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).
Tracto ("Tract") is a tunnel-poem, a poem-stairway, an intimate passageway connecting one darkness with others, the origin of light from whence the poetic word, the very essence of language, is interrogated.
Corona Tallo Raíces ("Crown Stem Roots") represents, through the experience of disappearance--a death in the family, the cutting down of a poplar grove that shaded the river--a radical immersion in the landscape, a harsh geography that joins the everyday traces of life and death.
Born into the upper strata of Milanese society, Antonia Pozzi (1912-1938) was educated at the University of Milan, where she studied with the influential philosopher Antonio Banfi. Pozzi's privileged upbringing allowed her to become current with poets such as Eliot and Rilke in the original, but social and intellectual expectations were also a constraint, and she struggled to grow in confidence as an artist. In 1933, her family prohibited her from continuing to see Antonio Maria Cervi, her high school teacher of Latin and Greek fourteen years her senior, ending a six-year relationship. In December 1938, her health eroded by illness, and depressed by the pervasive effects of the increasingly oppressive Fascist regime, Pozzi ended her life by taking an overdose of barbiturates and putting herself to sleep in the snow beside the abbey of Chiaravalle in the newly industrialized outskirts of Milan, where she had been volunteering to help impoverished children. In her last letter to her parents, she explained that "part of my mortal desperation is due to the cruel oppression inflicted upon our faded youth." She was only twenty-six, unpublished, and virtually unknown, but the notebooks she left behind were filled with terse poems of astonishing power. Her work was soon published with an admiring preface by Eugenio Montale, but the sensuality of many poems was erased in her father's editing; the originals have since been recuperated. Pozzi is now placed by many alongside the greatest poets of her day. Her voice is solitary and unmistakable, offering an exceptionally open and intense dramatization of the crisis of the private, pacifist sphere in a time of rising ideological rigidity and aggression. Pozzi's poems constitute a continuous yet tenuous barrier of hope, a "gentle offering" to the reader, witness to the poet's "longing for light things."
Cuba | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
April, 2012The featured texts belong to assignments [tareas], an innovative long poem that has as its core the experiences of otherness, both in Cuba and the United States. assignments ponders the impossibilities of a stable identity, its infeasibility in space and time. On a formal level, assignments constitutes an homage to the number 7. It is made up of 21 sections, divided into 7 stanzas, with 7 verses each.
Just as Virgil's Aeneid represented Rome's answer to Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, so was Gavin Douglas' Scots translation of the Aeneid in 1513 a rival's response to the English version published twenty-three years earlier by William Caxton. The first complete rendition of a classical text to be produced in the Scots vernacular, Douglas' Eneados represented, along with works by William Dunbar and Robert Henryson, the flowering of the golden age of the Northern Renaissance in Scotland. Douglas not only translated the epic poem with a careful attention to scholarly and artistic accuracy, but also added significant prologues to each of Virgil's twelve books. In the two prologue excerpts featured here (from Book One and Book Seven), Douglas first defends his use of the Scots language while blasting Caxton's earlier work, then settles down for a wintry physical description of his translation process. These prologues thus present a rare and fascinating insight into the growth of a poet and his language, literature, and culture, while also providing a thrilling opportunity to translate a translator.
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).