Sand Issue 7

EDITOR’S NOTE Lyz Pfister At its most basic, translation is the act of taking a string of words from one language and turning it into another. But even for the most multilingual, translation is never as simple as the 1:1 ratio it might suggest. Like a country’s history, its language also has a past; contained within each word is not just its definition, but also its connotations. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, “To translate a text into another language, one must translate every text that has preceded it, and that has contributed to its making.”

Translation tries to connect two disparate worlds which necessarily remain separate, much like Shane Sutton’s astronauts, featured in this issue of SAND, who are shut off from the world within thick, padded suits and eerily reflective helmets. Or like those unfortunates who sight the elusive Okánugu, a creature which can only live in legend, as contact seems to portend disappearance or death.

In this issue, we pay tribute to those who attempt the impossible, those who translate. Issue 7 features stories and poems translated from Chinese, German, French, Portuguese, Croatian, and Russian, and we’ve devoted our Kaffee Pause section to the winners of our first ever under-30 translation competition, judged by Katy Derbyshire, literary translator, and Catherine Hales, poet and translator. Julia Sanches’ translations of Ana Martins Marques’ poems from the Portuguese capture loss – of love, of a city, of youth and words: “We are strangers / and not only to ourselves – / we speak with mouths full of quiet.” On the other hand, an excerpt from Isabelle Rivoal’s novel Grosse translated by Allison M. Charette gives a voice to two common cultural taboos, sex and obesity.

LYZ PFISTER

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In a sense, we could say that all writers are translators. They take the tangible and transcribe it onto the page. Though the written word can never be what it describes, its beauty is found within this uneven ratio. As with translation, the selections in this issue deal as much with what’s missing as what’s there. We feel the space between a man and a woman sitting beside each other at a bar, separated by unfathomable distance. We look at what’s left when love leaves, when parents die, or you just need to get the gravity out of your hair.

“What is this land called and who gave us its name?” asks Hrvoje Tutek through the voice of translator Dunja Bahtijarević. Who tells us what a thing is called? Whether it’s the correct translation of one word to another or the correct way to feel alone, within the pages of this journal, we do our own naming.

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SAND IS

EDITOR IN CHIEF Christina Wegener

SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER Valentina Uribe

MANAGING EDITOR & POETRY EDITOR Lyz Pfister

COMPETITION JUDGES Katy Derbyshire Catherine Hales

FICTION EDITOR Florian Duijsens

INTERN Erin Fortenberry

ART EDITOR Alex Bodine

GRAPHIC DESIGNER Matthieu De Schepper

COPY EDITOR & DISTRIBUTION MANAGER Sophie Nibbs

PRINTING Solid Earth

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Danielle Janess ADMINISTRATIVE MANAGER Yvonne Andreas

CONTACT SAND Journal Donaustraße 50 12043 Berlin info@sandjournal.com www.sandjournal.com

EVENTS MANAGER Chris Troise

CONNECT WITH US ON FACEBOOK FOR NEWS AND EVENTS: www.facebook.com/sandjournal ISSN 2191-429X Published in Berlin Copyright Spring 2013 SAND IS

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

6 TRACKING A LOW SHOT

35 THE ALA WAI AT NIGHT

Shannon Quinn

Jeffery Ryan Long

8 BLUE WORDS FOLLOWING STARES

44 DRAFT H & PAREIDOLIA

David Groulx

9 THIS IS CALLED AGNOSIA Kate Nacy

14 <СТИХИ К H. ШТЕМПЕЛЬ> Osip Mandelstam

15 (VERSES TO NATALYA STEMPEL) translated by Alistair Noon

17 THE SEX TOURISTS

46 10 Ali Blythe

(OIL ON CANVAS) artwork by Shane Sutton

49 KAFFEE PAUSE 50 A SELECTION OF POETRY Ana Martins Marques translated by Julia Sanches

Jon Lincoln

61 BIG (EXCERPT)

(INK ON PAPER)

Isabelle Rivoal translated by Allison M. Charette

artwork by Dmitry Borshch

33 POLITE ADDRESS Ottilie Mulzet

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Ali Blythe

78 OSIROMAŠENI RADNIK RAZGOVARA S MAD MAXOM …

Hrvoje Tutek

80 AN IMPOVERISHED WORKER TALKING TO MAD MAX … translated by Dunja Bahtijarević

83 A PAIR OF DARTS Mark Terrill

(PHOTOGRAPHS) artwork by Clark Mizono

85 SAMIZDAT

98 MOULTING Joel Vega

99 COCAINE (EXCERPT) Walter Rheiner translated by Gijs van Koningsveld

111 LOOT’S LUTH (HOMMAGE) Caleb Salgado

Vassilis Zambaras

86 Tammy Ho Lai-Ming

87 SCALE translated by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming & Ricky Garni

89 CONCERNING THE OKÁNUGU Wolfram Lotz translated by Marshall Yarbrough

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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TRACKING A LOW SHOT Shannon Quinn If we’re going to do this let’s turn on all the lights let’s plug in everything we own.

Charge it up.

Put the kettle on repeat.

Start by pulling out all the names and places in our floorboards.

Let nothing languish.

And in case either of us is harbouring any wet prayers in our hollow chests; let’s talk about who left, when and where and who is leaving now.

Turn on every light we have so there won’t be any shadows to remember us.

Check the kitchen cabinet for any lost regard.

Let’s light this place up big because once, I found the rogue taxidermy of your dreams wondrous and in kinder light might come back on an expedition to salvage our shiny bits.

This is a hot set now, tracking a low shot, on its way to a white out.

Let’s not use words like crumbs or hardly enough and especially not the word promised, instead,

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one of us can remark on the beauty of old typeface as we divvy up the books, mystery, biography, reference.

SHANNON QUINN

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BLUE WORDS FOLLOWING STARES David Groulx Empty glasses line-up in arrow there seems to be no ending to them or words we say we talk gardens weather and the correct custom of burying tequila in the throat We sing we say to the sea to the dances in our ashtray smoke that drifts away incense to an unknown god of silence and dead-ends I know you as a wife and mother a god of distant solitude with the wild parts cut into slices left in glasses with the rind

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THIS IS CALLED AGNOSIA Kate Nacy You call me and I call you and you call me and I call you and then I call you and I have you.

You tell me about working at the hospital, about how you get there at six and leave around seven, which you say is not that bad.

It only takes 20 minutes to get to work, because you can just take I-95. You have a discount at the cafeteria; food is only free for doctors. You don’t have time to eat anyway.

There’s a lady who can’t get the gravity out of her hair. She tells you black people have this problem: they have so much gravity. At home, she has a pomade and it helps control the conflict between her hair and the atmosphere. The pomade is liquid drain opener and it burned her scalp raw and they covered her wounds with cadaver skin. Now she takes antipsychotics and antidepressants but her hair stays full of gravity.

You tell me about the girl from your English class. You say she’s rich; she comes from a fine family of racists in Grosse Pointe. She stopped eating and taking showers and didn’t leave her apartment for four weeks and I guess that’s why she’s there although you’re also there but not for the same reason and it’s funny sometimes who winds up with what.

You tell me about the woman who scares you, the one who walks through the corridor and smiles all day. Her smile says fuck you; it is not a safe smile. She grabbed another patient by the face, you say.

She plunged thumbs deep into eye sockets and it took a long time to 10

make her let go. I tell you that vision happens in the brain and not the eye and you tell me that’s a stupid thing to say and you are right.

I tell you I’ve met all these people in Wal-Mart Supercenters. You tell me about neural circuits and I have to think of questions to ask so that we can keep having a conversation.

I ask if Dad told you I’m depressed. You say yes, he did. I remind you that Dad says I have nocturnal eating syndrome diabetes narcolepsy shingles and that he euthanized our dog for an ear infection.

I tell you I am not depressed and I choose (joyful) words and form (exuberant) sentences to convince you that every day is a saturnalia. I meet a lot of people, I say. This is true, but it sounds like a lie. It’s like saying I am the most popular person in my apartment complex or My dentist thinks I’m hilarious or Everyone in the post office wants to fuck me.

I make an elaborate show of complaining, as a depressed person couldn’t possibly have the energy to do. I complain about other people. I complain about the postal system, about having to recycle. I tell you the only reason I recycle is to not get caught not recycling. I say Who do those assholes think they are, in reference to at least three different groups of assholes. I complain about the state of California. I tell you I might try to poison this one lady.

You are buying a textbook on Amazon.com, but I can’t tell because you are doing a good job of saying Really and What and That’s crazy. I tell you I’m wearing slipper socks from Tajikistan. I can’t stop talking.

You ask if I’m working, which means you’re ready to engage in the Lying Ritual. I tell you I am a conchologist and a lepidopterist and KATE NACY

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that I am very busy. I employ interesting and fabricated anecdotes to convey that I am: creative entrepreneurial optimistic reliable detail-oriented computer-trained un-depressed not eating olives off a steak knife over the sink with no shirt on I finish and your idea about what I am stays the same and my idea about what I am stays the same too.

I ask when you’ll get a vacation and you say never and I feel bad.

I always ask when you’ll get a vacation and you always say never and I always feel bad. Four years ago, you’d say never like it made you angry and sad but now your answer is flat and grown-up and I am ashamed of myself for asking silly vacation questions, for being ridiculous and out-of-touch, for not knowing enough about hard things, for suggesting that you stop going to your job and go somewhere else instead. Today, you are a soft/hard person and I am a fontanel and a lotus-eater.

We check for signs of my unraveling.

Not yet, but soon. Soon you’ll tend to my cancers.

You’ll give me pamphlets about my infertility and expound on the ways I’ve poisoned myself, on the toxins I’ve swallowed and the chemical agents and the pesticides, the oxygenated gasoline, the deranged equilibrium. The times I didn’t sleep didn’t listen didn’t check, the times I didn’t do the things everyone says are 12

very simple things to do, the things that take only an hour but could, allegedly, alter the entire course of one’s disease one’s recovery one’s continued reluctant survival. I do not do those things. I stand in front of microwaves; I sit close to the television; I mix things that don’t mix. I wait for a car door to bash the teeth from my face.

And, then.

Then I will bring you my amnesia, blurred vision, phantom limbs and sluggish cognitive tempo. You will make guesses as to why my body is dying faster than it should and you will tell me we are the pulpy throbbing colonies of tens of trillions of cells and I will beg beg beg you to please please please take the gravity from my hair.

This story was first published online at apt: http://apt.aforementionedproductions.com/

KATE NACY

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Dmitry Borsch Daughters of the Dust

Dmitry Borsch Betrothal of the Virgins

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Surely, it’s an inexorable truth: the Sun has had its day.

White frost builds up on the lashes, and down the head felled sawlogs roll.

Only brittle sawdust remains of what were thoughts. Who will change the schedules, what power can switch the stoplights back on? We can’t do it, who would give us the strength and authority? We are allowed to cook, and argue afterwards: someone is always left to do the dishes. The total electrons contaminate us. What other horrors await?

I know what you feel. When you set out late, when night comes. The cluck of the hours pecks at your skull, in a frozen yawn, this land waits. No hoe, no force, nothing can scratch its stern shell. We struggle, yes. We aim, we pound, we bear, we bash. Sometimes it’s easiest to stop. At the brim of the horizon bulldozers dully plod. Where are the benevolent old men when we really need their help! What is this land called and who gave us its name?

AN IMPOVERISHED WORKER TALKING TO MAD MAX, SOMEWHERE ON THE TERRITORY OF THE REPUBLIC OF CROATIA, IN THE NEAR FUTURE, AFTER THE GREAT EVENT Translated by Dunja Bahtijarević

HRVOJE TUTEK

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For we learned and we took in. Wars thundered, fathers died, and the lips we bit through uttered: we must accelerate. Very few had the strength to weep. We listened and stared blankly. We hung tied up and were dried like hams by the winds.

Now everything is invisible. The stars come out and like Coca-Cola bubbles against a dark surface they burst. Things cease too soon. No traces remain, only questions: which hand to cross this bit of dust with, whose land is this, and why is it so eager to swallow us?

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE Marshall Yarbrough The German language has a reputation for unwieldiness. Often the translator’s job is to unravel its twists and turns for the sake of clarity. In the case of Wolfram Lotz’s “Über das Okánugu,” however, that very obscurity of language is among the story’s greatest assets.

Translating the story meant finding a way to preserve as much of that obscurity as possible, to turn German confusion into English confusion.

Wolfram Lotz has written primarily for the theater, a medium much less forgiving of the level of ambiguity found in this text. In that sense, the story afforded Lotz an opportunity to venture outside of his usual mode.

As for the story itself, “Über das Okánugu” relies on mystery for its impact on the reader. For that reason, the less said about the text, the better. To probe Lotz’s inspiration for the story, to ask after its origins in reality, would be to do it an injustice. As far as the Okánugu is concerned, better to let it alone, whatever, wherever it may be.

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CONCERNING THE OKÁNUGU Wolfram Lotz The first written record concerning the Okánugu is to be found in the account of the obscure Spanish conqueror Miguel Francisco de Carvanez. In an entry dated July 17th, 1533, said personage makes note in his diary of the discovery of a village in the southern Amazon basin. On the arrival of Carvanez and his small detachment, the natives, taking the conquistador for God on account of his glittering armor, are to have prepared for his reception an impressive cut of meat. As the sole piece of information regarding what kind of animal the meat is to have come from, the natives are to have repeatedly called out the word Okánugu. Carvanez was unable to obtain any further information from the natives, as after ingesting the meat he had all inhabitants of the village beheaded by his followers. One must assume, however, that the order was not made in connection with the meat the natives had prepared, as this, thus notes Carvanez in his entry, is to have tasted, if unusual, remarkably delicious nevertheless.

After Gonzalo Pizarro’s expedition through the rainforest had failed to uncover the longed-for Golden City of El Dorado, Pizarro came to the decision, in February of the year 1541, to lead his detachment, severely reduced as it was from combat and from malaria, on the return journey. Pizarro chose a detour, for he had not yet given up hope of finding the legendary El Dorado.

Finally, on the 24th of February, Pizarro and his contingent were left with only one horse, all the others by this point having been slaughtered. The Spaniards had also begun to boil and consume the leather soles of their boots. After they had also consumed the rest of their boots, they began to eat their pants. On the 4th of March, WOLFRAM LOTZ

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this according to surviving accounts, the Spaniards, as if by some miracle, in a bend of the river came upon two bathing animals which were identified by the Spaniards’ native guides as Okánigua.

The starved Spaniards shot at them with their crossbows, but the arrows are to have rebounded and the animals to have submerged in the river. In a despairing fit of magnanimity, Gonzalo Pizarro gave his followers permission to slaughter the last horse, namely his own. These are then to have fallen to it immediately and to have begun, even before Pizarro was able to dismount, cutting pieces from the horse with their swords and devouring them.

According to surviving accounts, in the year 1634, the Jesuit monk Ignacio Vieira was at silent prayer on the edge of the jungle near the mission of Cabruta in upper Orinoco, when suddenly the Okánugu emerged from the undergrowth. The two stood opposite one another for a moment as if paralyzed, until the bewildered Ignacio crossed himself and the Terrible Beast, as it is named in the accounts, fled back into the undergrowth, defecating as it went, apparently out of fright. In any case, the pious Ignacio brought a clump of feces with him back to the mission as proof of the corporality of this apparition of his. There, the evidence was cause for some excitement among the monks, before being put away and stored in the chapel for the following four years. At the instruction of Abbot Francisco de Quereda, the so-called Ignacio Apple was eventually, in 1638, sent together with other precious objects aboard one of the famed galleons transporting riches to the Spanish King Phillip IV in order to persuade the latter to extend his guarantee of support for the so-called “Jesuit Reductions” in the new world, which he, in fact, did. The Ignacio Apple disappeared thereupon for centuries in the treasure vaults of the Spanish crown.

In the year 1807, the researcher Sir Edward Halworth was able to claim moderate success in the search for the Okánugu: In the evening hours of April 27th, in a forested region in the northern 92

Amazon Basin, his assistant Stuart Smithson notices a suspicious movement in the undergrowth. At issue, thus Smithson, is an animal of considerable size, unknown to the two Britons. With great presence of mind, Sir Halworth takes his musket and fires upon the animal, which flees into the jungle. The two Britons are able to follow it, as the stricken animal emits roaring cries, which Smithson later reconstrues with the phonetic sequence Oo-oo-hoai. The following night, shortly after Sir Halworth and his assistant have lost the trail, they come upon a settlement of the Tupi. There, for reasons that go unexplained, it comes to violence on the part of the natives towards the two researchers, over the course of which Sir Halworth is struck fatally with an arrow. His assistant is able to escape into the neighboring jungle. The aborigines are thereupon, thus Smithson, to have beheaded Halworth’s corpse, removed the brain from the Briton’s skull, and preserved his head. Pursuant to this they are to have devoured the rest of the body raw. This last claim is called into doubt by ethnologists today; one presumes that Smithson invented it in order to denigrate the Indians. It is much more likely that the Tupi fed Halworth’s headless body to their dogs. At any rate, Smithson returns to the site in just under two weeks with a heavily armed detachment of twenty men in order to restore, in bloody fashion, the rule of law. Afterwards, the ever faithful assistant makes his way back to England with Sir Halworth’s shrunken head, which he delivers to Halworth’s widow, Lady Mary Ann Halworth. Lady Halworth keeps said object for two and a half years in the salon of her country estate in the Earldom of Yorkshire. She then decides to donate the head to the British Museum in London, where in 1811 it is placed on display inside a glass vitrine. Only in the year 1957 does Sir Halworth have to give way to more spectacular exhibits, and since then he has been stored in the museum’s archive.

On a September morning in the year 1849, in a northern region of the Amazon, the zoologist Rudolf Ludwig Karcher is awakened WOLFRAM LOTZ

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by noises in the neighboring undergrowth. Looking out of his tent he sees an animal, to him unknown, grazing behind a bush. When he tries to awaken the expeditionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s other participants, the animal disappears into the jungle. Karcher describes it as a kind of dwarf rhinoceros with an armor-like gray hide. A detailed drawing of the scene finished that same morning depicts a bush behind and to the left of which a snout juts out that is indeed astonishingly similar to the snout of a rhino, albeit hornless. Back in Europe this drawing at first receives little attention in scientific circles, but a short time later becomes something of a small sensation when biologists are able to identify the bush pictured therein as a hitherto unknown kind of spirea, the existence of which in South America is shortly afterwards proven beyond doubt by another expedition. The plant is named Spiraea Karcheri, after its discoverer.

Pedro Luis Sousa, an unmarried physician in private practice in the jungle settlement of Santa Isabel do Rio Negro, notes in his diary on January 27th, 1897: On a morning walk through the copse of mangrove trees bordering my house, I suddenly caught sight of two OkĂĄnugu on a small branch of the Rio Negro. As I take it, they had just begun mating, anyway they did not notice me at first. The animals are truly fascinating, in such a way that it makes you speechless. For the three minutes I was able to watch them, my whole body was shaking with excitement. In his diary Sousa is silent with regard to anything further, though two days later he will plan to make his way to Manaus by steamboat, where he intends to give a detailed account of what he has observed at a biological institute. Stepping on the gangplank to board the ship, however, Sousa slips on the boards, slick due to the high humidity, and falls off the side of the dock, where his skull, according to eyewitness reports, bursts open on a plinth. Shortly thereafter, the incident receives a measure of attention in certain magazines, such as, among others, The Observer. One and one 94

half years later the academic Bernard Hayflick publishes a nearly 130-page treatise on the Sousa case. There, Hayflick defends the theory that Sousa had neither seen an Okánugu, nor had at any time planned to give an account of having seen one. With the help of the diaries, Hayflick takes great effort in proving that Sousa had suicidal tendencies, and that his death, though unusual, was nevertheless carried out with full intent by Sousa himself.

He supports his theory with the revelation, among others, that Sousa had boarded the landing for the steamer without a ticket; it was, however, only possible to obtain tickets for this line before stepping onto the ship. Moreover, in Sousa’s luggage there was not a single change of underwear to be found, although the trip to Manaus, according to the shipping company, required two and a half weeks.

On the morning of September 7, 1912, not far from the settlement of Codajas, the researcher Albert Weinrich, with 12 men, 21 mules, 340 kilograms canned ground meat, 470 kilograms of flour, a modern, hand-cranked camera from the Dresden firm Ernemann, two Columbia-brand wax cylinder phonographs, a Telestereoscope, and 43 signaling rockets, enters the jungle in search of the Okánugu. There has since been no trace of the expedition.

In the year 1937, the American biologist Caleb Heston publishes an essay in which he defends the theory that the putative Okánugu is merely a common lowlands tapir, such as is frequently encountered in the Amazon region. Heston grounds his theory on his indication that the Tapir, like the rhino, which does not appear in South America, belongs to the order of odd-toed ungulates, from which relation stems the occasional comparison of the Okánugu with the rhinoceros in written reports. Since the reports do not mention a pelt, which characteristic the tapir exhibits, but it is rather almost exclusively a hide that is spoken WOLFRAM LOTZ

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of, Heston attempts to explain that with regard to the Okánugu the case must be of a tapir with an extreme form of mange, which would also explain the rarity of incidence. There is a brief state of euphoria in relevant scientific circles, after which Heston’s essay is proven to be so rife with methodological errors that it is dismissed ad acta.

Waking from a midday nap on his veranda, the woodsman Nuno Peres observes, on the outskirts of the city of Manicore on November 2nd, 1963, around 3:30pm, an animal, unknown to him and as big as a cow, swiftly crossing the dusty street next to his house. Peres later describes the animal as gray, corpulent, shortlegged, and remarkably ugly.

In 1978, almost half a year after the death of her husband, the renowned biologist Alain Giverny, the widowed Mathilde Giverny publicly claims that her husband had observed an Okánugu on two back-to-back occasions during a research trip in the midsixties, but fearing for his scientific reputation had not published – and then shortly before his death had destroyed – his notes.

Giverny’s widow is thereupon accused of defaming the dead and is heaped with scorn in publications in the field. An academic publishing house that planned to bring out Giverny’s complete writings must delay these plans on account of the bad press for so long that it eventually decides to refrain from publication entirely.

Shocked, Giverny’s widow withdraws from public life half a year after making her claim. Three quarters of a year later she is found hanged from her kitchen fan by her cleaning person. In a short notice in Le Monde it is conjectured that she suffered from manic depression all her life.

A sample taken from the famed Ignacio Apple, since fallen into dust and donated in 1914 by the Spanish monarchy to the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, is sent by the latter 96

institution in the year 1986 to the Department of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma. Although sent by registered mail, the sample disappears en route, whereupon the National Museum of Natural History Madrid sues the United States Postal Service for damages in the amount of 200,000 dollars. A U.S. court rules in its favor, and with this money the museum facilities can be outfitted with escalators a year later. A second feces sample sent to Oklahoma, which this time reaches its destination, results, after a thorough investigation there, in the conclusion that the animal supposed to have been seen by the monk Ignacio in 1634 was, possibly, a strict herbivore.

During the night of the 22nd of December, 2007, and into the morning of the 23rd, the mildly inebriated financial official Filipe Jimenez, as he later reports, is driving from Carvoeiro to Moura and nearly runs into an animal the appearance of which is nearly identical to known descriptions of the Okรกnugu. The bewildered Jimenez has the presence of mind to stop the car, and through the side window he takes a blurry photo with his cell phone in which nothing is recognizable.

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Clark Mizono Postcard (Untitled), 2013

Clark Mizono Untitled (On the Ethics of Retweeting Duchamp, The Downloadable PDF as Readymade, Chance and the Decisive Moment on Snapchat, and the Aesthetics of the Parenthetical Title), 2013

MOULTING Joel Vega What is cast off, splits and falls away from the rejuvenating body like blue-black feathers caught in the tightness of twigs, or horns amber-tinted at the breaking end now ringed to snap cleanly.

Familiar territory that is skin, once mottled, rubbed or gained to win a mate, passed on to mark the gnorl of spring, heat of summer, of limbs that lay inert for a time, desiring the necessary calcium, that hardness against this intemperate cold.

Amphibians eat their shed skin. Witness, their slithering tongues, the swallowing of old coats and opaque wings. Sudden departing flight as if hairy covering is heavy baggage.

All plumage is transition; the honey-comb antler branches to break another stage, burnished exoskeleton betrays a lobsterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s soft core, our nails bordered by half-moons renewing, the quiet splitting of hairs.

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TRANSLATOR’S NOTE Gijs van Koningsveld In 1914, a 19-year-old Walter Rheiner arrived in Berlin from Cologne to report for his military medical examination. Quickly making contacts among the artists in the Café des Westens, he managed to get his first work published in the Expressionist journal Die Aktion less than a year later. A plan by one of his friends to ensure exemption from active military service by posing as drug addicts not only failed (Rheiner would be drafted to the Russian front), but the experiment also formed the beginning of a lifelong dependency to drugs, first cocaine and later morphine.

Back from the front, Rheiner’s writing career took off. Within three years, he published four collections of poetry, as well as critiques, essays, and a small number of prose texts, of which the novella Kokain (excerpted in this issue of SAND) is the longest. The original 1918 edition featured illustrations by the painter Conrad Felixmüller. But despite his impressive start, Rheiner would soon fade into obscurity again. Unable to escape his addiction, he became estranged from friends and family, until, unemployed and essentially homeless, he died of a morphine overdose at the age of 30 in a doss house on Kantstraße.

Rich in tragic parallels to Rheiner’s brief life, Kokain describes the last night in the life of the addict Tobias. As he wanders the streets of central Berlin, shooting up in doorways and public toilets, Rheiner’s protagonist gradually descends into a drug-induced psychosis, where trees begin to whisper and streetlamps dazzle, where buildings rise up from the fog like fists and residential corridors are plagued by ghostly voices.

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With its themes of addiction, madness, and metropolitan estrangement, Kokain is clearly a work of Expressionism. Rife with bizarre metaphors and images, as well as idiosyncratic sentence structures and paragraph breaks, and an abundance of short and panting phrases that are all, in one way or another, expressive of the protagonist’s mental state, it poses many challenges to the translator.

My aim has been to retain these characteristics as much as possible, without distorting the English beyond Rheiner’s intended sense of disconnection.

None of Rheiner’s work would be republished during or after his lifetime, until in 1985 an annotated edition containing the bulk of his poetry and prose appeared with Reclam Verlag. The present translation is the first to date.

GIJS VAN KONINGSVELD

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COCAINE (EXCERPT) Walter Rheiner Here, in the shadow of the bushes, he took off his jacket, put it down on the pavement against the trunk of a tree, and rolled up his shirtsleeves, exposing large dark spots that gave off the peculiar smell of spilled blood. With gnashing teeth, he took two more injections, slowly and with the utmost precision.

He held up the bottle against the distant lamplight. It was still two-thirds full. Reassured, he shoved it back into his trouser pocket, pulled out the other bottle, and cleansed his upper arm with ether. He did the same with his forehead and neck.

The bushes in the front gardens were whispering, and one of the last trams approached from a distance.

Quickly, Tobias put his clothes in order.

Oh, how he wished he could be at home right now, to stomach the misery behind locks and bolts. But he knew he couldn’t go to his furnished room. The landlady would have locked his door and hidden the key to prevent him from getting in.

Where could he turn in his need? Bareheaded, he stood under the stars. Should he just wander around all night, as he’d done so often, only to end up being met by the grey morning alongside the Spree canal, or near the gasworks as it rose through the fog like a fist?

The ether had somehow diminished the spell of frenzied excitement he was under. He could feel his pulse was still flying, rising, racing. Or was it the solitude, the absence of other people that gave him this relative calm?

He began to march, with the drug addict’s toxic tenacity that 102

left him no longer feeling his muscles or his tendons, down the long Kaiserallee to the Wilmersdorf-Friedenau station. There, he veered off and soon found himself in front of a large apartment building.

This was where Marion, his saintly friend from the café, lived in a large studio.

The front door was locked. He whistled a couple of times and called out: “Marion, Marion!”

It was in vain. She was sure to be asleep.

As he waited, pacing to and fro, the night air from the wastelands on the outskirts of the city blew around him and he could feel the black skies weighing down on him once more. The stars were heavy with viscous drops. The tall buildings oppressed him. The wind sang in the swaying arc lamps as they scattered their mad and dazzling light.

Fear took hold of him again. He looked around anxiously and then ducked into a dark corner where he administered two new shots.

Ha! Straight away that fever, that yellow flame lit up in him again! His brow crackled, his eyes widened and fixed in a stare as he shifted restlessly from one foot to the other.

He had almost forgotten what he wanted as footsteps approached the house.

A gentleman halted at the front door, rattling his keys.

Tobias shyly went up to the man and greeted him.

“No one is answering,” he said haltingly. “I’m here to escort a lady to her sick relative.”

The man said nothing, let him in, and relocked the door.

Tobias switched on the light and hurried up the stairs.

Suddenly it occurred to him it might be better to let the man enter his apartment first. He waited. As soon as the man reached the first floor, he opened the door and stepped inside his home.

The door closed. The light, on a timer, went out. Through the WALTER RHEINER

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Walter Rheiner's morphine prescription (likely forged by Rheiner) Akademie der K端nste, Berlin, Walter Rheiner Archiv, nr. 37

colourful windows of the stairwell, the trembling light of the streetlamps formed fantastical patterns.

Tobias nervously sneaked up to the fourth floor, dreading each landing with deathly fear.

Upstairs, on the fourth floor, a door that stood ajar brought him into a little corridor with a skylight. At its end was a heavy iron door, which led to Marion’s studio.

Tobias switched the light on again. He placed the bottle and the pouch with his syringes down. He rubbed his bloody arms once more with ether and took another injection.

Powerful new hallucinations began.

He turned around. From the bottom of the staircase on the ground floor, voices rose, the voices of many people about to come up. Confused, semi-audible whispering. Tobias managed to make out a few phrases: “This really has to stop … It’s a scandal … That pig is ruining himself and his family … To the asylum with him! … We’ll drag him into the car … You grab him right away! …

And make sure he doesn’t drink that bottle, it would do the chap in!”

Tobias shivered. He was dripping with sweat (… or was it blood?). He could hear his mother’s voice as the light went out again: “Tobias, my son! Tobias, I beg you! … Tobias, Tobias! …

Tobias …”

The voice was plaintive. Clack, clack, clack! They were mounting the stairs, steadily, coming closer. All the while the whispering did not for a moment fall silent.

Did he have the nerve to switch the light back on? … He did. … There, before him, at his feet, still wriggling ever so slightly, lay the body of his dying mother. And next to her, dressed in black, her face shrouded in black veils, his sister squatted down, crying softly, her head lowered.

Tobias shrank back and turned away, pressing his hot face against the wall.

His heart was pounding like a hammer in his skull. After a while he turned around again. The ghost had disappeared. He WALTER RHEINER

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quickly gave himself a new fix and then started knocking on the iron door, quiet at first, but then louder and louder.

He bent down to the keyhole and with muted voice called “Marion! Marion!”, constantly looking over his shoulder to make sure no one crept up on him from behind.

At last he could see the light come on through the keyhole. A shadow moved across the floor and approached the door. A thin, sleepy voice, Marion’s voice, anxiously asked: “Who’s there, for God’s sake?”

“It’s me, Tobias … Marion, open up, I have to get in.”

The door opened, softly screeching on its hinges. Tobias staggered inside, his body shuddering with wild spasms from the series of shots he had taken in such rapid succession.

Marion stood before him in her nightgown, a candle in her hand. She knew Tobias and his condition; this wasn’t the first time he’d come to call on her at night.

She was tired – it must have been half past two – but she didn’t betray her annoyance. Without a word, she prepared a camp bed for him behind a partition.

“Lie down,” she said, “and give me the cocaine.”

She knew she was asking in vain; that he wouldn’t surrender the cocaine even if she tried to force him to.

Tobias shook his head. He had put the candle on a chair next to the bed and sat perched on the edge of the camp bed, staring hard at his friend as she laid back down.

“Did you close the door properly? Are the windows shut?” he asked.

“Yes, of course!”

He took off his jacket.

Marion moaned and looked away.

He was a ghastly sight indeed!

Both of his sleeves were stiff and darkened with blood down to the wrists. They gave off a foul smell.

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“Please, hurry,” Marion whispered, “and don’t stain the sheets with blood.”

Still turned away from him, she was overcome with nausea.

Suddenly she got up and vomited in the corner of the room, crying to herself.

Tobias, desperate and distraught, began to howl. He shook his fists above his head and gazed up at the ceiling with his eyes open wide.

Marion, as pale as a sheet, rushed towards him and put her hand over his mouth.

“Quiet, quiet,” she whispered into his ear, “no one must hear you, or they’ll kick me out of here!”

No! No one could hear these desperate people, least of all that merciful father, whose unforgiving black figure appeared in front of the large studio windows; rigid, unmoved, and immobile!

“Come, lie down and be quiet,” Marion said, “I want to sleep. Put out the light.”

Tobias took all his clothes off. Marion looked away in fright.

Even the lower edge of his shirt was covered in blood from the injection wounds to his thighs. It was his only shirt and he had been wearing it for three weeks; his landlady in Charlottenburg was holding back all his other clothes as collateral for the rent he owed.

He reeked and was disgusting to himself, revolting, loathsome.

He placed the medicine bottle on the chair, put away the syringe, stretched out on the camp bed without covering himself, and blew out the candle.

Breathless, he waited a couple of minutes, staring motionless at the ceiling which, on his side of the room, was half window, the same window that also covered the upper half of the walls.

Marion didn’t stir. Night crept through the room, slow and slimy. Dark sticky threads seemed to cross the studio, back and WALTER RHEINER

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forth from one wall to the other, emitting the smell of clotted blood mixed with the cloying perfume of cocaine and the more astringent tone of ether.

It was deathly quiet. Marion appeared to be asleep. Only the nocturnal wind regularly rattled the window panes. Tobias was grinding his teeth loudly, the way he always did when the cocaine poisoning had reached a certain stage. It distorted his face, and his temples rippled like waves. Didn’t some limping old lady on Alexanderplatz just recently flee from him in terror on seeing his contorted expression?

His thinking stopped. He lay there motionless and stared at the glass ceiling. From time to time he injected a shot of cocaine in the dark, no longer taking even the slightest bit of care. He could feel the blood running over his battered thighs and his ragged upper and lower arms. It undoubtedly dripped onto the sheets Marion had begged him to keep clean as well. He couldn’t give a damn anymore. He was already poisoned to such a degree that, almost mechanically, he had to keep fixing up at increasingly shorter intervals, like something as self-evident as breathing or eating, simply to stay alive at all.

Suddenly he became aware of shadows gliding over the glass walls and roof of the studio. He observed them for a while suspiciously.

When he looked closely, he became convinced they were the shadows of people, heads, arms, legs, who were up to something there on the edge of the roof.

Now a faint whispering even crept through the glass. Tobias could distinguish three voices. Male voices, talking eagerly. He followed the shadows warily. He could see them handing each other tools, levers, pliers, crowbars, and the faint exclamations fit their movements exactly.

“Look out,” he heard. “One … two … three … Go!” Then a distinct cracking.

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A draft entered the room, a cold breeze apparently coming from above. He could feel it over his entire body.

A rapidly intensifying panic took hold of him. They were burglars! Or detectives! … Didn’t the painter Ludwig M., from Südwestkorso, not far from here, tell him about a burglar he had met in the storage room outside his studio?

His throat burned with a paralysing fear. He lay there helplessly, bleeding, sick to death. Marion was asleep, a defenceless girl. If those were burglars, they’d deal with the two of them in no time.

And if they were detectives, they’d both be taken into protective custody, and charges would be pressed against him, Tobias. He would be sent to an institution for years, and wouldn’t get any cocaine.

He got up quietly and shook his friend awake. She had been sleeping soundly and rose with a start.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

Tobias pointed up to the ceiling window and whispered: “Do you see? Do you see those people there?”

The shadows were still moving.

“What people?” Marion asked fearfully.

“There, there, the shadows on the roof,” said Tobias, “those are burglars or secret agents. For Christ’s sake, what should we do, Marion?”

Marion, now fully awake, gave him a horrified look.

“Nonsense,” she said. “Those are the shadows of the arc lamps from below, from the street.”

Tobias shook his head.

“Arc lamps don’t cast any shadows,” he whispered, staring up at the ceiling with a twisted expression.

Marion began to doubt his sanity – Is he really already so far gone? she thought.

A vague fear crept up her spine. To be at the mercy of this madman, alone in a sleeping building! She didn’t know what to WALTER RHEINER

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do. If she could just calm him down, then they’d take it from there when the day came. “But surely, those are the shadows of the trees down below and the chimneys and eaves on the roof,” she told him. “The arc lamp is swaying in the wind down there; that’s why the shadows are moving. Go to bed, lie down!”

This did not put Tobias entirely at ease, but it calmed him a little. He would stay awake and alert.

“Where do you have your revolver? You’ve got a small revolver, haven’t you; where is it?” he asked.

But she made sure he wouldn’t get his hands on the gun.

“I don’t know where it is right now,” she said. “Just lie down, there are no burglars.”

Tobias decided to search for the revolver as soon as Marion fell asleep. He lay back and spied on the shadows that swayed back and forth unceasingly, appearing to reach out for all manner of things.

A dim light already fell through the glass panes, their edges becoming clearer and sharper. The first streaks of dawn were breaking through.

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LOOT’S LUTH (HOMMAGE) Caleb Salgado Before a hammering out the dayslong dementia, (E se si muovasse – in giù, non essendo mosso – in su) Le trouvère a trouvé le nombre, disons – cinq!

All hell traversed – jusqu’au fond du lac, Callow, singing the shores of his master’s Anna (Quoque fugit se patria quis exul?)

Und so weiter, du leichte, leichte Leiche.

Anon! the sun – glib, glib.

CALEB SALGADO

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CONTRIBUTORS

Dunja Bahtijarević is a translator and musician. She studied English translation, comparative literature, and art history. She currently lives in Zagreb and works as a translator for the national television.

Ali Blythe recently completed a first book of poems at the Banff Centre for Literary Arts. Her work appears in literary magazines across Canada and in the anthology of contemporary BC poetry, RockSalt. She lives on Vancouver Island.

Dmitry Borshch is an American artist of Soviet origin. He was born in Dnepropetrovsk and studied in Moscow. Today, he lives in New York and exhibits internationally. His work has been exhibited at the National Arts Club (NY), Brecht Forum (NY), Exit Art (NY), CUNY Graduate Center (NY), Salmagundi Club (NY), ISE Cultural Foundation (NY), Frieze Art Fair (London).

Allison M. Charette is a translator and writer whose most recent book, The Last Love of George Sand, was published in February 2013. Most recently in the musical world, her English translation of Hector Berlioz’s L’enfance du Christ was used as supertitles in the New York Choral Society’s performance at Carnegie Hall. She has lived in various regions of France, where she taught schoolchildren and translated Sève, a local author’s poetry collection. Allison currently resides in western New York with her husband.

Ricky Garni is a poet and graphic designer based in America.

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David Groulx was raised in Northern Ontario. He is proud of his Aboriginal roots – his mother is Ojibwe Indian and his father French Canadian. His poetry has appeared in 147 publications in 13 countries. He lives in Ottawa, Canada. His 6th book of poetry, Imagine Mercy, will be out this spring.

Tammy Ho Lai-Ming is a Hong Kong-born writer currently based in London, UK. She is a founding co-editor of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and an assistant editor of Fleeting Magazine.

More at www.sighming.com.

Jon Lincoln is a sign painter from San Francisco currently living in Berlin. His first novel, Ruin Value, should be out sometime in 2013.

Jeffery Ryan Long currently lives in Honolulu, Hawai’i and works at the University of Hawai’i’s John A. Burns School of Medicine. He has published works in a number of venues, most recently in Intellectual Refuge (“Two Drunks”) and the No Rest for the Wicked anthology (“Stephanie’s Birthday”). He is also a weekend board operator at Hawai’i Public Radio.

Wolfram Lotz, born in Hamburg in 1981, is a renowned German playwright and winner of the 2011 Kleistförderpreis for his play Der große Marsch and, most recently, the 2013 Kasseler Förderpreis Komische Literatur zum Kasseler Literaturpreis für Grotesken Humor.

Osip Mandelstam was born in 1891 in Warsaw into a Russianspeaking Jewish family and grew up in St. Petersburg. Along with Anna Akhmatova and Nikolay Gumilev, he was a prime mover behind the Acmeist group, which saw poetry in architectural terms. Publication of his poetry became more difficult after the Russian Revolution, and with the rise of Stalin, Mandelstam was exiled first to the Urals, then to the southern provincial city of 114

Voronezh, and finally deported to Siberia, where he died in a gulag transit camp near Vladivostok in 1938.

Ana Martins Marques is a Brazilian poet from Minas Gerais.

She has published two books of poetry: A vida submarina (Scriptum, 2009) and Da arte das armadilhas (Companhia das Letras, 2011), with which she recently won the Prêmio Biblioteca Nacional. She is currently completing her PhD in Comparative Literature, where she researches the use of photography in contemporary literature with particular emphasis on W.G. Sebald, Orhan Pamuk, and Bernardo Carvalho. Her work references a variety of poets, spanning from e.e. cummings to Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Joan Brossa.

Clark Mizono is a living artist living and working in New York City.

Ottilie Mulzet translates from Hungarian and Mongolian and writes literary criticism about contemporary Hungarian literature. Her essays and translations have frequently appeared on www.hlo.hu. She is currently completing a PhD on Mongolian proverbs and riddles, as well as a monograph on the Tibetan and Mongolian versions of the Vetāla (“Enchanted Corpse”) cycle of tales. Her medium-format photographs of Budapest, Prague, and Mongolia, which document now-vanished aspects of the urban landscape, as well as the sacred spaces of the post-Communist nomadic realm, respectively, have appeared in the Prague-based arts journal Revolver Revue since 2000.

Kate Nacy writes. Her work has appeared in apt, Bodega Magazine, Flux Magazine, Die Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Rolling Stone, Untoward, and elsewhere. She lives in Berlin, where she’s at work on a chapbook about medicalization and, to a lesser extent, butt implants. She’s interested in issues pertaining to both.

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Alistair Noon’s translations from Russian and German include Alexander Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman (Longbarrow) and Monika Rinck’s 16 Poems (Barque). He’s currently at work on a collection of translations from Mandelstam. His own first fulllength collection, Earth Records, appeared from Nine Arches Press in 2012. He lives in Berlin.

Shannon Quinn lives in Toronto, Canada. Her writing has appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, Existere, Sein Und Werden, Maisonneuve, Halfway Down The Stairs, and Southword Journal.

Walter Rheiner (1895-1925) was a German Expressionist poet and writer. After working briefly in Paris and London as a salesman and serving in Russia during WWI, he established himself as an author in Berlin. He started out prolifically, publishing four collections of poetry in three years, as well as critiques, essays, and poems in several Expressionist journals (among which, Die Aktion), and the prose text Cocaine, which was illustrated by the painter Conrad Felixmüller. He died at 30 of a morphine overdose in a doss house on Berlin’s Kantstraße.

Isabelle Rivoal was born near Paris in May 1965. She grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, where she trained as a dancer and acrobat before returning to Paris as an adult. She loves words and would be an actress, but refuses to sacrifice movement for writing. But when she climbs down from her trapeze, she writes. Grosse is her first novel.

Caleb Salgado is a writer and musician living in Berlin. He performs in various ensembles in Germany, France, and Holland.

Julia Sanches is Brazilian but has lived in New York, Mexico City, Lausanne, Edinburgh, and Barcelona. She has an under116

graduate degree in Philosophy and English Literature and a Masters in Comparative Literature and Literary Translation. She was runner-up in MPT’s poetry in translation competition and has translated fiction from Spanish and into Spanish, as well as published a short story in Vol. 1 Brooklyn. She works as a freelance translator and as a reader for Random House Mondadori, while also interning for Asymptote and Electric Literature. She is currently learning her sixth language and living in her sixth country.

Shane Sutton was born in Dublin, Ireland. He is currently working in Berlin as a lead artist on an animated feature film. He is a published illustrator and an award-winning documentary film director. His subjects change constantly, but there is a consistency throughout each of his collections.

Mark Terrill was born in Berkeley, California, shipped out as a merchant seaman to the Far East and beyond, and has been stranded in Germany since 1984, where he’s worked as a shipyard welder, road manager for bands, cook, and postal worker. His poem “Waiting for Pernod” appeared in the first issue of SAND. Hrvoje Tutek was born in Karlovac, Croatia in 1984. His first poetry collection was published in 2008 and received the Croatian Writers’ Association award for best literary debut. He has also written and published essays, prose, and academic texts.

Currently, he lives in Munich.

Gijs van Koningsveld lives in Amsterdam, where he edits children’s books. He has an MA in English literature and has published in To Hell with Journals and Paleo Psycho Pop. Recently, he recorded his impressions of a quest to find traces of Rheiner’s existence for NPR’s Berlin Stories.

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Joel Vega lives in the Netherlands, where he works as a medical journalist and publications editor. His poems have appeared in Runes, Disquieting Muses Review, SAND, Poetry Salzburg Review, and other U.S. and European literary journals.

Marshall Yarbrough is a writer and translator living in New York. He was recently chosen as a translator for the 2013 Festival Neue Literatur, an annual festival for German literature in New York put on by the Goethe Institute and German Book Office.

His cultural criticism has appeared in Brooklyn Rail (where he is assistant music editor), Cinespect, and The Rumpus.

Vassilis Zambaras was born in Greece and returned there after 25 years in the USA. He has published three small books of poetry: Sentences (Querencia, 1976), Aural (Singing Horse, 1984), and In Credible Evidence (Longhouse, 2010), a foldout booklet of poems.

His poems appear in the anthology How the Net Is Gripped: A Selection of Contemporary American Poetry (Stride, UK, 1992) and Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams (U of Iowa Press, 2011). Published in Poetry Salzburg Review, The London Magazine, First Intensity, Arabesques Review, Shearsman, Poetry Northwest, The Salt River Review, etc.

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