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…

by Rafaël Newman “D — — , I presume, is not altogether a fool, and, if not, must have anticipated these waylayings, as a matter of course.” “Not altogether a fool,” said G., “but then he is a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool.” “True,” said Dupin, after a…

by Rafaël Newman It’s hard to feel sanguine about the human project these days, insofar as there still is, or ever was one. Canada has been on fire, in part evidently because we have yet failed to address the dire effects of our fossil fuel use; while a Ukrainian reservoir, willfully damaged by fascist-imperialist belligerents,…

by Rafaël Newman My father’s mother—Annie Newman, my grandmother or Bubbi—was born Hannah Dubin in a shtetl in what is now Ukraine a few years before the Great War. One of her earliest recollections—in addition to the image of her own grandmother hiding in a baby carriage to escape marauding Cossacks—was of being able to…

by Rafaël Newman In the 1960s, when I was a boy growing up on the west side of Montreal, whenever my father needed a hit of soul food — a smoked-meat sandwich, some pickled herring, or a ball of chopped liver with grivenes—he would head east (northeast, really, in my hometown’s skewed-grid street plan) to…

by Rafaël Newman My favorite bookstore closed this month. Well, my favorite bookstore in Zurich, where I live. Also it hasn’t actually closed, it’s only changing hands. But Pile of Books, opened in 2007 by Daniel Nufer and run by him and his wife, Verena Nufer-Huber, until two weeks ago, has been such an expression…

by Rafaël Newman On two separate occasions in mid-February this year, the Swiss parliament, or Bundeshaus, and adjoining ministry buildings in Bern had to be evacuated and searched following bomb threats. During the first incident, in which a lone man in military dress attempting to clear security at the parliament was apprehended when traces of…