Brandon ShimodaÌęis the author of several books, most recentlyÌęThe Grave on the WallÌę(City Lights), which received the PEN Open Book Award,ÌęThe Desert(The Song Cave), andÌęEvening Oracle(Letter Machine Editions), which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He lives in the desert.

Ìęby Etel Adnan, translated from the French by Sarah Riggs (Nightboat)

After the smoke clears, there will be more smoke. And when that smoke clears, there will be even more smoke after that. The source of the smoke: fires, fires everywhere, some lit a long time ago, some that only just started burning. “But then when thick smoke blinds the streets, the noise cuts the heart off from the world, the thinking body gives up and finds itself on the side of decay.” That is a sentence from Etel Adnan’s Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz), a collection of epistolary travelogue-essays, and one of my favorite books—by Etel, and by anyone. Another of my favorite books is also by Etel, translated into English from the French by Sarah Riggs, and published by Nightboat Books: Time.

It feels vulgar to play favorites, but I guess that is the nature of judging for an award. There is a distinct debt that I owe to Etel Adnan and her work. I have been rescued, many times, from surrendering to the varieties of ill-temper that are easy when one’s eyes and head are overwhelmed with smoke, by Etel’s writing—by what of it has reached, through the smoke, to touch and encourage me, so kindly, yet so uncompromisingly. Maybe Etel would disagree with the ways in which her writing has been put to use—if what I am describing above is use—or even with the similarly vulgar idea that her writing, or any writing, could be appraised in such terms. And it is not as though I am always on the verge of surrender. But life is unforgiving, and reading and writing are not entirely exempt from contributing to what is unforgiving about it. What it means is that I often forget to slow myself into the forms of attention and presence that Etel’s work embodies, and that her work offers. Her writing is magnanimous. It is the best of human nature. It often takes only a single line, sometimes a single word, to bring me back to myself, and to my ability to attend to and be present in the world.

Time is comprised of six poem sequences, the first of which begins with the lines, “I say that I’m not afraid / of dying because I haven’t / yet had the experience / of death” (“October 27, 2003”). According to Sarah Riggs’s Translator’s Note, the line was written after receiving a postcard from her friend Khaled Najar, October 27, 2003. (Najar is a poet; he published one book of poetry, which was translated into English as Windows of Sand, although I am having a difficult time finding physical proof of its existence.) To repeat:

I say that I’m not afraid

of dying because I haven’t

yet had the experience

of death

“I say,” she writes, and Riggs translates, not “I’m not afraid.” And also, dying and death are not the same experience, so could it be possible that one could fear one and not the other? (In a later poem, Etel writes, “it’s more bearable to think of / death than of love,” but of course love is an entirely different, if not entirely unrelated, matter.) All six of the poem sequences were written during the first decade of the 21^st century, and there is something significant about that—about the example, and the image, of Etel Adnan reestablishing and sharpening, on the edge of the new millennium, her acute and longstanding form of witness. One of the many results of that sharpening, is the continuous revelation of the generosity of her witness—of what and how she sees, and of how thoroughly she shares what and how she sees with everyone with whom she comes into contact.

Sarah Riggs also writes, in her Translator’s Notes, about how, while reading “Le 27 Octobre 2003” in a cafĂ© in Paris, she realized she wanted to translate it into English. She asked Etel if she might want to translate the poem herself. Riggs writes: “Etel responded very simply and enthusiastically as is her way, ‘I’d rather you did it.’” Etel is generous, yes, but she also knows. Riggs has published five collections of her own poetry, and has translated, in addition to Time, five collections of contemporary French poetry. The accumulation of this work has generated a voice that is the most crystalline and brilliant and seamless guide to the evolving, transformative voice of poetry. I have come to believe, through Riggs’s work, that translation is touch. Meanwhile, check out this perhaps unintentional moment of sly intimacy from page 50:

time can’t be translated

your voice in my veins

Truth be told, I find it difficult, sometimes impossible, to write about work that means so much to me. It can feel superfluous, when not denuding, but I understand the need to advocate for something in the chance that it might reach, by some hard-won miracle, that particular person—that person out there, i.e. you, or even you. When I first started writing this appreciation of Time, I meant to write, “After the smoke clears, there will remain, as powerful as ever, the poetry of Etel Adnan.” She is, to paraphrase her words—from her short story, “The Master of the Eclipse”—one of our most important and persistent contemplatives of the ongoing apocalypse. I have to admit: I have not read the Bible. And yet despite every indication that now might be a good time to start, it is doubtful I am going to read it, because I already have access to the profound weight and ever-giving benefaction of another more relevant body of literature. Time is the latest entrant into what I consider, in fact, to be one of the most important bodies of work ever produced. Not in this or last century, but ever.

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Pretty good overview, and when he puts it like this, it really does seem like our industry is totally back-asswards:

Publishing has deeper, more systemic problems, like the fact that its business model evolved during an earlier fiscal era. It’s an antique, a financial coelacanth that dates back to the Depression.

Consider the advance system, whereby a publisher pays an author a nonreturnable up-front fee for a book. If the book doesn’t “earn out,” in the industry parlance, the publisher simply eats the cost. Another example: publishers sell books to bookstores on a consignment system, which means the stores can return unsold books to publishers for a full refund. Publishers suck up the shipping costs both ways, plus the expense of printing and then pulping the merchandise. “They print way more than they know they can sell, to kind of create a buzz, and then they end up taking half those books back,” says Sara Nelson, editor in chief of PW. These systems were created to shift risk away from authors and bookstores and onto publishers. But risk is something the publishing industry is less and less able to bear.

If you think about it, shipping physical books back and forth across the country is starting to seem pretty 20th century.

I swear, the only ones who really wins in this game are UPS and FedEx. It’s not like stores make money by paying someone to order too many books and then pull them from the shelves and ship them back, and it certainly doesn’t help publishers or authors . . .

There’s a lot more that can be said about what’s wrong with the current model, but Lev goes one step further and paints a picture of what the “new publishing” will look like:

In theory, publishers are gatekeepers: they filter literature so that only the best writing gets into print. But Genova and Barry and Suarez got filtered out, initially, which suggests that there are cultural sectors that conventional publishing isn’t serving. We can read in the rise of self-publishing not only a technological revolution but also a quiet cultural one—an audience rising up to claim its right to act as a tastemaker too.

So if the economic and technological changes of the 18th century gave rise to the modern novel, what’s the 21st century giving us? Well, we’ve gone from industrialized printing to electronic replication so cheap, fast and easy, it greases the skids of literary production to the point of frictionlessness. From a modern capitalist marketplace, we’ve moved to a postmodern, postcapitalist bazaar where money is increasingly optional. And in place of a newly minted literate middle class, we now have a global audience of billions, with a literacy rate of 82% and rising.

Put these pieces together, and the picture begins to resolve itself: more books, written and read by more people, often for little or no money, circulating in a wild diversity of forms, both physical and electronic, far outside the charmed circle of New York City’s entrenched publishing culture. Old Publishing is stately, quality-controlled and relatively expensive. New Publishing is cheap, promiscuous and unconstrained by paper, money or institutional taste. If Old Publishing is, say, a tidy, well-maintained orchard, New Publishing is a riotous jungle: vast and trackless and chaotic, full of exquisite orchids and undiscovered treasures and a hell of a lot of noxious weeds.

There’s more to this issue that I could possibly unpack in a paragraph, but it seems to me that the publishers most well suited to this sort of “riotous jungle” are the ones that have a particular vision, that inspire public trust, and that are most interactive with their readers. More crassly put—the publishers that have a strong brand. Which is funny since for years publishers have been claiming that books don’t work this way, that there isn’t a brand awareness or allegiance among readers. (And there probably isn’t when you’re talking about wide-and-low general publishers.)

This also represents the sort of paradigm shift that Richard Nash likes to talk about—that publisher need to evolve from the current business-to-business model to a business-to-consumer model. I think that concept is at the heart of what’s going on in publishing these days, and although I don’t think publishing or reading or books will ever end, it’s easy to envision a time in which book culture has evolved in a way that’s not exactly like Lev’s vision, but is much more in that direction than how things function now.