New England Review

Andrea Appleton

Curation Conservation

Nonfiction from NER 40.3
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Feral cats can jump as high as six feet. Juvenile mice can fit through a hole smaller than an aspirin tablet. Stoats move so quickly they can scale an electric fence between high voltage pulses and land on the other side unscathed. We have learned these things by trying to fence these animals out.

We are fencing them out to atone for our mistakes. Human beings have rearranged the matrix of life on Earth, sometimes on purpose and sometimes by accident. In the nineteenth century, the British wanted to blow bugles and hunt foxes in Australia just like they did on their Yorkshire estates, so they shipped some over. The foxes still live there in vast numbers, devouring numbats and wallabies.

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Ellen Hinsey

Polish Poetry in Translation: Bridging the Frontiers of Language

Torn Posters III Rue Ordener Paris, by Roger Camp

Translation is a mysterious, imperfect art. Its impetus often arises out of unforeseen circumstances: impromptu voyages, a book’s accidental discovery, or the punishments and revelations of exile. These chance factors mean that, despite the increasing so-called globalization of the world, one can never definitively be sure that a text, no matter how important it is for one culture, will make its journey across the frontier of silence to another language.

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Gregg Williard

Move

New nonfiction from NER 40.2

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay
I

  can’t go to the meeting tonight because I’m working. In the dark he whips his head around and cringes when cars go by. I have to stand up again because the motion sensor in the empty classroom shut off the lights. The active shooter drill in the office is scheduled for Wednesday. He’s from Afghanistan and marked for death. The new apartment buildings are very beautiful.

I wave my arms in the dark with him, my only student. Last week was the meeting about what to do if ICE comes to the door. I stand up and wave my arms, but I don’t need to go that far in this classroom because the sensor is more sensitive. New apartment buildings are going up. Sometimes we jump up and down in the dark. My only student in that classroom is a former military translator. 

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Alisa Koyrakh

Tomorrow We Travel

New nonfiction from NER 40.2

1. Prague: The Distraction Is the Thing Itself

I’m more interested in the lives of the Kafka sisters than in the life of Franz.

Three sisters:

Ellie, 55
Vallie, 51
Ottla, 51

Franz and his youngest sister, Ottla, were very close. For a while, they lived together in a tiny house near Prague Castle. Ottla married a non-Jewish man against the wishes of everyone in her family except Franz. Her husband’s name was Joseph David and they had two children, Vera and Helene. When the Nazis arrived, Ottla divorced Joseph to protect him. I can’t find the names of their daughters on any lists. I don’t know if they lived with the father or died with the mother.

My boyfriend, Colin, is not Jewish. If we got married and today was 1944, I would divorce him to protect him. If we had children and we could hide that I was their mother, I would divorce him so that he could protect the children. And then, in the camp, would I be bitter that he left me, or would I be comforted that he was somewhere, alive?

I’m almost always more interested in girls. But are these girls a waste of my time?

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