Norway | Norwegian | Poetry (excerpts)
December, 2017Anne is a long poem, or a "bullet-pointed novel," as Paal-Helge Haugen calls it. He writes in his “Note to Self” (in the final pages of Anne) that the book should be constructed collaboratively by its author and its readers. He goes on to explain that he has termed Anne a bullet-pointed novel because it is made up of poetic sections and sections of found text; Anne is not meant to be either cohesive or complete. (These sections of found text range from Bible citations, hymns, medical text and documents, excerpts from children's textbooks, and public records.)
The book follows Anne as she goes from being a girl to a young woman,while also showing her declining health due to tuberculosis. It is set in Norway around the beginning of the twentieth century.
This is perhaps Haugen's most well-known book of poetry in Norway, and it was very well received upon publication in 1968. It was one of the first books where Haugen explored his interest in using religious texts in his creative work. It's an important book because of its experimental and collaborative nature. U.S. readers of Roland Barthes will recognize some of his philosophy in Haugen's approach and thoughts about the relationship between reader and author. What U.S. readers will not be familiar with is the landscape and culture on the west coast of Norway, which Haugen describes beautifully. Norwegian and Scandinavian literature has been gaining popularity in the English-speaking world, through authors such as Karl Ove Knausgård, Tomas Espedal, and Kjell Askildsen, and I believe the time is right to introduce this iconic Norwegian poet.
Haugen is similar to famous Swedish poet and Nobel Prize winner Tomas Tranströmer in his evocative but unadorned language, as well as the investigation of and engagement with the unknowable and transcendental, visible in Anne when Haugen explores her feverish dreams, inner longings, and experience of disease, in part II of the book.
The number that follows each excerpt is the number of the page on which it appears in the book.
- Julia Johanne Tolo
Italian | Italy | Micro-Stories
December, 2017Superwoobinda is a collection of "micro-stories" (or "polaroids," as the author calls them) written by Aldo Nove. At the time of its publication in 1998, it was extremely popular--some call it a cult book--and played an important role in the Young Cannibals Italian literary movement. The Young Cannibals wrote about the reality of Italy during that period in an exasperated way (often with the inclusion of brand-name consumerism, hyper or surreal violence, and black humor). They were highly influenced by Quentin Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction (1994).
Superwoobinda depicts the Italy of the 1990s, an Italy that is marked by consumerism and an unnatural relationship with television. Silvio Berlusconi, a millionaire business and media mogul, has recently been elected prime minister. Italian television has been privatized, Berlusconi owning three out of the seven national TV channels, thus creating the Italian commercial TV empire. Nove chose to use the language of television in his writing—to highlight the absurdity, the horror, of a reality mediated by it. There are many different styles found here, often with repetition and syntactic disruption, and the fragmented stories mimic the rhythm of flipping through channels. There is a conglomeration of voices and perspectives, the sad and disturbed characters disconnected from one another, and from themselves, all brainwashed by the TV and its advertising.
Superwoobinda is an extreme and exaggerated social commentary. Its stories are both comic and tragic, scandalizing and iconoclastic, and they have an overload of lurid content (be forewarned). What follows is a selection of eight of these stories.
- Hope Campbell Gustafson
Belgium | French | Song Lyrics
December, 2017For this labor of love, I set ambitious goals: to translate 50 songs, preserving Brel’s meter and rhyme schemes, as well as the essence of his imagery, moods, and caustic humor, without ever being a slave to the original lyrics. That is, I put lyricism and naturalness of phrasing ahead of word-for-word equivalency. I chose a mix of songs that have not been translated before and songs that have poor English versions. I am currently translating all the songs on his famous last album, which he recorded in secret shortly before his death.
- Michele Herman
Latin | Poetry | Roman Republic
December, 2017Catullus’ poem LXVIII has perplexed many. It has survived in the MSS as one poem, but it seems to be two. In the first part, A, Catullus is in Verona and the poem is a verse epistle, a response to the request of his friend Manlius in Rome to send him the gift of a poem (possibly either one of his own or a translation from the Greek). Catullus is unable to write something original, as he is still mourning the recent death of his brother, and besides, he has left most of his books in Rome (so, probably, he has no Greek poem to translate).
The second and much longer part, B, expresses his gratitude to a certain Allius, who has lent him a house in Rome where he can pursue his love affair with Lesbia. At this point, she is still married to Metellus, so Catullus has to proceed with some caution. B contains a number of digressions, the longest being the legend of Protesilaus and Laodamia, which itself contains two further digressions, on his grief for his brother, and on a feat of Hercules and that hero’s apotheosis.
There are two issues:
- Is the poem in fact one poem or two?
- If the latter, is each poem written to a different person, or are Manlius and Allius in fact one and the same?
It seems clear to me that these are two different poems. They are apparently written to or for two different people (but see below), they describe two different situations, and they express very different moods. The clincher for me, however, is what they have in common: a passage in which Catullus mourns his brother. For Catullus to include two passages of identical or very similar wording in the same poem would be extreme carelessness.
It is quite possible that Manlius and Allius are the same. The two different names may be the result of textual corruption ("Mallius" also occurs). Alternatively, Catullus may have decided to hide Manlius’s identity by giving him a false name. After all, Metellus was a powerful man; aiding and abetting Catullus and Lesbia in their adultery was not without risk.
Catullus LXVIII, whether one poem or two, is a rather disjointed affair with its many digressions and clumsy transitions. Still, the strength of feeling throughout and the many beautiful passages make it well worth translating.
- Ranald Barnicot
Greece | Modern Greek | Short Fiction
December, 2017This short story is one of thirteen that appear in Konstantinos Poulis’ acclaimed fiction debut Ὁ Θερμοστάτης [Thermostat] (Melani Editions, 2014). Poulis and I met on the remote Aegean island of Icaria in the heady Greek summer of 2015—the summer of the “Greferendum” and capital controls, when the fate of Europe seemed to hang in the hands of a tiny nation on the continent’s margins. When I passed through Athens on the way back to the United States, I made a point of stopping by Poulis’ favorite bookstore, Politeia, to pick up a copy of Ὁ Θερμοστάτης. On the plane ride home I read “The Leonardo DiCaprio of Exarcheia” and quickly realized that, without knowing it, I had just met one of the country’s most unique new creative voices.
Today Greece is best known for an illustrious antiquity and ongoing financial crisis. Traces of both appear in the stories collected in Ὁ Θερμοστάτης, yet in oblique and unexpected ways. In «Θρίαμβος» [“Triumph”], the narrator recounts a memory of how one teacher, a philologist, handled an awkward classroom moment by asking a student to read out loud from a piece of pornography—pornography written in the most elevated Greek literary style. In «Νά πῶς μὲ λὲν ἐμένα!» [“That’s what my name is!”], a man frustrated by his inability to understand conversations about the economy sets out to educate himself through impenetrable financial news articles—only to find true satisfaction between the covers of a poetry anthology.
But while these stories were written during the Greek crisis, they are not motivated by or about the crisis. They are stories, above all, about imagination, in the broadest, most thrilling and even perilous (as in the case of “The Leonardo DiCaprio of Exarcheia”) sense of the word. Throughout the collection, Poulis himself also imaginatively experiments with literary form: «Ἑνάμισι τετραγωνικὸ μέτρο» [“One and a half square meters”] is as short as the space it describes is small. In both architecture and dialogue, the stories also bear signs of their author’s decades spent as a theater practitioner: fresh from his degree (and to his mother’s dismay) Poulis first earned money by putting on impromptu performances in front of Athens’ Monastiraki metro station.
As the first piece in the collection, “The Leonardo DiCaprio in Exarcheia” is in many ways programmatic. Its main character, Takis, is a boy with a dream. But it is a wild, insistent dream that soon takes a life of its own—and Takis’ life along with it. The story steadily transforms into its own kind of dreamscape, its contours shaped by a narrator who, through digressive anecdotes and first- and second-person interjections, lures the reader into a contract of complicity in Takis’ fate. For unlike Takis, who is at first exhilarated, then baffled and imprisoned by, his dream, both narrator and reader know from the start that “this is just how dreams are—a land where 1 + 1 = 5 and dogs recite Milton.”
- Johanna Hanink
Classical Persian | Iran | Poetry
December, 2017These poems are selections from an ongoing project to translate Hafez’s collection of ghazals. Rather than attempting in vain to recreate the form, turns of phrase, and connotations of the fourteenth-century Persian, these translations aim instead to give the English speaker a taste of the experience of reading the original. Hafez’s ghazals span the sensual, social, and spiritual, with radical, anti-conformist social critique nestled amid reverence in equal part of the lover and of God. Despite the tightly structured meter and rhyme of each ghazal, and a complete lack of classical enjambment, scenes and perspectives shift erratically at the level of the individual line. These translations aim to preserve the evocative power of the spaces that open up between each such unit by linking disparate images in a contemporary voice.
- Patrick Sykes
Norway | Norwegian | Poetry (excerpts)
December, 2017The translation of these poems was sometimes challenging, as the book was published in 1904, prior to Norway’s secession from Sweden in 1905 and the subsequent process of Norwegianization of the written language that followed. Formerly, written Norwegian was basically Danish in orthography due to Norway’s having been part of Denmark for more than 400 years. Though the text is for the most part readable in Norwegian, there are often words spelled using an older form of Danish than is used today. Hamsun would go on to heavily revise The Wild Chorus in his collected works to reflect these national changes. Written Norwegian is today called Norwegian Bokmål (“book tongue”).
- Peter Dahlstrand
German | Germany | Short Fiction
December, 2017I first encountered the work of Ödön Von Horváth one pleasant summer afternoon in Berlin, on an outdoor remainder table. I was looking for some light reading, and an old-fashioned paperback anthology of short pieces on the theme “Autumn” seemed exactly to fit the bill. Goethe, Fontane, Brecht—and a little piece by someone named Von Horváth, dating from the 1920s, that I found unexpectedly moving and well written. It had an unreliable and increasingly hapless narrator through whose distorted lens we can see truths about his motivation and feelings towards women that he tries, but fails, to understand.
I had been looking for a lyrical, even sentimental writer, and instead found a political one. Passionately antifascist, Von Horváth sought in his plays and prose to explore the complacency and indifference that made possible the Nazi victory of the 1930s. His subject is the struggle between consciousness and the unconscious, and its manifestation in the cruelty of men towards women in a patriarchal society.
“A human being only comes alive in speech,” he once said. Rejecting the convention that German literature could only be written in “high German,” he imitated the speech of characters low on the social scale. Rendering this speech in an English appropriate to its time was one of the translation challenges of “A Family Saved,” also from the 1920s. A second challenge was doing justice to Von Horváth’s stated aim of creating a “synthesis of irony and realism.” Like other works, “A Family Saved” seeks to do this in depicting a post-World War I Austria in which societal trust, once destroyed, cannot be restored.
Like all major writers in German of his generation, Von Horváth was forced into exile, where he died. I find it noteworthy and timely that he emphatically rejected the Nazi definition of a German as a person of German blood. For Von Horváth, who was partly Hungarian, being German was a matter of identifying with German culture. Nietzsche, he pointed out, was half Polish; Dürer, half Hungarian.
- Linda Frazee Baker
German | Germany | Short Fiction
December, 2017“Window in Flames” is the titular story of a volume of short stories Carmen-Francesca Banciu wrote during the height of the Ceaușescu regime. One of the stories in this volume resulted in a publication ban for Banciu in 1985 because of the way in which the author took aim at the abject poverty and indignities that characterized the Ceaușescu government. That same story was also awarded the International Arnsberg Prize and brought Banciu international acclaim. My English translation of this story, “The Beaming Ghetto,” appeared in The Brooklyn Rail in 2005. The volume was first published in Germany with the title of “Fenster in Flammen” in 1992.
I was drawn to this story because of its chilling and complex portrait of a female survivor of a grotesque dictatorship. Physical and emotional abuse, psychological torture, and authoritarian deceit populate the canvas of cruelty that the narrative’s young female protagonist, La ventana en llamas, inhabits. Implementing surrealistic visual imagery and rich literary symbolism, Banciu foregrounds these powerful themes in an evocative dreamlike narrative. The recurrent window, Banciu’s locus of choice here, is also worth considering, for it plays a key role in Banciu’s literary imaginary. Windows invoke the possibility of passage into a different reality, a boundary crossing. A keen preoccupation with borders and boundaries has permeated, and continues to permeate, much of Banciu’s work. Contemplating separate yet simultaneous realities and perspectives is one of her hallmark themes. In her 2002 collection of short stories, Berlin Is My Paris, she explores the ideals as well as the everyday realities that differentiated Eastern and Western Europe in the wake of the collapse of the Iron Curtain and German Reunification. Here the window represents a transparent border between La ventana en llamas’s perceived struggle with the threats that vex her from her real-life oppressors in the outside world and her own inner demons. Haunted by enduring trauma and the ongoing menacing violence of party tactics and party-sympathizing patriarchs, the protagonist learns to transform intense emotional wounds and psychological scarring into a life-affirming agency.
- Elena Mancini
Takarai Kikaku was a Japanese haikai poet and among the most accomplished disciples of Matsuo Bashō. His father was an Edo doctor, but Kikaku chose to become a professional haikai poet rather than follow in his footsteps. Kikaku's poetry is known for its wit and its difficulty. Whereas Basho, especially in his later years, focused on the countryside and espoused an aesthetic of simplicity, Kikaku preferred the city and the opportunities it provided for extravagant play. He also preferred a more demanding form of poetry, one laced with wordplay, allusions, and juxtapositions of images that defy easy explanation. At the time of his death, he was perhaps the leading poet in Edo (today's Tokyo), which then had a population of around one million, making it perhaps the largest city in the world at the time.
- Joshua Gage
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).