France | French | Short Fiction
August, 2010Jacques Barbéri is a French author of more than fifteen novels and numerous short stories. Thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, or the fringes of literature—nothing is off limits to his perpetually mutating imagination. He is also a musician (with the group Palo Alto), screenplay writer, and translator.
Poetry | Spanish | United States
August, 2010Evgueni Bezzubikoff Diaz was born in Huancayo, Perú in 1978. He studied at the Colegio Salesiano and graduated from the Instituto Pedagógico Nacional Monterrico (IPNM) in 2000 with a degree in Education, majoring in the English language. He has lived in the United States since 2001, but wrote poetry well before his voluntary exile to this country, winning IPNM’s Primer Premio de Poesía, Libertad Bajo Palabra, in 2000. Cartas de Nueva York was published by Hipocampo Editores (Lima, Perú) in 2007. His new book, Crónica del Adiós will be published in 2010 by the same press.
Gujarati | India | Short Fiction
August, 2010A writer’s identity is a fragile thing, but what happens when two writers living in the same city share the same name? Can their voices and styles distinguish them? But the real issue isn’t about credit, but rather who will be remembered in the footnotes of time. There is a certain terseness in the original, an abruptness, that I've struggled to do justice to in this translation. (Mira Desai)
I have a contemporary reaction to the life of Charles Baudelaire. I am reminded of Bob Dylan's "Yonder stands your orphan with his gun/Crying like a fire in the sun." Or of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Or I think of the joke between a friend and me that to "follow your bliss" may lead to homelessness. An adolescent genius, Baudelaire sometimes, like most adolescents, felt weary beyond his years. Seemingly willful and contrary—undoubtedly to protect his role as the soul in revolt—the poet setting out to make great demands on language was intently committed, it seemed, to a certain internal journey. While his biography has romantic connections with various women, you may read in his poetry that his essential nature was that of the poet, a life essentially of solitude, resisting the world.
In the process of translating, one finally walks into the poem as if into a house or a forest and looks around from the inside, because you cannot make the final transition from literal translation to new poem if you are not drenched in the presence and feeling of the original. (Perhaps my inflated language about this only expresses the joy I feel whenever pieces in the English counterpart little by little fall into place.) What a kick to have a dialogue with someone speaking a different language—in the case of Baudelaire, a dialogue across time. We hear Baudelaire colored by the style of English translation during each era since his death, and those past translations lose effect for me, and so I am motivated, as well, to let Baudelaire go on speaking as fresh as in his original by "refreshing" the way he is translated. (James McColley Eilers)
Aleksey Khomyakov (1804–1860) was a Russian religious philosopher, historian, economist, poet, painter, engineer, and inventor. He was the leader of the Slavophiles and promoted the idea of Pan-Slavism based on the principles of Orthodoxy. His early poems, created within the framework of romanticism, are concerned with the inner unity between the spirit and nature. Later he drew the most important source of his poetry from Orthodox Christianity. His theological writings influenced Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Solovyov. Khomyakov’s poetry remains largely untranslated.
Catalan | Novel (excerpt) | Spain
April, 2010Mill Town Memories is a captivating novel that holds the reader's attention with a skillful non-linear narrative technique. It immerses the reader in an industrial era, depicting life in one of the textile colonies that were such a vital part of Catalonia in the 1950s (the author lived in the Colonia Vidal from the age of six months until she was 20). It is a portrait of the heartland of Catalonia: its traditions, customs, and pressures to conform.
Catalan | Novel (excerpt) | Spain
March, 2010Due to the physical after-effects of a fateful traffic accident, a waiter in a roadside bar finds himself forced to give up his job and withdraw into himself. In this situation and out of the need to do something—anything—he resumes his old pastime of voracious reading, and begins to write. In an exercise of reminiscence superimposed on the most immediate present, the story becomes a magnificent and careful intertwining of crossed paths, encounters and misunderstandings among a wide variety of characters that were once part of the microcosm of the roadside bar. When he was working there he unwittingly became a witness to the ever-complicated human psyche, and to an everyday reality verging on decadence and disillusionment with a changing world shrouded in an atmosphere of pessimism. Ramon Erra's extraordinary literary precision establishes him as one of the best current writers of Catalan fiction.
Catalan | Novel (excerpt) | Spain
March, 2010A Lake in Flames is a first novel, and also the first part of a trilogy that continues with The Sea of Minsk (La mar de Minsk) and Towers of Clay (Torres d'argila) and marks Hilari de Cara's birth as a novelist. In this chronicle of characters and stories that touch on life, memory, hopes and ambitions, and sex, the author addresses his themes with sarcasm and, above all, a certain sense of terminus. The parallel plots are set in a village in present-day Mallorca and the Mallorca of the past; in the Barcelona of the 1970s and the Spanish Civil War. The novel is grounded in its author's own personal experience, but is developed with irony and a style close to contemporary English-language fiction.
French | Morocco | Novel (excerpt)
March, 2010From Pierre Joris's memoir of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine:
During a dinner at La Coupole in Paris (circa 1979)...I turned to my neighbor, Kathy Acker, and started to tell her everything I knew about Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, what an absolutely superb poet he was, the greatest of his generation in Morocco, how powerful his prose was, how violently he had disemboweled the colonizer’s language in order to be able to put it to accurate new uses, how he had turned it into a truly alive counter-language and how especially in Moi l’aigre he had done that with a brilliance that bordered on genius. I sang Mohammed’s praises for as long as she and anyone else at the table would listen—I wanted them to know, but, maybe before all, I wanted to reassure myself, as I knew without knowing it, that this was the last time I would see him. And it was. Except that from time to time when I sit down to write a poem I try to think through him, Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, and try to gather that way some of the absolute intensity and fearlessness necessary for a true guérilla poétique.
When I heard of his death, the line of poetry that came to mind was not his, but this one, by Guillaume Apollinaire: soleil cou coupé / sun throat cut.
Finnish search-engine poet Tytti Heikkinen is the author of two books, 2008's Täytetyn eläimen lämpo (Taxidermied Animal's Warmth) and 2009's Varjot astronauteista (Shadows From Astronauts), both from poEsia. Helsingin Sanomat nominated her first book for its book prize, saying in the accompanying review that her work "challenged poetry to a new level." Heikkinen uses new digital media to tackle issues of authorship in brave and often funny ways, and for this she has been critically praised.
Heikkinen's poems have a total effect at once light and devastating. They are overlaid with both a classic, quiet, characteristically Nordic dark, and a bloggy, confrontational, postmodern self-awareness. This duality is what first attracted me to Heikkinen's work, and it is also at the center of our collaboration, which goes something like this: Heikkinen sends me an enthusiastic email. I retreat to process the information quietly. Heikkinen sends me a pithy reply and tells me to get shit done.
Our correspondence has been reckless, wordy, occasionally drunken, and always passionate. It has become exceedingly clear that neither of us is perfect, but the poems stubbornly push past all personal matters, and what they invoke is pure.
The translations featured here began to take shape in the spring of 2009, and portions of the project are found or forthcoming in At-Large Magazine and PRECIPICe.
(Niina Pollari)
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).