Dan Beachy-Quick

Writer’s Notebook: Why I Translated This

July 6, 2020

It is as if translating these ancient poems returned me to a way of knowing I had not only lost, but never knew I lost.

Archilochus, Callimachus, & Alcman, A Suite of Poems from the Ancient Greek, from NER 41.2

I wanted to learn Ancient Greek to work down toward the roots of certain words and so dig deeper into the earthy loam that is the mind. And for a long time—studying the bewildering grammar, trying to memorize conjugations of verbs and declensions of nouns, reading through the vocabulary flashcards I made on the way to teach my seminar on Keats and Celan—that first feeling stayed true. Some words shook my head apart like a child shakes apart a dandelion: a strong breath that scatters its wish into greener fields. The word for poet was one such word, ποιητής, which means “maker; workman; inventor.” The related verb ποιέω means what you’d expect it to mean: “I make; I invent.” But unlike English, verbs in Ancient Greek can occur in the “middle voice.” I think of the middle voice as John Keats taught me to—a verb that is active and passive at once, a “diligent indolence,” in which the nature of the verb’s action is curiously at work inside and against itself. Some words change their meaning in the middle voice, a kind of magic, and ποιέω is one such word. What in the active indicative means “I make” in the middle voice, ποιέεσθαί, means “to consider.” So I learned the poem is the thing that must be made before it can be considered, that the thinking of the poem cannot occur in any true way before the writing of the poem, can be held or found no place else, but once the poem is written, the primer is there, and one can learn how to read once again. That one word made poetry more sacred to me—I understood that I didn’t understand, and that bewildered condition requires this building on the page called a poem.

But as I moved from those years toiling on in my student way to learn the basics of the language into these years of translating from the early lyric tradition (Alcman, Anacreon, Archilochus, Callimachus, Simonides, Theognis, and now Sappho) and from early philosophy (Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, and Thales) something changed in me. Another word helps explain it. The word for “reading” in Ancient Greek is ἀναγιγνώσκω. Its most literal definition is “to know again.” Reading returns us to knowing—the thought keeps echoing inside me, and by the echo, a kind of echolocation, I’ve found this work has opened something larger in me than I’d ever intended. Not a getting down to the roots, but as the poet Paul Eluard supposedly claimed, that “there is another world, but it is inside this one.” Not a root, but a cosmos: an order, an ardor, a door. It is as if translating these ancient poems returned me to a way of knowing I had not only lost, but never knew I lost. Some more essential way. A way of thinking we can no longer think in, it is so simple, our questions cannot reach it. Not mastery or fact. But participation. Nearing. Or as Heidegger puts it writing about Parmenides, “a heedful retreat in the face of being.” If one could draw the vectors of force of translating as I’ve learned to translate, it might look like this: a drawing near, a walking close, and the quick living fix of the other’s gaze, and then a walking backward, eyes to other eyes’ brightness locked, hoping what I see, and what sees me, follows. I’ve come to love this walking backward blind to every step, eyes fixed on a brightness more important than direction: to be in heedful retreat.

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator whose newest collection, Arrows, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Milkweed Editions will be publishing Stone-Garland, a selection of lyric poems from the Ancient Greek that includes the poems published here. His work has been supported by the Monfort, Lannan, and Guggenheim foundations, and he teaches at Colorado State University, where he is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar. Beachy-Quick’s poem “Memory-Wax, Knowledge-Bird” appeared in NER 38.3. Read Beachy-Quick’s conversation about that poem with poetry editor Rick Barot.

Ellen Hinsey

A State of Fog: Making Sense of the Polish (Non)Election

June 16, 2020

Ellen Hinsey reports on recent developments in Poland during lockdown, where the May 10 presidential election was not officially canceled, nor was it held.

OVER THE LAST TEN YEARS we have seen the progressive rise of authoritarianism in Europe and now also in the United States. Restrictions on the media, limits on freedom of assembly, and the dismantling of the separation of powers have taken different forms in different countries. In Central Europe, over the last two months, countries have used COVID-19 lockdown conditions to pass emergency laws or introduce further repressive measures. In Poland, the governing Law and Justice party attempted to push through legislation that would have resulted in a presidential election that was neither free nor fair. The story suggests a cautionary tale for us all.

℘

In Europe, the uncertainty brought about by the pandemic comes on the heels of a twelve-year period in which—after the 2008 financial crisis, the 2015 refugee crisis, and the recent rise of anti-democratic sentiment—social and political assurances have steadily been eroded. We are aware that we are facing not only a pandemic of exceptional proportions, but that something even more disruptive, even more dangerous, may await us. We are confronted with the most pressing questions: do we have the resources to maintain our civic decency, address our errors, in short, to save ourselves?

Among the critical tools we possess to counter this moment of pandemic uncertainty—in addition to farsighted medical recommendations and scrupulous crisis management—is that of legal certainty. The last two months in Poland, as the ruling Law and Justice party prepared for a presidential election, have shown us how the basis of a country’s rule of law and legal certainty—as it pertains to the fundamental democratic freedom of free and fair elections—can be dismantled.

Poland’s State of Fog
A review of the facts: like many nations, in the face of the gravity of the COVID-19 epidemic, the Polish government sought to introduce emergency regulations to address the crisis. The Polish Constitution allows for a response to such an emergency situation under its “extraordinary measures,” including a “State of Natural Disaster,” fundamentally suited for the COVID-19 epidemic. However, anxious to carry through with the country’s May presidential elections, the Law and Justice government held off, as enacting this extraordinary measure would have legally triggered the postponement of all elections until the crisis’s end. Moreover, with the incumbent Law and Justice President Andrzej Duda leading in the polls—national confinement having provided him with unequaled campaign visibility—such a step was not deemed advantageous. Instead, on March 13 the Polish Government introduced by decree a “State of Epidemic Emergency” (later changed to “State of Epidemic”). Legal scholars sharply questioned the proportionality of the restrictions introduced under the State of Epidemic (not among the constitution’s extraordinary measures), as well as its indefinite duration, but we leave that debate for another time.

Two weeks later, in early April, a sequence of events began to unfold that would gravely undermine Poland’s legal certainty regarding free and fair elections. Although voices, including the Polish Association of Epidemiologists and four hundred legal experts, increasingly called for the election’s postponement—and despite the fact that the country’s Constitutional Tribunal holds that no electoral law should be modified less than six months prior to an election—on April 6 Law and Justice introduced a special election draft act and pushed it though the Sejm in a single day. Defying growing opposition, the draft act proposed, with now only a month remaining before the presidential election, to organize national postal voting for 30 million citizens, a task never before attempted in Poland. It also included a highly disputed restructuring of the electoral process itself, in particular by transferring the organization of the elections from the country’s independent National Election Commission to the Ministry of State Assets, run by Jacek Sasin, a Law and Justice appointee.

Due to the controversial nature of the proposed changes under pandemic conditions, critics of the legislation contended that if the elections were to go forward, they would effectively be conducted without a genuine competitive campaign, with inadequate assurances for the ballots’ delivery and inviolability, and without requisite provisions for overseas voting. These doubts, and numerous others, were expressed not only by the country’s political opposition, but also by certain key politicians aligned with the leading party, and disagreement over the bill subsequently created a split between the majority Law and Justice party and its coalition partner Agreement, led by Jarosław Gowin, who resigned in protest.

Future legal scholars may well single out May 6, 2020, as a particularly dark day for Poland’s constitutional history. On that day, with chaotic and incomplete postal voting preparations, and only four days to go, party leaders Jarosław Kaczyński and Jarosław Gowin, newly reconciled, issued a joint statement announcing that the presidential election—though constitutionally required to be held on May 10—would not be officially canceled, but neither would it be held (stay with me here), with the understanding that the Polish Supreme Court, which oversees the legitimacy of elections, would consider such a (nonexistent) election invalid, and having invalidated it, empower the Marshall of the Sejm to set a new date.

Here it seems, having left behind legal certainty, one reaches the abyss of the legally absurd.

To further complicate matters, even if it wished to do so, the Polish Supreme Court is only empowered to issue such a verdict on the basis of an election report by the National Election Commission. On election night, the National Election Commission would announce that since there had been no election, there had been no candidates, and no such report would be forthcoming.

Thus, on Sunday, May 10, 2020, the Polish nation awoke mystified, to no ballots, no election, and to candidates who had vanished. In short, fog and uncertainty reigned.

Subsequently (based on the National Election Commission’s legal fiction of nonexistent candidates, a contested fact) it was announced that the Marshall of the Sejm, as if ex nihilo, would set a new election date. After two months of contentious struggle, the opposition parties accepted this proposal.

At this writing, it appears that the Poles will have hybrid postal and in-person elections at the end of June. With the cost, however, of a clear disregard for fundamental principles of rule of law.

Life after COVID-19: Dancing on the Precipice
What can we learn from this cautionary tale? As we remember, a number of other high-stakes presidential elections are approaching—notably in the United States—where human safety and democratic legal certainty are being weighed in the balance of political ambition. The implications of basing one’s reelection on the compromised safety and lives of those one is mandated to serve deserves no comment. In this time of global upheaval, however, what we can know is that either we fight to uphold the integrity of our legal systems—with the hope they will be there for us after the COVID-19 crisis—or we can squander them now. To make such a dangerous trade-off now with our rule of law and legal certainty, to be sure, is at our greatest peril.

This special dispatch is a follow-up to Hinsey’s earlier pieces on Poland, which are available here.

Ellen Hinsey is NER‘s international correspondent. She has lived in Paris since 1987, and witnessed firsthand the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. She has extensively reported on the rise of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Irish Times, Die Welt and Poetry. Her most recent books are Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism and The Illegal Age, a poetic investigation into the twentieth-century’s legacy of totalitarianism and the rise of political illegality.

Zach Linge

Writer’s Notebook: On or Around “Branches”

May 18, 2020

If I am the root of my problems, and I am, then what can I do to find solutions?

Welcome to our inaugural Writer’s Notebook column, in which NER poet Zach Linge thinks out loud about the path of pain—how it impacts us and those around us, and how it leads to a poem like “Branches.”

One day, junior year of high school, I came home to find my room reordered, the contents in every drawer and cubby rearranged, my journal read and re-stacked, put into its new place. While I was growing up, there was no information my mother kept from herself. “I’m your mom. I know everything.” She’d make a joke of it. She wasn’t joking. I was so convinced of her knowing everything that, when I hit puberty, I stuck slivers of tissue in the nail holes in my wall: I was afraid she was using them to watch me at night. She loved me so much, with such terror, she could’ve eaten me up.

Researchers talk about the urge to pinch a baby’s cheeks as a form of emotional self-regulation. The thing is so cute, you have to hurt it.

You know how it starts: your lover’s ex texts him. You read the text, then their conversation. Suddenly, you’ve stuck your hand in every pocket around, looking to find anything, to confirm a suspicion that your lover is dangerous. What do you expect to find? Anything. Want, for some, leads to violence. I have an urge to eat almost everything I touch—oil paints, pine bark, my leather desk, inch-long baby fingers, they’re so cute. And even if I don’t do it, what do I do with the urge? And if I don’t actually harm what I can touch, what other violences do I permit myself? My partner gave me the password to his phone and his computer because he’s not hiding anything. I used it.

There are so many ways my love for the life I have enacts suffering on those around me and on the bigger world—and each presents first in the home.

If I am the root of my problems, and I am, then what can I do to find solutions? Focusing on my fears has never solved them. Acting out makes them worse. Looking to what’s been modeled for me means propagating violence. So, where do I start? There’s something to be said about the power of inventory and confession, a brutally honest account of the self as a first step toward amending one’s wrongs. But both inventory and confession have to be followed with action to turn into amends. This poem suggests, at its end, that silence might make a good start. Listening to what another wants to share about their suffering might be one way to operate outside the stubborn problems of the self.

Read the poem “Branches,” from NER 41.1 (2020).

Zach Linge (pronouns: they/them/theirs) has poems published or forthcoming in Poetry, Puerto del Sol, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere, and a refereed article in African American Review. Linge lives and teaches in Tallahassee, where they serve as editor-in-chief of the Southeast Review.

J. M. Tyree

Remote Viewing

April 13, 2020

Our nonfiction editor reflects on the movies as a binding force for good, and NER offers a sold-out issue for free, including our first film supplement.

On lockdown in the nation’s capital with my novelist wife and our anxiety-ridden tortoiseshell cat, I keep getting e-mails with suggestions for films I ought to watch “while you are bored at home” during the pandemic. Sharing movie ideas with far-flung friends and with my wonderful film students brings me a sense of solace and normalcy when the whole world is going haywire. So here goes my version of “while you are trapped at home and bored/terrified/losing your gourd/wiping down high-touch surfaces/feeling desolated and crazed/trying to stay positive/succumbing to despair/donating to hospital charities/knitting a masterpiece scarf that doubles as a face covering.” I really don’t mean to sound flip—I’m barely holding it together much of the time (refresh, refresh, refresh). And we are the lucky ones privileged enough to stay at home.

This blog post contains my viewing journal for a plague season. I make no apology for my decision to recommend whatever strikes my fancy, whether or not it seems “relevant,” “appropriate,” “relatable,” or any of those other soul-killing terms. Given NER‘s literary mission, it makes some sense to foreground adaptations from the page to the screen. But I am not feeling sensible, so I will not be following that plan. I’ve named this post “Remote Viewing” for obvious reasons, given the circumstances of a world without open cinemas and popcorn machines. That’s one very small and insignificant aspect of this heartbreak and these are my love letters to films that I miss sharing. I enjoy being with other people when they watch a great film for the first time. I like listening to how it affects them to experience art in the same room—and then hearing them fight about it afterwards.

The series to watch right now, if you can bear it, is HBO’s devastating account of nuclear error, Chernobyl. And, if you cannot bear it, then watch the hilarious HBO space farce Avenue 5. Actually both shows are about the same thing, which is precarious oddballs risking their lives to save people who are threatened with imminent death due to the rank incompetence and lies of their leaders during a disaster. In fact, that’s what every film is about now, it seems, from A to Z—from Ridley Scott’s blockbuster Alien (1979, don’t break quarantine, you fools!) to Lucrecia Martel’s latest masterpiece, Zama (2017), which among other things memorably features an outbreak of disease in eighteenth-century colonial Argentina.

I, too, have noticed lately that few characters in cinema, from the denizens of the ship in McCarey’s An Affair to Remember (1957) and the blue people of Cameron’s Avatar (2009) to the serial killer in Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) and the psychedelic desert orgy-goers in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) are practicing responsible social distancing. I suppose the accidental exceptions are Tom Hanks in Cast Away (2000) and Tom Hardy in Locke (2013), two films that achieve additional poignancy at the moment, for different reasons. As does J. C. Chandor’s sea-disaster one-man show, All Is Lost (2013), if you can stand a film with that title at the moment. And then there’s the unforgettable isolation of Cuaron’s Gravity (2013).

These movies where mostly solitary figures take up almost all the space and screen time are somewhat rare, although Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1964) fits the bill and the meal-prep scenes of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975) perhaps feel closer to resembling the way we live now. And besides, if you are fortunate enough to have the time, this era of self-isolation might well provide a unique opportunity to take in the full power of such films and to see them in a new light, as riveting dramas as driven and compelling in their extraordinary internal poetic logic as the chase scenes in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). The big sister, Elsa, in Frozen (2013) also had the right idea—if anyone needs me I’ll be chilling in my ice castle.

Okay, now that I have established myself as a serious critic with a clearly defined set of tastes—sorry/not sorry, I love it all—I’m going to be so bold as to suggest that you watch nothing except what makes you feel most deliciously alive. For me that’s always going to start with Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), with its travels to the four corners of the globe. Marker’s narrator files quasi-fictional reports in the form of letters from the richest areas of Tokyo to the poorest markets of the Cape Verde islands.

It’s a strange sort of film that seems to be a different movie each time I view it. It’s also a film of films, containing many other movies inside it, and a film about film and about television that “watches you back.” One of the most intriguing sequences records Marker retracing all of the real-life locations of another film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), which Marker claimed to have seen nineteen times. Watching Marker tracking down Hitchcock, I always pause and replay the section about the Mission Dolores. This was the fictional location of the burial place of Carlotta Valdes, who is believed to be a possessing spirit from beyond the grave, like Rebecca in the 1940 film named for her and somewhat like the boy’s best friend in Psycho (1960), Norman Bates’s dead mother. Just on the level of daily business, and hopefully not in our mental states, many of us are currently living a little too much like Norman now, cooped up with our ghosts and unable to leave the grounds, “lighting the lights and following the formalities.” We’re the proprietors of empty businesses like the Bates Motel, with its “12 cabins, 12 vacancies.”

When I see the Mission Dolores, I am transported back in time to my loveable old haunted sublet on 16th Street, where the Mission bells were a regular aspect of my routine. The place had a ghost cat and the bedroom shivered during smaller earthquakes. I once found a child’s tooth in a drawer that I was convinced had not been there the month before. When I’m watching Vertigo, or Sans Soleil, I fully expect to see an image of myself haunting the edges of the picture, like the extra ghostly space inhabited by otherworldly figures at the margin of the screen in The Ring (2002).

In another sequence from Sans Soleil set in Japan, Marker quotes Brando’s Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979) as he watches the film on television: “You must make a friend of horror.” Indeed, we must, yet we cannot manage it. This hideous virus attacks everything that makes us human, in particular our need for contact and love and going to the movies. It targets those who gather to mourn and to celebrate, to worship and to dance. We have to deny the horror, to look away, and to watch something else, no matter how trivial or profound. That’s one thing films are good for, but films can be more than distractions, of course. They are mirrors, portals, doors that we can open and pass through into the world and ourselves and the past.

Marker claims Vertigo as the only film that captures what he calls “impossible memory, insane memory.” But Marker is being characteristically modest. His own film is the only one that does that for me, or to me. Now that I cannot go anywhere, I feel like disappearing into this film altogether. Impossible and—yes—slightly mad.

Marker’s heart-stopping opening sequence features an “image of happiness,” three children walking along a road in Iceland holding hands. Later, Marker’s footage returns to Iceland to show how a volcano filled a fishing town with lava, up to the rooftops in some cases.

I’ve never been to Iceland but this form of “remote viewing” or tele-visual “action at a distance” gives me the chills. What makes the film all the more remarkable is that Marker created it without any scripted scenes, actors, lights, dialogue, producer, or studio. It’s a film that presages the whole DIY YouTube/smartphone video upload ethos. Could it or something like it be made today? I think so, if you already had the footage gathered from many years of travel.

Yet to watch Sans Soleil now is to experience one peculiar heartbreak of our shared moment in which travel is impossible. Making future plans, however banal or luxurious, feels vital at the moment. I promise myself that I will finally visit Iceland when all this is over. Then I consult the pollution charts and see the planet breathing a little bit better now, and I make a vow to travel by cargo ship. Then I remember my horrible tendencies towards seasickness and vertigo. Then I recognize that I’ll likely be inside most of the time from now until . . . who knows when. Right now that’s the definition of a happy problem. Then I realize how everything I’m thinking and feeling today may pale into insignificance tomorrow as the crisis unfolds. The low-key impact of not going anywhere or doing much of anything at least doesn’t add to the problems of first responders. We’re told that staying home saves lives, but it’s difficult not to feel useless or even burdensome, even if doing nothing minimizes harm to others. And expressing gratitude does precious little to change the working conditions of those who must risk their health and safety. But art means there must be a future, and there is more to the belief in movies as a binding force for good. As one great line goes in Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), a film that dares to joke courageously at the darkest hour, “A laugh is nothing to be sneezed at.”

I’ve been reading that the Germans (who else) have a term for this feeling I’m having a lot right now, fernweh, a “farsickness” that counterpoints homesickness. As far as I understand the term, fernweh conveys a feeling of yearning for unexplored distant places—and, presumably, an enduring feeling of heartache related to missing all the things and people in those places that we feel we might never encounter. That is how it feels to me to be alive—alive!—in April 2020.

Interested in reading more about film? In summer 2018 we published a feature on Terrence Malick, including ten writers’ and one illustrator’s views on his films, from Badlands to Song to Song. To help you through the time with no movie theaters, we’ll be happy to send it to you for free! Click the following link and download NER 39.2 to your computer or mobile device:
E-pub for your iPad, iPhone, Nook, or computer.
MobiPocket for your Kindle.

J. M. Tyree is a nonfiction editor at NER, a contributing editor at Film Quarterly, and teaches at VCUarts. He is the coauthor of Our Secret Life in the Movies (with Michael McGriff), an NPR Best Books selection, and BFI Film Classics: The Big Lebowski (with Ben Walters). He is the author of BFI Film Classics: Salesman and Vanishing Streets – Journeys in London.

Above: The author’s shared working space.

Photo captions for the gallery at the top (left to right, top to bottom):
Vertigo – Hang in there, kitten.
Chris Marker’s “image of happiness.”
From Marker’s Sans Soleil.
The author in a vanished era.

New England Review