#24: I Have A New Gig

This June I began working as a translations editor at The Bombay Literary Magazine. Not to be confused with Black Lives Matter or the Bureau of Land Management (both of which I adore), TBLM is a strictly private, strictly non-serious outfit based out of India. We publish online three times a year. We are free to read and we pay our writers.

My boss at the magazine is the illustrious Mani Rao, who has written twelve books and translated several more. Her gorgeous new book of poems, “So That You Know,” was just brought out by HarperCollins India.

TBLM’s editor-in-chief is the luminous Anil Menon, who is both a prolific writer and a gifted technologist. Among other things he has developed our in-house submissions portal, one that allows writers and translators to submit their work free of cost. This is a big deal in the magazine world. Most literary magazines use Submittable, a for-profit platform that charges them a pretty buck, and unfortunately this is almost always passed on to writers.

I’m known to be a bit of a suck-up, a bosses’ pet if you will, but that’s not what I’m doing here. I could say Mani and Anil aren’t that kind of boss, but that would be flattery too, wouldn’t it? At any rate, I want you to know how thrilled I am to be part of something so cool and vibrant, out of India no less. Issue #61—my inaugural issue!—came out last week, and here are two of the many glittering stars it features:

Rachael Daum lives in Berlin and translates from Serbian, Croatian, Russian, and German. She received the prestigious PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant in 2021. In #61 she brings us three haunting confessional poems from the celebrated Serbian poet and musician, ognjenka lakićević. An excerpt:

and from fire
i’ll build a house
with pictures on the walls
coasters for cups
and a trombone in a case
new year’s cookies and a christmas tree
and your tracksuit on the shelf
and those little lights from ikea i turned on
shining through the tree
a soft fire in trembling leaves
to show you the way home

Kingshuk Sarkar is a poet, translator, and Spanish teacher based in Kolkata. In #61 he brings us three pastoral wonders from the little-known Bangla poet Sambhunath Chattopadhyay, whom Sarkar discovered accidentally when, he writes, “a Bangla newspaper announced in its Kolkata Chronicles section that the poet had won a literary award. ‘At 80, the first since his schooldays,’ the news item said.”

It may happen
that I dissolve into the dark field
where the crimson evening ends.

That silent pond, those clumps of hyacinth
will not know my strange passing shadow.
Now here, now vanished.

As I’ve said, Daum and Sarkar are just two of the many amazing writers in the issue. You can read the whole thing here. If a piece speaks to you, by all means inhale it again, share it with someone you adore, or else pen a little note to the writer. We are lonely princes in our tight high towers, beastly Rapunzels making beauty on the page. Encourage us, I beg you! Tell us what you think! Save us from our chosen monsters!

Patricia Lockwood is having a moment right now. Her new book is out, and the New Yorker says she’s gone viral. Well, I’ll just stand up now and say this: as an early adopter I’m not surprised.

When I chanced upon this book in 2021, I fell into it at once. I remember being baffled and stunned from one line to the next. I did not know what to make of it. I had never seen anything like it. Lockwood wields her language like a whip, straddles the line between exhilaration and indictment, pain and pleasure. In lieu of paragraphs, sections, chapters, there were tweets, and each was a gemstone worth serious study, worth re-reading at least twice. For instance:

Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money. Slowly, slowly, she found herself moving toward a position so philosophical even Jesus couldn’t have held it: that she must hate capitalism while at the same time loving film montages set in department stores.

And:

White people, who had the political educations of potatoes - lumpy, unseasoned, and biased towards the Irish - were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about injustice. This happened once every forty years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again. When folk music became popular again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and then, after a considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things

And:

Every day we were seeing new evidence that suggested it was the portal that had allowed the dictator to rise to power. This was humiliating. It would be like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian.

“No One Is Talking About This” is a novel of the internet, a novel of social media, a novel about what it means to swim through a sea of information and wash up on the beach no smarter than before. It is also a novel of the heart. The thing no one is talking about is the thing that is most painful and precious and important and rare. It is the thing that afflicts the poorest, purest part of us, which is what, exactly? For each person it is different, Lockwood might argue. To see it we need only tune out for a bit, take a few breaths, heaven forbid put our phones away.

This summer the Texas Hill Country outside Austin was ravaged by the worst floods in at least a hundred years. Hundreds died, including thirty-plus young girls in a Christian summer camp who were asleep in their bunk beds when the Guadalupe river rose up in the middle of the night and swept them away. My friend Naveena, an award-winning reporter at Grist, recently published a heartfelt, moving, and deeply-researched piece on the emotional aftermath for locals in the area. What happens when your house vanishes overnight, when your livelihood disappears too, and the bureaucracy seems not to care all that much? It’s a sobering story, with some hope at the end too: doom and gloom and light and spunk.