by Rafaël Newman The National Library of Kosovo is perched above downtown Prishtina. Built in the early 1980s and now with holdings of some two million, the complex resembles a mashup of Moshe Safdie’s Habitat with a flying squadron of geodesic domes, the whole unaccountably draped in chainmail. During the war in Kosovo in the…

by Rafaël Newman January 16 is the anniversary of the death of Margarete Susman (1872-1966), the German-born Jewish philosopher and poet who survived the Third Reich in Swiss refuge and is buried in Zurich. To mark the occasion this year, Martin Kudla, a lecturer in Jewish intellectual history in Germany, organized a performance of lyrical…

by Rafaël Newman An empire, threatened on its flank, vents spleen Upon the would-be sovereign state between Its borders and a surly host beyond— Which wavers not with weapons to respond; The fray’s then joined by nations treaty bound To emperors (one more, one less self-crowned): And thus the world comes closer to a war…

by Rafaël Newman Saidiya Hartman made her second trip to Ghana in 1997. She had visited the country briefly the year before, as a tourist, but now, having recently completed a doctorate at Yale and published her first book, she was in Ghana as a Fulbright Scholar searching for historical evidence of local resistance to…

by Rafaël Newman Last Saturday, November 2, 2024, at a collective atelier in Zurich’s Wiedikon neighborhood, I attended the launch of a new periodical. TETI Journal, available both online and in print form, is a publication presenting academic and artistic work in line with the aims of TETI Group, an “interdisciplinary research platform to investigate…

by Rafaël Newman I have always been tall. Or rather, I have been aware of my above-average height since puberty, when freakish physical change kicks in, mischievously, in concert with enhanced self-consciousness. At age 14 I moved with my mother and siblings from the Vancouver suburbs to midtown Toronto, where the students at my new…

by Rafaël Newman Around ten years ago—before the physical and cognitive decline that began during the pandemic; before his removal from autonomy to a care home in the north end of Montreal; before his death there at the beginning of this month—my father entrusted me with his personal collection of jokes. As he approached his…

by Rafaël Newman Before the first round of voting in the French legislative elections on June 30, the author and activist Edouard Louis posted the following on Instagram: To those who would still be loath to vote for the Nouveau Front Populaire on Sunday because they have too many differences with one fraction or another…

by Rafaël Newman It was my birthday last month, a “round” one, as anniversaries ending in zero are known in Switzerland; and in gratitude for having made it to a veritably Sumerian age, as well as for the good health and happiness I am currently enjoying, I threw a large party for family and friends.…

by Rafaël Newman I was asked recently to speak at the University of Toronto about poetry in translation, a topic close to my heart for a number of reasons. I happened at the time to be working on a text concerned, not with translating poetry, but with lyric expression in its most practical form: that…

by Rafaël Newman Those of us employed in the city of Zurich got some extra time off last week. Every year, on the third Monday in April following the vernal equinox, the Zentralkomitee der Zünfte Zürichs—the Central Committee of Zurich Guilds, also known by its German initialism ZZZ—stages Sechseläuten, a festival featuring a parade and…

by Rafaël Newman Notational A Zurich-based translator answers an ad that reminds him of his youth and is sent several lapel pins, or buttons, bearing the likeness of a 20th-century French poet emblazoned with a motto. The creator of these buttons, a Chicago-based teacher, does not charge for his products, but asks only that they…

by Gunnar Heinsohn (translated by Rafaël Newman) The past weekend marked the second anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The following article originally appeared in German in Die Welt magazine on April 29, 2022. It is posted here in a first-time English translation, with the permission of its author…

by Rafaël Newman The initial syllable of the English word “island”—or rather, just its very first vowel—is descended from the Proto-Germanic *awjo, meaning “an area on the water.” The element “land” was subsequently added to differentiate the word from other inflections of the Proto-Indo-European root for water, *akwa-. Our “island” is thus cognate with its…

by Rafaël Newman There was an old man who so loved his son, His day was only properly begun Once he had hugged his darling to his breast And kissed his tender cheek. Nor could he rest At night until the boy was put to bed; And still he’d stand by him, and stroke his…

by Rafaël Newman When I was eleven years old, Eva Kornpointner, my mother’s mother—our Grossmutti, as we were taught to call her—took me, together with all five of her other grandchildren, on a trip up the Rhine. Our ultimate, trans-Rhenish objective, after we had crossed the Swiss border at Basel, was Zurich and its hinterland,…

by Rafaël Newman Every human generation has its own illusions with regard to civilization; some believe that they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction. In fact, it always both flames up and smoulders and is extinguished, according to the place and the angle of view. —Ivo Andrić…

by Rafaël Newman I am not outside the language that structures me, but neither am I determined by the language that makes this ‘I’ possible. —Judith Butler The force of recent attempts to increase minority visibility in the performing arts, principally in the US, by matching the identity of the performer with that of the role—in…

by Rafaël Newman All will unite—no sooner had our world Combusted (see “The Big Bang”) than it sought Accretion of the bits that had been hurled To every corner (where there once was naught, One nanosecond previous, un-warmed By ours or any other burning stars, Un-lit by lunar satellite), and formed, In steady labour, suns…

by Rafaël Newman I’ve been visiting Ontario this month. Which is a wildly non-specific thing to say, since the province of Ontario, though only the second largest of Canada’s constituent divisions, boasts a surface area greater than those of Germany and Ukraine combined. But while I would normally designate as my destination the city in…