Fragments from Moon Ring by Annie Le Brun, trans. from French by Alicen Weida
Children of this century, avert your gaze. Lips are no longer on every word. Words climb pell-mell onto the backs of things. And things, wandering in the desert of their own erosion, seek to bribe our bones, the uncertain keepers of a fortified mirage... Read More
Excerpt from Agnomia by Róbert Gál, trans. from Slovak by David Short
Even errantry has paths to follow. One could speak of being freed of the compassion that necessarily follows from circumstances. In her case, this means that when they’re dancing and she’s twirling around them she’s the only one who’s not dancing... Read More
The Lydian by Théodore de Banville, trans. from French by Patricia Worth
Not long ago and not far away, a sculptor in love with his statue, as in the days of Pygmalion the King of Cyprus, reproduced the same miracle and brought her to life, transforming the marble into living flesh through which glorious blood flowed by his will and the force of his overpowering desire... Read More
Saint-Ouen | Stalingrad by Marie Silkeberg, trans. from Swedish by Kelsi Vanada
Rashomon. The Demon’s Gate you say. / I understood that it had opened. / Only a few more seconds. And it would be opened wide. / Time would stratify. / It snowed. The first snow fell... Read More
Excerpts from My Heart Laid Bare by Charles Baudelaire, trans. from French by Rainer J. Hanshe
Love can be derived from a generous feeling: the taste for prostitution; but it is soon corrupted by the taste for property. Love wants to abandon itself, to confound itself with its victim, as the conqueror with the vanquished, & yet preserve the privileges of the conqueror...
Read More
Three Poems by Sharron Hass, trans. from Hebrew by Tsipi Keller
Honestly, the tapping of feet and the clatter of silverware / will hush in me the great loss. When you leave the house / will be filled with the glory of exhaustion to mean: / Did I have the strength to withstand the severity of visions, / or is this fatigue the oblation to the... Read More
Nature vs. Fertility, God vs. Science by Philippe Sollers, trans. from French by Armine Kotin Mortimer
I have no choice but to think that I have been desired by the Dealer in Death, just as the very ugliest of the least of the believers can always tell herself, with satisfaction, that God so wished it. Death, as a result, becomes my natural and social contract, instead of being a tragedy... Read More
Metro by Tony Duvert, trans. from French by S. C. Delaney and Agnès Potier
You sit down on a bench. It’s not a seat, but rather a sign suggesting a position of rest: half crouched, thigh-bones level, back squared or hunched toward the knees, pelvis crushed between both weights—a scale’s balance beyond all use. Migraine. The head gone, migraine within its space... Read More
Three Poems by Ivonne Gordon Carrera, trans. from Spanish by Cindy Rinne
A secret lodges itself in the ellipsis. / The dream eclipses my body into yours. / The suns multiply themselves in thousands of eyelids. / Green disguises us as fluid dreams. / We suspend from the lung of the wind. / The burnt stone, our witness, blesses the sacredness / of our name... Read More
Acéphale or the Initiatory Illusion: Paule Thévenin and André Masson, trans. from French by Rainer J. Hanshe
In the mid-1930s, during a flagitious political era, Georges Bataille founded the journal Acéphale as a protest against the horrors of Nazism, all forms of fascism, and decadent democracy. In addition to serving politically as a contra-force to the populist spirit of the times, Acéphale was also to function aesthetically as a Dionysiac contagion... Read More