I’m nothing
Says Kabir
I’m not among the living
Or the dead

It is true, in a way—true at least that next to nothing is known about Kabir, a mysterious figure from medieval North India who is one of the world’s great religious poets. During his life, which is said to have extended for well over a hundred years, Kabir was celebrated as a poet and as a sant, or holy man, and many legends, some as unlikely as his reputed lifespan, have grown up around his name. It is generally accepted, however, that he came from a low-caste Hindu family that had recently converted to Islam and that he was a weaver—someone, in other words, very much on the outside of good society. Kabir’s songs have come down to us both through a number of written sources—none, however, that can be traced to Kabir’s hand—as well as through a lively, extensive, and very varied tradition of oral performance, and they continue to be sung in the fields and on the streets of India. Some of the songs are otherworldly, others are biting send-ups of the world and its ways, while Kabir’s God is a shapeshifter whose only true and always unseizable form is the form prepared within the heart of the true devotee. In Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s wonderful new translation, Kabir’s work takes on a startling and unforgettable new shape in the English of our time.

    From Dante to Dickinson, from Han Shan to Hopkins, religion and poetry have been close, if often uncomfortable, companions. Why? Religion, like poetry, you could say, is nothing if it is not a form of realism. (No doubt this is why both are so attractive to frauds.) Religion is preoccupied with first and last things, birth and copulation and death, as it is, too, with the ongoing war of hope and despair within the individual and in the world at large. Religion poses questions of good and evil that reason parses with difficulty, if at all. As to poetry, its realism is to pay particular attention to the difficult business that all our meanings and feelings are entangled in words. As Kabir says,

Except that it robs you of who you are,
What can you say about speech?
Inconceivable to live without
And impossible to live with,
Speech diminishes you….
Strike [a pot] that is full,
Says Kabir, and hear the silence.

The lines are as matter-of-fact as mystical, and they go to the heart of Kabir’s riddling genius, invoking silence the better to violate it, so transforming both speech and silence into the uncertain quantity of song.

    Paradox is central to Kabir’s vision. Mehrotra’s selection starts out with a series of so-called “upside-down poems”:

What is this untellable tale about?
The ogress and the dog make bedroom eyes;
The big cat prowls the jungle;
In my family of five, all hell breaks loose.
Led by drum-beating rabbits, a herd
Of antelopes mounts an attack….

What indeed is this about? Beginning in a state of bewilderment, Kabir’s work explodes in questions. Negatives abound:

Listen carefully,
Neither the Vedas
Nor the Qur’an
Will teach you this….

Elsewhere he says,

My home…
Is where there’s no day, no night,
And no holy book in sight

To squat on our lives.

He is no less questioning of rites and observances, whether conventional or unconventional:

If going naked
Brought liberation,
The deer of the forest
Would attain it first.

And he dismisses the powerful with withering scorn:

“Me shogun.”
“Me bigwig.”
“Me the chief’s son.
I make the rules here.”

It’s a load of crap.
Laughing, skipping,
Tumbling, they’re all
Headed for Deathville.

    There is at times something almost nihilistic about Kabir’s assault on worldly forms. Certainly he is much possessed by death. And yet he never rejects the world itself (presented with the prospect of going to paradise, he responds, “I’m okay where I am…./Spare me the trip.”), and his poems are as full of yearning as they are of savage mockery. Seeking union with the divine, Kabir’s voice attains a wry and poignant intimacy:

If we’re still strangers
To each other, who’s
 
To blame? Did I
Blunder or did you
 
Never know
What a heart desired?
 
One could go on.
Enough, my Lord.
 
Invite me over, says Kabir,
Or come over yourself.

    As I hope my quotations here suggest, Mehrotra has invited Kabir over into a vigorously individual English, bitter and salty and sweet and utterly free of the bland music of so many contemporary versions of “spiritual” texts from the Psalms to Rumi and Rilke. Mehrotra’s Kabir is never ingratiating. His poetry is as starkly convincing as that of his near contemporary, the jailbird Francois Villon. Poet and translator meet across the centuries to call in question the way we live now and to urge us to take the risk of revelation. And then we are left to our own devices. After all,

The yogi’s a solitary
 
You can’t meet him.
He’s left the country
We’re citizens of
And he’s not coming back

Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics

Songs of Kabir
Selected and translated from the Hindi by
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Preface by Wendy Doniger

L. J. Davis was a remarkable writer with a caustic sensibility that was very much his own. He was also a true character, scabrously funny and perfectly free of false piety. NYRB was lucky to publish his novel A Meaningful Life, one of the best books about not just New York but America in the strange decade of the 1970s, when the country lost its post-World War II optimism once and for all. I hope L.J. wrote down his wonderful and oft-told story about flooring (literally) a drunken George W. Bush. As far as I know it doesn’t make an appearance in Decision Points.—Edwin Frank, Editor, NYRB Classics

Join NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank as he moderates a conversation between Robert Walser translators Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky on Wednesday, April 6th at 1PM. $10 includes a bratwrust lunch.

The Swiss Institute
495 Broadway 3rd Floor
New York, NY

Christopher Middleton translated Walser’s Jakob von Gunten and Selected Stories. Susan Bernofsky is translating Berlin Stories, which will be published in November 2011.

The Swiss Institute is an innovative international venue for art that provides a forum for cultural dialogue between Switzerland, Europe, and the United States.

Sophia Jansson, the niece of the late Tove Jansson and the chairman of Oy Moomin Characters, Ltd, will speak about her famous aunt in conversation with Thomas Teal, translator of Jansson’s novels, and Aili Flint, the head of Columbia University’s Finnish Studies Program. Tuomas Hiltunen will moderate the panel and actors Taina Elg and Heli Sirviö will perform short, dramatic readings from the novels. Ambassador Ritva Jolkkonen, Consul General of Finland in New York, will introduce the evening.

Scandinavia House
58 Park Avenue
New York City
Free and Open to the Public
Reception Immediately Following the Program
Reservations recommended.
Call 212.847.9740 or email [email protected]
~ ~ ~And, in April, don’t miss translator Thomas Teal at Harvard Bookstore where he will speak about translating Tove Jansson’s works from the original Swedish.

Friday, April 8, 2011; 3 p.m.
Harvard Bookstore
1256 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
(617) 661–1515

Tove Jansson’s novels, The Summer Book, The True Deceiver, and Fair Play, are published in the NYRB Classics series.

We’re pleased to announce these March releases from NYRB Classics: Vladimir Sorokin’s thrilling apocalyptic epic, Ice Trilogy, now translated in its entirety for the first time; Tove Jansson’s beautiful novel, Fair Play, in an award-winning translation; and J. R. Ackerley’s We Think the World of You, released in an edition that restores the previously expurgated text.

For a limited time, these March titles, as well as all NYRB Classics by Tove Jansson, Vladimir Sorokin, and J. R. Ackerley, are available at 25% off.

 

Ice Trilogy

By Vladimir Sorokin
Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell

From one of Russia’s boldest and most infamous contemporary authors, now in its first English translation, comes an exhilarating, apocalyptic epic, an exemplary illustration of Sorokin’s singular prose style and sense for modern myth.

 

Beginning with Bro, Ice Trilogy follows the surreal and destructive journey of ‘the brotherhood’—a severe and severely conflicted group of idealists who are seeking to return to their origins in pure light. Their goal: global destruction. The middle section, Ice, serves as the central episode of Sorokin’s trilogy. In the last, gripping section, 23,000, Sorokin wields an unfettered narrative of suspense as he brings his readers to the brink of the brotherhood’s ultimate fate. To say the least, Sorokin’s harrowing vision of the future is sure to remain a classic of dystopic fiction for many years to come.

Fair Play

By Tove Jansson
Introduction by Ali Smith
Translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal

Fair Play follows the life and love of two unforgettable women as they travel, argue, live, and create side by side in a friendship that celebrates truly caring for and respecting a fellow human being.

 

Mari and Jonna are creators—one of drawing and film, the other of stories—and they share a tender, unique friendship bound together as much by their art as by life itself. Jansson’s Fair Play transports us into their world as they critique each other’s work, summer on an island off the Finnish coast, travel to Arizona, and, in a particularly memorable vignette, get lost in an unforgiving fog on a boat.

 

Both thoughtful and liberating, Jansson’s delicate exploration of Mari and Jonna’s relationship, which reflects Jansson’s own relationship with lifelong partner and artist Tuulikki Pietilä, is an inspiring tribute to the author’s belief in “work and love.” From start to finish, Fair Play never fails to compel and delight.

We Think the World of You

By J. R. Ackerley
Introduction by P. N. Furbank

Described by Ackerley himself as “a fairy tale for adults,” We Think the World of You combines acute social realism and dark fantasy.

 

Frank, Ackerley’s narrator, is a smart, self-righteous civil servant who has just hit middle-age; he is angry, acerbic and lonely. And he has just fallen for his neighbor, Johnny, a handsome, young married man with a wife, children, and a German shepherd named Evie. When the carefree Johnny is arrested for petty theft, Frank is forced to fight Johnny’s family for access to the prison in which his beloved is incarcerated. Frank’s struggle to stay connected to Johnny spirals out into a fantastical and often hilarious tale of star-crossed love, social misunderstandings, and the true meaning of caring for another.

This month NYRB Classics adds to its collection three remarkable nineteenth-century European novels. Theodor Fontane’s Irretrievable tells the tragic yet beautiful story of a married couple who begin to slowly and irreversibly drift apart. Bolesław Prus’s The Doll is an epic masterpiece about the life, politics, and tumultuous social climate of late-nineteenth-century Warsaw. Marcellus Emants’s gripping tale of murder and self-hatred, A Posthumous Confession, is superbly translated by Nobel prize winner J. M. Coetzee. For a limited time, each of these February titles is available at 25% off.

Irretrievable

By Theodor Fontane
Afterword by Phillip Lopate
Translated from the German and with an
introduction by Douglas Parmée

Written with a delicate sense of irony, Irretrievable follows the heartbreaking disintegration of a marriage that, though seemingly happy, has begun to buckle under the weight of inexplicable strains, misunderstandings, and incompatibilities.

Helmut Holk and Christine Arne could not be more different. Helmut is carefree and convivial; Christine harbors a dark and reverent seriousness. Yet opposites attract and for twenty-three years of marriage they are happy. But, of late, they have begun to sense a disturbing tension seeping into their interactions with one another. The couple’s asides, casual jokes, and long-term plans begin to reveal devastating conflicts and bring them to a destructive point of no return in Fontane’s profoundly humane domestic drama.

“…the combination of so many factors—the accuracy and vividness of the background and setting (not forgetting the very comical secondary characters), the skilful narrative technique, the sureness of purpose, the brilliantly aphoristic style, the pervasive irony, the importance and modernity of theme, make Irretrievable one of the outstanding novels of the nineteenth century.”
—From Douglas Parmée’s Introduction

Read Douglas Parmée’s Introduction

The Doll

Bolesław Prus
Introduction by Stanisław Barańczak
Translated from the Polish by David Welsh

In this novel, considered the Polish novel of the nineteenth century, the author examines late-nineteenth-century Warsaw through the eyes of a fascinating and colorful cast of characters, all of whom must come to terms with the swiftly changing landscape of life in Eastern Europe.

Prus’s work centers around the stories of three men from three different generations: Wokulski, the fatally flawed and hopelessly love-struck hero; Rzecki, the methodical and romantic old clerk; and Ochocki, a bright young scientist who hopes for universal progress in the midst of a darkening political climate. As the stories of the three men intertwine, Prus’s novel spins a web of encounters with an embattled aristocracy, the new men of finance, and the urban poor. Written with a quasi-prophetic sensibility, The Doll looks ahead to the social forces of imperialism, nationalism, and anti-Semitism that would soon hound the entire continent.

“A vision of the future derived from an interpretation of society’s past and a critical assessment of its present state—this is actually what Prus’s The Doll is all about. This is the minimum that this novel demands from successive generations of its readers. It is also an old-fashioned yet still fascinating love story, a historically determined yet still topical diagnosis of society’s ills, and a forceful yet subtle portrayal of a tragically doomed man.”
—From Stanisław Barańczak’s Introduction

“The Doll demonstrates 19th-century realism at its best.”
—Czesław Miłosz

Read Stanisław Barańczak’s Introduction

A Posthumous Confession

By Marcellus Emants
Translated from the Dutch and with an
introduction by J. M. Coetzee

This novel is a powerful and unsettling psychological study of the relationship between hatred and desire. Translated by Nobel prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee, the novel that “won a permanent place for [Emants] in the history of Dutch literature” is now available after being out of print for many years.

Termeer, Emants’s narrator and antihero, is a deeply frustrated, emotionally stunted man who finds himself continually reminded of his own worthless mediocrity. Due to a dark and condemning upbringing and his own sense of self-loathing, Termeer can only seem to live up to the low expectations of his family and community—until, that is, he successfully woos a beautiful and gifted woman. Their marriage, however, leads only to further distress, and Termeer soon decides that only in murder can he find ultimate satisfaction. Reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Termeer’s chilling narrative will have every reader pondering the delicate nature of self.

“Since the time of Rousseau we have seen the growth of the genre of the confessional novel, of which A Posthumous Confession is a singularly pure example. Termeer, claiming to be unable to keep his dreadful secret, records his confession and leaves it behind as a monument to himself, thereby turning a worthless life into art.”
—From J. M. Coetzee’s Introduction

Read J. M. Coetzee’s Introduction