech in Salem in January. But he purposefully didn't speak long. Better, he indicated, "to cling to (John Brown's) history ... or let him speak for himself."

 

Related:

• PBS American Experience: "John Brown's Holy War"
• "The Life and Trial of John Brown"
• Harpers Ferry National Historical Park
• "The Portent: John Brown's Raid in American Memory"
• Bob Dylan's take on the old John Brown song

Horse in the Dark

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone: Horse in the Dark by Vievee Francis is out at last. The second book by a wonderful poet (and friend, and inspiration), it is the winner of the Cave Canem/Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize.  

New Yorkers: Francis is reading from the collection today at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, as part of New York University's public reading series. Gregory Pardlo is introducing; Sheila Carter-Jones and Mitchell L. H. Douglas will also read. You most certainly should be there.

Horse in the Dark is rooted in Texas myth, story, and landscape: the publisher renders these poems as "panhandle folktales" and poet Adrian Matejka describes them as...

...revelations—of memory, of dust, of the cotton and marginalia strung together to make a history. Her poems remind [us] that geography is fluid and camouflaged by our own memories, memories that are often anthropomorphized by the mechanisms of race and place. And when the poems lean sideways to whisper something necessary, or rise up to tell another kind of truth, history is distilled like moonshine, each moment perfect and dangerous.  

Horse in the Dark was recently featured on Indiana Public Radio; Francis read several poems. Francis is also the author of Blue-Tail Fly, a book of poems that turns on the provocations of those on the outside of our histories of war, politics, and nation. Francis is the winner of the Rona Jaffe award, the Kresge Arts in Detroit fellowship, and Callaloo and Cave Canem fellowships. She is a past poet-in-residence at the Alice Lloyd Hall Scholars Program in Ann Arbor. Francis is a graduate of the University of Michigan's MFA program and she is the associate editor of Callaloo.

In this video, she describes poetry as compulsion. Below: her title poem.

Vievee Francis from Art X Detroit on Vimeo.

 

 

Horse in the Dark
Vievee Francis

Brown as a mule, I stomped
through the flocking geese
who thought themselves swans –

but a mule knows its opposite
and so did I. They were no swans.
A horse can be broken by such

beauty. A horse may follow it
down a slope that slices of its hooves.
Beauty, like a restless man in a tall hat,

a wandering boy with teeth white
as if he had never known meat,
or the score of water over stones.

I leapt up for the rain-cloud
shaped like a darker horse,
jumped a too-tall fence believing

a horse could be loved more
and ridden less. Until we fell
apart, the horse I was and I.

We who had prayed for a heaven
of toothless-grass and barley –
how did we untwine? When

did my long face pull itself back
into this flat form? When
did words replace neigh?

Two legs took my trot.
And I, freed of my horse-self
who lay dead to the greening world,

ran through the clover. On two legs

ran and ran – 

Speaking: Katherine Boo

 

"Going in, I didn’t think so much about what I could add, but what I didn’t know: how people get out of poverty. As a reporter, you know the tropes of how stories on poverty work in any country. A reporter will go to an NGO and say, 'Tell me about the good work that you’re doing and introduce me to the poor people who represent the kind of help you give'” It serves to streamline the storytelling, but it gives you a lopsided cosmos in which almost every poor person you read about is involved with a NGO helping him. Our understanding of poverty and how people escape from poverty, in any country, is quite distorted.

{...}

"When I pick a story, I’m very much aware of the larger issues that it’s illuminating. But one of the things that I, as a writer, feel strongly about is that nobody is representative. That’s just narrative nonsense. People may be part of a larger story or structure or institution, but they’re still people. Making them representative loses sight of that. Which is why a lot of writing about low-income people makes them into saints, perfect in their suffering. But you take Abdul (in my book, Beyond the Beautiful Forevers), for instance. He’s diffident, he’s selfish, he’s not very verbal. Even his own family considers him charmless. But when the reader meets him, they sense he’s a real person, that he’s not a construct. And even Manju—who’s good and generous in many ways—she’s good and generous as a way of getting back at her mother. The more righteous she can be, the better she can stick it to her mom."

 

-- Katherine Boo, interviewed in Guernica on reporting poverty

 

Katherine Boo long covered poverty and social issues for The Washington Post: she won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2000 for her series on public homes for mentally retarded people. She is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and is the author of the much-celebrated first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Boo, a Washington D.C. native, is also a past recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" grant and a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing.

Emily Dickinson: Second Image of Poet Has (Almost Surely) Been Found

Look at her, the one on the left: a mature, healthy 30-year-old woman. She was well within her life of writing rich, textured poems. She's sitting alongside the woman who may well have been her lover.

Compare it with what had been the only known photo of Emily Dickinson, taken in 1847 -- she was sixteen then, and about to enter the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where she'd stay only a year and resist much of the religious formalities and pieties. She had not yet begun to write poetry.

 

The second image, which complicates the narrative of Dickinson as a haunting wisp of a thing that lived as a recluse, was uncovered by a collector in Springfield, Massachusetts. Scholars at Amherst College, who have been examining the image since 1995 but only just recently made it public, believe it is legitimate. There's even an opthamological report you can look over, and a video from Amherst that overlays the two faces. I'm no expert, but even at a glance, if you compare the images, feature by feature, it certainly seems to be the case: see how her left eye is slightly hooded in both images, and how her eyebrows have the same line. But researchers are going further. According to the Associated Press, they are now "trying to get higher resolution pictures of the dress in the picture, to see if it matches fabric samples known to belong to Dickinson." More comparisons are detailed here, at the Dickinson online archive.

The new image is a daguerreotype from about 1859. Dickinson, in an out-of-style dress for the year, sits with her friend Kate Scott Turner, who is identifiable from other images and makes it more likely that she, as a known friend of Dickinson, is likely to be with her here. (It has been rumored since the 1950s [!] that the two were romantic partners, deeply in love with one another.) When the image was captured, Dickinson had already begun copying her poems into her famous little booklets, with the pages sewn together. Dickinson was afire: this was perhaps the greatest creative period of her life, which makes her appearance in this picture -- assertive, serene -- all the more interesting). By 1865, she'd written nearly 1,100 poems. She circulated them widely among her friends and mentors, though her family would not discover her booklets, brimming with 1,800 unpublished poems, until after her death in 1885.

At the time of this second image, she wasn't long from writing, for example,"Before I put my eye out" (336):

Before I got my eye put out –

I liked as well to see

As other creatures, that have eyes –

And know no other way –

But were it told to me, Today,

That I might have the Sky

For mine, I tell you that my Heart

Would split, for size of me –

The Meadows – mine –

The Mountains – mine –

All Forests – Stintless stars –

As much of noon, as I could take –

Between my finite eyes –

The Motions of the Dipping Birds –

The Morning’s Amber Road –

For mine – to look at when I liked,

The news would strike me dead –

So safer – guess – with just my soul

Opon the window pane

Where other creatures put their eyes –

Incautious – of the Sun –

 

Related:

• Emily Dickinson Museum
• Emily Dickinson - The Poetry Foundation

How Do You Translate Haiku?

My review of Stephen Addiss's The Art of Haiku: Its History Through Poems and Paintings By Japanese Masters is live over at The Christian Science Monitor. I was particularly intrigued by the question of haiku translation, and particularly with how Addiss works to open up that process to readers even as he narrates the sweeping history of visual and textual haiku art. (Hint: it's not just the 5-7-5 formula.) From the review:

Idiosyncrasies in the originals, such as pause marks called kijeri (literally, cutting words) leave room for translators to make judgment calls on how to evoke rhythm or amplification. Addiss encourages readers to sound out the Japanese originals – and provides the tools to do so – to hear the music, and he does so with a grace that does not undercut the worth of the gorgeous English versions. He arms readers with a wealth of context on how, for example, the Japanese word for “color” and “passion” is the same. Like the art of haiku itself, Addiss invites readers into the poems, amplifying them with their own experiences and, in a way, collaborating with the poet to complete the poem.

There is even an appendix on translation, which sets forth yet more choices in moving haiku between Japanese and English. Addiss presents a haiku by Chiyo in Japanese and lists each word with its literal meaning before indicating that, “Now it is up to you: Will you try to make this a 5-7-5 poem in English? Will you change the line order? Will you use any plurals? What words and rhythms in English do you think can convey this scene best?”

What might seem gimmicky is actually an endearing manifestation of how Addiss writes this book as a meeting-of-equals between author, readers, artists, and poets.