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 (excerpt)
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)
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