Gérard de Nerval was born in Paris in 1808. His published works include translations of Goethe and Heinrich Heine, numerous plays and operettas (some of which were co-authored with Alexandre Dumas), the travelogue Voyage en Orient (Voyage to the Orient, 1851), the poetry collection Les chimères (Chimeras, 1854), and the prose work Aurélie (1855). He committed suicide in Paris in 1855.
Hebrew | Israel | Play (excerpt)
April, 2013Set in Haifa in 1988 during the first Intifada, The Admission is a play about memory and denial in the context of what Israelis call their "War of Independence" and the Palestinians call their "Nakba." It portrays one Jewish and one Palestinian family. Some of the families' members are trying to reveal the events that took place during the 1948 war between Jews and Palestinians, hoping that an open and truthful discourse will heal their wounds--but some are trying to deny the events and bury their memories deep in the ground, hoping that peaceful co-existence without exposing the painful memories will heal those same wounds.
Dutch | Play (excerpt) | The Netherlands
April, 2013Six years after their divorce, a man and a woman meet each other again for the first time, at the place where their only child is buried. A letter, announcing that their child is going to be reburied because poison has been found in the soil, brings them back together. But whereas she is looking for someone with whom she can re-live the past, he wants someone who can look to the future. Both are torn apart by grief, but it is not until they let themselves become vulnerable enough to return to the past, to their child's deathbed, that they seem to reconnect.
France | French | Play (excerpts)
April, 2013Under the cover of one of her many aliases--"M. Auberte the Mad"--the author takes the stage and conjures up a whirlwind of scenes. This comedy about power relations presents some thirty characters at the dinner table, in the bedroom, and in the boardroom--at work and at play, but always in trouble. Witness domestic drama, national scandal, and capital crimes--in a word, the everyday insanity of the world we live in. The Chonchons, dramatis personae of this play, come directly from Borgès' book El libro de los seres imaginarios. They can be full of humanity, and then all of a sudden they will sin, out of pride, stupidity or fragility.
German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
April, 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.
Mexico | Spanish | Verse Novel (Excerpts)
March, 2013After being pensioned off for his unstable behavior, Mr. Gordon experiences a fracture of his spirit in an artificial, Californian Eden. In the shade of the tree of a thousand leaves, at the edge of a swimming pool, Gordon transcribes his thoughts, memories, and questions while striving to sort out the harassment he experiences from his wife and his best friend, engaging all the while in a dialogue with an interior voice determined to finish off what remains of his sanity.
Death on rúa Augusta is the diary of a person who cannibalizes his own self. In this narrative poem, Tedi López Mills masterfully delves into the machinery of consciousness in order to exhibit, boldly, that slender thread that keeps us attached to the world. A masterful work of contemporary Mexican literature, which shares both the human depth of Zbigniew Herbert's Mr. Cogito and the teasing ambiguity of Johann von Goethe's Elf King, it does showcase one truth at the heart of all human life: No person is to be despised as worthless; no person can ever be deprived of her or his dignity. Even the "zeros" among us are all "classics after our own fashion."
German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
March, 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.
The problems associated with translating this passage are the usual ones encountered when selecting the opening chapter of a longer work: there is a fine line between leaving the reader intrigued or bewildered. Fichte's style, telegraphic and allusive, makes orientation even more difficult.
Despite such difficulties, Forschungsbericht serves, in this regard, 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.
Brazil | Poetry | Portuguese
March, 2013Caio Meira's 2003 poetry collection Things the First Dog on the Street Can Tell You is a stylistically daring blend of science, philosophy, and pop culture. Meira--a writer, editor, critic, and translator from French into Portuguese--is most interested in the state of "between-ness." His poetry wrestles with limits, both mental and physical, and explores the uncertain, shifting boundaries of modern life.
The collection is divided into three sections: "Epidermatic" (Epidermática), "Other Lives, the Same" (Outras vidas, a mesma), and "Venereals" (Venéreas). "Epidermatic"--referring to that which acts only upon the outer surface of the skin--is a characteristically wry title for a series of poems that delve into the speaker's inner thoughts and bodily processes. "Other Lives, the Same" moves the reader into more domestic territory, dealing with daily life in present-day Rio de Janeiro, where the speaker contemplates all the other paths he might have chosen. The poems in the last section, "Venereals," are told in the persona of three complex female artists who serve as the speaker's muses: Emily Dickinson, Marilyn Monroe, and Billie Holiday. The title is a play on the word's connection to the goddess Venus, who embodies both love and sexuality, in all their beauty and grotesqueness.
Brazilian critic Leonardo Fróes notes that Meira's work is unique among Brazilian poetry not only for its intensity but for its stylistic control. Not a single period is used in the first section. The general lack of punctuation, and the use of commas instead of periods when there are sentence breaks, skillfully mirrors the porousness of the speaker's world. Nothing seems to start or end; instead, we are privy to a stream of consciousness told only in the "space between breaths." In the cinematic prose poems of "Other Lives, the Same," the reader is bombarded by commas, periods, and question marks. Venereals employs long lines, standard capitalization, but no periods. Over and over again, Meira reintroduces the world to us, making it familiar, only to render it strange as soon as we've gotten comfortable.
Dislocation and doubleness, echoing Arthur Rimbaud's famous statement, "I am an other," are recurring themes in Meira's work. The poetic "I" roams uninhibitedly between genders, inner and outer worlds, and the mundane and existential issues of twenty-first-century life. In fact, this "I" can only exist in a state of perpetual formation: a perfect reflection of Brazil's, and of the world's, rapidly changing realities.
Brazil | Flash Fiction | Portuguese
March, 2013Brazilian writer Adriana Lisboa's honors include the José Saramago Award, the Japan Foundation Fellowship, a fellowship from the Brazilian National Library, and the Newcomer of the Year Award from the Brazilian section of IBBY (the International Board on Books for Young People). She has published ten books, including novels, children's books, and a collection of short stories and prose poetry. Her fourth book, Caligrafias, collects her short stories written between 1996 and 2004, including those featured here. Lisboa holds a BA in Music from Rio de Janeiro Federal State University (UniRio), an MA in Brazilian Literature, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Rio de Janeiro State University (Uerj). Born in Rio de Janeiro, she now lives in Colorado.
Jürgen Becker was born in Köln, Germany, in 1932. He is the author of over thirty books--novels, story collections, poetry collections, and plays--all published by Germany's premier publisher, Suhrkamp. He has won numerous prizes in Germany, including the Heinrich Böll Prize, the Uwe Johnson Prize, and the Hermann Lenz Prize, among others. Becker's work often deals with his childhood experience of WWII and the political consequences of the postwar division of Germany.
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).