Two Lines 24
Spring 2016
Out of Print
And then she doesn’t want to see anything or think anything anymore. She closes her eyes and leans on the glass of the balcony door and with her eyes closed listens to the darkness of the house spreading itself around her and listens to the heartless hum of cars down below in the street.
—from “Something Will Happen, You’ll See” by Christos Ikonomou, translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich
Choosing is the problem. It’s impossible for any issue to be representative, capturing all cultures, histories, and languages, even though we work with every issue to bring more voices into Two Lines. But we have to choose, whether that choice is toward balance, or toward our aesthetic, or even, sometimes, pointedly against our aesthetic. We choose not to fill issues only with what we think will feel familiar to our American audience, but we also recognize that it’s those same familiarities that let us (all of us) decide if we like something or not. —CJ EVANS
Table of Contents
Fiction
Poetry
field poppy | koi | beetcounter | pieter codde: portrait of a man with watch
By Jan Wagner
Translated from German by David Keplinger
Classical Ode to V. V. Mayakovsky | "Fire-breathing beast, fumes wreathing your figure..."
By Maxim Amelin
Translated from Russian by Derek Mong and Anne O. Fisher
"Don't take a last breath—nothing to breathe here..." | "Wavy white lines..." | "Wind in the room. rain..." | "Fulfilling a program for the rest of life..."
Translated from Russian by J. Kates
Poemínimos
Translated from Spanish by Jerome Rothenberg
A Fable | The Jungle | Portrait of a Dog
Translated from Japanese by Eric Selland
Last Words
Translated from Vietnamese by Martha Collins and Nguyen Ba Chung
Essay
And Thirst
By Jeffrey Yang