Asymptote Reviews Etel Adnan's Time

Catalan American essayist, poet, academic, and translator Emma Gomis has reviewed Etel Adnan's Time, translated by Sarah Riggs and published by Nightboat in 2019, for Asymptote. "I pored over the book six times," writes Gomis. "[I]t was the suspended and atemporal space of an airplane that felt most akin to the setting of Adnan’s text, in which we are not anchored to geography, nor to a past or present, but instead meander through a nonplace of nonlinear time." Read on:

Time brings together a series of poems that were originally written in French starting in 2003 and that were later translated into Arabic, before appearing now in English. The collection was initially provoked by a postcard sent to Adnan by the Tunisian artist Khaled Najar, whom she had met in the late seventies. True to the postcard’s gestures of traveling across territories, the text is in constant movement, spanning a vast historical and geographic reach. Adnan is from many places, and in the text they shift. Her mother’s native Greece and her own time spent in Lebanon, Paris, and California all merge together:

“There’s a temple in Baalbeck dedicated to Bacchus, and in Bolinas a Night Palace that Joanne Kyger protects with her poems under our footsteps a ghost rises and instantly disappears because our countries keep going up in smoke.”

(from “Baalbeck”)

Places disappear as they smolder, and we acknowledge the atemporal as a ghost makes a cameo in the realm of the living. Joanne Kyger, the experimental poet often associated with the Beat Generation, is juxtaposed with Bacchus, as if to signify a mixing of lineages and histories. Throughout the text, concepts oscillate between a process of dissolution and one that resolidifies, the words turning inward even as they spin out. Adnan then further accentuates this cyclical movement by invoking the process of respiration...

The full review is up now at Asymptote.