Journal of the Week: Missouri Review
by Michael Rudin
…se of reading a translation is to know the culture from which the original comes, shouldn’t we comprehend it in its entirety, warts-and-all, so to speak? Shouldn’t we let post-Soviet people and their politics speak for themselves? Perhaps, like with Limonov, the English translation of Sankya says more about its American, or English-speaking, audience than the original’s Russian one. Perhaps the problem comes from the Western audience’s need for he…
…ved out the month before. Neither my father nor I knew what to do with our new freedom. “I saw Lenny Stern this morning,” he said. “He asked after you. You remember your Uncle Lenny.” “Sure,” I said, and I thought for a second about Uncle Lenny, juggling three sandwich halves in the back room of his five-and-dime in the Hill District a million years ago. I was nervous and drank more than I ate; my father carefully dispatched his steak. Then he ask…
…oss as a caricature. So, really, how Wilde speaks in my novel is a kind of compromise between nineteenth-century diction and what feels comfortable in my ear. In that manner, I hope, his personality and his continuing trials are what remain highlighted. As Jennifer Steil comments in her blurb, the novel vividly conveys “the misery and waste of Wilde’s final days” and “the destructive power of senseless persecution.” Is that theme what drove you to…
…iterature-related headlines of late have been painfully funny. See their latest, “Miranda July Called Before Congress To Explain Exactly What Her Whole Thing Is.” You should really just read the whole thing, but—okay, here’s a little taste: Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) at one point attempted a drastically different style of questioning in which he clearly explained to July what his own whole thing is in hopes that she would reciprocate in a way tha…
…rk with who I try to show how something is not quite tracking or not quite coming across. Then I’ll give examples of how I think they can fix it, and discuss challenges and ways they can work it through. When you’re working as an editor, your relationship with a writer is a companionship, working side by side, versus the teacher telling the student, “Go this way” or “Go that way.” So, I think that there are some writers who are able to take the cr…
…hey join others of their kind on my desktop, which is a more organized and complete map of my brain and imagination. The laptop gets lean and mean again until the next project takes it over, and the cycle repeats. Impetus, chaos, cleansing, impetus. Whatever work we immerse ourselves in is naturally going to generate a ton of questions for us, and the digital clutter that accumulates on my computer during big projects is useful evidence of those q…
…one of the prose. In “DestroyedMichygen,” the theme of not-understanding becomes complicated by language, age, and her new culture: Darling is a little older when she arrives in the U.S., that sparkling mirage of plastic electronics and silky underwear, via Detroit. The color seems to leave the language, or at least the landscape: If you come here where I am standing and look outside the window, you will not see any men seated under a blooming jac…
…whom she betrayed in high school, and the unlikely fulcrum on which Rose’s new life in New York now swings. After a chance reunion, Rose convinces Lacie to let her move in, and the two, now roommates, fall into an uneasy friendship, as Rose finds herself increasingly drawn to all aspects of Lacie’s life, including her boyfriend. Even as Rose threatens to repeat the worst moments of her and Lacie’s lives, I couldn’t help but be enthralled by her mi…
…magic—filtered through the individual’s emotions and experiences, place is comprised not simply of sensory descriptions but also abstract emotions and images. Yet what about imagined landscapes? Let alone historical ones? How does a writer go back in time to inhabit a past that lives and breathes beyond mere facts, that is tinged and tainted by an individual’s experience in that place? One writer who has managed to accomplish this task exceptional…
