Contemporary Concrete Poetry (in Finnish: Nykykonkreettista runoutta) presents traditional concrete poetry and YouTube comments. The book seeks to highlight how YouTube comments sometimes evoke the aesthetics of early concrete poetry (especially the writing of Eugen Gomringer).
The concrete movement was very international, and one of its goals was to create poetry that was universal and understandable even if the poet and the reader did not speak the same language. The YouTube comments area is likewise international. Maybe the urge to be understood by other commentators from all over the world is the reason behind YouTube comments' occasional resemblance to concrete poetry? Or maybe it is just our natural impulse to play with letters, words, and images. In a literary context such play is called art, and in other contexts it's called...well, nothing. In this book, hopefully, the boundary between high and low is blurred, not so that concrete poetry is seen as trivial, but so that the reader can perceive the poetical dimensions in YouTube comments.
Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
June, 2012This transposition of "The Nose" by Russian writer Nikolai Gogol represents the first publication of a story in this newly developed genre. It takes Gogol's original narrative (about a man who loses his nose) and shifts it from Saint Petersburg, Russia in the 19th century to New York City in the 21st century on a systematic basis similar to translation.
In the essay accompanying his transposition, Henry Whittlesey explains some of the differences between translation, transposition, and adaptation, since transposition falls between translation and adaptation. The transposition of "The Nose" represents a purely literary transposition that retains the form and shifts the content of the original story. This essay looks into five important aspects related to a transposition of content: character, setting, consciousness, identity, and the narrator's voice. As the content shifts from 19th-century Saint Petersburg to 21st-century New York, these five elements undergo various degrees of transfiguration, depending on the extent to which their manifestation in the original is commensurate with the given phenomenon in the present day.
Croatia | Croatian | Short Fiction
June, 2012Buddy lives in a provincial town in Croatia with his elder brother, sister-in-law, and father, whose mind is deteriorating. Buddy's mother died when he was small. Soccer is his big love, and he dreams of becoming a professional player after school. The monotony of family life is interrupted one day when Buddy is approached by an agent from one of the country's big soccer clubs--with an enticing proposition that poses big challenges for Buddy and his family.
Irse (English translation: "To Leave") is Isabel Cadenas Cañón's first poetry book. It was awarded the 2009 Caja de Guadalajara-Fundación Siglo Futuro Award for young poets and published in 2010. The book is divided into three parts, and it explores the consequences of leaving, of being abroad, and the impossibility of returning. The book was one of the ten best-selling poetry books in Spain for twelve consecutive weeks.
Critical Essay | English | United States
June, 2012"Clemens Berger, the Austrian playwright," writes Damion Searls, "was telling the audience one of those stories--you know the kind--about 'untranslatable' words, in this case a word from an indigenous language in southern Patagonia, and the word means, well, when a man and a woman are in a bar, and he looks at her, and she looks at him, and they look at each other and their looks say okay I'm interested in you but you need to make the first move and come over to me? The word means that. Everyone laughed, Clemens Berger is charming and tells a good story. I was on the panel as the translator, of his play Angel of the Poor, and he'd told the audience the story because I had just said that as a translator I didn't like to admit that anything was untranslatable, and now I said: 'See, you translated it! You told us in English and everybody laughed!' He said: 'But you can't translate it in one word--' and I said: 'Well, what matters more to you, how many words it has or whether everybody laughs?'"...
Arabic | Short Fiction | Tunisia
June, 2012Hassan Nasr was born in 1937 in Tunis. He has been active in Tunisian literary life since Independence in 1956, and started publishing short stories in magazines in 1959. He studied literature in Tunis and Baghdad, and lived for two years in Mauritania. He worked mainly as a high school teacher while writing short stories and novels. He lives in Tunis. The translation by William Hutchins of his novel Return to Dar al-Basha was published in 2006 by Syracuse University Press. His other novels include Sijillat Ra's al-Dik (Mr. Cockhead's Files, 2001), Dahaliz al-Layl (Corridors of the Night, 1977), Khubz al-Ard (Bread from the Earth, 1987) and Ka'inat al-Mujannaha (Winged Creatures, 2010). His short story collections include: Layali al-Matar (Rainy Nights, 1978), 52 Layla (52 Nights, 1979), al-Sahar wa-l-Jurh (Insomnia and the Wound, 1989), and Khuyul al-Fajr (Pipe-dreams, 1997).
Austria | German | Novel (excerpts)
June, 2012The Graveyard of Bitter Oranges, Josef Winkler's sixth book, is an episodic record of the author's travels through Italy. A blend of memoir, fiction, and reportage, it inaugurates an iconological approach to experience that would gain increasing importance in the works that followed it, according to which observations and anecdotes drawn from newspapers and literature serve as codices for the decipherment of the traumatic events of the past.
Dominican Republic | Prose Poetry | Spanish
June, 2012Death juxtaposed with amorous love becomes a creative force that fuels life as a never-ending cycle in this short, inventive prose poem originally published in Spanish in the literary journal La Poesia Sorprendida (No. IV, January 1944).
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).