France | French | Genre-defying
July, 2013Pierre Autin-Grenier (b. 1947) is a French author living in Lyon and the Vaucluse. His many works are difficult to classify, and the trilogy from which the pieces featured here are excerpted is no exception. They feel very much like prose poems, but combined they read (dixit the author) as autobiography. These pieces are excerpts from the first volume of the trilogy entitled Je ne suis pas un héros (1993). The second volume is called Toute une vie bien ratée (1999); the third, L'eternité est inutile (2002). The three volumes together form Une Histoire, which can be translated as either A Story or A History. Among their many charms are their syntactical idiosyncrasies and the author's prodigiously refreshing use of set phrases and clichés.
Antonio Gamoneda was born in 1931. He is one of the most widely read contemporary Spanish poets. His most successful early work, Blues castellano, dates to the period 1961-66. He then entered a long period of self-protective censorship, from which he emerged upon the death of Franco with the publication of Description of the Lie (León 1977). In 1986, with the publication of the first five sections of Book of the Cold // Libro del frío, he became recognized for the originality of his language and the way in which it enacts psychological processes of personal loss and responds to the conflicted emotions needed for survival. Book of the Cold // Libro del frío is considered to be most vital and innovative volume in Antonio Gamoneda's body of work. In 1992, a new edition of Libro del frío appeared, including the major poem featured here, "Cold of Limits," inspired by and written in collaboration with the painter Antoni Tapies. In 2006, Gamoneda received the Cervantes Prize, an honor bestowed annually upon a distinguished Spanish-language author.
Description of the Lie, Book of the Cold, and another of Gamoneda's works, Gravestones (all of which were translated by Donald Wellman), are deeply marked by the dark years of the Franco dictatorship. Gamoneda's poetry can be read as a form of witness, but the work itself is conceived and should be understood as poetry marked by distinctive compositional values of a musical order, both in terms of rhythms and interlaced imagery.
Donald Wellman's translation of Description of the Lie is forthcoming from Talisman House Press.
Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
July, 2013Anatoly Gavrilov is a contemporary Russian writer of short stories. Born in Ukraine, and a graduate of the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute, Gavrilov now lives in Vladimir and works as a postman. His work was not published in the USSR until 1989. A writer of modest output, Gavrilov's laconic style and experimental narratives have left their mark on modern Russian prose, particularly the so-called "new prose" movement. The mood of his works is pessimistic. His heroes are despondent and confounded by unexpected twists of fate. His basic theme is the futility of the little man's existence--the writer has little faith in his heroes' attempts to change the world. His artistic approach is one of unwavering authenticity and specificity.
Creative Nonfiction (excerpt) | Italian | Italy
July, 2013Miransù is the name of a place and Monica Sarsini's family home outside Florence, in the Valdarno. The book is in two voices, Monica Sarsini's and her grandmother's; the voices alternate. Each voice follows different memories about the place and relations with generations of family. Stylistically, the voices differ as well: Sarsini's is intensely physical, though reflective; her grandmother's more direct, like speech.
Arabic | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
July, 2013Najem Wali, who was born in al-Amarah, in southern Iraq, October 20, 1956, currently lives in exile in Berlin, where he works as a freelance writer and cultural correspondent. In 1978, he earned a degree in German literature from Baghdad University. He left Iraq at the end of 1980 after being imprisoned and tortured and after witnessing the start of the First Gulf War, which has influenced his work. He has studied German literature in Hamburg and Spanish and Latin American literature in Madrid. He has devoted many years to travel and to language study, spending six months in Oxford in 1993, six months in Florence in 1996, and three months in Saint Petersburg in 1998. He writes for major German newspapers and for the Arabic paper al-Hayat and is one of the better-known Iraqi and Arab authors internationally.
German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
July, 2013Forschungsbericht, at less than 40,000 words, is perhaps the most immediately accessible of Fichte’s ethnographic novels: set in the coastal Belizean city of Dangriga over the course of a two-week visit in February 1980, it depicts the attempts of Fichte’s alter ego, the writer Jäcki, and his companion Irma, the alter ego of Fichte’s long-time companion, the photographer Leonore Mau, to investigate the religious practices of the Black Carib (or Garifuna) community in Belize. The centerpiece of the novel is Fichte’s unsuccessful attempt to observe the dugu, the Garifuna feast for dead ancestors, which is presided over by the local buyei, or shaman, to placate the departed.
Forschungsbericht serves as an excellent point of entry into Fichte’s ethnographic writing, as meditation on both the consciousness of the writer and the creative process, and as illustration of the epistemological problem of knowing anything outside oneself, especially the foreign. Fichte, who originally meant his life’s work to be regarded as a history of tourism in the latter half of the twentieth century (and who might best be thought of as a French writer who wrote in German, a cross between Proust and Lévi-Strauss), is a crucial figure in that century’s literature, and deserves to be more widely known outside the German-speaking world.
Bosnia and Herzegovina | Bosnian | Short Fiction
July, 2013Muharem Bazdulj was born in 1977 in Travnik, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He has published several novels and short story collections, including Druga knjiga (2000), which was awarded the Book of the Year prize by Open Society Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2005, the Northwestern University Press series Writings from an Unbound Europe published it in English translation. Bazdulj's work has been featured in international anthologies such as The Wall in My Head, published on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Best European Fiction 2012 (Dalkey Archive Press). His short stories and essays have appeared in World Literature Today, Creative Nonfiction, Habitus, and Absinthe, among other literary journals. Two of his early novels are available in German translation: Der Ungläubige und Zulejha (2008) and Transit.Komet.Eklipse (2011). He works as a journalist for the Bosnian daily Oslobođenje, and the Association of Journalists of Bosnia and Herzegovina honored him as the country's best journalist in 2012.
Novel (excerpt) | Spanish | Uruguay
July, 2013Who Among Us: A Novel narrates the history of a classic love triangle, but with the variation that it is the husband who encourages the wife to take a lover. The novel consists of three parts--three different versions of the same sentimental conflict that culminate in the story each character relates from his or her own perspective. The novel takes place in Montevideo, but this is merely circumstantial; the most prevalent element of the work is the delving into each character's mind, not the monitoring of a social atmosphere. With effective subtlety, Benedetti creates opposing mirrors of the three characters' lives and, at the novel's climax, explicitly asks its underlying question: "Who among us judges whom?"
The Cansó de la Croza/Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise, though preserved as a single work, is the record of two different Occitan poems composed by two very different authors. The poems were joined together, probably in Toulouse some 50 years later c. 1275, so that it now appears as a chronological whole.
The first part is the work of Guillaume de Tudèle, who was a Master of Arts and a clerk in minor orders. He seems to have combined knowledge of the chanson de geste with interest in geomancy and may have had some early success as a jongleur. His main period of activity was between 1190 and 1214. He travelled from the Kingdom of Navarre to Montauban, apparently being present at the marriage of Count Raimond VI of Toulouse to Éléanore d' Aragon in 1199. Leaving Montauban, probably, despite Guillaume's claims to foresight, only when it was menaced by the crusading army in 1211, he found refuge in Bruniquel where, under the protection of Raimond VI's brother, Count Baudouin, he became a canon at Saint-Antonin and so, in a small way, he profited from the results of the crusade. His part of the Chanson was probably composed between c. 1210 and 1213/14. Although it is not without criticism of the crusaders (his is the record of the massacre of the citizens of Beziers in 1209), he takes a sympathetic view of the church and of the crusade and is largely favourable to the crusade's effective leader, Simon de Montfort.
The second part of the Chanson, from the autumn of 1213 on, was the work of a still unknown poet whose language and viewpoint are entirely distinct. The second part was composed in what has, until recently, been regarded as probably a Toulousaine dialect. Whatever the mystery of its authorship, this second part is bitterly opposed to the crusade, to de Montfort and to leading churchmen; it is deeply loyal to the people and leaders of the south, most of all to the Counts of Toulouse, being particularly proud of the city, then the second in Europe, and of its people. There is no evidence that the second poet was a Cathar believer or even a supporter of any heretical views.
Though both parts are written with great poetic immediacy, the second part is composed with an even greater ability to evoke the reality of events and this is combined with passion and an eloquent sense of real drama. The two poems follow a largely similar verse form divided into rhyming sections (laise) of unequal lengths, of which there are 130 in Guillaime's part and another 84 in the second part. The Chanson, as a whole, covers events from 1208 to 1219 and the laise extracted here are taken from 143-145 in the second part of the Chanson and are the main part of the debate held before Pope Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council in Rome during the period November to December, 1215.
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).