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Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator from the French. She was the recipient of the 2019 French Voices Grand Prize and a finalist for the 2019 BTBA. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, and elsewhere.

by Marcus Malte, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan and Tom Roberge (Restless Books)

First sentences aren’t everything. Except they kind of are, aren’t they? This is the opener of The Boy:

Even the invisible and the immaterial have a name, but he does not.

“He” is the mute, feral boy who drives Marcus Malte’s sprawling novel, which spans thirty years, much of France, one world war, and the earliest harbingers of the second one. The Boy won’t say a single word.

Occasionally, I will read a novel without looking at the front inside flap or back cover, going in blind. I wish I’d done that with The Boy. The book starts like a grim, dystopian tale: the Boy lives with his mother in the wilderness that still remains in turn-of-the-century France. She dies, leaving him to fend for himself able to hunt, fish, climb, hide, etc. but with no conception of his fellow man. What follows is the Boy’s journey toward (into) society, slowly leaving behind woods and rivers for farms, running water, prejudice, and worse.

This part is long—so long that a reader might justifiably be concerned about a Castaway-esque monotony: boy hunts rabbit, boy skins rabbit, boy eats rabbit. But no fear, Malte is an expert craftsman, his plot quietly accelerating despite the painstaking detail accorded the Boy’s physical environment. The author also knows to give us breaks, offering piercing observations about the human condition:

He has not yet asked himself whether [mankind] is a good thing in the end. Whether it’s a desirable thing. He has not yet told himself that it’s meaningless.

And then cuts to this, which I can confidently describe as my favorite literary passage about frogs:

He eats the frogs dusted with rosemary flowers.
He eats the frogs sprinkled with savory.
He eats the frogs rubbed with sage leaves.
He saves the last bone of the last skeleton and places it in his matchbox as a kind of talisman.

Had I not read the synopsis, or glimpsed the cover of the book, I wouldn’t have known The Boy is a war story. I wouldn’t have known because after starting as a pseudo-post-apocalypse novel, unexpectedly, after pages of frog-hunting and tree-climbing and apple-picking, The Boy gets steamy, pages and pages of sex, until, finally, we get it: this is a book about war. The author tells us as much on page 307:

This is the story of those who will die.

The first two sections of the book—the journey from wilderness to society, and a sexual awakening—could be novels apart. But the war part is what gets you, is what got me. The Boy is punctuated with historical asides, frequently as stark lists of dates and names—just often enough for effect. In 1912, “Eva Braun comes into the world.” The same year,

Jean Baptise Blumet, twenty-six years old, dishwasher, perish[es] off the coast of Newfoundland, at 41° 46’ N latitude and 50° 14’ W longitude, in the shipwreck of the unsinkable transatlantic liner baptized Titanic.

Malte interweaves this historical framework with visceral portraits of the battlefield. Death, dismemberment, disease, all of it; but also, monotony, resignation, boredom, terror, the savagery that forms, or rather rises from within. All with a protagonist who never speaks.

There’s little doubt Malte gave his translators a difficult challenge. To their credit, you can’t tell there were two of them—Emma Ramadan and Tom Roberge, who, incidentally, are married. Or not incidentally. Having co-translated with both friends and acquaintances, I can easily believe that the intimacy of marriage fosters an especially seamless translation, though perhaps the arguments over semantic choices are somewhat more intense. I like to picture chilly debates over morning coffee: innards or viscera, dear?

The Boy is rife with translation pitfalls. French has the perfect noncommittal pronoun—on, which can be understood as either “they” or “we.” If you opt for they, you risk removing the universality of a text; we, and you might eliminate necessary distance. In this novel, imagine a world-weary narrator, he’s told this story before, or some version of it; he uses on constantly. Ramadan and Roberge smartly chose to translate it as “we.” As a result, as with the French, the reader is involved, attentive.

Now the boy has his bearings, he recognizes his guideposts, he is back on his path. [. . .] Towards what destination? To what end? Deep down, we don’t really care to know, but we catch ourselves hoping that they’ll reach it.

Verb tenses in the book are tricky too, switching from present to past in a way that shouldn’t function, grammatically speaking, yet does. These passages can’t have been easy to translate, but again, Ramadan and Roberge look to have navigated them with ease. The same for transitions between second person and third.

I’m always wary when cautioned to patience before even starting a book, as Julie Orringer does in her preface to The Boy. But to be fair, patience is required. The novel isn’t perfect. To start, it’s thirty or forty pages too long. And at times Malte can be too clever by a tad. The Boy is teeming with obscure references—music, history, art, literature (and smutty literature! the smuttiest of nineteenth-century French poetry and prose, folks!) But the author is easily forgiven. A French reviewer, Christine Ferniot, wrote that Malte “has both nerve and well-placed ambition.” Well-placed being the important bit, I think. This is hardly the sole novel to tell of a boy returning from war, no longer the same, to a girl, no longer the same. And yet, it’s all in how the tale is told, right?

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��by Virginie Despentes, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan (France, Feminist Press)

Virginie Despentes’s reputation rests on her ability to grab readers with enticing and controversial topics that are also incisive. She isn’t afraid to weave the ugly into her works. Her punk feminism tackles subjects of rape, pornography, and the precariousness of a sexualized femininity. Her recent trilogy, Vernon Subutex, has made her one of France’s most important contemporary writers. Books like Baise-Moi (1994) and her collection of essays, King Kong Theory (2006), are cult favorites that helped Despentes break into the mainstream. In the opening lines of King Kong Theory, Despentes identifies her audience and the thematic unity of her works: “I am writing as an ugly one for the ugly ones: the old hags, the dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckable, the neurotics, the psychos, for all those girls who don’t get a look in the universal market of the consumable chick.”

Pretty Things (Feminist Press 2018), translated by Emma Ramadan, is a take on the ideas espoused in her essays; it concerns itself with capitalism, the sexualization of the female body and the internal and external violence that these elements can generate. At first Pretty Things can be a difficult read. The characters seem cruel and detached, self-serving Parisians up to no good. When we first meet Claudine and Nicolas, they are plotting to use Claudine’s twin sister, Pauline, as a stand-in for her in singing auditions. Claudine’s dream is to become pop star, but she is the pretty one, while Pauline is the talented sister.

Yet, in the first thirty pages of her novel, Despentes manages to do something incredible—amidst the anger and hatefulness that the twins exude, she reveals their vulnerability. The book seems to hold a mirror up to the reader, asking us to question our judgements. Those first few pages manage to both set up the central scheme and to show Claudine reaching into her past as she anxiously waits to hear about Pauline’s gig from her friend Nicolas. The story briefly shifts to memories of her childhood. Her anger at her father for being abusive and at her mother for being weak suddenly present a profound issue: the powerlessness of a child in an abusive household. And just like that, Despentes gives the reader a moment of sympathy and understanding—only to jolt the reader out of it immediately.

Claudine commits suicide during this reverie and Pauline’s plans change as she instantly decides to inhabit her sister’s life, pursuing a record deal while embodying the kind of femininity her sister represents. There is no mourning; the substitution is fast and easy. The shock of this moment is eluded by Pauline’s new plans. Despentes constructs an unsettling and off-putting response to one of the main characters’ death, but it isn’t until this death takes place that we get the real story—the one about sacrifices for the sake of spectacle. The double in literature often relies on a polarity of good and evil but we don’t get that with the Pauline/Claudine paradigm. The characters exemplify clichés, but they are not flat archetypes. This leaves room to explore the real antagonist: the feminine ideal.

The ultimate takeover in the novel is the appropriation of femininity by corporations that sell it back to us as perfectly packaged goods, sometimes makeup and other times a pop star. Even Despentes’s writing—short, punchy descriptions—give the text a sense that we are watching a performance, something put together for our pleasure and immediate consumption. Pauline’s decision to enter the world of pop stars and fame only pushes her further into a precarious definition of femininity. Pretty Things is pertinent because it tackles the too-familiar uproar against the workings of the media industry—the situations that women find themselves exposed to simply for being women.

Pauline condemns her dead sister’s lifestyle, despite being a usurper of it. Claudine’s way of dressing and overt sexuality are characteristics that Pauline must take on in order to be a believable Claudine. There’s a comical scene where Pauline first walks out in heels in the streets of Paris trying to get to the metro. She’s dressed in Claudine’s much-too-tight shirt and mini skirt, unable to gracefully handle heels. Though it’s funny, Pauline quickly turns it into a scathing critique of the way her sister presented herself to the world. She resents that her sister made herself a subject of stares and nasty remarks by men. But as this scene is taking place, it’s clear that Despentes is working to highlight the many forms of aggressions women endure, the reasons behind the rage. There’s Pauline’s rage against her sister for using her body as a means of attention, then there’s the more nuanced rage against men who come into the picture as “good guys,” as saviors of the feminine body:

Did the mother of this old, very gallant gentleman dote on him to such an extent that he now believed all women exist to be nice to him, looking simply to “please” him? Does he find it pleasing that she’s dressed like a whore, should she be flattered? She repeats that she wants to be alone, she gets more and more disagreeable, he doesn’t take it badly, instead he’s amused, as if she were a child. She pushes him away violently—“Let go of me right now”—and all chivalry stops, through clenched teeth, without backing away: “Don’t come crying back to me if you get raped in a back alley, you hear me?” She repeats that he needs to back away, he’s suffocating her, this old man, with his kindness that only wants one thing, to screw her with his mangled and disgusting dick, and she has a responsibility to be friendly, he still won’t leave, his eyes have changed, now he’s saying things he doesn’t even mean: “What are you doing in the Goutte d’Or, huh? I’ve seen girls from around here, you like to get fucked by black guys, huh?” And she shoves him with both hands, forgets her heels and her skirt, once again people are staring, he’s not discouraged, he says to her in a low voice, “You don’t want to see mine? If you like getting fucked by guys with big cocks, you’ll be satisfied, you’ll see. Is that it, huh, you like big black cocks?”

At this point, I couldn’t help but think of the many times women encounter these situations. The compliments that quickly turn violent. The many good guys who won’t stop until a woman submits to their goodness. Despentes takes this topic head on in its many forms throughout the novel. There is the production team who transforms Pauline into a sex symbol for the camera. But there is also the consumer, who is convinced that the other exists to prove to them their own power and virility.

Capitalizing on desire and manufacturing femininity are the central topics of this book. Despentes inverses the meaning of “pretty,” and the reader is forced to grapple with the implications of having and being pretty things. What is considered disgusting or offensive constantly changes for women according to the product du jour. The feminine becomes grotesque because it is manufactured by the popstar factories, the agents and executives that literally, and figuratively, fuck Pauline into stardom. Pauline quickly learns that everything she does can be turned into publicity—that her narrative can be arranged and manufactured as a means for production. The cost, however, is that it all becomes a performance: sex and desire, daily life, and the stage, all become one. The boundaries between fame and self break and meaning is lost. Pauline left her identity behind once, when Pretty she took over Claudine’s, but it is truly when she becomes a star that she loses her entire self. “It takes a lot of work to sell that shit. She is surrounded by herself. Never has she existed so little, no life, nothing. But she’s everywhere. People have violent words for her, she’s the bitch you love to hate.”

Why should Pretty Things win? First, Molly Crabapple does a damned good job with this cover and that should be reason enough to pick up this work. But really, it’s not often we get a narrativization of the abuses of the female body through characters that are radically unapologetic of their take on femininity. Pauline and Claudine are not damsels in distress; they recognize that the “good guys” in these narratives are just as complicit as the outwardly abusive men they encounter. It’s a fun and tragic novel about a feverish dream for power over the body, as misguided as the actions can be, there’s so much room for reflection. There’s no surprise that Despentes suddenly finds herself a household name in France. She’s a writer for our times.

by Ana Ristović, translated from the Serbian by Steven Teref and Maja Teref (Serbia, Zephyr Press)

Very occasionally, reading a book in translation can feel like I’m sitting across from a friend having coffee, and I get a little start when I remember that the book was written by someone I’ve never met, in a country I’ve never been to, and in a language I’ve never heard spoken aloud. So familiar are the sentiments, so inhabitable are the ideas, so comforting is the communality between my lived experience and the words on the page.

Ana Ristović’s Directions for Use is full of sexy, coy, ruthless poems about the body, about a woman’s experience, about love and lovemaking, about the life of a poet, about the underbelly of the day to day. Her poems are funny and terrifying all at once. seem on the surface to be deceivingly lighthearted or perhaps even lovely. But there is something darker lurking beneath the surface to stir up your ways of thinking about everyday occurrences.

As her translators Steven Teref and Maja Teref mention in their foreword, Ristović refreshingly breaks from the “Western stereotype of Eastern European writing as chronicling political persecution, depressing tones and bleak lives . . . The poet represents a new generation.” In a translation that finely emulates Ristović’s rhythms and peculiar word choices meant to accommodate seemingly nonsensical ideas that when read in this book somehow make perfect sense, this new poetry shines.

In “Circling Zero,” Ristović describes female masturbation as caught up in the female experience.

We are independent women.
We breathe asthmatically
while waiting for new love.
We pop pills
of unfulfilled promises. We drown in murky dreams.
Twenty-four hours a day we painfully make love
to a migraine and forgive her
because she’s female.

. . .

Independent, we claim, more than ever.
Yet during lonely nights, in our tight vulva
more and more, we insert a small magical finger,
as if placing a bullet into the chamber
which refuses to fire.
And we smile with sadness in dreamless dreams.
And the safe hand, circling
the soft zero.

Other treatments of women’s bodies and experiences are equally jarring and yet immediately comprehensible, as in “The Body,” when she describes “a woman’s bones shuffling across the street / like fragile musical instruments.” And in “ Little Zebras”:

When she opens her eyes she gazes at aluminum clouds; snow drifts through her skin. Glass pins
sink into the little canyons of her pupils and hoarfrost
spills from her smiling lips. She covers her face
with squeaky palms.

The author of six books of poetry, the translator of over 20 books of Slovenian literature into Serbian, and the recipient of numerous European awards, Ristović has an uncanny way of describing the outside and the inside at the same time, of seeing the world from one step more removed than the rest of us and showing us what we’re missing. Reading her poems, I felt like she was winking at me, showing me glimpses of just how connected we all are.

by Johannes Heldén, translated from the Swedish by Kirkwood Adams, Elizabeth Clark Wessel, and Johannes Heldén (Sweden, Argos Books)

Johannes Heldén’s Astroecology is an art object, and merely describing it won’t do justice to the weighty beauty of it you feel when holding the book in your hands. A compromise: Some of the images and accompanying text can be viewed It’s a hardcover book of photographs accompanied by short texts that are in turn accompanied by footnotes, translations of images into words and words into other words. The glossary at the end is itself a continuation of the book’s poetry, with entries like “horizon, as far as the human eye could see” and “loneliness, standing outside the flock. Walking towards the school building at the end of summer. Darkness in the storage room. The sound of footsteps. Laughter.”

Heldén describes nature and the world around us, but there’s something sinister lurking in these pages. Flipping through the book, it might seem like a collection of beautiful photographs of plants, animals, landscapes in nature, but the accompanying text subtly explores nature’s brutal confrontation with us. Humankind’s negative influence on the world seeps into the pages. A picture of a tree stump is captioned “October 10, 2011, a 24-hour long clip of the engine sound from the fictional starship U.S.S. Enterprise was uploaded to YouTube.” An aerial photograph of trees is accompanied by a description of the roar of engines and drones crowding out the sound of the wind, crowding out even the sound of breathing. We encounter a dead dormouse, there’s an apocalyptic atmosphere: The only light: the emergency generator of the hospital.

Heldén’s glossary plants us firmly in the future: “badger, Meles meles, four-legged animate object (last confirmed sighting in 2027).” “blue whale, the last blue whale was hunted into a shallow bay in the Arctic in 2026, where she beached and expired after several hours struggle to return to deep waters.” Every animal mentioned is now extinct. And often their former actions and movements are described as though the glossary were someone’s diary, keeping record of the specific habits of various insects and animals around his or her property. What kind of future is this?

Is it the end of the world? Are we the end of the world? The layers of Heldén’s text are so all-encompassing and in such intense juxtaposition that sometimes we forget this is not a simple documenting of someone’s garden and their pleasant discoveries captured in photographs. Soot from burnt-out stars falling slowly to the ground. I tried to write their existence, their consciousness, like code into the interspace.

The text is also woven with Heldén’s sporadic philosophical musings, inner thoughts inextricably bound up in the outside world. A question: what would a secret language be called interspersed between raindrops. These are Heldén’s photographs, and through them he brings us into his construction of a future universe. For Astroecology is, essentially, a work of science fiction shattered into images, text, intertext, the pieces coming together to expand the genre, both of science fiction and of poetry.

by Eleni Vakalo, translated from Greek by Karen Emmerich (Greece, Ugly Duckling Presse)

I would happily and readily make the argument that of all the books on the BTBA poetry longlist this year, Eleni Vakalo’s Before Lyricism was without a doubt the most difficult to translate. Made up of six book-length poems, the poems in Before Lyricism get at a version of reality that can only be accessed by making someone hear and see an image through the written word.

The shape of the forest has
The shape of a jellyfish
That you catch in your hands and it slips through
As a wave
Pushes it out
Perhaps this happens
Because
It moves
Without
Opening seashores
That are white
And
The fresh ones glisten
While the others
Are white all through
You’ll find too the bones of the drowned

Now I’ll push out my heart
But no
Since jellyfish
Have no blood

If I pretended for so long to be writing poems, it was only so I could speak of the forest.

These poems don’t have a setting or a thread of movement. The most accurate thing would be to say that these poems are set in Vakalo’s mind and in our minds and nowhere else. Poems that seem to start out as straightforward descriptions peel apart in our hands as we read, every line taking another layer with it so that what we are left with is a series of jarring images that reverberate with an energy of abstraction. Her translator Karen Emmerich describes in an excellent interview for Tupelo Quarterly, “That’s what all of reading Vakalo feels like to me: being in the sea in a moment of utter calm, and then finding that the water I’m standing in is so many more things than I thought—and the calm of the sea and of me becomes host to an undercurrent, if not of fear, then of astonishment at the unfamiliar.”

At night people betray one another
And when the forest
Begins
To smother you
You cry out
As if
You were not in
The forest

Vakalo pushes the Greek language to its limits, stretching its syntax and playing up its room for ambiguity. As Emmerich elaborates in her translator’s note at the end of the book, “Before Lyricism is intensely inward-looking in its disruption of conventional grammar and syntax, which render it resistant to familiar modes of translation . . . Greek is an inflected language in which word endings indicate grammatical function . . . Writers can manipulate these elements in such a way as to push their texts to the limits of intelligibility . . . Vakalo does just that: she intensifies the particular forms of grammatical ambiguity available in Greek by recasting its syntax in unexpected ways.”

If this poem is filled with the beating of wings
It’s because you hear birds
You don’t just see them

Emmerich spent over a decade translating these poems. The difficulty, she says in her Tupelo Quarterly interview, is that “what Vakalo is doing in this regard simply isn’t something that English can do. The languages aren’t the same. In many places, given the tyranny of the word order in English, there are clear subjects or objects for my verbs, in places where there aren’t for hers. What I tried to do instead was just let other forms of ambiguity exist, syntactical, grammatical, interpretive . . . I wanted there not to be a clear image, always, but rather a sense of something . . . I just had to let myself go, mess with all the pieces and make something I thought was equally disturbing, mixing issues of innocence and guilt in a similar way of effacing the boundary between actor, action, and effect . . . Yet the cumulative impression is somehow still comprehensible. There’s a point, a thing to understand but not untangle.”

Striking the spider
The spasm as it falls
And its legs contract and tangle
In three closed corners
The whole spider shrinking
Death when it suddenly comes
With a swift pain from the strike
And that power you have in your hands
The image of these moments gathers
As passing you saw it on the wall
Creeping with its eight legs
In an odd rhythmic arrangement
The rapid change
In the scene, starting with the strike,
Transforms the innocent into intent.

Emmerich’s stunning translation is nothing short of miraculous in its ability to evoke the same feelings of both alarming confusion and immediate comprehension in her English readers as Vakalo was able to evoke in her Greek readers. This book shimmers with a new layer of reality, with new poetic possibilities, and it is a gift to English readers to be able to access both.

This week’s music is by The New Pornographers.

As always, feel free to send any and all comments or questions to: threepercentpodcast@gmail.com. Also, if there are articles you’d like us to read and analyze (or just make fun of), send those along as well.

And if you like the podcast, tell a friend and rate us or leave a review on iTunes!

The entry below is the first about the poetry longlist, and is written by Emma Ramadan, translator from the French and co-owner of in Providence, RI.

<b”In Praise of Defeat“:https://archipelagobooks.org/book/in-praise-of-defeat/ by Abdellatif Laâbi, translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Morocco, Archipelago Books)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 53%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 11%

Abdellatif Laâbi’s In Praise of Defeat, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, is an 800+ page proof of poetic genius. I’m not sure I’ve ever read another book of poetry in translation where the electric connection between translator and author produced such gripping results. The book contains a selection of poems, chosen by the author, of his poetic work from the late 1960s to 2014, aka his entire poetic range.

hear the clash of languages
in my mouth
the thirst for new births
hear the swish of sweat
at my underarms
the ripple of my biceps
driven by my inner fauna
springing from caves
pen bloodied
my head against every wall
my breath at the gallop
spewing planets
in its eruptions

If you’ve heard Laâbi’s name before, it might be because he co-founded the journal Souffles in 1966, during Morocco’s “years of lead,” as a way for artists and intellectuals to wage a written war for democratic ideals under a monarchy persecuting independent and progressive thinking. King Hassan II began implementing torture and imprisonment, and poets were not immune. Abdellatif Laâbi was himself tortured and then imprisoned for more than eight years for his political beliefs and writings. Many of the poems in In Praise of Defeat were in fact written while he was serving his sentence in Kenitra prison.

Write, write, never stop. Tonight and all the nights to come. Another night when I can do nothing but write, confront this silence that provokes me with its idiom of exile. I brace myself to the full to explore the voice of the prison night.

These poems give us an idea of what it means to be a Moroccan poet. For Laâbi and his compatriots, politics and poetry were one and the same, every poet a combatant, spurred on by the desperate necessity of continued resistance on the page.

The sun is dying
with human murmurs on its lips
Chaos will come and clear the stage
of this old tragedy
told a thousand times
by an idiot
in an empty theater
There will be another eternity
of roiled absence
dueling masks
and the failure to write

The entry below is the first about the poetry longlist, and is written by Emma Ramadan, translator from the French and co-owner of in Providence, RI.

by Ashraf Fayadh, translated from the Arabic by Mona Kareem, Mona Zaki, and Jonathan Wright (Palestine, The Operating System)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 86%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 14%

In times like these, we hear a lot of people talk about how writing and literature are more necessary now than ever. It’s easy to scoff at the idea that literature can solve society’s problems, that a really good book of poetry might have the power to topple totalitarian leaders. But we have to admit that there must be something to the idea when there is such a long, disturbing history of writers and poets who have been imprisoned for criticizing their countries in their work. From China to Iran to France to Israel to the Philippines, governments and leaders have felt so threatened by the words of their country’s poets that they have felt the need to imprison them, disappear them, punish them, make an example of them. What is it about poetry that is so powerful its writers risk death? Perhaps it’s as Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, the woman behind The Operating System, says: “It will, indeed, be the poets (musicians, artists, creators of all kinds) who ‘wake up the world.’”

For revenge
you take pleasure in your pain—
singing, with what is left of your voice,
on the high wires of effort.

One poet currently serving time in prison for his work is Ashraf Fayadh. Fayadh was born to Palestinian refugee parents in Saudi Arabia. Using art as a way to explore the painful memories surrounding his exile, Fayadh helped form a group called Shatta that aimed to turn art, perceived as elitist and abstract, into something accessible and grounded in reality. In 2015, in part because of the words in Instructions Within, he was sentenced to death for blasphemy in Saudi Arabia, a sentence that has since been lessened to eight years and 800 lashes. The book is about Fayadh’s experience as a Palestinian refugee. It is about fundamentalist religion in Saudi Arabia. It is also about the hypocrisies of a world in which Western governments, supposed protectors of freedom and democracy, maintain financial ties with Saudi Arabia, turning a blind eye to the country’s human rights offenses at the expense of people like Ashraf Fayadh in order to keep a steady supply of oil.

Being a refugee means standing at the end of the line
to get a fraction of a country.
Standing is something your grandfather did, without knowing the reason.
And the fraction is you.
Country: a card you put in your wallet with your money.
Money: pieces of paper with pictures of leaders.
Pictures: they stand in for you until you return.
Return: a mythical creature that appears in your grandfather’s stories.
Here endeth the first lesson.
The lesson is conveyed to you so that you can learn the second lesson, which is
“what do you signify”?

I was a nightmare
my steps carrying me towards the unknown
towards lonely roads
away from the societies of eternal honor.
I was betrayed even by my steps
they took me far into exile . . .
away from a homeland
that had no ports.
The smell of home is stuck in my nose
and in my memory there remain fragments never to be forgotten.

Suddenly people everywhere were reading Ashraf Fayadh’s poems, at the Berlin International Literature Festival, at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, at the NUS Middle East Institute in Singapore, at the Ledbury Poetry Fesival in the UK, in Austria and Nigeria and Bolivia and all over the world. How many people would have read his book had he not been sentenced to death? What should have been a poet, a book, silenced and forgotten about instead became an explosion. In the words of Tahar Ben Jalloun, “This sentence teaches us all we need to know about his poetry—about his strength, about his violence.”

Surrender to sleep.
The time has come for you to melt, and dissolve,
to take the agreed shape of alienation
into which you’ve been poured.
Evaporate, condense,
and go back to your void,
to occupy your usual space
of the You.

Your soul was forged and used for illegal purposes,
voted on—
then eaten
like a loaf.

Instructions Within was published by The Operating System as the first title in their series Glossarium: Unsilenced Texts and Modern Translation, “established in early 2016 in an effort to recover silenced voices outside and beyond the familiar poetic canon . . . in particular those under siege by restrictive regimes and silencing practices in their home (or adoptive) countries.” All proceeds of this book go to support the ongoing fight against Ashraf Fayadh’s prison sentence. One additional particular the book worth noting is its format. The book was designed so that English readers would be reading the same way as Arabic readers: starting the book at what we normally perceive as “the end” and flipping the pages left to right, or “backwards,” taking to a whole new level the idea of translation as providing an experience for the reader of the target language that is as close as possible to the experience of the reader of the source language.

God sits on the throne
as you stain the stillness of night with your voice
looking for a light to exhibit your darkness

So what is it about Ashraf Fayadh’s poetry that threatened the power of Saudi Arabia’s leaders so much that they felt the best way to keep themselves safe was to lock him away forever, to kill him?

I am Hell’s experiment on planet Earth.