ESSAY DAILY

2020 Advent Calendar: Dec 9, Genia Blum

Found in "Found, Again" by Renée E. D’Aoust: a Reflection

"Don’t come to my funeral," my father once told me, hoping, perhaps, that I would. "If you drink, don’t drive," he cautioned, not heeding his own advice. But I would never learn to drive, despite the free lessons offered in high school—all you had to do was sign up. I wasn’t interested in anything practical, only ballet and art, and the books I hauled home every week from the public library, six at a time, to read all night beneath the comforter, under the yellow radiance of a cheap flashlight.

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SOLSTICE LITERARY MAGAZINE

An Interview with Genia Blum

By Dzvinia Orlowsky

When I first decided to write a memoir, I didn’t have a clear idea of where it would take me, so nothing really surprised me, except maybe the discovery of certain facts about my family, and a few about myself. I also never expected to become an essayist. In the last three years, adapting chapters into self-contained stories, pulling short essays from long ones, and composing even shorter flash nonfiction pieces, I produced enough words to fill a tome.

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QUEEN MOB’S TEA HOUSE

Vlad Interviews: Genia and Daria Blum 

By Vlad Savich

Ballet has a specific vocabulary and is governed by its own precise grammar and syntax, the underlying technique that defines how a trained dancer’s body must move. A strong and correct technique is the foundation of classical dance, and the names of its steps and positions—terms like tendu, grand jeté, arabesque—are understood by dancers all over the world. Joined together, these form the sentences and paragraphs of a choreography, which is guided and anchored by music.

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ASYMPTOTE JOURNAL

Hopin': Nine Excerpts

Translator's Note

In 2018, I asked the Swiss poet and author Pablo Haller to recommend “something wonderful and exciting by a contemporary Austrian author, preferably female, TCK (third culture kid), or from the LGBT community.” Haller, a member of the programming committees for woerdz – Das Spoken Word Festival and Solothurner Literaturtage in Switzerland, had recently attended BookBasel, where Puneh Ansari had read from her first book, Hoffnun’, published by mikrotext (Berlin). At his urging, I downloaded the digital version and after delving into its alternatively lyrical and staccato-paced texts, was so captivated by Ansari’s voice that I ordered several print copies, excited to share my discovery with friends.

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ASYMPTOTE JOURNAL

from About Mountains, Humans, and Especially Mountain Snails

Translator's Note

As a longtime resident of famously neutral Switzerland, I am familiar with its gravitas and was delighted to come across Anaïs Meier’s Über Berge, Menschen und insbesondere Bergschnecken, a collection of humorous short stories in which the Swiss author disproves the prejudice that Swiss humor emerges only under exceptional circumstances; in farces mounted by village theater groups or in high-proof buffoonery during carnival time. Poking fun at the earnest self-image of her fellow citizens, Meier subverts the Swiss traits of understatement and self-deprecation through the use of a sparse vocabulary and precise phrasing, and succeeds in gently, yet ruthlessly, ridiculing the conventional concept of Swissness.

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HUNGER MOUNTAIN REVIEW

Penguins, Puberty, and Other Problems: Short Excerpts From Hopin'

Translator's Note

The liberties Ansari has taken with language complicated my research, especially into misspelled Austrian vernacular and, particularly, obscure Viennese slang. Finding suitably “wrong” English proxies added to a feeling that I was amusing myself, passing time with impenetrable riddles, even though some equivalents were simple enough to determine—in order to convey the irritation caused by a disregard for the German convention of capitalizing all nouns, I’ve mixed up a number of upper- and lowercase first letters of proper and non-proper nouns in my English translation.

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