Oberlin Creative Writing Professors Sylvia Watanabe and David Young shared a strikingly unusual reading Sunday night in the FAVA gallery. Young read translations from Italy in the 14th century, while Watanabe’s novel is set in 20th century Ohio and Hawai’i.

Young read from The Poetry of Petrarch, a translation from Italian of Petrarch’s Canzonieri that came out this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This is a love-lorn, life-long poetry cycle that revolves around a woman named Laura as, to quote Young, “the still center of his turning world.”

Young started his finely-acted reading by calling on people in the audience by name to choose numbers: “I have a proble; there are 366 poems in this book and you’re going to have to help me decide which ones to read.” As he read the six randomly-chosen poems, he explained their relationship to the rest of the cycle, letting his audience into the world of Petrarch’s obsession and Young’s own understanding of its meaning in the poet’s life.

Young interrupted himself often during the reading to tell the audience what was going on in the poem; when he finished one he reflected on how it related to the other poems: a complaining one, an exultant one. Young burrowed deep inside Petrarch’s struggles, the connections he makes with everything from rivers to politics back to Laura. But Young also let his audience into the humor and complaint of them, illuminating the complex relationship of a translator to the narrator of the poems he or she translates.

The last person to pick a random number was a plant, so that Young could finish on a fitting note. This final poem presents a common medieval situation of two speakers in argument being judged. Here the face-off is Petrarch versus the god of love, each arguing why the other should be held guilty, with Reason presiding.

Love argues that through his torments he gave Petrarch “fame, raising his intellect and mind to heights they never could have managed on their own. I helped him rise so high that there among a thousand brilliant wits his name shines bright and many people make collections of his poems, otherwise he would have been a hoarse and mumbling courtier, lost among the mob.” This is a moment of poetic self-consciousness that was enriched by its contemporary translation and by Young’s expressive voice and acting.

Watanabe read three excerpts from her novel in a clear and graceful voice. She has read from this novel in Ann Arbor, Mich., but this was her first reading in Oberlin since she first arrived here to teach nine years ago.

Watanabe read from her forthcoming novel which will be published by Graywolf Press in spring 2005. It surrounds a biracial family in two places at two times. Like Young, Watanabe was generous in her transitions from piece to piece with her smooth, unaffected reading. Rather than stepping humorously away from her text and involving her audience, however, she remained inside of the words, reading pieces that were both layered and accessible.

Watanabe’s novel was well-served by being read out loud; it was apparent even in the small bits she read that Watanabe makes fluid and complicated meaning out of objects. Her language is so visually specific that it is easy to see her stories and scenes even as the language passes quickly aloud. As former Creative Writing Professor Stuart Friebert pointed out in his introduction, the rhythm of language and of human behavior are deeply realized in her writing.

These rhythms emerge from the quotidian. For example, the narrator describes the entries for her parents’ races on her birth certificate without telling what to make of this. Gender and race and geography intersect in these sensual descriptions, making different and complicated sense of each other without didactic layers of explication.

There is nothing simple here, but it makes for very easy listening. The narrator tells a precise story about the histories and instructions she is given by her family. Trees and food and news resonate and make new meaning of each other across geographies: “My mother did not tell me stories. She read me the news. She read about a place in England where each year it rained green beans in the summertime. She read about a woman in New Mexico who discovered Jesus’ face in a tortilla and a famous poet who wrote a poem about this. She read about a dog in Russia swallowed by a giant sturgeon which was then fished from the river and split open. The dog, released, was quite itself again.”

The reading was the final part in the Main Street Reading Series, organized by Margaret Young, who hosts local and visiting writers at the FAVA at 8 p.m. on Sunday nights. This Sunday’s readers agreed that the series had been very successful. David Young likes the diverse audience it attracts; Watanabe said that “having that series really livens up the literary life in Oberlin, gives one the sense of a literary community that extends outside the College.”