Published in Overland Issue 208 Spring 2012 · Main Posts Old Europe (2) Adam Aitken You don’t need to queue at the entrance but then so dark your captions now unreadable since the children left. Come dine with me in a dead café. Let’s dance in my old Turkish residence lined with uncut books where a cigar accords with taste and the chocolatier snores. You may need to sidestep the urine. Rémy flew home in a djellaba the armless no glory veteran the pigeons don’t bother with the bread the accordion’s sellotaped to wheeze a tune. The Romanies sell puppies to lovesick tourists but the light is what we dream, Saron’s scything searchlight, the Eiffel Tower a blingy earring on the ear of Europa. In the courtyard of a hôtel particulier she showed me the seventeenth century rainwashed and dishabille with a horse in harness and a Russian lover who won’t spy for money or love. A warning: the shih tzu twins are locked in patrolling my millionaire terrace, the road a crime scene below, a day-for-night with Citroen and café shoot-out. You might have to step over the body. I only come here for a summer for language, macaroons, delicious cod. Good thing Cheryl got the handbag she wanted she’s so persistent we filmed it. Adam Aitken Adam Aitken has published four main collections of poetry and other pamphlets. His latest is Eighth Habitation (Giramondo Publishing). He teaches at the University of Technology, Sydney. More by Adam Aitken Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays First published in Overland Issue 228 25 May 202326 May 2023 · Main Posts The ‘Chinese question’ and colonial capitalism in New Gold Mountain Christy Tan SBS’s New Gold Mountain sets out to recover the history of the Gold Rush from the marginalised perspective of Chinese settlers but instead reinforces the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty. Although celebrated for its multilingual script and diverse representation, the mini-TV series ignores how the settlement of Chinese migrants and their recruitment into colonial capitalism consolidates the ongoing displacement of First Nations peoples. First published in Overland Issue 228 15 February 202322 February 2023 · Main Posts Self-translation and bilingual writing as a transnational writer in the age of machine translation Ouyang Yu To cut a long story short, it all boils down to the need to go as far away from oneself as possible before one realizes another need to come back to reclaim what has been lost in the process while tying the knot of the opposite ends and merging them into a new transformation.