France | French | Novel (Excerpts)
July, 2009The novel excerpted here, La fin des paysages/The End of Landscape is a suspenseful and obsessive oratorio about brotherhood and affiliation, not only between the twin brothers at the center of the book, and the sisters they love, but also between Africa and Europe, and the ties—affective, artistic, and political—that bind them together.
The setting is Liverpool in the final days of the Thatcher administration, hovering between the rioting youth of an abandoned industrial working class and the burgeoning gentrification of the all-but-abandoned port area and its forlorn population. The symbol of this moment is the opening of a new outpost of the Tate Gallery in the former Albert Dock. Sir Abel Manson is the Irish-born curator of the first exhibit, “A Century of Africanism: 1850-1950.”
The novel opens with a gruesome accident on the docks: while unloading a shipment of priceless artifacts on loan from the governments of Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, and Kenya, a chain breaks, a man is swept up by the loose wire of a crane, his body sectioned, and a crate smashes open on the ground. Some sculptures are lost in the space between the boat and the dock. A fallen landscape painting is slashed by an angry worker and some masks are purloined by a mysterious stranger. A narrator describes the scene. His voice is unpunctuated, relentless, and the reader seems to become this man, Martin Finlay, as he tries first to help his employer get the exhibit back on track, and then solve the mystery of the missing masks.
French critic and literary blogger Pierre Assouline on The End of Landscape:
Here is what the author calls venturing into the labyrinth of time—that time which, in the words of Faulkner used by Lang as an epigraph, is “longer than any distance.” Revisiting a story he first told fifteen years earlier, Luc Lang has produced a block of prose with an energetic and sinewy rhythm, at times Céline-like and stuffed with narrative detonations reminiscent of Dos Passos. The novel turns on twindom, on doubles and duels: the harbour master and the museum curators, two brothers that everything sets against one another, two sisters standing for two ideas of love…. Lang has not chosen an easy path. So much motion gives rise to a highly visual story. Luc Lang has filmed his own On the Waterfront in his head…a boundless palimpsest. The experiment can take the reader’s breath away, and this quite literally: no white space, no extra leading, no paragraphs, no air. No better way, though, to approach a paroxysm. But the reader who feels that this is a mere exercise in bravura will surely suffocate…. Luc Lang clearly enjoys the role of an (anti-)landscape architect on the terrain of the novel…. This was a risky undertaking, but a successful one. It is impossible not to think of both Joyce and Lowry, for both of whom Lang confesses a passion.
Luc Lang on novel writing:
One day in the early 1990s, I heard a news report on the radio. There, in the incandescence of the facts, was a model for fictional narrative…. A woman pulls up in the fast lane of a highway and begins to change a wheel, as though she was on the hard shoulder. Just as she is removing the wheel with the puncture, she is struck by a fast-moving car and killed, borne aloft along with her wheel, her jack, and the rear wing of her car—bone, flesh, and metal exploding on the hood of the other vehicle. Was she stupid? Was her psychological make-up involved? Her mental state at that particular moment? Her age? Sex? Family history? Her psycho-socio-historico blah-blah-blah background? Who cares? We could not care less! From the point of view of the novel we could not care less. Only the act matters, in all its madness, all its intensity. No chatter, no analysis, no glossing, no academic editorializing on universal lessons. And no intellectual detachment either! All null and void. No distance! None! Just the facts! Write inside the fact, the fact in its opacity, its mystery, its chance quality—in its humaness therefore, its, mad, mad unpredictability, partaking of the order of creation. Because the act is all: the act in itself reveals and illuminates the whole world that is ours.
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Like dance, it seems to me, the novel should forbid itself to think, to think itself, to reflect itself, to theorize itself within its own realm of movement. Failure to abide by this principle means slowing down, unbalancing, or even destroying the movements of writer and dancer alike. Dancers cannot comment on their movements while executing them, for the time in which they move is of great intensity and the sequence of their gestures is part of an irreversible fusion of duration and speed. This is not to say that the novel cannot become a subject of analysis outside its own space: but this must only happen after that space has been traversed and experienced at first hand, along with the characters, their story, and the writing that brings them into being. Like speaking of swimming only after allowing oneself to be swept down a river, and not while still on the bank, imprisoned in some distant, inert form of knowledge.
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A novel is a black box, closed around its own time yet without beginning or end. A place where what is living speaks and tells of the world to which it belongs from within its own continuum, which is, to say it once more, the coherence not of a subject but of a time, constituting ultimately whatever remains of the universal despite the fury, whatever its source, that strives to silence or instrumentalize its voice.
(From Luc Lang, Notes pour une poétique du roman (Paris: Inventaire/Invention)).
María Negroni has published numerous books of poetry, including De tanto desolar, Per/canta, La jaula bajo el trapo, Diario Extranjero, Camera delle Meraviglie, Islandia, El Viaje de la Noche, and Andanza, as well as novels, translations, and essays. She has won two Argentine National Book Awards, as well as other prestigious prizes and fellowships. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
Italian | Italy | Short Fiction
July, 2009Valeria Parrella was born in 1974 in the province of Naples. During the period in which she wrote and published her first stories, she was an Italian Sign Language interpreter and worked at the National Agency for the Protection and Assistance of the Deaf in Naples. Her first collection, Mosca più balena (Fly Plus Whale), from which the present story is taken, was published in 2003 and awarded, among many other prizes, the 2004 Premio Campiello for the best debut work of fiction. Her second collection, Per grazia ricevuta (For Grace Received), was one of five finalists for Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, the Premio Strega (2005). The novella Il verdetto (The Verdict), recasting the story of Clytemnestra in contemporary Naples, appeared in 2007. Parrella’s first novel, Lo spazio bianco (The White Space) was published by Einaudi in 2008. For Grace Received is scheduled for publication this fall by Europa Editions as Parrella’s English-language debut.
Brazil | Novel (Excerpts) | Portuguese
July, 2009Moacyr Scliar was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1937. He is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and the author of more than 60 books published in 18 countries, many of which have won awards or been adapted for the movies, stage, or television. He also writes for newspapers around the world. His books include O centauro no jardim (1980; published in English as The Centaur in the Garden, 2003), Max e os felinos (1981; published in English as Max and the Cats, 2003), A mulher que escreveu a Bíblia (winner of the Prêmio Jabuti, 2000), and Saturno nos trópicos (2003). A majestade do Xingu (1997) received the Prêmio José Lins do Rego from the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
The excerpt featured here begins at page 35 of the novel.
Héctor Hernández Montecinos was born in Santiago, Chile in 1979. His books of poetry that were published between 2001 and 2003 are collected in [guión] (Lom Ediciones: Santiago, Chile, 2008); [coma] (Lom Ediciones, 2009) collects his writings from 2004-2006. His other books include Putamadre (Zignos: Lima, 2005), Ay de Mi (Ripio: Santiago, 2006), La poesia chilena soy yo (Mandrágora cartonera: Cochabamba, 2007), Segunda mano (Zignos: Lima, 2007), A 1000 (Lustra editores: Lima, 2008), Livro Universal (Demonio negro: Sao Paulo, 2008, traducido al portugués), Poemas para muchachos en llamas (RdlPS: Ciudad de México, 2008), La Escalera (Yerba Mala cartonera: La Paz, 2008) El secreto de esta estrella (Felicita cartonera: Asunción, 2008), La interpretación de mis sueños (Moda y Pueblo: Stgo, 2008) y NGC 224 (Literal: Ciudad de México, 2009). He has been invited to present his poetry in Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Peru. Since 2008, he has lived in Mexico where he teaches, and directs a small literary press called Santa Muerte cartonera. He holds a doctorate in literature with a focus in art theory.
Based in Bombay, Suryabala is originally from Varanasi in the northern part of India. She completed her Ph.D. in Hindi Literature at Benares Hindu University. She has been a prolific writer for more than three decades, publishing in all the major Hindi-language magazines and newspapers in the country. Besides satire, she has written novels and short stories, some of which have been adapted for television.
Bolivia | Short Fiction | Spanish
June, 2009Bolivian writer Victor Hugo Viscarra (b. 1958) was an indigent alcoholic in La Paz from the 1970s until his death in 2006, and published five works of literature: Avisos necrológicos (2005), Borracho estaba pero me acuerdo (2003), Alcoholatum y otros drinks: Crónicas para gatos y pelagatos (2001), Relatos de Victor Hugo (1996, 2005), and Coba: Lenguaje secreto del hampa boliviano (1981, 2004). He was honored at Bolivia’s International Book Fair in 2004 and 2005, and each of his books has gone through various printings. He has had an exceptional reception among younger readers.
Ángel Escobar Varela was born in 1957 in Sitiocampo, located in Cuba’s rural eastern province of Guantánamo. As an adult he spent many years on the western side of the island in and around the city of Havana. The publication of a posthumous anthology in 2006 (Ángel Escobar: Poesía completa, Ediciones UNIÓN) symbolizes rising acclaim for his work. Escobar generated the complex field of his poetics out of numerous influences–his training in theater, wide readings in international literature, his autobiography, family trauma, and philosophical reflections on modern life, among other strands. Those who knew him late in his life also see the influence of his worsening battle with schizophrenia: many poems make reference to illness and endurance. They also challenge prevailing notions of rational conduct, and some commentators argue that the spatialization of the late poetry itself performs “schizophrenic” moves. Over the course of his career, Escobar’s articulations of suffering opened some of the richest veins in his poetry. He took his own life in Havana in 1997.
Born Aldo Giurlani to a well-off Florentine mercantile family, Aldo Palazzeschi (1885-1974) was educated as an accountant and trained as an actor. The author of colloquial, absurdist free verse parables of urban-bourgeois life, his early work anticipated Dada and the Surrealists. His novels, particularly Il codice di Perelà (Perelà’s Code, 1911; translated as Man of Smoke) and Le sorelle Materassi (The Materassi Sisters, 1934), were hugely successful in their time. Palazzeschi’s first book of poetry, I cavalli bianchi (The White Horses), was published in 1905 by Cesare Blanc–the poet’s cat, also the publisher of Lanterna (1907) and Poemi (1909). The latter volume includes “Chi sono?” (“Who am I?”), a pointed rejection of the then-dominant D’Annunzian model of bardic national hero that is still among the best-known twentieth-century Italian poems (Chi sono? / Il saltimbanco dell’anima mia; Who am I? / The acrobat of my soul). This was followed in 1910 by L’Incendiario (The Arsonist), published by F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist press, Poesia, from which this selection of poems is taken. With its irreverence, biting parody, and blithe nonsense, The Arsonist resembles works of Apollinaire and Mayakovsky still to come. In a series of grotesque allegories depicting contemporary urban-bourgeois life as timid, conformist, and squalid, Palazzeschi broadens his antic vision in colloquial, dramatic episodes dictated by the “saltimbanco dell’anima mia” (acrobat of my soul) of his prior volume: an exemplary gadabout, ironic boulevardier, and armchair provocateur who guides the reader around the dystopia and eventually disappears into a dilapidated rural castle retreat with a fictive family menagerie. Palazzeschi was a pacifist and political agnostic, and his satire does not spare himself; the poet is portrayed as a poor dunce whose folly nevertheless exemplifies the (pyrrhic) perseverance of individualism in an atmosphere of stultifying conformity. In 1914, Palazzeschi turned away from the Futurist ideology of violence as necessary ‘purification’ (as war had been described in the 1909 Manifesto of Futurism), broke definitively with Marinetti and the Futurists, and took a rare stand in favor of ‘neutralism.’ The poems of this literary hero of the Futurists, whom Marinetti had acclaimed as possessing “a fierce, destructive irony,” are laced with a pungent, subversive humor.
(Nicholas Benson)
German | Germany | Novel (Excerpts)
June, 2009Carmen-Francesca Banciu’s Song of the Sad Mother is a novel about an anguished mother-daughter relationship set against the backdrop of Communist Romania. Its protagonist Maria-Maria is the daughter of two passionate party loyalists. Her academic aptitude and upbringing seem to destine her to become the embodiment of the party’s utopian concept of the new human. The only problem is that Maria-Maria is intent on writing her own destiny. The predetermined quality of Maria-Maria’s life coupled with the fact that she is tyrannized by a mother who is depressive and deeply distrustful of any type of happiness or pleasure, rob the protagonist of a childhood and cause cruelty and harsh discipline to take the place of maternal nurturing and reassurance. It is thus that Maria-Maria’s mother, whose only indulgence was deprivation, cold-bloodedly destroys her daughter’s dolls only to replace them with books, out of love and to impart upon Maria-Maria the valuable lesson of self-reliance. Armed with this lesson, Maria-Maria is able to take possession of herself and defy every party–and familial–expectation. She does this by leaving the past behind and becoming an émigré writer in post-Communist East Berlin. While the crossing of national and political boundaries proves catalytic for Maria-Maria in that it enables her to discover her autonomy and individuality, it does not wipe the slate clean of her psychic and emotional wounds. It is only by doing the work of remembering that she begins to exorcise her demons and heal the trauma of her painful relationship to her mother and her country.
(Elena Mancini)
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.