“The origins of the word urge contain both the idea of pushing forward, forcing, but also to fasten or to tie. I turn to the urges of others and attempt to inhabit them through translation. I tie myself to someone else’s work, and the practice that emerges—the conflict of translation—can lead me into language, into saying, into translation’s agonistic pleasures of wayward mimicry and irresolution.
I have recently been sleepless and so I read poetry for comfort in the hours that are no longer night but not yet dawn, the tiny hours. I am reading to situate myself in a new place (Gothenburg, Sweden) and to close in on a faraway home (New York). These night-mornings, I am reading a sprawl: Khashayar Naderehvandi’s Allting glittrar och ingenting tar slut (Norstedts, 2016), rereading Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (Abrams ComicArts, 2017), la paperson’s A Third University Is Possible (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), Imri Sandström’s Det kommande skallet / The Coming Shall (Gothenburg, Autor, 2017). I read not in order to write but in order to feel like a writer, to believe it. The reading becomes a kind of evidence.”
—Jennifer Hayashida, author of A Machine Wrote This Song (Gramma Press, 2018)
Photo credit: Charles Richardson