Short Fiction | Spanish | Uruguay
September, 2019After an unpromising beginning (“What on earth is this?!”), in recent years the work of Armonía Somers has come to play a defining role in my professional life. Having had her writing recommended to me by a couple of learned friends (neither of whom, it eventually transpired, had read much of her), I picked up a copy of her first novel, La mujer desnuda (The Naked Woman, available in English from Feminist Press). Ignoring said initial reaction (a secondary impulse that has served me well in my reading), I persevered and, some way in, was rewarded with that click of connection that will be familiar to readers of all shapes and sizes. From then on, I was hooked.
In probably the most famous essay to date about Somers’ work, the critic Ángel Rama describes her, admiringly, as a weirdo in a generation of Uruguayan weirdos that also included writers such as Felizberto Hernández and Juan Carlos Onetti. Somers, however, was reserved a special place among them, something of weirdo’s weirdo, if you like. And when you open one of her books, you can see why she was afforded the distinction: her writing weaves sinuously from thought to thought, from vivid realism to wild surrealist fantasy, with little quarter given to exposition or, indeed, punctuation. But her perceived difficulty belies a taut sense of purpose. She knew exactly what she wanted to write about, and often this included subjects that few of her contemporaries were addressing at the time: a fierce defense of women’s rights, especially in the realm of sexuality, the accompanying denunciation of male stupidity and viciousness, and wider philosophical, religious, and political meditations that reveal, almost in spite of herself, an extraordinarily erudite and brilliant mind. But perhaps the most salient qualities of Somers’ work are her sense of humor and lust for life, the way she embraces its manifest pleasures and ambiguities with a chuckle or cry of joy. Never afraid to get her hands dirty, she has a talent for reaching into the sludge and pulling out whatever she finds has spawned there, be it monstrous or beautiful. Or both.
“The Man from the Tunnel” is a case in point—on a whim, a seven-year-old girl crawls through a sewer pipe, unwittingly headed for an encounter that will prove revelatory in all manner of ways. It’s an excellent introduction to Somers’ work, and one that I hope will encourage more readers in English to seek her out.
– Kit Maude
Guatemala | Prose Poem | Spanish
September, 2019I met the Garifuna poet Wingston González in the fall of 2013 when I was living in Berlin and he was passing through for a poetry festival. We ended up collaborating on the translation featured here and the years passed. Earlier this year, I was overjoyed to see that Ugly Duckling Presse had published a book of his poetry. I’m happy to add “Whiskey against the Rage Machine” to his body of work now available in English.
– Priscilla Posada
Short Fiction | Spain | Spanish
September, 2019In Miguel de Unamuno’s “The Mirror of Death (A Very Common Tale),” we meet a young woman who suffers from a depression with no explanation, simple or complex. Only in recent years have we accepted this as a defining feature of depression and so treat it with the gravity and respect it demands. But in 1911, the author’s understanding of the phenomenon as just one of the many side effects of simply being human allowed him to feel its weight intuitively, to dramatize it, and to tell us all about it in this story, which was first published in the November 27, 1911 edition of El Imparcial.
We’ve all seen an old medical brochure or educational video and laughed at its ignorance or even gasped, downright scandalized by just how minimizing the past’s explanations of grave disorders like depression could be (in fact, the doctor in this story offers his own misguided opinion on the matter). But in the hands of a writer like Unamuno, we can find the very same ailment, this time without a grasping explanation, or even a name, but instead a wealth of compassion and a desire to help us understand. And this is one of the pleasures of looking back at ourselves through the lens of literature: the proof that any experience society or science might sell to us as new, we often have already lived.
– Andrew Adair
Mexico | Novel (excerpts) | Spanish
September, 2019Yo, la peor (“I, the Worst of Women”) is Mexican writer Mónica Lavín’s 2009 historical novel about the life of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695), who became a nun to enable her writing. Continuing to write after losing viceregal protection, she risked being tortured by the Inquisition. Juana Inés was a brilliant, gifted woman in the New Spain of the 17th-century, a time when most women were illiterate and their education ended at embroidery. Her educated grandfather allowed her to receive basic schooling, which she augmented on her own by using his library.
She became the first great Latin American poet. To find a comparable U.S. poet, we must wait 200 years for Emily Dickinson. The Mexican nun was a female literary pioneer like Mary Wollstonecraft, who published her declaration of women’s rights in 1792 and is regarded as a first feminist in the English-speaking world. Juana Inés complained about the unequal treatment of women a hundred years earlier.
In the novel, Juana Inés is seen through the eyes of other women, those who loved her and those who feared or were jealous of her. We follow the troubles and loves of Refugio, her first teacher; Isabel, her mother; her sisters; Bernarda, a rival lady-in-waiting during Juana’s years at court; Sister Cecelia, a jealous nun who conspires against her; and the two vicereines who were Sor Juana’s patrons, for whom she wrote many of her poems. The excerpts featured here are from Refugio and Juana’s oldest sister, María.
The book is divided into three parts: childhood, court life in Mexico City, and the convent years. Each section is prefaced by a letter written by Juana Inés to a former vicereine, the Marquesa de la Laguna. Those letters are in her own voice, in the language of her time:
“You who have received from my pen evidences of affection and reverence, of my perennial friendship and devotion, give now such lofty evidence of your love for me that it would be impossible for me to match the degree of your gestures of understanding or your strategist abilities to win the battle.”
That imitation of 17th century writing—none of Juana’s letters to the vicereine survive—stands in contrast to the register of the rest of the book, like the first chapter included here, in which Juana’s teacher prepares for class:
“Refugio looked out the window at the brightening day, morning fog still threading through the oak trees. So much stillness filled her with melancholy and she yearned for the children’s voices to interrupt her as they trooped in . . .”
Those differences of register and the distinctive perspectives of the numerous narrators are chief among the challenges in translating this novel.
– Patricia Dubrava
Cuba | Poetry | Spanish | United States
April, 2019“Poetry saved me from madness,” Jorge Olivera Castillo once said to describe his time in Guantánamo Prison. Between 2016 and 2018, the poet escaped what remained of his 18-year sentence by living in the United States, first as a writer for the Harvard University Scholars at Risk Program (where I met him) and second as an International Writers Project Fellow at Brown University. The poems featured here were written during the writer’s time in the United States, before he returned to Cuba at the risk of being incarcerated once again.
The primary tensions I see in Olivera’s poems lie between experiences of confinement and imaginaries of travel, evocative of the challenges of migratory communities (past and present), of Olivera’s own physically and psychologically traumatizing time in prison, and of his 1981 journey in a cargo ship to fight in the Angolan Civil War. The sincerity of Olivera’s poetry is reminiscent of Cuban journalist-poet José Martí’s Versos sencillos (1897), but also, more recently, of the works of exiled writer Enrique Labrador Ruiz (1902-1991). Even as they underline confinement, the poems reflect the motifs of transport, both under the auspices of continued captivity (to political regimes, nightmares, desire) and the hope for freedom.
While the difficulty of translating these poems sometimes sprang from their harrowing content and remarkable tonal candor, I took refuge in the poems’ structures. Olivera’s lines are often jagged, some extending over the page and then followed by brief two- or three-word lines that appear to retreat into quieted, controlled thought, before extending again into rumination. The use of white space and the poems’ brevity speak equally to an aesthetic of erratically controlled speech marked with the quick imposition of silence. As with the queer Cuban poets Severo Sarduy and José Lezama Lima, the Afro-descendant poet’s works are reflective of concerns that Caribbean poets elsewhere share: the bounds between sea and land, land and body, dream and reality, and the myth of home faced with the reality of exile. In illuminating these bounds in “Endangered,” for instance, the poet’s voices leap between anthropomorphized depictions of the sun to “heaps of sand” embedded in a landscape of “hardened faces.” Indeed, it seems in Olivera’s poems that imaginaries of landscape are often more alive and animated than the bodies that navigate their place within it.
Written from Cambridge, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island, these poems are part and parcel of the ongoing work Olivera has taken up to share his memory of imprisonment and aspirations for uncensored speech and literary discourse in and about Cuba. When I served as an interpreter for Jorge Olivera—at a talk he gave at Harvard University—he shared these objectives with his audience while stating that one of the main poets that provided him sustenance in solitary confinement was a woman from Massachusetts who passed much of her life in solitude: Emily Dickinson.
As Jorge Olivera Castillo has just recently returned to Cuba, he seeks further opportunities to share his voice in English while building literary and political conversations on and beyond the island.
– David Francis
In Stella Díaz Varín’s poems, woman speaks. She speaks as god, as wife, as mother, as poet; she “intone[s] the song of love” and slices society into fine, jagged pieces. She calls to the reader as her confessor, her disappointing lover, her jailer, her child. She asks, flatly, insistently, what choice is hers—“What do you all want me to do with these materials. / Nothing. Except write melancholy poetry.”
Díaz Varín’s materials—her experiences, her words—were vast, and she wrote the poem featured here, “The House,” for her 1959 collection, Time, Imaginary Measure. The book title is apt: her voice is atemporal, daring us to keep her to her generation. Such verse opens itself generously to translation into American English, which prefers directness, wants us to lean in and tell all.
In her introduction to the Collected Work, Chilean poet and academic Eugenia Brito wrote that Díaz Varín’s speaker is a sacred, pagan, archaic figure, one that expresses the poet’s own “fiebre de malestar cultural y de locura reparadora, intuitiva, poética.” This is the motor of her poetry— a fever caused by both her cultural malaise and her intuitive, poetic, healing madness. In translation, the challenge is to let the poems be mad, let them resist sense, without exaggeration or imprisonment.
– Rebecca Levi
El Salvador | Poetry | Spanish
November, 2018Claudia Lars (pen name for Carmen Brannon Vega, 1899-1974) is one of El Salvador’s most important and beloved poets. She is required reading in many Salvadoran schools, and several schools have been named in her honor. I first came to know her work in the 1990s, when I worked with a human rights organization in El Salvador: whenever I asked about poets, the reply included Lars, and I was delighted to discover that many of the Salvadorans I met had one or more of her poems memorized. As Stephen Tapscott notes, Lars was “a writer of integrity and continuity whose example and generosity toward younger writers, especially young woman poets, made her a beloved—and even symbolically maternal—figure in Latin American poetry.”
Born to a Salvadoran mother and an Irish-American father, she was raised bilingual, and she learned French in Catholic school. Her youth was spent in the Salvadoran countryside reading Shakespeare, Jules Verne, and Lorca. She eventually translated a selection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry into Spanish. Though she never traveled to Ireland, she retained a strong sense of connection to what she called “the land of my song.” Her “two bloods” (as Gabriela Mistral writes in a famous letter) became an important theme in her work. Over the course of thirteen volumes of poetry, her poetics expand from an early reliance on the sonnet, ballad, and lira to uniquely-voiced explorations in free verse.
It feels important to bring Lars’s work into English. Beyond the remarkable language and the many worlds brought into view, these poems offer a fresh glimpse of a country many of us in the United States think we know. El Salvador has long been in the news, at first because of the brutal civil war and later because of the U.N.-brokered ceasefire and elections. More recently, violence (in particular gang violence) has garnered headlines. Through it all, the U.S. has played a devastating and disproportionate role, whether by supporting the military governments of the 1980s or by deporting gang members in the years after the war. While such developments have kept the country in our sights, I have always felt that it is too easy to attend to the disasters. We should bear witness to them, certainly, and Lars herself takes note (in a poem like “Crumbs”) as her country veers toward civil war. But the danger is that we let the catastrophes define the country and thereby narrow our sense of the world beyond our borders. What Lars’s work offers is a glimpse of a woman’s mind at work in the years before the tumultuous events of recent decades. Her concerns are worldly, spiritual, and lyrical; her verse offers the perspective of a poet who looks at the world around her—and into the future that is coming—with a longing and hopefulness that strike me as fundamentally and importantly human.
– Philip Pardi
Argentina | Poetry | Spanish | United States
November, 2018What makes Silvina López Medin’s poetry complicated is its philosophical, impressionistic, associative qualities. Often her language steers us away from noticing the despair behind her images by forcing us to work with nuances of abstraction. To some degree, translating the words suffices to render that complexity: present it as she’s presented it. But I have also tried to select words that point to what is missing. Often, López Medin’s poems are more about what is not there than what is there—the missing man, his missing eyes, the missing laughter, the touch that doesn’t happen. This, to me, makes López Medin’s poems consummately Argentinean: it’s a country where there is almost more missing than present, where the stifled voice rings after the spoken falls silent. André Lefevere wrote, “The word does not create a world ex nihilo. Through the grid of tradition it creates a counterworld, one that is fashioned under the constraints of the world the creator lives and works in, and one that can be explained, understood better if these constraints are taken into account.” López Medin creates a counterworld out of the one that exists, her world peopled by what is missing and the language that has survived people’s disappearance. If ever a country needed poets to create a counterworld from the language that has survived its violence, Argentina does.
– Jasmine V. Bailey
Chile | English | Hybrid | Spanish
August, 2018The poems featured here use a limited vocabulary derived from the Fortune 500 list of company names to translate “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” as an exploration of what happens to words in the course of the history of their usage. As an experiment in translation, these poems are meant as an active approach to reading Neruda’s poems anew, to discovering what transformations take place in the history of a language and what role the translator might play in that long process. On its surface my project is to see how far the language of capital is capable of replicating Neruda’s poems and what it means for one’s words to be one’s own. My hope is that I have leveraged the gap between Neruda’s poems and my translation into something akin to an empty dictionary. My hope is that this empty dictionary might contain the “actual” translation without uttering it. If it is somehow like a dictionary it is because it contains the possibilities of language, and if it is somehow empty it is not because its words do not exist but because they are not inscribable.
My goal has never been to translate the poems as they are but to re-read them, to attempt to glimpse which words might actually have been uncovered by Neruda who, according to Raúl Zurita, writing in his introduction to Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), “shows us that in speaking, no one is singular. That the act of speaking is the opportunity for those who have preceded us to return, to be granted words.” If Neruda attempts to recover the language that leaves no trace in history, I am interested in the ghost of a translation that leaves unspoken what cannot be spoken, even as it haunts the gap between my poems and Neruda’s.
My choice of “Alturas” as a source text stems from my discomfort with Neruda’s attempt to recover language acts that may not be his to recover. Nevertheless, I hope that my translation will be taken not as a declamation against Neruda or the consensus of those like Zurita who are moved by Neruda’s attempted recovery of those lost voices, but rather as a re-reading that hopefully sheds new light on what it means for one’s language to be one’s own, ethically and literally. When I devised my constraint, I genuinely did not know which words would be available to me, and I am surprised how well this lexicon has been able to capture the suffering named by the originals.
It is my hope that the reader of this manuscript will agree that my translation is, even if it resembles Neruda’s poems a great deal, an original work.
– Adam Greenberg
Giovanni Quessep has been influenced by Colombia’s most important poets from the first half of the 20th century, such as Aurelio Arturo and León de Greiff, with whom he was personally acquainted and developed an important friendship. In the sixties, he worked as an editor at the legendary Mito, Colombia’s highly acclaimed philosophical and literary magazine created by Jorge Gaitán Durán, and in the seventies he co-founded Golpe de dados, a poetry magazine recognised throughout Latin America as one of the most important poetry publications of the past and current centuries.
Quessep’s poetry is nourished by his personal experiences growing up on the Colombian Caribbean coast; by his travels through Italy, where he fell in love with the work of Dante Alighieri; and by his knowledge of the vast tradition of Spanish poetry, particularly the poets of the Spanish Golden Age and Ruben Darío, one of his most important literary references. A descendant of Lebanese immigrants, he is also deeply acquainted with Middle Eastern poetic traditions, and specifically with the work of poets such as Omar Khayyam, Farid Uddin Attar, and Ferdowsi, who have also greatly influenced his work. Quessep’s poetry is the result of an improbable mixture of faraway elements that come together to create a unique voice both indisputably Colombian and universal.
I started working on this project in 2015, with Quessep’s permission, and I have been collaborating with Ranald Barnicot since the beginning of this year, following the advice of some editors who told me that my translations could benefit from a collaboration with a native English speaker, preferably a poet or poetry translator, as Ranald is, and they certainly have.
– Felipe Botero
It has been a privilege and a challenge to work with Felipe on these richly allusive, mysterious, deeply felt and moving poems. I feel that Quessep exemplifies Eliot’s First Voice of Poetry. The poet is primarily addressing himself in the hope of working through profound, personal, and painful issues. Perhaps we are left feeling that we have not completely understood, but, in Eliot’s oft-quoted and memorable words, poetry can communicate before it is understood. Indeed, perhaps it is impertinent to suppose that we have a right to complete understanding.
– Ranald Barnicot
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since 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).