The New Renaissance – Spring 2007

tnr is truly an international journal, featuring in this issue the written work and artwork of people from over a dozen countries. Translations of poems from Bengali, Bosnian, and Spanish sit side by side with original English-language works. Among the poems, which include works by Stephen Todd Booker, Alice Jay, Luis Miguel Aguilar, and others, “This Shooting” by Bosnian writer Marko Vešovi? is particularly compelling. With his translation of Hanns Heinz Ewers’s (1871-1943 ) “Abenteuer in Hamburg,” Don Maurer also gifts Anglophones with the quirky tale of a man obsessed with using the new invention of the era – a mechanical pencil sharpener – to sharpen his cache of “723 almost complete ones, 641 halves, and 379 stumpchens.”

tnr is truly an international journal, featuring in this issue the written work and artwork of people from over a dozen countries. Translations of poems from Bengali, Bosnian, and Spanish sit side by side with original English-language works. Among the poems, which include works by Stephen Todd Booker, Alice Jay, Luis Miguel Aguilar, and others, “This Shooting” by Bosnian writer Marko Vešovi? is particularly compelling. With his translation of Hanns Heinz Ewers’s (1871-1943 ) “Abenteuer in Hamburg,” Don Maurer also gifts Anglophones with the quirky tale of a man obsessed with using the new invention of the era – a mechanical pencil sharpener – to sharpen his cache of “723 almost complete ones, 641 halves, and 379 stumpchens.” As I’m rather enamored of my electric pencil sharpener, I found this piece amusing. Nonfiction works include an article on U.S. unionism, an interview with Soviet dissident artist Boris Sveshnikov who created many ink-and-paper works while in a labor camp, and a memoir by Marc Widershien of Samuel French Morse as mentor, academic, and poet. The art section features paintings by eight Mexican artists, of whom the best known is Frida Kahlo, with a brief introduction by the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico. That the journal is printed on high-gloss paper means that readers can enjoy the vibrancy of these paintings.
[www.tnrlitmag.net/]