translated by Lisa Dillman

Over the past decade, narcotics-trafficking has profoundly affected Mexican society: corruption, violence and increasing militarization are some of its consequences. Literature, too, has begun to reflect this reality. Some border writers have explicitly explored the impact of the drug world on the everyday lives of Mexicans, particularly in the crime fiction genre. One prime example can be seen in Élmer Mendoza’s (Culiacán, 1949) novels, in which a more or less honest cop becomes mixed up in an intrigue that brings to light just how deeply drug trafficking has penetrated all levels of society.

A new generation of writers, however, is seeking out different perspectives and new approaches. The following is an excerpt from Trabajos del reino / Kingdom Cons (Editorial Periférica, Madrid, 2008), Yuri Herrera’s first novel. It tells the story of Lobo, a poor corrido (ballad) composer and accordionist who one day has a chance encounter with a drug lord in a cantina. The incident will change his life. With this novel, Yuri Herrera immerses readers in the inner world of the cartel with lyrical, at times almost baroque language. Trabajos del reino / Kingdom Cons received the “Border of Words” US-Mexico Cross-Border Novel Prize in 2003.

Excerpt:
Yuri Herrera: Kingdom Cons
translated by Lisa Dillman

The following is an excerpt from the upcoming book, The Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist by Heinrich von Kleist, English translation © 2009 by Peter Wortsman, reprinted with the permission of Archipelago Books. Archipelago Books is a Brooklyn-based, not-for-profit press devoted to publishing excellent translations of classic and contemporary world literature.

Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), one of Germany’s most enigmatic and celebrated authors, was an aristocrat by birth, a rebel by inclination and a Romantic by temperament. He was a stylist of uncompromising rigor who wrote in multiple genres, including drama, fiction and expository prose.

Kleist’s stories take the reader into a visceral virtual reality. His novellas, The Marquise of O. and Michael Kohlhaas, and short stories like “The Earthquake in Chile” and “St. Cecilia or the Power of Music,” influenced Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, among other notable German writers. Kleist shot himself in a suicide pact at the age of thirty-four, leaving behind a startling body of work.

In the following essay, “On the Theater of Marionettes,” Kleist, with a luminous sixth sense, delves into illusion, transcendence and the uncanny in art. The essay points out the prison of man’s self-consciousness. Kleist wrote this influential piece in 1810, one year before his death.

Excerpt:
On the Theater of Marionettes by Heinrich von Kleist
translated by Peter Wortsman

Essay:
Horacio Castellanos Moya: Two Shots in the Wannsee

translated by Peter Wortsman

Click here for the text in German.

One evening in a public garden in M…, where I spent the winter of 1801, I happened to run into Mr. C…, who had recently been hired as the principle dancer of that city’s opera and was already all the rage.

I told him that I was surprised to have found him on several occasions in a makeshift marionette theater erected in the marketplace, an establishment that catered to the rabble with little dramatic burlesques and song and dance.

He assured me that the pantomime of these puppets gave him great pleasure, and suggested in no uncertain terms that a dancer inclined to improve his technique could learn a thing or two from them.

Since, by the way he said it, the remark seemed to me more than the stuff of idle fancy, I sat down with him to learn more about the underlying premises for such an extraordinary statement.

He asked me if I did not, indeed, find some of the movements of the puppets, particularly the smaller ones, to be extraordinarily graceful.

This fact I could not deny. A group of four peasants dancing the Ronde to a rapid tempo could not have been portrayed more charmingly by Teniers.[1]

I inquired as to the mechanism of these figures, and how it was possible, without myriad threads attached to fingers, to direct the motion of each limb and its pauses as prescribed by the rhythm of the movement or the dance?

He replied that I must not picture it as if each limb were individually posed and tugged at by the machinist during all the different moments of the dance.

Each movement, he said, had a center of gravity; it would suffice to control this point from the center of the figure; the limbs, which are, after all, nothing but pendulums, would follow mechanically on their own without anything else needing to be done.

He added that this movement was very simple; that each time the center of gravity is moved in a straight line the limbs trace curves; and that often, when merely shaken in a haphazard fashion, the entire mechanism slipped into a kind of rhythmic motion that resembled dance.

This remark seemed at first to shed some light on the pleasure he claimed to take in the marionette theater. But I did not then and there have the slightest inkling of the conclusions which he would subsequently derive from it.

I asked him if he believed that the machinist who controlled the puppet had himself to be a dancer, or at least to have a sense of the aesthetic of dance.

He replied that even if a task seemed simple in its mechanical basis that it does not necessarily follow that such a task could be practiced without any sensibility.

The line the center of gravity had to trace would indeed be very simple, and in most cases, he believed, straight. In those instances in which it was curved, the gravitational law of its curvature appeared to be of the first, or at most, the second order; and even in the latter case, it would only be elliptical, which form of movement was, in any case, (on account of the joints) the most natural for the nethermost parts of the human body, and consequently, demanded no great artistry on the part of the machinist.

On the other hand, viewed from another angle, this same line was something very mysterious. For it was nothing less than the pathway of the dancer’s soul; and he doubted that it could be produced in any other fashion than, thereby, that the machinist adopted the center of gravity of the marionette, in other words, that he danced.

I responded that the puppeteer’s craft had been described to me as rather vapid: more like the turning of a crank that plucked at a lyre.

Not at all, he replied. The manipulative relation between the movements of his fingers and the movement of the puppets attached to them is really rather ingenious, more like the relation between numbers and their logarithms or between asymptotes and hyperbolae.

At the same time, he believed that this latter soul splitting, of which he spoke, is extracted from the marionette, that its dance is completely transposed into the realm of the mechanical, and could be evoked, as I had supposed, by means of a crank.

I expressed my surprise to see what attention he lavished on this art form invented for the masses, as though it were a fine art. Not only that he deemed it capable of a higher artistic development, but that he even seemed to dabble in it himself.

He smiled and said that he dared claim that if a mechanic could build him a marionette according to the stipulations he envisioned, that he would have it perform a dance which neither he himself, nor any other skilled dancer of the day, not even Vestris, could execute.

Have you, he asked, upon noticing me cast my gaze in silence to the ground, have you heard of those mechanical limbs that English artists had fashioned for those poor unfortunates who’d lost their own?

I said, no, I had never laid eyes on such a thing.

What a shame, he replied; for if I told you that these poor unfortunates could dance with them, I almost fear you would not believe it. –Well not exactly dancing! The sphere of their movements is indeed limited; but those movements which they are able to command are executed with a calm, ease and comeliness that makes every thinking person stand in awe.

I remarked in jest that he had surely found his man. For the artist able to construct such a remarkable limb would undoubtedly also be able to build him an entire marionette according to his specifications.

What, I asked, for I noticed him casting a somewhat despondent look at the ground: of what sort are those specifications that you would make for the workmanship of such a puppet?

Nothing, he replied, that can’t already be found here: symmetry, flexibility, agility—but all to a higher degree; and especially a more natural disposition of the centers of gravity.

And the advantage that this puppet would have over live dancers?

The advantage? First of all, a negative one, my fine friend, namely that it never strikes an attitude. For attitude, as you well know, arises when the soul (vis motrix) finds itself twisted in a motion other than the one prescribed by its center of gravity. Since, wielding wire or thread, the machinist simply has no other point at his disposal than this one, all the other bodily articulations are as they should be, dead, pure pendulums, and merely follow the law of gravity; an admirable quality that one may seek in vain among the vast majority of our dancers.

Take P…, for instance, he continued, when she dances the part of Daphne, and turns around to peer at Apollo, who is pursuing her, her soul sits in the axis of the spine; she bends as if she were about to break, like a Naiad from the School of Bernini.[2] Look at young F…, when, in the role of Paris, he stands among the three goddesses and passes the apple to Venus: his soul, if I dare say so (and it’s a horror to see) lodges in his elbows.

Such missteps, he added as an aside, are unavoidable ever since we ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. But Paradise is bolted shut and the cherub is on our tail; we are obliged to circle the globe and go around to the other side to see if perhaps there’s a back way in.

I laughed.—Indeed, I thought to myself, the spirit can’t go wrong if there’s no spirit to begin with. But I sensed that he still had more on his mind, and bid him continue.

The puppets, moreover, have the advantage in that they are gravity-defiant. They know nothing of the inertia of matter: for the force that lifts them into the air is greater than the force that binds them to the ground. What wouldn’t our worthy G… give to be sixty pounds lighter, or if a weight of this magnitude were to aid her in her entrechats and pirouettes? The puppets only need the ground, as do the elves, to graze it, and thereby to reanimate the swing of their limbs against the momentary resistance; we need it to rest on it and recuperate from the strain of the dance: for us the moment of contact clearly plays no part in the dance and we have no other recourse but to get it over and done with as quickly as possible.

Whereto I said, that, as cleverly as he might maneuver the crux of his paradox, he would never convince me that there was more grace in a jointed mechanical figure than in the structure of the human body.

He replied that it would simply be impossible for a human being to even hold his own with the mechanical figure. Only a god could measure up to inert matter in this regard; and here precisely was the point at which the two ends of the ring-shaped world came together.

I was ever more surprised and did not know what to make of such extraordinary assertions.

It appears, he suggested, taking a pinch of tobacco, that I had not read carefully enough the third chapter of the first Book of Moses;[3] and it would be impossible to confer with a man who was unfamiliar with the first period of human refinement concerning the subsequent periods, let alone concerning the last.

To which I responded that I did, indeed, know all too well what a mess consciousness had made of the natural grace of Man. A young man of my acquaintance had, as it were, before my very eyes, forfeited his innocence with a single remark, and was never, thereafter, despite every conceivable effort, able to retrieve this lost paradise.—But what conclusions can you draw from this? I added.

He asked me, just what had transpired?

Some three years ago, I recounted, I happened to be bathing beside a young man, blessed at the time with an astounding beauty. He must have been about sixteen years old, and manifested only the faintest first traces of vanity fostered by the favor of women. It so happened that we had both shortly before seen the young man pulling the thorn out of his foot in Paris; a copy of that famous sculpture can be found in most German collections. A glance he cast into a large mirror at the very same moment at which he set his foot on a stool to dry it reminded him of it; he smiled and remarked that he had just made a discovery. In fact, I had at that same moment made the same association; but, whether to test that his innate grace was still intact, or to put a healthy damper on his vanity, I laughed and told him he was seeing things! He blushed and raised the foot again, to show me; but, as one might well have predicted, the attempt failed. Befuddled, he raised his foot a third and fourth time, indeed he raised it ten more times: but for naught! He was simply unable to repeat the same movement—and what’s more, the movements that he did manage to make looked so comic that I was hard pressed to restrain my laughter.

From that day, indeed, as it were, from that moment on, the young man underwent an incomprehensible transformation. He began to stand for days at a time in front of the mirror; and he lost one charm after another. An invisible and inconceivable force, like an iron net, seemed to settle over and impinge upon the free play of movements, and after a year had gone by, not a trace could be found of the charming allure that had once entranced all those whose eyes fell upon him. I know another living soul who witnessed that strange and unfortunate incident, and could confirm, word for word, my account.—

In this context, Mr. C… replied in a right friendly manner, I must tell you another story, of which you will immediately comprehend the connection.

On a trip to Russia I happened to find myself on the country estate of a certain Sir von G…, a Livonian nobleman, whose sons were at the time very much focused on their fencing; especially the older one, who had just returned from his university studies, played the virtuoso, and one morning up in his room handed me a rapier. We fenced, yet I proved superior; passion helped put him off his guard; with almost every thrust I struck home, until, finally, his rapier flew into a corner. Half in jest, half pained, he said, as he picked up his rapier, that he had found his master; but everything in nature finds its match, and he would soon lead me to mine. The brothers laughed out loud and cried: Off with him! Off with him! To the woodshed he must go! Whereupon they took me by the hand and led me to a bear that Sir von G…, their father, was training in the yard.

When I appeared before him in stunned amazement, the bear stood upright on its hind legs, with his back to a post to which he was attached, his right paw raised and ready to strike, looking me straight in the eye: this was his fencing position. And finding myself face to face with such an opponent, I did not know if I was dreaming; but Sir von G…, egged me on: Thrust man! Thrust! he said. See if you can teach him a thing or two! And having gotten over my initial amazement, I lunged with my rapier; the bear made a very slight movement with his paw and parried my thrust. I tried with feints to trick him; the bear did not budge. And once again I lunged with a nimble stroke that would have pierced without fail any human breast; but the bear made a very slight motion with its paw and parried the thrust. Now I was almost as befuddled as had been the young Sir von G… The bear’s perfect calm helped rob me of my own composure, I varied thrusts and feints, sweat dripped from my brow: for naught! Not only did the bear, like the foremost fencer in the world, parry all my thrusts; but, unlike any human counterpart would have done, not a single time did he go for my feints: Looking at me eye to eye, as if he could read my soul, he stood stock still, paw raised and ready, and if my thrusts were ruses, he did not even budge.

Do you believe this story?

Absolutely! I replied with cheerful applause; I’d believe it from the lips of any stranger; all the more so from you!

Well then, my fine friend, said Mr. C…, you now have all the knowledge you need to grasp my meaning. We see that in the organic world, to the same degree that reflection gets darker and weaker, grace grows ever more radiant and dominant.—But just as two lines intersect on one side of a point and, after passing through infinity, suddenly come together again on the other side; or the image in a concave mirror suddenly reappears before us after drawing away into the infinite distance: so, too, does grace return once perception, as it were, has traversed the infinite—such that it simultaneously appears the purest in human bodily structures that are either devoid of consciousness or which possess an infinite consciousness, i.e. in the jointed manikin or the god.

In which case, I observed, a bit befuddled, would we then have to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge again to fall back into the state of innocence?

Undoubtedly, he replied; which will be the last chapter of the history of the world.

[1] David Teniers the Younger, Flemish genre painter, 1610-1690.
[2] Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Italian Baroque sculptor and architect (1598-1680)
[3] Reference to Genesis, 3: “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked…” The Holy Bible, King James Version.

EXCLUSIVE BOOK PREVIEW:
The Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist
Heinrich von Kleist

Essay:
Horacio Castellanos Moya: Two Shots in the Wannsee

translated by Aung Aung Taik

As the Pittsburgh spring finally arrived, I began to see some stores displaying packages of vegetable seeds and bags of soil and fertilizers. Sometimes, on the sidewalks, I saw shops selling colorful and strikingly beautiful flowers.

Perhaps because I was brought up in Maletto, a small village in Burma’s delta region, I have a great interest in gardening. In front of our long-legged house, there is a mango and a coconut tree that my mother planted.

During one rainy season, as I was bathing in the Maletto Creek which flows behind our house, a small plant floated by. I took it home, padded it with some coconut husk and tied it with a Thinoo rope to the trunk of our coconut tree. It rained almost every day, and my orphan scion grew quite well. At the beginning of summer, three or four stalks with buds appeared. I was so happy to see them.

One morning, I woke up and opened the front door to see the coconut tree. I clapped my hands and cried out “Dear God!” There they were: Four stalks of ruby red orchids in bloom.

Suddenly a motto I learned when I was a child came to mind, “Grow trees for everlasting happiness.”

Click here to read Khet Mar’s bio.

Horacio Castellanos Moya

Since the first time I read Heinrich von Kleist, I’ve been impressed by the way he handled his death or, to be precise, by how he committed suicide.

It was on November 21, 1811. He was with his lover, the talented musician Henriette Vogel, in an inn at Lake Wannsee, between Berlin and Potsdam. He was 34 years old; she was 31. They had lunch and perhaps enjoyed their last love afternoon. Then they dressed up and went outside, to be on the lakeside and under the sky. They had agreed to a plan: a suicide pact.

He prepared the gun. He shot her in the heart and then shot himself in the head. He knew just how much powder and ammunition to use so that he wouldn’t even affect his hairdo.

A lieutenant of the Prussian Army, Kleist quit the military and became one of the most important German writers, the head of the Romantic revolt. However, very few contemporaries recognized his genius. In a decade he produced brilliant plays, poems, short stories and political pamphlets; but he faced failure after failure. At the end he couldn’t even find a job. He was desperate.

Whenever I travel, I like to go to the gravesites where writers that I admire have been buried. I think that Kleist is the real inventor of the modern short story as we know it, not Edgar Allen Poe, as is commonly believed.

The first time I went to Berlin in 2005, I looked for the place where Kleist committed suicide. It was not easy for me to get information about it. Finally, I met a Mexican who had been there and gave me directions. I took the S-Bahn train to Potsdam. It was the morning of a sunny day in early July. I got off in Wannsee station. There were hundreds of people around the area, visiting the spas and the tourist attractions of the lake. None of them, of course, was looking for Kleist’s trail.

I followed the directions the Mexican gave me. I walked a block, crossed a highway and then moved into a neighborhood of luxurious old houses. There were no signs to follow until I got in front of the lot. And there it was: the stone tablet in the middle of a small wood. Under Kleist’s name appeared the sentence: “Nun. O- Unsterblichkeit bist du ganz mein” (“Now, oh immortality, you are completely mine”).

I was the only person around. The silence was broken by the blowing of the wind through the trees. How interesting it was that both great writers who created the modern short story—Kleist and Poe, a German and an American—were defeated by life, not recognized by their contemporaries, and died in a terrible way.

I said some personal things to Kleist. Then I walked down the lot, in the middle of the small wood, towards the shore. I sat on a bench in front of the lake. I remembered that I was born on November 21.

The day was bright; some yachts were sailing deep into the lake.

EXCLUSIVE BOOK PREVIEW:
The Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist
Heinrich von Kleist

Excerpt:
On the Theater of Marionettes
Heinrich von Kleist
translated by Peter Wortsman

photo collage by Brian Weller

Telly is, in a way, the first love poem I ever wrote. Ever since I was a child, my writing was a place I talked to myself about things I couldn’t talk about to my parents and friends. I wrote in secret. I worked out my ‘dark’ side in my writing.

For years, as my writing became more public, I brought that dark side, that ‘secret’ life, into my public writing. I wrote about my anger, my abuse, my abandonment. I thought I would never be able to access poems that held a combination of love and sadness. The Telly poems were more difficult to read in public than any of my other poems. What would people think of a poet who wrote a love poem about a fish? The tenderest, shyest, most hidden part of the heart is the most vulnerable.

Because I was good to Telly in his life,
because I taught him Alice Neel,
and feed him frozen mealworms,
(until I found out he’d
lose his bright red tail color
for that pleasure),
because I paid 100 dollars
for a pet sitter to come
when I was away on trips (never liking those
who said their beta did just fine
sitting on the edge of their office desk
over the long weekend-how would you
like it not to eat for three
days, I wanted to ask), for choosing
carefully among the pet
sitters, interviewing, for looking for one who took a fish
seriously and
told beta stories about how smart they
are, coming up
to say hi in the morning, checking you
out with a certain calm or anxious
look in the eye, because
I believed
in one fish’s
brain and life and skills, because
I put him in a painted wooden…

Click here to download full poem.

Introduction by Toi Derricotte: Grief Poetry by Yona Harvey
To Describe My Body Walking
One Impression / After / Another
Black Winged Stilt

translated by Lisa Dillman

It was just as he’d always imagined a palace to be. Supported by columns, with paintings and statues in every room, animal skins draped over sofas, gold door knockers, a ceiling too high to touch. But more than all that, it was the people. So many people, striding down corridors. This way and that, attending to affairs or eager to excel. People from far and wide, from every corner of the earth, people from beyond the desert. There were even, God’s honest, some who’d seen the sea. And women who walked like leopards, and giant warriors, their faces decorated with scars; there were Indians and blacks; he even saw a dwarf. He sidled up to circles, he pricked up his ears, he yearned to learn. He heard tell of mountains, of jungles, of gulfs, of summits, in singsong accents he’d never before heard: words with no esses, yos like shos, some whose tone rose up so high and down so low it seemed each sentence was a journey: it was clear they were from nowhere around here.

He’d been through these parts long ago, back with his parents. But back then it was a dump, a hellhole of waste and infection. No way to know it would become a beacon. The royalty of a king determined these things: the man settled among simple folk and turned filth to splendor. Approached from afar, the Palace exploded from the edge of the desert in a vast pageantry of gardens, gates and walls. A city of splendor on the fringes of the city, that seemed only to reproduce its misfortune on street after street. Here, the people who came and went thrust their shoulders back with the air of those who belong to a prosperous dominion.

The Artist had to find a way to stay.

He’d learned there was to be a party that night, set off for the Palace, and played his only card.

“I’ve come to sing for the chief.”

The guards regarded him like a stray dog. Didn’t even answer. But the Artist recognized one from the cantina encounter and knew that he recognized him, too.

“You saw he liked my songs. Let me sing for him now and you’ll be set, you’ll see.”

The guard furrowed his forehead for a moment, as if envisioning fortunes. Then he approached the Artist, shoved him to the wall and frisked him.

Satisfied that he was harmless, the guard said, “He better like you.” He dragged him in and when the Artist was on his way, warned, “Around here, you screw up, you’re fucked.”

He couldn’t find a good spot at the party so decided instead to wander among the guests. Until the music started and a sea of sombreros swelled, looking for action on the dance floor. Couples configured and the Artist found himself ricocheting from hips and elbows. Some shindig, he thought. He’d scoot to one side and a couple would come at him in three quick steps, scoot to the other and the next one tripped him on a turn. Finally he found a way to corner himself and observe, out of the way: so stylish, the sombreros; so seductive, the violent thrusting thighs; so much gold, dripping off the guests.

Awestruck, thus, the question took him by surprise.

“Like what you see, friend?”

The Artist turned and saw a weathered man, blondish and elegant, who sat in his chair giving him a How’s it hanging look. He nodded. The man pointed to an empty seat beside him and outstretched his hand.

He said his name and then added, “Jeweler. All that gold you see? Made by me. What about you?”

“I make songs,” the Artist replied. And as soon as he said it, he sensed that he, too, could begin repeating, after his name: Artist, I make songs.

“So belt one out, amigo, you got plenty of hooch.”

Indeed, it was a banquet. Each table overflowed with whisky, rum, brandy, tequila, beer, and plenty of sotol, so there’d be no grumbling about the hospitality. Girls in black miniskirts topped up glasses the moment they were raised, or you could pour yourself whatever you wanted, if you preferred. And the promise of carne asada and roast kid filled the air. A waitress slipped a beer into his hand, but he didn’t so much as touch it.

“Don’t think they raise Cain around here all the time,” said the Jeweler. “The King likes to let her rip with the people in old dives, but today’s a special day.”

He glanced side to side before leaning over to the Artist as if he had a scoop, though everyone knew:

“Two kingpins are coming to make a deal so he’s got to treat them right, go all out.”

The Jeweler leaned back smugly and the Artist nodded again and looked around. He felt no envy for the gold-worked belt buckles and snakeskin boots the guests wore, although they were dazzling, but the outfits the musicians on stage had on, those were something else: black and white spur-print shirts with leather fringe. There by the band, close enough to make requests, he spotted the King, his majesty chiseled in stone cheekbones. He was laughing raucously with the two Lords flanking him, both of whom gave an impression of might but not the power or the autocratic air that radiated from the King. There was one other man sitting at their table, who’d also been there at the cantina the other day. He was less elegant than the Lords, or more like people from other parts: no sombrero, no belt buckle.

“That’s the Top Dog,” the Jeweler said, seeing where he was looking. “The King’s right-hand man. That punk’s fearless, ballsy, but cocky as hell, too, yes he is.”

Better be, if he’s the Heir, the Artist thought.

“Don’t say you heard it from me, friend,” the Jeweler went on, “no dirt allowed. Way it works here, you get along with the pack, you do fine. Like right now, you and me just made friends, isn’t that right?”

Something in the Jeweler’s tone put the Artist on alert, and now he did not nod. The Jeweler seemed to sense it and changed the subject. He told him he only made jewelry to order, whatever his clients wanted, and that’s what you should do, too, Artist, make everyone look good. The Artist was about to respond when the guard who’d let him in approached.

“It’s time,” he said. “Hustle on up, and ask the boys to accompany you.”

The Artist stood nervously and walked to the stage. On the way he sensed the shape and the scent of a different sort of woman but refused to turn his head and look, though the heat lingered. He stood among the musicians and asked them to play “They’re on My Tail,” and launched into it. People already knew the story, but no one had ever sung it. He’d asked endless questions to find out what happened, to compose this song and present it to the King. It told of his mettle and his heart, put to the test in a hail of bullets, and had a happy ending not just for the King but also for the deadbeats under his wing. Beneath that enormous vaulted ceiling his voice was projected, taking on a depth it never had in cantinas. He sung his song with the faith of a hymn, the certainty of a sermon, and above all he made sure it was catchy, so people would learn it with their feet and their hips, and so they, too, would sing it, later.

When he was done, he was regaled with whistles and applause, the elegant musicians clapped him on the back and the Lords accompanying the King bobbed their heads and pursed their lips (the Artist wanted to believe),with envy. He climbed down to go pay his respects. The King looked him in the eye and the Artist bowed his head.

“As soon as I saw you I knew you had talent,” said the King, who, it was known, never forgot a face. “Are all your songs that good, Artist?”

“I do what I can, sir,” the Artist stammered.

“Then you just write, you got nothing to worry about; stick around with the good guys and it’ll all go your way.” He nodded to another man, standing nearby, and said, “Take care of him.”

The Artist bowed again and followed the man, wanting to burst into tears, blinded by bright lights and his future. Then he took a deep breath, said to himself, It’s really happening, and came back down to earth. That was when he remembered the silhouette that had called his attention. He looked around. Meanwhile, the man spoke.

“I’m the Manager. I take care of accounts. You never ask Señor for money, you ask me. Tomorrow I’ll take you over to see a man who does the recording, and you’ll start giving him everything you write,” the Manager stopped, seeing the Artist’s eyes wander. “And I’d watch it before you go sticking your snout where it doesn’t belong; don’t even glance at another man’s woman.”

“And who does that one belong to?” asked the Artist, pointing to a dolled up adolescent just to cover up.

“That one,” said the Manager distractedly, his mind on something else, “belongs to whoever I say.”

He turned back to the Artist, measuring him up, then called the girl over and said, “The Artist here has made Señor very happy; treat him well.”

And overcome by an absurd panic, fearing slightly what he sensed would happen next, but fearing more that he’d succumb to that other scent, the Artist accepted the Girl’s delicate hand and allowed himself to be led out of the hall.

EXCLUSIVE TRANSLATION
Introduction to Kingdom Cons
Horacio Castellanos Moya
translated by Lisa Dillman

translated by Aung Aung Taik

My very first trip to America was in 2007 to participate in the International Writing Program held at the University of Iowa.  Here I am, again, in America for the second time. I arrived the second week of March 2009 as a writer in residency at City of Asylum/ Pittsburgh. On this trip, I was allowed to bring my family with me, including my artist husband and two sons to live together on Sampsonia Way.

The plane ride from Rangoon to Pittsburgh, with layovers at various airports, took almost forty hours. When we left Burma, the March heat was in full might. When we eventually reached the Pittsburgh airport, the lingering winter suddenly drilled in our veins. We, the children of a hot land, trembled from the unfathomable cold. My two sons suffered severe allergic reactions causing them to bleed from their noses and through their mouths.

About two weeks later, the cold noticeably waned and everything—including my sons—began to act better, feel better and look better. The beauty of spring warmly welcomed us with an amiable display. The naked branches of the trees started to bear fledging leaves. Other trees were exclusively covered with tiny buds. About ten days later, the buds blossomed, choking the trees with beautiful flowers.

Spring in Pittsburgh—it was an unforeseen wonder to my eyes.

The following is an excerpt from the upcoming book, A Lifetime Is a Promise to Keep: Poems of Huang Xiang, China Research Monograph 63. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2009. To learn more about Huang Xiang, follow this link to his bio and his original essay for Sampsonia Way, written on the Twentieth Anniversary of Tienanmen Square.

Another Kind of Vastness:
Introduction to Huang Xiang’s Poetry
Michelle Yeh

Excerpt:
A Lifetime is a Promise to Keep
Huang Xiang
translated by Michelle Yeh

In October 1978 Huang Xiang, Li Jiahua, Fang Jiahua, and Mo Jiangang traveled from Guiyang to the capital for the first time. Arriving on the tenth, they posted the inaugural issue of the underground journal Enlightenment on a wall in downtown Beijing. Huang also recited his long poem “God of Fire: A Symphonic Poem” to the large crowd that had gathered spontaneously. The wall on which Enlightenment was posted soon came to be known as the Democracy Wall. From October 1978 to April 1981, the Democracy Wall witnessed a golden age of underground journals, such as Exploration, in which the essay “The Fifth Modernization—Democracy and Other Things,” by Wei Jingsheng (b. 1950), was published; April Fifth Forum, founded by Liu Qing (b. 1946), Yang Jing, Xu Wenli, and Zhao Nan; League of Human Rights, in which “A Manifesto of Human Rights in China,” by its founder Ren Wanding (b. 1944), was published; the purely literary journal Today, founded by Bei Dao (b. 1949) and Mang Ke (b. 1950); Thaw, by Li Jiahua; and Beijing Spring, by Hu Ping (b. 1947) and Wang Juntao (b. 1958). The name of the last journal has come to designate this hopeful period, which came to an abrupt end with the arrests, under the order of Deng Xiaoping (1904-1977), of some of the editors and writers.

The same day Enlightenment appeared in Beijing, Huang wrote “I” (p. 11) on the spur of the moment. The three couplets present three images of incremental somberness and power. The human voice cannot be muffled, the brilliance of a shattered diamond cannot be covered up, and life cannot be eradicated. The violence implied in the images is overcome in each case by the “I” (and “me” in Chinese), a word that appears six times in the last couplet. The repetition affirms the self (“I am I”) and suggests a transcendence of the physical destruction (“obituary”) visited upon him. In light of his personal experience, we now understand why Huang Xiang would name his study The Morgue and his residence Dream-Tomb. When compared to “Singing Solo” written sixteen years earlier, “I” brings to the fore the human courage and strength in the face of oppression and death.

*    *   *

For most of his life, Huang Xiang has been denied access to official outlets in China. After the country opened up to the world in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he became known to the underground poetry scene as a pioneer, but even there he remained an outsider for two main reasons. First, he lived far away from Beijing, where the underground poetry movement in post-Mao China attracted national and international attention. In the heyday of underground poetry in the 1980s and 1990s, he had few ties to the various groups active in Beijing and other urban centers and was almost completely left out of literary history until recent years. The second and equally important reason is that Huang was in and out of jail multiple times from the 1970s through the 1990s for defending human rights and civil liberty. Unlike many “exile poets” from China, he has endured years of imprisonment and torture and has refused to yield to political pressure. To this day, he is a persona non grata in China, where his work is banned.

From Michelle Yeh, trans. and intro., A Lifetime Is a Promise to Keep: Poems of Huang Xiang. China Research Monograph 63. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2009. Pp. xiv-xv, 2-3, 10-11, 20-23, 36-37. Copyright © 2009 by The Regents of the University of California. Reproduced by permission.

EXCLUSIVE BOOK PREVIEW:
A Lifetime is a Promise to Keep
Huang Xiang

Excerpt:
A Lifetime is a Promise to Keep
Huang Xiang
translated by Michelle Yeh