Pakistan | Short Fiction | Urdu
October, 2009Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-55) is perhaps the best-known Modernist fiction writer in South Asia. His stories won him censure during his lifetime, including five trials for writing obscene material (in each instance he was acquitted). Since his death, his fiction has been widely cited by South Asian writers and his border stories have been used in classrooms to help students come to some understanding of the atrocities that took place during the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. His stories that take place in Bombay offer another view of the times—full of the characters of pulp fiction, they depict a seedy world of opportunity, ambiguous morals, and cosmopolitan energy. His evocative use of the colloquial (and swear words), as well as his often abrupt and ambiguous conclusions, can be seen as attempts to destabilize the prim sense of morality that dominated the subcontinent’s social sphere during his lifetime.
Argentina | Novel (Excerpts) | Spanish
October, 2009Ursula’s Dream is a multi-layered construction, a coded journey that redefines the rules of the epic genre. Any outline of the plot would be misleading, since María Negroni’s method is to question the distinction between dream or vision and historical, fictional, and legendary reality, while refusing to respect the limits of chronology. The medieval histories of Ursula that inspired this thoroughly contemporary novel recount the life of a young woman near the end of the first millennium. Heiress to the throne of Cornwall, in order to escape immediate marriage to a suitor and on the advice of an angel, she lays down three conditions: that her suitor be baptized, that she be supplied with eleven ships and eleven maidens to command them, and that she be given three years to make a pilgrimage to Rome. Ursula—according to the many surviving versions of her life—made the pilgrimage with her companions and was killed before her return. Accounts of her death differ; perhaps she died at the hands of Attila the Hun, perhaps her vengeful suitor pursued and killed her.
On the whole, the novel follows these legendary events, depicting Ursula’s youth at the court of Cornwall and the arrival of the suitor’s messengers, then introducing her companions and narrating the progress of their journey while incorporating the characters—from bishops to minnesingers—that they meet along the way. There are debates, crises, and defections among the women, a plot of sorts. Yet the question of Ursula’s death remains unresolved. The larger action of the novel takes place out of time, as Ursula’s Dream continually departs from the linear, through apparitions and presentiments, embodying figures from other realms of reality: some who died before the pilgrimage began and others who were to live—and write—of her in future centuries.
Expressing the polyphony of inner life through female voices, the novel reveals the depth and risk of feminine experience in a world controlled by patriarchal institutions. Its concerns are millenary: the confrontation with death, time, love, historical circumstances, and destiny. In endowing them with a contemporary perspective, Ursula’s Dream rediscovers for its readers the spiritual quest that gives a deeper meaning to the epic gesture.
Arabic | Kuwait | Short Fiction
October, 2009The narrator of the short story “Behind a Latched Window” is a female school assistant in Kuwait. She describes her experiences during Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait (August 2, 1990 to February 26, 1991) from behind her latched window. While trying to calm her elderly mother, the terrified narrator observes the arrival of Iraqi tanks and soldiers in front of her house. Although at first she finds fault with her fellow citizens for not putting up a fight, she herself, despite her conservative social views, finds herself becoming part of a vibrant Kuwaiti resistance movement. The hallucinatory ending may reflect dramatic events outside her window or inside her own mind.
Arabic | Novella (Excerpts) | United Arab Emirates
October, 2009The narrator of the novella The Diesel explains that being raped in a mosque when he was fifteen forced him to confront troublesome questions about his authentic gender early in life. When he turns eighteen, he joins his sister’s clique of widows and divorcées. Later he becomes an acclaimed performer with his sister’s otherwise all female song and dance troupe. After temporarily losing his will to perform, he returns—more resolute than ever—as the troupe morphs into a pro-democracy movement. From the United Arab Emirates comes this exploration, which is partly told in the form of a folkloric fantasy, of the meaning of sexual identity and of the links between gender liberation, the arts, and rebellion against patriarchy. This excerpt is the novella’s concluding section.
Chapters 4-8 of this translation appeared in a slightly different form in Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature no. 35, Summer 2009.
Arabic | Poetry | United Arab Emirates
October, 2009Thani al-Suwaidi was born in the United Arab Emirates in 1966. He has published two collections of poetry: Liyajiff Riq al-Bahr (So the Sea’s Foam May Dry Out, (Ittihad Kuttab wa-Udaba’ al-Imarat, 1991), and al-Ashya’ Tamurr (Stuff Happens, Dar al-Intishar al-Arabi, 2000).
His novella, al-Dizil (The Diesel) was published in 1994 by Dar al-Jadid in Beirut, reprinted in Baghdad in 2006, and then published in 2008 by al-Maktab al-Misri lil-Matbu‘at in Cairo.
Arabic | Lebanon | Poetry (Excerpts)
August, 2009A Celebration of the Obscure and the Luminous, unlike any previously translated work of Adonis, traverses the entire expanse of Arab poetics, making it a uniquely representative text. It contains the elemental lyricism of pre-Islamic poetry, the prophetic and scientific dimensions of the Islamic tradition, and the iconoclasm of his ancient predecessors who defy categorizations in time or aesthetics. Here, knowledge dances with the unknown, history converses with oblivion, and archaic forms present themselves before the reader in the robes of an eternal, luminous present.
German | Germany | Short Fiction
August, 2009In 2008, the artist Markus Lörwald approached Selim Özdogan, asking for permission to print one of his stories in a catalog of his work. Özdogan, curious, asked to see some of the pictures for the book and offered to write a literary essay to accompany them. But in fact the pictures instantly gave him a title and the line, It could be so easy. And so the story was born.
Arabic | France | Novel (Excerpts)
August, 2009As an adolescent, Zeina left Iraq for the United States with her family, her father having been accused of conspiracy against the regime of Saddam Hussein. Well-integrated in her country of adoption, but raised in the love of her native land, at the age of thirty she decides to return there as an interpreter with the American army. Convinced of the nobility of her mission, yet slightly ashamed of returning in this uniform, she delays in informing her grandmother, the widow of colonel in the Iraqi army. Given the job of translating and sensitizing the American military to Arab culture, the young woman realizes that her role goes beyond this: with reluctance, she is present at interrogations, or bursts into suspect houses during the night… Uneasiness sets in. And disapproval as well, that of her grandmother, of close ones, and, worse still, her own….
Through the beautiful character of this woman torn between two identities, the author paints the picture of the life of expatriate Iraqis in America and of their intensely close relationship with the mother country. The resentment of Iraqis on the inside toward the American occupier is echoed by the pain of families in mourning in the United States. Written in a pacy, punchy language like a soldier’s logbook, this novel renders with great subtlety the wounds that war inflicts on each individual, whether in uniform or not, and thus is universal in effect.
The novel was published in Arabic by Dar el-Jadid, 2008, and in French by Liana Levi, fall 2009.
France | French | Novel (Excerpts) | Short Fiction
August, 2009Force ennemie (Enemy Force) was awarded the first Prix Goncourt in 1903. In 1906, Paul Léautraud said: “The Prix Goncourt has really only been given once—the first time to Nau.” And years later Huysmans would say, “It was the best one that we ever crowned.”
A visionary masterpiece: Phillipe Veuly, accursed poet, wakes up in a rubber room. Where is he? An insane asylum. Why? He doesn’t know and the doctors refuse to tell him. Is he crazy? Or rather are the ‘psychiatrists’ the ones who should be in his place? Stricken with amnesia, he learns from a guard that he was committed by his cousin to separate him from his alcoholic tendencies. In reality, he is the victim of the imaginary (?) jealousy of this relative. Soon he thinks he is inhabited by a being from another planet: Kmôhoûn, the ‘enemy force’, (among others), a disembodied spirit who fled the insupportable conditions of his home planet, Tkoukra. It’s not easy living with this naughty tenant who doesn’t hesitate to act insanely, speak extravagantly and even vulgarly, or even scream inside your head when others talk to you. And the “semi-lucid mental patient” falls passionately, madly, desperately in love with a female inmate, Irene. She leaves, disappears; he flees after her. He runs to the ends of the earth to find her. Enemy Force tells the story of the troublesome cohabitation of these two beings in the same body, and Veuly’s desire to concretize his love for Irene while protecting her from Kmôhoûn.
Also featured is a short story by Nau called The Emerald Eyes.
Vyacheslav Vasilievich Semikin was born on May 23, 1937 in Leningrad, USSR. He attended Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) State University, majoring in Philosophy, but left in the third year without completing his degree. He worked as a stage assistant at the Lenin Komsomol Theater, now Baltic House, and toured with the company throughout what was then the Soviet Union. In 1978, Semikin was forcibly physically removed from his home, an ancient wooden wing of an old structure on the Canal Griboedov, near Bankovsky Most. The wing was demolished. This forcible eviction, coupled with his disillusionment with the University and general feeling that he could not express himself freely, solidified his disdain of the Soviet state and propelled him further into what was to become a solitary and isolated existence. All of these experiences heavily influenced his poetry. Semikin died in February of 1990, immediately upon his return to Leningrad from a trip to New York. Neither a member of the Writer’s Union, nor a part of the Leningrad Underground which would have afforded him the opportunity to publish in Samizdat form, Semikin was never published during his lifetime.
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Launched in April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced)
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format)
* Translators must hold the necessary rights and permissions for the original work, unless it is in the public domain. Please append short (1-2 paragraph) biographies for both the translator and the original author. Translators who wish to have their contact information published with their bio should provide it. For excerpts, please also include a brief synopsis of the work as a whole.