In this post, editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida introduces her in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the five posts that follow for poetry that will be featured in the anthology.
Argentina | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
May, 2017The poetry featured here will appear in an in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the above post for editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida's introduction to the project.
Argentina | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
May, 2017The poetry featured here will appear in an in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the above post for editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida's introduction to the project.
Argentina | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
May, 2017The poetry featured here will appear in an in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the above post for editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida's introduction to the project.
Argentina | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
May, 2017The poetry featured here will appear in an in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the above post for editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida's introduction to the project.
The poetry featured here will appear in an in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the above post for editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida's introduction to the project.
France | French | Radio play (excerpt)
May, 2017The play, Fossoyeurs (Gravediggers), was written by Cécile Cotté upon her return from Rwanda, where she’d put up a production about the genocide with Rwandan actors (video excerpts of the show can be found on Cécile Cotté’s website: www.cecilecotte.fr). Gravediggers is thus haunted by her stay in Rwanda, where she visited death sites and saw piles of corpses stacked in school classrooms and other public places. Murambi is one of the sites she visited: a vision of horror that stayed with her forever and that she tries to exorcize in this play.
Fossoyeurs was produced as a radio play by France Culture in October 2006.
Gravediggers is a collective translation done by New York University B.A. students under my supervision in the spring semester of 2016, as part of an advanced literary translation workshop.
- Emmanuelle Ertel
The title "The Graveyard by the Sea" suggests a poem in the style of Gray's "Elegy Written in a County Churchyard," a contemplation of the finality of death and the way it levels out the differences of fame. Superficially Valéry follows this pattern. Valéry's graveyard, like the one Gray describes at Stoke Poges, is the one at Séte (originally Cette) where the poet was born and where he is buried. It is also a poem about eternals; about death and deathlessness, but it is soon apparent that he is not concerned with pseudo-religious morals.
It is not easy at first (or dare I say it, even at second) reading to grasp clearly what Valéry means. Rather than using words to point up some moral, his language comes across as convoluted, seems to become incorporated back into itself, to be involved in itself like music. It can seem, in fact, meaningless. Rather than use words as signifiers, he uses them to compose sound patterns which draw the reader into a mise en scène, not unlike programme music. Valéry wrote:
"Literature interests me profoundly only to the extent that it urges the mind to certain transformations--those in which the stimulating properties of language play the chief part [...] The force to bend the common word to unexpected needs without violating the 'Time-honoured forms'; the capture and subjection of things that are difficult to say; and, above all, the simultaneous management of syntax, harmony, and ideas [...] are in my eyes the supreme object of our art."
This speaks to the interiority of Valéry's poetic process, He wrote: "Poetry has never been an objective for me, but an instrument, an exercise." The sound of the language is intrinsic to its imaging, its rhythm and this, of course, untranslatable."
Jacques Derrida wrote of Valéry's antagonism to Freud: "We will not ask what the meaning of this resistance is before pointing out that what Valéry intends to resist is meaning itself."
In the highly formal, mannered musicality of Valéry's verse the influence of Mallarmé is clear. In his Cahiers, Valéry notes that the programme of a poem is less important than its subject: By a programme he means a gathering of words and syntactical moments, above all "a table of verbal tonalities, etc." In his La Musique et les lettres, Mallarmé had said something similar:
"I assert, at my own aesthetic risk, this conclusion: [...] that Music and Letters are the alternate face here widened towards the obscure; scintillating there, with certainty of a phenomenon, the only one, I have named it Idea."
Coleridge thought "The French wholly unfit for Poetry" because "Feelings created by obscure ideas associate themselves with one clear idea." So, the translator is presented with a "feel" or "sound" rather than a story or logical structure to hold meaning together, and this makes the whole process almost impossible. It might explain why there are so few translations of either poet.
It is this "feel" that has to be caught and the meaning left to fend for itself.
In Terence Rattigan’s play The Browning Version, the student Taplow, after translating some lines of Aeschylus rather too fluently, is reprimanded: "You are supposed to be construing Greek, not collaborating with Aeschylus." I hope I manage to avoid Taplow's error and that my attempt here, insofar as it succeeds, is a collaboration with Valéry.
- David Pollard
German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
May, 2017In den Wäldern des menschlichen Herzens (Into the Woods of the Human Heart) (2016) follows a number of women (and a couple of men) as they travel throughout Europe and to the American West Coast. The oscillation between countries and sexes sparks a wild curiosity between the lovers and friends, while the book stages a larger exploration of borders--between nations, people, and sexes.
Woven through their travels are discoveries of new sexualities, dissolutions of classical ideas of love and gender, and encounters with the majesty of the natural world, the beauty of another person, and the exquisiteness of true self-discovery. This masterful, global novel is a powerful portrait of matters of the heart.
- Festival Neue Literatur Reader
Sardinia is the second largest island in the Mediterranean Sea and an autonomous region of Italy, perhaps best known in a literary sense for being the birthplace and home of Grazia Deledda, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926. But Sardinia was also home to a number of other intellectuals, writers, and artists, including Sebastiano Satta (1867-1914), a journalist and lawyer who is widely considered Sardinia’s greatest poet.
While working as colleagues in the now defunct but still singular international MFA program at the City University of Hong Kong, we visited the island in 2014 as part of a contingent from the university and as guests of Beyond Thirty-Nine, an independent arts and culture platform. Our trip took the form of an immersion in various aspects of Sardinian culture, such as the masked ritualistic dance of the Mamuthones and the canto a tenore or polyphonic singing of pastoral songs. We were also exposed to the work of the island’s great writers and artists, among them Sebastiano Satta.
A committed socialist in the vein of Pablo Neruda, Satta spent his life advocating for the island’s working class, while his poetry (such as Versi Ribelli and Canti Barbaricini) celebrated the island’s terrain, especially the mountainous wilderness of the Barbagia region. We were introduced to Satta’s work with the caveat that his particular music and use of local dialect made translating him very difficult. Taking that as a challenge, we set about trying to render his work in English while retaining some of the lyricism of the original. The following translations were composed in Sardinia and performed at the open air gallery of acclaimed sculptor Pinuccio Sciola.
- James Scudamore and Ravi Shankar
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).