Lithuania | Lithuanian | Poetry
September, 2015He smokes Camel grays. He translated Ginsberg into Lithuanian. Bushy grey hairs sprout from his pony tail--an unmistakable mane on a wiry frame. He quit drinking six years ago. He translated Bukowski. We worked together to put out an anthology of young Lithuanian poets in English. His literary knowledge is vast. He has read more than most people I know--in English, not to mention Lithuanian and Russian. We are now working together to put out a manuscript of his selected poems, and the poetry here is a part of that project. Marius Burokas is a poet and translator--a constant commentator on contemporary literature, an organizer of events, an editor of anthologies of new poetry, a family man. His poetry is rooted in the daily life of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Unlike much of the neo-romantic, nationalist verse of the last century that came out of a country struggling for independence, Marius is part of a new generation ushering in the postmodern era of interrogation and transnationality. In his second poetry collection, Conditions (Būsenos), he marks himself as a Lithuanian poet while standing naked in an American laundromat--not in the countryside, not on an ancient castle hill as would be expected in the hoary neo-romantic vein that dominated Lithuanian poetry until recently. In his I’ve learned how not to be (Išmokau nebūti), which won him the Young Jotvingian Prize in 2011, his Vilnius is the city outside of the renovated, tourist-filled, historical Old Town. Dingy dives and impersonal apartment blocks present the reader with a seedy and grim contemporary landscape. Whether thematically or stylistically, in a free-verse style indebted to William Carlos Williams, the beats, and the deep-image poets, Marius positions himself outside of traditional Lithuanian perspectives. He sees different aspects of life in Vilnius and he sees more typical aspects differently. So when he describes a traditional folk festival, he brings out the cruelty that lies behind the superficial enjoyments and smug nationalism. Burokas searches for meaning in a fallen world, while death in the form of a naked prostitute calls to him from an apartment window.
- Rimas Uzgiris
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
September, 2015Pierre Senges’s Geometry in the Dust is a book about city life. On a visit to a foreign city, the book’s narrator is trying to write a description of the city that will furnish instructions for his king to build a city in his home land. Never having seen a city before, his approach is to try to apprehend and set down on paper the principles of the city that he observes in action around him.
In this third chapter, the narrator reflects on one of the city’s many paradoxes: in order to truly know the city, we have to get lost in it. There are cultural resonances here with certain of the psychogeographers’ and Situationists’ experiments (namely la dérive: the urban walker’s surrender to unconscious impulses, useful for discovering hitherto unknown aspects of the city), but if Senges had them in mind when he was writing this chapter, they go nameless--or nearly so.
Whatever may be said of these wanderers, the greater focus is on the orientateur, or wayfinder: the person one stops on the sidewalk to ask for directions. Luckily, their instructions do not interfere with our ability to get lost: instead of useful directions, the wayfinders provide the traveler with “a Menippean satire for their little corner of the city, a macaronic, a description expressed in the local creole.” Along with the street preachers, buskers, graffitists, bustling crowds, romantic couples, and insomniacs of the city that Geometry in the Dust describes, these wayfinders are the book’s comic heroes, and probably not too different, if we only look hard enough, from ourselves.
This is the second excerpt of Geometry in the Dust to be published here at InTranslation. The first chapter was published in the May 2015 edition. The original book, published in 2004 by Éditions Verticales, includes twenty-six illustrations by the artist Killoffer.
- Jacob Siefring
German | Germany | Poetry (excerpts) | Polish
September, 2015Do others sneak their words to our lips? Is it confiscated at customs, or will it suit our own angles of approach? These questions of language are ones that Uljana Wolf never poses directly in her debut collection kochanie i bought bread, published by kookbooks in 2005. Wolf’s ear is tuned to what happens at the porous borders between literary cultures, everyday experience, and national history, engaging a poetics in which this dissonance is galvanized into a vibration that rattles us. That we feel unsettled and seduced in this border dance, where “strophe by strophe / the guest is better versed,” alerts us to how we incessantly draw and contest borders through the particularities of language. For Wolf, born in East Berlin in 1979, the complex historical strata of Germany--the ineradicable shadow of the war, the East-West dissonance, the multilingual melting pot of Berlin--offer a site of intercultural contact, her poems brimming with multilingual and historical variances that provoke and kaleidoscope her homeland’s murky inheritance.
Wolf is equal parts inventor and dementor of language, and each poem shimmers with the possibility of what ordinary object or utterance might undergo metamorphosis. A phrase in “postscript to the dogs of kreisau” describes much of Wolf’s wordplay and my approach as a translator: “lautrausch,” or “sonic intoxication.” The semantic and aural qualities of words are not distinct categories in kochanie, but ones that infect each other.
- Greg Nissan
France | French | Genre-defying
September, 2015Max Jacob’s writing gives a glimpse of debauchery, the kind that might lie at the collapse of linguistic functioning or on the other side of cliché and metaphor. In taking on washed-up subject matter like the story of Don Juan, Jacob gives new life to staid texts— literary history is used against itself as the means to imagine an otherwise. Yet Jacob’s work poses a problem to translation. As is true of translating most surrealists, the task of the translator becomes more about capturing sound than meaning, more about the feeling of a word than its definition; speech over language.
Some liberties were admittedly taken in translating this text. To keep meter and rhythm, some French words were exchanged for ones with entirely different meanings in English. The sounds and connotations of English words, I hope, evoke the playfulness and tone of the original. I also kept the Chapter sub-headings in French (or semi-French) since, again, the materiality of language is definitively prioritized over the meaning of the words.
This text, neither poem nor drama nor prose but something veritably non-disciplinary, was found in an archival collection of Pierre Reverdy’s short-lived journal Nord-Sud. Though a good portion of Jacob’s work has been translated into English, his writings from this journal have mostly been overlooked. This might be because the orthography is difficult; the words seem somehow unedited and difficult to parse out. Yet I kept the punctuation, spacing, and capitalization exactly as they appear in the original in order to leave a remainder or reminder of the historical context within the text—to keep the rules out, so to speak.
- Mimi Howard
France | French | Poetry (excerpts)
September, 2015Jean-Baptiste Para, the author of four volumes of poetry, does not receive the kind of attention that some other contemporary French language poets or French poets receive. But then regimes and canons of visibility are always imperfect in their constitution and more than ever in the present epoch. I would stipulate that if there were but one contemporary French poet whom one could have the opportunity to read, then it should be Para, although I would immediately add that one should also read the late and lamented poet, Alain Suied (1951-2008). Para is a poetic and literary intelligence of the first order and the possessor of a sparkling and profound literary erudition, but the truly admirable wonder is that this intelligence and erudition resonate without remainder or constraint or imposition, resonate in seamless lacing with the diction and dynamism of his poetic vibratos and crescendos. Kenneth Rexroth’s poem “For Eli Jacobson,” a poem greatly esteemed by Para, is as good a poem as Rexroth ever wrote, a perfect poem in its union of existential intelligence, socio-historical wisdom, and poetic reciprocity and tragico-existential magnanimity. But so many of Para’s poems have this shimmering and sentience of poetico-existential encompassment where life in its tragedies and celebrations emerges in a music which remains within us in ever the more sustained duration. Poems of existential and political immediacy are the most difficult of all poems to write, but Para’s tribute poem to Rosa Luxembourg, “Ghazal pour Rosa L,” greatest intelligence of her politico-historical epoch, whose terrible and tragic assassination was the gravest historico-political loss, is one of these rare poems where a subject finds its perfect election, its perfect music and duration. But so many of Para’s poems have this sustained and sustaining quality. There are poetries of richness and there are poetries of riches, but rarely a poetry in which we find both, find poem after poem as gift and reward in both breadth and depth. Para is a different poet than is Cavafy or Mandelstam, and yet in all three we find a poetic sounding and historico-existential savor and fancy that all at once are the only ones that a subject at hand could possibly have or beckon or instantiate in all actuality, attention, and affection.
- Steve Light
Arabic | Short Fiction | Tunisia
September, 2015Hassouna Mosbahi's fiction often sounds somewhat autobiographical, and this is certainly true for these two short stories. Each of them illuminates the character of the same type of contemporary Tunisian intellectual, who is a person torn between the cool comforts of Europe and the frustrating warmth of Tunisia.
- William Hutchins
Danish | Denmark | Short Fiction
September, 2015My translation retains the original story's street names (Frederiksborggade, Gothersgade, and Rosenvængets Sideallé) as well as the name of the bridge crossed by the narrator and Cora, Dronning Louises Bro ("Queen Louise's Bridge"). Readers who are unfamiliar with Copenhagen and are interested in the spatial relationships referenced in the story would be well served by consulting a map; it is easy thus to recreate the approximate routes of the various short walks taken by the narrator and Cora to the lake Sortedams Sø, the parks, and the Church of Our Lady. We learn that during the lengthy stay with her grandparents that the bulk of the story describes, the narrator, then a schoolgirl, saw her mother only about once a week (and there is no indication that she saw her father at all); it is particularly worth noting that the location of the narrator's (parents') home on Rosenvængets Sideallé is in fact, as the description of the excursion to the lake suggests, within easy walking distance of the narrator's grandparents' home on Fiolstræde. The locations reflect typical generational differences: the grandparents' apartment, which the grandparents have clearly occupied for many years already when the narrator is a child, is located in the medieval core of the city, while the narrator's parents reside in a historically peripheral area that, while it was certainly considered quite attractive by the 1970s, when the story's central events transpire, had not been heavily urbanized before the late nineteenth century.
The original story uses the very commonly-used Danish terms of address for "paternal grandmother" and "paternal grandfather," Farmor and Farfar respectively. While I have generally used the formal English terms of address "Grandmother" and "Grandfather" respectively, I have rendered the original's "Farmor og Farfars gæsteværelse," which contains the first instance of the nouns in question, as "my paternal grandparents' guest room." While this constitutes a slight departure from the narrator's usual tone, the translation would otherwise never definitively establish that the grandparents and Cora are the narrator's relatives on her father's side, a circumstance that suggests particular tensions and interpretive possibilities (it is of course striking that as far as we know neither the grandparents nor the narrator receive a telephone call from the narrator's father during the narrator's stay on Fiolstræde, much less a visit). The story is very much written in a Hemingway iceberg theory mode; it hints at but does not specify the exact nature of the problems in the relationship between the narrator's parents on the one hand and between the narrator and her parents on the other hand, and it appears not unlikely that these problems have been a causative factor in the narrator's undescribed breakup with the unnamed, undescribed father of her own children, about whom we know nothing except how old they are at the time of Cora's death. All of these problems may ultimately be intimately intertwined with and have been determined by the narrator's father's early relations with his parents and sister or his genetic inheritance, or both.
- Peter Sean Woltemade
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).