Hindi | India | Short Fiction
March, 2010Poor children witness the destruction of their neighborhood. While playing, they build their own small replica of what had been destroyed and guard it from destruction.
The Word Exchange: U.S./Mexico Playwright Exchange Program was created by the Lark Play Development Center in collaboration with Mexico’s Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA). The Lark annually hosts playwrights from Mexico and pairs them with American playwrights for a ten-day translation and development residency designed to create stage-worthy translations of new works from Mexico; it also introduces the writers to New York’s theater scene, industry leaders, and the Lark community. Public readings of these works are presented each November, followed by a closing night Celebración. In 2009, the Lark launched a reciprocal program where U.S. writers develop Spanish translations of their work with artists in Mexico City.
The Sadness of the Limes is the story of Rite Pool, a bitter formerly successful comedian, who is now tired and depressed from a life that isn't funny anymore. He spends his life talking to parking meters and thinks repeatedly about quitting comedy, but an unexpected encounter with his former sidekick, the happy innocent Izzy Dedley, makes him think that there is still hope on a laughing track. The comic duo plan a comeback at their favorite gig joint, the Three Trapped Tigers, but Rite Pool's own legs run away from him and decide to steal the show.
The Word Exchange: U.S./Mexico Playwright Exchange Program was created by the Lark Play Development Center in collaboration with Mexico’s Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA). The Lark annually hosts playwrights from Mexico and pairs them with American playwrights for a ten-day translation and development residency designed to create stage-worthy translations of new works from Mexico; it also introduces the writers to New York’s theater scene, industry leaders, and the Lark community. Public readings of these works are presented each November, followed by a closing night Celebración. In 2009, the Lark launched a reciprocal program where U.S. writers develop Spanish translations of their work with artists in Mexico City.
A poetic, chaotic, and moving tale of evolution and adaptation in the modern world, Events with Life’s Leftovers follows the residents of an apartment building as they celebrate insomnia, and life’s beginnings and endings.
Minimalism? Stevens, “the nothing that is”; Williams, “a machine made of words.” Economy of means, focus on surfaces, concreteness, eschewing figuration, making silence and absence present, self-effacement, and the spareness of Suprematism. In the American context, Robert Morris, “Maximum resistance to…perceptual separation” inviting the viewer's participation and co-production in the creation of meaning. Donald Judd's “Specific Objects” and their “indeterminancy of arrangement” making for unclassifiable art “between” painting and sculpture, challenging the poetry/not poetry distinction, non-Art references and the use of industrial materials akin to citation, cliché, common speech, public announcement, advertising slogan, proverb, etc. But also Zen, a nearly spiritual pursuit, and human voice as sound sculpture. Not a movement: “Minimalism is not really an idea; it ended before it started” (Sol LeWitt). In the Russian context of the ‘60s and ‘70s, a resumption of the ‘30s generation's Absurdism, the naïve populist lyric of the war generation with its creation of a sphere for private utterance, a truly subversive act, parody of ‘50s Socialist Realism through coding, implication by omission, and ironic critique of the Soviet status quo. The emergence of Russian Conceptualism and so called SotsArt (Russian Pop Art). Yes Irony, but also pathos and a kind of aesthetics of exhaustion, both of the personal and of the historical kind. Minimalism: that legal definition of pornography: I know it when I see it. Enough said.
Yuli Gugolev was born in Moscow in 1964. He is a translator and the author of two books of poetry: Polnoe: Sobranie sochineniy (Complete: Collected Works; Moscow: OGI, 2000), and Komandirovochnye predpisaniya (Official Instructions; Moscow: Novoe izdatelstvo, 2006), which won the Moscow Count prize for 2007. In 2008, Gugolev was one of three poets invited to give a series of bilingual readings around the United States sponsored by the NEA and the Poetry Foundation in conjunction with the release of Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology from Dalkey Archives. He works in the regional division of the International Commission of the Red Cross in the Russian Federation.
Pakistan | Short Fiction | Urdu
January, 2010Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-55) is perhaps the best-known Modernist fiction writer in South Asia. His stories won him censure during his lifetime, including five trials for writing obscene material (in each instance he was acquitted). Since his death, his fiction has been widely cited by South Asian writers and his border stories have been used in classrooms to help students come to some understanding of the atrocities that took place during the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. His stories that take place in Bombay offer another view of the times—full of the characters of pulp fiction, they depict a seedy world of opportunity, ambiguous morals, and cosmopolitan energy. His evocative use of the colloquial (and swear words), as well as his often abrupt and ambiguous conclusions, can be seen as attempts to destabilize the prim sense of morality that dominated the subcontinent's social sphere during his lifetime.
Avrom Sutzkever, who died on January 20, 2010 at the age of 96, was the greatest postwar Yiddish poet, a prophetic survivor whose fate paralleled the tragedies and joys of Jews in the twentieth century. Raised in the brief but intense literary flowering of Vilna, he melted the printing plates of the city's most famous press into bullets for the guns of ghetto fighters. He witnessed the ghetto's destruction, helped to salvage the remains of the city's Jewish treasures, testified at Nuremberg, and immigrated to Israel, where he was at the center of rapidly waning high Yiddish literary culture. He founded and edited for some four decades the premier Yiddish literary magazine, Di Goldene Keyt. His poems depict his life not autobiographically, but auto-epically.
The dove of the Ode serves as a spiritual mentor to the boy-poet. The poem ends with the impassioned declaration of a secular-literary neomessianist: "Build, build the temple, build it with the sense of the sun!" It is a measure of the complexity of Sutzkever's Jewish poetics that he calls it a templ (a rarely used word in Yiddish), not a beyt-hamikdash. The third temple will be nothing at all like the first two.
Boris Karloff is the pen name of Dov-Ber Kerler, the polylingual and peripatetic son of the refusenik Yiddish poet Yosef Kerler. The two Kerlers are probably the only father-son team in postwar Yiddish poetry. The younger Kerler is known for his poetic and Yiddishist heterodoxy, his wit, and his openness to young talent. He is a scholar of Yiddish literary history at Indiana University.
Yonia Fain's odyssey is also emblematic of recent Jewish history. Born in Russia in 1914, he fled to Vilna, where he studied art and decided to be a painter. In 1939, the Soviets occupied the city; he fled again to Warsaw but was captured and imprisoned by the Soviets. He escaped to Japan via Siberia in 1941; the Japanese deported him to Shanghai, where he spent the rest of the war. After liberation he went to Mexico City, where he worked on murals with Diego Rivera. He has lived and painted in New York since 1953, publishing two books of poetry (the latest in 2008) and one book of short stories. His preoccupations are bleak and unsparing but offer the possibility of resurrection.
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).