Some Short Stories from Mongolia

#300
Title: Some Short Stories from Mongolia
Compiler: Ts. Bold
Editor: D. Natsagdorj
Publisher: State Publishing House, Ulan-Bator
Year: 1988
Country: Mongolia
192 pages

Published after the start of the collapse of the Soviet Union, but before Mongolia's Democratic Revolution, this collection serves as a reminder of just how awful nationalistic fiction can be. The look and hand-feel of this Soviet-era volume gives me flashbacks to 10th-grade Russian class, where my dictionaries (Russian-Spanish, Spanish-Russian, and trusty Anglo-Russki Slovar, all purchased from a second-hand bookshop in Washington, D.C.) were printed on the same rough, thin, grey paper with what appears to be hot type. Despite having no illustrations, the book lists an illustrator, as well as the compiler, editor, artistic director, technical director, and corrector. The State Publishing House of Ulan-Bator apparently was not immune to bloated bureaucracies. The skill of the translators, and proofreaders, varies wildly across stories, often causing unintended hilarity.

These technical details aside, the stories in this collection are unified by their themes, structures, and styles. First, the theme of the pastoral Mongolian countryside, which is highly romanticized. Second, the theme of the heroic Mongol soldiers and workers, alongside their Soviet military friends, striding arm in arm to spread communist propaganda (in stories set before the Soviet), fight Soviet wars (if during the Soviet), and, in either case, die heroically for their ideals. Structurally, many of the stories use a framing narrative, along the lines of <<And then, as I dried my boots, I asked the old grandma to tell me how the mountain got its name.>> Like a roach motel, the story gets into this frame, but usually can't get back out. Stylistically, these stories are flat and at times their emotional intent cannot be discerned.

I did learn a great deal about the basic settings and props for writing a Mongolian story of this era: A girl with braids (who is compared to a blade of grass or other natural phenomenon); a ger (yurt), sometimes placed mysteriously in the landscape; fermented milk; an old person; a truck; a cooperative farm, worker's collective, or documentation of same; and sometimes a legend. Assert heroic and noble sentiments toward the state (told, not shown). Run the manuscript through Babelfish a few times, and you will approximate this earnest yet dated collection.

Because the Sea Is Black

#299
Title: Because the Sea Is Black
Author: Blaga Dimitrova
Translators: Niko Boris & Heather McHugh
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Year: 1989
Country: Bulgaria
76 pages

It turns out that I already had Bulgaria covered by Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, but I decided to read Dimitrova anyway since I'm on a bit of a poetry kick.

This collection evokes a similar set of feelings as walking through an exhibition of Frida Kahlo's paintings: The work is stylized, beautiful without being romanticized, and disturbingly compelling in its representation of pain, difficulty, and death. The translation was not clunky and in their introduction, the translators describe how they managed non-translatable words and jokes. I liked the "sea" poems best; the more abstract poems later in the collection were less interesting to me. Overall, the themes of longing for and repulsion from the forbidden (whether the sea, death, or other freedoms) were consistent throughout and the volume has good flow and coherence, not an easy task for the translator/anthologists.

Dzalabadig: Images of Survival

#298
Title: Dzalabadig: Images of Survival
Photographer: Vartan Derounian
Author: Alidz Jebijian-Agbabian
Publisher: Dzil-u-Dzar Publications
Year: 2003
Country: Armenia
34 pages
A slight stretching of my Books of the World Challenge rules--this is about the Armenian refugee refugee community in Aleppo, Syria following the Armenian genocide. These photos document the ghettos and shantytowns of Armenians following their flight or expulsion from Armenia in 1920. Schoolrooms, churches, homes, workshops and streets are showing in large black and white photos. The text, intended for children, includes Armenian words and phrases in its descriptions. An accompanying CD includes an Armenian folk song.

Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

#297
Title: Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters
Author: Mark Dunn
Publisher: Anchor Books
Year: 2001
220 pages

A clever novel that is probably more fun for linguaphiles than for the general reader. The premise is that a tiny island nation off the coast of the U.S. has been constituted around Nollop, the originator of the pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." The community eschews or lacks many modern conveniences (such as reliable telephone service), priding itself on its linguistic erudition. The novel is told in, and about, letters; the tiles spelling out the sentence begin to drop from Nollop's statue. The community leaders' response is more mystical than empirical and literary entertainment ensues as each fallen letter is forbidden. Though the plot mocks religious, power-grabbing governments that abrogate civil rights and freedom of expression on the basis of dogma (insert "lazy dog" joke here), it also includes much language play. As some of the citizens, including the eponymous Ella Minnow Pea, race to construct another pangram against the lipogrammatic clock, the reader may enjoy the characters' sophisticated vocabularies and circumlocutory heroics. The reader familiar with pangrams may spot the plot resolution before the characters do.

My only complaint is that I do not believe that, even with the use of exempted 7-year-olds, the attempt to construct the alternative pangrams would have been permitted by the Council.

Read with Abish's Alphabetical Africa for a different kind of lipogram game, and with concordiform novels such as Ann Marlowe's How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z to increase your appreciation for the challenges inherent in presenting a coherent narrative in a linguistically constrained structure.

Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love

#296
Title: Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of LoveAuthor: Myron Uhlberg
Publisher: Bantam
Year: 2009
232 pages

A sweet but not treacly memoir by a hearing son of deaf parents. Uhlberg nicely balances characterizations of his parents' speech (particularly his father's) as beautiful, visual, and expressive against the limitations imposed on them by a hearing world that sees them as unintelligent. He also articulates well his frustration at having to act as their translator and to serve in a parentified role, especially in relation to his younger brother, who had epilepsy. A good memoir to teach with as the family members' multiple identities (e.g., deaf and Jewish) highlight the complexity of characterizing people solely be reference to their most evident characteristics.

Dreams of a Rainbow (Moemoea a te Anuanua)

#295
Title: Dreams of a Rainbow (Moemoea a te Anuanua)
Author: Kauraka Kauraka
Illustrator: Imaikalani Kalahele
Publisher: Mana Publications (Suva, Fiji)
Year: 1987
Country: Cook Islands (a self-governing parliamentary democracy in free association with New Zealand)
98 pages

An enjoyable dual-language collection (English and Cook Islands Maori) of primarily narrative and imagistic poems. Pen and ink illustrations contribute to the visual immediacy of these pieces. Kauraka includes poems addressing racism and other salient issues, bringing contemporary concerns to more folkloric pieces.

Black Stone

#294
Title: Black Stone
Author: Grace Mera Molisa
Publisher: Mana Publications (Suva, Fiji)
Year: 1983
Country: Vanatu
68 pages

The back cover bio states that the author "has recently begun writing in verse somewhat by accident. This collection is her first attempt." Both the accidental and preliminary nature of her poems is unfortunately evident in this volume. I spent a long time thinking about these poems. Specifically, I pondered why I don't find them appealing or compelling. Is it because they don't reflect a Western sensibility? I don't think so; I've read a great deal of U.S., British, and continental poetry in the same style: Abstract, non-imagistic, telling rather than showing. This is the polemical poetry one finds in any political movement, poetry that could as easily be a diatribe of a sentence or two or a paragraph, poetry that is "poetry" only because of how it is arranged on the page. Is it because they are better expressed orally than in writing? Again, I don't think so. I read several out loud but didn't find that this shifted my experience significantly. Instead, I think that even accounting for differences of culture and style, they aren't good poems, either linguistically or in their expression of content. Molisa was an important political activist for Vanatu, advocating for women, the arts, and anti-colonial policies. This collection might best be appreciated by reading them as polemics, not poetry.