I have a confession to make. (Another one.) I am reviewing a work of flash fiction, I Am Currently Working on a Novel, by Rolli, who lives in Saskatchewan. And I don’t really know what flash fiction is. Like, I just don’t get it. It’s short, and somehow different from poems, not that I really get poems either. Like condensed, telegraphed stories, stories without characters or plots. So maybe take what I say about Rolli’s flash fiction with a pinch of salt. Or whatever flavouring you’d prefer. I like cayenne pepper.

I Am Currently Working on a Novel is a collection of a lot of stories. I haven’t counted them, but there are a lot of them. Most of the stories are short, but reading them is oddly exhausting. The effect is a bit like listening to a pop album, one of those bubblegum pop CDs that exist only platonically, where all the songs are breathless and pleasurable for two minutes and they all sound the same. Like pop songs, Rolli’s stories have ways of using language that seem wide-eyed and memorable but don’t mean very much when you think about them.

For example, “What keeps so many of us moving, what keeps us breathing, through the week, is the weekend. We form a vision of meaning and float it, over our heads, like helium balloons.”

Now I’m not against pop songs, but I don’t often read them. I certainly don’t read whole albums. To me they seem incoherent, like jelly on paper when I want something crisper and more structured. Maybe sweet potato fries. Cooked with paprika and a dash of cayenne pepper.

Pop albums have this way of structuring themselves that doesn’t necessarily lend itself to appreciation of the whole. The songs reflect each other, with moments of recall, sometimes shared names or places, often the same tone or mood, images and phrases repeated just enough that you notice, but you’re never sure whether it’s some kind of unconscious auto-plagiarism. I want meaning, but it is hard to find amongst the noise.

I should have said though, if Rolli is like an album, it’s more like one of those bubblegum pop LPs made by an indie band—shot through with perversity. Most of the stories in this collection have the same mood: matter of fact about dreamlike occurrence, self-contradictory, with sorrow not far from the surface. The surface itself is shiny, sunny even, and often funny:

I have a scabby tongue. Why, I can’t say. I would benefit from a medical consultation. There is, however, no doctor where I presently live. I presently live in a well.

I was wheeling through the trees, on the wheelchair path, just in awe of the trees, when I realized their new green leaves were actually black and yellow, and were actually bees.

In another story, someone else lives in a well. She is a good example of Rolli’s fairytales turning sad: “When my cakes don’t turn out right, I throw them down the well. Then I hang my head over the edge of the well and my tears fall down into it. Recently my husband complained that the well water has begun to taste suspiciously like tears and cake, and if this doesn’t soon change, he will take my face. The faces of several young women in their prime adorn the kitchen walls.” OK, so, she doesn’t actually live in a well, she just cries in one.

The closest I have come to understanding this sort of thing is Kafka. He has a story of which I am quite fond called ‘The Vulture’. It is only about half a page. It is about a vulture. The vulture is hacking away at a man. The man is not happy about this situation, exactly, but he is bearing it pretty well, all things considered. A second man finds the first man’s passivity shameful and offers to help. This help does not go all that well. I won’t spoil the ending.

Now, it’s not really fair to compare anyone to Kafka. But, Rolli, my apologies, I’m going to anyway:

It seems to me that everything we get in Rolli we could be getting out of Kafka, and we aren’t getting anything new or exciting. Rolli’s situations are absurd, sad, funny, lucid. They end as punch lines or in contradictions. They don’t have Kafka’s tone, though, or his vast depth. They don’t seem like they could be about anything and they don’t seem like they are about everything. To be honest, most of Rolli’s stories don’t seem to be about anything. ‘The Vulture’ or ‘Before the Law’ seem like they could be the most glorious metaphors for all of human life or for whatever else the reader wants. A story of Rolli’s, like ‘Thumbs’, in which a man cuts off his thumbs and then gets fake thumbs, and is happy again, just seems to be about thumbs. Even though the whole story seems like it’s about how desire is perverse and can’t really be satisfied, or some other really universal thing, it still just doesn’t seem to be about anything.

I think the difference is one of style. Kafka, of course, is Kafka. Rolli is very North American, sort of Salinger or something. His writing is a lot flatter. He relies heavily on two techniques. I don’t know if they are representative of flash fiction or not, but they are very representative of Rolli.

Rolli often introduces a short juxtaposing sentence at the end of a paragraph that seems quite unrelated and is designed to inflect everything that proceeded it differently. For e.g.: “I wrote something down on paper and slid it under the door. It said, ‘At the Smoker’s Lounge.’ Janet didn’t think it was funny. She has a degree.” It isn’t clear why this degree thing is relevant, but now it’s inflected our idea of Janet—she’s sort of a snob or something. It’s also a joke: the juxtaposition performing this perverse dream logic. Of course she didn’t think it was funny, no one with a degree finds it funny.

The other thing Rolli does often (and by often I mean in pretty much every story) is delaying the final word of the sentence with an ellipsis or a dash. Usually this delayed word is unexpected. This technique is just another kind of punch line. Here is a passage characteristically dense with these ellipses and dashes: “The precipice. Near … our home. On the edge of town. I should not have thought of it. Yet it remained a thought. On the edge—of the mind. I would be working. Yet thinking…of the precipice. I would be speaking to my wife, and yet thinking. So slowly breathing, sitting, and facing…the bookcase. When I heard footsteps, I reached for a book. She imagined I was reading.”

Here’s an example that’s really like a joke: “The ghost of Winston Churchill was chasing the ghost of a cigar. I was kind of rooting…for the cigar.”

So I think my problem here is that I Am Currently Working on a Novel feels like a collection of hundreds of jokes. And some of them are very funny. I like this one: “I used to bend spoons in the 70s. Now I bend an assortment of other utensils.” I laughed. I like the word “assortment.”

Some of the jokes are less funny. Most of them, in fact. I don’t see this as the collection’s major problem though. It’s not that it’s inconsistent—collections are almost by their nature inconsistent. It’s the opposite; it’s too consistent. It’s all jokes. Sad jokes, funny jokes, weird jokes, boring jokes, like you’d get in any good joke book. But I don’t usually read joke books front to back, like I don’t usually read pop albums. I don’t know how to read them.

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Tim Kennett is a writer who lives in London. Follow him on Twitter here.

I Am Currently Working on a Novel was published by Tightrope Books.

It’s a popular notion in the literary community to say that people don’t read enough literature in translation, especially poetry. It’s one of those opinions that most people nod along with, probably because they don’t read enough translated poetry but ‘have always been meaning to.’ It’s likely that, even in the most well-read of literary circles, most people’s only interaction with poetry in translation are the classics required by grade school and university syllabi—Homer, Ovid, Dante, etc. One major cause of this lies at the root of poetry itself—it can be incredibly difficult to translate something as nuanced and delicately organized as a poem. Poets spend years tweaking even the smallest of details in their poems, details that can be so specific to their language of origin that there is literally no equivalent in the translated language. Thus, poetry in translation is a work of art upon itself, rather than just a copy of the original work in a different language. The translated poem takes on a life of its own, closely related to the original poem but still unique.

In A Midsummer Night’s Press’ new series ‘Periscope,’ three international poets publish in English for the first time. Publisher Lawrence Schimel notes that the goal with Periscope is to publish poets that are not only obscure to English-speaking audiences, but are also notably difficult to translate. Schimel says, “translation allows us to see between languages, even if there is not always a straight line of sight, as is often the case when translating poetry, where the translator must often recreate a metaphor or meaning in the target language.” Three books have been published in the series so far, all from female poets in different European countries.

One is None by Katlin Kaldmaa (transl. Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov)

Prolific Estonian poet and translator Kaldmaa kicks off the series with her collection of poems that reach far and wide while sticking with a few select thematic elements. One of the most obvious trends amongst this collection are Kaldmaa’s ‘My _____ Lover’ series, which feels almost like a Bachelorette-esque reality series cascading through the book. In the first of those, ‘My Bosnian Lover,’ the speaker evokes scenes of romance and passion while weaving a thread about the deep scars of war that still ails Bosnians:

My Bosnian lover
longs for his kin
and is always up at night.
When he walks his footfalls fit
into those of his forerunners.

In another poem of this ilk, ‘My Icelandic Lover,’ the lover in question starts to feel more ethereal, almost “general” as if the speaker isn’t addressing a real lover in this series, but the country from which each lover is purported to be from:

My Icelandic lover
is man, woman, child, creature
from the youngest of places
known to planet and people.
This is a land on the edge
of the one and the other.

The speaker here addresses a deep love for Iceland and its people, history, and culture—reinforced by the use of multiple pronouns in the poem. Both “her” and “him” are used interchangeably when addressing ‘My Icelandic Lover’.

Love itself is also a common thread within ‘One is None,’ finding itself in ten of the sixteen poems in the collection. Some are quite good, like in the poem ‘geography of love:’

but most of all,
yes, most of all i have loved you in this town
where the snow never leaves
where the sun never comes,
and where longing
is the most common feeling.

Others miss the mark a little, as with the last poem in the book, one of the ‘Lover’ series of poems, ‘My Swiss Lover.’ The poem moves between grand statements about Switzerland disguised as comments about the Lover, and overly specific comments that don’t exactly feel married to the first section of the poem.

Nevertheless, Kaldmaa’s writing (and that of her translator) is still excellent in many of the poems, and the thematic framework of the book works well for the most part.

Dissection by Care Santos (transl. Lawrence Schimel)

What initially stands out about the second book in the series by Spanish author Care Santos is how different it is to the Kaldmaa collection. Any notion that translated poetry is any sort of genre is quickly dispelled when reading books as different as these two. Santos bursts through the gates with the first poem in the book, ‘Self Portrait,’ a visceral and self-deprecating look at what’s expected of women in culture:

For many years I’ve felt proud
of knowing how to practice an ancient trade:
offering pleasure
(and at the same time being able to receive it).

While the first book in the series has a playful and often allusive look at sex, ‘Self Portrait’ gets real and gritty from page one.

Much of Santos’ work gets even more detailed and gruesome when speaking about flesh, using titles and terms that might seem more at home in a coroner’s report or scientific research paper than a book of poetry: the second section of the book is entitled “THE DIVISION INTO PARTS OF THE CADAVER OF AN ANIMAL FOR THE EXAMINATION OF ITS NORMAL STRUCTURE OR ORGANIC ALTERATIONS.” The poems themselves tend to have a similar feel, focusing on flesh and bones and the physical properties of humans. In one of the poems that stands out in particular, the speaker is both brutal and beautiful in two simple lines:

For now Oblivion is just a restaurant
where together we feast on my entrails.

As the book nears its end, themes of death and darkness creep into the poems, and the vocabulary becomes a little more abstract. Many of these late poems have a bit of a nihilistic vibe to them, but in the final poem ‘Penitence,’ the speaker devastates in just a few lines:

If you’ve reached here
and you’re still breathing
you’ve already paid for everything you’ve done.

Anything Could Happen by Jana Putrle Srdic (transl. Barbara Jursa)

It’s understandable that, when publishing for the first time in a new language, one would want to provide a sampling of their best work. In the last book published by Periscope so far, Slovenian author Jana Putrle Srdic provides a sampling of poetry from her first three published collections. The goal is to show off Srdic’s range of subject matter and language, which the collection does, but at the expense of a rather disjointed collection as a whole.

Anything Could Happen jumps from theme to theme without much connecting them, aside from the writer’s style and general structural preferences. The author comments on life in the city in ‘The Other Side of Skin,’ and jumps to the writing life in the next, ‘And You Write.’ This isn’t to say these poems aren’t good poems with beautiful writing, like the last two stanzas of ‘The Other Side of Skin:’

The city gives us an infusion of glittering
rhythms and saves us from a sweaty
apartment, flowers in pots that we are quietly dying away,

the city is a recourse of cellophane
and we wait patiently—rabid dogs.

Srdic later shows off some serious poetic ability, like in the poem ‘Fish,’ in which the speaker compares the cleaning of a fish to the organization of one’s home, connecting the two by their roles in the grand order of things.

The collection finishes with a poem that, while different from many in the collection, demonstrates very well the skill that Srdic shows throughout the book. ‘Our Tongues’ is a commentary on the culture of language and translation in the author’s experience of Europe, and she tosses in a sexual metaphor that does as much to evoke that culture as the rest of the poem does altogether:

Still, this language insurmountably
binds us:
this honey-sweet tongue in our mouths
with which we’re licking each other.

As a whole, the Periscope series does a great job at finding and translating poetry that would have otherwise never found its way into the hands of English-language poetry readers. The lessons of the series so far should serve as an example both to future translations by Periscope, and to other English-language publishers translating new work: first, that the right poetry will need to have the right translators that can do the work justice (as far as I can tell, the Periscope series did a fantastic job finding appropriate translators), and second, that individual collections do a better job at teaching new audiences about a poet, rather than a sampling from different collections. The art of writing and ordering a poetry collection says nearly as much about the poet as the poems themselves, and its a disservice to both poet and reader to pick and choose rather than let the reader experience a single collection from a poet. But if A Midsummer Night’s Press and other translation publishers continue to publish poets as good as the three in the Periscope collection, they’ll have done a great things for the global poetry community.

— Spenser Davis

Spenser Davis is a freelance media and culture writer based in Seattle, WA. His work can be found at VICE, Pacific Standard, and The Freelancer. You can read more of his poetry reviews for Structo here.

The first three books in A Midsummer Night’s Press’ Periscope series were published in November 2014.