Flash Fiction Research Articles

Reading Characters Rhetorically

This essay updates and extends the model for understanding the concept of character in literary fiction I proposed in Reading People, Reading Plots (1989). That model proposes that character has three simultaneously existing components, the mimetic (character as possible person), thematic (character as representative of a larger group of people and/or a set of ideas), and the synthetic (character as construct within the larger construct of the narrative). The model also specifies that the relations among the components varies from narrative to narrative, depending on the narrative progression. Using Joyce Carol Oates's flash fiction "Widow's First Year" as a test case, I develop three interrelated points: (1) character is a flexible resource that authors can deploy in a diversity of ways; (2) a rhetorical approach to audiences helps clarify the relations among the mimetic, thematic, and synthetic components; and (3) the approach works, with appropriate adjustments, for nonfictional as well as fictional narrative. Along the way, I also suggest how the updated model can address some of the tensions in the nature and functions of character identified by Alex Woloch and John Frow.

Contribution of Cyber Literature by Agus Noor to the Preparation of “Kisah - Kisah Kecil dan Ganjil Malam 1001 Pandemi”

Cyber literature is literature that is present due to the development of communication media, especially internet media. His presence became a benefit for several writers, including Agus Noor. Agus Noor developed a story idea with flash fiction or a collection of stories taken from Instagram with the use of the hashtag 1001night pandemic. The collection of stories is then combined into a whole story that is recorded. This work is closely related between the cyber world and the literary space to produce a literary work. This research aims to map the work of Agus Noor on social media in relatively deep. The approach used in this study is qualitatively exploratory. With reading without data, but focus on exploration found on Instagram accounts and books. This research will produce some narrative. First, the relationship of cyber literature with the book collection of stories by Agus Noor. Second, the usefulness of cyber literature in making story ideas and stories by Agus Noor.

GENRE AND STYLISTIC PECULIARITIES OF YURII KLEN’S FLASH FICTION

The article examines the peculiarities of Yurii Klen’s flash fiction creation in the genre and stylistic aspect, drawing attention to the individual modes of artistic existence, the metaphysical perspective of modeling reality. Using specific examples, an attempt was made to analyze the genre and stylistic originality of flash fiction, highlighting the peculiarities of the existential manifestations, the unknowable and irrational in the human Self through the prism of style dynamics, psychological aspects. It has been proved that the verbal transmission of sounds and songs clearly and exhaustively reveals auditory perception, fills the work with deep associations, and helps the character to learn more about the world. Musicality enhances the inner image of the hero, his dreams and hopes. For the first time, we have clarified and interpreted the genre peculiarities of the short story “Apples”. It has been revealed that the linguistic ornament enriches the lyrical prose of Yurii Klen. Although ornamental poetics is modeled only in certain parts of texts, it performs fundamental functions for the entire prose work, because it expresses various leitmotivs, more comprehensively reveals the perception of the world, creates multi-aspect subtexts, intensifies the suggestive function of the word, space-time parameters, more clearly illuminates the point of view of the characters. The linguistic ornament in the short story “Apples”, in the novellas “Medallion”, “Acacia”, “Adventures of the Archangel Raphael” makes it possible to reach the level of the ontological field of social reality, to identify the philosophical line, to expand or change the scale of the artistic world, that is, the depicted one. In the Yurii Klen’s prose, ornamental poetics is distinguished by the associativity of thoughts, images, the sophistication of sayings, the richness of metaphors and other artistic devices of representation. Lyrical prose of the writer reveals the position, attitude of the narrator to his perception of the environment, society, life, his thoughts, feelings and experiences.

Microcuentos

Abstract This article brings attention to a form of narrative fiction that has engaged with the Covid-19 outbreak by embracing social media. Microcuentos, a form of very brief short stories usually referred to as flash fiction in English, have widely circulated across Latin America through digital platforms in pandemic times. But more than simply thriving in a context of globally spread fear, death, and isolation, I argue that – in the 2020s – microcuentos are uniquely suited for pandemic times. By combining narrative intensity condensed in a structurally limited wordcount with social media’s capacity to circulate swiftly and widely, writers of microcuentos across the region have been exceptionally capable of responding to the crisis as it is happening. The case of the Latin American microcuento in the time of Covid-19 invites us to question the hegemony of the novel while rethinking the meanings of World Literature in a pandemic and post-pandemic world.

Translated article] Cuentos Lunares: Poems and Flash Fiction That Save Lives — A Euromelanoma Project During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Translated article] Cuentos Lunares: Poems and Flash Fiction That Save Lives — A Euromelanoma Project During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The influence of Leo Tolstoy on the work of european writers from the standpoint of developing family themes

The family theme permeates the work of the three titans of literature - Leo Tolstoy, Hervé Bazin and John Galsworthy. As is well known, these are great representatives of different generations and nationalities. The importance of the problem statement is self-evident; it is included in the register of the so-called "eternal plots". The institution of marriage and family, as well as issues of the extinction of love and the identification of the causes of the breakdown of relationships, will draw attention to themselves as long as humanity is alive. The family theme in the work of Leo Tolstoy is so voluminous, and the breadth of conclusions and generalizations in the work is so deep that it is fundamentally impossible to fit it into the framework of one article. Therefore, we limited ourselves to the most striking examples from Tolstoy's "flash fiction". To complete the picture, we pointed to the creative borrowing of a number of Tolstoy's ideas in the family epic sagas of Bazin and Galsworthy.

An Acceptable Sacrifice

An Acceptable Sacrifice is a flash fiction story. It explores Awah’s relationship with tradition, culture, and as an individual. She is ready to shed the weight of her inheritance and provide the only sacri6ce that would ensure her freedom.

Speculative fiction, criticality, and futurity: an introduction

ABSTRACT This short essay introduces the reader to the special issue, Speculative Fiction, Criticality, Futurity, featuring original short speculative fiction, flash fiction, graphic novels, and visual art–each of which critically imagines liberatory futurities. Each submission contributes to a different component of futuristic world-making. Some of the pieces tend to the messy fight against neo-fascism by speaking to the various tactics to dismantle supremacy. Other pieces situate their protagonists in post-apocalyptic worlds where the fight for liberation has ended with new equitable systems. Other pieces revise historical moments in an effort to reimagine what our current lives could be like without injustices chaperoning our existence. Regardless of the approach, each piece pushes us to imagine the fight and future ahead.

A Rush Hour Ride on the Dwarf Planet: Neotropical Imaginings from a Postpandemic Colony

In this dystopian flash fiction piece, a colonist on the Dwarf Planet takes the train back to her cubicle after another hard day’s work. As she struggles amid the harsh environmental conditions, KÆ reflects on why she volunteered to come out to this remote colony in the far reaches of the solar system. It is revealed that the great pandemic of 2020 never ended; the virus mutated and humans fled the Earth to build new worlds on other planets. But glimpses of the world left behind beckon as KÆ and her fellow colonists are now being enticed to return to a revived Earth; in particular, to the land of her forebears, Borneo, where orangutans roam in the resurrected rainforest and holiday-makers frolic in the famed underwater world of Sipadan and play on the island’s pristine beaches.

THE IMPORTANCE OF ARTICSIC DETAIL AS A FACTOR OF PROSE POETICALNESS IN THE SGORT STORIES OF THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN AND CANADIAN WRITERS

The article considers the role and functions of artistic detail in the contemporary short stories. The investigation involved the flash fiction stories by the American writers written after the year 2020 and several short stories by the outstanding Canadian writer Alice Munro. The aim of the research is determining the major devices of prose poeticalness in these texts and revealing the role of artistic detail in creating poeticalness.Prose poeticalness is defined as such property of a prose text which involves the priority of poetic function and envisages the introduction of poetical features into prose – stylistic convergence, phonetical repetitions, parallelism, rhythm. Stylistic convergence can be considered the most foregrounded device of poeticalness as it involves the accumulation of different stylistic devices which add expressiveness to each other (M.Riffaterre). Our investigation shows that convergences function in strong positions of texts- the initial or final text fragments. Artistic detail is the object or some feature of the object which acquires special importance in the literary text (V.A.Kukharenko). Artistic detail is usually associated with metonymy or synecdoche, but unlike these tropes, it embraces the whole text. In the flash fiction stories and the short stories by A.Munro the major artistic details are objects like a coin (L.Wilson), a brooch (A.Munro), a glove (D.Shea) or a feature of appearance like a bruise (S.Dybek). These details characterize people’s behavior, their dreams and aspirations. Therefore, they symbolize love, friendship, sympathy and give polysemantic character to the narration. Another result of our investigation is determining the metaphoric detail (G.Paley) in the description of the woman, the mother of the defendant. Thus, the emotional effect of the artistic detail is realized in the metaphoric similes comparing the woman to the faded flower. These artistic details in combination with stylistic convergence create the impression of the texts as modern parables. The theoretical novelty of our research lies in the analysis of artistic details from the viewpoint of poeticalnees as well as in revealing the significance of emotional effect for prose poeticalness.The prospects of further research lie in the investigation of poeticalness in other genres of modern prose.

Creative Writing in the Classroom: On Twitter, Aphorisms, Flash Fiction and Haiku

Creative Writing in the Classroom: On Twitter, Aphorisms, Flash Fiction and Haiku

O outro emudecido

This essay covers the relationship among images, in particular photography, and the literary text. The concept of alterity, in the relation between the subject who photograph, and the object, the “other”, which is photographed, is analyzed, as well as the iconoclasm that renders historically difficult the use of images and texts in combined midia. Most of existing studies concern the inclusion of photographs in literary texts, but some relate to photographs with short texts, like haikai, flash fiction and even epigrams. In the first case we study the works of W.G. Sebald that make extensive use of vernacular photographs around which the narratives are developed. In the second case we study the work of Bertolt Brecht, Kriegsfibel, where the author writes one epigram for each image of the WW II collected from the press, with the objective of awakening the critical reading of such images and the news that they refer to. In the end a description is made of the work of the author about Jorge Luis Borges. The work consists of an essay about the themes and obsessions of the Argentinian writer, four short stories inspired in his universe and photographs of Buenos Aires that refer indexically to his work and life.

What to Read Now: The Novella in Flash and the Flash Novel: Forms of and for the Times?

Nancy Stohlman Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction Ad Hoc Fiction, 2020 ALTHOUGH A CRAFT BOOK on the form, Nancy Stohlman’s Going Short is itself arranged like a novella in flash, with flashlike chapters “demonstrating the form as they discuss it.” As Stohlman concludes, “The form is still soft and pliable. . . . The best ideas rarely fit into neat check boxes.” And herein may lie the form’s attraction. Stohlman debunks myths on size (smaller is easier / bigger is better) and that readers have short attention spans. Not so readers of flash fiction. Flash fiction, and by extension the novella in flash, “invites the reader up on the stage, hands them a tambourine and tells them to keep up.” You become part of the act; you are included. And though you may read a novella in flash in one sitting, something can linger as you ponder the effect of words condensing ideas that might unfold much later again in your mind. Karen Jones When It’s Not Called Making Love Ad Hoc Fiction, 2020 A RECENTLY PUBLISHED novella in flash, When It’s Not Called Making Love, by Karen Jones, was specially commended at the annual Bath Novella-in-Flash competition . In just forty pages, Jones takes the reader on a coming-of-age roller-coaster ride, attesting to how less can be very much more. Some titles, stories in themselves, are: “Recommended Stopping Distance,” “Stop and Think,” followed by “Everything Sucks,” with the novella ending with a spin on the title: “What It’s Called When It’s Not Called Making Love.” Jeanette Sheppard Seventy Percent Water Ellipsis Zine, 2020 ANOTHER UK PUBLISHER devoted to flash fiction and the novella in flash is Ellipsis Zine, which brought out Jeanette Sheppard’s Seventy Percent Water. In her approach to representing relationships and loss over fifty-three pages, Sheppard also plays with different representations, employing a hermit-crab approach in one flash and a triptych one in closing. Titles, too, evoke stories: “Seventy Percent Water,” “Because of You,” “The Last Time I Visited My Mum,” “I remember the cockerel my father received as a housewarming present,” and the enigmatic “Kelly Loves Traffic Light Jelly.” Interestingly,thesethreebookswerepublished during the pandemic and launched via well-attended Zoom events. Sylvia Petter, an Australian now based in Vienna, writes short, long, serious, sexy, and fun. Her debut novel, All the Beautiful Liars (2020), was published by Lightning Books, UK, as an e-book and released in paperback in 2021. Her novelette in flash, Winds of Change, is forthcoming. She blogs at www.sylviapetter. com. what to read now The Novella in Flash and the Flash Novel Forms of and for the Times? by Sylvia Petter WHEN LYDIA DAVIS WON the Man Booker International prize in 2013, flash fiction made it into the sitting room of the house of fiction. Not just flash fiction collections appeared, but also the novella in flash, a form perhaps already foreseen by Sandra Cisneros’s 1984 “novel in vignettes,” The House on Mango Street. If flash fiction is a story under a thousand words, a novella in flash is a collection of such stand-alone pieces arranged to form a longer story where the reader may leap from one flash to another along a narrative arc. A flash novel is something else again, a new form with the urgency of flash fiction. a Notebook 8 WLT SPRING 2021 ...

Table of Contents, Masthead, and Editor's Note

REVIVING SCOTTISH GAELIC | ISRAELI POET YUDIT SHAHAR | FLASH FICTION FROM IRAQ’S DIAA JUBAILI plus China’s Invisible Migrant Workers Writers Who Refuse to Remain Silent REVIEWS OF BOOKS BY Cixin Liu Najwan Darwish Mieko Kawakami Olga Tokarczuk World LiteratureToday YOUR PASSPORT TO GREAT READING REDREAMING DREAMLAND 21 Writers & Artists Reflect on The Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial SPRING 2021 US $12.95 CAN $19.95 Giannina Braschi Pops Up in Pop Culture RC Davis-Undiano Remembers Rudolfo Anaya Major funding for this program is provided by Oklahoma Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Norman Arts Council, and OU’s Vice President for Research & Partnerships. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of its sponsors. For accommodations, contact specialevents@ou.edu or (405) 325-1701. The University of Oklahoma is an equal opportunity institution (www.ou.edu/eoo). OKLAHOMA HUMANITIES YOU ARE INVITED TO ATTEND The University of Oklahoma’s Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Symposium April 8–10, 2021 The University of Oklahoma, Norman Greenwood District, Tulsa, Oklahoma Featuring a keynote talk by two-term U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith and plenary talks by Scott Ellsworth and Hannibal B. Johnson Plus the premiere of I Dream of Greenwood, choreographed by Marie Casimir and J’aime Griffith, with additional presentations by more than a dozen writers, scholars and students To register and for complete schedule information, visit ou.edu/tulsa1921 TRACY K. SMITH ELLSWORTH JOHNSON HUMANITIES OKLAHOMA Get your free copy of our special Spring/Summer 2021 issue, featuring poetry and writing on “Hope,” and perspectives on the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Subscribe for free: okhumanities.org Oklahoma Humanities Magazine Culture. Issues. Ideas. Linguistic R/evolutions 10 Speaking in Tongues by J. R. Patterson Fiction 13 The Hat Stand by Diaa Jubaili 23 Chlorophyll: A Reminiscence by Tatsiana Zamirovskaya Essays 14 Rudolfo Anaya (1937–2020) by RC Davis-Undiano 16 The Collapse of Industrial Publishing by Eric Schierloh 19 Giannina Braschi in Pop Culture by Tess O’Dwyer Poetry 22 Three Poems from Israel by Yudit Shahar IN EVERY ISSUE | 3 Editor’s Note | 5 Notebook | 21 Editor’s Pick | 77 Books in Review | 116 Outpost Redreaming Dreamland 21 Writers & Artists Reflect on the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial FEATURING 42 Patricia Smith 44 Jewell Parker Rhodes 48 Joy Harjo 50 Tracy K. Smith 51 Quraysh Ali Lansana 52 Kalenda Eaton 55 Crystal Z Campbell 56 Minna Salami 59 Candace G. Wiley 60 Rilla Askew 63 Clemonce Heard 64 Karlos K. Hill 67 Jasmine Elizabeth Smith 68 Laurie Thomas 72 Lindsey Claire Smith ON THE COVER Detail from Loud Whispers from Greenwood (2021), by Ebony Iman Dallas, acrylic, golden leafing, and Ghanaian textiles, 40 x 50 in. “I am hoping that the confidence, dignity, and pride needed to create a thriving Greenwood shines through this painting,” says Dallas, “represented by the Ghanaian textiles worn by the elders and passed down to the young boy. The ancestors’ hands on the boy’s shoulders symbolize that he has everything he needs to thrive. The golden brick represents a new Greenwood, and the vintage pocket watch with the word ‘Now’ reflects an urgent need to rebuild. These are gifts given by our ancestors. Their stories are our blueprints. These elements combine to represent the great past, present, and a bright future for Black Tulsans.” Chinese Migrant Workers’ Literature FEATURING 29 Ping Zhu 31 Zhang Huiyu 32 Fu Qiuyun 33 Maghiel van Crevel 35 Zheng Xiaoqiong 36 Xiao Hai 38 Hui Faye Xiao Giannina Braschi in Pop Culture by Tess O’Dwyer 9 W CONTENTS SPRING 2021 COVER FEATURE SPECIAL SECTION 40 19 28 What’s on worldlit.org Visit our website for fresh content including audio, video, web-exclusive stories, reading lists, and more. Connect with WLT Online Find us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Goodreads, and Flickr to share ideas, view photos, watch videos, discover book reviews, and more. Instagram Favorites Follow @worldlittoday on Instagram for literary inspiration. Vote in Our Readers’ Poll! 21 BOOKS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY COMING IN THE SUMMER 2021 ISSUE Palestinian Voices The summer issue will include some of the best writers, poets, and artists...

Translator's Note: Exchanging Different Versions of Jokes with Ariel Magnus

translator’s note Exchanging Different Versions of Jokes with Ariel Magnus I first came across Ariel Magnus’s work back in 2012 when I was working on an anthology of Argentine writers for the city government . The texts tended to be sent to me already excerpted with little context or explanation, and generally that wasn’t a problem: I can usually get the gist of a voice and plot pretty quickly, or at least well enough to produce a decent version in English. With Magnus’s texts, though, taken from the novel El hombre sentado (The sitting man), I was all at sea. El hombre sentado, I learned, is a kind of po-mo novelization of a film-poem by the Swedish director Roy Andersson, inspired by the poetry of César Vallejo. Or, in other words, pure existentialist angst filtered and condensed through various different mediums right onto my computer where it was about to undergo a transformation into yet another language. Having kind of gotten my bearings, I think I was able to produce a good rendering , but more importantly, Magnus was now very much on my radar. Looking through his bibliography, it was obvious that he’s a writer who likes to play with literary concepts and genres; heck, you can see it just from his author photo: the pate and facial hair seem specially designed to accentuate the sparks flying off of that mad-scientist brain of his. No doubt about it, I wanted to work with him. I got my first chance when the Short Story Project asked me to translate one of his stories, “Doing Your Duty,” for their extraordinarily ambitious program (check it out if you haven’t come across it before). This was a very different text from El hombre sentado, far more organic, gritty, and (oh, bane of translators) full of sparkling wordplay. This time I got to send my queries to Ariel, and we soon hit it off; essentially working on a translation with him boils down to exchanging different versions of jokes. It’s fun. Subsequently, Seagull Books asked me to translate his novel Chess with My Grandfather (originally scheduled for this year but now Covided into 2021), an extraordinary novel based around the diaries of a grandfather he never met and the World Chess Championship played in Buenos Aires in 1939; a blend of real life, madcap schemes, acute political, philosophical, and literary reflection, and, of course, lots of jokes. I hope I’ve done it justice. But really all you need to know about Ariel is that he’s the kind of writer who thinks it’s a good idea to produce a book consisting of a hundred one-hundred-word stories and another hundred onehundred -character aphorisms. And that he’s able to pull it off: some of these ministories boast more depth and brilliance than several rather well-regarded novels I don’t care to name. And all you need to know about me as a translator is that I think it’s a good idea to try and translate them. The challenge, obviously, was to match the word count, and I find that Spanish tends to shrink by about 10 percent when transferred into English, but that actually gave me (or rather us: I naïvely thought that the restrictions would reduce the scope for author comments; I was wrong) a little more leeway when trying to find the right combination of words and phrases to reflect what in the original is a glorious exercise in playful brevity. It’s for the reader to determine whether we’ve been successful. Translator Kit Maude lives in Buenos Aires. Editorial note: Turn to page 31 to read Maude’s translations of Magnus’s flash fiction, and visit worldlit.org to read their interview together. by Kit Maude Notebook 10 WLT WINTER 2021 ...

Translator's Note: Exchanging Different Versions of Jokes with Ariel Magnus

translator’s note Exchanging Different Versions of Jokes with Ariel Magnus I first came across Ariel Magnus’s work back in 2012 when I was working on an anthology of Argentine writers for the city government . The texts tended to be sent to me already excerpted with little context or explanation, and generally that wasn’t a problem: I can usually get the gist of a voice and plot pretty quickly, or at least well enough to produce a decent version in English. With Magnus’s texts, though, taken from the novel El hombre sentado (The sitting man), I was all at sea. El hombre sentado, I learned, is a kind of po-mo novelization of a film-poem by the Swedish director Roy Andersson, inspired by the poetry of César Vallejo. Or, in other words, pure existentialist angst filtered and condensed through various different mediums right onto my computer where it was about to undergo a transformation into yet another language. Having kind of gotten my bearings, I think I was able to produce a good rendering , but more importantly, Magnus was now very much on my radar. Looking through his bibliography, it was obvious that he’s a writer who likes to play with literary concepts and genres; heck, you can see it just from his author photo: the pate and facial hair seem specially designed to accentuate the sparks flying off of that mad-scientist brain of his. No doubt about it, I wanted to work with him. I got my first chance when the Short Story Project asked me to translate one of his stories, “Doing Your Duty,” for their extraordinarily ambitious program (check it out if you haven’t come across it before). This was a very different text from El hombre sentado, far more organic, gritty, and (oh, bane of translators) full of sparkling wordplay. This time I got to send my queries to Ariel, and we soon hit it off; essentially working on a translation with him boils down to exchanging different versions of jokes. It’s fun. Subsequently, Seagull Books asked me to translate his novel Chess with My Grandfather (originally scheduled for this year but now Covided into 2021), an extraordinary novel based around the diaries of a grandfather he never met and the World Chess Championship played in Buenos Aires in 1939; a blend of real life, madcap schemes, acute political, philosophical, and literary reflection, and, of course, lots of jokes. I hope I’ve done it justice. But really all you need to know about Ariel is that he’s the kind of writer who thinks it’s a good idea to produce a book consisting of a hundred one-hundred-word stories and another hundred onehundred -character aphorisms. And that he’s able to pull it off: some of these ministories boast more depth and brilliance than several rather well-regarded novels I don’t care to name. And all you need to know about me as a translator is that I think it’s a good idea to try and translate them. The challenge, obviously, was to match the word count, and I find that Spanish tends to shrink by about 10 percent when transferred into English, but that actually gave me (or rather us: I naïvely thought that the restrictions would reduce the scope for author comments; I was wrong) a little more leeway when trying to find the right combination of words and phrases to reflect what in the original is a glorious exercise in playful brevity. It’s for the reader to determine whether we’ve been successful. Translator Kit Maude lives in Buenos Aires. Editorial note: Turn to page 31 to read Maude’s translations of Magnus’s flash fiction, and visit worldlit.org to read their interview together. by Kit Maude Notebook 10 WLT WINTER 2021 ...

Monochrome Photo with Fragments in a Closet, and: How We Use Our Hands to Divide Us

Monochrome Photo with Fragments in a Closet, and: How We Use Our Hands to Divide Us Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto (bio) Keywords Chunua, Ezenwa-Ohaeto, Nigerian poet, song, library, God, Africa Monochrome Photo with Fragments in a Closet I am singing about the undone things cited on buried bones.I am singing them because I like to imagine a valley with a library on it.A library with catalogues that don't always read, sorry for the losses.I like to imagine a lot of things but death.I am familiar with how each momentoutweighs the knowledge that appears close by.In my country, it's a fact the cheaper an item, the better it feels.And it feels right now like I have beenholding back a privileged complaint.Oh well, everything can't always come as clean as bones.And it's not funny I don't know things till I know them.And I am still singing about the undone things cited on buried bones:Half the sun dulls and I remember myfriend who is everything but history tamer.I am not tired narrating stories wherethe past grows tall into disturbances.I like to hop onto a train and visit my friendwho recognizes the idea in building sand castles.This poem is not about me if you look close enough.I often fail at naming the unsettled ponds in my head.Everything I wish known is all in the eyelashes.Last month, I figured out every unplacedmemory is a palette asking for purpose.I can name the excesses accorded to swanned afternoons.But I can't for now.So come, come help me.Let's mend these museums where we can never forget. [End Page 276] How We Use Our Hands to Divide Us I begin my day by throttling my throat and thoughts. It's so hard trying tofind God before God finds me. I begin my day by throttling my throat andthoughts and theatrics. Every flower you see had its dirt to become theflower you now see. The arrogance of itch is what people often overlook.But that's not why I am here today. One time like that, I came upon a riverby my village. And its shimmering face defies the illusions of erudition andhunger. I remembered reading things about the memories a river can hold.I remembered being told how rivers were the spots turned into whips andguns that saw our fathers into ships. Now upon this one by my village, Iwondered how many people that have drowned in it. A thousand maybe.Three thousand, I guess. Perhaps more. I keep wondering the mouthpeople use in kissing after lying with them. I keep wondering about nam-ing. Especially naming with intents. We are so close to nature that we arenamed uncivilised. We are so us that black is all these mouths could say ofour skins. It's always too hard to do life alone. It's always too hard to do lifealone. See how we invalidate everything that suffers. See how we use ourhands to divide us. [End Page 277] Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto chinua ezenwa-ohaeto (Twitter: @ ChinuaEzenwa) is from Owerri-Nkworji in Nkwerre, Imo state, Nigeria, and grew up in Germany and Nigeria. His chapbook The Teenager Who Became My Mother is from Sevhage Publishers. He was a runner-up for the Etisalat Prize for Literature, flash fiction, in 2014. He won the Castello di Duino Poesia Prize for an unpublished poem in 2018, which took him to Italy. He was the recipient of the New Hampshire Institute of Art's 2018 Writing Award and its 2018 MFA program scholarship. In 2019 he won the Sevhage/Angus Poetry Prize and was second runner-up in the 5th Singapore Poetry Contest. He won first prize in the 2020 Creators of Justice Literary Award, poetry category, organized by the International Human Rights Art Festival, New York. His works have appeared in Lunaris Review, AFREADA, Poet Lore, Rush Magazine, Frontier, Palette, Malahat Review, Southword Magazine, Vallum, Mud Season Review, Salamander, Strange Horizons, One, Ake Review, Crannòg, The Question...

Towards A Poetics of Narrative Brevity: Short Story, Microfiction, Flash Fiction

Towards A Poetics of Narrative Brevity: Short Story, Microfiction, Flash Fiction

Translator's Note: Scapegoats and Metamorphoses

translator’s note Scapegoats and Metamorphoses by Chip Rossetti PEOPLE IN DIAA JUBAILI’S STORIES have a confounding habit of turning themselves into other things: a eucalyptus tree, a dung beetle, a lighthouse , a butterfly, or even water. These stories—from his flash-fiction collection, No Windmills in Basra— read at times like modern folktales or urban legends, presenting the reader with inexplicable, even magical, events, even as they foreground the violence and war that have overshadowed Iraqis’ daily lives over the past several decades. It’s what first drew me to Jubaili’s work. His story “The Hat Stand” demonstrates this blend of fairytale metamorphosis and grim reality perfectly: the protagonist, ‘Ubayd, has become the neighborhood scapegoat, blamed for everything bad, from broken streetlights to the US occupation and Iraq’s burgeoning civil war. When rumors fly about a vicious testicleeating creature at large in the city, ‘Ubayd’s neighbors, like the torch-wielding mob in Frankenstein, descend on his apartment to kill him once and for all. Having already served as a metaphorical hat stand on which they can hang all their problems, he transforms into an actual hat stand, which conveniently saves him from the clutches of his pursuers, who now focus their attention elsewhere. I first came across this collection in December 2018, not long after it won the Almultaqa Prize, a relatively new award specifically for Arabic short-story collections. I was on a work trip to Abu Dhabi, and as on other occasions, I took advantage of access to brick-and-mortar Arabic-language bookstores to buy a pile of books and stuff them in my suitcase. I hadn’t read flash fiction in Arabic before, but I was struck by Jubaili’s stories, which ended with a dark twist and a surprise emotional wallop. It wasn’t until the late spring of 2020—still early on in the Covid pandemic, which now seems like eons ago—that I turned to the idea of translating the book. I naïvely thought these stories would be straightforward to work on. But, as I should have known, there is no such thing as an “easy translation”: every literary text reveals its challenges only after you’ve started working on it. In this case, the compactness of the flash-fiction genre makes it closer to poetry than to short stories: every word has to cohere and drive the reader seamlessly toward the final line. Even more challenging from a translator’s perspective , many of the pieces in No Windmills in Basra hinge on a pun in Arabic. One story, for example, turns on the word mismar (meaning both a carpenter’s nail and a skin tag) and its close relation mismari (referring to cuneiform script) for its central motif—a neat vocabulary overlap that English can’t replicate. Other pieces offer even trickier conundrums outside an Iraqi context : in the story “A Hundred Laylas and One Wolf,” some alert English readers may catch Jubaili’s allusion to the popular Majnun and Layla legend, but far fewer will realize that “Layla” is also the name used in Arabic for Little Red Riding Hood without some translatorial handholding. While working on “The Hat Stand,” I began thinking about the story as a metaphor for translation itself. Like a man becoming a lighthouse or a woman turning into water, translation is always an act of metamorphosis . At the same time, I have often felt the impulse to become as unobtrusive as ‘Ubayd, to adopt the “invisibility ” that can’t (and shouldn’t) always be the goal of translation. But unlike ‘Ubayd, I have to confront the text and make decisions. As a translator, I don’t have the option of turning myself into a hat stand. Chip Rossetti has a doctorate in modern Arabic literature from the University of Pennsylvania. His published translations include Beirut, Beirut, by Sonallah Ibrahim; Metro: A Story of Cairo, by Magdy El Shafee; and Utopia, by Ahmed Khaled Towfik. He is currently editorial director for the Library of Arabic Literature at NYU Press. “IRONFEST - RON’S HAT STAND” BY WENDY TANNER IS LICENSED UNDER CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Z WORLDLIT.ORG 9 ...

Strategies of investigating and translating poetical prose of the classical and contemporary English short stories

The article considers the notion of prose poeticalness from linguistic and translation points of view. Prose poeticalness can be defined as the introduction of poetic features into the prose text with the help of such devices as extended metaphors, intertextual allusions, stylistic convergence, syntactical and phonetic repetitions. The investigation involved the analysis of the fairy tales by Oscar Wilde, the short stories by Kate Chopin and Dylan Thomas, which are referred to as classical prose, and the contemporary American flash fiction stories. The strategy of investigating prose poeticalness involved determining the devices of prose poeticalness in each text, defining the linguistic and stylistic components of these devices and their functions. As a result of our research, it is determined that the most foregrounded device of poeticalness is stylistic convergence. In the classical short stories, convergences function in bigger text fragments, they are based on the extended antropomorphic metaphors or similes in the interaction with alliterations. The stylistic convergences are used for poetical description of nature as human beings possessing the ability to speak, to think, to love (Wilde, Thomas), and even as gods (Rob Carney). Biomorphic tropes are used as the core of convergences, as a device of poetical description of people in the stories by Thomas, fairy tales by Wilde, in the flash fiction stories by John Updike, Grace Paley, Leigh Wilson and other writers. In the contemporary flash fiction stories, convergences foreground the ideas of sympathy, tolerance; they help to create a strong emotional effect. The strategy of rendering stylistic convergences in translation of the poetical prose consists in the exact reproduction of images applying literal translation or synonymic substitution and retaining the sound effect in trope components. Mythological and biblical allusions used as a system in the text are a device of poeticalness typical for Thomas's stories. The strategy of translating implicit allusions involves retaining the intertextual comments and giving explication in the text or in the footnotes. It is suggested that the prospects of further research lie in investigating poeticalness in the novels of contemporary writers.