Editorial
Here then, Almost Island’s ninth issue: that looks both backwards and forwards from where we stand, both kinds of looking necessary to make our own continuing understanding of the experimental, the strange, or the interior real, an understanding that doesn’t merely borrow its gestures and approaches from elsewhere, from this or that national or local avant-garde. Each of the entries here does so in its way. With both the velocity and the sudden silence of his characteristic long sentences, László Krasznahorkai unravels the physical and inner world of a Japanese artist who makes Noh masks; the writing like a high mountain trail – dangerous yet revealing spectacular beauty.
Two older living Indian writers whose writing has been steadfastly concerned not with the obviousness of narrative but with its endless potential for detours – Naiyer
Masud (translated from Urdu) whose narrators see something other than physical reality, the words shining with dark inwardness; and Subimal Misra, Bengali’s wonderful and uncompromising collagist trickster, with his surprising and seemingly inexplicable shifts, interruptions, turns lighter and quicker than air.
Poems from Jerusalem-based poet and translator Peter Cole’s forthcoming book, including excerpts from its centerpiece, a long and fascinating poem, “The Invention of Influence” that – the quality of its thought solid and mysterious as the stone of a descending stepwell – explores how and why “our innermost thoughts are foreign”.
Psalms by the Germany-based Iranian poet, SAID: prayers from our time that locate the doubt within belief but keep the utterance of prayer alive.
Kazim Ali, who brings the characteristic intensity and delicacy of his attention to a sometimes tender, sometimes disturbing new sequence about coming home, “Prodigal”.
“Notes from Pre” a poem by the extraordinary writer Susan Gevirtz that, in its little collisions and fragments, considers, perhaps, how the traces of an elusive past – in language, in the properties exchanged between places – both troubles and leaves open the idea of travel.
And finally, a translation of a text by the early Hindi modernist and experimentalist Bhuvneshwar (1910-1958) – a “play” that seems more like disjunctive poem fragments from a world pulled asunder by both melancholy and its obverse side, a dreamlike seeking for something understood but impossible to define.
– The editors