Rafaël Newman studied classical philology at the University of Toronto and comparative literature at Princeton University, where he earned his doctorate. He has published essays on literature and contemporary culture in German and English in Germany, New Zealand, Poland, Switzerland and the United States. He is the author of The Visible God: Staging the History of Money (UPA, 1999) and the editor of Zweifache Eigenheit: Neuere jüdische Literatur in der Schweiz (Limmat Verlag, 2001) and Contemporary Jewish Writing in Switzerland: An Anthology (UNP, 2002). His poetry has appeared in journals and collections, most recently in Live Long Enough (Paekakariki, 2017), and on two CDs: We Are The NewMen (EyeMix, 2008) and Everything Is Good (EyeMix, 2010). He lives and works in Zurich as a translator, companion to addicts in recovery, and moderator. Email: rnewman [at] gmx.net
by Rafaël Newman On the first day of August in Year One AC (anno coronae), I boarded an Intercity train in Zurich bound for Singen, in the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg. In Singen I transferred to the Intercity headed to Stuttgart but left the train a few stops shy of the state capital, at…
by Rafaël Newman I may rise in the morning and notice that a long overdue spring rainfall has revived the flagging vegetation in my kitchen garden. I may give thanks to an unseen, benevolent power for this respite from a protracted and wasting drought. And I may record in my journal: “The heavens cannot horde…
by Rafaël Newman A friend of mine, a retired Swiss high school teacher and an aficionado of American culture, has been compiling a list of “Pseudo Anglicisms”, words of evident English origin used in contemporary colloquial German (especially in Switzerland) which often have no actual correspondence in English as commonly employed by native speakers. His…
by Rafaël Newman Morgan Meis, The Drunken Silenus: On Gods, Goats, and the Cracks in Reality (Slant Books, 2020) Reviewing a new translation of the Iliad, the military historian Edward Luttwak speculates about the enduring popularity of the ancient epic: Why are our contemporaries so keen on buying and presumably reading the Iliad’s Iron Age reminiscence of…
by Rafaël Newman For C.J. Newman My father is no longer at home. He returned to Montreal, the city of his birth, on retirement from the University of British Columbia, and has been living in the bottom half of a duplex in the Mile End district since. Some time ago he decided to sell the…
by Rafaël Newman Some years ago, a friend told me about his dilettantish taste for nicotine, indulgence in which, however, he noted ruefully, was often thwarted by his young daughter. He supposed the vehemence of her protests derived, simply, from a concern for his health – to which I responded, perhaps: but that there might…
by Rafaël Newman Notwithstanding the spread of English as a global lingua franca, translation continues to be a vital component of international relations, whether political, commercial, or cultural. In certain cases, translation is also necessary nationally, for instance in countries comprising more than one significant linguistic group. This is so in Switzerland, which voted by…
by Rafaël Newman For Eva, mère & fille; and for Tom Yesterday was James Joyce’s birthday. His one-hundred-and-thirty-seventh. Or would have been, if he hadn’t died, in Zurich, in January 1941, but were instead swelling the ranks of the current generation of supercentenarians, their increasing longevity bedeviling the demographics departments of local life insurers. Joyce…
by Rafaël Newman When Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, the poet Nora Gomringer expressed her satisfaction at the recognition thus afforded not only poetry, but in particular songwriting, which she identified as the very wellspring and guarantee of literature, citing in her appraisal such classical forebears as Sappho and…
by Rafaël Newman And the children of the moon / Were like a fork shoved on a spoon Hedwig and the Angry Inch 1. The goddess Demeter, having received the Earth as her domain in the post-Titanic dispensation that followed the parricidal murder of her father Kronos, had mated with her brother Zeus, lord of…
by Rafaël Newman In the spring of 1991 I crossed the German-Polish border at Görlitz and travelled through Zgorzelec, the city’s one-time other half across the river Neisse, into Poland. The Gulf War had just ended, and the streets of Berlin, where I was spending the year at the Freie Universität, were still littered with…
by Rafaël Newman For Fred Weinstein “What is hidden is for us Westerners more ‘true’ than what is visible,” Roland Barthes proposed, in Camera Lucida, his phenomenology of the photograph, almost forty years ago. In the decades since, the internet, nanotechnology, and viral marketing have challenged his privileging of the unseen over the seen by…
by Rafaël Newman It was Ramadan on Mother Teresa Street, so the professor and his wife were discreetly abstaining. Their daughter, an aspiring YouTuber, had been granted special dispensation and was gorging herself on chocolate ice cream and Coca Cola, along with me and my colleague, an Israeli poet who had won an award from…
by Rafaël Newman I am employed two or three weekends a month as a minder or “Betreuer” at a treatment centre and halfway house for recovering drug addicts in Zurich. My duties include spending the night at the facility as the lone member of supervisory staff, eating meals with the clients, supervising their activities and…
by Rafaël Newman Herta Müller, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009, was born and raised in a traditionally German-speaking region of Romania. When she moved to what was then the German Federal Republic in 1987, she was eagerly asked by strangers hearing a Latinate inflection in her German whether she was French.…