Short Fiction | Spanish | Uruguay
November, 2007Mario Benedetti was born on September 14, 1920 in Pasa de los Toros, Tacuarembó Province, Uruguay. When he was four years old, his family moved to Montevideo. Between 1938 and 1941, he lived in Buenos Aires almost continuously. When he returned to Montevideo in 1945, he published his first book, La Víspera Indelebe (Poems) and became the editor of Marcha. Although he was a trained accountant, he went on to publish Peripecia y Novela (Literary Criticism) in 1948, and a year later, Esta Mañana, his first book of stories. In 1953, he published his first novel, Quién de Nosotros, but it was with the publication of Montevideanos: Cuentos (Stories), in 1959, that the urban concept of his narrative style took shape. With the publication of La Tregua in 1960, Benedetti acquired international pre-eminence. This novel, written in the form of a diary, has been published in more than one hundred editions, translated into nineteen languages, and has been adapted for the stage, screen, radio, and television. In the late fifties and sixties, he traveled extensively in Latin America, Europe, and the U.S. While in Cuba, he founded the world famous Centro de Investigaciones Literarias at Casa de las Americas, which he directed from 1969 to 1971. Returning to Uruguay in 1971, he opposed increasing government repression through his writing and participation in the leftist coalition known as the Frente Amplio, which he helped organize. Following the coup of June 1973, his work was banned by the Uruguayan military. Between 1973 and the return of the civilian government in 1985, he lived in exile in Argentina, Peru, Cuba, and Spain. Writing for an international audience, he denounced the tragic events occurring in Uruguay at the time. Since 1985, he has lived in Montevideo, where he devotes his full time to writing.
Short Fiction | Spanish | Uruguay
November, 2007Mario Benedetti was born on September 14, 1920 in Pasa de los Toros, Tacuarembó Province, Uruguay. When he was four years old, his family moved to Montevideo. Between 1938 and 1941, he lived in Buenos Aires almost continuously. When he returned to Montevideo in 1945, he published his first book, La Víspera Indelebe (Poems) and became the editor of Marcha. Although he was a trained accountant, he went on to publish Peripecia y Novela (Literary Criticism) in 1948, and a year later, Esta Mañana, his first book of stories. In 1953, he published his first novel, Quién de Nosotros, but it was with the publication of Montevideanos: Cuentos (Stories), in 1959, that the urban concept of his narrative style took shape. With the publication of La Tregua in 1960, Benedetti acquired international pre-eminence. This novel, written in the form of a diary, has been published in more than one hundred editions, translated into nineteen languages, and has been adapted for the stage, screen, radio, and television. In the late fifties and sixties, he traveled extensively in Latin America, Europe, and the U.S. While in Cuba, he founded the world famous Centro de Investigaciones Literarias at Casa de las Americas, which he directed from 1969 to 1971. Returning to Uruguay in 1971, he opposed increasing government repression through his writing and participation in the leftist coalition known as the Frente Amplio, which he helped organize. Following the coup of June 1973, his work was banned by the Uruguayan military. Between 1973 and the return of the civilian government in 1985, he lived in exile in Argentina, Peru, Cuba, and Spain. Writing for an international audience, he denounced the tragic events occurring in Uruguay at the time. Since 1985, he has lived in Montevideo, where he devotes his full time to writing.
Short Fiction | Spanish | Uruguay
November, 2007Mario Benedetti was born on September 14, 1920 in Pasa de los Toros, Tacuarembó Province, Uruguay. When he was four years old, his family moved to Montevideo. Between 1938 and 1941, he lived in Buenos Aires almost continuously. When he returned to Montevideo in 1945, he published his first book, La Víspera Indelebe (Poems) and became the editor of Marcha. Although he was a trained accountant, he went on to publish Peripecia y Novela (Literary Criticism) in 1948, and a year later, Esta Mañana, his first book of stories. In 1953, he published his first novel, Quién de Nosotros, but it was with the publication of Montevideanos: Cuentos (Stories), in 1959, that the urban concept of his narrative style took shape. With the publication of La Tregua in 1960, Benedetti acquired international pre-eminence. This novel, written in the form of a diary, has been published in more than one hundred editions, translated into nineteen languages, and has been adapted for the stage, screen, radio, and television. In the late fifties and sixties, he traveled extensively in Latin America, Europe, and the U.S. While in Cuba, he founded the world famous Centro de Investigaciones Literarias at Casa de las Americas, which he directed from 1969 to 1971. Returning to Uruguay in 1971, he opposed increasing government repression through his writing and participation in the leftist coalition known as the Frente Amplio, which he helped organize. Following the coup of June 1973, his work was banned by the Uruguayan military. Between 1973 and the return of the civilian government in 1985, he lived in exile in Argentina, Peru, Cuba, and Spain. Writing for an international audience, he denounced the tragic events occurring in Uruguay at the time. Since 1985, he has lived in Montevideo, where he devotes his full time to writing.
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
September, 2007Anne Garréta's La Décomposition, written over a four-year period and published in 1999, is the story of a serial killer. However, given that the author is a member of Oulipo, and the killer well versed in literature, we shouldn't be surprised to discover that victims are chosen from among the characters in Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Their flesh-and-blood counterparts are hunted in a contemporary Paris of video arcades, bars, and shadowy corners by the Seine. As the murderer dispatches the victims, their fictional counterparts are eliminated from a digitized version of Proust's magnum opus. Every reference to the “murdered” character is expunged from the book, reducing the novel's length with each fresh kill. To complicate matters, the philosophical and ruminative killer, who is, disturbingly, also the book's narrator, chooses these victims on the basis of a grammatical rule: they must agree in gender and number with the character in the novel. Otherwise, they are chosen randomly.
As should be obvious in a book with such a literary plot device, albeit a quirky one, La Décomposition is not simply the story of a serial killer, even a well-read one. For along with the victims, the narrator is also murdering Proust's novel, lopping off body parts bit by bit, cutting it down to manageable size. At one point in the beginning of the book, the narrator even comments, “For life is too short, and Proust is too long.”
In the novel two ideas widely found in twentieth-century literature are merged: the perfect crime and the gratuitous act. Through their amalgam the murderer hopes to raise murder to a fine art, to blend fiction and reality. And what better way to do so than to use a literary masterpiece as the scaffolding for one's crimes? For, in doing so, murder will wrap itself in the aesthetic mantle of the fine arts. But ethics is lost in aesthetics.
Filled with dark humor and dense, classically tinged prose, La Décomposition is ultimately not about serial killers but the role of the reader. For Garréta not only cuts Proust down to size, she questions literature's complicity with violence. In allowing us to identify with a murder, even a fictive one, literature provides a way for us to identify with evil, to absorb it through our sympathy with a character. In what is ultimately a profoundly ethical book, La Décomposition questions the mechanisms used by fiction to enable us to experience violence from within, vicariously, safely.
(Robert Bononno)
German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
September, 2007It is heating up in a small village in the flat hinterlands. The villagers spend their weekends bathing at the gravel pit and when a new villager, the beautiful Miranda, appears from the water, a group of friends find their relationships changing. Both Victor, recently jilted by his girlfriend, and his friend, the older, married artist Rudolf, woo her desperately. Their friend Asta is a life-coach who lectures to businessmen around the country and yet is falling apart inside as she loses all contact with her children who live with their father in Berlin. She cannot understand the men's fascination for this pretty normal looking woman. Nor can Rudolf's wife Emma, who after a whole life with Rudolf is starting to realize she has sacrificed her own life for his, all for nothing it seems. Miranda herself is married, but no one has met her husband. As passions and tensions flare, a spate of animal killings begins, and Mr Allyours, a hare, and Fledgling McFeather, a heron, decide to solve the mystery. McFeather has the laudable motives of making their community safe again, and he is not impressed with Mr Allyours' motives: he is besotted by a young doe, Lady Why, and wants to capture the killer to prove his love to her.
(Stefan Tobler)
Drama (Excerpts) | France | French
September, 2007A woman struggles to reclaim her identity after a violent event leaves her stripped from her sense of self. Written as a monologue, Jaz transcends its form by distancing the character from herself—being both the character and outside of the character—and by engaging dialogue with a musical instrument.
(Chantal Bilodeau)
Drama (Excerpts) | Serbia | Serbian
July, 2007A tough comic look at the lost generation of Serbia caught between Milošević and the new state of possibility. In a long night of drinking, tall tales, sad stories, confessions, and intimations of murder, a couple of young men dream of England and try to find their place in their country.
(Caridad Svich)
Drama (Excerpts) | Greece | Modern Greek
July, 2007A Mother and Father, a Man and a Woman, a Doctor and a Nurse, and an unfortunate victim all cross paths in a hospital and become intertwined in ways that push all boundaries of the appropriate and expected. Exploring the deeper comic underbellies of violence, sexuality, and caretaking, the playwright seeks to unburden the audience, to help them diminish their fear about moral issues, illness, and death.
(Alexi Kaye Campbell)
France | French | Novel (excerpts)
April, 2007”Yvan Goll is a man without a country; fate made him a Jew; chance caused him to be born in France; and a rubber stamp on a piece of paper decrees that he is German.“ This was how Goll described himself in 1920 for Pinthus’s famous anthology of Expressionism. He might as well have added that Yvan Goll was a man with no name—a man living anonymously, pseudonymously. And—inasmuch as Goll was equally at home in French, German, and English—a man with no mother tongue.
(Donald Nicholson-Smith)
Italian | Italy | Short Fiction
April, 2007Antonio Delfini was a writer and poet born in Disvetro di Cavezzo, Emilia-Romagna, in Northern Italy. In the 1930s, he started writing poems which blended fantasy, magic realism, and surrealism. He also wrote provincial stories, such as Ritorno in città (1931), Il ricordo della Basca (1938), and Il fanalino della Ballimonda (1940). Other works include Poesie della fine del mondo (1961) and Racconti (1963). His Diari, an autobiographical novel, was published in 1982.
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).