Blue
2013; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 87; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wlt.2013.0046
ISSN1945-8134
Autores Resumo46 worldliteraturetoday.org nearly a hundred. Add that to her base pay and the bonus for every appointment booked, and it’s close to €1,000. Obviously, there are gals here who barely take home €350 a month for their four hours a day, but if anyone dared to bring it up, I imagine the response would be that the fault was theirs and not Kirby’s. In other words, if you earn a lot, the reason is our generosity in rewarding winners ; if you earn a little, it’s your fault because you’re a loser. The best moment was when they interviewed the newest phone rep, one of ten who arrived the month after me. “So how are things going, Penny?” “Good, I think. I mean, I’ve only been here two days. But people told me such awful things about this place. . . .” “Really? Do you know someone who used to work here?” “Yes . . . for three months.” “I don’t want to know her name.” (I’ll bet you don’t. Two hundred of these women have passed through here in the last year; you wouldn’t remember her anyway.) “But my guess is that now she doesn’t have a job or, if she does, she’s working as a cashier or a waitress, because people like that don’t have any real desire to work. When they turn forty, they’re still figuring out what they want to do in life.” See what I mean, Pretty Penny? If your friend beat it out of here after three months, it’s because she was a loser in a job that’s meant for winners. Now that she’s quit telephone salestitution, she’s surely doing something degrading like being a waitress or a cashier or, why not say it, a whore. If this really were a religion, at this point I bet we’d be talking about heresy and excommunication. If the women who witnessed this surreal conversation fell for the entire act, it goes without saying that a future as a cashier would mean shipwrecking the entire project of female selfactualization and that the prospect of a waitressing job would constitute professional disgrace in its most concrete form. A little less so, maybe, for anyone who ends up a whore. That’s a job you can really put your heart into. Translation from the Italian By Wendell Ricketts Michela Murgia (www. michelamurgia.com) was born in 1972 in Cabras and is currently a ProgRes candidate in regional elections in Sardinia. She has published six books, including Il mondo deve sapere, a tragicomic novel of life as a telemarketer, which inspired the Paolo Virzì film Tutta la vita davanti. Murgia has won numerous literary prizes, such as the 2010 Premio Campiello for Accabadora (2009). In 2012 she co-founded the Sardinian cultural foundation Lìberos. Wendell Ricketts is the editor of Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men about More-or-Less Gay Life, and his fiction has appeared in Mississippi Review, Salt Hill, Blue Mesa Review, and The Long Story, among others. He holds a degree in creative writing from the University of New Mexico and has worked as a translator from Italian since 1998; his translation of the plays of Natalia Ginzburg, The Wrong Door, was published by the University of Toronto Press. Blue Zheng Xiaoqiong A small blue cloud hangs in the sky, leaning toward peace A little blue flame reaches the furnace, thoughtfully A night blue appears on a sheet of iron, a blueprint, full of grease The machines thundering blue, let something slip A tranquil blue is another side of the Dagong living A sliver of blue opens in someone’s love Like fire, on the hammer’s iron sheet – its blue Like a flower, opening on a pear tree outside – its blue His secret colors remain so distant In the lychee forest, white birds call out Last year’s flowers are all blue in my eyes Wavering, blue welding flames, their bodies Sway back and forth, my obscure thoughts and clear feelings Grow, a small piece of blue inside love A quiet blue is on the other...
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