Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Jim Hicks IN THE FIRST introduction I penned for this magazine, I felt it incumbent to cite Ralph Waldo Emerson. One line in particular, for the fall of 2016, seems even more appropriate now than it did in 2010, or in 1848, for that matter. In his introduction to the first issue of the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, Emerson wrote, “This country needs to be extricated from its delirium at once.” This issue’s featured artist, Nina Chanel Abney, also brings Hamlet to mind, holding, as she does, a mirror up to that madness — “in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of passion.” Abney’s work is all the more essential given what we find on the national stage today — dominated by “players that [we] have seen play” as they strut, bellow, and “imitat[e] humanity so abominably.” Back at the onset of the millennium’s second decade, I argued that another key step toward extrication, and away from delirium, would be a dramatic increase in the amount that the Massachusetts Review publishes in translation. Since then, we’ve done well on that score, averaging perhaps twenty percent, though we could certainly do better. In this issue, for example, only two of our twenty authors first wrote their work in a language other than English: poems from Fahrad Showghi, translated from German by Harry Roddy, and letters from Joan Sales, translated by Contributing Editor Peter Bush. So this round we’ve batted just half our average. That said, it should be added that the goal for MR was never quotas, even if we remain resolutely pro-immigration. To much of the world, much of what this country produces appears, it must be said, provincial. And MR will never stand for that. So let’s take a closer look at what’s included in this issue. We begin with three “Amherst Stories” from MR’s founding editor, Jules Chametzky. The red thread that guides these accounts, however, ties them each to flakey international movements: first the Moonies, then Scientology, and, in perhaps the grimmest tale of all, Reichian orgonomy. Elsewhere a hat trick of other local heroes — Marilyn Chin, Stephen Clingman, and Sabina Murray — also adds to our understanding of the world and its history. The nightmarish diet in Chin’s “Immigrant Dreams,” the three episodes from Clingman’s memoir about growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, or Murray’s vision of the visionary Roger Casement: each a case study in [End Page 378] how all true politics is global, even when it acts only locally. In Amherst historian Laure Katsaros’s lovely tale of the Goncourt brothers, and French culture itself, surrendering to a Japanese invasion, we have a fascinating story of cross-cultural pollination, one that arrived at our office from just across town. Joann Kobin’s tale of late-life language learning has a French twist as well, though in this case the author does live all the way across the river in Northampton. Muira McCammon’s research on the Guantánamo Bay library is another fruit of local scholarship, and one with evidently historic ramifications. Elsewhere in this issue, Nil Santiáñez delivers the second half of his lesson in reading the literature of the Great War comparatively. And as their work here makes manifest, neither the poetry of Michael Waters nor that of Terese Svoboda fits neatly into any national box. Let a last line from the latter stand as slogan for both, and for us: “Not you, where once was all-you.” Our autumnal offerings also include a pair of atypical family stories: Christine Sneed invents an advice column capable of giving life lessons to its author, and Alex Poppe hatches a CRISPR tale of genetic manipulation than any we’ve ever read. Both narratives for our time, about our world, not ourselves. Finally, let me also mention the closing poem from Lisa Beech Hartz. Its subject, a photograph by Doris Ulmann of the great Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco, seems a particularly good fit for these pages. Ulmann was an alumna of the storied Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City, an institution that counts among its early...