Editorial
In this issue, we wanted to explore literature’s relationship to the pasts that go beyond conventional or linear ideas of history and lineage. In particular, we wanted to propose – as a provocation – the idea of untamed time: time that proliferates like weeds between things, appears behind our eyes, in our gestures, lodges in our bodies.
How has an untamed time, whether ancient or more recent, been transformative for writers
in any fundamental way, no matter what their geography? Not only one’s literary past or traditions, but the width and persistence of the past in its many manifestations? We welcomed any work – reflections, critical writing, prose, poetry – that addressed itself to these broad questions.
Here are some varied and possible responses.
In a brief but startling essay, the Swedish poet and translator Magnus-William Olson reads a multiple and fragmented time into the very act of apprehending poetry.
Lewis Hyde brings us the Oxherding series, a set of medieval Chinese poems, and a parable about the conduct of Buddhist practice. Hyde offers us multiple versions of each poem such that the versions generate intriguing and cross-cutting conversations among themselves and seem to offer us a fuller view than any singularity could.
Ottilie Mulzet brings us a rare translation from the Mongolian, of the Legend of Mother Green Tārā. The cult of Tārā in that vast land combines early Indian Buddhism preserved in surviving Sanskrit scriptures along with Tibetan Mahāyāna influences – all held together by the “glue” of the utterly unique Mongolian milieu.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra gives us new poems that pass the “double test” of history and literature, searching, like inscriptions in stone, for both clarity and silence.
Steve Komarnyckyj gives us his nimble and sparkling translations of poems by Bohdan Ihor Antonych (1909-37), a key Ukrainian modernist.
In a passage from his new, forthcoming book, The Small Wild Goose Pagoda, Irwin Allan Sealy travels as if in total time, rendering landscapes and minute everyday details equal to each other, simultaneously strange and familiar.
Togara Muzanenhamo gives us poems from a new book, Gumiguru, that – in reticent, watchful, hymnal tones – show us Zimbabwean rural and agricultural landscapes as never before.
Mani Rao gives us versions from what she tells us is Kalidasa’s least admired poem – but, completely reinventing Sanskrit translation, she also gives us new eyes by which to think on it.
Ishion Hutchinson, in his very individual language, gives us London and the “undying violence of Empire.”
And Jeffrey Yang’s prose stitches together a dream from the present with dreamers from varied pasts.
– The editors