The Paris Review – Redux: Pulling Away the Greenery

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating the launch of the Spring issue by featuring a few contributors who have appeared in previous issues of the magazine. Read on for Anne Carson’s Art of Poetry interview, Allan Gurganus’s short story “Art History (From An Only Modestly Good Translation),” and Forrest Gander’s poem “Body Visible.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

Anne Carson, The Art of Poetry No. 88
Issue no. 171 (Fall 2004)

One thing I do understand about the Greeks is that they, too, understood otherness and valued it. That is what the god Dionysus is as a principle—the principle of being up against something so other that it bounces you out of yourself to a place where, nonetheless, you are still in yourself; there’s a connection to yourself as another. It’s what they call ecstasy.

Photo: Marjory Collins. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Art History (From An Only Modestly Good Translation)
By Allan Gurganus
Issue no. 85 (Fall 1982)

In the shady northeast corner of the park, where vines have overcome the water fountains, and evergreens grow, rangy and unkempt as in the depths of Vronsky Forest, I came upon two children doing something very naughty. I had wandered to this most rustic corner of the Common seeking quietude and relief from the dogs recently permitted by a foolish ordinance to run free without leashes in the park. Their barking had annoyed me, a man of modest but fixed habits, and I strolled in this new direction.

Illustration: Christopher Dresser. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Body Visible
By Forrest Gander
Issue no. 198 (Fall 2011)

Then he deflowers her, pulling away the greenery.
Then a blue vein thinning into a hollow.
Then it is the hollow between her neck and lower jaw.
Then spaced ligaments twitching in his forearm.
Then connected in lightlessness, they are.
Then by an invisible capillary network …

And to read more from the Paris Review archives, make sure to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives. And join us on Thursday, March 11, for an evening of readings from the Spring issue.