Two Lines 23

by C.J. Evans (Editor)

Two Lines continues its two decade–long tradition of excellence, hand-picking the best from translation’s acknowledged masters and world literature’s up-and-comers. Lebanese author Rabee Jaber offers an explosive excerpt from his powerful Confessions. Emerging Argentine author Florencia Werchowsky provides fiction appropriate to the land of Jorge Luis Borges. And this issue's poetry includes astonishing works from Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, Mexico, and more. A vital space for cultures to merge and writers to flourish, Two Lines belongs in the hands of bibliophiles everywhere, as well as in front of writers and editors in search of a truly global perspective.

192 pages, Paperback

First published September 8, 2015

About the author

CJ Evans is the author of A Penance, forthcoming from New Issues Press in October, and The Category of Outcast, selected by Terrance Hayes for the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets chapbook series. He co-edited, with Brenda Shaughnessy, Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House, and his work has appeared in journals such as Boston Review, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Pleiades, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He is editor of Two Lines Press, which publishes contemporary international literature in translation, and a contributing editor for Tin House. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, daughter, and three-legged cat.

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

CJ Evans's Editors Note to this volume, written in summer 2015 after a year overseas, speaks to the pivot points of history. He was asked to, but couldm’t, explain a complex country of 300million+ people to those he met abroad; he had only an individual voice like those in this collection.

But he says there are not enough voices, or powerful enough voices, in the translated literature arena to do the complexity justice. For instance, he says, while Two Lines 23 includes a piece by Thai writer Prabda Yoon, the Three Percent database at that time showed no literary books translated from Thai in the last eight years. This issue includes poems by Aghani poet Nadia Anjuman, written before she was beaten to death by her husband. And so on.

And he notes with trepidation the growing nationalism and bigotry across the US.

So, almost two years later, things are looking up for some of the contributors to this collection. Prabda Yoon has had a book published in English (The Sad Part Was, translator Mui Poopoksakul, Tilted Axis Press) and contributor Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear is on the long list for the Best Translated Book Award (translator Susan Bernofsky, New Directions).

On the political front, the news is not so good.

I recommend devoting an evening to this volume; it is full of excellent writing. I thought Tawada’s collection of short riffs on the Pied Piper of Hamelin was very nice; I liked it better than the Polar Bear novel. She penetrates the motives and treachery underneath the fairy tale lilt. Prabda Yoon explores authenticity and Western cultural incursion, in a subtle and lovely way. Peter Campion offers a new transaltion of Ovid’s meditation on the never-ending rustle of rumor, “Fama.” Cole Heinowitz translates several in-your-face poems by Mario Santiago Papasquiarto, the poet on whom Bolano modelled Ulises Lima in The Savage Detectives. Other wonderful poems come from Zhang Zao, which build on classic Chinese images but end up in very modern places. Three strong short stories from the point of view of teenage girls show them struggling to find a path to adulthood when the adults responsible for them are fatally flawed (not my usual cup of tea, but these are very good).

And lastly, the poems by Nadia Anjuman. So beautiful. What a tragedy that she was prevented from writing more.