Mexico | Short Prose | Spanish
July, 2017These brief pieces, originally written for a monthly column in the Buenos Aires newspaper Clarín, were published in one of Fabio Morábito’s more recent books, El idioma materno [“Mother Tongue”] (Sexto Piso, 2014). I happened upon this book when I was living in Buenos Aires a few years ago, though I didn’t intend to translate it at the time. When my partner started reading the book, wondering why I was always carrying it around and laughing out loud, she convinced me to at least write Morábito to see whether the book had been translated into English. Not only did Morábito give me permission to translate the collection, but that was also the beginning of his regular and invigorating correspondence with me about his work.
Much like Alejandro Rossi’s book Manual of a Distracted One, Morábito’s El idioma materno is less a book about one theme or subject and more a demonstration of style and the view of a broad, discerning gaze cast over almost every imaginable subject. Instead of pontificating or pushing some moral stance, these texts provide a critical view of literature, literary professionalism, and imprecise language, and the author does not shy away from critiquing such themes as creative writing pedagogy, translation, and the reading practices of academics, three spaces or roles he himself inhabits. Morábito is a writer who believes in the substantive, in the complex idea, and in the rhythms of long, complex phrases; quirky details, of course, are the hallmarks of his work.
What I most appreciate about Morabito’s prose, however, is his fixation on, and deep love for, the languages we speak and how we speak them: each of the eighty four texts in El idioma materno contains a stylistic lesson, sometimes subtle and other times explicit, and represents the author’s effort to reveal the essence of a subject and its place in the world. The selections published here exemplify the breadth of the book. The essay—to give a name to these prose pieces—“The Sirens,” for example, is more than a retelling of Odysseus’s encounter with the dangerous creatures who enchanted nearby sailors with their music and voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island. By varying the syntax of the same phrase, Morábito not only encourages us to look at the story from multiple perspectives, but also asks us to consider how slight shifts in language can open up new meanings inside a text. The “ominous song” of the sirens in one sentence leads us to the “ominous island” in the next, to the “ominous sirens” followed by the “ominous sea,” and on and on until the wax becomes “ominous” at the end of the text and the snapping point for the crew, “tired now, as we know, of their Odysseus, the calm sea, the oars, the mast, the islands and that beautiful song.”
– Curtis Bauer
The rich and varied poetic tradition of Ecuador is often overshadowed by that of its larger neighbors —Chile and Peru, in particular—and its contributions tend to go unrecognized internationally. In spite of this, or perhaps to a certain degree as a direct result of its oft-referenced “national inferiority complex,” Ecuador’s poets continue to produce outstanding, groundbreaking work.
At just twenty-three years old, Juan Romero Vinueza has already developed a poetic voice that is multilayered, intertextual, humorous, and deftly crafted. He began writing his first collection of poems, Revólver Escorpión (La Caída Editorial, 2016) at the age of 16, drawing on a wide range of influences, from Federico García Lorca to Nicanor Parra, and to some extent providing a response to the highly neo-baroque style of the generation of Latin American poets directly preceding him. The section of Revólver Escorpión from which these two poems are taken is entitled Vértigo sobre un paísaje andino (“Vertigo over an Andean Landscape”).
– Kimrey Anna Batts
Mexico | Short Fiction | Spanish
July, 2017Translating Nadia Villafuerte’s work is a pleasure and a challenge. I am very fortunate that she and I are friends and I can easily ask her to clarify passages for me. This time my particular challenge was finding the character of Micaela’s voice, something with which Nadia couldn’t help me. What a person whose first language is Ch’ol sounds like when speaking Spanish has no obvious equivalent in English. My research took me to various schools of thought about dialects in translation, furthering my education and helping me to make my choice, which was simply to create a dialect rather than to try to copy one in English. “Getting Ahead” is a work of fiction, but it is also a tribute to all the Micaelas who have died and are still dying, many anonymously without even a story to mark that they once lived. Micaela is not a perfect person; although she’s admirable, she’s not even particularly likeable. We can have some sympathy for the abandoned child who is the narrator, but she is also a bit of a brat. And yet it is a joy to enter their world for the little time they have together.
The original story, “Salir Adelante,” has just been published in the anthology Los pelos en la mano. Cuentos de la realidad actual, edited by Rogelio Guedea (Lectorum, 2017).
– Pennell Somsen
The first time I visited Buenos Aires, I was sixteen years old. It was only the second time I’d ever left the States–the first to a country that was not English-speaking–and my experience was meticulously mapped. There were tango shows and treks through the technicolor alleys of La Boca. There were orange trees and street markets and performances at the Teatro Colón. There were handsome waiters not so much older than I was who served me steak, and handsome gauchos who put on the traditional corrida de sortija displays for us—on horseback, armed with thin jousting poles, they’d attempt to pierce the key rings strung with ribbons of white and baby blue that were mounted on an archway overhead. When they speared one, they’d single one of us from the crowd and offer it with a kiss as a souvenir.
This Buenos Aires was the one that lived for many years inside my mind. I was not young or silly or inexperienced enough, even then, that it was lost on me that this had all been carefully curated for an outsider, and yet memories of it still ached with that visceral pang of romance that memories of that age do.
Margarita García Robayo’s collection Orquídeas (“Orchids”), on the other hand, offers an entirely different Buenos Aires: one that lives on scaffolds and in backroom bars, at late-night parties and among transgender prostitutes, on mosquito-ridden patios and in butcher shops–in the quotidian, in the ephemeral, as crónicas do. Published daily in newspapers and magazines around the world—but especially in Latin America—this literary genre of short prose may range from witty commentary to melancholic remembrance to fiery political satire. What the best crónicas unfailingly share, however, is that they live in a dark, amorphous space where observance may be faulty, memories may be deliberately amended, character is often irrelevant, tragedy and comedy may coexist, and the reader never quite knows where they stand.
Assembled together between covers like slides in a carousel, García Robayo’s crónicas make Buenos Aires begin to look a lot like Brooklyn, or like anywhere, where mundane and absurd observances spin through our heads constantly each day and quickly disappear. And yet the author treats each with such indelible specificity, with such tenderness and disdain, that immersed in each page-long moment, the reader knows it could never have occurred anywhere else but in García Robayo’s city, in her world. And so I struggled to translate this book, at first. The words were there but the spirit wasn’t. I still wanted the technicolor alleys, the handsome waiters. Never before as a translator have I so struggled to find an author’s voice.
In November 2016, two days after the election of Donald Trump, I returned to Buenos Aires. My rose-colored glasses were gone, my guard was down, I was alone, and for a week I spoke to almost no one except shopkeepers and taxi drivers to whom I would struggle to explain the Electoral College in Spanish. I had planned to return to the street fairs, to see some tango, to vacation. Instead, for a week, I walked. From Villa Crespo to San Telmo, Nuñez to the Recoleta, Palermo Soho to the Centro, I walked and walked and there it was: García Robayo’s Buenos Aires, in the punk-rock art students and their rustling sketchbooks, in the sex shops in the Retiro, in the tourist traffic across the footbridges over the brown water of the Río Dique, as in the life of any great city seen through a cronista‘s eyes. I now prefer this version, this vision, the one García Robayo offers, the one glimpsed at in this selection, the one I finally found in her voice upon returning. A Buenos Aires uglier, more pathetic, truer and therefore somehow ever more romantic than the one I had once known.
– Alicia Maria Meier
José Asunción Silva (1865-1896) is credited, through his assimilation of elements of Symbolism and the work of poets such as Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe, with helping inaugurate Latin American modernismo. Silva was born in Bogotá to a wealthy family with a love of literature and a history of tragedy. At nineteen, he visited France, where he met the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, but was forced to return to Bogotá to take control of his father’s failing business. Unable to pay his family’s debts, he took a diplomatic post in Caracas, and in 1892 his sister Elvira died, occasioning the composition of “Nocturne III,” one of the most famous poems in the Spanish language. Silva is also the author of a novel, De Sobremesa, which was reconstructed after first having been lost in a shipwreck on his return from Caracas. On May 23, 1896, after a dinner party, he shot himself in the heart. He was thirty years old. The house where he lived in Bogotá is now the Silva Poetry House, a national monument and an important cultural organization that grants the José Asunción Silva poetry prize for the recognition of a lifetime of poetic work.
While Silva is Colombia’s most famous poet (he appears on the 5000 Peso bill), his poems are virtually unknown in the United States. These translations stay close to the overall sense of Silva’s poems, but nevertheless diverge and take liberties. Readers encountering Silva for the first time should note that that while many of these translations fulfill the mandate of translation as it is usually understood, some, such as “Nocturne III,” might best be described as collaborations. I’d compare them to the paintings of Glenn Brown, whose hallucinatory reworkings of old masters result in something both familiar and uncannily new. But while Brown might adapt, say, a Rembrandt—an image long established in the canon—Silva’s poems are not yet widely available in English, so comparisons can’t easily be made. I’ve taken the risk of introducing some of these poems into English in non-traditional translations because I’m hopeful that more normative translations of Silva will follow, but also because my original intention in translating Silva was more personal: I sought to engage, as an American of Colombian descent, on my own terms with the work of one of Colombia’s most important poets. I was pleased to find not the antisocial, “diseased” modernist many Latin American critics have dismissively accused Silva of being,* but, to the contrary, a poet whose work centers around the question of life—both life as such, in all its scintillation and strangeness, and the complex question of how to live. The questions Silva poses—whether poetry can be lived, whether the price of stability isn’t a forfeiture of life itself, and how life and the numerous deaths-in-life manifest themselves—are as urgent as ever. My primary objective as a translator was thus to convey the urgency and originality of Silva’s vision and the consistency of his thought.
* For an analysis of Silva’s reception in Latin America, see Alfreo Villanueva-Collado’s “Masculine Culture, Feminoid Modernism: José Asunción Silva and ‘El mal metafísico’” (Confluencia, Volume 19, Number 2). Villanueva-Collado looks at Silva and others to explore “the relationship between the paradigm shift called Modernity, understood as a national project gendered as masculine, and the concept of Modernism as a pathogen which feminizes culture,” and argues that “Such a relationship lies at the center of Latin American critical and cultural practice and, operating outside critical consciousness, still shapes and determines cultural and literary criticism, especially with respect to Latin American turn-of-the-century narrative production.”
– Robert Fernandez
Argentina | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
May, 2017The poetry featured here will appear in an in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the above post for editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida’s introduction to the project.
Argentina | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
May, 2017The poetry featured here will appear in an in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the above post for editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida’s introduction to the project.
Argentina | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
May, 2017The poetry featured here will appear in an in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the above post for editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida’s introduction to the project.
Argentina | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
May, 2017The poetry featured here will appear in an in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the above post for editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida’s introduction to the project.
The poetry featured here will appear in an in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the above post for editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida’s introduction to the project.
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).