AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW最新文献

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• The Country Where Everyone's Name Is Fear: Selected Poems by Boris and Ludmila Khersonsky
• Kathryn Weld (bio)

In 2017, Lost Horse Press established a dual-language series of poetry by important contemporary Ukrainian poets. The Country Where Everyone's Name Is Fear, by Boris and Ludmila Khersonsky, edited by Katie Ferris and Ilya Kaminsky, is the ninth volume in this series. These poems remind us of the role of the poet during times of war, in the particular context of the Ukrainian struggle for independence.

The reader will remember that the Russo-Ukrainian War is now more than a decade old, having begun after the Revolution of Dignity (February 2014), which ousted the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, and overthrew the Ukrainian government, and was immediately followed by the Russian annexation of the Crimea. During the eight subsequent years, Russia supported separatists in the Donbas region in armed conflict, naval attacks, and cyberwarfare. In February 2022, while Lost Horse Press was preparing for the book release, the war entered a phase of major escalation with the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia. The poems in The Country Where Everyone's Name Is Fear bear witness to nearly a decade of war.

The English portion of this dual-language publication is lean, featuring [End Page 106] only fifteen poems by Ludmila Khersonsky and fourteen by Boris Khersonsky. Nevertheless, this sampling is more than enough to reveal the stark desperation of current times in Ukraine, where "explosions are the new normal, you grow used to them / stop noticing that you, with your ordinary ways are a goner." There are hints that this myopia is a human condition, even when a people are mired in crisis: "against the background of lies, it's not apparent that we're also liars."

How to describe this, and what is the weight of that role as witness? Ludmila, in "How to Describe," tells us:

a man who turned to the wall, weary of war.Ear of the war: so much noise from a single man,as if a whale was birthed into a common shell,as if fear was trapped in the heart's punchbag.A lonely human is dust.Where to run from dust?

An award-winning lyric poet and translator, Ludmila Khersonsky was born in Moldavia. She has published three volumes of poetry, a fourth is forthcoming from Arrowsmith Press. Her

• The Last Dictionary
• Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio)

dictionary, n. [c. 1480–] 1.a. A book which explains or translates, usually in alphabetical order, the words of a language or languages (or of a particular category of vocabulary), giving for each word its typical spelling, an explanation of its meaning or meanings, and often other information, such as pronunciation, etymology, synonyms, equivalents in other languages, and illustrative examples. Also (from the late 20th cent.): an electronic resource performing this function. Cf. lexicon n., wordbook n.

—Oxford English Dictionary (online)

last dictionary, n. [2024–] The last book that explained or translated, usually in alphabetical order, the words of a language or languages (or of a particular category of vocabulary), and gave for each word its typical spelling, an explanation of its meaning or meanings, and often other information, such as pronunciation, etymology, synonyms, equivalents in other languages, and illustrative examples. Replaced in the 21st century by an electronic resource performing this function. Cf. dictionary n.

—a future addition to the Oxford English Dictionary (online)

There is a dictionary for everything—except every word in the English language.

For some, the lexicographical maniacs, such a dictionary is the Holy Grail of lexicography. They dream of a space where the entirety of the English language is accessible through a dictionary the likes of which the world has never seen. It is a dictionary with an entry for every word that has ever been used by anyone in the English language. This includes not only formal and informal writing from books to blogs but also any and all verbal acts from music to marketing. Its principle of inclusion is that no word used in the English language will be excluded from it. In short, this very long dictionary would be a dictionary without gatekeepers who agonize over what words should be included and excluded. [End Page ix]

For others, however, this dream amounts to a complete deconstruction of the role of the dictionary in lexicography. Dictionaries are about gatekeepers. These gatekeepers are lexicographers who determine whether a word should be in the dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), for example, has had upwards of eighty lexicographers working on its forthcoming third edition. A large part of their job is to determine what words need to be added to this dictionary. It is a task these lexicographers take very seriously. As evidence of the gravitas of this decision, consider that it can take up to five years to add a new word to the OED.

"Y

• An Old Poem That Tells You How to Have Beautiful Children
• Anthony Madrid (bio)

All right, you never heard of this one. And I don't blame you. It's called Callipædia, or the Art of Getting Beautiful Children ("Getting" as in begetting.)

Originally written in Latin by a French doctor, Claude Quillet, and published in 1655. Translated into English many times, I'm told. It had a certain popularity, I'm told. But today? Utterly forgotten.

Only reason I know about it is 'cuz of Nicholas Rowe. He's fairly forgotten as well, but he was a big deal, three hundred years ago. Poet Laureate of Great Britain. Author of several plays that held the stage for years after his death. Translator of Lucan's Pharsalia, Bruyère's Characters, Boileau's Lutrin. Writer of the first biography of Shakespeare. Important early editor of Shakespeare.

Also, you know how occasionally a womanizer will be called a "Lothario"? That's 'cuz of Rowe's play The Fair Penitent (1702). Samuel Richardson's Clarissa owes a lot to that play.

Anyhow, this Rowe translated Book I of the Callipædia (there are four books, in all). The English version to which Rowe contributed is more than twice as long as the original. I have a facsimile of the original right here, and the poem occupies fifty-two not-at-all-crowded pages. The English is a hundred and thirty-seven.

That's actually fairly standard eighteenth-century translation praxis. The rhyming couplet offered the translator room to expand, clarify, and otherwise improve the original. Today, of course, any talk of "improving the original" is heresy, but it's good to be reminded occasionally that our assumptions about reading are not based on, shall we say, the laws of physics. Not everyone in history went to translations hoping to find exactly what the original writer said. In the eighteenth century it was quite reasonable to imagine that the English version of something might be quite a bit better than the original. Everyone could name examples of this. [End Page 55]

And it's not like Callipædia ever had the reputation of having been composed by a poetic genius. People were drawn to it, not because of Quillet's handling of neo-Latin hexameters, but because of the information the poem might contain. There was a porn possibility.

Remember: Europeans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries hadn't heard of the Kama Sutra yet. They needed one as much as anybody; good information was even more scarce then than it is now. And they also needed some kind (any kind) of excuse for thinking about sex. You don't want your kids to b