Messages across seas

Delighted to share with you a translation just now out in the journal Asymptote. I love this journal, its global intention attention & compass. Check out this map of their scope & multiplicity.

My little poem is a pre-modern throwback in an issue otherwise on translation’s front edge. (Okay, there’s some Tzara, too, but he’s still.) Grateful they thought to find room for it. Thematically it does I guess fit an issue called “People from the In-between.” It’s got people at a loss, unbridgeable textual gaps, & runes – runes how to make meaning from which is all dispute.

Well see what you think it’s here. Poem I’ve called His Message and usually goes by The Husband’s Message. With floating footnotes, & the Old English, & me reading said Old English badly, should you wish to go there.

Whole issue’s rad. Especially worth your time and heart, the special feature on “literature from banned countries,” i.e. those 7 or 6 singled out by the present US administration’s unconscionable incoherent & never mind that they’re unconstitutional travel bans. I’m having trouble finding the section as a cluster, but go to the headline piece, then you can just wander over borders, as surely mostly we should be.

Wander or sojourn or flee as our luck has it. I avoid the word “privilege” as calcified but I am luck-filled. Many on the map above are not. Many pressed against borders are getting fucked by the stick of the world. May you come to places of rest. You should have, & it’s in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Trumpwad, so you’re a signatory, you should have a place to live that’s safe for you to love & work & love more & live & die meaningful lives and deaths.

Reading this article in The New Yorker has shocked the living shit out of me.

These women girls & men are moving up Africa along the old slave-trading routes. What they endure on the journey & when they arrive, if they do arrive, seems, to this far away safely sheltered reader, no less than what the slaves did in olden days, when they were fuelling the economic growth of the Americas.

More to say here. Such as, bringing it to my nonfiction workshop’s notice, putting it beside Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, his effort to broaden a indictment of systemic American racism into a critique of global inequality, including climate change. That’s for another post. God & damn it’s all connected. Where to snip the thread? Thank you friend. May I call you friend? If you’ve read this far.