HR 44 Editorial

The first piece I chose for this issue was an essay on walking—or perhaps on islands, or maybe on Romanticism—by Kevin McGrath. It is called “Walking to Windward” and is set on an island in the Lesser Antilles. Because it was accepted some time ago, I’ve had a chance to  re-read it at intervals, and this has reminded me just how contextually dependent the experience of reading is.  

The first time I read McGrath’s essay, I was moved by the contemplative spirit of the piece and by its vivid descriptions of a place I was never likely to see but that was like some other places—other islands—I had been to. The second time I read it, thinking about line editing this time, I felt vaguely impatient and wondered if it were too contemplative, too slow, maybe even too wordy. I didn’t have time to edit it just then, however, so once again I put it down. Time passed and, with a deadline approaching, I read McGrath’s essay for a third time. This time I was so struck by the elegance of the prose, its rhythmical coherence, its deliberate tempo, that I wondered what had happened in the interim to make me experience the writing in such different ways. 

At the time I was listening to an audiobook of Middlemarch, and, as anyone who has read this book knows, there is no one so brilliantly circumlocutory as George Eliot. Her vocabulary, her syntax, her stately pace are so unlike anything one comes across these days that it’s almost like reading (or listening to) a foreign language, certainly like a voice from a distant world. The third time I re-read “Walking to Windward” it was with the sound of this very different language in my ears, and this,  I think, is why I caught the echoes I had missed before.  

At the opposite end of the spectrum—in terms of reference and sound—is Erin Glass’s funny poem, “The Nanny,” in which the speaker’s mother calls to say that “Arnold Schwarzenegger has confessed to taking the skin boat to tuna town with the Nanny.” Or that “Arnold Schwarzenegger has confessed to having a bit of summer cabbage with the Nanny.” Or that “Arnold Schwarzenegger has confessed to doing the mommy-daddy dance with the Nanny.” “‘Don’t get a bee in your pocket about it,’ she says before hanging up.” 

Or, at a somewhat more complex level, Linda Bamber’s marvelous “Cleopatra and Antony,” a witty, innovative retelling of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, along with exegesis, history, and jokes. Bamber,  who is a professor of English, knows her Shakespeare, but the real brilliance of the piece is the way it combines the language of the play itself—O, whither hast thou led me, Egypt?—with Bamber’s own street smart lingo—Sweet queen, my ass—the two voices, the high and the low, the antique and the contemporary, mock and mirror each other in clever and entertaining ways.

While a lot of literary journals pride themselves in fostering a particular kind of voice, we at Harvard Review have always tried to mix it up, so that the wisdom of an Edith Pearlman can butt up against the eclecticism of a Timothy Donnelly. In order to achieve this, we rely heavily on the help of our genre editors and with this issue we would like to announce the appointment of a new fiction editor, the novelist Suzanne Berne. Our deepest thanks go to Nam Le for his generous assistance over the past five years.