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Staff Picks: Primeval and Other Times and Flights

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Celia recommends Primeval and Other Times and Flights by Olga Tokarczuk:

Prior to being awarded the Man Booker International Prize for the recent translation of her novel Flights, Olga Tokarczuk, while famous in her native Poland, was mostly unknown in the US. Which is why I was so thrilled, after hearing the results of the Booker International, to find that we also had a translation at Malvern of Tokarczuk’s earlier novel, Primeval and Other Times, published by Twisted Spoon Press. Both novels are fascinating and accomplished, but as I read them (back to back, I should add) I was especially impressed by the range of Tokarczuk’s artistic vision, which has produced two amazing and rigorous but also extremely different novels.

Primeval and Other Times is set in the imaginary village of Primeval. Bordered by a forest, two other villages, and a larger, bustling town that’s just near enough that the residents can travel there to buy vodka, Primeval is isolated, forgotten, it seems, by time. At the beginning of the story, the First World War has just begun. The men are gone, the women make do, easily enough, on their own. A farmer’s wife, Genowefa, is pregnant. It seems she will stay pregnant for years, until the war is over, until her husband comes home, finally, remembering the war outside of Primeval as a kind of dream, a nightmare land that may or may not have ever existed.

This is Primeval: an enclosed snow globe, a world in itself, which it may or may not be possible to ever leave. Outside, wars rise and then break like waves, disgorging soldiers and refugees through the border of Primeval, whose residents are swept up in the flood without always being entirely certain whether the outside world really exists. In one of the novel’s most eerie and strange passages, Ruta, the daughter of a destitute prostitute, gives this speech:

This is where Primeval ends, there’s nothing beyond here…[Travelers] set off on a journey, they reach the boundary, and here they come to a standstill. Maybe they dream they’re traveling onwards, that Kielce or Russia are there. My mother once showed me some of those who looked like they’d turned to stone. They stand on the road to Kielce. They don’t move, their eyes are open and they look terrible. As if they’re dead. Then, after a while, they wake up and go home, and they take their dreams for memories.

History, in this novel that spans the bulk of the twentieth century, is a thing that happens elsewhere, a dream that, like Goya’s Sleep of Reason, gives birth to monsters. And yet, as much as the town of Primeval is devastated, over and over, by history, there is also a counter dream, full of creaturely magic and wonder, in which an immortal mushroom kingdom sleeps beneath the forest, a woman feuds with the moon, a flowering vine fathers a child with a wood woman, a forgetful and tempestuous angel watches (as best it can) over a farmer’s daughter, and maybe, just maybe, there may be a way out.

If Primeval and Other Times is a snow globe, a crystal ball in which wonderful and terrible visions appear, Flights is a network of neurons, a fragile map that might not be immediately recognizable as a system, but which is constantly transmitting impulses, stories, quick bursts of scenes. It claims to be about travel and the body, but a better description might be: what does a body look like in movement? What are its transitions, the way it’s constantly disintegrating and being born? Tokarczuk is inspired by Frederik Ruysch, the eighteenth-century anatomist who used his experimental embalming techniques to create macabre works of art—infant skeletons dining together atop a hill of preserved gall bladders, a perfect, pink child’s arm, in lace sleeve, floating in a preserving jar—and also by the modern Bodies and Body Worlds exhibits, which used plastination to preserve a wide array of human bodies and internal organs. In Flights, Tokarczuk traces a winding genealogy of these preserved bodies, pausing on Philip Verheyen, the Dutch anatomist who discovered the Achilles tendon while dissecting his own leg (to which he also writes anguished letters, afflicted by phantom pain from the amputation), and the fictional Dr. Mole, a genteel kind of mad scientist who, on his death bed, leaves in his study a life-like preserved cat, which, when opened to display its internal organs, plays a cheerful tune.

Interspersed with these passages are stories of people in transit: the biologist who specializes in the eradication of invasive species, who returns to her native Poland to find it changed beyond recognition; the housewife who walks away from her home and rides the subway for days on end, looking for salvation, or at least the compassion of religion; the lonely “travel psychologist,” who sets up lectures in airports, to ask, again and again: who are we, once we’ve sloughed off the structure of family, city, country, culture? Who are we when we’re somewhere else? “Each of my pilgrimages aims at another pilgrim,” Tokarczuk writes, over and over again, a kind of refrain. There are pilgrims of the globe and of the body, those who look outwards and those who look within. Throughout, Tokarczuk’s style is rigorous, analytical: disassemble, Tokarczuk seems to say. Abandon, leave behind, remove. Here is one glimpse into a life, as in a cabinet of wonders (another motif that appears over and over again in Flights). Do you really need more than the artifact itself? Or does this preserved lung, this fragment of overheard conversation, this formula for the plasticization of organic tissue, tell enough of a story?

Of the two novels, I think my favorite is Primeval and Other Times. Reading them back to back, I was mostly astounded by how two such different and successful works could come from the same author. There are traces of Primeval’s hallucinatory style in Flights, but for the most part, Tokarczuk seems to desire that the second novel be an exercise in analysis, that it hold the reader a little bit at arm’s length, the better to experience the unknowability of the body, and of the human consciousness that inhabits it. But, whatever a given reader’s preference is, I think we can all agree to eagerly await the next translation of a Tokarczuk novel—which, by the way, will be an ecological murder mystery called Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead, released in the US next month.

Staff Picks: For an Ineffable Metrics of the Desert

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Stephanie recommends For an Ineffable Metrics of the Desert by Mostafa Nissabouri:

When Mostafa Nissabouri’s For an Ineffable Metrics of the Desert (Otis Books, 2018) arrived here at Malvern Books, its title immediately gripped me; it’s quite a mouthful, with its seven words and their twelve syllables combining to create an unruly abstraction. The title tells us the book of poems to follow will likely be concerned with language in favor of what can’t be said. Sure, that’s one of poetry’s “jobs,” but to make that claim a part of the title struck me as bold, so I started opening to pages at random to gauge my further interest. And Reader, I had no chance; I’ve been reading and rereading Ineffable Metrics ever since.

– from “Higher Memory,” translated by Pierre Joris

When I think about the experience of reading For an Ineffable Metrics of the Desert—edited by Guy Bennett and featuring translations from French by Bennett, Pierre Joris, Addie Leak, and Teresa Villa-Ignacio—I think about: water; identities and how they are constructed; language as a landscape; land as conquered space; conquering as cyclical; how a poem might make a music of the tension between interiors and exteriors. And I think of specific excerpts I can’t (and don’t want to) shake:

“Dead I drink your water to know I’m separated from myself” (“Diurnal,” AL)

“what identity if not / imagined” (“Approach to the Desert Space,” GB)

“like a life possibility that is other like a cry” (“Anticipation of an Exclusion,” PJ)

“the absurdity of the infinite in my body / assassinated / humiliated / vampire” (“Scheherazade the Tongue,” AL)

“I don’t know where to put you / or how to forget and die” (“Scheherazade the Tongue,” AL)

But let’s go back to the beginning; the book’s first line is:

“Caves opened for the crawling of my ribs as if I were as if” (“Caves Opened,” AL)

What strikes me here is the repetition of “as if,” both because this is the first line of the book and so the “stutter” carries a particular weight and also because the line ends on that stutter, emphasizing that the speaker’s identity (or perhaps any identity) is indeterminate.

For Nissabouri’s speakers, identity is inherently fraught. Nissabouri was born in Casablanca in 1943, just roughly thirty years after Morocco was divided into French and Spanish protectorates. In his teen years, Nissabouri’s home regained its independence after almost half a century of French rule.

During those occupied years, Nissabouri says in an interview included at the book’s end, “young Moroccans in the north of the country were educated in Spanish and, in the rest of the country, in schools modeled on those of the French Republic and … in line with the programs of Jules Ferry. In these establishments Arabic was considered a foreign language. In Tangiers English predominated.”

Nissabouri continues: “So up to the end of the protectorate in 1956, we would see an entire population educated in francophone institutions … burst into professional life having been prepared to serve as assistants to the French colonizer … in the country’s administration. Everything was in French, from signs, bus routes, names of shops and their displays … The only Arabic press was in the north of the country, and that with the permission—under certain conditions, to be sure—of the Spanish who, unlike the French, didn’t care two hoots about a ‘civilizing mission.’ … Since then Morocco has opted for bilingualism (classical Arabic as its official language and French as its second language), except in the courts and related services where only Arabic is allowed.”

So why does Nissabouri compose his poems in French rather than Arabic?

“Vicissitude of history? Fatality? Intentional choice? Re-appropriation of the language of the other, the better to live my own status as one who narrowly escaped oblivion? It’s all of those things,” he says.

Or, perhaps, as the speaker of his poem “Approach to the Desert Space” says:

“it is not the sky that establishes order / its image overhanging a silenced memory does” (GB)

The poems in Ineffable Metrics are both dense and expansive. “Nissabouri’s work explodes across the page,” translator Addie Leak says (click on View Translator Notes), “questioning genre by breaking with traditional French forms and defying linguistic imperialism with long, syntactically complex sentences that include mid-phrase or mid-sentence erasures and insist that the reader work to pull sense from them.”

While I’m by no means a source of knowledge about Morocco, it seems fitting to me that—given the wonderful context provided by the notes and author interview included in this book—Nissabouri’s poems are concerned with the way space perpetually opens once conquered, whether it’s opening up new space for itself to reclaim an identity or culture after colonization or whether it’s having space opened within it by such colonization. And these are of course both violences, infinite ones:

“which is this nowhere whose desert / at my side is the shattered incidence / like an allegorical I / that never stops being multiple” (“Approach to the Desert Space,” GB).

When I sell this brilliant text to Malvern customers, I often talk about the trauma (that I imagine must be) involved when one’s country is in a way divided into different languages and then rule shifts so quickly; how it must feel to have something as intimate as one’s way of communicating determined to be Not the National Language or shoved underground or labeled appropriate only in the vernacular or appropriate only for religious ceremony, etc., and then to have those determinations change again. Of course what is a native tongue and what is a foreign language and what is a country and why do I speak English and on and on—I can’t possibly get into all of that here on this little bookstore blog, but my point in (stumbling through) bringing up such concerns is this: For an Ineffable Metrics of the Desert, with its multiple tongues and diverse approaches to syntax, with its obsessions with “opposites” like desert and ocean, is a collection of poems rooted in such trauma. And Nissabouri’s language questions those roots, rips them from the ground, grows them into song.

I hope I’ve done this incredible work justice in this blog post; I had never before encountered Nissabouri’s poems and the book includes half of his published work and selections from current, unpublished work (including the astounding long poem “Seven Waves,” which I’ve not even touched on here!), so I found it particularly nerve-wracking to write about. But I wanted to write about it for two main reasons:

1) For an Ineffable Metrics of the Desert is one of the best books of poetry published by a small press in 2018 and 2) I haven’t read a single review of the book or heard buzz in the English-reading book world about this critical English translation of such a singular poet. If you don’t want to miss out on this intelligent, wide-ranging work, stop by Malvern for your copy here in Austin or seek it out from your local independent bookstore.

– from “Seven Waves,” translated by Teresa Villa-Ignacio

Staff Picks: The Education of a Gardener

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Julie recommends The Education of a Gardener by Russell Page:

It’s easy to imagine Russell Page (1906-1985), author of The Education of a Gardener, holding his thumb up to a distant hill to assess where to plant a cluster of ancient lemon trees. Where a landscape painter is concerned primarily with light, Page must take into account the elements of sun, water, wind, soil, seasonal changes as well as sensory concerns: How might citrus aromas blend with nearby lavender and lilac? How might a box hedge in the background make the yellow fruit pop? Difficult to define—gardener, landscape architect, artist, sage, Page is all these and more. He is the creator of living breathing “pictures,” as he calls them, so that wherever you happen to stand, plants are in harmony with each other, with the landscape, and with you the observer.

I didn’t read Page’s book because I have a deep interest in gardening (it’s quite superficial—if by gardening you count a small, dysfunctional family of houseplants), but because from page one (oh dear, a pun) I was swept away by his passionate lyricism. With modest directness, he writes:

I know that I cannot make anything new. To make a garden is to organize all the elements present and add fresh ones, but first of all, I must absorb as best I can all that I see, the sky, and the skyline, the soil, the colour of the grass and the shape and nature of the trees.

This is from the first chapter, “In search of style,” and I quickly began to absorb Page’s sentences as teachings on the broader categories of beauty, aesthetics, and craftsmanship. It seemed certain lines could be applied to my own artistic undertaking—poetry.

A serious composition cannot depend on intuition or on an intellectual concept alone. All the objects you are going to place require careful study. If it is a plant you must know its size, habit, colour, texture and cultural requirements as well as its place of origin, its history and the way it has been used whether commonly or uncommonly.

Replace “plant” with “word” and you have brilliant advice on the precision of language. There’s something about Page’s bountiful spirit and gorgeous use of language that both delights and inspires—so many times I felt this great sense of broadening within my skull—a student again, I listen with rapt attention.

You have only to take a magnifying glass to a wild orchid or columbine, to the smallest plant of primula or androsace and, at once, strength, will, design, colour and a tremendous rational simplicity invades eye and mind.

It took me months to read Education, which I kept at my bedside, because it was so densely packed with Latinate beauty—Stravanesia undulata and Y. filamentosa—it proved hard to sustain a rapid reading clip. My sleep was likely better for all the lush language: “the prostrate and horizontally growing junipers are wonderful evergreens for massing in full sun.” And the playful names for flowers, too: pinks, catmints, rue, zinnias, nemophilas, larkspur, sweet sultan, and my favorite, “bachelor’s buttons” (cornflowers).

Can I admit that it was also hard to finish Education because it would be like saying goodbye to a new friend? Page reveals very little about himself in the book proper, but there are moments when I genuinely felt I knew him. I particularly loved when he made clear his dislikes: “rhododendron addicts,” nude statues, and round swimming pools. He uses quotes to mention a prototypical showroom-style “American” garden. I laughed aloud when I read the sentence:

Central Park in New York was designed by Olmsted as a nineteenth-century pastiche of an eighteenth-century landscape park.

Page devoted his life to creating picturesque settings, and it saddens me that he wasn’t called on to design a public park because he would have considered every detail imaginable. A man The Telegraph called “the most famous garden designer no one’s ever heard of” would have fulfilled his aim “to lift people, if only for a moment, above their daily preoccupations” as he believed that “even a glimpse of beauty outside will enable them to make a healing contact with their own inner world.”

While there’s still time, see every Page garden you can. If you’re in New York see his garden at the Frick, which has been in a precarious state for the last few years. If you happen to be in Purchase, NY see the Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Garden at the PepsiCo headquarters. See the Anne Bass Garden in Fort Worth, Texas if it’s open to the public. Go abroad. See them all, as seasons shift and change—the best galleries are outdoors.

Staff Picks: The Governesses

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Celia recommends The Governesses by Anne Serre:

Sometimes an ordinary piece of information startles you. For instance: reading about Anne Serre in preparation for writing this review, I discovered the publication date of the original French version of her novel The Governesses: 1992. I regret to inform you that I stopped reading right there, closed the tab of French Wikipedia on my browser, and will be offering you absolutely no anecdotes from Anne Serre’s life.

It’s not that the date itself is implausible, but that it had the strange effect of providing an anchor point for a book that feels as if it has sprung fully formed from the air. The Governesses could as easily be a Victorian experiment by the likes of Christina Rossetti, or a novel written just this year, and still on the cutting edge. It’s difficult to picture Serre writing it, in the same way that it’s difficult to picture the craftsmanship of a Fabergé egg, that perfect, jewel-encrusted world unto itself. And yet this is a novel that asks its reader to think deeply about the act of creation, and about the nature of the created world.

The premise of the novel is familiar: a family hires a governess. Or rather, three governesses. Two look after the troop of small boys (only boys) who roam the gardens of the manor house, climbing trees and catching frogs. The other cares for the old man across the way. But the governesses do very little teaching or child-rearing, and there are too many little boys for them to be the children of Madame and Monsieur Austeur, who own the house, and the old man spends most of his time glued to his window, watching the governesses wander through the gardens of the house. They, aware of his gaze, don’t seem to mind. Sometimes they strip nude and make up tableaus, to entertain themselves and him. Sometimes they encounter a strange man in the gardens, and then they chase him down and eat him. Or make love to him. It’s approximately the same thing, really.

The whole slim novel teeters between the extremes of two powers: on the one hand, there is the wildness of the governesses, their changeable passions, the transporting force of their desire. Planning a party, “they had clanged so many cymbals and banged so many drums that every man and woman for miles around, and even a few curious dogs, had come trotting over to gaze hungrily at the scene through the garden gates.” And, at the other pole, the bestilled equilibrium of the Victorian novel, the setting in which nothing can ever truly change, and every new event is assimilated back into the status quo. So, when the governesses come to the manor house: “all the trees they had ever known—the ones in the school playground, for example, and the ones outside grandma’s house and along the road to the beach—came rushing into Monsieur and Madame Austeur’s garden, lining up side by side with the elms and the oaks, and then disappearing inside them. The same thing happened with houses, barns, chateaux, and whole towns. They all came storming in through the wide-open gates the morning of the governesses’ arrival.”

The manor house eats the governesses’ past, and they become—what? Part nymph, part maenad, part prim young ladies. There’s a tyranny beneath the beauty of Anne Serre’s fiction. How many remembered trees does it require to make one of those imaginary oaks or elms? What is this thing, the novel, that takes no account of the outer world, bowing only to its own internal structures? The governesses, for all of their wildness, are trapped within a cyclical, enclosed world, in which all of their reckless libertinism cannot upset the status quo. Take them outside of it, and they are nothing.

And so within the novel’s wild flights of fancy, there is a core of melancholy.

Staff Pick: I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do)

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Rebekah recommends I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do) by Tatiana Ryckman:

Tatiana Ryckman’s voice radiates from the pages of her 2017 book I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do). Her musings on the emotional turbulence of a long-distance relationship are authentic, honest, and raw. For those who have gone through a long-distance relationship, this book is a heartfelt commemoration of that experience, a comforting blanket of solidarity. And for those who haven’t, the narrator’s emotions are so deep, so human, so universal, and so elegantly expressed that they will captivate from the start. Unafraid to give voice to the smallest, to the pettiest, to seemingly insignificant and foolish feelings, Ryckman absolutely nails the exploration of the human condition in all of its facets––its inconsistencies, its weirdness, and its beauty.

For the entirety of the novella, Ryckman never specifies the genders of the lover and the loved. By leaving her characters pronoun-less, Ryckman erases any potentially distracting gender markers, establishing a closeness and inclusiveness that blurs the boundary between book and reader. Suddenly, a story and an experience that seemed to belong to Ryckman’s narrator becomes the reader’s as well. The feelings emanate from the text, uninhibited by specifications and labels. The genderless narrator could be anyone; the emotions are everybody’s.

It is rare to find a book that approaches emotionality with such a frankness and willingness to delve into the nitty-gritty. Ryckman rejects the embarrassment that many authors feel when dealing with private emotions and the visceral ways in which they physically manifest. Grappling with the emotional roller coaster of believing that a distance, no matter how large, could never defeat love while simultaneously being forced to face the insurmountable loneliness of day-to-day life causes the narrator to engage in behaviors that might seem strange. But human beings do odd things when confronted with harsh realities. Things like distractedly watching porn to reconstruct a missing sense of intimacy, fabricating an imagined imposter who steals the lover’s affection away, or mapping associations with the lover onto everyday objects, like hairbrushes, become coping mechanisms. In all of their abnormality, the narrator’s actions never seem contrived, and this is where Ryckman’s talent really shines.

Ryckman returns time and again to religious terminology to accentuate the depth of the narrator’s infatuation. The narrator essentially worships at the altar of their love, trying to keep it alive and to imbue it with some sense of tangibility as its lack of physical immediacy constantly threatens its existence. In an early moment of reflection, the narrator states, “I prayed at the foot of my memories,” memories so firmly rooted in the past yet colored by a yearning for an imagined ideal future. Insecurity, jealousy, and a perpetual fear of the end become pleasurable. They become ways to keep the flame of something so distant burning. In order to preserve their desire, the narrator elevates the beloved to the level of a god while self-transforming into a martyr.

Ryckman’s musings do not follow a traditional story arc in the conventional sense of the word, but it’s still possible to trace a progressive development in the narrator’s self-perception as they navigate the ever-increasing muddiness of their relationship. At the beginning, the relationship essentially consumes the narrator: “I hadn’t thought of you as The Other, only as The. As Me. So much so that I could not delineate between my image of you and the parts of you that had inserted themselves into my image of myself.” The alternative version of their beloved, desperately created to fill the void caused by their physical absence, swallows the narrator’s individuality. However, progressively over the course of the text, Ryckman subtly shifts the way in which the narrator talks about their lover. Barely perceptible at first, it becomes apparent that the narrator, with the healing passage of time, is slowly beginning to reclaim their identity, with all the pitfalls and relapses mandated by the process of letting their partner go. In one of the most empowering lines of the book, the narrator says, “I remembered that just because you weren’t there, didn’t mean I was alone” (77). More than just a testimony to the difficulties of long-distance relationships, Ryckman’s novella details the sometimes painful and sloppy yet inspiring journey of self-discovery.

Staff Pick: Fires

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Celia recommends Fires by Marguerite Yourcenar:

The first line of Fires is, “I hope this book will never be read.” This isn’t an accident—in her introduction to the novel’s English translation, Marguerite Yourcenar reaffirms her desire that no one should read it, and acknowledges that writing an introduction under such circumstances seems preposterous. Why should you read this book that wasn’t intended to be read, then? Because it’s the deeply personal account of a doomed love affair, in which Yourcenar weaves the ancient past and the troubled present of Europe deftly together. Because it’s a love story about falling out of love, and going on with life. Because it’s an incredibly impassioned, complex vision not just of a single unhappy love affair, but also of the relationships between men and women, between women who love one another, between the past and the present, and between the individual and her destiny. Because I am obsessed with Marguerite Yourcenar, and I’m fairly sure that you, dear reader, ought to be as well.

Marguerite Yourcenar is best known for her erudite and layered historical novels, Memoirs of Hadrian and The Abyss. These books reconstruct the ancient world so thoroughly that, reading them, it seems that Yourcenar has a direct line into the past, which allows her characters to speak through her. And, indeed, Yourcenar very much conceptualized her relationship with her characters this way. She told one story in which, having taken Zeno, the hero of The Abyss, into a bakery with her, she accidentally lost him and had to return later to pick him up.

Fires, however, is an early novel that has the seeds of these later books, but also uses history in a way that is all its own. Written in 1936, under the shadow of the Second World War, Fires is ostensibly the chronicle of a doomed love affair, a kind of psychomachea, in which Yourcenar, embodying various characters from classical history and myth—Phaedra, Achilles, Clytemnestra, Sappho—examines the various facets of love, desire, and despair. It is a book that asks us to think deeply into the past, and particularly into the stories of classical women, and bring them into conversation with the present. Over the Trojan War looms the impending shadow of the Second World War, the receding shadow of the First. The story of Antigone becomes a very modern story of civil war. And Phaedra, descending into Hades, finds it transformed into the modern day hell of the subway system.

As much as each story is a record of a particular moment in a love affair, they are also an exploration of the difficulty of establishing oneself in a gendered world. So, for instance, Achilles, pictured disguised among the women of Skyros before the Trojan War, is torn between his love for his companion, Deidama, and a passion for the newly arrived Patroclus. The violent conclusion of this love triangle is also a crisis of gender: will Achilles remain among the women, disguised as one of them—will he become a woman—or will he depart for the Trojan War and become a man? This isn’t only a question of gender identity in the strict sense, but of the role he will play in society. When one of his female companions leads him out of the palace on Skyros, she contemplates, momentarily, taking his place: “since,” Yourcenar writes, “the most discerning of gods or butchers could not have distinguished this man’s heart from her own.” But ultimately, she does not go. She remains a prisoner, buried, Yourcenar says, alive.

I tend to suspect that Yourcenar found the constraints of her gender equally restrictive. In her personal life, she was a bisexual woman who had a reputation for falling passionately in love with gay men (Fires is said to be inspired by her break with her editor in France, who admired her work deeply, but, to her distress, was not interested in women, and by the beginning of her relationship with Grace Flick, an American academic who would become both Yourcenar’s translator and her long-term partner). As a novelist, she developed a reputation as a “masculine” writer, a woman who captured the voices of men so well that, critics wrote, one could forget her gender entirely, so uninterested did she seem in the domestic lives of women. But in Fires, as in much of her early work, she is intimately concerned with what it is to be a woman dying to escape the constraints of gender—to love another woman, to be a hero, to stand on equal footing with men and be accepted by them, to stand against the workings of an unjust government.

It would be a mistake if I managed to end this review without including at least a little bit of Yourcenar’s extremely beautiful prose. Here is Sappho, transformed, in Yourcenar’s telling, from a poet into an acrobat, performing along the Mediterranean between the two World Wars:

With one pull, she brings herself to the last support her will to die will allow: the trapeze bar swinging in midair transforms this creature, tired of being only half woman, into a bird; she glides, sea gull of her own abyss, hanging by one foot, under the gaze of a public which does not believe in tragedy. Her skill goes against her; no matter how she tries, she can’t lose her balance; shady equestrian, Death has her vault the next trapeze. She climbs at last higher than the spotlights: spectators can no longer applaud her, since now they can’t see her. Hanging onto the ropes that pull the canopy painted with stars, she can only continue to surpass herself by bursting through her sky.