Only my enemy for all time, The abominable black queen, Has had nerve equal to mine In helpin her inept king. Inept and cowardly mine too — that's understood: From the very start he's crouched Behind his row of plucky pawns, Then fled across the chessboard, Askew, ridiculous, with little stumbling steps. Battles are not…
trans. Czech Ewald Osers Life taught me long ago that music and poetry are the most beautiful things on earth that life can give us. Except for love, of course. In an old textbook, published by the Imperial Printing House in the year of Vrchlicky's death, I looked up the section on poetics and poetic…
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editors for This Issue James Alan McPherson DeWitt Henry Managing Editor Susannah Lee Editorial Assistant Eileen Pollack CONTRIBUTORS Gina Berriault's novels, Conference of Victims and The Son are being reissued by North Point Press, which has also published The Infinite Passion of Expectation: Twenty-five Stories and a new…
You mean that — halfway through, With the game all but over — you would like To change the rules of play? You know perfectly well it's not allowed. To castle under threats? Or go so far — if I am not mistaken — As to replay the moves you made when you began? Come…
ALLEGRO NON TANTO It's getting dark. But don't turn on the light. I like to look at your eyes in the dusk. Tell me then! How's Vienna? Do they still sell in the market bunches of lavender, that sweet fragrance of bygone loves from the end of the millenium? My mother used to put them…
I went again to that place I loved not far from here, or from the noise of cars though quiet enough this early— where the sound of a stream found a deep ear in the woods, and came out in me; went to that place as one might go to the slain body of a…
(Or, Sr. Calvino's Shaving Brush) In a note accompanying "A Letter from the Sahara," Italo Calvino described that piece of writing as a page "from life." It was just days before his death last September in Siena, Italy. Had he lived, he would be in the U.S. at the time of publication of this issue,…
trans. Italian Alan Williamson You are life, you are death come with the wind of March onto the naked earth— your shiver grips, and holds. Blood of the young year, first anemone or spring cloud, your lightly passing footfall violates the earth. The way of sorrow opens. Under a poor sky the earth lay motionless…
The rain had long since stopped. In the pilgrimage church in Moravia, where I had sought shelter from a storm, they were chanting a Marian song which stopped me from leaving. I used to listen to it back home. The priest had genuflected at the steps and left the altar, the organ had sobbed and…
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