Last September, I responded to a request to help translate a few poems for Dareen Tatour, then in her second year of house arrest in Israel. Since then, her friend and advocate Yoav Haifawi has managed to ferry a few poems out of her house and into my inbox whenever he manages to visit--some small comfort for Dareen as her Kafkaesque trial unfolds, with Israeli authorities warping the meaning of words and gestures to try and prove that poetic expression and a few shared images on Facebook constitute incitement to violence and support for terrorism. Unable to secure a clean verdict, prosecutors have instead prolonged Dareen’s detainment month after month, with no end in sight.
Themes of detainment and repression have been prominent in Dareen’s stanzas since even before her arrest, with a dual emphasis on the plight of Palestinians and the suffering of women in an oppressive society, along with a dedication to express herself despite all the obstacles in her path. In these unpublished poems, which speak to her trial as well as other injustices she has contended with, Dareen warns those trying her of the hypocrisy of their actions, and (perhaps in some distant future) reflects on the toll that the challenges of life have taken from her. As I translated each line, Dareen’s words reminded me not to despair in a world where injustice seems pervasive and remedies often seem beyond my reach--some days there is nothing for it but to produce something that gives us joy, even as we hope for and work towards a brighter tomorrow.
- Andrew Leber
Short Fiction | Spain | Spanish
March, 2018My collaboration with Spanish writer, poet, and filmmaker Pilar Fraile Amador began through an old professor of mine at Brown University, writer and translator Forrest Gander. In his work as the editor of Panic Cure: Poetry from Spain for the 21st Century, he first discovered an up-and-coming Amador through her poetry, known for its innovative and surreal flavors. After Amador published a book of short stories (Los Nuevos Pobladores, Ediciones Traspiés, Granada, 2014), Forrest put the two of us in contact, and what would follow was a giddy stream of emails bubbling from one continent to the next for over a year. We finally left the technological plane behind in 2016 when Amador accepted a translation residency at the Omi International Arts Center in New York. My visit was short, and aside from translation involved just as much time spent walking together across wide, empty sculpture fields, staring at oddities such as a small house that spun like a barometer in the blustery fall wind.
When reading Amador’s fiction, one might think she lived full-time in such a place, removed from society yet imagining the shadows of daily life strangely twisted, hauntingly similar at the edges of her vision. The small universes encapsulated inside each of Amador’s short stories are as familiar as a word on the edge of your tongue, as comforting as paranoid glances over your shoulder. Her fiction seeks to challenge the quotidian, to shade the expected with sharp, nervous doubt honed on a modern edge. In my translation of her short story collection, which is titled The New Tenants, I strive to embody her blunt style that both entices and discomforts with its casual disregard for convention, its logical jumps that challenge the reader to not just read between the lines, but build a whole world from her constellations. The piece published here, The Island, is a showcase of her unique style and unforgettable poise.
- Heather D. Davis
Poetry (excerpts) | Ukraine | Yiddish
March, 2018The poems featured here are excerpts from Debora Vogel’s collection Day Figures (1930), comprised of 68 poems in total, arranged into four smaller collections: Rectangles (1924), Houses and Streets (1926), Weary Dresses (1925-1929), and Tin (1929).
The difficulty in translating these pieces lies in the fact that Vogel’s idiom is visual--she “paints” for her reader in a manner similar to Picasso, El Lissitzky, or Fernand Leger. Her cityscapes are filled with geometrical figures, colors, and numbers that are frequently repeated. Repetition, stark minimalism in vocabulary, and experimentation with syntax and punctuation are distinctive qualities of Vogel’s style.
At times certain words are repeated incessantly (“sticky,” “renunciation”), the reiteration of word combinations is identical (“sticky smell”), at other times these are slightly transformed syntactically, to underscore the significance of changes that occur even with the slightest modifications. This poses a challenge, since Vogel insists on a certain glossary that does not always allow for diversification. The synonyms, especially for adjectives in epithets, need to be chosen carefully: they cannot be too extravagant, and have to be limited. The approach to punctuation has to be balanced. At times the punctuation needs to be domesticated, at other times preserved, in order to keep the strangeness of the text. Vogel utilizes the colon in a different way than is accepted in English usage; the period is used when you might prefer a comma; and the comma is used when you would logically expect a period. Some punctuation marks, such as question marks, are absent. The word order needs to be rearranged at times, to reflect the English word order of a sentence, with the subject being in the first position, the verb in the second. Vogel’s articles in Yiddish do not always make sense in English, so I worked on them as well.
- Anastasiya Lyubas
Greece | Modern Greek | Poetry
March, 2018My translations of Yannis Ritsos’s postwar “Exercises 1950-60” chronologically follow Edmund Keeley and Karen Emmerich’s translations of Ritsos’s Diaries of Exile—a collection of poems written while Ritsos was a political prisoner during the Greek Civil War. Echoes of war, torture, and detention also litter “Exercises.” In this work, however, the references to atrocity are less immediate. Details like a sailor’s bobbing cap expose the essence of war in the everyday, rather than documenting the experience of detention, as the poems in Diaries of Exile do. Keeley and Emmerich note that Ritsos’s “I” withered during detention, his pronouns grew ever more collective, and his lines shrank. Formally, his “Exercises” are similarly impersonal and many are still short in line length. The difference in their construction is primarily conceptual, in that Ritsos, when writing these later poems, was consumed with what to say about atrocity.
Scholar and translator Minas Savvas once asked Ritsos whether writing, for him, was a means of survival. “It is a refuge and it is power,” Ritsos replied. “Power, moral, and intellectual power—that’s what good, fulfilling writing is, the power to shape words that open up new realities in the mind. That’s what has sustained me.” Martin McKinsey argues, in the introduction to his translations of Ritsos’s Late into the Night, that more than anything else a Marxist hope kept Ritsos alive, sustaining him through years of imprisonment and torture. Both writing and politics, then, ultimately determined Ritsos’s literary response to war. Like Paul Celan and George Oppen, Ritsos also struggled with how to respond, but unlike his contemporaries, Ritsos didn’t nearly sever the social contract with his readers. A Communist and leftist to the bone, Ritsos wrote instead toward revolution.
In “Exercises,” Ritsos’s voice is at once sodden and airy. Rocks are pensive, agency is limited, a star does not believe the man looking it in the eye, and one gets used to others “finding endless evidence against” him. These poems, however, remain hopeful.
Ritsos refuses to submit solely to the ills of war; rather, he infuses his poems with the smell of the sea, the sound of coffee being ground, the fluffiness of a woman’s smile. What shimmers throughout these micro-narratives is what I might label the celebration of simply living after torture and war. As bodies wash up on dark coasts in these poems, Ritsos does not forget to celebrate the meaning of life in the sparsest of gestures.
Seven years after writing these “Exercises,” Ritsos was again imprisoned for his political ideals. He kept writing. Although his poetry was often banned during his lifetime, today his writing is still sung by the left at protests, and it is this staying power that I turn to in his poems. As I read and translate Ritsos into the global unrest of the present, I find his refusal to turn away from the most horrifying and the most beautiful is exactly what makes his voice so necessary now.
- Spring Ulmer
Poetry (excerpts) | Slovene | Slovenia
March, 2018Slovenian writer Aleš Šteger has published seven books of poetry, three novels, and two books of essays. A Chevalier des Artes et Lettres in France and a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, he received the 1998 Veronika Prize for the best Slovenian poetry book, the 1999 Petrarch Prize for young European authors, the 2007 Rožanč Award for the best Slovenian book of essays, and the 2016 International Bienek Prize. His work has been translated into over 15 languages, including Chinese, German, Czech, Croatian, Hungarian, and Spanish. He has published four books in English: The Book of Things appeared from BOA Editions in 2010 as a Lannan Foundation selection and won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award; Berlin, a collection of lyric essays, appeared from Counterpath Press in 2015; Essential Baggage, a book of prose poems, appeared from Equipage in England in 2016; and the novel Absolution appeared in England in 2017. He also has worked in the field of visual arts (most recently with a large-scale installation at the International Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India), completed several collaborations with musicians (Godalika, Uroš Rojko, Peter N. Gruber), and collaborated with Peter Zach on the film Beyond Boundaries.
Poetry | Spanish | United States
March, 2018I am a native English speaker who wrote these poems first in Spanish, then translated them into English. I’ve found this to be a fascinating experience, for it asked me to consider the confluence of the two languages in my head: how the languages feed and inform each other, how they share the same “author.”
In some ways, composing in one’s second language may help to serve the poem with happy accidents and inventions. On the other hand, such a project is problematic, especially when one’s native idioms, and cultural and cosmological orientations, may violate the second language--probably in ways that I’m not even aware of. For a poet in any language, the line between invention and violation is often diaphanous, ephemeral, nonexistent. Far from alleviating the inherent difficulties of the translator’s art, translating oneself introduces an additional range of issues.
The act of bringing the Spanish poems (back?) into English, translating my Spanish self to my English self, was intriguing. Poem by poem these selves may recognize each other clearly, or may find each other irritating strangers. Bringing the two into mutual awareness and respect took patience. At their best, the Spanish self and the English self feed each other’s poems with new surprises, shared discoveries.
This project has also expanded my understanding of what “translation" may mean or entail, and of the parallels between translation and revision. I was struck by the notion that all writing is translation in one way or another, starting with a rendering of the electric impulses of the neurotransmitters, a primal alphabet, perhaps.
I am deeply indebted to my colleagues Phillip Krumrich and Gustavo Osorio de Ita for their generous readings and responses to my efforts. Their caring expertise in both languages has been both instructive and inspiring.
- George Eklund
Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Poetry (excerpts)
March, 2018Losango Caqui (1926) is one of Mário de Andrade’s poetry collections published within the period of Brazilian Modernism. This slender volume is situated in an important phase of rupture, written and published in between his two most influential poetry books—Paulicéia Desvairada (
Paulicéia Desvairada, published in English as Hallucinated City (trans. Jack E. Tomlins, 1968), is often critically placed within the Anthropophagy theory, inspired by the native indigenous Brazilians, who were known to have practiced cannibalism on their war captives as a means of absorbing the strength of their enemies. Subverting the idea of the indigenous as being colonized, modernist narrative portrays the indigenous as the powerful ones, therefore able to devour and synthesize diverging sources, digesting what’s European not out of subjugation but in order to create something better.
Losango Caqui ("Khaki Diamond") is, in many ways, a continuation of some of the same themes and avant-garde formal ideas from Hallucinated City. Andrade’s use of free meter introduced revolutionary European ideas into Brazilian poetry, which was previously strictly formal. At the same time, his focus was slowly shifting to a more nationalistic agenda. In this book, one can foretell the author’s subsequent turn to primitivism, as his exploration of national identity would consolidate itself in his following poetry volume, Clã do Jabuti(1927).
My intent while translating these poems was to further explore the ambiguity of Andrade’s poetic discourse, as well as the harlequin’s conflicting views on urbanization, multiculturalism, immigration, and colonialism, amongst other things.
- Ana Paula
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).