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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Report from Constantinople

July 12, 2017

A “Redisovery” from Vol. 38, #2. Originally published in 1866 by Henry G. Bohn.

 

I have not written to you, dear sister, these many months:—a great piece of self-denial. But I know not where to direct, or what part of the world you were in. I have received no letter from you since that short note of April last, in which you tell me, that you are on the point of leaving England, and promise me a direction for the place you stay in; but I have in vain expected it till now: and now I only learn from the gazette, that you are returned, which induces me to venture this letter to your house at London. I had rather ten of my letters should be lost, than you imagine I don’t write; and I think it is hard fortune if one in ten don’t reach you. However, I am resolved to keep the copies, as testimonies of my inclination to give you, to the utmost of my power, all the diverting part of my travels, while you are exempt from all the fatigues and inconveniences.

In the first place, I wish you joy of your niece; for I was brought to bed of a daughter five weeks ago. I don’t mention this as one of my diverting adventures; though I must own that it is not half so mortifying here as in England, there being as much difference as there is between a little cold in the head, which sometimes happens here, and the consumption coughs, so common in London. Nobody keeps their house a month for lying in; and I am not so fond of any of our customs to retain them when they are not necessary. I returned my visits at three weeks’ end; and about four days ago crossed the sea, which divides this place from Constantinople, to make a new one, where I had the good fortune to pick up many curiosities.

[read more]

From NER 38.2

 

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) was an English aristocrat and writer who was also known for introducing and advocating for smallpox inoculation in Britain. A number of her poems and essays were printed in her lifetime, sometimes anonymously, with or without her knowledge and permission. Her letters from Turkey, for which Lady Mary remains best remembered, were published posthumously in 1763, as Letters Written During Her Travels (Becket and De Hondt), and in later years were frequently reprinted. Other edited volumes of her writing were published after her death, the most significant being Letters and Works, edited by her great-grandson Lord Wharncliffe, published in 1837 and reissued with corrections in 1866. Lady Mary defied convention throughout her life, and interest in her life story has so far outpaced the scholarship on her considerable accomplishments in writing.

 

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Filed Under: Nonfiction Tagged With: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Report from Constantinople

Bruce Beasley

Sibboleth

July 5, 2017

From NER 38.2

. . . for several years my Lexicon was my only companion
—Emily Dickinson

cry out your shibboleth
into your homeland strangeness
—Paul Celan

Emily Rankin, “Disintegral”

Word-ridden, have
you been that way:
-riddled,
I mean, morphemes

begging to be multibegotten

at once, and, for once, always
alphabet-encysted:

are you like me like that, relieved
from sense, shot

through with it, shot through it, into it…

[read more]

 

Bruce Beasley is the author of eight collections of poems, most recently Theophobia (2012) and All Soul Parts Returned (2017), both published by BOA Editions.

 

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Filed Under: Poetry Tagged With: Bruce Beasley, Emily Rankin, Sibboleth

James McCorkle

History of Barbed Wire

July 3, 2017

Faisal Mohyuddin, “The Bosphorus”

From NER 38.2

Stockman’s ribbon wire, two strands with a third wire twisted in
and sheared, began the Devil’s fence in 1863, when Michael Kelly

first made it, to keep his wife’s garden from cattle and vermin,
a couplet of wires then patented by Joseph Glidden,

DeKalb, Illinois, 1874, the twisted wire began the division
of land, and the end of common-use and free movement

across the Great Plains of the last of the First Peoples. After the Civil War,
it came into use ending the primacy of cavalry that began with Darius,

and ended with the Russian–Japanese war, in 1902, the British
in South Africa used it to enclose their settlements against the Boers,

who were sent when captured to the first concentration camps
and by that time the Great Divide had been squared off, the ghosts had begun…

[read more]

 

James McCorkle is the author of two collections of poetry, Evidences (Copper Canyon Press, 2003) and The Subtle Bodies (Etruscan Press, 2014), and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry from the Colonial Era to the Present (Greenwood, 2015). He co-directs the Africana Studies Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.

 

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Filed Under: Poetry Tagged With: Faisal Mohyuddin, History of Barbed Wire, James McCorkle

Steven G. Kellman

Jhumpa Lahiri Goes Italian

June 30, 2017

Faisal Mohyuddin, “Caliban”

Any casual runner knows how diabolically difficult it is to traverse 26.2 miles in under five hours. However, in 2011, James Gefke not only completed the 115th Boston Marathon in four hours, 18 minutes, and 29 seconds, he did it while carrying thirty pounds of firefighting gear to honor the memory of a fellow firefighter. Similarly, anyone who has ever tried to write a book might agree with George Orwell’s assessment that it is “a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” Why exacerbate the horror by contending with the additional burden of a foreign language’s unfamiliar vocabulary and grammar? Joseph Conrad wrote remarkable fiction not in his native Polish or even his second language, French, but in English, a language he began studying seriously only after settling in England while in his twenties. Conrad likened his literary translingualism to arduous, dangerous labor: “I had to work like a coal-miner in his pit, quarrying all of my English sentences out of a black night.”

Immigration is a common and compelling motive for switching languages. After news of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre convinced Ha Jin, who was studying in Boston at the time, not to return home to China, it made sense to adopt the language of the country in which he remained. Ten years later, he won the National Book Award for Waiting, a novel he wrote in English. Louis Begley, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, Aleksandar Hemon, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Luc Sante are among many other writers who adopted English after moving to the United States. Translingual transplants to France include Romain Gary, Nancy Huston, Milan Kundera, Alain Mabanckou, and Andreï Makine. Turkish immigrants to Germany who have adopted German as their literary medium include Zehra Çirak, Emine Sevgi Őzdamar, and Feridun Zaimoğlu. Many other writers abandoned the language of their homeland without leaving home; Chinua Achebe, Raja Rao, Léopold Senghor, and Wole Soyinka all adopted as literary medium the language of the European imperial power governing their country.

The case of Jhumpa Lahiri differs from them all. Noting how the three most celebrated translingual authors—Samuel Beckett, Conrad, and Vladimir Nabokov—all had closer and longer ties to their adopted languages than she has to hers, Italian, Lahiri writes, in Italian: “Mi chiedo se ci siano altri come me”—“I wonder if there are others like me.” There are not. Born in London to immigrants from Calcutta, she counts Bengali as her mother tongue, though she admits to an imperfect command of it. When she was two, the family moved to Rhode Island, where she grew up and where she began to cultivate a talent for writing in English. After receiving a BA in English literature from Barnard College, Lahiri continued to pursue her interest in English through two MA’s, an MFA, and a PhD from Boston University. With two commercially successful collections of short fiction—Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008)—and two novels—The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013)—Lahiri has received some of the most prestigious accolades in the Anglophone literary world—a Pulitzer Prize, a PEN/Hemingway Award, and a National Humanities Medal, among others.

[read more]

From NER 38.2

 

Steven G. Kellman is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His books include Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (Norton, 2005), The Translingual Imagination (University of Nebraska Press, 2000), Loving Reading: Erotics of the Text (Archon, 1985), and The Self-Begetting Novel (Columbia University Press, 1980).

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Filed Under: Nonfiction Tagged With: Faisal Mohyuddin, Jhumpa Lahiri Goes Italian, Steven G. Kellman

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Volume 39, Number 4
Cover art by Emilia Dubicki

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