My sister wrapped her arms around me. I did not cry. I felt nothing.
(nonfiction)
Category: Translations
All that’s left of the baby is the rattle. / All that’s left of the granny is her knitting.
Back then, protecting the border was about preventing people from getting out; now it means not letting anyone in…
(fiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“She washed her hair and chose the most suitable clothes her closet would allow, the kind of outfit she imagined the woman who headed up the office of human resources would want to see.”
(fiction)
I blossomed into violet / flames while my / Self, in silent flight / within my soul, / drank and sang / until dawn.
I’m paranoid, I’m chronically fatigued. / Neither Freud nor Jung can help. / Lord, grind us with your palette knife down into / the dark, into the soil.
(poetry)
The only language you know / the form you know as love / as one, / complete / complete.
(translations)
I don’t trap my dreams in books / you might as well store fire in paper
(translation)
But those who press the grapes now, / who toil from morning till night, / they’ve disowned us…
✶✶✶✶
He’s standing around and a girl in a red coat makes him think of me. Or a French bulldog, that I would run to pat. Or a scent makes him turn back.
(fiction)
in silence, those dark minutes of recess when they stomp on my shadow with their hyena / laughter
(poetry)
She returned home when her village was liberated after six months of occupation. Her house greeted her with a collapsed wall.
(translations)
It was late in the evening and dark, the dark river with its lights passing by, reflections from the Seine travelling across the ceiling, sliding along the walls.
That day has never ended. / The fence he built is still new.
Entangled one with another they watch us. / The good died too soon.
(translations)
O, old ocean! the river has mixed with your waters / where I so often bathed
The roof soars so high above the sky’s hanging at arm’s length / And you, dear, are now drunk on a thousand glasses of wine
“Looking up / the wave of your gaze arrived / upon my shore.”
He demands I be a man. What is it to be a man? I ask him.
“In this story, day zero is when I live, and you die.”
(fiction)
“for just a moment I lived / through what they may have felt”
He remains in place next to the stove, watching everyone, observing their flaws.
(fiction)
just a slight breeze, early in the morning / as you lie asleep and the bulb / you planted pushes through the soil
Four poems by Alain Mabanckou, translated from the French (Congo-Brazzaville) by Nancy Naomi Carlson
He rejects the idea that Humankind descended from the apes, otherwise why has he, the gorilla, remained at the animal stage?
(poetry)
“wind unravels the light / seeks a face / for the coming storms”
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“I fell in love with a sweet-lipped / bitter-eyed / girl from Balkh”
(poetry)
Now the extent of my friend’s madness was clear. I couldn’t understand how I’d failed to realize it earlier.
(fiction/translation)
She didn’t go to a hospital—with the traffic in Bogotá, she’s sure she would have ended up giving birth in a taxi!
(fiction)