Toro Wins Ahsahta Poetry Prize + More Spring Awards + New Counternarratives Review

Vincent Toro

I have been intending for several weeks to offer congratulations on this site to Vincent Toro, one of the first students I taught upon arriving at Rutgers-Newark, though not in a creative writing course. A poet and playwright, Vincent was one of the intrepid souls who signed up for my Fall 2012 graduate literature class, "Topics in Postmodernism: Transhumanism and Posthumanism," which unfolded in almost magically smooth fashion, despite the intercessions of Hurricane Sandy.

I did not have another opportunity to work with Vincent, but I could tell by his MFA program and off-campus readings, as well as his performance and final submission in the literature course that he was not only a brilliant mind but also possessed a special gift as a writer.

After graduating with his MFA in 2014, Vincent, a New York native, received a Poets House Emerging Poets Fellowship, and also earned a Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Not long ago, I learned the great news that he won the 2015 Ahsahta Press Sawtooth Poetry Prize, which includes $1,500 and publication of his first book, Stereo.Island.Music, with Ahsata Press, in January 2016. This year's judge was my former Northwestern colleague, the marvelous Ed Roberson, and the two finalists, Sasha Steensen and Lauren Russell, are noted poets as well. 

You can read more about Vincent at the Ahsahta Press website, and do look for his first book early next year!

***

On June 8 the PEN American Center held its annual awards ceremony, adding one of the last waves of authors and books to 2014's list of prize winners. I did not attend the ceremony, but as with prior years, the organization created a bit of excitement with its withholding of all the winners in advance, reserving some honorees' names until ceremony time. (Also overshadowing the event was the uproar surrounding PEN's decision to give its inaugural PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Award to Charlie Hebdo, which led a number of its major author, beginning with Francine Prose, Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner, and Taiye Selasi, to withdraw from this year's annual fundraising dinner in New York.)

The main award event went off, if the absence of reports of any dust ups are to be believed, without a hitch. One of last year's most highly praised--and timely--works, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press) by Claudia Rankine, received the PEN Open Book Award for a Distinguished Work by an Author of Color, while another, Rutgers-Newark alumnus and Buzzfeed writer Saeed Jones, received the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, for his sparkling debut collection, Prelude to a Bruise (Coffee House Press). Saeed's was by a wide measure one of the better poetry books published last year. 

Other winners included Jack Livings, who received the PEN?Robert W. Bingham Prize for his debut novel The Dog (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux); Sheri Fink, who received the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction for Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in the Storm-Ravaged Hospital (Crown); Anna Whitelock, who merited the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, for her volume The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux); and Adriana Ramírez, in the PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize category, for her unpublished manuscript Dead Boys.

Among the translation awards, Eliza Griswold received the PEN Award for Poetry in translation for her assured rendering from Pashto of I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from the Contemporary Afghanistan (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). I have no familiarity with this particular language or poetic tradition, but because of Griswold I felt as if I were grasping something vital in and from these poems. I also appreciate that the award went to an author translating non-canonical work from a non-European language. The prose winner was Denise Newman's translation from the Danish of Baboon (Two Lines Press), by Naja Maria Aidt. For distinguished lifelong work in this area, Japanese literature translator Burton Watson received the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation.

Unusually among the annual bestowers of American literary honors, PEN also hands out awards for sports and science writing; you can find out who received those awards, as well as the wonderful fact that this year, all the winners of the playwriting awards were women (none of whose work I was familiar with, though I plan to look all of them up), and more of the awards here.

***

László Krasznahórkai, whether in his native Hungarian or in the stirring translations by George Szirtes, is a masterfully innovative stylist. His sentences are serpentine to a dizzying degree, and within them he is able to weave a range of material so that once you as a reader fall under his spell, proceeding through his books almost feels like navigating down a strange and enstranging but deeply compelling living river. (Twitter they ain't!) The Danubian sentences, with their clusters of narration, observation, detail, and imagery, give way something lighter, more luminous, more strange and yes, more compelling, to my mind, in his recent book Seiobo There Below (New Directions, 2013). This text confirmed for me at least his greatness as an international literary figure, a fact that the Man Booker International Prize jury saw fit to ratify by giving him, and his translators, who include Ottilie Mulzet, this year's award, which it only presents on a biennial basis. (Why? There are too many great authors to wait every two years to honor one.) 

About Krasznahórkai's award, the judges, enamored of those sentences, stated: 

In László Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance, a sinister circus has put a massive taxidermic specimen, a whole whale, Leviathan itself, on display in a country town. Violence soon erupts, and the book as a whole could be described as a vision, satirical and prophetic, of the dark historical province that goes by the name of Western Civilisation. Here, however, as throughout Krasznahorkai’s work, what strikes the reader above all are the extraordinary sentences, sentences of incredible length that go to incredible lengths, their tone switching from solemn to madcap to quizzical to desolate as they go their wayward way; epic sentences that, like a lint roll, pick up all sorts of odd and unexpected things as they accumulate inexorably into paragraphs that are as monumental as they are scabrous and musical.’

In addition, judging panel chair Marina Warner added:

Laszlo Krasznahorkai  is a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic, and often shatteringly beautiful. The Melancholy of Resistance, Satantango and Seiobo There Below are magnificent works of deep imagination and complex passions, in which the human comedy verges painfully onto transcendence. Krasznahorkai, who writes in Hungarian, has been superbly served by his translators, George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet.

I sign on to what she's saying 100%. Krasznahórkai was in excellent company, too. The other finalists included César Aira; Ibrahim al-Koni; Hoda Barakat; Maryse Condé; Mia Couto; Amitav Ghosh; Fanny Howe; Alain Mabanckou; and Marlene Van Niekerk. I don't know the work of al-Koni, Barakat or Van Niekerk at all, unfortunately, but any of the others could have received the award, though something tells me none of their work--Aira's prodigiousness; the smartness of Condé's fiction; Couto's fantastical portraits of Mozambique; Ghosh's immense and knowing novels; Howe's poetic prose; and Mabanckou's witty, opportune fiction--cast the same spell, on the judges, of those sentences! Congrats to all the finalists, and to Krasznahórkai, who I'm told will be in New York this fall, so I hope to hear him read live at some point!

Another Central European author, also writing a quite singular book, received a major international prize recently. I am talking about Jenny Erpenbeck, who with her translator Susan Bernofsky, one of the greats, received the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, for the novel The End of Days (New Directions, 2014). She becomes the first living German author to receive the award, as the prior ones, -W. G. Sebald and Gert Hofmann, were both honored posthumously. Among her shortlist companions were Haruki Murakami (Japan), Edwin Mortier (Belgium), Daniel Kehlmann (Germany), Tomás González (Colombia), and Juan Tomás Ávila (Equitorial Guinea).

The award, now in its 25th year, honors non-Anglophone authors and their translators for a book published the previous year. Longtime prize panelist and Independent columnist Boyd Tonkin noted of Erpenbeck's book that "This is a novel to enjoy, to cherish and to revisit many times. Into its brief span, Erpenbeck packs a century of upheaval, always rooted in the chances and choices of one woman’s life." This only scratches the surface of this entrancing, disorienting book, which opens with the main character's death...only to reveal what might have happened had she lived and followed other paths, and died...and lived...and died...and--well, if this description intrigues, you should run and get the book!

***

I want to offer my deep thanks to Nate West for his probing, laudatory review of Counternarratives, which is now up at the arts and letters site Music & Literature. His reading, which opens with a discussion of the contemporary cleavage among writers between those who adhere to a conception that the bourgeois imagination is sufficient (Jonathan Franzen, for example), and others who believe in the necessity of confronting, through a variety of formal and stylistic means, the effects of history and politics (the late Edouard Levé, W. G. Sebald, and I'd add, Roberto Bolaño), as a way of talking about how he believes Counternarratives addresses questions arising from this divide. I'll let J's Theaters dive into the review to find out where the critic takes this thread, but I want to note that West's thorough reading of the book, though not long, brims with insight, ultimately identifying something I have not really been asked about in any of the excellent reviews so far, which is to say, the political thread woven throughout all the stories.

Two quotes:

Keene’s Counternarratives offers a corrective to boilerplate that would forbid art from entering into the political. Its very title suggests that not only that the story has been told wrong, not only that it is not enough to tell other stories to be placed in their appropriate box (African-American, Post-Colonial) and thereby neutralized before being passed on to readers as ersatz probity while the real economic and political conditions that perpetuate injustice grind on unaffected; but rather that, for literature to continue to fulfill its vocation, the record has to be set straight. The political is not imposed on these tales from above; instead, a full account of the character’ life histories cannot be given without recourse to the political. Even their names are imbued with relations of power

and

Throughout the book, Keene plays with the possibilities of his title: Counternarratives serves as the heading for the first group of stories, Encounternarratives the second. The final section, Counternarrative, implies a more conceptual approach—the opposition to narrative, or the narrative that exists solely by opposition. It consists of a single story, Lions. In a conversation between a dictator and his muffled victim, the easy continuity between ideology and demagoguery and the inexhaustible lure of corruption come to life in a cell that could equally lie in Zimbabwe, in Uganda, or in Equatorial Guinea. The two figures speak of their youthful idealism, their yen for Fanon and Amilcar Cabral; of the depraved luxury of power and rapine; of boyhood love incompatible with the struggle for dominance; of what might have been, had Africa been untouched by Western hands.

Do check it out, and many thanks to Music & Literature!

Krzhizhanovsky's Memories of the Future + Krasznahorkai's Ontological Depths

Four years ago on the Open Democracy website I came across a strange but prescient short story, "Yellow Coal," by a writer I'd never heard of, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950). The site had excerpted the story from the first collection of English translations, by Joan Turnbull, of his work, Seven Stories (Moscow: Glas, 2007). In the story, Krzhizhanovsky imagines that an alternative and inextinguishable fuel source arises to replace the almost complete depleted stores of oil, coal, and so on: human bile.  I'll say no more, because it's better to savor Krzhizhanovsky's (translated) words themselves.

Despite enjoying the story I completely about Krzhizhanovsky's work until I recently came across Adam Thirwell's sprightly June 2011 New York Review of Books essay "The Master of the Crossed Out," which made me want to find the review's new publication of Turnbull's translation, with Formozov, of Krzhizhanovsky's stories, Memories of the Future (New York: New York Review Books, 2009), and also provided an insightful overview of the ill-fated writer's life. Krzhizhanovsky, a Russian of Ukrainian-Polish ancestry, was active in the post-Revolutionary Moscow literary world, but because of thematic vision and aesthetic daring quickly ran afoul of Stalin and his censors. In addition to short stories he wrote novellas, short stories, plays, screenplays, and libretti, but as Thirlwell recounts, his publishing history is the nightmare of any author.

In 1924 a collection of Krzhizhanovsky’s stories, Fairy Tales for Wunderkinder, was accepted for publication, but the publishing house went bankrupt before the book came out. And so begins the sad history of Krzhizhanovsky’s impossible publications. In 1928 and 1929 he wrote more stories, a screenplay, and a play. None of these appeared in public. On April 23, 1932, the Central Committee of the Communist Party created the Union of Soviet Writers, with Maxim Gorky appointed the first chairman. In the same year, Gorky stated that stories like Krzhizhanovsky’s “would hardly find a publisher,” and if they did, and managed to “dislocate a few young minds,” he added, would this really be desirable?

In effect, his opinion made Krzhizhanovsky definitively unpublishable. The next year, Krzhizhanovsky’s Academia edition of Shakespeare was canceled. In 1934, another play, The Priest and the Lieutenant, went unstaged. A collection of stories that was provisionally accepted by the State Publishing House was stopped by the censors. 

It was only downhill from there; the war prevented publication of another collection of stories, while censors gutted or held back his plays. He sank into alcoholism, suffered a stroke in the spring of 1950 and died before the year was out.

As "Yellow Coal" shows, Krzhizhanovsky was able to see almost 75 years ago what people today still fail to grasp in terms in terms of our limited resources and the truth of who we truly are. In 1976 scholar Vadim Perlmuter discovered a cache of Krzhizhanovsky's papers at the State Archives in Moscow, and 13 years later, during the Perestroika period, was able to publish one of his stories, which led to the slow but steady publication of his collected works and a concomitant rise in his reputation.  I'm slowly making my way through Memories of the Future, but it's clear that Krzhizhanovsky's is a highly original voice, a parallel to Kafka with the SF chops of generations of writers who appeared decades later, and a clarity of vision that would make many a realist envious. I'm enjoying dipping into the new volume, which does not include "Yellow Coal," but you can read that online as a way of entering this deservedly-acclaimed writer's world(s).

===

Another writer with a long and poetic last name, the Hungarian László Krasznahorkai (1954-), is the subject of critic James Wood's thoroughgoing critical essay in the current (July 4, 2011) New Yorker; the article unfortunately remains behind a firewall.  The screenwriter of five films, all directed by the internationally praised director Béla Tarr, Krasznahorkai has also authored six novels, only two of which, The Melancholy of Resistance (1989, published in English in 1998) and War and War (1999, translated into English in 2006), are available in English, from New Directions Publishing Corporation; his first, Sátántángo (1985), in its cinematic form secured Tarr's reputation outside Hungary as much as earned Krasznahorkai within his local literary culture.

To summarize, Wood, whose chief critical interest is Euro-American realist prose fiction, explores the idea, taken from Krasznahorkai's novel War and War that the author's work represents "reality examined to the point of madness." Citing a host of well known and challenging avant-gardists ranging from Nobel Prize winners Claude Simon and José Saramago to the late W. G. Sebald, Roberto Bolaño and David Foster Wallace, Wood argues that Krasznahorkai is perhaps the most unusual (and that's saying something) of all of them, squaring the tendences both of the maximalists (like Thomas Bernhard) and the minimalists (like the later Samuel Beckett), as his prose pushes the boundaries of the real inwards and thus outwards, not towards the fantastical but as if scanning the depths of the real as our perceptions, however skewed, record, reflect and create it, doing so through exhaustively serpentine sentences, hallmarks of nearly all the writers listed above, that pierce like rays not only plot, character, theme, tone, and the other fundamental elements of fiction, but of perhaps the most fundamental ones, language and time.

Wood describes Krasznahorkai's narrative ontology--for dramatic arc is not exactly what he's describing, nor is thematic arc, or character trajectory, let alone plot, but the status of the narrative as the text progresses--as "unstable," almost to the point of dizzying, though rendered superbly by translator George Szirtes. It produces for Wood a feeling akin to that of two of Krasznahorkai's epigones, Bernhard and Beckett, but goes even further, charting "abysses [that] are bottomless and far from logical," in a maximalist prose different from the later work of the latter, more vertiginous, disorienting and yet self-correcting, leaving Wood feeling that he "had got as close as literature could possibly take me to the inhabiting of another person, and, in particular, the inhabiting of a mind in the grip of 'war and war'--a mind not without visions of beauty but also one that is utterly lost in its own boiling incommunicable fictions, its own grotesquely fertile pain ('Heaven is sad')." That sounds almost like he's encountering a version of the sublime, which is to say, it's quite an appraisal.

I'll only note in conclusion that Wood also analyzes the other New Directions-published novel, The Melancholy of Resistance, which became Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies, a film that's on my Netflix queue, to suggest that it's less involuted than War and War and not at all magical-realist as the film adaptation portrayed, but still quite exceedingly strange, demonstrating the author's interest in "apocalypse," as the late Susan Sontag wrote of him, "broken revelation," and "indecipherable messages" that nevertheless appear to convey substantial truths.  In discussing Melancholy, he also touches upon the author's most recent English-language book, 2010's Animalinside, texts in conversation with images by German artist Max Neumann, with an introduction by Colm Tóibín. Animalinside was jointly published by New Directions, Sylph Editions of London and the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris, and translated by Ottilie Mulzet.  In this text disturbing images of a dog-like creature parallel Krasznahorkai's texts, which evoke the work of Beckett, but the Hungarian writer is more overtly political. Or, as Wood says, "By the end of this text, the dog has passed through the political and become metaphysical and theological." I was given a copy of The Melancholy of Resistance last summer, but did not get to it. Before the end of this summer I shall....

From New Direction's Website, a snippet of Animalinside:

(Excerpt) Krasznahorkai Animalinside