 Each year, from four to six travel fellowships are awarded to emerging translators to help them pay for hotel and travel expenses to this, our annual altar conference, where they are invited to present their work as the first of our Thursday evening plenum events, thus giving them an opportunity to strut their stuff, to showcase their talents to an audience of translators, authors, editors, and publishers from around the world. Funded by a combination of altar membership dues, what is this? Funded by a combination of altar membership dues and private donations, the altar travel fellowship has become increasingly competitive over the years. This year are judges who were Jeffrey Brock, are you here? Jennifer Croft, did she show? And Sydney Wade, who was unfortunately unable to join us this evening, had to read a hundred and forty five page applications and ten page writing samples. A hundred of which were very, very good. The five translators who eventually rose to the top like cream on milk are all better than me, and I'm no slouch. We're privileged, we're lucky to have them, so please join me in giving them a warm round of welcoming applause. Hello, my name is Audrey Hall, and I translate from Spanish and Russian. Thank you so much for having me here, I'm really honored. I'll be reading a few vignettes by Sara Gallardo, who is a 20th century Argentine author who, despite or maybe because of the many years she spent in Europe during the dirty war, spoke of a very deep spiritual connection to the Argentine Pampa, which she called the Land of Smoke, or El País de Alumo, which is the title of the collection from which I'll be reading. The first story is called The Man in the Ararucaria, which is a type of tree coniferous and native to South America. It looks kind of like a drawing out of a Dr. Seuss book. A man spent 20 years making himself a pair of wings. In 1924, at dawn, he tried them out for the first time. His main fear was the police. The wings worked, beating very slowly. They carried him no higher than 12 meters, the height of an Ararucaria tree in the Plaza de San Martín. The man abandoned his wife and children to spend more time up in the tree. He was employed in an insurance company, so he set himself up with a pension. Every night at midnight, he applied sewing machine oil to the wings and strode to the Plaza, carrying the wings in a cello case. His nest on top of the tree was quite comfortable. It even had pillows. At night, the life of the Plaza became extraordinarily complex, but he never bothered to find that out. He contented himself with the foliage, the dark houses, and above all, the stars, the moonlit nights were the best ones. Our fault is not accepting limits. Once on a company holiday, he spent all day in his nest. The sun emerged. There was nothing quite like the dawn flooding down between the tree tops. Very high up, a flock of birds flew by leaving the city at their feet. He watched them with a kind of giddiness, weeping. That was what he had dreamed of those 20 years he spent fashioning his wings, not the Ararucaria. He blessed them and his heart went with them. A servant in the house of an insomnias old woman opened the shutters and spied the men in his nest. The old woman called the police and the fire department. Armed with loud speakers and ladders, they surrounded him and he noticed too late. He strapped on his wings. He stood up. Cars slowed down. People gathered. They threw up in their windows. He saw children wearing the school pinniforce, his wife with her grocery bags, the servant and the old woman clutching one another. The wings slowly flapped. They skimmed the branches, but he was losing altitude. He flew as low as the monument. He leapt. He landed astride the horse's haunches and seized hold of the belt of General San Martin. He was smiling. A policeman fired a shot. One shoe dangled, still caught on the statue. But he could fly. Slowly he flew on, though he barely rose above the heads of those standing in the square and no one breathed to watch him. He flew to the tower of the English and the wind helped him southward. Now he lives among the chimneys of a factory. He is old and eats chocolate. All right. Number two is called Tachibana. And to all those in the audience who speak Chinese, I offer my profound apologies for the pronunciation of a Chinese word in this text. Tachibana. No one brought more money to the house on Sweet Pacha Street than Little Flora or Tachibana. The year was 1892. Her wondrous knowledge of feelings never failed to astonish. Gentlemen, politics and alcohol, remarked on her at the club. One even made her an offer of marriage, as if it were a handkerchief he offered her his property, which could fit 100 Japan's. Another tall and fair-haired killed his father in a duel over her and killed himself soon after. This little flora, or Tachibana, agonized over the Changi, the great doctrine without a doctrine, in the mornings she wondered, who were you before your parents were born? The thought welled up inside her until it permeated her bedroom. And well, as we know, one day at 10 o'clock in the evening, the vice president of the republic dropped by. They toasted. The clink of their crystal cups erupted in her ear like a thousand volcanoes. She pictured herself reverberating like leaves and houses and monsters and planets and the burble of a fountain. They say she descended the stairs, her face effulgent. She laughed in the madam's face and flung open her arms. It wasn't as if she didn't go back to work. She went back and was invulnerable. And the third and last story, the trains of the dead. The express train, the Bahia Blanca, dragged a boy behind it, the son of the foreman of a railroad repair crew. The foreman had been depressed ever since his wife died. This incident drove him to drink. The son lay there for a month as if asleep. When he returned home, he wasn't the same. Crippled. But above all absent. He had a penchant for lighting small bonfires. He fed them by day and by night. And sometimes he lifted his arms to the sky and screamed. One afternoon, his father came home from the bar and burst into tears for the love of God. What was the boy doing with all of those fires? He drew the sympathy of his neighbors. At the time of the accident, the boy said, I saw the trains of the dead crossing over the earth like lightning. Some coming, some going. Others going up and going down with no direction and no destination. In the windows, he saw the faces of the dead in this world. Livid, smiling faces, crumpled up faces. Faces wrapped in suffocating fabrics, dangling hands, skins of all colors, electricians, housewives, priests, company managers. Dead in life. Cheekbones feathered with the fine bone dust, jostling each other. He saw people he knew, neighbors. On trains that shimmered like ghosts rising from the swamp, nodding off curls pressed against the glass, not asking for help and not wanting it. In the permanent night, trains with neither voices nor whistles, crossing. No signals, no order. They overlapped, pursued one another, changed places, but nobody hears or sees them as they fly everywhere in the world. The pain he had experienced was joyous compared to what he had seen on those trains. He could tell as if he had touched them how the cold air froze those passengers just as it froze those who sleep in Los Andes forever. And inside those icy peaks, nameless eyes called out without an answer. That was why he made the signals for the trains of the dead. Thank you. Hello, my name is Anne Griot and I'm thrilled to be here. I want to thank Ulta for this chance to be here. I'll be reading some poems by the 20th century Italian poet, Mario Luzzi. Luzzi was born in Castello near Florence in 1914 and he died in 2005. His 70-year publishing career included not just 21 volumes of poetry, but also extensive theater, criticism, essays, and translation from French and English. He taught French literature at the University of Florence and his work is grounded in his study of the French symbolists and also influenced by German writers such as Rilke and Holderlin, as well as by the Florentine Stilnovisti Dante and Cavalcanti. During the 1930s and 40s, he came to be known as one of the Florentine hermetic poets. Luzzi's early poems, which I'm focusing on the first half of his career, are largely unavailable in English, possibly because of their intensely lyric hermeticism. They offer us a richly cloaked response to the devastation of war, as well as a complex portrayal of the Tuscan landscape as both nourishing and turbulent in an unpredictable world of human conflict and perpetual change. This happiness. This happiness is promised or given to me by pain, pain without cause. The cause, if it exists, is this bribe that moves the multiple in the only one, like the liquid flowing in the sphere of glass that interprets the life of the enemy. This happiness is promised or given is grief for me, grief without cause, or the cause, if one exists, is this bribe that moves the multiple in the only one, like the liquid flowing in the sphere of glass that interprets the life of the enemy. This happiness is promised or given to me by pain, pain without cause. or the cause, if one exists, is this trembling that stirs the many in the one like the liquid churning in the fortune teller's crystal ball. Still I say, so far, so good. All around objects and images wage war against it. Over all of it falls or lifts either night or the seamless snow of memory. The next two poems are the final poems in a collection of his from 1947 called Gothic Notebook, the series of 14 poems that he described as one single poem. Images rare and wakeful in the mind, a few enigmas at last made clear by love reduced down to the truth like you they consented to the weight. From nightmare to promise bright yet still not known, still not fallen within the scope of the spirit, you hounded the future with victory's fire as strong as those restless powers whose triumph looms ever over the heart. In regions unopened even by dreams you were a mute spring gushing images of days empty of you where the ash and the rock studded the weakened winter until a figure came out in the field it was a sign of death it was you ashamed and weeping in a feeble body and when from one instant of light and delight you melted in the wind lush with flowers oh a breeze blew over your brow it was late i had to slip away into the dense shadows what stayed with you awareness or pity such peace where you were not the sky gathered the streets white offering between swirling trees a face glistened in the dark pools honey mild marrow eased the angst of passersby and beauty beamed disappeared divided down lighted roads in the windy silence not memory not image not dream the missing face was a sphere shining in the evening star and even there you were not you had fallen out of existence pure light vexed the crossroads and it wasn't nightfall it was harmless white truth at the bottom of all my turmoil unperceived the rest of the poems i'll read are from his 1954 collection to tell the truth the fishermen people come in by boat quiet folk skirt the hulls of the ships into the harbor and the hit on the dock makes them jump the breath of early summer hovers low brushes through curtains and grass tangles hair it's dawn and it's time to cast out the nets that moment that flashes from house to house in a bright shy hesitant shiver making hollows and visions that melt away when you look over trees past the bridges a time halfway between a dark place and a clear one when it seems that what's true is nowhere inside us but in some secret or some wonder about to be revealed a time that misleads men and if any hope stirs it's the hope for a miracle anxiety makes the shadows strange and distant on the wet sand along the shore where i gaze through all these masks and rigging forgive me it's part of being human to dig like this in the most obscure places for what's right next to us humble and true or else is nowhere i crane my neck and follow with worried eyes the fishermen crossing the breakwater hauling in from the sea what the sea allows him to take an offering or two from its constant seething as much as you want the north wind cracks apart the clay shrinks and hardens the farmers lands it irritates water in puddles leaves shovels idle plows a ground in the field if someone goes out looking for wood or slogs through fields or stops to rest shrunken in hoods or capes they clench their teeth what governs the street is silence the wordless voice of the snow the rain and the smoke the motionlessness of change i'm here adding pine cones to the fire i turn my ear to the shuddering peaks i am neither calm nor worried you who promised long ago to come fill the space that was left by pain don't give up on me or you forage around the land near the house look for the gray wooden door little by little the measure fills little by little by little as much as you want solitude overflows come and enter plunge in your hands it's one day in the winter of this year one day one day of our lives if you dare at all autumn wind wind of passion and dust that streaks across this land where the streets are whiter than bones this weather makes the burdened heart uncertain calls into doubt what was real not a fable not a vision in vain if news came of you what could it tell me i know you well enough to know you're troubled i'm sure you hardly dare if you dare at all to wonder what i think i think about you your passion left open to the jeweled light of early summer between foligno and terni in umbra and i wonder i know it's silly if a joy ever does become a joy forever or if somehow i've had my full share of things that i must love and lose thank you hello my name is christiana hills and i translate from the french this evening i will be reading from the novel sans venter en jour or 121 days by michael odin and i want to thank alta for giving me this opportunity to share this book with you odin is a member of the oolipo a paraspace group of experimental writers who write using formal constraints each chapter of this particular novel takes the form of a different genre i will be reading from the first chapter which is a pastiche of one of kippling's just so stories for children chapitre 1 venant false chapter one a childhood 1900s i start to write once upon a time in a remote region of a faraway land there lived a little boy and this little boy was full of an insatiable curiosity and he was always asking ever so many questions the faraway land where he lived was in africa in a country that encompassed a big river called the saloon river and the little boy filled the land around this river with all of his questions he asked his father why the blacks on the plantation were beaten with a stick and his father spanked him with his leather belt he asked his mother why she didn't read her bible by herself and his mother spanked him with her two white hands he asked the village priest why he drank the communion wine during catechism class and the priest spanked him with his cane he asked the school teacher why the same number pi was used to measure all circles both big ones and little ones and the school teacher didn't spank him i must tell you oh best beloved that some good fairies were watching over this little boy's cradle if there were a few evil fairies as well no one noticed so there will be no discussion of evil fairies at this point in the tale a fairy tale is one way to recount history the saloon river its village its plantation its parokes and its flame trees form the setting for this tale the little boy's parents his little brother the fairies the priest the school teacher a dog and a few of the villagers are its characters the little boy who lived in this exotic setting at the center of this little world was named christian the good fairies along with the school teacher who didn't spank anyone who asked questions were responsible for the fact that he really loved going to school where he was taught to read books to write fast and well to count fast and high and to ask questions as for his parents they thought that the time he spent at school was much too long because you see although his mother liked that he could read the gospels allowed to her his parents wondered why he needed to learn anymore one day while spanking him with his leather belt the boy's father said well you're not going to become a writer in any case because oh best beloved at this time on the banks of the saloon river there were public writers who would write letters for people and read them the letters they received and you see the little boy's father was working hard to make the negro sweat on the peanut plantation and he thought that the writer who spent all his days sitting in the shade of a k-pop tree right in the middle of the village was a lazy man one fine morning at the beginning of summer the school teacher came to the plantation and explained to the little boy's parents that not only could their son read and write fast and well but that he also knew how to do sums using very big numbers and that it would be good to send him to secondary school in the big city so that he might learn all that can be done with all those big numbers and all that reading and writing but you see oh best beloved at that time and in the land around the saloon river no boy had ever gone to secondary school his parents listened politely and said they would think about it yet as soon as the school teacher left they fought his mother kicked his father punched and then they both started spanking the little boy without wasting any more time they even called the priest over for help the little boy's the boy's little brother was also spanked for good measure a little later when all that was over the little boy came across a yellow dog that belonged to one of his friends and said to him my father has spanked me and my mother has spanked me and the priest has spanked me but still i want to go to secondary school in the big city and learn how to do calculations with even bigger numbers and learn more about the number pi and the little yellow dog looked the little boy's face affectionately as the boy scratched him behind the ears naturally a few days later the school teacher came back to the plantation then the mayor then the school teacher once again each time they negotiated but with no success until the day when the school teacher came back saying that he had found a scholarship and then the boy's parents agreed to let the little boy leave they all spanked him once more for luck then he went away a little swollen it was a fine morning at the time of the equinox the little boy rode down the saloon river with his little suitcase on the pierogue the chickens have been pushed out of the way to clear a comfortable place for him it was the beginning of his new life after the pierogue the little boy took a steamboat that eventually brought him to the big city the world around him had expanded at school he went straight into seventh grade he was a very good student both a quick learner and a hard worker he was eager to learn so that he could find answers to the questions that stirred his insatiable curiosity he even got caught up in german because at that time obese beloved they learned german in secondary schools in the big cities of faraway lands he also took latin and greek he really liked poetry and would often recite another poem himself which said you'll be a man my son you see he thought that this poem was speaking to him because it said you just like this story is meant for you obese beloved at school no one spanked him the teachers loved him and pampered him especially the german teacher so he was very happy yet you must know that even though he really liked german his favorite class was mathematics that was where he also excelled the most in mathematics you were allowed to ask ever so many questions and even to come up with new ones as soon as you found the answers to the old ones and he loved numbers logical reasoning and even the most complicated shapes in geometry and then he was 15 so his professors came up with the idea of having him prepare for the exam to get into the occult polytechnique which was they said the greatest school in paris and the world this couldn't be done at the secondary school in the big city in the faraway land the teachers wanted him to go to paris which was the largest and most beautiful city in france as you know so the teachers wrote to the school teacher at the edge of the saloon river the school teacher went to see the boy's parents on the peanut plantation the boy who had taken the steamboat and the parogue to spend the summer with his father his mother his brother and the yellow dog was spanked from all sides his little brother was also spanked for good measure the yellow dog licked his face affectionately his teachers found a scholarship the father put his belt back on and in the end everyone left in single file towards the banks of the saloon there the boy who was a little swollen climbed into the parogue and the chickens were pushed out of the way to clear a comfortable place for him you can't go all the way to paris just by taking a parogue down the saloon river after the parogue and the steamboat the boy still had to get on an ocean liner and then a train but this is perhaps where an evil fairy appeared and christian fell gravely ill it was an illness with fever and delirium and so he had to be taken to the big hospital in the big city he stayed there for several weeks while the boats he didn't get on left for france it looked like he was going to die but as you know children don't die in fairy tales while he was sick there were times when he had nightmares filled with demons like the one the priest in the village on the banks of the saloon used to describe in catechism class and there were also more peaceful times when he thought about geometry problems and also a little bit about his nurse in the hospitals in big cities and far away lands the nurses were actually nuns the one who was taking care of the boy wore a cornet on her head a wooden cross and all those other things nuns wear you had to call her sister but that didn't prevent christian from seeing she was just a girl and he liked her very much at that time boys and girls didn't go to the same secondary schools and so this boy had never met any girls white girls of course there were black girls on the plantation on the banks of the saloon but at that time blacks didn't count the story isn't over but the fairy tale ends here at the moment when young christian fully recovered climbed bravely up the gangway of the ocean liner while thinking about his yellow dog and the ocean liner which was called afrique carried him over the atlantic ocean and the mediterranean sea past the canary islands morocco and spain to the railroad at marseille then it was the garden lyon and the greatest city in the world with its coachmen its chancelizé its eiffel towers its numbers its polytechnical schools its theorems and all of its pretty girls who reminded him of the pretty nun who had taken care of him at the hospital thank you my name is claire eater and i want to start by thanking alta for the opportunity to be here it's already been a wonderful day so far and i am just really impressed with my first alta experience so thanks i will be reading from three different contemporary french poets um and i will start with two poems by arian drafus um she was born in 1958 she's a professor specializing in literature and she has published over a dozen volumes of poetry most recently la lampe allumé si souvent dans l'ambre she lives and teaches in paris this is a poem from her book iris c'est votre bleu marie marie mustn't move or close her eyes valérie begins her daughter's portrait now the boat feels its anchor sink down marie must stand at the edge without spilling from herself a face like water driving water higher and the rope there below rippling to work with sufficient delicacy the base of the neck not to betray its fragility by stiffening it not to wreck the eyes to meet the astonishment of living feeling tears rise valérie looks at it upside down this painting where she shudders much better than herself in the mirror this painting could be death by blunder she has to know while the brush is in her hand and keep working to give up her light to write is less scorching even when it's slow head on or from behind the words don't see anyone i take one to light another sometimes a name never a face when i write i'm in the other room valérie seeks the exact point where she would be more face to face than in reality it's a hallway straight ahead incredibly after the silence it's still someone iris but god certainly not don't put empty words in your mouths men look at iris in spite of the wall upstanding it's your blue your line think a wound quickly stitched up your embroidery it's swelling joy a few seconds of love miraculously successive here the swaying of risen velvet iris next i'll read three poems by marie claire boncar from her book opera de limite this is orpheus and hades my journey begins in the mystery of a landscape without birds inhabited by white presences born from our seeding shadows mint on wounded memory you are the men hears of a civilization which would have lost the sun and i interrogate you in the belly of the enigmas fortress alone among your faces with my guts and the warm breath of my words i offer you an odor of cats and of women knowing that to say in this mute place is already to try on death i name the death of euridice and i forgot to read the bio for marie claire boncar she lives in paris where she is the professor america of at the paris serban university her most recent book of poems is violon vie she is the recipient of numerous prizes including the pre robert ganzo and this is another one by her stretched out a woman on the carpet tells its story of grass breasts hard against earth sprawls along land meets fresh forests under her dress nakedness knows the happy truce of stones of roots the mouth on hers is quiet silence runs the length of veins reaches the heart heads down to the ocean outside of infinitive and soft tree talk harvest of sap in the earth between resin and blood the sun sweetened by leaves filters a long dream over the verbs whispered without past or future a faultless gesture to drink to live to fuse your body with pine needles lying halfway outside of yourself your the echo of a tree's contentment and i'll finish but with a poem by christian prigeant christian prigeant has lived in roam in berlin and currently resides in britney from 1969 to 1993 he directed the avant-garde literary magazine txt as well as the txt book series he is the author of some 50 books of poetry fiction and criticism on literature and art so this poem comes from a longer poem series so sort of like one long poem broken into five parts this is called palatino referring to the palatine hill in roam which is the site of the romulus and remus myth and i'll go ahead and read the french first and then the english but i have to apologize for the one italian word that he includes here which i will butcher and there's also a couple of english words included in the french version and one made up word so it's a little strange but i think it's pretty fun as well so i'll read i'll read this palatino mosh palatino firemen olive trees trucks a junkie crankshaft peacocks clucks the gear grinder is the rural i feel it grumble then there's that which thunders stanzas castruzione women blocks zones a talc'd heap that powders a meadow greats canals h2o in 3d a guarantee is that it's flat echo stones kaka tanned underneath staccato cirroco everything trademarked wind and co tempo pumps s o the moan tones that form the fount and mount to the teeth eat all me eat thank you this is gonna work okay uh oh no that isn't gonna work okay so is an incredible honor to be here among these four women who have just read a bunch of translations that are a lot better than mine um and i i do here you go i love it um all right um it is it is a real a real honor to be here and i'm so glad to be back here at alta and i want to thank the entire alta community um but especially the 2014 fellows uh last year was my first alta um and it was their example that encouraged me to apply i'm gonna read uh a short piece from um a novel called yin shen yi the invisibility cloak by the chinese author goffay this is a book that i found in 2010 um in beijing and i stayed up in a true high school style i stayed up until two for a couple of nights until i finished it um and knew that i had to do it um i warn you there will be some singing and the the main character builds amplifiers he's uh he's an artist and he builds amplifiers and he's being beaten down by almost everyone uh including his own family that evening i arrived early chang baokuo had gone to play cards at the neighbor's place and wasn't yet back my sister was at the kitchen counter chopping meat she had ground pork in the fridge she could have used but she said that the machine ground chuck had a metallic taste to it she was only two years older than i but really showing her age it was the first time in a lot of years i'd looked at her closely there was an ingratiating quality to her an expression whenever she smiled she'd always been that way but now whenever i saw her face i felt a twinge of loathing but she asked me if i had met anyone i liked recently then followed up immediately on that with the announcement that she had a colleague in the office who was divorced in her 40s had a boy of about 13 you know a nice straightforward person pretty and well proportioned uh just had a bit of a lisp when she talked did i want to meet her i told her that a couple of days ago i had run into a fortune teller and it sounded from what he'd said like i might as well forget about getting married in this life i didn't mention where i was i had met him she wouldn't want to hear the name jiang sonping you believe blind scam artist too i've introduced you to quite a few women over the years and nothing ever works for you you know what i think you haven't gotten over that hussey you fun i chuckled and replied maybe you're right to appease her i didn't feel like going on about it do you want to go in and watch some tv ba will be back soon i just stared at her blankly without speaking looking at her hair which was dyed black but still yellowing i felt a sudden grief deja vu overcame me for a space and i could have sworn the woman standing in front of me was my own mother she was just as skinny as mom had been and getting smaller as she got older a cold draft blew through this kitchen the old locus tree outside shook off a few golden leaves and i felt a stinging in my nose i felt like i'm going up and giving her a hug do you want to go outside and walk around my sister was alarmed by my absentness i got up went outside and sat down in the courtyard stooped to have a smoke the alley was filled with parked cars motor dollies and all those tricycles that those metal with those metal cabins that the handicapped use the old state my dad's old workshop was long gone replaced by an open fire peaking duck restaurant the state run barbershop and the tailor shop run by the family from july's young were long gone as well only the public toilet was still as foul as it always had been only now its facade was checkerboarded with blue and white ceramic tile and of course not one of the faces that passed down the alley was familiar to me human memory really is unreliable i clearly remember this alley being long broad submerged in green shade or sprinkled with white locust flowers and nowhere near as cramped and seedy as it looked this day the intersection in the east end always had street vendors laying their blankets there in the summers they were always the same group of old men sitting with their straw hats weaving waving the bamboo fans over their wrinkled stomachs as they watched the emerald watermelons in the winter that corner was occupied either by a guy from shendong who cooked popcorn or by others who sold caramel hawberries or cotton candy as i sat on the stoop and surveyed the cluttered street i felt vaguely alienated from it all sacred fragments of my past life stirred my sluggish memory like echoes of a dying voice i'm no nostalgic man maybe my heart was heavy because this place used to be called home the shushing of trees in the roof the moon in the branches the wine of cicadas and the crashing of rain the smell of cold dust brushed from the furnace on an early morning all used to accompany me to bed night after night but once that unique kind of loneliness settles in your chest you feel the fear of time and life extinguishing as if the best years of your life had finally been squandered completely our place abutted the eastern end of the alley jiang sung ping lived on the western half our houses were separated by a private courtyard and a large compound for factory workers and their families the clean little courtyard rarely had residents only once in a while you would find a black luxury sedan parked in front of the stone lion at its door and at night a muted light in one of the windows of the tree shaded courtyard that would that would light up and stay lit all the way until morning to this day i have no idea who it was who used to live there i often saw young jiang sung ping come kicking a filthy pigs bladder or pushing an iron hoop from the west end of the alley to the east then turn just before the intersection and go back our house was right at the turning point of his mysterious solitary root sometimes it wasn't a pigs bladder an iron hoop or a slingshot that he had with him but a date seed which he dragged along the wall as he walked he scratched white line after white line on those dirty concrete walls already plastered with fuck and bring down until he'd worn two eyes and a mouth on the pit surface to make a little face no one ever paid any attention to him he eventually got familiar with my sister and started playing games with the local girls he turned out to be very good at all kinds of them hacky sack jump rope and jacks i expect it was loneliness that motivated him to go hang out with girls there was a spell when my sister was obsessed with jacks not the new metal ones but the old ones made from sheep knuckles she would take the s-shaped talus bones from the lamb and polish them until they shone then soak them in red ink to give them color she also sewed her own neat little bean bags and filled them with that those expensive green mung beans god knows how many times mother slapped her for that i never played the game myself so i don't know much about the rules but i've heard that you need at least four bones to play those were easy to get a hold of back in that day and age but jiang son ping somehow had a magic pocket that could produce whatever it was my sister wanted whenever he presented the fruits of his labor to her dropping the greasy black objects into her hands she would laugh and ask jiang son ping your parents own a meat market or something there was a time after the heart attack caught my father when i'd go to his wireless repair shop nearly every day somehow sitting quietly at the workstation where he used to sit made me feel a little better the other two repairmen pretended not to notice me they neither engaged me nor did they care what i did not even in the days immediately following my father's death did i ever hear a single word of comfort from either of them my young heart wouldn't take it i couldn't handle that kind of indifference and reacted with hate i would stomp into the repair shop every day sit down at my father's workstation stare at the half repaired radio and the green screwdriver it was my privilege when it got dark my mother would come crying and quietly take my take me home that was how it went nearly every day until one day came when the repairman we called horse whip walked over and sat quietly beside me for a long spell he smoked two cigarettes in a row and then his expression became serious he put a large hand on my shoulder side heavily and said to me i'll make a deal okay if you can get that old semiconductor your father left to make some noise again you could take it home how's that sound i was still very young back then and the idea of having a radio of my very own was beyond my wildest dreams so i started playing around with a dust covered mess horse whip taught me some basic skills how to recoil tangled magnet wire evenly along a spool how to scrape rust off the spring poles of battery with a razor edge how to find a short circuit and reconnect it with a bead of solder how to upgrade the system for a larger battery how to install capacitors and resistors about two weeks on my father's half gutted radio finally made a sound i still remember the first song i heard out of it was the revolutionary opera night assault on the white tigers with son yuqing singing lead role if i could ever have been said to have had an idol during those long years of my childhood it would have been son yuqing he was valiant he had a posture and a presence like nothing jho and the other modern celebrities could even dream of not even wang xiao gong the movie heartthrob that yufeng's generation all fell in love with could quite match up to this day the only peaking opera that i ever learned was that part he sang that day when i first turned the radio on from overthrow the american imperialist wolves yes uh 一旦见环国静来,张耀无兆,又疯狂! Debate has cleared our comrades' hearts and minds to see beyond the enemy's evil scheme. America's hunger for power knows no bounds. To conquer the world is their undying dream. When they fail, they hide the sword and talk of peace, but soon they wave their claws in avarice. Listening to that music on a sunny afternoon, I thought at how great it would be if my father was still here. If he heard this music, if he knew that I'd learned how to fix a radio, as I fantasized, I started to cry. A gust of cold wind hit my face, my chest relaxed, and the stone that had been blocking my throat and pressing down upon my heart finally disappeared. I finally accepted the fact that my father was gone. Thank you. Thank you all for coming. You were terrific. All of you. That was great.