From revolutionary manifestos, to the ravings of the Beat Generation, to well-thumbed romances on suburban library shelves, books possess a unique power to shock, subvert, and inspire, which often transcends their genre and era. SAND 20 explores many kinds of taboos; moral, political, sexual, social. We recognise the privilege it is to live in a time and place in which we can publish writing that pushes and transgresses boundaries without fear of persecution or censorship.

Ahead of the issue’s launch at Prachtwerk Berlin on Friday 22nd November, we asked a selection of SAND #20 contributors from around the world about the controversial literary works that have influenced their writing and art.

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TERENCE YOUNG / POETRY / “THE PARTY”

The only banned book that has had any discernible effect on my life is Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, an effect that has little to do with actually reading the book, which I have not done yet, at least not in its entirety. I came across Miller’s novel as a young boy of seven or eight in the early sixties, when I discovered a copy on the shelf of a small bookcase tucked away in the closet of our upstairs bathroom. I thought nothing of it until a decade later when I became familiar with its content, and to this day — in light of my understanding of my parents’ aesthetic and moral dispositions — I still have a hard time explaining how such a book ever made it into our house. It is a mystery, one that compels me to rethink everything I know about my mother and father, not necessarily a bad thing.

CHISOM OKAFOR / POETRY / “A SHORTER NOTE ON MY COMING OUT”

Lawmakers in Nigeria passed an anti-­gay law in January of 2014, which imposes a jail term of 14 years on same-sex lovers. However, in April of 2016, a young Nigerian poet, Romeo Oriogun, published a collection of poems titled Burnt Men, with themes that border on queerness and acceptance, which was like an awakening and also served as the first clapback by a Nigerian poet against the government in Nigeria. Since then, more writers have taken up this task. I have been writing ever since.

QUINN RENNERFELDT / POETRY / “THE TONGUE IS A DISGUSTING MUSCLE”

One of my favorite graphic novels, Palomar by Gilbert Hernandez, was deemed “pornographic” and “obscene” by a high schooler’s mother last year, who attempted (and thankfully failed) to have it banned from the school’s library, per the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Had she bothered to read this stunning collection of work, she may have realized that it touches on the taboo, but also on the grit, the beauty, the boredom, the mayhem, and the magic contained within a small town that serves as a microcosm for many communities abroad.

MILVA MCDONALD / FICTION / “NAKED”

Talking openly about rape, incest, poverty, bigotry, and sexuality isn’t easy. Cultural discouragement and silencing only make it harder, which is why reading Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina and its riveting, brutally honest narration was so revelatory for me.

SOOKOON ANG / COVER ART: EXORCIZE ME II

There are many books that told stories about the failings of women due to their whimsy and emotions: Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Portrait of a Lady and so on. When I read them in my youth, I interpreted them as cautionary tales, social taboos directed at women. My young mind lacking of ambiguity and appreciation of humanity thought these protagonists are exemplary of women who are gullible and of weak morals. Then as an adult woman and an artist, I see the courage to follow one’s heart even if it is an apparent mistake to others.

JON BLAKE HACKLER / POETRY / “THIRTY OBSERVATIONS ON THE HUNTERS IN THE SNOW BY PIETER BRUEGEL”

What comes immediately to mind is David Wojnarowicz’s book Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. Filled with a barely contained rage, it turns the stuff of racism, homophobia, and violence into something deeply lyrical. Both his writing and his art, was reviled by the conservative political establishment at the time as being pornographic, but Wojnarowicz’s work, blatant in its refusal to shy away from both his homosexuality and his HIV positive diagnosis, has been a constant inspiration and challenge to my own writing.

SHANNON SMITH / POETRY / “UNDER THE ACKEE TREE BOTTOM-SIDE BEECHWOOD”

The book that has inspired me during my undergraduate years is one titled The Groundings with my Brothers by Dr. Walter Rodney, a scholar and activist who was himself made persona non grata by the Jamaican government in 1968, leading to what became known as the Rodney Riots. He encouraged black intellectuals to not simply join the establishment and live comfortably but to devote themselves to the concerns of the poor masses as well as to, within their own disciplines, “attack those distortions which…white cultural imperialism have produced in all branches of scholarship.”

CHRISTOPHER LINFORTH / FICTION / “INITIATION”

As a teen, I read Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, and was shocked by the narrator’s uncompromising and visceral voice. The depictions of sex and drug use and swearing caught me off-guard. But I loved it. I loved that this was also what a writer could do.

JESSICA BLOOM / FICTION / “BANNIK”

Nancy Friday wrote My Secret Garden (1973), a non-fiction compilation of female sexual fantasies, after her fiction was deemed too explicit by a publisher. It hasn’t aged very well from a feminist perspective, but my imagination was cracked open by the highly descriptive fantasies in the book. They’re so beautiful, bizarre, and honest.

GUILHERME BERGAMINI / ART / FEMINICID

I see in the poem “Ismália” by Alphonsus de Guimaraens the relationship between the sky and the sea, the anguish of being in the sacred sky and being at sea, the pulse of life and death. At the same time that Ismália wanted to be in heaven in search of the sacred, she wanted to go down to the sea in search of the profane.

JUAN ROMERO VINUEZA (TRANSLATED BY KIMREY ANNA BATTS) / POETRY / “TAUTOLOGIES”

When I was learning French, I took great interest in the writing of Michel Houellebecq. I was drawn to his books due to their social satire and disdain for humanity, and their concurrent compassion for humans’ self-destructive tendencies. In Houellebecq’s work I found, so to speak, everything I love and hate about the world.

SARA ANWAR / NONFICTION / “SVALBARD”

Lolita, Nabokov’s examination of desire for a forbidden body made almost holy in perverse worship, is both repulsive and delicious. To me a story, no matter how taboo, will still find its way in the world if it’s written beautifully.

 

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SAND #20 will be launched on Friday 22nd November at Prachtwerk, Berlin, with a night of live readings from contributors and music until late.

For more information, RSVP on Facebook.

You can pre-order SAND #20, or subscribe to SAND via Newsstand now, find our previous issues in our online store.

In the run-up to the publication of SAND 19, we quizzed our contributors on their favourite pieces of writing originally published in a language other than English.

We were overwhelmed by their varied, heartfelt responses, which ranged from French children’s books to Hebrew religious texts, and dystopian Kikuyu fiction. We were also struck by the fact that several of our contributors had common favourites, despite their very different cultural and geographical backgrounds, which makes it seem even more fitting that their works share the pages of our forthcoming issue.

We hope you enjoy their answers as much as we did.

Andriana Minou | “An Anniversary” | Fiction

L’ecume des jours by Boris Vian (Froth on the Daydream). One of the few books I have read several times and every single time I really don’t want it to end. Although I know the story too well by now, every time I read it I am almost convinced something entirely new will happen. To me it’s beyond literature – as literature should be, in my view; a beautifully sad and exhilaratingly funny universe I want to live in.

Jeffrey Gibbs | “Sometimes They Fall From The Sky” | Fiction

It’s difficult to choose a favorite work not originally in English. My story published in SAND was inspired in many ways by the moods in the The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson, in particularly the story, The Chicken which manages to turn the silliest of domestic birds into something haunting and profound. My favorite, though, would have to be the novel, The Wizard of the Crow by  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, another inspiration for my short stories about Istanbul. Translated by the author himself from Kikuyu, it brilliantly and comically captures all the horror and absurdity of living in a dictatorship. It seemed that a hundred times a page I was left laughing or shaking my head in recognition.

Hussain Ahmed | “Maghrib” | Poetry

My best translation book is Murogi wa Kagogo, written by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, which he translated from the original Kikuyu to English as Wizard of the Crow. The story of the book is set in an imaginary Free Republic of Aburiria, governed by a Ruler. The story is a satirical representation of a country that is most likely African.

Carlo Andre | “CTRL+ +DELETE” | Poetry

Though I am primarily in love with English, I have the biggest hardon for Brazilian Portuguese, which I learned when I was in elementary school in Peru.  Not until adulthood, when I had nearly rusted that tongue over in me, was I introduced to Clarice Lispector (in English). Her fire words forced me to seek her out in the original Portuguese, which is a glory to read aloud as if in a panic; especially her Agua Viva.  The insides she puts up, to me, are like those of a makeshift fun-house: mirrors, curios and surprises.  I don’t know how to describe it… think Woolf, just untidy with a slight scent of gasoline.

Candice Nembhard | “Sunstroke” | Poetry

During my undergraduate studies, I came across Brazillian writer Clarice Lispector and her fantastic novella Água Viva. Equal parts poetry, storytelling and lyricism, the text is an incredible testament to pushing the boundaries of writing. A gripping and affirming read.

Arianna Reiche | “Nothing Machine” | Fiction

One work that I think about all the time is the short story “End Of The Game” (“Final Del Juego”) by Julio Cortázar. It absolutely destroys me every time. It’s such a heartbreaking snapshot of early adolescence, from a male author with actual empathy for the female experience, which is so astonishingly rare for 2019, let alone 1956.

Joshua Bohnsack | “Lazy Eye” | Fiction

I picked up Dorthe Nors’ Karate Chop at a small press book fair just after I had finished college. Though the brief stories are in a familiar world, the prose Nors uses makes them tender and strange. This was my first exposure to contemporary translated literature. It got me interested in work outside of the English language.

Marc Cohen | Sunset Dance / The Idea Of Permanence | Art

My favourite piece of writing that was not originally written in English would be the Hebrew Bible, not because I’m religious (I’m not), but because it may be one of the oldest pomo texts in history (or at least, one of the oldest texts that exhibit post-modern qualities like intertextuality, metafiction, fragmentation, and a most unreliable narrator). The persistent gaps, contradictions and paradoxes, a consequence of extensive redaction over centuries, resist any possibility of a singular, overarching (not to mention fundamentalist) interpretation, and so make it an endlessly fascinating text, especially in the original Hebrew.

Rowen Foster | “Don’t Know What To Do With Violence So I Pick At My Lip” | Poetry

I’ve fallen so in love and wonderment with Aase Berg that I named my cat after her. Aase Berg is an absolutely mad and brilliant surrealist Swedish poet and master of the necro-pastoral. In her books With Deer and Dark Matter, human-animal-machine-plant hybrids writhe and fight with or against the decaying land around them. The way she works with language itself mimics the hybridized creatures in her work as she creates new words and meanings by smooshing words together, much like Paul Celan, but also by using a variety of languages, as in her book Hackers which uses Chinese, English, and Swedish in both the original and in the translation. Her engagement with language in collaboration with her translator Johannes Göransson of Action Books is enhanced by the decision they made to include the original Swedish on the left side pages throughout all of her books. Though Hackers perhaps more clearly engages with contemporary jargon, technology, and referenced events, there is a displacement of time and space, a brutal refusal to submit to borders, boundaries, traditions, norms that fuels all of her writing.

Marta Helm/Jordan Martin | “Poems are Locations” | Poetry

My choice would be the complete works of Juana Inés de la Cruz (Obras completas de sor Juana Inés de la Cruz). I used to skip class, hunching under the bleachers near the football field or sitting on a curb in the school parking lot reading her work until the last bell rang & I could go home or to work. I got suspended a few times because of her but, obviously, it was worth it.

Saskia Vogel | “What Once Was” [translator] | Nonfiction

My answer: Lina Wolff’s The Polyglot Lovers. I fell in love with Lina Wolff’s writing when a short story of hers came across my desk at Granta, when I was their publicist. Her vision, her voice, her dry wit, her cool, sharp gaze has made her one of my favorite authors of all time. I translated that story, and now have been lucky enough to translate her latest novel, The Polyglot Lovers: an incisive polyphonic story about a lost manuscript, male genius, and the nature of perception. As a writer, translating her work has taught me so much about non-linear storytelling and playfulness in language.

Helena Gränstrom | “What Once Was” | Nonfiction

One work that springs to mind is the philosopher Martin Buber’s I and Thou (Ich und Du), published 1923. To me, the importance of this book is how it shows that the way we relate to our surroundings also form who we become; that in denying that the living world around us has a soul, we are at the same time denying the possibility of discovering one within ourselves.

Rachel McNicholl | “Mouse” [translator] | Fiction

I gobbled up children’s classics, fairy tales and comics (notably Asterix and Tintin) in translation long before I was aware that they’d been written in a language other than English. Once I’d started learning languages, I became more conscious of the role and the skills of the translator in bringing those stories to me. During a spell of illness in my teens, I remember reading The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and being blown away by the big philosophical questions posed in the beautiful little book. It left a lasting impression. I don’t remember whose translation I read back then, but I’ve often given Ros Schwartz’s translation of it to young friends in recent times. It’s available in a few different editions now.

Vicky Charles | Hair Vigilante / Drapo | Art

I didn’t grow reading books or pieces of writing outside America growing up, but one book I do remember reading is Le Petit Prince also known in America The Little Prince. My family are from Haiti and most of my family members speak both Creole and French. Reading Le Petit Prince in my family is practically tradition as a child. I loved adventure, pretending, and playing as a child. Reading Le Petit Prince as child made me want to explore the world more and imagine every little thing in my life whether it’s real or not. No matter what language a book was originally written in, you can always find something in it to connect with.

Kayvan Tahmasebian | “Wild Grass” / “Mourning The Birth Of Image” [translator] | Poetry

One of my favourite books is Idea della prosa (Idea of Prose) by Giorgio Agamben, available in English translation by Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (SUNY Press, 1995).

Rebecca Ruth Gould | “Wild Grass” / “Mourning The Birth Of Image” [translator] | Poetry

Impossible to identify just one book, but I have been heavily impacted by Alexander Wat’s The Envoy of Mr. Cogito in the translation of Bogdana and John Carpenter. Among my favorite lines: “and let your helpless Anger be like the sea / whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten”.

Kanika Agrawal | from “Okazaki Fragments” | Poetry

Either I have no favorites or they’re always changing. But I do have touchstones—texts and sounds that have marked me irrevocably. All other marks are compared to those primal ones. Among my touchstones are the poems/songs of the North Indian poet-saints of the Bhakti movement. especially  the works of Kabir, many of which are available in translation by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. I hesitate somewhat to point to this corpus as a major influence at this point in time; I have no doubt that Bhakti traditions, like many other Indian traditions, are currently being “reclaimed” by Hindu nationalists and turned against marginalized communities.As a nontheist, I find in Kabir the extreme attention that is devotion, and this devotion does not need a god as its object.

Lisa Lopez Smith | “From The Ayotzinapa Investigation Report” | Poetry

I enjoyed reading Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, but I loved it when I finally read it in its original Spanish after moving to Mexico. The Mexicaness of it was so alive it was practically breathing. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is another favourite book which I first read in English translation but I suspect that knowing and experiencing Colombia would also take that book to a whole new level of appreciation.

Rosaire Appel | Mathematical Weather / Tooling Around The Keys  | Art

In the late 70s when I quit painting and decided to write a novel, I came across Robbe-Grillet’s For a New Novel (Pour un Nouveau Roman). This introduced me to a whole slew of Nouveau Roman writers whose work had been translated into English. Translated French became my favorite language. It was clean, non-idiomatic, and the rhythm of the sentences didn’t feel automatic or casual but had a subtle formality which I liked. The writers included: Nathalie Sarraute, Robert Pinget, Maurice Blanchot, Raymond Rousell, Philippe Sollers, and Marguerite Duras. Some of the translators were Richard Howard, Maria Jolas, Barbara Wright, Lydia Davis, and Robert Lamberton.

Alyssa Ripley | “My Second Encounter With Abandonment” | Poetry

Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote was the book I read first in a sequence of classes that made me the thinker, writer, and person that I am today. It was actually the very first book I read in a university course. Something about Don Quixote and his adventures with Sancho resonate with me–I’m an idealist. Perhaps my efforts in this life aren’t concerned with chivalry or fighting imaginary enemies, but I’d like to think Don Quixote’s adventures meant something. That my adventures mean something. I’d like to think there’s more to windmills, too.

One Book From Home:
SAND 18 Contributors on the Literature That Influences Them

In the run-up to the publication of SAND Issue 18, twelve of our contributors share their favourite book from their home country. 

 

Tolu Oloruntoba / Poetry / “Gambit / Salvator” 

Ben Okri’s “The Famished Road”, which deservedly won the 1991 Booker Prize for Fiction, had a character that has stayed with me for 20 years, a struggling boxer going back at it daily in a magnificent metaphor for life. Set in a fictionalized version of my country [Nigeria], Okri’s poignant blurring of a vivid fantastic world with the “normal”, evokes the oldest Nigerian storytelling traditions and the magic of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

 

Alex Luke / Fiction / “Sweet Blood”

A British book I fell in love with a couple of years ago is The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss. It’s a novel that follows a family in the aftermath of the eldest daughter’s near-death experience. It’s about being confronted with life’s fragility, and the fear that comes with that confrontation, and the impossibility and necessity of living with that fear. And it’s about the National Health Service!

 

Lawdenmarc Decamora  / Poetry / “Tunnel #2 (strange balloon)”

The manicured repetition of the schizoid “I” and the masturbatory utterances of Mark Anthony Cayanan’s Placelessness poems have demonstrated enough poetic dexterity and mastery of language, remarkable for their introspection and wassailing with familiar cohorts: Waldman, Gregerson, Glück, The Dresden Dolls. His ludic attempts in “Placeleness (The human is a porous animal)” are like subterranean tunnels stretching fastidiously into syntactical spaces, into splits or ‘gaps’ of our alliterative realities, abysmal, semelfactive, but often setting up the reader into the J’accuse problematic confronting place and memory in the charmingly sign-punctured postcolonial Philippines. Placelessness therefore is music wreathed in miasmatous smoke, unfreezing the gaze—or, the often ambidextrous Cayananesque lyricism which “you too—yes, you—you cannot have [it].” 

 

Genevieve DeGuzman / Fiction / “Dark Forest”

I don’t really play favorites but I’ll list two books I’ve read this year that are really staying with me. I’m just a little obsessed with Jonathan Lethem’s latest novel, The Feral Detective. Lethem writes using the detective/hard-boiled noir template and is known for playing with the genre – distorting it, gentrifying it, remixing it – so that it feels entirely something else. This novel is a missing person demolition derby that plays out in the deserts of southern California. I’ve also been enamored with Kim Fu’s The Lost of Girls of Camp Forevermore, a book set in the Pacific Northwest where I presently live. It’s a story of how a single major life event shapes four women forever. Fu captures the psychology of young people, makes that experience of adolescence so immediate (the exhilaration, the terror), and shows how we carry those experiences of our youth with us, for better or for worse. 

 

Jeremy Tiang / Translation / “Green Vines” by Zou Jingzhi

I call many places home, but Singapore is the place where I actually grew up, and there is no better book about it than Singapore: A Biography by Mark Ravinder Frost and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow. A brisk journey through the country’s past and present, going beyond colonial and government narratives, with a great eye for detail and an abundance of fascinating asides.

 

Federico Federici / Art /  From the Series “Concrete Disassembled Poems”

I actually have a two-room home. The first room is a country whose borders do not appear on any contemporary map but whose people retain every detail of it in their lenga d’òc.. One of its bards was Barba Tòni Bodrìe from Frassino, to whom I have dedicated a couple of texts in my Dunkelwort book as well. The second room is a city still struggling with the many contradictions aroused while switching from being a divided land to being a borderless one. My favourite pages for a Berlin diary are in Durs Grünbein’s Grauzone Morgens.

 

Ekaterina Costa / Art / From the Series “Moscow Meditations”

The first book that comes to mind for me is the [original version of] Selected Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva. This 1979 nearly complete Soviet edition of the poet’s writing was a gift from my high school Russian literature teacher, the woman who really introduced me to the scope of my country’s great literary heritage. Tsvetaeva, with her sharp rhythm and poignant confessional reflection is one of the first poets who made me fall in love with language. This small book, that has seen some wear and tear, still resides on my bookshelf, with corners bent and worn on poems like “Insomnia,” “The poem of the mountain,” and “An attempt at jealousy.”

 

Robyn Pickens / Poetry / “Break-up Poem”

The Bone People (1983) by Keri Hulme which I read in the late 1990s. Even though the plot specifics have faded, the book has a presence which is still with me. It won the Booker Prize in 1985.

 

Blessing Musariri / Fiction / “The Memory Tree”

As for favourite book about Zimbabwe. This is difficult. I think I would have to pick, Sunflowers In Your Eyes: Four Zimbabwean Women Poets because it was the first international publication that featured only women poets from Zimbabwe, including myself.  Poetry is my first love and always will be. It’s my truest writing self. 

 

C.M. Lindley / Fiction / “If You Should Turn a Lemon Sweet”

I remember how heavy East of Eden felt in my hands the first time I held it, how important. With John Steinbeck, I always felt I was reading something bigger than me. Many years later, I can see why. There are few people who have been able to paint Californian’s landscape onto the page like Steinbeck. Few who have been able to engross us in the banalities of Salinas Valley, who have been able to find something threatening in central California’s openness. Few who have been able to make the ugly side of the North American West so beautiful.

 

Logan February / Poetry / “Fine I Admit I am Bitter”

My current favorite work of Nigerian literature is Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater. It is a gorgeous autobiographical novel that gives a fearful account of an unusual phenomenon which appears in Igbo mythology, and additionally explores issues of queerness and mental illness, which are themes that are underexposed in popular African literature.

 

Jason Wee / Poetry / “Pirate Radio, If There’s Still Such a Thing”

The poetry of Arthur Yap is not well-known outside of Singapore and Malaysia, but his sharp insights into the ironies and secrets of our everyday, his sly wit, his playful language are still as vital as ever. The Collected Poems of Arthur Yap (NUS Press) is the best place to discover him, and a book I keep next to my writing table.

 

Ollie Tong / Poetry / “Spine Incidental”

I’d recommend the poet R. S. Thomas. Regarding Welsh poetry, the name Dylan Thomas is ubiquitous, R.S. less so. Also, Chris Torrance, who (I believe) was born in Edinburgh where I currently live, but moved to Wales as a younger man – his long sequence The Magic Door should be consumed.

Travis Dahlke / Fiction /  “Hulls”

Gutshot is a collection of short fiction by American writer Amelia Gray. There are stories that vilify swans with gross nature facts, explain the inner workings of a Christmas themed house and explore a corn maze turned Greek labyrinth. One piece revels in characters living the fables they’ll tell their children, starting with witnessing a Dunkin Donuts burn down in a grease fire. Gray writes how the cream-filled donuts sizzle and pop, with oozing precision. It is eloquent prose about ugly things, which is in itself something very allegorical of living in America – of helplessly watching a burning Dunkin Donuts from the parking lot.