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translation
It has taken three Aprils and nearly as many Mays for me to feel like I’m getting the hang of living in Britain, for it to feel like home. Along with the obvious (time passed, friendships formed, residence herein), uncountable little things contribute: bookstore selections, snack aisles of grocery stores, television program(me)s.
Cover image is a screenshot of the Barbican website: Hyde Park, London (1953) by Cas Oorthuys is currently on view as part of Strange and Familiar.
Sometime near the end of September, I started wondering if it was ever going to be cool again.
—Nefelomanzia, said the man, it’s a Greek word, nefele means cloud and manzia, to foretell, nefelomanzia is the art of predicting the future by observing the clouds, or rather, the form of the clouds, because in this art, form is substance, and that’s why I’ve come on vacation to this beach, because a friend from the air force who deals with meteorology assured me that in the Mediterranean there’s no other coast like this one where clouds form on the horizon in an instant. And as quickly as they take shape they dissolve again, and it’s right in that instant that a real nefelomant must practice his art, to understand what the shape of a certain cloud foretells before the formation dissolves in the wind, before it transforms into transparent air and turns to sky.
- Antonio Tabucchi, "Clouds," translated by Martha Cooley & Antonio Romani
Image: Gilda, the 23-kiloton air-deployed nuclear weapon detonated on July 1, 1946 during Crossroads Able.
Samuel Solomon grew up in New York City and spent his twenties in Los Angeles before moving to the U.K., where he is Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. He completed a PhD on socialist-feminism and innovative U.K. poetry at the University of Southern California and is co-translator of The Acrobat: The Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin (Tebot Bach 2014). His essays, poems, and translations have been appeared in a range of US and UK journals, including differences, Décalages, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, htmlgiant, Hi Zero, and Lana Turner, and his chapbook, Life of Riley (2012), is available from Bad Press. He is Co-director of the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence.
Claude de Burine: "La poésie, c’est un état. Une sorte de vagabondage."
