Bosnian Poet Sasha Skenderija now lives in the US. His poem ‘Why The Dwarf Had To Be Shot’ is a strong and acid-edged work about a visit from Mitterand to Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. Skenderija ridicules the visit: “Mitterand came, to give us and our slayers a lecture / in morals and mutual understanding. Horrified starving old women / sobbed beyond consolation… The whole world applauded with praise the French / love of justice, the French courage…” While this is going on, “Murderers did not / bombard us for a few hours, taking their time / to shake his hand, and all went smoothly…” The dwarf of the title is Mitterand. A professor interviewed by TV journalists about Mitterand’s visit and what ought to be done, said, “to shoot the dwarf dead.” The interview is never broadcast. Skenderija himself fled the siege of Sarajevo the same year in 1992, and in “Why The Dwarf Had To Be Shot”, there’s a strong sense of the writer as eyewitness to events. There are five poems from Skenderija in Absinthe 5. The second, ‘Family, Summertime’ is located in a far more common and everyday familial conflict between father and son. The last three poems all have a beautiful lyrical quality, flowing across the page, line to line. Skenderija is a poet I’d like to see more of.

Kostas Karyotakis is another fine poet. In fact, he was one of the highlights of Absinthe 5. Born in 1896 in Tripoli, he spent his childhood in Greece before studying law and becoming a civil servant. French symbolism had a strong influence on his work which is described in his bio as post-Romantic despair, with a uniquely satirical edge. He had three collections of poetry published before his tragic early death by suicide in 1928. Sadly, his work has seldom been translated into English, and the five poems here illustrate what a loss that is. Surely it would be possible to make even a small selection of Karyotakis’s poetry available in English, in chapbook form, or on the internet? I particularly loved ‘To an Old College Friend’, ‘Joy’ and ‘Carnival’, but the last one, ‘Only’ has the most poignant lines in view of his early death:

“Agh, everything had to happen the way it did! / Hopes and roses had to wilt. / Years, like small boats, had to slip away, / to slip off from me, to ebb away.

Like that, as casually as we used to part in the evening, / close friends had to be lost forever. / On some afternoon I had to leave / the place where I grew up….”

Italian writer Bettina Galvagni had her first novel published to great literary success when she was 21. Her second novel followed in 2002. The short story which appears in Absinthe won third prize in the Ingeborg Bachmann competition in 1997. ‘The Final Icon’ is a story that I was left feeling very ambivalent about. It seemed overlong, full of surface details, with many locations and references dropped into the narrative in passing. Perhaps it rang alarm bells for me when it began: “I was a girl who would dress up in lemon yellow to read Duras’s Emily L. and would compose insipid texts. The black ink, staying wet till it hopped from one word into the next. The chalk-white stockings the girl used to wear. Yes, she said, yes. Diaphanous. The girl would often sleep with her eyes open and stand in front of people who were dancing.” Now, as someone who’s read a few Marguerite Duras novels including Emily L. I wasn’t particularly taken with all this. But it’s the main body of the wandering text and its, yes, insipid nature that I found hard to take. Granted, Galvagni does know how to compose poetic prose, but the whole piece seemed unfocused. There are references to Orpheus and Eurydice, and other stuff too is woven in. The story seemed to lack depth. On the other hand, there’s something in Galvagni’s writing in spite of all this, a strong hint of promise, and certainly an ability to convey atmosphere and mood. If I saw a collection of her short stories, I’d be tempted to buy it, which is a recommendation in itself.

While I got something out of Galvagni’s story, the same can’t be said for Hélène Sanguinetti’s excerpts from ‘Lefthand Exploring.’ Sanguinetti is a critically acclaimed poet and writer in France. Of the two excerpts of ‘Lefthand Exploring’, the first has an emotional involvement, but the second section left me cold. Nor did I connect with Monica Sarsini’s ‘More Animals’, which I read as allegorical (perhaps I got that wrong), and which did have a certain wry humour at times. But otherwise, it didn’t resonate with me.

I did enjoy Norberto Luis Romero’s somewhat obliquely told ‘Telecita’. The Argentine writer, now a citizen of Spain, offers a tale of a bald-headed homeless woman and her nemesis who is dying in a great house nearby. The prose is fluid, poetic, engaging. And there’s a beautiful opening paragraph to the story ‘Upper and Lower Limbs’ by Greek writer Michel Faïs. Though I liked this story, it wasn’t one of the strongest pieces

Boris Slutsky was born in what is now the Ukraine in 1919 to a Jewish family. Decorated in the war, he later became a hero of the liberal intelligentsia. After his wife died in 1977 he wrote no more poetry and died in Tula in 1986. Seven of his poems appear. The first has a nice sense of irony when it describes how Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - “Gentlefolk of worldly renown” - are celebrated, while Abrám, Isák and Yákov, ordinary Jews, are treated with suspicion. There’s the haunting image in ‘Horses in the Ocean’ of a ship going down with a thousand horses on board. All seven of these poems are well worth reading. In one he speaks of: “Puny Jewish children, / Bespectacled and bookish, / Who triumph on the chessboard / But can’t do a single push-up…” He advises them to take up kayaking, boxing, sailing. “Keep marching with the ages, / Try not to break formation… “ because “The terrible twentieth century / Still has a few more years.” This poem is from 1957-58.

Georgi Gospodinov is a Bulgarian writer, born in 1968. Two of his short stories appear, and though I liked both, I particularly enjoyed the second one, ‘The Late Gift’, where a homeless man sees himself on TV in a shop window on New Year’s Eve and thinks he’s being broadcast across the nation. He gives an impromptu speech. Amongst other things he tells a story of how he secretly wanted a camera as a child, and sent letters to Santa Claus without telling anyone. His parents never did buy him the camera, but ten years later, after returning home from the army, someone knocks on his door. Santa Claus with his beard hanging off. He hands over a present and it is indeed a camera. The narrator runs after him but he’s gone. “What was the point of having it now, what could I possibly do with it? If something doesn’t happen when you want it to happen, better for it never to happen at all.” Gospodinov’s first book, ‘A Natural Novel’ has appeared in English, published by Dalkey Archive Press (Chicago).

Two poems by the Polish writer Marcin Jagodzinski appear, ‘Fairy Tale’ and ‘Rewind’. The second is especially memorable: “suddenly the sick heal. wreak havoc for the healthy. / pay back prescriptions with wounds. hospitals / are bursting at the seams….” But this is just the beginning: “the resurrection is coming. the dead murder the living.” There are two poems from Bulgarian writer Stefan Mihalev Furnadzhiev. There’s a beautiful precision to ‘Rite’, no extraneous words, a perfectly pared down piece of work with two powerful opening lines: “In the face of death / We all remain silent.” But I liked his second poem too, ‘Medal’, which has quite a different feel to it, but the same pared down quality.

Romanian writer Florin Ion Firimita offers an excerpt from ‘The Salt Diaries’. Firimita, who was born in 1965, began to keep a journal of his art and writing from 1977. He emigrated to the US in 1990 and took the notebooks with him. The excerpt from ‘The Salt Diaries’ is set shortly before his departure for the US. The text is dated June 10th, 1990. In it he expresses his despair and a sense of alienation from his country which is caught in post-Communist turmoil. “Six months after the official death of communism, the communists are still among us, fierce and ugly, unapologetic and rising. The Front has given them hope: although communist and Nazi crimes are similar in nature, there isn’t going to be a Nuremberg for the Red Plague.” Later on he muses, “What if Freedom is a trap? What if it is only our desire to be free, and communism and capitalism are similar in essence? What if everyone, the good guys and the bad guys equally, have been lying to us all along?” There’s a sense of disgust for the way things are going in Romania (at the time). Government-controlled newspapers are replaced with trashy tabloids where anything goes.

’Absinthe: The Story of a Blue Titmouse’ by Swedish author Niklas Rådström is a lovely non-fiction piece (at least it reads like non-fiction) about how he and his wife found a baby bird and took it in. There’s a touching warmth to this piece which also manages to weave in other threads. It’s one of the most engaging works in the magazine.

This is the first issue of Absinthe that I’ve seen, and it’s that rare thing, a magazine that specialises in translated works. There ought to be more of these publications, bringing talented writers, living and dead, into the depressingly parochial English language. Readers and writers have much to gain from reading magazines like Absinthe and the Arabic magazine, Banipal. The quality of a lot of English language writing is quite poor, and while this is probably true around the globe, the lack of influence from other cultures (and the subsequent inward and incestuous nature of the Anglophone world) surely has to be factored in. Very few books published in English are translations, compared to the likes of Japan, where a sizeable proportion of publications originate from somewhere else. For anyone with a curiosity about what the rest of the world has to offer, a magazine like Absinthe is worth checking out. If I had any criticism to make of it, and I can only do so on the strength of one issue, it’s that the prose side did seem to favour heavier, weightier styles of writing. But the poetry offset this, and the magazine as a whole is well produced, with space also allocated to translator bios.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.