I can’t remember why “boomerang” brings me so painfully into my own sights. The medicine has stopped nothing, nor was it intended to. These twin jars of split peas, I boil them for days. They will not soften, as I do. I try to work up the nerve to listen to some music. Is it so wrong to end a sentence with a pronoun? I haven’t licked a stamp for years, not with this tongue. You have to run to taste the wind, says my dog from his leash, says my friend from Orofino, to his. Chase the grass, then, in the wind down a long hill. Suffering is not, as it turns, its own schadenfreude. My friend stayed wrong about that. My stomach: still tender where she shot it, though I did not feel anything at the time. I felt nothing. It was quicker than the fall of an eyelash. The beauty berry bushes have spread, and their day-glo fruit hangs in bends throughout the forest. Words that matter can’t be words.
Further Reading
Kaddish
by Matthew Isaac Sobin
In “Kaddish”, Matthew Isaac Sobin considers language’s limits in both prayer and poetry as the speaker delves into the difficulties of myriad types of translating: not just meaning, but also spirituality, ritual, intimacy, grief. What suffices? When grief calls us, what language becomes enough?
“Let us bless transliteration
and chant
congregate right to left
to crest cold wind
[..]
Is one enough
to reach
the ear of God?”
Jorge Volpi interviewed by Okla Elliott: WAYS OF EXPLORING THE WORLD (english/spanish)
The following interview took place in Spanish via email between April and June 2010. English translation: Jorge Luis Volpi Escalante was born in the tumultuous year of 1968, in Mexico City. He studied law and literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and received a PhD in Spanish philology from The University of Salamanca […]
M.
by Sofia Ciriello, translated from the Italian by Scott Belluz
There was a crack in the wooden floor underneath the living room table. In fact, it had always been there. The split was barely noticeable, widening in the middle to form an oval, almost like an almond. Sara had looked at it many times but that day was different: the light touched it differently so […]
