Ever since storytelling began around a primordial fire, words have consoled. When COVID-19 pushed the globe’s Reset button, Ilan Stavans kindled a blaze around which notable word people around the planet gathered to tell stories of a Scared New World. Publisher of Restless Books, Stavans is also a professor of humanities and Latino culture at Amherst College, as well as a translator, editor, critic, and author.
Fifty-two contributors provided poems, essays, fiction, reports, letters, allegories, parables, discourses, memoir, and reportage, including photos and artwork. Stavans assembled them into a 400-page book: And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again, from the last line of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. That 14th-century poem, first of three in The Divine Comedy, precedes Purgatorio and Paradiso. As Inferno ends, Dante and his guide, the ancient Roman poet Virgil, ascend from the depths of hell and see points of light in the night sky — beacons of optimism. Stavans employs Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1867 translation as an epigraph:
The Guide and I into that hidden road
Now entered, to return to the bright world;
And without care of having any rest
We mounted up, he first and I the second,
Till I beheld through a round aperture
Some of the beauteous things that Heaven doth bear;
Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.
Framing a coronavirus anthology with hope amid the hellacious upheaval we’re in demands some imagination. Stavans invokes the modern-day muses, petitioning them from 35 countries across our global village to tell this tale of universal distress. Together they create a Covid compendium of cultural criticism.
Five sections maintain the theme through other Inferno lines. “A Mighty Flame Follows a Tiny Spark” establishes the plague’s eruption. “The Path to Paradise Begins in Hell” calls for a road map. “I’m Not Alone in Misery” demonstrates a worldwide community of empathy. “Faith Is the Substance of Things Hoped for” clings to expectation. And finally, “Love Insists the Loved Loves Back” believes metaphorically that stars will light our paths once again.
Stavans weaves a cross-cultural kinship with a common thread: words. Twenty-two translators (conduits to Stavans) tackled over a dozen languages. Written from March to June 2020, these rich perspectives arrived from Mauritius, Mexico, Madrid, Massachusetts, and Missouri, as well as New Jersey, New York, and Nigeria. Words streamed in from Chile, Canada, California, Copenhagen, and Cuba. It was as though a dam of expression had burst: work arrived from London, Kazakhstan, Virginia, Hungary, Poland, Argentina, Paris, Oxford, Taiwan, Russia, Uzbekistan, Haiti, Dublin, Tel Aviv, India, Italy, Spain. Contributors include Jhumpa Lahiri, Mario Vargas Llosa, Daniel Alarcón, Ariel Dorfman, Rivka Galchen, Daniel Halpern, Jane Hirshfield, Forrest Gander, Matthew Zapruder, Eavan Boland, Carlos Fonseca, and Claire Messud.
Essay topics vary from “the new boat people” quarantined on cruise ships to the revival of literature “in these times of collective fear.” They acknowledge liking “the peaceful quiet better when it was voluntary,” wonder whether social distancing is “a permanent feature of our lives,” observe “the days melt into one another,” and underscore how Covid-19 confirms a social and economic system that “punishes the poor and helps the prosperous to thrive.”
Science-fiction writer and heavy metal band singer Yoss, going “full ostrich” in Cuba, offers a fine 13-page essay, “This, Too, Shall Pass,” describing 2020 as “our Year of Living Dangerously.”
One short story likens Coronavirus to “a ravenous zombie” while another connects it to ecological disaster. They address confinement, police violence, racism, and the “war language” of totalitarianism. Several engage time: “Journal of the Kairos” and “Plague Days.” Others feature nonhuman characters: monk crabs and the stormy petrel. A parable suggests: “imagination is what is getting us through.” One protagonist is a new doctor facing Coronavirus in a long shift.
A Spanish-Argentine poet transcribes Covid-19’s genesis, thanking Stavans for his foresight in pulling everyone together so early. Titles convey emotions: “The Intrusion,” “Today, When I Could Do Nothing,” and “Not Without.” Poetry professor Rajiv Mohabir meditates in 18 pages of photos. A Turkish poet calls reading “another portal out of the present reality, as well as a deepening of it.” “Quarantine,” about the mid 19-century Irish famine by poet Eavan Boland, is poignant. She died in Dublin during Covid-19. Her final collection, The Historians, is due out October 13 from W.W. Norton.
Costa Rican author Carlos Fonseca in London thinks “Empty Days” have “made evident the world in which we were already living.” Claire Messud in Massachusetts notices “the beautiful minutiae” during life in hiatus, while Tel Aviv novelist Yishai Sarid writes “The Day After the Plague” as a bouquet to his wife, an ER doctor. In India, Arshia Sattar, quarantining with her aged mother, self-isolates in her old bedroom to reminisce about her younger self.
Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon in Paris views his current role not as a writer but rather as a father, “making sure my three-year-old son sees this new reality as if it were some kind of adventure.”
Grace Talusan survives in Boston “amid whatever hand you’re dealt.” From Paris, Hubert Haddad of Tunisia compares his current quarantine with his ICU time in a maximum security, zero-tolerance prison. Sudanese artist Khalid Albaih, caught in Copenhagen during Covid-19, notices First World countries experiencing what “billions of Brown and Black people around the world” have long known: “restriction, repression, and deprivation.”
In “The Age of Calamity,” a dialogue with Jon Lee Anderson in Dorset, England, Stavans in Amherst comments, “The future will remember how we acted.” Peruvian writer Gabriela Wiener’s “Chronicle from the Vortex of a Global Tragedy” from Spain moved me through her description of a family of five contracting the virus one by one.
On May 9, Frederika Randall wrote of birds during the lockdown in Central Rome, where she died three days later. Stavans honors her on the Restless Books website. https://restlessbooks.org/blog/tribute-to-frederika-randall Before she died, Randall translated the piece by Italian writer Giacomo Sartori, focusing on the plusses of his Paris seclusion compared to the real isolation he once experienced in the Foreign Legion headquarters of an African city. The anthology culminates with Sartori’s comment as the perfect calming bookend: “For the moment, I will savor my solitude — cultivate my garden.”
[Left: Ilan Stavans] At the behest of a microscopic virus, we realize the world will never return to “normal,” and that we don’t want it to: knees to Black necks, a leadership vacuum, economic inequality, arms out of control, a digital divide, global warming, walls as barricades to humanity.
Sailing any volume to print in just half a year is a stunning feat. Stavans pays homage to his staff — the seven-year-old independent nonprofit press lives up to its name. Restless Books https://restlessbooks.org is an international publisher “for a world in motion,” with a “hunger for new perspectives, passion for other cultures and languages, and eagerness to explore beyond the confines of the familiar.”
The anthology is a prism reflecting outrage, fear, bewilderment — and yes, even small joys, such as cleaner air with fewer cars on the streets. It’s left to the arts to make sense of this scourge through eloquence. Ilan Stavans conducts here what one contributor calls “a symphony of voices.” They sing of our despair while beseeching assurance.
In his poignant 1968 lyrics to “One Hundred Years from Now,” songwriter Gram Parsons wondered whether people would “still feel this way” a century in the future. Perhaps, in 2120, earthlings will open And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again as a time capsule, to read of their ancestors struggling to survive a year none of them ever imagined
[Published by Restless Books on August 25, 2020, 400 pages, $22.00 paperback, $5.99 eBook. A portion of proceeds will go to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, which gives financial support to booksellers in crisis. To purchase from Bookshop.org, click here.]