Ariel MagnusChess with My Grandfather by Kit Maude

Abstract

0 written, and nothing mars the undeniable power of this poignant and very intelligent novel. Rita D. Jacobs New York Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza Intensive Care Trans. Arthur Dixon. Columbia, South Carolina. Alliteratïon. 2020. 213 pages. “POETRY IS THAT WHICH is worth translating,” says Eliot Weinberger in 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, his 1987 treatise on the difficulties of just such an enterprise. “Great poetry lives in a state of perpetual transformation, perpetual translation : the poem dies when it has no place to go.” In other words, translating poetry from one language to another requires a kind of transformation in which the poem succeeds on its own terms not only in its source language but also in the target language. Otherwise, to paraphrase the American poet and translator Robert Bly, the poem is what gets lost in translation. Arthur Dixon’s translation of Venezuelan poet Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza’s Cuidados intensivos succeeds brilliantly as both translation and English- language poetry. Gutiérrez Plaza’s voice in Spanish, his diction and rhythms, are those of everyday speech—earthy, gleaming like a rock in the sunlight. Yet at the same time it is visionary and incantatory, carrying with it poetry’s power to bring something momentous into being. To be at once straightforward on the surface but suggest the deepest human dilemmas and emotions is a hallmark of this book, a paradox Dixon’s translation brings out beautifully. For example, in “A True Story,” Gutiérrez Plaza’s speaker tells us, “It’s true, today you know nothing / for certain, / except that from one dawn to the next / things happen.” This gesture toward the mystery of existence—that our lives are disorderly, random, and mostly unfathomable—is rendered in the most straightforward diction, without the kind of embellishment that would weaken the gravity of the realization. The major themes of Intensive Care accumulate and dovetail throughout the book through such oracular pronouncements . The book’s title suggests illness and mortality but also the vocation of the poet to impose order through language on chaos, even though language has the power both to bring us closer and to separate us. In “Written at the Wrong Time,” the speaker tells us, “Had it been said before, / had it been said without pause, / then maybe, just maybe, all writing / would be in vain and time would do the talking.” Other themes of the book include the mysterious interventions of fate and the difficult situation of contemporary Venezuela at this particular historical moment. Intensive Care is Gutiérrez Plaza’s fifth book of poems but the first to be translated into English. He has won major awards in both Venezuela and Mexico and is currently a professor emeritus at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas. Given the high quality of both the poems and the translation , here’s hoping Dixon will bring us other of Gutiérrez Plaza’s books in English. Steve Bellin-Oka Tulsa, Oklahoma Ariel Magnus Chess with My Grandfather Trans. Kit Maude. Kolkata. Seagull Books. 2021. 312 pages. WHAT IS CHESS if not a metaphorical microcosm of a myriad of human institutions , conflicts, and systems? In Chess with My Grandfather, Argentine novelist Ariel Magnus (with the help of Kit Maude, his infinitely talented translator), descendant of German immigrants, shows just how honed a tool this tabletop theater has been in acting as a proxy for a vast number of human endeavors, specifically war. And what better war to allegorize than the Second World War, whose star hegemons resemble the command the King and Queen pieces have over the fate of the game? Ariel Magnus’s grandfather, Heinz Magnus , was a German Jew who managed to escape (along with his mother, father, and sister) likely death by fleeing to Buenos Aires, Argentina, after the first rumors of Hitler’s ascent and the ensuing transcontinental conflict. The plot of Heinz’s relatively languid life in Argentina crescendos when the 8th Chess Olympiad takes place between WORLDLIT.ORG 93 BOOKS IN REVIEW Frances Larson Undreamed Shores:The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology London. Granta. 2020. 352 pages. FRANCES LARSON IS AN anthropologist at the University of Durham and the...