 And welcome to the annual Lucian Strike and National Translation Award Reception. I want to thank a few people real quickly. We didn't have an opening this morning of the conference, so I'm going to take a couple minutes right now to thank some of the people who made this possible. Some of you who came to the reception last night know that at least one of our sponsors was Chad Post and Open Letter Press. Also a – yes, thank you. Amazon Crossing is helping to support the event, the Milwaukee Public Library Central, where we're having some readings. Seth Schuster in the People's Cooperative Bookstore that is staffing the book exhibit on the fifth floor. The Alta Travel Fellowship Selection Committee, and wasn't that a fantastic reading just before this? Sincere thanks to the Selection Committee, which this year consisted of three people – Esther Allen, Susan Harris, and Jason Grinnebaum. Thanks very much for all your hard work. We had a ton of good applications this year. We also have benefited greatly from the organizational skills of Alta's managing director, Erica Mena. Where is she? And Brandy Host and her colleagues at IU Conferences who are making things run. As well as a number of student assistants and volunteers, including my graduate assistants, Brittany Penzer and Rachel Dom. Where are you? You're here somewhere. And also intern Sarah Corcoran. A special thanks to Alexis Leviton, who continues to organize the bilingual readings, which have grown exponentially. We're going to have to figure out how to handle them. They've just taken off, I think I mentioned last night, that at the Bloomington Conference last year we had a record 85-86 bilingual readings, which was 20 more than Alexis could remember ever getting in 26 years of administering that initially surreptitious book guerrilla movement in the Alta Conference, and this year we had 136, I believe. So, I don't know, it's like double the number that we had two years ago or more. I also want to thank Marion Schwartz for helping with the, for coaching the, sorry, the Alta Fellows this year and for MCing the event just before this one. Thank you, Marion. And tomorrow night at Declamacion you'll see the results of Barbara Pashke's work. Thank you, Barbara, in advance for organizing the Declamacion again this year. And finally, no conference would happen without an organization committee. This year's committee was led by Leah Leone, who is at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and she's stepped out for the moment, but she is our leader here. And the rest of the committee members, Erica Mena, Aaron Aji, Kathy Nelson, Avia Kushner, Siblin Forester, and Kyle Semmel. So, thank you, everybody. So, I have the honor of introducing two winners. I want to introduce more than two, though, because we have tried to expand this process a little bit to reflect the high quality of submissions that we get across the board in the Lucian Strike Prize and the National Translation Award. And so, I want to mention that we're having a long list reading of National Translation Award finalists tomorrow. And I believe they are Karen Kovacic, Jason Grunerbaum, Stephen Kessler, and Bill Johnston. So, if you have time to come out and listen to them. I think some of these people are also reading at the Public Library, which is a public event open to everybody, not just ticketed altar members, convention members, attendees. And also, I want to name our finalists. I'm going to give those in a few minutes. The long list and the short list this year, we made a great effort to publicize and to get them out into the various media outlets so that people knew who was actually nominated and made their way to the finalist round. First, I want to introduce and announce the winner of the Lucian Strike Prize by starting with the runner-up. And this year, the runner-up for the prize was a book published by White Pine Press called Magnolia and Lotus Selected Poems of Hyesim, which was translated from the Korean by Ian Haight and Taeyong Ho. And that's the runner-up for the Lucian Strike Prize. Let's give them a round of applause. That committee, I should note, forget, the selection committee for that prize. This year, we were still in slight transition mode. So the committees were not, as you know, everything used to be administered by the office at the University of Texas at Dallas. And some of the operations have still, during the year, we had a collaborative arrangement. Let me put it that way. And so this year, the selection committee for the Lucian Strike Prize would actually consisted of Jonathan Staling, Janet Kim Ha, and Reiner Schulte. And they actually, they not only administered the prize, but they worked with the publishers getting the submissions and we owe a debt of gratitude to the Dallas office for continuing to do that even after our official arrangement with them had ended. So thank you very much for doing that. And so I want to introduce now the winner of the Lucian Strike Prize who's going to come up and read a little bit from, tell you a little bit about the book, the project, and read a little bit from it. And this year's winner is Every Rock, A Universe, The Yellow Mountains, and Chinese Travel Writing, translated and introduced by Jonathan Chaves. It's a book by Wang Hongdu. And Jonathan is a distinguished translator from the Chinese and also a poet. He has his own poetry published in a variety of literary magazines, Antioch Review, and a number of others. His work has been nominated for the National Book Award in the translation category. He presents the first complete translation of Wang Hongdu's poetry in a Western language and his translation shows, according to the selection committee, a translator who recreates the world of Wang with a refined sensitivity to the nuances of the Chinese language and the underlying cultural and aesthetic landscape of the Yellow Mountains expressed in poetry and prose. Please welcome Jonathan Chaves. It is a great, great pleasure to be here. I am absolutely delighted by this award and completely and utterly surprised that a book of this sort would be selected. The writer is completely unknown anywhere, including in China. This is the first time he has been noticed at all, Wang Hongdu. He was a painter, a calligrapher, a poet, and as this book I think demonstrates a remarkable master of prose in classical Chinese and I'm going to be reading some of the Chinese to you in just a few moments and you will understand that this is what the Chinese call Wen Yan or classical literary Chinese. It is not a spoken version of the Chinese language. Huangshan or the Yellow Mountains located in southern Anhui province. I'm curious to know how many people here have ever gone to the Yellow Mountains in China? And do we have any? There's somebody back there. Okay, good, good. This is one of the most beautiful places on the face of the planet. When you go there, you feel as if you are walking through Chinese paintings and as a matter of fact the Yellow Mountains inspired an entire school of Chinese painting known as the Xin'an School or the southern Anhui province school in the 17th and 18th centuries. The key event that kicked off the great popularity of the Yellow Mountains among the literati, the scholar officials of China was the tragic invasion and conquering of China by the Manchus in 1644. And the scholars of the day not being Marxist in their inspiration, Marx was not yet born, did not consider that historical events are caused by mysterious social and economic forces nor did they consider that history is brought about by conflicts among classes. They considered that it was brought about by moral integrity or a failure of moral integrity. This is the classical Confucian philosophy. And the loss of moral integrity had caused heaven, Tian to withdraw the mandate to rule. Tian had withdrawn the Ming. The mandate to rule. They looked to the Yellow Mountains as a place where perhaps the essence of classical Chinese civilization with its moral and spiritual foundations might still be recovered. And so some of them simply refused to take the civil service examinations and serve in the government and they would go and live there. Wang Hongdu lived in the heart of the Yellow Mountains for ten years at a time when the place was completely remote and completely cut off from the outside world. Others became Buddhist monks and still others were Taoists who would go there to refine the elixir of immortality. The Dan, based on Cinnabar, the term yellow comes in fact from Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor, the founder of Chinese civilization according to traditional Chinese historiography who was said to have refined the elixir of immortality right there in the Yellow Mountains. So trips there became a pilgrimage to a place not only of great beauty, stark and or steer, but great, great beauty, but also a pilgrimage back toward the origins of Chinese civilization. Huangshan Lingyaolu, or Comprehending the Essentials of the Yellow Mountains, is Wang Hongdu's brilliant collection of prose essays about the Yellow Mountains, describing them and talking about what they meant to him and his peers. The mountains were famous for their rock formations, for their pine trees, which have their own botanical name and modern botany. The Huangshanensis pine, the pine of the Yellow Mountains, they cannot be found anywhere else. They grow as it were out of rock without any place to root themselves in soil. They are twisted by the winds into dragon-like shapes, and they all have names that are given to them. And then finally, the Ocean of Clouds, or Yunhai, also known as Huanghai, the Yellow Ocean, because when you stand in these mountains, all of a sudden clouds or mists will come swirling up out of nowhere, form incredible patterns, and then disappear. And I'd like to start, in fact, with a passage descriptive of the clouds in the Yellow Mountains. First, let's listen to it in classical Chinese, although I would caution you that it comes along with something that did not exist in the 17th century, a Brooklyn accent. 于是水风古荡上下花然中风,其上天与寇然未来一色, 其下斗落缅中日光窗露风苔平之, 雅图雅吞千字飘壁左千万种运,左千万种光十故, 山一外者一望茫然,破瓶若静, 山一内者炼破千条,容悔有意于鸡方之息, 上三次而下平如蓬莱岛鱼高之天, 风海桃上,仙山楼阁,莉莉不言也, 如浮容望多丛生湖光, 建宴中因风耀阳不定也. Okay, now the same passage translated and I will add a bit more. You wouldn't think that this much could be written about clouds by anyone but a scientist who specializes in clouds. By the way, do we have any of those in the audience today? No? Thank God because I probably made all kinds of mistakes in capturing some of the terms that describe the clouds. The clouds go along with the winds sweeping and burgeoning above and below until there is a great divide formed with heaven's vault above all, a perfect blue while below in the midst of the cottony forms beams of sunlight flicker and penetrate and the forms of the peaks following these sometimes peak out and sometimes or again swallowed up while purplish blueish greenish forms produce thousands and thousands of orioles and thousands and thousands of types of scintillating light and that is why everything beyond the mountains is one vast panorama of voidness as even as the surface of a mirror while within the mountain it is as if thousands of skeins of silk are twisting and turning floating and dangling amongst the crevices of all the peaks above all is zigzagged below all is perfectly level. It is like the isle mountains of paradise jutting upwards toward heaven. The Chinese believed that there were mountain islands of paradise way out in the ocean where shenren or immortals lived so now the tips of the peaks protruding above the clouds have that appearance. While in the windswept ocean waves the towers and pavilions of the mountains of the immortals are clearly one after the other unobstructed or it is like tens of thousands of lotus blossoms growing together or scintillating wavelets of lake light shaking and swaying in the breeze and never settling down. I have heard from those who have grown old living in these mountains that the clouds actually have homes they come from a particular mountain and will inevitably return to that same mountain on hot summer days in the windswept rain the dragon clouds arise and fade at such times it is difficult to keep track of them in the haze and there would seem to be no way to determine if the clouds of all the near and far mountains are in fact facilitated by yellow mountain clouds but indeed they are. He's referring to the belief that clouds emerged not from water, not from oceans, not from lakes but from mountains the mountains were the roots of the clouds. Same cloud would always come out of the same cave and return to it at the end of the day a cloud commuter you might call it. I have further heard that once in the past there was a visitor here who was seated at his mountain window grinding his ink and painstakingly working at poetry when a cloud suddenly flew in through the window approached his desk totally absorbed the liquid ink and then departed leaving his inkstone as dry as if it had been rubbed clean. The cloud had stolen his ink. Now of course before the era of modern tourism to the yellow mountains which has been facilitated by the government in the form of launcher or cable cars that have been erected there getting through was extremely extremely difficult and we have some descriptions of how this was done for example as one proceeds to the south one sees yet another sheer cliff face he's describing a group of climbers being led into the yellow mountains by a guide usually a Buddhist monk who's living there as a hermit hundreds of feet high and broad there are no crevices or fissures one can grasp hold of nor are there any places where withered tree branches could be set the leader informs one that this is the cliff of the king of hell and at the top lies a ridge known as poison dragon back which is even worse but once past this ladder it becomes possible to reach the summit with no further difficulty once an announcement to this effect has been made the climbers tentatively crawl crab like up the cliff until the halfway point where there is a transverse crack barely a foot or so in width above it protrudes a rock which presses right against one's body preventing one from standing here but if one reaches into the mouth of the crack one can reach inside it and grab hold of some pine roots and thus manage to advance several tens of feet a gigantic pine tree next blocks one's way lying nearly horizontal where one to grasp the trunk around and pass under one's way would still be obstructed and ascent would still be impossible now at the very top of the cliff protrudes a knob of rock the size of a fist if one crawls along to the tip of the pine tree which is growing horizontally out of the cliff if you crawl to the very tip of it so that you're now thousands of feet above the valley below and secures the rope to this knob at one end and wraps it at the other around one's body and then swings one's entire body free hanging in the void from the rope one can pull oneself up by the rope as if by a hanging thread and upon reaching the top one can hang the rope back down to the next climber and who can attach it to his waist and thus also ascend to the top by leaping into the void now finally I would like to read just one passage about the various animals that live in the Yellow Mountains which captured Wang Hongdu's attention and some of what he reports about them stretches one's credibility a bit he is talking here about monkeys that is gibbons or yuan and these gibbons are so beloved to the Chinese that there was a famous painter in the 11th century named Yi Yuanji who painted nothing but gibbons it was the only thing he would paint something like Joseph Albers and Squares and his masterpiece is a hand scroll called 100 Gibbons no two of which are in the same position there are mother gibbons with baby gibbons after he was done with that he said I put aside my brush I have done my life's work now Wang Hongdu tells us that there are two groups of gibbons in the Yellow Mountains immortal ones which have eaten the leftover elixir of immortality and now can live for thousands of years if not forever and ordinary ones for the immortal gibbons of the mountains two grey ones for every white one do not flock together with the ordinary gibbons when the climate is clear and lovely they will freely emerge to observe the cloud sea below white ones crouched on the rocks looking like snow the mountain monks call them old snow gentlemen if they raise their hands to wave at one of them he will look up Yuan and gazing at them respond with a gesture of his hand as for the grey ones their whiskers too are entirely white often they seem to serve the white ones one on each flank scratching their backs or massaging their bellies as if they were servitors not daring to stand upright in the presence of their masters few are those who get to see this the other gibbons form troops and do not reside in any fixed location when they pass through a gully beneath the cliffs they inevitably search out the most hidden remote spots eating all the flowers and fruits that they can find there until these are exhausted and only then do they head elsewhere throughout the mountain these gibbons will form troops and then form themselves into a circle and if one goes out to observe them upon numbering them it always turns out that each troop has precisely 99 gibbons if the hundredth gibbon comes along they scatter them away their fur is greenish yellow not limited to a single color it is warm and thick suited to resist the cold but when everything freezes over the troop will huddle all together forming a huge ball and then roll along the cliff tops those gibbons on the inside of the ball will after a long while rotate to the outside changing places with the gibbons there who take their places within and thus they continue rotating places without cease the people of the mountain call this the yuanqiu the ball of gibbons I will end with a recommendation that you visit the yellow mountain sometime keep your eye out for the ball of gibbons and if you manage to see it please send me an email jchaves at gwu.edu thank you for your attention thanks very much I heard two titles of books that are probably now in the works one experimental volume of poetry called 99 gibbons and the other children's book the ball of gibbons so I have two other announcements about things happening tonight that are after this one is in the monarch lounge it is a banff reception and I believe that starts at 8 30 so it's like right after this and the other is the given the number of bilingual readings we devised this last year and we're going to repeat it this year it's the cafe Latino which will be at La Perla restaurant which is I'll give you the address it's in the book but you have to look a little bit it's at La Perla Mexican restaurant 734 south 5th street and that starts at 9 p.m. and there will be readings from bilingual readings from Latin America primarily if I think they're all from Latin America and Alexis Leviton will be presiding and there will be a little bit of food there and I've heard that the place has really good margaritas so please join us for that alright well this year okay so Katie Silver who is listening very carefully asked me to clarify that the banff reception is for everyone it is the banff international literary translation center reception and it is in the monarch lounge which is downstairs in this very building and it is open to everybody not just alumni of the banff residencies so that starts at 8.30 so I'm going to move on to the national translation award this year we had an illustrious committee made up of three people they were, read them there in the program but I just want to make sure I get all the names right so the committee this year was Jessica Cohen, Barbara Epler and Elaine Katzenberger thanks very much to you three for judging the finalist and selecting a winner it was a hard job I have to say we had a lot of really really fine entries and as you can tell from the shortlist actually the long list which was published and then the shortlist which I'm going to read you it was just a very difficult decision to come up with a winner and they had their work cut out for them the shortlist was the five, I believe, one, two, three, four, five five books, finalists Between Friends by Amos Oz translated from the Hebrew by Sandra Silverstone and Invitation for Me to Think by Aleksandr Widzinski translated from the Russian by Eugene Astashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich Life's Good Brother by Nazim Hikmet translated from the Turkish by Mutlu Konuk Treatise on Shelling Beans by Vislav Misłewski translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston and Theme of Farewell and After Poems by Milo De Angelis translated from the Italian by Susan Stewart and Patrizio Czekagnoli so a really fine list and you can read more about each one of them at the website each one has a little blurb and a little description of each one might have been a winner in this case I have one to announce and I'm going to invite the winner to come up and do a little reading for us it is two people actually and that should give you a clue the winner this year is Aleksandr Widzinski an invitation for me to think which was translated by Eugene Astashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich so Eugene couldn't make it I think he's in Berlin at the time and he couldn't make it but Matvei is here let me say a couple words about Eugene because he's not here and then I'll say a couple more about Matvei because he is Eugene Astashevsky was born in 1968 in Leningrad in the USSR and he grew up in New York after his family immigrated in 1979 as a translator from Russian Astashevsky focuses primarily on the late 1920s and early 1930s underground circle led by Daniel Harms and Aleksandr Widzinski in addition to Widzinski's an invitation for me to think he has edited the first English language collection of their writings called Abiryu or Obiryu I don't know how to say that in English Abiryu is the Russian anthology of Russian absurdism with contributions by Matvei Yankelevich published by Northwestern University in 2006 his as yet unpublished project on Abiryu Conversations by Leonid Lipovsky won a translation fellowship from the NEA and he is currently preparing an edition of Tango with Cows a 1913 book of visual poetry by the Russian futurist Vasily Kaminsky which won the Penheim Award he also edited and co-translated collections by the contemporary Russian poets Dmitry Golenko as it turned out which was published by Ugly Duckling Press in 2008 and Arkady Dragomoshchenko in Darkment Selected Poems published by Wesleyan University Press in 2014 finally his moonlighting in Italian as a co-translator of Elisa Biagini's The Guest in the Woods helped to win the 2014 Best Translated Book Award 3% this year I guess earlier this year and then Matvei I have to say a couple of words about Matvei and then let him come up and talk about the project and then do a little reading Matvei Yankelevich is a founding editor and volunteer for Ugly Duckling Press where among other projects he curates the Eastern European Poets series he's the author of a poetry collection Alfa Donut United Artists Books The Bella in Fragments Boris by the Sea published by Octopus Books and several chap books his translations of Daniel Harms were collected in Today I Wrote Nothing the selected writings of Daniel Harms in the artist series Overlook Press he is an itinerant lecturer today wandering among us currently teaching poetry at Wesleyan University and the art of the book and translation as writing and arts among other seasonal jobs he is a member of the writing faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College please welcome Matvei Yankelevich Thank you I'm really nervous Is it Khrushchev that said I'll bury you? and that is the correct pronunciation of the group that Harms and Wiedensky are part of oberiou that's an easy way to remember it thank you for that Russell Eugene has sent me a couple of things he wanted to say and I had a couple of things I wanted to say and I'm ecstatic and kind of really nervous in front of all of you so Eugene was sorry for not being able to come to the conference his wife just gave birth to a child their second daughter last week in Berlin and now he's teaching in Paris right now I think so we are both as translators deeply honored to receive this award but we are also and maybe most grateful on behalf on our author's behalf Wiedensky born in 1904 died in 1940 when he died on a prison train 73 years ago very few had read his work and there was very little chance that anyone would read his poetry unpublished and scattered as it was yet he would have been yet another unknown of that century expunged from existence voice and all to quote John Berryman he went over everyone and nobody's missing often he reckons in the dawn them up nobody is ever missing Eugene has well I should say so much of Wiedensky's work is lost also because it was it's simply not extant in Russian and very little of it is read what is published in Russia so in a way this award allows it a kind of life that it doesn't actually naturally have it's sort of the unnatural aspects of translation and Eugene has described his translation work as a performance with intentionality almost like an interpretive dance with and by a particular poet in a particular language at a particular time well for me I guess he speaks for me too we translate with philological knowledge of the original as scholars but because we're both American poets born in Russia and brought up in Russian poetry we're not the denotative approach for us is insufficient we can't stop hearing things and prosody which can't emigrate as easily as even as easily as difficultly as we did can't emigrate so easily and it's meaning the meaning of its prosodic moves of an author's prosodic moves are unique to the language and the period so we our own prosodic moves Eugene's and mine so it's pretty horribly subjective what we're doing Eugene and I first started translating Vodensky around 88 and we didn't know each other then we met in 2000 in New York thanks to Jean Etruske and Thomas Epstein who are like our matchmakers who showed Eugene my draft of Rug Hydrangea which I'll read in a second and he said something very touching in this email he said that I should say that I'm his dearest friend and he hopes the feeling is mutual indeed it is and I'm kind of embarrassed though because it's a real pleasure to have done this book with him but especially and to win this award with him but especially because he did most of the work except now I have to be up here so I guess I okay so I want to read just a very short statement by Eugene about I asked him to write a little bit about what he thinks about Vodensky's role in contemporary Russia for the political climate can you hear me okay yeah okay Vodensky once said that his work carried out a poetic critique of language he was referring to his practice of combining linguistic units in rationally non-decodable ways which he called meaninglessness or a historian of the international avant-garde would class alongside data and perhaps future language experiments a historian of philosophy however might see his poetic, Vodensky's poetic work as taking place in the arc between Nietzsche and Wittgenstein or perhaps even Wittgenstein and Wittgenstein but in a specifically Russian context all the genealogies of early 20th century language philosophy and linguistic experiments it is hard to see Vodensky's protest before the mendacity of ordinary language as being independent of the invasion of ordinary language by Soviet and especially Stalinist Newspeak in newspapers in the workplace in the communal apartments in other words outside and inside language was turned into a machine for the manufacture of ideological fictions a poet who in such a linguistic environment asks how do we write in a language that's false cannot be viewed as an apolitical poet in Russia Vodensky is the main classical reference point for the younger artists of the opposition today most famously for Pussy Riot in that sense he has taken the canonical place that Mandelstam held for their parents the way his writing evades conventional structures the way it offers the reader constellations instead of isolatable figures this already makes Vodensky a more contemporary poet aesthetically than our most poets who are more contemporary chronologically but it is his poetic critique of language his insistent questioning how one may write in language that's false what kind of sense can be made when making sense makes no sense that makes him a central figure for today because we too live in a linguistic universe colonized by ideologies we too live in a linguistic universe where to paraphrase much ado about nothing we may very well ask are our words our own whom do I mean by we here of course I mean the Russians whose government has taken over virtually all media with the result that submits its citizens to unrelenting unimpeded and excellently choreographed an excellently choreographed barrage of propaganda but it is hard to think that we in the states although not subject to a single all embracing propaganda campaign but many campaigns some of which cancel each other out while others reinforce yet others are how can we put it the subjects of our own language we are not are spoken through sometimes unconsciously manipulative ways by political or corporate entities sometimes less consciously but always for someone's profit whether financial or psychological linguistic manipulation surrounds us we absorb it we unwittingly inflicted on others this is why Vadensky's question how do we write in a language that's false is also our question my hope is that translation in some way what everybody here in this room is doing in some way directs itself at this project or this problem by projecting language into the foreground of their work and attention I'd like to also thank I think all of you and thank also the publishers who brought out this book Edwin Frank and Jeffrey Yang at the R&B poets the new poets series I also want to thank posthumously in absentia or whatever Daniel Harms and Jacob Druskin two friends of Vadensky who actually held on to Vadensky's manuscripts a gesture that we forget the necessity of today so and in the 30s in the 1920s and 30s Vadensky wrote these works and I'm going to read I think just two pieces one in Eugene's translation first and maybe I'll read a little bit of the Russian and then if you want I can keep reading while you go drink somewhere let's see but first Russell will tell you where or maybe not I don't know he already told you I think so this is the soldier ABC translated by Eugene Stashevsky along the shore of the resounding C walked the soldier ABC he had a fundamental guiding thought about nuts he walked and whispered a song it was evening the soldier ABC approached a pitiful unlit by the inhabitant fisherman's hut where fisherman lived provided they were not out navigating the resounding black Caspian or essentially even the Mediterranean or which is one in the same the Adriatic sea but were ashore that's when they lived there the fishermen were five in number they intently ate soup with fish their names were André, Banderé, Bindré Ganderé and Coudidré they all had daughters their names were Liala, Tala, Bala Kala and Salah the daughters had all gotten married it was evening the soldier ABC did not stop by the home of these garden patchminders he did not knock on their home door he walked deep in his thought the fundamental guiding him thought about nuts the soldier ABC did not notice their fisherman's house not their nets, not their rigging not their daughters, not their soup even though he felt cold and night was falling all the same he still walked past them so much was he engulfed by his fundamental guiding thought about nuts it was evening still ABC walked by his nut song let us imagine that is let us mentally hear this song does it follow from the songs being called nut song that nuts must feature proudly in it yes in this case it follows it is far from being always so but in this case it follows here it is that's this song the soldier ABC sang about the difference in the shells of the walnut and the brazil nut the shell of the walnut is tender to look at the shell of the brazil nut is savage to look at the former shell is clean firm, lush and lean the latter shell is a simple one it's like a tailless swan why this difference goodness gracious those in the know are horribly pugnacious I like the walnut before and after its body carries a certain laughter its shell is mighty fine but thinking about it is a waste of time the brazil nut has color maybe the color is its brother yet where it's dawn gets its start no one can say either forward or backward why this difference goodness gracious those in the know are horribly pugnacious this is all that I could say about their shell that ends with an A here as if an answer to this song blazed up the candle lit previously unlit window of the fisherman's house whose light had gone out entirely and forever the fisherman andre bendray wrapped his fist on the window and shouted to the soldier abc officer officer do you take the world's offer sir but the fisherman self sufficiently cooked and went on eating his fisherman's soup it was evening although also night was falling but what could abc say in reply when he didn't hear the question he was already very far away from them and then he suddenly but not unexpectedly turned into a father and and right away sang a new song the father sang the mother listened the father sang but the mother listened the father sang and the mother listened and what was she listening to I walked along the city streets I looked for my son everywhere I couldn't find him anywhere even among the seaside cliffs then I walked into the forest then I ran to wards the sea where are you where oh my son I cried around me sadly my son answered here I am may be I entirely here then I looked around myself my son who my son wholly disappeared all the birds put up a howl the wild animal cry and cry and cry and cry the four rest to them all the soldier abc strongly inspired courageously we the text is unfinished and I'll read a poem one poem from just a little earlier from 1933 oh no I think my phone died where I had the Russian technology anyone know Cyrillic and have an iPhone huh you can find it in Russian by typing it in Cyrillic and you will come upon it very quickly so Russell if you do that I'll read a short bit from from the grey notebook in this text and then maybe read that poem with a tiny bit of the Russian and this is just apropos of this sort of what Eugene has talked about in the introduction to this book and what we both talked about in other cases this questioning of language that's going on in the Oberu poets so I'll read apart from the grey notebook which is also unfinished notebook text of Odenskis from the early 30s oh and the poem is I'm sorry I'm not a beast Russell you got that it's like on the wiki it's pretty easy to find Russian text they don't have copyrights if they're Russian did you know that so I'll read this little part from the grey notebook first before every word I put the question what does it mean and over every word I place the mark of its tense where is my dear soul Masha and where are her wretched hands and her eyes and other parts where does she wandered murdered or alive I haven't the strength who I what haven't the strength I'm alone as a candle I'm seven minutes past four alone eight minutes past four as nine minutes past four a candle ten minutes past four a moment is gone as if it had never been the clock also the window also but everything remains the same it gets dark it gets light not a dream to be had where's the sea where's the shade the notebook the word 155 is nearly at hand and that essay and poem grey notebook meditates on connections between our language about time and subjective experience of time and then I'll read this lot just one poem to finish and thank you for your patience and attention and thank you to the generous panel that chose this book I'll just read the beginning in Russian a little bit I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I