Archive
The complete Open Letters Monthly Archive.
Mira Jacob's stunning debut A Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing spans continents and generations while exploring the enigmas of art, love, and neurochemistry. Amelia Glaser reviews.
Read MorePresident, prime minister, or unnamed Tsar, Vladimir Putin is at once ubiquitous and unknowable; a new book examines the many facets of a new species of autocrat.
Read MoreVladimir Sorokin's gruesome (and frequently censored) satires puncture Russia's surprising nostalgia for the glory days of Stalin and Khrushchev; Amelia Glaser reviews two newly released works.
Read MoreDostoevsky's moody, brilliant "Notes from the Underground" was recently given an edgy, provocative theater treatment. Can Russia's most unfilmable writer be acted on the stage?
Read MoreWho is Gary Shteyngart to call thirty-somethings old? Perhaps a thirty-something himself, bringing forth his most mature novel to date.
Read MoreWhen Peter Stein adapted Dostoevsky’s The Demons for the stage, he found himself unable to cut a single scene of its 800 pages. The result: a marathon 12-hour production.
Read Moretranslated by Amelia Glaser
--- --- ---
Hey, what do you deal in – sorrow?
What are you selling there – despair?
I’m a buyer and a dealer,
and I’m dealing and I’m wheeling
days and nights, and even moments:
on a scale of joy I weigh them,
buy them up and then resell them,
half are black
and half in blazes,
at fairs, in markets, and on highways
who should happen in my pathway,
in whoever’s path I happen
I count Mammon!…
I’m a buyer and a dealer
and I’m dealing and I’m wheeling…
What are you selling – corpses? Rags?
Or long-since-departed dads?
Hey, a buyer's slipped a way,
he's dying but will be reborn.
-- 1917
--- --- ---
With lips pressed one to the other,
and eyes,
laden to their brows, silent,
and wooden bellies bound round
by rusty
iron belts,
gray rows of shops drag
across the Saturday-market gray,
like blind men, tightly clinging one to the other…
In the middle of the market
stands an overloaded wagon,
under the wagon a tall Gentile is stretched out
like a slaughtered corpse, snoring, ruminating, he gnashes and spits.
The horses chew, heads turned toward the wagon,
tails left dangling into infinity…
-- 1919
Peretz Markish (1895 - 1952) was an avant-garde Soviet Yiddish poet who eventually turned to Stalinism, then was arrested and killed along with the other top Soviet Yiddish writers in Lubyanka prison, the "Night of the Murdered Poets," less than a year before Stalin's own death.
Amelia Glaser is an Assistant Professor of Russian Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She translates poetry from Yiddish and Russian, and has translated and coedited (with David Weintraub) a collection of leftist Yiddish poems, Proletpen, America's Rebel Yiddish Poets (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).
By showing his readers the unimaginable, Etgar Keret returns us with relief and sobriety to a world we thought we knew. Amelia Glaser interrelates Wristcutters, Jellyfish, and The Girl on the Fridge, illuminating the works of this strange Israeli export.
Read MoreAfter years of indecision, Dmitri Nabokov has at last decided to publish The Original of Laura, the incomplete novel his father asked that he burned. But before the damage is done, Amelia Glaser humbly offers a plan that would satisfy the ravenous legion of Nabokov lovers while simultaneously honoring Vladimir’s request.
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