As always, you can post your thoughts and opinions about all of the RTWBC books in the comments section below, on Twitter using the hashtag #RTWBC, or at the

Anna Rosenwong’s Introduction

Anna’s introduction to Diorama might not put all readers at ease, but I think it’s worth quoting from here because it does provide a couple suggestions for how to approach the collection:

Translating Rocío Cerón’s Diorama was at first baffling. As an experienced translator and as a less than conventional poet myself, I know better than to seek clarity or narrative or concrete structure in experimental poetry. Nonetheless, it is precisely this sort of legibility that readers often demand of translated work, which can result in selection bias; difficult, experimental, or what Cole Swenson calls “immanent” poetry is often left untranslated in favor of the more familiar and legible. Diorama is not plainly legible. It is essentially impressionistic, stubbornly elusive, and at times outright hallucinatory.

To get closer to this book, I found I needed—and I urge the reader—to set aside notions of tractability and surrender to its associative and auditory insights. So much of reading and translating poetry is training your ear to the text’s private language, particularly in a text like this, where sound often provides the surest foothold amid the rush of cascading images. This emphasis on sound is demonstrated by Cerón’s enveloping, fierce live performances, and perceptive readers may find much to gain by putting the book down and trying the lines aloud for themselves, attentive not only to sound and rhythm but to the play and gripping of words in the mouth. In its repetitions, its incantations, its subtle and unexpected linguistic linkages, this is work that demands to be spoken and heard.

An Example

The book opens with “13 Ways to Inhabit a Corner,” which is made up of thirteen short pieces. (Obviously.) Here are two of them:

I

Ostriches in flight—there are women whose words are ash trees. Shadows stitch together harbors of air. In the midst of the stampede, a hand rests on the arc of a kneecap. Cigar and smoke. Rosy cypress sleep. The scent reaches far beyond the border. From the bureau—power, smile destroyed/ocher temptation, strophic enjambed body. Vestibule.

XII

Jubilation and adoration in parentheses. Above the long hair of that woman, seen in Baden-Baden, a galaxy hangs. No satellite rings. No saintly crown. Aftershock. Pealing bells (no ecclesiastical province) whisper a half-truth. White and cracked. The lips. We need a new password to get back to the world in time. While the word appears, she draws a spiral in the water. Resplendence.

Anna mentioned section “XII” in her intro stating, “To her translator, it appears that Diorama is Cerón’s attempt to find or forge that password.” Which is intriguing to me.

The Sounds of the Poems

Going back to Anna’s suggestion to listen to the poems, to read them aloud, here are two videos that give you a sense of what the poem sounds like.

And, even more interesting, here’s Rocío herself reading “Sonata Mandala to the Penumbra Bird” as part of the Maintenant Series at Poetry Parnassus.

The Author

Rocío Cerón is from Mexico City and her work combines poetry with music, performance, and video. In addition to Diorama (or DIORAMA? Sometimes it’s in all caps) she’s published Basalto, Imperio/Empire, and Tiento. Her poems have been translated into a number of languages, including Finnish, French, Swedish, and German.

Here’s an with her for Poetry Parnassus:

SJ Fowler: Mexican poetry has long been an immense and formidable tradition, reflecting so much of the passion and invention of Mexican culture itself. Octavio Paz is obviously a world-renowned figure, but I think his anthology of Mexican poetry, in conjunction with Samuel Beckett, really opened many eyes in the English-speaking world to the depth of the poetry historically in Mexico. Is this tradition ever present to contemporary poets?

Rocío Cerón: Mexican poets are children of their own traditions and customs, for better or worse. Young poets disdain their ancestors and they frequently succumb to them. I think this is only natural and I don’t think that this happens only in Mexican poetry. My generation does not live under the weight of Octavio Paz anymore. There is a chorus of voices and ways of looking at the world. The global era has played an important role in poetry; for example, by bringing together traditions as far as those of the Slavic world and the indigenous pre-Hispanic poetry. Using Internet these influences can dialogue and share their experience. Translation has become a great tool to re-signify different traditions and their poetic legacies.

SJF: Multi-disciplinary approaches to poetry seem very important to you, fusing the art form with music and art. How central is this to your work?

RC: I was raised in a family headed by my grandfather, who was a scientist, and my grandmother, who was an avid reader and storyteller. Contemporary art has nurtured my poetry. It has become an important influence in my writing and led me to something I call “expanded poetry” (the type of poetry that seeks a dialogue and allows for breaking borders between disciplines). Writing from many angles has been a natural process for me. I am interested in the kind of transversal poetry I call Galaxy Projects, meaning a fusion of language, music, action, video and the body.

It’s a really interesting interview—be sure and check out the whole thing! There’s also a short conversation with Rocío and Anna that World Literature Today shortly after Diorama won the Best Translated Book Award.

If all goes according to plan, we’ll run a short interview with her some time next week.

The Translator

Anna Rosenwong is a former judge of the Best Translated Book Award, and has a MFA from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine. She has also translated José Eugenio Sánchez’s Suite Prelude a/H1N1 and has published an original collection of poetry, By Way of Explanation.

And from this past ALTA conference, here’s a video of Anna and David Shook (publisher of Phoneme Media) talking about this translation and the editing process.

A Review

If you want another entryway to this collection, I’d recommend checking out that appeared in Entropy.

Yet for all its experimental or “immanent” and “stubbornly elusive” language as Rosenwong writes in her informative translator’s note, Cerón’s Diorama skillfully situates itself among longer poems from Latin America which use collage, kaleidoscopic experimentation and an all-observant eye to fly over the history and landscape of a country, people or epoch. Cerón´s new collection commences with the micro, ants foraging for candy in a room, and then opens up to the macro in wider thrusts, addressing a “Pan-Latin American” exploration of “Silenced sun on the Rio Grande or the Amazon,” South America and the harrowing legacy of the Guarani and “Columbus on his knees in Hispaniola: the blindness of deer and the cunning need to procure prey: Malinche, the first American Babel.”

Hopefully by now you’re interested in reading Diorama and participating in this month’s RTWBC!

The Book

I remember having a conversation with Deborah Smith about how she hoped that Crown would use the same cover that Portobello did when they brought out this book. Well, instead of using the collage of meat and body parts (that tongue in the lower right is still unsettling to me), Crown decided to go with the striking red background and a silhouette of a woman who seems to be trying to either escape the ground, or grow out of it. (Both interpretations of which make sense, given the plot.)

Speaking of the plot, here’s the U.S. jacket copy:

A beautiful, unsettling novel about rebellion and taboo, violence and eroticism, and the twisting metamorphosis of a soul

Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself.

The novel is broken up into three distinct sections, each of which is about Yeong-hye, but narrated by someone else: first her husband, then her brother-in-law, and finally her sister, all of whom are pretty shitty people. Through these three movements—which were initially published as separate short stories in Korea—the reader is witness to Yeong-hye complete dissolution from an average housewife to (SPOILER ALERT) a woman confined to a mental institution believing that she is a tree.

Portobello brought this book out last year and got quite a bit of attention for it. Here in the States it was actually selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the Gabe Habash gave it a in PW:

There is much to admire in Han’s novel. Its three-part structure is brilliant, gradually digging deeper and deeper into darker and darker places; the writing is spare and haunting; but perhaps most memorable is its crushing climax, a phantasmagoric yet emotionally true moment that’s surely one of the year’s most powerful. This is an ingenious, upsetting, and unforgettable novel.

It even received a glowing review from Porochista Khakpour in the

All the trigger warnings on earth cannot prepare a reader for the traumas of this Korean author’s translated debut in the Anglophone world. At first, you might eye the title and scan the first innocuous sentence — “Before my wife turned vegetarian, I thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way” — and think that the biggest risk here might be converting to vegetarianism. (I myself converted, again; we’ll see if it lasts.) But there is no end to the horrors that rattle in and out of this ferocious, magnificently death-affirming novel.

The book seems to be doing quite well, which is great, since Han Kang and Deborah Smith deserve it, and because it hopefully marks the beginning of a moment for South Korean literature.

South Korean Literature

Not to dwell on that statement too much, but there does seem to be a growing interest in Korean writing. It sort of started with Dalkey Archive’s which Ed Park wrote about for the

Speaking of the New Yorker, in January, Mythili Rao published a piece there entitled In this article, she talks about the efforts of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea to help promote the publication and promotion of Korean literature. These efforts range from funding complete translations of literary works (even before they have a publisher), to promotional grants (which is why Bae Suah and Deborah Smith will be touring the U.S. later this year), to travel grants for editors (which is how Ross Ufberg, Will Evans, and I ended up in Seoul last year¹).

There’s even this unexpected Vanity Fair list of (Unexpected in the sense that these sort of lists are so BuzzFeed and LitHub, not what I usually associate with Vanity Fair.)

With three Bae Suah titles on the horizon—A Greater Music, The Owls’ Absence, and Recitation—a couple Jung Young-Moon titles coming out from Dalkey and Deep Vellum, and The Vegetarian doing so well, we could be approaching critical mass . . . And the more that North Korea is in the news, the more attention people will be paying to this part of the world . . .

An Excerpt

You can read a decent-sized extract from this novel over at Here are the first few paragraphs.

Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way. To be frank, the first time I met her I wasn’t even attracted to her. Middling height; bobbed hair neither long nor short; jaundiced, sickly-looking skin; somewhat prominent cheekbones; her timid, sallow aspect told me all I needed to know. As she came up to the table where I was waiting, I couldn’t help but notice her shoes—the plainest black shoes imaginable. And that walk of hers—neither fast nor slow, striding nor mincing.

However, if there wasn’t any special attraction, nor did any particular drawbacks present themselves, and therefore there was no reason for the two of us not to get married. The passive personality of this woman in whom I could detect neither freshness nor charm, or anything especially refined, suited me down to the ground. There was no need to affect intellectual leanings in order to win her over, or to worry that she might be comparing me to the preening men who pose in fashion catalogues, and she didn’t get worked up if I happened to be late for one of our meetings. The paunch that started appearing in my mid-twenties, my skinny legs and forearms that steadfastly refused to bulk up in spite of my best efforts, the inferiority complex I used to have about the size of my penis—I could rest assured that I wouldn’t have to fret about such things on her account.

I’ve always inclined towards the middle course in life. At school I chose to boss around those who were two or three years my junior, and with whom I could act the ringleader, rather than take my chances with those my own age, and later I chose which college to apply to based on my chances of obtaining a scholarship large enough for my needs. Ultimately, I settled for a job where I would be provided with a decent monthly salary in return for diligently carrying out my allotted tasks, at a company whose small size meant they would value my unremarkable skills.

And so it was only natural that I would marry the most run-of-the-mill woman in the world.

The Author

Han Kang has made quite a name for herself over the past number of years. She’s published at least nine books—including Human Acts, which just came out in the UK—and won a couple big awards—the Yi Sang Literary Award and Today’s Young Artist Award. According to J.M.G. Le Clézio considers her to be a future Nobel Prize winner. (Not sure what that’s worth, but it’s interesting to note.)

LitHub recently which includes a lot about The Vegetarian, including this bit:

Bethanne Patrick: The events and themes in your novel are extremely potent: Physical and sexual abuse, abandonment, self-harm, eroticism, much more. Have any reader or critic reactions surprised you? Have they, for instance, fixed on one aspect of the story and missed another?

Han Kang: I think this novel has some layers: questioning human violence and the (im)possibility of innocence; defining sanity and madness; the (im)possibility of understanding others, body as the last refuge or the last determination, and some more. It will be inevitable that different aspects are more focused on by different readers and cultural backgrounds. If I could say one thing, this novel isn’t a singular indictment of the Korean patriarchy. I wanted to deal with my long-lasting questions about the possibility/impossibility of innocence in this world, which is mingled with such violence and beauty. These were universal questions that occupied me as I wrote it.

If you’re curious, there’s also this feature in

The Translator

Deborah Smith (on the left in the picture above) is crazy talented. She’s a fantastic translator, which is why she recently won the She’s finishing her Ph.D. at SOAS in London, and she’s launching a new publisher dedicated to bringing out works from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

She was recently interviewed for by Jen Calleja about all of these things.

How is it that you came to translate Han Kang? What’s your relationship with her like?

DS: I read The Vegetarian and fell in love with it. A year later, I was invited to go and speak at the London Book Fair (which I’d never even heard of before), as they were gearing up for Korea being the market focus country in 2014. I met Max Porter there, Kang’s editor at Portobello, sent him my sample, and the rest is history.

Possibly the best thing about the whole experience is that Kang and I are now really good friends. It’s as much of a pleasure and privilege to know her as a person as it is to translate her work. She’s been over for two UK publicity tours, which means lots of time to chat on trains etc., and she was hear all last summer for a writer’s residency in Norwich, where I got to meet her son too.

Whenever I visit Korea she buys me lunch and takes me to a gallery. As if all this wasn’t enough, she has incredible respect for translation as a creative, artistic practice – she insists that each English version is ‘our book’, offered to share her fees with me when she found out I wasn’t getting paid for translating her publicity stuff, always asks the editor to credit me, and does so herself whenever she’s interviewed. Too good to be true.

What are your next translation projects?

DS: Alongside Han Kang, there’s only one other author I’ve chosen to translate so far – Bae Suah. Her work is radical both stylistically and politically, influenced by her own translation practice (she’s translated the likes of Kafka, Pessoa, and Sadeq Hedayat into Korean). Her language is simply extraordinary. I first came across her when I read some elderly male critic castigating her for ‘doing violence to the Korean language’, which of course was catnip to me, especially as I’d recently discovered Lispector doing pretty much the same to Portuguese.

Hopefully we’ll be able to get Deborah on the podcast this month . . .

My Class

One last thing. Every year, I make my spring class on World Lit & Translation read eight recent works in translation. (Generally from eight different countries and eight different presses. This is probably the only class these students will ever take in which they read books originally written in more than one language. Which is sort of sad.) After talking about the book, we talk to the translator, and then argue about which book deserves to be the “Best Translated Book of Our Class.” This is mostly a way of getting the students to talk about how they evaluate books—the readability, the difficulty of the translation—and the politics of awarding prizes—should we look for authors from areas that are usually overlooked, should we award the “best” book or the one that’s going to get the most readers, etc.

Anyway, last year, The Vegetarian won the class’s award. They were all enamored with the book, with it’s politics, and with Deborah. It was up against The Physics of Sorrow, Modiano, Jon Gnarr, and several other worthy titles. But there’s something about this particular book that struck a nerve with all of them, and hopefully will with everyone participating in the RTWBC as well!

So go get a copy and feel free to post any and all comments, thoughts, questions, objections, criticisms, or whatever down below, on Twitter using #RTWBC, or at the

Tomorrow or Thursday I’ll get up some information about the other RTWBC book this month: Diorama by Rocío Céron.

¹ And which led to this part of Mythili’s article:

Chad Post made a similar L.T.I.-sponsored trip to Seoul, with Will Evans, the publisher of Deep Vellum, and Ross Ufberg, of New Vessel Press, last winter. “They paid for the whole thing and were incredibly generous in every way,” Post said. “We stayed in this amazing hotel with the best toilet I’ve ever seen in my life. The whole thing was wonderful.”

Yes. The toilet was that amazing. Trust me.

We also previewed the March titles a bit, which led to a major complication . . . the poetry book that I had previously announced has been delayed, which is problematic. So, instead, what we thought we’d do is slot in Rocío Cerón’s Diorama, which won the 2015 Best Translated Book Award and is translated from the Spanish by Anna Rosenwong and is readily available from Phoneme Media in a bilingual edition.

Diorama will join Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, which will serve as this month’s work of fiction. The Vegetarian is translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith and available from Crown in the U.S., Portobello in the UK.

I’m working up introductory posts about both of these books, and will have those up by Thursday, but in the meantime, feel free to post your thoughts or comments below, using #RTWBC on Twitter, or at the

Later this week, I’ll also post an update with info on RTWBC books for April, May, and June, so that participants can plan ahead.

As always, anyone interested in participating in the Reading the World Book Clubs should feel free to email me their questions and comments. Or, if you’re more of a public sharer, feel free to post them in the comments section below, on Twitter at #RTWBC, or in the Facebook We’ll be talking about both of these books on our next podcast.

Chad W. Post: It might be due to the fact that I had been talking about Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute and Pinget earlier in the day before reading this, but I was reminded a bit of the nouveau roman when I was reading it. Something about the way the reader is put in the perspective of the creator, watching the creation come into being, seeing how the scene is set, so to speak. Do you know if this movement had a influence on Parian? Or are there other authors/ideas/movements that are more influential?

Emma Ramadan: While I would venture to guess that any French writer would have to be influenced by the nouveau roman movement to a certain extent, I would hate to speak for Parian in this case—but would be happy to email her asking if you’d like.

CWP: I think it’s interesting that there are no commas in the main poem. (Contrasted with the footnotes, which do have commas.) I found myself having to slow down, reread and parse the lines. I assume this is intentional and present in the original. Was this something that impacted your translation process? I really had to get used to it, as a reader, figuring out where to pause in the middle of lines—it was a bit of an adjustment.

ER: Oh man, the no commas thing. It did make translating this very difficult because it threw into confusion what the sentence structure was, whether a line was a list of adjectives or meant to be nouns modified by adjectives, etc. French can get away with that in a way, and I often felt like in places my translation was begging for commas. Where it was too confusing I sometimes reconfigured the sentences (I’m thinking of: “Wood piles and cardboard demarcate the zone enclosing a small mobile object position unknown compared to a bigger more stable object position known”). Sometimes I let the sentence be confusing if it seemed like it was just as confusing in French. I think there’s a certain aspect of confusion that’s purposeful here, since the narrator is figuring things out as she goes, piling things on, starting over. There’s a messiness to it that feels right. BUT—what was really interesting was that when I finally went and “translated” the index, I realized that she was indexing all the nouns in the book. And while it still remains a mystery to me why exactly she did that—to inventory the garden?—some parts suddenly became clear to me. Things I had previously decided were adjectives in a list were actually nouns! And so I was able to go back and fix some of those more confusing lines.

CWP: In your essay you mention that there are photographs at the end of the P.O.L. edition. What are those and why aren’t they in the La Presse one?

ER: There are two photos, they’re both the same, black and white of a tree and its leaves. I’m almost positive they were taken by Anne. But I actually couldn’t tell you why they’re not in the translation, either because Cole couldn’t get the rights, or because La Presse publications aren’t equipped for that kind of thing. Really not sure. For one of Cole’s translations, of Suzanne Doppelt’s Ring Rang Wrong (Burning Deck), Cole “translated” the photos from the original, taking photos of her own (at least, I know that was her plan). Maybe she felt it required something like that and we didn’t have the time. This was a very long response to say: I have no clue!

As a way of introducing Chirbes, I thought I’d post this bio and interview from an anthology of Spanish-language writers Open Letter published in the fall of 2014 featuring the first of Chirbes’s writing to appear in English translation. The principle idea of the book is that each of the included literary masters select the best thing s/he has ever written. (In Chirbes’s case, he selected part of Crematorio.) Prefacing these excerpts are long biographies situating the writer, and a short interview in which each author answers a few standard questions about their influences and why they chose the section they did. That’s what’s posted below.

From A Thousand Forests in One Acorn, edited by Valerie Miles:

Rafael Chirbes is an author who has been creating his work—indispensable to understanding Spain’s recent history—in the shadows. Born the 27th of June, 1949, in Tabernes de Valldigna, in the province of Valencia. He is the son of a republican family, but above all a child of the post-war—social and historical conscience have marked both his life and his writing. From the age of eight, he studied in schools for the orphans of railway workers, and he spent parts of his childhood and adolescence in Ávila, León, and Salamanca. When he was sixteen, he left for Madrid, where he got a degree in Modern and Contemporary History, perhaps to better understand that particular time in history (the second half of the twentieth century) of which he considered himself a product, that moment when a generation—his—succumbed to “chronic amnesia” right when they took power.

An insatiable reader, he worked for several years in bookstores and spent others writing literary criticism. Then he lived in Morocco (where he was a Spanish teacher), Paris, Barcelona, La Coruña, and Extremadura, and finally he went back to his city of birth, Valencia. For years he did various journalistic activities; writing restaurant reviews for the magazine Sobremesa and travel reports. It wasn’t until he was thirty-nine, in 1988, that he became known as a writer. His first novel, Mimoun, was a finalist for the Premio Herralde. Since then, Chirbes has published eight novels that have composed a bitter portrayal of modern-day Spain, blending realism and introspection, history and story, in what the author defines as “a boomerang effect”: you have to look behind you to get back to the present. Rafael Chirbes’s novels are populated with individuals who long to change history and who, nevertheless, end up succumbing, confronting the impossibility of intervening in anything, torn away toward the end of the world; revolutionaries who shield themselves behind a historical past in order to justify their uselessness in the present.

After publishing En la lucha final (1991), La buena letra (1992), and Los disparos del cazador (1994), in 1996 appeared La larga marcha, a novel that along with La caída de Madrid (2000) and Los viejos amigos (2003) formed a trilogy about Spanish society from post-war times, through the Transition. The ethical sensibility in Chirbes’s writing consists precisely in situating the reader in front of a moral conflict, forcing the reader to take part. Through his minutely detailed stories, the minature world of his characters, Rafael Chirbes manages to shed light on the mechanisms that make the real world run. In his most recently published novel, Crematorio (for which he received the Premio Nacional de la Crítica and the Premio Dulce Chacón), he depicts a world adrift, eaten away by corruption and speculation, where that game of masking the real within the fictional becomes rawer and savager. Skeptical and happy, he has accepted the recognition with his characteristic discretion, which serves him so well in Beniarbieg, a small Valencian town, where he currently lives, far away from literary cliques.

Rafael Chirbes states that up until this moment he has the impression of having written only one book. In that book “they don’t talk about the war, though the war is present; they don’t talk about hope, though they carry the aspirations of the twentieth century.” The book he’s referring to is a place where you go to try to understand the past in order to attend to the present; it’s a place where you find yourself forced, simply, to find out who you are.

The Torture of Doctor Johnson

This is the end of my most recent novel, and although the protagonist who’s speaking in the text isn’t very much like me, I do share a certain texture of his dark outlook.

In Conversation with the Dead

There are a lot of deceased authors I love crowding my bookshelves at home. I talk to them; I listen to them. From Aub and Galdós, to Tolstoy, Montaigne, Yourcenar, Lucretius and Virgil, Faulkner, Döblin, Proust, Balzac, Eça de Queiroz, and on and on. I don’t leave the house much, so I reread them either at random or impelled by some intuition that tells me that this one and no other is the dead author I should hear at a particular time. For the most part, I’m not mistaken. I also dream about the dead people I knew when they were alive; I’ve touched them, even, and now they’re nowhere, and knowing that they’re not here and that I can’t talk to them or hear their voices distresses me when I go to bed. Some nights they take control of the room: their absence leaves me breathless and I have to turn on the light so I don’t suffocate. With the light on, it’s easier to send them back to the peaceful nothingness they’re struggling to escape from.

Coda

You said once that literature is like a lover. Either you go all the way or they leave you. You have to know the value of hitting bottom.

I think texts betray any sort of imposture on the part of their authors; they’re an extremely sensitive detector. They contain what the author wants to say, but also—and almost more importantly—what’s up his sleeve. And yes, I have the impression that writing saves me—I know, I know it’s sort of a romantic idea—don’t ask me from what, even if it’s from myself, it helps me stay afloat. It puts my doubts, my anxieties, at a certain distance and, more importantly, in the service of something.

Do you think there’s an ethical place for literature or is it merely an aesthetic exercise?

I don’t believe in an aesthetic without ethics, there’s no such thing: all aesthetics suggest a particular outlook on the world, and no outlook is innocent. A point of view situates you somewhere, in a location where potentialities—ways of being—battle one another. When you write, or paint, as when you read or look at something, you have to be conscious of the fact that the author wants to invite you to look from where he’s looking. Your mission is to protect yourself. Know that they want to seduce you.

*

I hope you grab a copy of On the Edge (AND ) and join in the reading group. Feel free to email me comments and thoughts, or post them in the comments section below, or use #RTWBC on Twitter, or join the

Well, in advance of that conversation, I just wanted to remind everyone who happened to read either of these books to send in your comments/questions either to me directly (chad.post [at] rochester.edu) or the podcast (threepercentpodcast [at] gmail.com). You can also post to the or on Twitter using #RTWBC.

There have been a number of comments and posts on the Facebook Group, including

A wonderfully bleak, dark, foggy tale, set during a further period of human decline after the second world-war, with Biblical references to Sodom and Gomorrah, Christ and the Madonna, this can be read as a straight forward tale, it can also be mulled over, steered through carefully, and is a work that demands a re-read from the moment you finish it. A worthy contender to make the Best Translated Book Award lists for 2016 and another wonderful addition to the world of Women in Translation.

along with one from

The Weight of Things moves restlessly backwards and forwards in time, which enables the narrative feints that I won’t go into here . . . More fundamentally, though, it disrupts the reader’s feeling of progression: a period of history flattens out into timelessness, a sense that these circumstances cannot be escaped. When I’d finished The Weight of Things, my immediate feeling was one of waking from a beautiful nightmare – but it’s a nightmare that demands to be revisited.

There are a few other comments on there as well—including multiple requests for a discussion of “come-hither-boys” (thanks, Sparks!)—but if you want to add anything, do it now. We’ll include any and all of these tomorrow in the podcast.

Then, it’s on to by Rafael Chirbes, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa and by Anne Parian, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan

BLVR: Reviewers also love labels. Even Kafka being called a “Walserian” type when his Meditation came out. Although, I have just finished The Tanners, so I was really thinking of Walser when reading The Weight of Things. I thought of Jelinek too, for the archetypes and word play, and this sense of a domestic gothic that’s haunted by the war and atrocity and violence.

ANW: Walser’s a magnificent writer. But so sensitive. I think Fritz in The Weight of Things is quite cruel.

BLVR: For me with Walser it was the syntax of Fritz’s novel, the slipperiness of it, the way she went in backwards with things, if that makes sense, the humor that is seemingly polite and servile yet has that nastiness underneath.

ANW: That’s a lovely way to describe his humor. Yes, the syntax in The Weight of Things does have—and this is something Walser has in common with Kafka—that feinting quality, of saying something only to retract it halfway through.

BLVR: I thought of The Weight of Things as a work in miniature, which seems so distinct from the rest of her work. Does the book explore her later themes?

ANW: The axis is always the same: war, who bears the responsibility for it, who suffers the consequences. The first book picks away the plaster, while the later ones dig deeper and deeper until they finally end up in a kind of parallel world. The themes and settings are the same throughout: Vienna, Przemyśl, etc. Fictional places recur, too: the mother of the family in Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst ends up in the same asylum as Berta in The Weight of Things, the same town, counties, and streets appear, and so on.

I’m also struggling with the issue of what to discuss at this point in time when several of the people I know are still reading this and have yet to reach the real emotional crux of the novel. Usually, I’m of the mindset that spoilers don’t really matter, that one should enjoy books for how their written more so than plot details, I think that’s all bullshit when it comes to talking about books in a “book club” sort of setting. That’s especially true in a book like this with such a dark, emotionally brutal reveal . . .

So I don’t necessarily want to write about my reactions to the book just yet. Maybe next week, after the month is technically over, and anyone deciding to participate in this book club idea will have had the maximum amount of time to read it.

What would be even better though is to post reactions from readers to the book. So, if you are reading it and have some thoughts or reactions, just email them to me, post them in the comments below, share them on Twitter with #RTWBC, or post them in the

Lizzy Siddal actually there, and since it’s pretty much spoiler free, I feel OK about sharing it now.

Of all the events of 1945, there was one Wilhelmine recalled with particular painful clarity. Wilhelm has hung the necklace with the tiny Madonna around Berta_’s neck, not hers._

A case of sibling rivalry you might think, nothing to worry about, except that Wilhelmine soon establishes herself as the most vicious and relentless pursuer of her own objectives ever to cross my reading path. Even so, when years later, she finally gets her hands on that necklace, it is an act so callous and calculated, it takes the breathe away, and earns her the title of villainess of the piece.

This necklace—introduced in the first sentence of the novel—really is the MacGuffin of the whole novel. Berta receives it from Wilhelm, and Wilhelmine wants it for herself. The rest of the novel is centered around her plan to take it from Berta. It’s great when a relatively simple narrative motor like that can be expanded into a much larger, more textured narrative.

One of the other things that stands out about this book—and is the reason behind my hesitation to say too much about the book—is how backloaded the plot is. The really crucial information about Berta—what was her relationship with Wilhelm? why is she in this creepy hospital?—is withheld until the end and is a bit of gut punch when it happens.

Looking at the notes I wrote down in my phone while reading this (I don’t have the book with me today, which makes writing this extra tricky) I think the real winner is: “Fuck is this book dark and hurtful.” I think I remember exactly what I read before typing that. (Spoiler: It has to do with Berta’s kids talking to her.)

Anyway, send us your comments! We’ll talk about them on the podcast, here on the blog, etc.

In the meantime, I thought for this week I’d post a few quotes from the part of the poem I’ve read with some initial reactions.

As someone who doesn’t read a lot of poetry, I tend to gravitate to collections at two very different ends of the spectrum: crazy experimental things that are completely divorced from the prose that I usually read, or poems that are more narrative based (like Twelve Stations) and feel comfortable, like fiction with line breaks.

Although that might seem like the case, the reading experience is very different when you’re reading fiction—especially conventional, “realistic” fiction—and reading a poem like this. With a novel, you can focus on pulling out the essential elements of plot, character, theme, etc., amid a wash of extra words that fill things out by adding texture and adjusting the book’s pacing.

Poetry, even narrative poetry, is more condensed. As a reader—and I know this is veering into Oprah Book Club territory here, but if there’s one thing I’d like to do with these RTWBC posts, it’s talk about books as a reader and not as a critic trying to show off my intellect—I appreciate the experience of having to slow down, go back a few lines, pause. In starting Twelve Stations, I found myself rushing past things, as if it were a story that I could gloss and still get it. There’s something to be said for dialing it back and taking extra time to read.

In Bill Johnston’s intro (which I referenced here), he mentioned the “������ę�岹, a long-established Polish literary tradition of prose writing in which the pleasure of pure storytelling trumps the need for tidy narratives and overarching plots.” This influence is evident right from the start, and really enjoyable. I like the ramble. And the lists. Reminds me a bit of Rabelais, although not as vulgar or extended, I suppose.

There’s an effusiveness to this poem that’s palpable on every page and somehow—through the lists? the abundance of language?—creates a sort of bustle, a fullness of motion, which drives the book as a whole. In contrast to a lyrical poem about a thing/emotion/moment, the first four “stations” of this book feel like they’re running towards something, gleefully veering out of control, or rather, almost spinning out of control, instead coming back to particular touchstones within the scene to keep the whole thing grounded. Reading this book is a bit of a trip.

Finally, this bit below also has a bit of the Polish history that Bill also addressed in his introduction. It’s interesting to think about a group of Poles moving into a bunch of abandoned houses and towns, creating a community with a set of habits and typical actions different from the people who had been living there, and different from the rest of Poland. For whatever reason, that concept really intrigues me.

So, to give you a sense of how all of those things seem to work together, and to try and convince everyone to get on board with reading this, here’s a long excerpt from the opening section of the poem:

He entered, then, through the wide-open door of a building
and proceeded directly to a first-floor apartment.
First he knocked, yes indeed, he knocked and waited a moment,
but hearing no reply he depressed the handle of the door.
He was not in the least surprised at the local practice
that permitted all doors and windows and gates
to be left open on the outside, notwithstanding intercoms
and all the break-ins, robberies, and crimes against property so      common today.
In other regions of that venerable city, in such a place
one would see chains, bars, barb wire strung across balconies,
mad dogs and, even worse, mad pig-dogs white or pink in color,
with tiny eyes, imported from Anglo-Saxon lands, capable
of biting an automobile in two or gnawing through the door behind      which
the birthday guests would be standing, flowers and a modest gift
in hand. The owners of such beasts, as they went to bed with a      sweet sense of security,
would come in time to resemble their own defenders,
eventually assuming their stance, their habits, their diet.
Thus it was often in Poland, or rather in the land that since the war
has always been referred to as Poland; but not here. This realm      here
was governed by its own laws. A person arriving uninvited
would sometimes have to search the entire apartment for their      host,
who, leaving every door unlocked, was presently taking a nap
in a distant chamber, snoring beneath a heap of blankets, head      wrapped
in a towel or dressing gown, such that any attempt to wake him      would be madness.
So it was now.

Danielle Dutton—a highly regarded and founder of Dorothy, a publishing project—offered to write a short piece about how she came to publish this wonderful, unsettling book.

We’re lucky to have a few brilliant friends—so brilliant we officially put them on our Advisory Board—who occasionally make the best recommendations. One of these is Jeremy Davies (excellent writer and editor in his own right), and it’s through Jeremy that we first heard about Marianne Fritz. He suggested I check out the essay on her work by Adrian Nathan West (aka Nate) that was online at so I did, and the essay I believe linked directly to a translated excerpt from what was at that time called The Gravity of Circumstances (for the book, the title was changed to The Weight of Things, which we all thought worked better, rhythmically, in the places where the phrase appears in the text). The excerpt was from a particularly harrowing dream sequence. It’s Berta’s anxiety dream: dark and surreal and poetic. I loved it. I couldn’t really imagine what the rest of the book would be like from that excerpt, though, so I reached out to Nate (whom at that time I didn’t know) and asked him if he had a completed manuscript of the book. He didn’t, but he said he could do a rough translation of the rest fairly quickly, and so he did. The book was, in different ways, so much stranger and also less strange than the excerpt suggested. It was shockingly sad and complicated, knotty and good. We took it on and edited it with Nate, who was a pleasure to work with—and The Weight of Things was born.

One thing I particularly like about this story is that it was exactly what I hoped would happen when I started Dorothy, a publishing project; I wanted to talk about good books with people who love good books (in fact, in the first year or so, we weren’t open for submissions but rather were looking for people to send in suggestions of other people’s books, whether these were OP or unpublished manuscripts). It’s actually hard to imagine people who love good books more than Jeremy and Nate, and the book’s warm reception among readers and critics has been edifying for all of us.

Thanks so much for featuring it at Reading the World!

Danielle Dutton, editor

I finished reading The Weight of Things on my flight to MLA and plan on posting some personal thoughts and reactions when I get back to Rochester. (Today I’m in Houston for an event at Brazos at 7, then will be in Dallas for events Tuesday and Wednesday night. If you live in either of those cities, you should definitely come out!) And if any of you have any thoughts about the book, please post them in the comments section below, on Twitter with #RTWBC, and/or at the

For this intro post, I thought I’d list five reasons why I chose to start the poetry RTWBC with by Tomasz Różycki, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston.

1.) This is a narrative based poem. I like more abstract poetry that plays with language, forms, meaning, etc., but for my first attempt at running a poetry book, I thought it would be nice to start with something that’s more narrative based. Although based on Bill Johnston’s introduction, the “narrative” aspect of this seems a bit incidental . . .

It’s a sort of mock epic about restoring a Catholic church in what used to be the eastern part Poland and is now the Ukraine. Bill Johnston does a fantastic job explaining the cultural background of this poem, but in short, after World War II, the eastern part of Poland was given to the Soviet Union, whereas Upper and Lower Silesia were incorporated into Poland, becoming the western part of the country. (Oh, those shifting Polish borders.)

To further complicate things, the Germans living in what became western Poland moved back to Germany, and the Poles of what used to be the eastern part of Poland took over their abandoned houses and towns. Which is why the older generation is essentially “returning home” to the Ukraine to restore the church.

2.) The humor. I heard Bill read a part of this at Translation Loaf, and it was incredibly funny in a very Polish sort of way. Rather than try and explain that myself, I’ll let Bill take over:

Różycki’s mock epic has strong affinities with the ������ę�岹, a long-established Polish literary tradition of prose writing in which the pleasure of pure storytelling trumps the need for tidy narratives and overarching plots. The ������ę�岹 goes back at least as far as Henryk Rzewuski’s Pamiatki Soplicy (Memoirs of Soplica, 1839) [. . . ] and stretches to the 20th century, where it left deep traces in the work or writers as otherwise diverse as Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) and Wiesław Myśliwski (b. 1930). Polish audiences know not to expect much in the way of plot resolution in such books; they read for the sheer exuberance of the narratorial voice, for the recounting of endless amusing incidents, and, going deeper, the delight of spendin ghours wiht a writer who is, simply put, good company. [. . .]

Though the form doesn’t draw attention to itself quite the way that, for example, rhymed verse does, a large part of the poem’s pleasure resides in its irrepressible torrent of words. Its comedy inheres as much in the exaggerations, excesses, and playful absurditites of the language itself as in those of the story and the characters.

Definitely a Chad sort of book.

3.) The fact that this is a contemporary work that’s made a huge impact. This poem was originally published in 2004, when Różycki was 34, and won the Kościelski Prize. Since that point, its made its way onto school reading lists, has been adapted for the radio, and has been performed in theaters throughout Poland. This sort of reaction to an epic poem is definitely more likely to happen in a European country than in the U.S., but still, that’s impressive.

4.) Because Bill Johnston. There are so many good Polish translators working today, but I have a personal soft spot for Bill. He’s a great person, incredibly talented, has a wonderful sense of humor, and picks some amazing projects. Over the past decade he’s translated Jerzy Pilch’s The Mighty Angel, which was one of the first books Open Letter ever published; Wiesław Myśliwski’s Stone Upon Stone, which is one of my favorite books of all time; and Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, which is one of the great works of twentieth-century science-fiction.

Oh, and remember this t-shirt? Which served as my indoor soccer team’s jersey for a season, and which I still wear? The front of which looked like this?

(Unfortunately, these are all sold out.)

5.) To give a shout out to Poland. Poland is also the Guest of Honor at BookExpo America in Chicago this summer, and was one of the main organizing forces behind the New Literature from Europe that took place last fall. The Polish Institute is great to work with, and over the past year has taken a lot of great editors over to Poland to learn about their literature and culture. There are so many great Polish writers and great translators from the Polish. And as most of my friends know, I’m mostly Polish! So why not honor this fascinating country and its wonderful literature by featuring one of its most notable contemporary poets?

Overall, I’m really excited that we’re starting the Reading the World Poetry Book Club off with this poem and am looking forward to reading what everyone has to say about this particular book.