Greece | Modern Greek | Poetry (excerpts)
November, 2018When I first learned that George Prevedourakis had written a take on Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” “America,” and “To Aunt Rose” set during the Greek financial crisis, I was taken aback. Not because it’s uncommon to find a contemporary Greek poet responding, in poetry, to iconic English-language poems (Elias Lagios’s 1984 Ereme Ge is a poetic synthesis of various versions of the “The Waste Land”). What struck me about Prevedourakis’ book-length poem was its inventiveness, its musical complexity—mixing theory with street urgencies and Joycean obscurities—in a way that defied, reconfigured, and retranslated Ginsberg’s poems into a faithful original.
Kleftiko (Panoptikon Editions, 2013) is over 40 pages long, and has been adapted for two different theatre productions in Greece. The name "Kleftiko" a syllabic rhyme of “Ourliachto” (Howl) in Modern Greek, yet as a body of work, Kleftiko also sustains a structural rhyme with Ginsberg. In an inversion of the syntax of the iconic opening line of “Howl,” Prevedourakis begins: “I saw the best generations of my mind / destroyed by frivolous logic / hysterical, naked, and in debt / left to crawl the Balkan streets at dawn, searching / for ways to pay a necessary fix.” It’s clear from the beginning that this isn’t simply a re-staging, the way a production company might re-stage Twelfth Night as a non-binary post-apocalyptic Western. Everything is different, and what might seem familiar or recognizably Ginsberg—a sequence of repetitions or fragment of litany—is made unmistakably new.
My challenge then, as an American poet translating a Greek poem cast on an iconic American poem, has been to negotiate Prevedourakis’ original voice with that of the Ginsberg I know from my native English, and the Ginsberg I gradually recognize, through layers of filtration and synthesis, in Prevedourakis’ Greek. It is a translation of a radical translation and, I hope, in its own particular way, a faithful original.
- Brian Sneeden
Ancient Greek | Fragment | Poetry
November, 2018This fragment, from the seventh century BCE, starts off as a typical warrior song. Like heroes from Homeric epic, the singer addresses his thymos, his heart—the seat of his emotion—asking for courage amid the battle. But then the poem turns to universals, the proper ways to behave in glory and defeat, in joy and in sadness, the importance of avoiding extremes—the last of which was commemorated upon the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: “nothing in excess.” The fluctuating rhythm of human life that concludes the poem is ultimately what sets us apart from the unchanging gods. What starts as a male fighter’s self-exhortation ends as a poem that crystalizes what is both terrifying and beautiful in human life—all human life.
- Stephanie McCarter
Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Short Fiction
November, 2018I first experienced the weird joy of Cidinha da Silva’s fiction in 2015, in a survey of Brazilian prose I audited at Rice University. Da Silva’s writing called out to me, as it will call out to any reader, urgently and without apology. In spite of its buoyancy, though, the joy in writing so evident in the prose, da Silva’s fiction is loudest where it is silent. In her “Dublê de Ogum,” she tells the story of an adolescent boy’s trip to a psychologist. In this psychologist’s office, in the contours of dreams, are the illegible answers to questions never asked. Is fantasy an escape from reality, or an alternative to it? What does it mean to be insane in an insane world? Finally, what does it mean to be black in contemporary Brazil?
“The Stunt Double” demands of its reader some familiarity with Afro-Brazilian culture, especially the Candomblé spiritual tradition. Like Santería in Cuba, Candomblé fused elements of Catholicism with Yoruba and other spiritual traditions governed by the worship of divinities known as orixas. Above (and perhaps beyond) this story’s action stands Ogum, the Candomblé orixa of iron and war who, legend has it, slaughtered disrespectful subjects with a broadsword. It is this narrative tradition, obscure to an American audience but totally familiar to anybody living in da Silva’s Salvador, which makes the story’s title almost impossible to translate. The “dublê” in “Dublê de Ogum” signifies not only a “stunt double,” but a virtual doubling: an embodiment, that is, a literal possession. The boy at the center of this story is split—between New and Old, between cartoon heroes and blacksmith gods—and da Silva’s brilliant language bridges the gap between his two worlds. Similarly untranslatable is the diagnosis with which the story concludes: Filho de Ogum, a Son of Ogum, a sort of elaborate shorthand meaning hot-tempered yet fun-loving, impulsive yet logical, brave yet a bit selfish. In short, this is a story of contradictions.
- JP Gritton
As a translator of Krystyna Dąbrowska’s poetry, I’m fascinated by her ability to pinpoint aspects of our existence that are left unsaid or passed over in silence, with a keen eye toward subtle yet profound interactions between cultures. Her poems show a great interest in understanding experience from different perspectives and often depict moments when the self is made strange through contact with other places and people. I’m in awe of the way she can call my attention to assumptions about class, nationality, and religion in such short, image-driven poems.
I’m currently at work—along with fellow translators Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Karen Kovacik—on Dąbrowska’s Selected Poems to present a volume of her poetry for the first time in English. Dąbrowska is a worthy successor to the extraordinary poetic tradition of Polish literature. Nobel Laureates Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska are world famous, and new, surprising voices continue to emerge. Dąbrowska became a poet to watch with the publication of her second book, White Chairs, which won two of Poland’s top awards: The International Wisława Szymborska Prize and the Kościelski Foundation Award. The judges praised her poetry for its sensitivity to ephemeral qualities of our everyday life and ability to detail the world with a visual artist’s sensitivity.
With this project, I also aim to address the marginalization of Polish poetry by women both in Poland and in translation. As Karen Kovacik, editor of Scattering the Dark: An Anthology of Polish Women Poets, pointed out in 2015: “In seven recent anthologies, published in Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, women poets’ work comprised less than 15 percent on average.” As Dąbrowska’s work continues to develop in fascinating and unpredictable ways, it is vital that she get the attention and recognition she deserves in English.
- Mira Rosenthal
El Salvador | Poetry | Spanish
November, 2018Claudia Lars (pen name for Carmen Brannon Vega, 1899-1974) is one of El Salvador’s most important and beloved poets. She is required reading in many Salvadoran schools, and several schools have been named in her honor. I first came to know her work in the 1990s, when I worked with a human rights organization in El Salvador: whenever I asked about poets, the reply included Lars, and I was delighted to discover that many of the Salvadorans I met had one or more of her poems memorized. As Stephen Tapscott notes, Lars was “a writer of integrity and continuity whose example and generosity toward younger writers, especially young woman poets, made her a beloved—and even symbolically maternal—figure in Latin American poetry.”
Born to a Salvadoran mother and an Irish-American father, she was raised bilingual, and she learned French in Catholic school. Her youth was spent in the Salvadoran countryside reading Shakespeare, Jules Verne, and Lorca. She eventually translated a selection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry into Spanish. Though she never traveled to Ireland, she retained a strong sense of connection to what she called “the land of my song.” Her “two bloods” (as Gabriela Mistral writes in a famous letter) became an important theme in her work. Over the course of thirteen volumes of poetry, her poetics expand from an early reliance on the sonnet, ballad, and lira to uniquely-voiced explorations in free verse.
It feels important to bring Lars’s work into English. Beyond the remarkable language and the many worlds brought into view, these poems offer a fresh glimpse of a country many of us in the United States think we know. El Salvador has long been in the news, at first because of the brutal civil war and later because of the U.N.-brokered ceasefire and elections. More recently, violence (in particular gang violence) has garnered headlines. Through it all, the U.S. has played a devastating and disproportionate role, whether by supporting the military governments of the 1980s or by deporting gang members in the years after the war. While such developments have kept the country in our sights, I have always felt that it is too easy to attend to the disasters. We should bear witness to them, certainly, and Lars herself takes note (in a poem like “Crumbs”) as her country veers toward civil war. But the danger is that we let the catastrophes define the country and thereby narrow our sense of the world beyond our borders. What Lars’s work offers is a glimpse of a woman’s mind at work in the years before the tumultuous events of recent decades. Her concerns are worldly, spiritual, and lyrical; her verse offers the perspective of a poet who looks at the world around her—and into the future that is coming—with a longing and hopefulness that strike me as fundamentally and importantly human.
- Philip Pardi
Argentina | Poetry | Spanish | United States
November, 2018What makes Silvina López Medin’s poetry complicated is its philosophical, impressionistic, associative qualities. Often her language steers us away from noticing the despair behind her images by forcing us to work with nuances of abstraction. To some degree, translating the words suffices to render that complexity: present it as she’s presented it. But I have also tried to select words that point to what is missing. Often, López Medin’s poems are more about what is not there than what is there—the missing man, his missing eyes, the missing laughter, the touch that doesn’t happen. This, to me, makes López Medin’s poems consummately Argentinean: it’s a country where there is almost more missing than present, where the stifled voice rings after the spoken falls silent. André Lefevere wrote, “The word does not create a world ex nihilo. Through the grid of tradition it creates a counterworld, one that is fashioned under the constraints of the world the creator lives and works in, and one that can be explained, understood better if these constraints are taken into account.” López Medin creates a counterworld out of the one that exists, her world peopled by what is missing and the language that has survived people’s disappearance. If ever a country needed poets to create a counterworld from the language that has survived its violence, Argentina does.
- Jasmine V. Bailey
Language as Destiny, Destiny in Language
On October 6, 1921, Lea Goldberg—a precocious ten-year-old, already whispered about among the neighbors and at school as a promising poet—records the first entry in her diary. Her mother tongues are Russian and German, and she writes her poems and stories in Russian, but the diary, she decides, will be in Hebrew, a language she began to study the year before at the Hebrew gymnasium in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania. Soon, she will start writing her poems and stories exclusively in Hebrew. She will memorize The Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes, and will translate the great Russian poet, Alexander Blok (1880-1921), into Hebrew. As will become apparent in a few short years, this early commitment to Hebrew will determine the course of Goldberg's life.
Inevitably, Goldberg's personal history coincides with the upheavals of the 20th century, both in Europe and in the Middle East. And so the diary she kept for 45 years (from 1921 to 1966) is not only a biographical and literary document of great significance, but also a fascinating historical one. The Diaries cover Goldberg's childhood in Kovno; her years as a student in Berlin and Bonn; her early years in Palestine where she emigrated in 1935; her entry into the literary scene, the cafés where she would sit alone or in the company of poets, usually the only woman at the table. Then come the momentous years in the State of Israel, the witnessing of its birth, her association and friendship with other poets and writers, among them Avraham Shlonsky, S.Y. Agnon, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Max Brod, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and, most notably, poet Avraham Ben Yitzhak Sonne (friend of Hermann Broch, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, and Elias Canetti).
Many pages could be filled with her curriculum vitae, but perhaps it suffices to say that she holds a place in Hebrew literature comparable to that of Emily Dickinson in the United States. Young poets flocked to her, and Goldberg, generous and encouraging, helped publish the first poems of a new and emerging generation of poets: Yehuda Amichai, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Dan Pagis, T. Carmi, to name a few. The late Dahlia Ravikovitch described her first impression of Goldberg thus: “It was like meeting Queen Elizabeth.”
A national treasure and a rich trove for scholars and researchers, Goldberg is recognized as one of the finest Hebrew poets of the modern era. She was also a beloved author of children's stories, poems, and songs, and was a highly regarded theater critic, playwright, literary scholar, editor, and teacher. In 1952, she joined the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and helped establish the Department of Comparative Literature, which she headed until her death in January, 1970.
- Tsipi Keller
Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Poetry
November, 2018These short poems from Clarissa Macedo’s award-winning collection Na pata do cavalo há sete abismos (Rio de Janeiro: 7Letras, 2014) present a number of fascinating dilemmas. A literal translation would sacrifice the vitality of the verses, which, notwithstanding their lightness and intensity, contain a striking lyrical sadness. Yet to take excessive semantic liberties or change word order arbitrarily would deprive the reader of the stimulation inspired by Macedo’s unusual and often surprising choices.
In these translations, priority was given to structural elements and sound, focusing not on how long the verses would be in print but on their size and value in terms of breath. Rather than counting syllables, I tried to create lines that adhered to the originals’ weight, rhythm, and duration in order to suggest the successions of moods I found in the originals, which move agilely between pensive and galloping. In crossing the bridge, I tried to concentrate not on reproducing individual phonemes but on building holistic relationships between sounds that created similar sensations in English that the originals create in Portuguese.
- Robert Smith
Poetry | Portugal | Portuguese
November, 2018My main guideline for the translation process was the theoretical works of Haroldo de Campos, a Brazilian poet, translator, and critic who emphasizes that the structural elements of a poem-- rhythm, meter, assonance, alliterations, and so on--are as important as, and sometimes more important than, its semantic aspects. Here, I have tried to maintain the rhythm by giving the English translations a twist of Portuguese meter (which counts the number of syllables in each verse), compressing it when possible, but still maintaining the rhythm and other aspects.
- Alessandro Palermo Funari
Arabic | Egypt | Short Fiction
November, 2018In my recent article published in World Literature Today, “Sheltering Words: Collaboratively Translating Montasser Al-Qaffash,” I write: “One of the reasons I love living in Cairo is the fact that everyone spins yarns: the porter, the maid, the taxi driver. No one has the corner on stories—many of these stories rely on rumor, humor, and hyperbole. Still, the problems of daily life are real and life is hard: many Egyptians vent their frustrations through anecdotes and jokes.” Montasser Al-Qaffash’s collection of short stories, At Eye Level, does just this—he takes humdrum problems and spins yarns around them. For example, in his story “To Describe It a Little More,” the narrator describes the relationships of tenants in a building through the eyes of one of its inhabitants. The narrator describes his father’s fascination with a ground-floor apartment, his dream residence. As a mature adult, looking back, the narrator understands that his father’s obsession with the ground-floor apartment masked an attraction to the widow who owned it, and his help in selling the apartment provided an excuse to call old friends. The complexity of his father’s relationship to the ground floor apartment--and of social relationships more broadly--is mirrored by the crossword puzzles the son would solve with his father.
- Gretchen McCullough
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).