Five Poems from "Opera Buffa"
by Tomaž Šalamun
Translated from the Slovenian by Matthew Moore
To open the faucets, Anastasia,
will bring you to naught
nowhere. We watched the heat.
A figure is a face, a part,
motif. Sulfur on a barrel.
Comments on Television
by Judita Šalgo
Translated from the Serbian by John K. Cox
My first window on the world, several decades ago, looked out onto a wall, onto bulletin boards with newspapers. Now that I need to say what I see out this window, what’s there? The wall has been demolished; behind it yawns an abyss.
Missing
by Anton Hur
Gunnie went missing in Chile. It is not the kind of place a young Korean man goes missing in. Jungmin, one of his best friends at university, has been on the phone for three days. The Korean consulate, the authorities at the University of Santiago, and anyone else he could get on the phone insist he left on his own.
Libations in Saturday's Waters: A Series of Estranged Libations
by Alina Stefanescu
Ancient Sumerians spent their afterlives in eternity eating dust. Generous descendants would pour liquid into their ancestors' graves with clay pipes to unparch their lips, to moisten their mouths. Thus water was added to dirt, making soil: the breath of creation.
Lord of the Cherries
by Kathrin Schmidt
Translated from the German by Susan Vickerman
It was in the times when, day in day out, the only thing I cared about, looking back now, was being an Exemplary Child of the German Democratic Republic; the times when our schoolbooks contained a verdict on the previous war, but only as a thing long in the past – a past which surely couldn’t have been the one our parents had lived through.
Pictures of Galina
by Herb Randall
We arrive at the improbably named village of Krushchevaya Nikitovka, once the home of a nobleman by that name, and now of Olga’s parents. She swears the village takes its name from that seventeenth-century boyar and not the Soviet leader of the 1950s, but I can’t help but wonder.
"Dry Tree" and Other Poems
by Lauren Davis
Neither I
nor the seasons
forget
what was before.
Only each of us make
a joyous rebirth
of what ourselves have figured out.
Longing, Troth, and Anti-Semitism in Gregor Von Rezzori
by Anthony Hennen
Austria-Hungary is a relatively hidden empire in the American conscience. Unless one has ancestral ties to it, or found their way to its former lands during a summer trip to Europe, it disappears under the swinging blade that divides western and eastern Europe.
People of the Puszta
by David Auerbach
The puszta is the Hungarian term given to the Carpathian Basin, the vast steppe of southwestern Hungary: sprawling yet flat and empty.
“In the air, that’s where my roots are”: An Interview with Alta Ifland
Interviewed by Kate Tsurkan
After the regime fell, we discovered that the Secret Police had installed a microphone behind our bed—yes! Apparently, the dictator’s wife got a kick from listening to the dissidents’ sex lives.
In Search of Memory: A Review of Olesya Yaremchuk’s Our Others (2020, Ibidem)
Reviewed by Liliia Shutiak
Translated from the Ukrainian by Kate Tsurkan
Our Others contains the testimonies of people from minority groups devoted to preserving their traditions, creating a special universe of multicultural diversity. Big and small Ukrainian cities alike are proud of this diversity, but at the same time, it is constantly receding further and further into the past.
Anya
by Anastasiia Ovcharova
Translated from the Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan
I remember our first meeting well. I was washing my hands with ice water in the procedure room when she came in to get acquainted, asking what language would be more convenient for me to speak. I replied that I understood both Ukrainian and Russian very well, “So, you can speak what suits you better.”
"A Kind of Black Magic": An Interview with Marek Šindelka
Interviewed by Michael Stein
I think that's one of the main forces of literature, that you can go inside. Other arts like film are on the surface. You're never able to reach the inner world, and even literally the innards.
"We are only now beginning to pay attention to language": An Interview with Oksana Lutsyshyna
Interviewed by Sandra Joy Russell
I was always innately feminist before I knew the word or the notion. The Soviet world was quite harsh and unforgiving of femaleness, of the condition of being a human being who is female.
Ruptures and Windows: A Review of Tereza Riedlbauchová's Paris Notebook (2020, The Visible Spectrum)
Reviewed by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler
For all the flesh this book rips apart, it does so as part of a subtler project of fragmentation. As the translator puts it in his thoughtful afterword, “Tereza Riedlbauchová’s intensely passionate poems explore the thresholds and ruptures of bodies and the borders between the physical world and the imagination.”
War is Closer Than You Think: A Review of Serhiy Zhadan's The Orphanage (2021, Yale University Press)
Reviewed by Khrystia Vengryniuk
Translated from the Ukrainian by Yulia Lyubka
Serhiy Zhadan’s The Orphanage does not teach and should not teach, and even more so, should not indicate what side to take in the war. The author, as sad as it may seem, described an ordinary Ukrainian who is marginal, detached, a stranger, the "other" in their own country.
Breaking Through Historical Oblivion: A Review of Sergei Lebedev's "The Goose Fritz" (2019, New Vessel Press)
Reviewed by Dmytro Kyyan
The fate of Goose Fritz in Russia following its publication is rather unusual. In an interview with radio 'Deutschlandfunk', Sergei Lebedev – who now lives in Germany – said that it was “as if [the novel] suddenly disappeared”.
War and Forgetting: On Sofia Andrukhovych's Amadoka (2020, The Old Lion Publishing House)
by Bohdana Neborak
At the Solovki prison camp, more than one thousand Ukrainian prisoners were executed between 27th October and 4th November 1937. How political persecution and mass murder on such a large scale was even possible remains a question.
