“A striking achievement, Celluloid Classicism deepens and broadens conventional histories of South Indian performance. Meticulously researched and conceptually rich, Krishnan’s work illustrates the aesthetic debt modern bharata natyam owes to South Indian cinema while also demonstrating cinema’s reliance on local dance and theatre traditions.” —Janet O’Shea, author of At Home in the World: Bharata Natyam on the Global Stage

Celluloid Classicism provides a rich and detailed history of two important modern South Indian cultural forms: Tamil Cinema and Bharatanaṭyam dance. It addresses representations of dance in the cinema from an interdisciplinary, critical-historical perspective. The intertwined and symbiotic histories of these forms have never received serious scholarly attention. For the most part, historians of South Indian cinema have noted the presence of song and dance sequences in films, but have not historicized them with reference to the simultaneous revival of dance culture among the middle-class in this region. In a parallel manner, historians of dance have excluded deliberations on the influence of cinema in the making of the “classical” forms of modern India. Although the book primarily focuses on the period between the late 1920s and 1950s, it also addresses the persistence of these mid-twentieth century cultural developments into the present. The book rethinks the history of Bharatanaṭyam in the twentieth century from an interdisciplinary, transmedia standpoint and features 130 archival images.

HARI KRISHNAN is associate professor of dance at Wesleyan University. His research interests span a range of topics, including queer subjectivities in South Asian and global dance performance, colonialism, post-colonialism and Indian dance, and the history of devadasi (courtesan) dance traditions in South India. He is also the artistic director of Toronto-based dance company inDANCE, and as an award winning dance-maker, is commissioned internationally for his bold and transgressive choreography.

“The tambura bands that play dangerously across the pages of Ian MacMillen’s compelling book rechart the discursive landscapes of race and nationalism today, opening spaces for witnessing music’s intimate affect in critical new ways. ” —Philip V. Bohlman, author of Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe

Tambura is a genre-crossing performance practice centered on an eponymous stringed instrument, part of the mandolin family, that Roma, Croats, and Serbs adopted from Ottoman forces. The acclamation that one is a “dangerous player” connotes exceptional virtuosic improvisation and rapid finger technique and, as the highest praise that a musician can receive from his peers. Tambura has served as a site of both contestation and reconciliation since its propagation as Croatia’s national instrument during the 1990s Yugoslav wars. New sensibilities of ‘danger’ and of race (for instance, ‘Gypsiness’) arose as Croatian bands reterritorialized musical milieus through the new state, reestablishing transnational performance networks with Croats abroad, and reclaiming demilitarized zones and churches as sites of patriotic performance after years of ‘Yugoslavian control.’

Playing It Dangerously: Tambura Bands, Race, and Affective Block in Croatia and Its Intimages questions what happens when feelings attached to popular music conflict with expressions of the dominant socio-cultural order, and how this tension enters into the politics of popular culture at various levels of human interaction. This study combines ethnographic fieldwork with archival research and music analysis to expound affective block: a theory of the dialectical dynamics between affective and discursive responses to differences in playing styles. A corrective to the scholarly stress on music scenes saturated with feeling, the book argues for affect’s social regulation, showing how the blocking of dangerous intensities ultimately privileges constructions of tambura players as heroic male Croats, even as the music engenders diverse racial and gendered becomings.

IAN MACMILLEN holds a Ph.D. in the anthropology of music from the University of Pennsylvania and has taught widely in ethnomusicology and slavic studies programs. He currently directs the Center for Russian, East European & Central Asian Studies at Oberlin College & Conservatory.

Joanna Chen, the translator of Yonathan Berg’s Frayed Light, recently penned an essay detailing her experiences working on the book and what brought her to the project in the first place.

Listening to the Voice: Translation of Frayed Light

An essay by the translator Joanna Chen

Frayed Light began four years ago, when poet Rachel Neve Midbar asked if I could translate some poems by Yonatan Berg for Transatlantic Poetry, an online program that paired up poets from all over the world. Berg had been matched with US poet Jericho Brown; each would read his poems and then answer questions live on social media. “So,” Neve Midbar said, “do you have time?” “Only if I love the poems,” I told her. Because translation is first and foremost a labor of love, and I use the word labor deliberately: translation is hard work, holding each word up to the light, examining it thoroughly in the source language and then moving it into phrases, lines and line breaks, and stanzas. It can give birth to books that straddle continents and help us understand other people’s lives better.

Cynthia Ozick once said that translation is a lens through which underground cultures are revealed, and she is so right. As I read the slim batch of poems Neve Midbar emailed to me, I discovered a world I knew very little about: Berg’s upbringing on a fervently religious Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, an upbringing he later questioned; his military service as a combat soldier in the Israeli army and his resulting PTSD; his complicated relationship with a God who has not always made sense to Berg but whose precepts are forever ingrained upon his soul; his resulting views on the precepts upon which Israel came into being. This world, I thought, was something I wanted to understand so that others could understand it better, too.

I asked Berg to read a few of his poems to me out loud. I have always found it instructive and revealing to first listen to the poets I translate. We met in a café on the campus of Tel Aviv University, where I was teaching that day. We ordered coffee, talked a little and then Berg began reading. I was mesmerized. Berg has a steadfast voice, like thick honey pouring slowly out of a jar. He reads confidently and quietly. By the time he finished reading, I was hooked. We parted company and I began translating his poetry that very night.

The Hebrew language is a particularly multi-layered one. So many words and phrases have their own biblical, cultural and social connotations, not to mention political; the work of translation is to relay these connotations without compromising the lyricism and without jeopardizing the tone. The poems, transformed into the target language, must breathe with a life of their own, but an echo, a glimmer of the original should remain in the air.

I translated a short cycle of poems for the program and then met once more with Berg, this time in Bookworm, a café in downtown Tel Aviv, a favorite of writers. I arrived early enough to browse through the books on display, including Berg’s. He has published three books of poetry to date. We made lists of poems each of us deemed important and we discussed many of the poems at length. This, I was sure, would be a brand new book curated from the vast quantity of material at my disposal.

Frayed Light gradually came into being. I began with the more personal poems—about his parents, the Palestinians he passed on his way to school as a child, his sorrow at the death of a close friend—then moved on to poems that consider the quintessential psyche of Israel. Through it all I listened to Berg’s voice and asked myself whether that voice still rang true in English. I translated poems in the kitchen of my home in the Ela Valley, on the fourth floor of the Hebrew University library; at a café in the UK, when my aunt was ill and I had traveled to be with her; on the train to and from Tel Aviv. Foremost in my mind was whether the people who sat in my vicinity, drinking coffee, working on papers, going about their lives, would be interested in listening to the voice that emerges from these poems.

Toward the end of this process, Berg and I met several times in the National Library in Jerusalem to hammer out the last cycle of poems. Part of this process included cutting or inserting words and phrases, adjusting line breaks and shifting stanzas so that the English language reader might read with ease.  For example, in “Particular Timing”, a meditation on devotion and a search for meaning, we considered how to preserve the mention of shaharit, mincha, aravit (the essential morning, noon and evening Jewish prayers) without losing the delicate rhythm and ambience of the source language. Finally, the words “daily prayers” were interposed, affording readers context and background without relying on footnotes or appendixes.

Sometimes, titles were altered. One example is “The End of Naïveté”, a poem entitled “The End of Israeliness” in the source language. I wanted it to encompass more than just Israel and I felt that the content warranted it, so I kept the essence of the title, that illusions have fallen away in today’s world and that the precepts upon which we have built our lives are not flawless. This idea, to draw readers in to a shared, accessible experience, guided me throughout.

Finally, we printed out all the poems and laid them out on a huge wooden table in one of the seminar rooms of the National Library. The titles of each of the five sections are taken from fragments of poems in other sections, to suggest the interweaving of themes; even the title of the book, Frayed Light, was lifted out of one of the poems, one of the earliest I translated, about an incident Berg experienced while serving as a combat soldier. It seemed to me to contain the whole book: the light that streams through an intense consciousness of life’s vicissitudes.

I am proud of this book. I enjoyed working on it and I’m excited to see it coming to life in the hands of people all over the world who speak English and who have the chance to understand Berg’s unique and enduring perspective on a very different slice of the world around us, part of a world which we all share.

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About Joanna Chen

Joanna Chen is a British-born writer and translator whose work has been published with Poet Lore, Guernica and Narratively, among many others. She writes a column for The Los Angeles Review of Books. Chen’s translations make Hebrew and Arabic texts accessible to an English-speaking audience. As well as Frayed Light, she translated Less Like a Dove (Shearsman Books 2016), a collection of poetry by Agi Mishol, and My WIld Garden (Shocken), a work of non-fiction by Meir Shalev, forthcoming in 2020. Her translations have appeared in Poetry International, Asymptote, Consequence, and elsewhere. Read more at www.joannachen.com

Just as artists of the 19th and 20th centuries participated in forging an American natural history as explorers, cataloguers, collectors, and early environmentalists, contemporary artists continue to incorporate and comment on the natural world in their art. Motivated by the inexorable rise of urban-industrial development and the subsequent deterioration of our planet, artists confront the vulnerability of our environment and the effects of global climate change to illustrate the continued relevance of ecology and nature conservation to contemporary artistic practice.

In Fragile Earth: The Naturalist Impulse in Contemporary Art, leading artists Jennifer Angus, Mark Dion, Courtney Mattison, and James Prosek make natural elements their medium conceptually and literally, from prints created with eel bodies, to ceramic sculpture mimicking coral bleaching, cabinets filled with colorful plastic collected from oceans and rivers, and walls covered with shockingly beautiful, preserved insects. Bringing an artistic perspective to natural science, these essays and written conversations showcase the persuasive role artists can play in advocating for the preservation of our earth.

JENNIFER STETTLER PARSONS is assistant curator at the Florence Griswold Museum. She lives in Chester, Connecticut.

Peter Gizzi, the author of seven collections of poetry, has published a limited-edition artist book, The Afterlife of Paper, with Catalpa. Catalpa has previously published the works of Antonia Pinter, CA Conrad, Rick Myers, and more. They have work forthcoming from Isabella Tudisco-Sadacca. The Afterlife of Paper features six poems by Gizzi and nine collages by artist Richard Kraft.

Melissa Kwasny and ML Smoker will serve simultaneously as Montana Poet Laureates for 2019–2021. Kwasny is editor of Wesleyan’s popular poetics anthology Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950.

Kwansy teaches English at Carroll College in Helena, Montana and previously taught at Eastern Washington University, the University of Wyoming, and the University of Montana. She is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Where Outside the Body is the Soul Today and Pictograph.

Mandy Smoker Broaddus (ML Smoker) belongs to the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of the Fort Peck Reservation in north-eastern Montana. She currently works for Education Northwest as a Practice Expert in Indian Education.  Her current work focuses on the work of equity and inclusion for Native education in the Pacific Northwest. Her first book of poetry is Another Attempt at Rescue. She and Kwasny co-edited the anthology I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poets in Defense of Global Human Rights.

Read more about the poet laureates here!