Art and Photography
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Dream Time: The Art of Christian Veschambre
all paintings are oil on canvas
Seeing a painting by Christian Veschambre for the first time can feel like you’ve been drawn into the vortex of an alternate universe. Figures emerge from a sandstorm unaware someone – us – is watching. They appear in profile or in movement, as if the force of the wind is sculpting them mid-action, sweeping away layers of stone and sand. We get the sense they’re not meant to be seen. When staring out from the canvas – as do some – they are as if startled, ready to frighten,
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Translating Empathy in a Time of War
Global Voices – Letter from Poland
Katarzyna Szuster-Tardi & Mark Tardi
At a slightly different historical moment, they could have been our grandparents – or us. They come from places with names that are familiar, like Kyiv, Lviv, and Odessa as well as from places that weren’t part of our mental map a few weeks ago – like Kryvyi Rih and Kherson. All of them have had to leave behind what they know and love: partners, relatives, friends, landscapes, pets. They’ve brought with them what they could: a few changes of clothes and whatever else one might grab when the pulse drum of panic and self-preservation are confronted with two enemies,
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Three Short Vignettes by Mariella Mehr (translated from the German by Caroline Froh)
Artwork by Isabel Peterhans
WHEN CHESTNUT BLOSSOMS GREW INTO YOUR BEDROOM
Laughter is a bright wall around us. A ceremony of drunken greetings over at the next table, the noise of belonging together. Hanging overhead, whiffs of cool oil and hungry desire – rosy, edged in black. Housewife faces, student faces, plump party mouths, little girl faces, intellectuals, sensitives – but mostly males. The Weavers, you say, was always a waiting room. The host carries bad wine from table to table. You have your I-am-strong-on-my-own face on.
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Lasting Art: A Review of Cole Swensen’s Art in Time
Art in Time is a book that resists the idea of it ever becoming a “timeless work of art.” For poet,
translator, and academic Cole Swensen, the very notion of a “timeless work of art” not only implies a
refusal to engage with the present moment, but also exposes a fundamental problem in our viewership:
our tendency of looking at rather than from within. In this collection of lyric essays, Swensen studies
the work of twenty artists, all of whom have “found ways through landscape to become an active
element in the view and its viewing.”The book itself remains neatly tied to its own present moment.
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film room 208, avenue of the poet rilke by Christian Formoso (translated from the Chilean Spanish by Sydney Tammarine and Terry Hermsen) Photography by Michael Angelo Yáñez
film room 208, avenue of the poet rilke
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fade to black and two cut-off images: a woman in front of a window—the gesture of gathering her hair from her face—and a smudged name like graffiti scrawled on the bridge at ronda. someone who looks like you across from the woman. a blink. the end of the gesture and the movement already washed-out and no longer there.
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you refuse to speak, thinking of the tree on a small hill. you want to see it in the scene and so it appears.
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Two Poems by M. Vasalis and Arno Bohlmeijer (translated from the Dutch by Arno Bohlmeijer) Artwork by Ton van Rijsbergen
Death
Death pointed out little interesting things:
here’s a nail – said Death – and here’s is a rope.
I look him in the eye, a child. He is my master
because I trust and admire him,
Death.He showed me everything: drink, pills,
pistols, gas tap, steep roofs,
a bath tub, a razor, a white sheet,
“casually”– in case I’d fancy it, one day,
death.And before he left, he gave me a little portrait…
“I don’t know if you forgot it yet,
