Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

Claude Cahun – Prison Notes

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The most recent issue of Spolia Magazine includes my translation of Claude Cahun’s “Prison Notes.” This has been one of my most interesting projects to-date and I’m so happy to see it finally published. This was the second of two publications – the first came out in February 2015, her “Prison Letters”, which were letters exchanged between Claude Cahun and her lover/partner/sister Marcel Moore while they were imprisoned on Jersey Island at the end of WWII.

For a quick explanation of this new piece, here is my Translator’s Note for Spolia:

In 1944, the German occupying forces on Jersey Island arrested the French artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore (a.k.a. Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe) for their work in the Resistance and sentenced them to death. Although their sentence was never carried out, the two women spent nearly ten months in jail until they were finally freed upon the liberation of Jersey in May 1945. The following translation comes from 35 handwritten papers stored at the Jersey Archives. Parts of these pages are published in François Leperlier’s Claude Cahun – Écrits (Editions Jean-Michel Place, 2002), and he attributes them to a long letter Cahun wrote sometime in 1946 to the writer Jean Legrand. According to Leperlier, Cahun intended to write a complete narrative of the occupation of Jersey and their time in prison, and she was gathering her notes and letters and papers together with this purpose. What follows is not a complete transcription and translation of the 35 pages, nor is it a strictly a linear narrative; the archived papers begin on page 32 and there are pages missing and abrupt changes of subject. Transitions around those missing pages as well as a few less relevant paragraphs have been redacted.

In these pages she writes about what it was like to be in prison, describing some of the German guards and the other prisoners and her connections to them and feelings about them. What strikes in these descriptions is the depth of her feeling for others—no one is ever a caricature, but a complicated human (why is this so often a synonym for flawed? here I use it this way) individual in the midst of his or her historical moment. She writes of how to find distractions while stuck inside the horrors of war, and she also writes directly of some of those horrors. She also writes about what it felt like the day they got out and where they went to live—the feeling on the island, how the inhabitants re-situated themselves after the occupation.

I hope it inspires a larger project somewhere; her work deserves a broad audience.

The issue of Spolia Magazine can be purchased here. If you don’t know Spolia already, spend some time with the site and sample the back issues. They are all well worth the small price. I hope these included Cahun pieces might inspire a larger project somewhere; her work deserves a broad audience.

And thank you to Scott for mentioning that Cahun’s Heroines can be found in English translation in Shelley Rice’s Inverted Odysseys. (Which looks wonderful.)

p.s. Earlier this year, I also wrote a tiny blog post about part of this translation and the story of an undelivered letter between a German soldier and his Jersey lover. You can read that here.

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“The rain, like a quarrel, was over.”

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“She opened the window and hung out. The rain, like a quarrel, was over. The earth breathed warm and damp in its sleep. Clumsy drops fell from the old trees. Suddenly she saw her life as a bird let into a series of cages, each one larger than the last; and each one, because of its comparative freedom, seeming, for a while, to be without limit, without bars. It’s time to get out again; she knew, but told no one. She stared down at the dark and forgot herself. Under the plastered, hammered earth there was a fecund stirring in the old garden. Under stones, out of decay, sticky wings, moving jaws, feeble millipede wavings—they were all coming back to hunger and reproduction, to crawl and swarm and eat their way through the feast.”

from Occasion for Loving, Nadine Gordimer, 1963

In the bustle of the holiday season, my brain has only seemed able to enjoy re-reading. I have a handful of wonderful new books (including Clarice Lispector’s Collected Short Stories) that I am eager to get lost inside, but I have found myself gravitating to old favorites instead. Comfort reading.

It has been some time since I have reread any Gordimer, and this is one of her “overlooked” novels—that is a bit of a lie, since I think she is rightfully famous for her entire body of work. But this particular novel, Occasion for Loving, which has a fiercely important story for its time and political context, is also alive with Gordimer’s bright and complicated writing. Somehow her writing feels a little old-fashioned to me right now, perhaps because of the things I’ve been reading over the last few years. But it’s so lovely to sink into and admire. By old-fashioned I do not mean slow or tedious or outdated, I mean more that she was writing in a literary moment that invited her to write “richly” in a very particular way, to linger on details and thought movements in a way that I feel contemporary fiction does differently.

 

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“Silence is multifaceted…”

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So far my favorite chapter in Sara Maitland’s A Book of Silence is « Silent Places » in which she talks about her experience walking for days in a forest – about the secrets of a forest and its complex silences. I grew up exploring the old growth forests of western Oregon, and her descriptions of the Caledonian Forest in Scotland made me wonderfully homesick for the densely growing pines, the lakes and waterfalls, the ancient moss-covered lava flows of this unique area of the United States. All forests are unique—thankfully so—and Maitland has reminded me of the joys of discovering a particular forest’s visual and auditory texture, and thinking how those two spaces interact and oppose.

At the end of the chapter she reflects on the “varieties” of silence, and I love this bit especially:

Beyond the purely auditory experience there is an even greater range; there are emotionally different silences and intellectually different silences, too. I have come to believe that while sound may be predominantly a brain phenomenon, silence is a mind event. The experience of silence is more tightly bound up with culture, cultural expectation and, oddly enough, with language than the experience of sound is. Chosen silence can be creative and generate self-knowledge, integration and profound joy; being silenced (a silence chosen by someone else and forced upon one) can drive people mad. It is possible to experience external silence without any sense of interior silence and in a few cases the reverse. Catherine of Siena, the Italian mystic, was famously able to maintain a conscious awareness of her own interior silence while pursuing an eloquent and complex ambassadorial role about the politics of the papacy. Silence is multifaceted, a densely woven fabric of many different strands and threads.

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undelivered letter

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Here is one reason why I absolutely love my job. Last spring, Spolia published my translation of a series of letters written between surrealist photographer Claude Cahun and her lover Marcel Moore. These were letters exchanged while the two women were incarcerated on Jersey Island during WWII. I am currently translating an excerpt of a diary (or is it a letter? This is just one of the mysteries of these fantastic handwritten papers) that Cahun wrote about her internment and about the occupation of the island. This second longer translation will also be published by Spolia later this year.

But today, as I am editing my draft of these thirty or so pages, I came across a tiny anecdote that makes me really excited. Cahun writes a considerable amount about a man in a cell near to hers—a German deserter who arrived in the prison a few months before Liberation. He was arrested, along with his lover (a woman from Jersey), and both were sentenced to death. The German was eventually shot about ten days before the islands were liberated, but the woman was pardoned. Cahun writes about his mental state and how he died – in detail – and it is quite sad. But there is one last part that she mentions only briefly. She receives (from one of the guards) a square piece of cardboard covered in careful handwriting. Moore (who could speak and read German) deciphers it while the two are hiding behind a wood shed in the courtyard of the prison. Here’s the best part, Cahun doesn’t write out what was written on the cardboard but only says that she has kept it, is holding it while she writes this story, and that she decided not to give it to the Jerseywoman, that it wouldn’t do that woman any good.

I don’t write historical fiction, but this is exactly the kind of personal historical footnote that would inspire me to do so – the existence of an undelivered letter between two people who were separated under horrible circumstances. I suppose what I find more interesting is coming across this story in the way that I did: from handwritten papers left in an archive that discuss related events, yes, but that are not intended to be about this German soldier and his Jersey lover. And yet they both became more real to me because of the secret letter that Cahun—who did not really “know” either of them—holds between them, refusing to give what might have been an ending to their story (or not – so many ways to consider why she didn’t just pass the note along; her reasons may be good, may be flawed, may be of no matter at all).

I’ll make a mention when the entire excerpt will be published – it’s a wonderful project, and I’m very excited to see it out in English. Cahun was such a thoughtful and prolific writer, and as far as I know, none of her writing has been translated yet into English.

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“…the terror that destroyeth in the noontide.”

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“And of course it grows silently. In our noise-obsessed culture it is very easy to forget just how many of the major physical forces on which we depend are silent — gravity, electricity, light, tides, the unseen and unheard spinning of the whole cosmos. The earth spins, it spins fast. It spins about its own axis at about 1,700 kilometres per hour (at the Equator); it orbits the sun at 107,218 kilometres per hour. And the whole solar system spins through the spinning galaxy at speeds I hardly dare to think about. The earth’s atmosphere spins with it, which is why we do not feel it spinning. It all happens silently.

Organic growth is silent too. Cells divide, sap flows, bacteria multiply, energy runs thrilling through the earth, but without a murmur. ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,’ is a silent force. Soil, that very topmost skin coating, is called earth and the planet itself is called earth. It is all alive — pounding, heaving, thrusting. Microscopic fungi spores grow, lift pavements and fell houses. We hear the crack of the pavements and the crash of the buildings — such human artefacts are inevitably noisy — but the fungus itself grows silently. Perhaps we are wise to be terrified of silence — it is the terror that destroyeth in the noontide.”

From Sara Maitland’s stunning A Book of Silence

Paulette Jonguitud – Mildew

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The opening paragraph of Paulette Jonguitud’s Mildew* involves a clever repetition:

Never forgive, I said that morning just as I do every morning, by the window, waiting for dawn. Never forgive. Whom? Constanza? Which one of them? Never forgive her, the young Constanza, or myself, the old one? I did not know, all I knew was: I was never to forgive.

‘It hasn’t been that long, mother, it’s normal you feel lonely,’ my daughter Agustina had said a few days before. I don’t feel lonely, it’s this house that suddenly has an echo.

First is the mention of two women sharing the same first name, a young and an old Constanza, something which creates an immediate doubling. Two women, both needing forgiveness. Second is that last word echo and how it so casually evokes an emptiness that both contains and repeats itself. More doubling. There is also the subtle image of a figure at a window; a pre-dawn moment that most likely involves a reflection as well as the implied experience of looking out while looking in. And, finally, there is the actual printed repetition of the word forgive—four times in five lines!—along with a single repetition of the word lonely.

This idea of doubling and echo winds its way throughout the entire novel, because even the premise of Mildew is dual. There are two stories running alongside one another—the story of a woman whose husband has fallen in love with their niece, and the story of a woman who finds a green spot on her body. And not just anywhere.

I went into the bathroom and undressed in front of the mirror. I did not find in my reflection the young woman I had been just seconds ago. I examined my body, a personal audition that I fail every morning. Big feet, varicose ankles, wide thighs.

A slight prickling in the pubis made me look down and I found a green spot, half hidden by pubic hair. It looked like a mole, irregular in form and velvety to the touch. It seemed to be covered by grey powder. I scratched but it did not go away. If anything the spot looked even larger.

Within a few lines, Jonguitud confirms what is first here only an allusion to Macbeth. Constanza is a costume designer for a local theatre group and six months before the novel opens, she made the costumes for this very play. References to theatre abound and this again reinforces the idea of doubling: scenes on stage within the scenes of the novel that give the reader two “stages” of action, careful insinuations that characters might be playing “roles,” specific theatrical movements within a longer story, even the growing spot of mildew on Constanza’s body is discussed in terms of costume. And the first person direct-to-reader narrative perspective plays right into this; it isn’t too much of a stretch to consider Mildew a form of or even an homage to Shakespearean soliloquy. With these careful allusions and parallels, Jonguitud enriches a short text with great depth and complexity.

Alongside this intertextual depth, there is a tremendous amount of story packed into these 91 beautifully printed pages. An entire history condensed into a single day, an entire family and their respective pasts brought out in quick but vivid portraits. Constanza tells of her childhood, her parents and siblings, and eventually explains how she came to raise her sister’s child, the younger Constanza, and what that experience was like—not just for her but for the rest of the family. If we believe Constanza, it was not a pleasant experience and the younger Constanza was a source of constant tension and family crisis.

Mildew is an unsettling and uncomfortable text. Not just because it moves through a variety of dark questions – including difficult questions of female desire – but from a structural and narrative perspective as well. Extending the idea of the novel as an echo of Shakespearean soliloquy, it stretches out the very strengths of that form—the way it builds tension through abrupt movements of thought, how it integrates past/present reflections, allusions to action that has occurred “off-scene.” And like many of the best soliloquies, there is a rising sense of madness as Constanza vents her thoughts and emotions.

The marvelous parallel to her increasing unsteadiness (and perhaps increasing untrustworthiness as narrator) is the mildew growing down the trunk of her body. By the middle of the book, Constanza’s leg is nearly completely covered:

I sat on the floor, among the plants. My green leg smelled like a dark basement, an old closet, it smelled forgotten. I saw then that the mildew had extended beyond my toes and had wide filaments, long like pine needles. From one of my toes a branch was now growing.

From this point on, the narrative (which was not particularly linear in the first place) begins to fragment even further. Each short chapter is somehow more jarring than the one preceding it, and the scenes become difficult to puzzle out in terms of timeline. There is a sense—fantastically carried off by Jonguitud—that the story is both building toward a big event and racing as quickly as possible away from a different big event. This, again, is another kind of doubling and it makes for great tension within the novel’s structure.

At only 91 pages, Mildew is a deceptively simple book. Its brevity and relatively unadorned prose belie what is more layered and difficult. This is a novel with a psychological and emotional intensity that invites careful reading and re-reading, and resists immediate interpretation.

*Mildew is translated into English (from Spanish) by the author and published by the marvelous CB Editions.

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“shortish, weird, metafictional, and poetic”

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Recently some friends of mine were bemoaning what they called “The Twitter culture” and how people don’t “talk” about much anymore, and I was happy to be able to jump in and say that while I think I know what they mean in a general sense (although not sure I’d agree with it – I think it just depends on the people you’re talking to), in a specific sense I’ve got mostly only good things to say about Twitter. From my view behind Tweetdeck, there is a non-stop books/literature/poetry/writing discussion going on, and I’m privileged to be able to jump in and out whenever the mood strikes.

Yesterday I asked about book recommendations and came away with a lovely long list of books, some I’ve heard of but forgotten to acquire and read, as well as some new-to-me titles that look absolutely wonderful.

I asked for books that were, “shortish, weird, metafictional, and poetic” because I seem to have the best luck with these lately. I love the range of titles that came back, and I think it’s worth sharing the list (which includes a few books I came across when looking up some of the suggested books) and asking for additional suggestions:

  • Ban en Banlieue – Bhanu Khapil
  • Argonauts – Maggie Nelson
  • Bluets – Maggie Nelson
  • Pond – Claire Louise Bennet
  • Hausfrau – Jill Alexander Essbaum
  • Heraclitus in Sacramento – David Carl
  • The Plains – Gerald Murnane
  • Uses of Literature – Rita Felski
  • Mildew – Paulette Jonguitud
  • Karate Chop – Dorthe Nors
  • Theory of Prose – Victor Shklovsky
  • DAN – Joanna Ruocco
  • Things to Make and Break – May-Lan Tan
  • A Book of Silence – Sara Maitland
  • Dans La Pénombre – Juan Benet
  • Tu Reviendras à Région – Juan Benet
  • Suite for Barbara Loden – Nathalie Leger
  • The Laughter of the Thracian Woman – Hans Blumenberg
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“…are many things of silence and dignity…”

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Over the last two months I’ve read a series of really wonderful books – but seem unable to put my thoughts into any sort of order about any of them except to express a deep admiration. Perhaps I am feeling them all too personally, or maybe it’s just the arrival of good weather and more time to sit and read in the garden, to just sit and think about this reading instead of wanting to write deeply about any of them. All of them have prompted plenty of notetaking, and underlining—they are all books that deserve long and thoughtful discussions. I just don’t seem able to write about them individually.

But it seems a shame not to mention them here and see if any of you have anything to add.

The first book I read was Julio Cortazár’s Hopscotch. This is my first Cortazár and I can say that the first short chapter just swept me away. The writing is stunning (lively and difficult and imaginative) and the story so odd and delightful and sometimes disturbing that it is hard not to want to spend days reading and re-reading the book just to try to figure out what he’s doing. The book is actually two books, and you read one first and then go back and read the second (which includes the first) after that. It’s bizarre, but there are exquisite scenes and intense dialogue and plenty to think about. The book creates a certain atmosphere that is hard to step away from.

The next book I read was Russell Hoban’s Amaryllis Night and Day which is hilarious and dark and sexy all at the same time. I loved it. I loved the oddity of the conversations and I loved the way that Hoban doesn’t explain everything or ease his reader into the strangeness of the book’s premise—which is basically a love story but an outlandish one that is really about two very lonely people and how they manage to ease each other’s loneliness. But it’s also about art and literature and impossible connections. I read it in two sittings and wanted to go back and read it all again right away. This was also my first Hoban, so any suggestions on where to go next would be very welcome.

After this I read William Goyen’s The House of Breath. This book quite literally stopped me still. I am going to put here the entire first page in the hopes that anyone reading this will go right out to a local bookshop and ask for a copy:

 …and then I walked and walked in the rain that turned half into snow and I was   drenched and frozen; and walked upon a park that seemed like the very pasture of Hell where there were couples whispering in the shadows, all in some plot to warm the   world tonight, and I went into a public place and saw annunciations drawn and written on the walls. I came out and felt alone and lost in the world with no home to go home to and felt robbed of everything I never had but dreamt of and hoped to have; and mocked by others’ midnight victory and my own eternal failure, un-named by nameless agony and stripped of all my history, I was betrayed again.

Yet on the walls of my brain, frescoes: the kneeling balletic Angel holding a wand of vineleaves, announcing; the agony in the garden; two naked lovers turned out; and over the dome of my brain Creations and Damnations, Judgments, Hells and Paradises (we are carriers of lives and legends—who knows the unseen frescoes on the private walls of the skull?)

So, yes, that first paragraph is a bit too intense, and there are some heavy biblical references (which usually annoy me, but for some reason here were okay) but isn’t that “all in some plot to warm the world tonight” just lovely? And then that very last sentence about “unseen frescoes on the private walls of the skull”? Stunning. And the book is extremely unique. It begins by addressing a place, using the 2nd person to create a picture of an old town, and create what is essentially an ode to this lost place—the narrator’s early home, a place that no longer exists. And then each chapter tells of a different member of the family, telling their lonely stories with a breathless kind of devotion, and how they affected and were affected by their lives in this small Texas town.

Goyen’s writing is thick and heavily descriptive, and his narrator embodies other characters and drifts—precisely, if that is possible, there is an incredible precision in how the narrator moves from person to person. What struck me the most about this book was how sad and yet how bravely ecstatic it was at the same time. It is a book I will probably read several times, and then often again in years to come. It’s all about nostalgia and love and displacement and place. Obviously things I am interested in.

I discovered this book by stumbling across Goyen’s interview in The Paris Review.

I’ve forgotten to mention Denton Welch – because I started reading him as well, finishing Maiden Voyage and starting A Voice Through a Cloud along with his journals. Welch is a fantastic discovery and I cannot wait to read him from start to finish. I’ll save any discussion of his work until then, except to say now that he is one of those writers who approach the world with a vulnerability and a rawness that makes his work really interesting. There is a preciousness about him, but he’s so aware of this, and so painfully honest about how exposed he lets himself be that it becomes endearing. His writing is simply lovely.

Finally, I finally read John Williams’ Stoner yesterday and today. It was not quite what I was expecting but I really enjoyed it. After this series of more experimental books, it took me a moment to get comfortable with the straightforward realism of Stoner, but the subject won me over easily. And Stoner is obviously a character that most devoted readers will feel an affinity for, if not a profound sympathy. As I finished the book up this morning, I realized that I found it quite depressing, actually, and wondered if most people felt this way. There are moments—especially at the end—when the book reaches for and achieves a kind of transcendence (of Stoner’s disappointments and difficulties) and this helped. I’m glad I’ve finally read it.

I also couldn’t help thinking that Stoner would be an interesting book to see written from Edith’s or Grace’s perspective. Edith is such a difficult character to have any sympathy for whatsoever – but I’m thinking of Wide Sargasso Sea and how Rhys achieves something so unusual by upending such a familiar tale. I suspect Grace would be the better choice for this kind of re-telling, but it would be very curious to see Edith’s perspective explored. I admit to being a little fascinated with Edith, whom William’s treats with great respect despite how awful she is.

Reading Stoner also made me think of Carol Shield’s The Stone Diaries, even if it’s been ages since I read this, so maybe they are not as similar as I remember. The Stone Diaries is also a fictional autobiography kind of novel, but of a woman, and it is marked by the same types of loss and longing over a lifetime of fairly unextraordinary events.

I’m now reading Rikki Ducornet’s The Fountains of Venus and finishing Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat as well as continuing on with Welch. What are you reading?

p.s. title of this post from The House of Breath

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Janice Galloway – The Trick is to Keep Breathing

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Through a friend, I recently discovered the Scottish writer Janice Galloway and her first novel The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989). Sometimes books make their way into your brain at exactly the right time. I had my copy for a few weeks but happened to start reading it on a day when I needed something completely distracting, something that would absorb me fully for a few solid hours. As luck would have it, this was the perfect book for that.

This is one of those books I love writing about because it falls outside of “conventional” writing and so I find it harder to describe, harder to pull apart. The Trick is to Keep Breathing has very little story, its timeline jumps and twists and inverts, it introduces characters at random and with no explanation, and even the formatting runs askew all over the page. All of this makes for concentrated reading. The overall effect is very intense. Since some of those descriptions could sound negative, let me say how much I loved the book.

It is a grief story and it’s also very much an internal monologue/dialogue. I say dialogue because a lot of the book works as a conversation that a woman is having with herself and with the universe. The kind of conversation a person finds herself holding in a moment of pure panic. Except this is panic that lasts, that just goes on and on. And effectively, the narrator, Joy, is writing from a place of deep trauma. I won’t give any details about the root of her trauma because one aspect of the book’s interest is seeing how this is revealed.

Galloway sets up the book to look at this trauma in a unique way. Joy writes:

I can’t remember the last week with any clarity.

I want to be able to remember it because it was the last time anything was in any way unremarkable. Eating and drinking routinely, sleeping when I wanted to. It would be nice to remember but I don’t.

Now I remember everything all the time.

There are two things about these deceptively simple lines. The first is the word “unremarkable” – such an easy word, but in the context of the novel practically shouts. Because of what has happened, life’s easy bits now take up too much space. Eating, drinking, sleeping. These are no longer a given. These actions are now remarkable. And then that last line is, to me, where the book’s entire premise lies. It signals that Joy’s world has lost its sense of order. She states this quite calmly, Now I remember everything all the time. But just imagine the force of this kind of constant remembering. What this really means is that Joy cannot get beyond that “everything” (which is both one single moment and her entire lifetime of memories) and so the next 230 pages take up the task of showing exactly what this actually feels like.

Much of what I’ve read about the book deals with Joy’s experience in clinical terms—this is what depression looks like, for example. The book certainly does do this, and there is a quite eviscerating criticism of health care practices surrounding mental illness to be found in these pages, but I couldn’t help thinking more how The Trick is to Keep Breathing does something much simpler and more profound at the same time. I most admired the novel because it does not shy away from depicting the messiness of strong emotion. And in particular a woman’s strong emotions. There are so many people throughout the book who want Joy to pretend to be handling things better. Who don’t want her emotional overflow. She wants this too, at times. But the depth of her feeling is just too strong. This is highly inconvenient to everyone about her. Especially as she does awkward, dangerous, discomfort-producing things. She puts people off, because she just feels too much. And ultimately she isn’t fit for “society” and must “go away” for a time in the hopes of finding her way back.

Finally, the oddness of the prose suited me immensely. I love this kind of close interior narration, even when the subject is dark and sometimes difficult, and especially because Galloway does such a good job of showing Joy’s erratic movement through thought and feeling. It’s all very raw, and confusing in the best of ways. To finish, here is just a small sample, from one of the novel’s most important scenes:

The first symptom of non-existence is weightlessness.

            The second is singing in the ears, a quiet acceptance of the unreality of all things. Then the third takes over in earnest. The third is shaking.

[…]

            I knew it couldn’t be me.

            I didn’t exist.

           The miracle had wiped me out.

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Daniel Albright – Evasions (The Cahiers Series)

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I sat down and read Daniel Albright’s beautiful Evasions yesterday, which is part of the ever-excellent Cahiers Series. Everything from the Cahiers Series is about translation in some way, but they take this notion and let it stretch extremely far. And I love this, I’m so interested in how the idea of translation applies to people and how we use language (and other mediums) for translation, and not just in terms of translating physical texts. In this particular piece, Albright collects together the fragments of writing, thinking, poems, dreams—all the ways in which our interior emotional lives fulfill/translate themselves into writing— that accompanied him for about a three year period after his father passed away. He notes in the introduction that he was dealing with other issues at the same time, and there is a feeling of different types of emotional convergence in his writing.

Some of the pieces are a little inscrutable, but this doesn’t actually detract from the pleasure of reading them. They become a kind of puzzle – a way to look inside a mind and wonder how it is coming up with what it’s producing. I like poetic expression that challenges a bit, and often I don’t want to know the reasons behind a particular poem. If I can find meaning in it for myself, this is enough.

There is a moment when Albright addresses this idea – in a small section called “The Vanita of a Literary Critic.”

The critic can respect the integrity of a work of art, but can he respect its self-concealedness? On a few occasions, as a critic, I have felt, not only that I had solved the technical problem of the means by which a poet had achieved a certain striking effect, but also that I had made the effect itself publicly overt, that I had forced an aperture in the poem through which the most casual schoolchild could behold its beauty – a feeling of desecration, as if I had permanently damaged some part of the poem, injured the lid by which the poem kept some of its secrets half-hidden, lovelier for its shadow.

I absolutely love this idea that a critic can “injure the lid by which the poem kept some of its secrets half-hidden.” I like the fine line here – because I love criticism and what it reveals, but I think critics must also accept the damage or the danger inherent in wanting to get below the surface of a piece of a writing.

Some other moments I stopped and had to re-read, to really think about what Albright was saying:

From a section called “A Character”

Whose strength lies entirely in the purity of her self-knowledge, who does not mind being wretched, frigid, hysterically blind, ideological, devious, as long as her honesty with herself is unimpaired.

Or this one, from “Capillaries”

Watching films of the inside of the body: human life consists of only two states, the excited, which is a spurt and a subsiding, and the calm, which is a trembling.

There is so much more – it isn’t a structured essay at all, but more like a collage of thought and feeling. It creates a complex whole, something to read and read again. It does very much feel like a translation of felt experience – through one simple medium (word), even if the form of that word changes from moment to moment. I think this is very true to how we do try to “translate” ourselves creatively. What Evasions does is give one possibility of what that might look like.