Discussion Questions for The Last Tortilla and Other Stories (original) (raw)
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2015
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Imagine the perplexity of a man outside time and space, who has lost his watch, and his measuring rod, and his tuning fork. (Jarry Doctor Faustroll 248)
Common Roots Memory, Myth, and Legend in 20th-Century Chinese and Latin American Literature
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Translanguaging in Latino/a Literature: A Guide for Educators
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Though on first appearance somewhat uncharacteristic of Velimir Khlebnikov’s work—he is primarily associated with Zaum and Russian futurism—in its brilliant simplicity, “Hunger” is representative of his frequent use of a folk-naïve style. !is particular poem is charged with a pathos that eerily presages Khlebnikov›s own death: weakened by a period of starvation, Khlebnikov died of infection on June ,-, +/,,, the year after “Hunger” was written. !e deceptively simple music of the original reveals an intricate design for the ear: “$%&'( )'*+&,- ./ 010+2'3 0+45” (budet sevodnya iz babochek borsch; “Today there will be broth out of moths.”) “… 67+(4-( 0+89:.7. *81/17., / 6;-(<7. +( *+8+&1” (Smotryat bol’shimi glazami, Svyatyme ot goloda; “!ey stare eyes wide open, / Made saintly by hunger.”) !e poem’s breathlessness and staggered alliteration reproduce the physical frothiness and salivation that accompany starvation. !e list of the forest’s inhabitants in lines +, through ,4 represent a virtual Noah’s Ark of potential sources of nourishment. As it did in Eden, the act of naming implies a mastery that produces, through the magic of attraction, if not a real then an imagined possession of the object. But in “Hunger” this naming functions as a perversion of Eden; it is not difficult to read in the pleasure Khlebnikov takes in the shapes of the vowels in the mouth his own, very real, hunger. In Russian, the sound-sense of verse that is fully accomplished is said to be written “deliciously” (vkusno.) I can only hope I managed to transmute some of this magic into the sounds of the English counterpart. !e poem was Orst published posthumously, in the anthology =41),1- ,+;9 (“The Red New”: +/,5, > -, p. +-+) under the title “?+2'7%?” (“Why?”) the present title (“@+8+&”/“Golod”) is taken from a notebook variant, originally composed in Pyatigorsk, upon Khlebnikov’s return, Orst to Baku and then to the Caucuses, from Persia, where he had spent the previous summer as an attaché of the Red Army’s command on its “march on Tehran.” In the context of this poem, Khlebnikov later wrote in 1922 mentioning the efforts of Fridtjof Nansen, one of the organizers of international aide for the victims of the Volga region famine: “A world revolution requires a world conscience.”