Ancient Greek | Drama | Greece
September, 2018The choral odes in The Bacchae are remarkable because they give us access to the experience of collective ecstatic worship. The chorus consists of “Bacchants,” adherents of the cult of Dionysus, from Asia Minor (now western Turkey). Studying religion is often frustrating because, though we can look at scripture and rituals, what we really want is the experience of being a devotee of a particular religion. These odes provide what is, I think, the closest one can get to feeling Dionysiac worship as an insider.
- Aaron Poochigian
Attention NYC Readers!
Aaron Poochigian's translation of The Bacchae, excerpted here, will be performed by SITI Company on October 3-7 as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's 2018 Next Wave Festival. For more information and tickets, see BAM.
Chile | English | Hybrid | Spanish
August, 2018The poems featured here use a limited vocabulary derived from the Fortune 500 list of company names to translate “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” as an exploration of what happens to words in the course of the history of their usage. As an experiment in translation, these poems are meant as an active approach to reading Neruda’s poems anew, to discovering what transformations take place in the history of a language and what role the translator might play in that long process. On its surface my project is to see how far the language of capital is capable of replicating Neruda’s poems and what it means for one’s words to be one’s own. My hope is that I have leveraged the gap between Neruda’s poems and my translation into something akin to an empty dictionary. My hope is that this empty dictionary might contain the “actual” translation without uttering it. If it is somehow like a dictionary it is because it contains the possibilities of language, and if it is somehow empty it is not because its words do not exist but because they are not inscribable.
My goal has never been to translate the poems as they are but to re-read them, to attempt to glimpse which words might actually have been uncovered by Neruda who, according to Raúl Zurita, writing in his introduction to Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), “shows us that in speaking, no one is singular. That the act of speaking is the opportunity for those who have preceded us to return, to be granted words.” If Neruda attempts to recover the language that leaves no trace in history, I am interested in the ghost of a translation that leaves unspoken what cannot be spoken, even as it haunts the gap between my poems and Neruda’s.
My choice of “Alturas” as a source text stems from my discomfort with Neruda’s attempt to recover language acts that may not be his to recover. Nevertheless, I hope that my translation will be taken not as a declamation against Neruda or the consensus of those like Zurita who are moved by Neruda’s attempted recovery of those lost voices, but rather as a re-reading that hopefully sheds new light on what it means for one’s language to be one’s own, ethically and literally. When I devised my constraint, I genuinely did not know which words would be available to me, and I am surprised how well this lexicon has been able to capture the suffering named by the originals.
It is my hope that the reader of this manuscript will agree that my translation is, even if it resembles Neruda’s poems a great deal, an original work.
- Adam Greenberg
Old English | Poetry (excerpts)
August, 2018We know the Old English poem “Wulf ond Eadwacer” due only to its survival in the Exeter Codex, the largest existing anthology of Anglo-Saxon poetry, which dates back to the 10th century. Since no original manuscript for the poem exists, the date of its composition, its provenance, and even the identity of its composer are all unknown. Even within the poem itself, ambiguities abound: the identity of the speaker is unknown, while the relationship of the speaker to both Eadwacer and Wulf, the poem’s setting, and its narrative content are all subject to conflicting interpretations. The prevailing interpretation of the poem’s narrative is as a love triangle in which the unnamed speaker (represented as “&” in my translation) is separated from her lover, Wulf, by threat of violence from Eadwacer, who is commonly viewed as either her husband and/or captor. However, the poem has also been interpreted as a riddle, a ballad, a wen charm, an elegy, and a beast fable. As Peter S. Baker notes in “The Ambiguity of Wulf and Eadwacer,” half of the poem’s nineteen lines “pose lexical, syntactical, or interpretive problems” [1].
But the challenge of interpretation is only part of what makes “Wulf ond Eadwacer” an anomaly. The poem is also formally radical, both for its departures from Anglo-Saxon prosody, and for its inclusion of elements like repetition and refrain, which were uncommon in Old English poetry. For this, and other reasons, some scholars even believe that this compellingly mysterious lyric poem might itself be a translation from the Old Norse [2].
As the act of translation cannot be divorced from interpretation, the enigmatic nature of “Wulf ond Eadwacer” would seem to begird the translator, to restrict the approaches, strategies, and outcomes available to her. Indeed, it seems sensible to decide what a thing is and what kind of effect it should have on the reader before translating it. But the reader should not have to pay for the translator’s convenience, and perhaps the least faithful translation of this enigmatic, polyvalent anomaly of an Old English poem that might have been born Scandinavian in the first place would be to present it in the absence of its complexity, to pin the poem down to a singular interpretation, to lock it into a linear narrative that it never loved.
The translation featured here aims to release the poem back into its radical complexity—to restore the lacunae, the indeterminacy, and the strangeness that makes the Anglo-Saxon version of “Wulf ond Eadwacer” so haunting. Using fragments of the original Old English both to re-acquaint the reader with her etymological roots and to make her a bit of a stranger in her own language, these translations embrace the proto-feminist, disjunctive voice of the original poem so that its enigmatic nature and plurality can fully be explored for the first time.
[1] Baker, Peter S. “The ambiguity of ‘Wulf and Eadwacer.’” Studies in Philology, Vol. 78, No. 5, Texts and Studies, 1981.
[2] Danielli, Sonja. “Wulf, Min Wulf: An Eclectic Analysis of Wolf-Man.” Neophilologus, Vol. 91, Spring 2007: 505-524.
- M.L. Martin
Epic Novel (excerpt) | German | Germany
August, 2018Döblin’s epic novels of South America, later united as the Amazonas Trilogy, were written in Parisian exile and published in 1937-38 by an émigré firm just before the outbreak of war. So their reception was severely limited (after 1933 Döblin’s books were banned in Germany), and even after the war it took almost three decades before decent editions began to appear. Since the 1980s, Amazonas has attracted more critical attention than any other epics (apart, of course, from Berlin Alexanderplatz).
The theme of Amazonas is not so much South America (although Döblin’s imaginative powers, first revealed in The Three Leaps of Wang Lun, his "Chinese novel" of 1916, are still playing at full strength here, as the excerpt shows). Rather, Europe is the theme, and the guiding impulse: the Nazis did not emerge from nowhere.
The trilogy lays out a remarkable and multifaceted critique of Europeans and their history since the 16th century age of conquests: a critique at odds with the Eurocentric schoolroom dogma of "progress" and "enlightenment" that for so long treated the world’s "people without history" as resources for exploitation and extermination.
The prose, as in so many of Döblin’s books, is vivid and direct, conjuring almost cinematically scene after varied scene, with many voices and changing moods. It is unfortunate that the linguistic pyrotechnics of Berlin Alexanderplatz have for so long overshadowed those other epics where the linguistic virtuosity works in more reader-friendly ways. (Check out the several Döblin excerpts already published by the Rail, in its print edition and here at InTranslation.)
The excerpt featured here, the beginning of the trilogy, presents Amazonian communities as yet untouched by Europe. The search for the "land without death" is a counterpart, in terms of human yearning, to the crazed European search for El Dorado which will be so powerfully depicted in later sections.
- Chris Godwin
These translations are born out of a fascination with Nikolaj Reber's poetry that began about ten years ago when I discovered his verses online at some Russian literary sites. Since then we've been in touch on and off. He is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting postmodern Russian poets. His voice is immediately recognizable, and my goal was to be as faithful to the original as possible in order to preserve his unique style and imagery. The two poems featured here, originally published in Going to downtown (2006), represent the aesthetics of Nikolaj Reber's poetry only to a certain degree, but I believe they give readers in English a good introduction.
- Boris Kokotov
In late 1960, a little-known writer by the name of Mercè Rodoreda entered an unpublished novel, Colometa, for competition in that year’s distinguished Premi Sant Jordi. She did not win. The book did, however, make quite an impression on Joan Fuster, who sat on the prize committee. Convinced the committee had made an awful mistake, Fuster wrote to his good friend Joan Sales. Just five years prior, Sales had co-founded the press Club dels Novel·listes—recently re-baptized Club Editor—and was ever on the hunt for exciting new novelists to add to his roster. “See what you can do,” Fuster said. So Sales sent a letter to this writer whose novel had so dazzled his friend. It was a decision he was not to regret. Two years later, Club Editor published In Diamond Square to instant popular acclaim. More than fifty years later, the novel continues to sell. It has been translated into more than thirty languages, and has seen adaptation to the stage as well as the silver screen. Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel García Márquez even called it the most beautiful novel to be published in Spain since the end of the Civil War.
The letters featured here are culled from the correspondence that brought this novel into being. They represent the early and often tempestuous days of one of the most important friendships in modern Catalan literary history, a relationship that would last for more than twenty years, until Rodoreda’s death. Now, they stand as a testament to the fastidiousness and insight, even the ego, of two of the most beloved figures in this little nation’s exceptionally vast literary tradition.
- Scott Shanahan
In 1938 and 1939, Marina Tsvetaeva was living in Paris with her son; her husband, Sergei Efron, who had fought with the White Army during the Civil War, had returned to the Soviet Union as an NKVD agent. Tsvetaeva and her son would follow Efron back to the Soviet Union in 1939, where it seems Tsvetaeva knew she was unlikely to survive, and where she would die in 1941. Tsvetaeva’s years in Paris were marked by almost complete isolation, these last years even more so, and it seems that at this time she knew she would not publish again.
It was within this context that Tsvetaeva wrote “Poems to Czechoslovakia,” a sustained sequence responding to the Munich Agreement of September 1938 and the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. The cycle is an impassioned outcry, condemning fascism and affirming the resilience and promise of human life and collective human struggle. It is also grounded in personal experience, political events, and an awareness of Czech history, landscape, and culture: Tsvetaeva had lived in Czechoslovakia during the first years of her exile (her son was born there in 1925), and her poems convey a sense of identification with this country so often marked by country-less-ness. The poems draw on images of the Czech national revival movement and the Czech national anthem, and often address specific political events, sometimes including quotes from newspaper articles or references to news photographs, such as the photograph taken of Hitler in a window of Prague Castle. “Poems to Czechoslovakia” is one of Tsvetaeva’s greatest works, varied yet integrated in tone and formal approach, speaking both to a particular historical moment and to larger questions of freedom, belonging, and survival.
Curiously, most significant translations of Tsvetaeva’s work, such as those by Elaine Feinstein or the recent edition by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine, include just a few poems from the cycle. These translations also remove Tsvetaeva’s references to specific events; for instance, both Feinstein and Kaminsky/Valentine remove the quote from a newspaper article (“The Czechs came up to the Germans and spat”), with which Tsvetaeva prefaces “Took,” the sixth poem in the second half of the sequence. These elisions take the poems out of their context, but they also obscure the fact that Tsvetaeva was not just writing passionate poems of protest; she was also and deliberately grounding her poems in real events as they occurred.
As a translator my intention has been to correct these redactions, by considering the sequence as a whole and staying as true to the original as possible, including notes where historical and cultural references might present confusion. This translation is part of a larger project to bring Tsvetaeva’s politically oriented poems into English at a moment when the sharpness of her perceptions, and the fierceness of her reply, are acutely relevant.
- Margaree Little
Giovanni Quessep has been influenced by Colombia’s most important poets from the first half of the 20th century, such as Aurelio Arturo and León de Greiff, with whom he was personally acquainted and developed an important friendship. In the sixties, he worked as an editor at the legendary Mito, Colombia’s highly acclaimed philosophical and literary magazine created by Jorge Gaitán Durán, and in the seventies he co-founded Golpe de dados, a poetry magazine recognised throughout Latin America as one of the most important poetry publications of the past and current centuries.
Quessep’s poetry is nourished by his personal experiences growing up on the Colombian Caribbean coast; by his travels through Italy, where he fell in love with the work of Dante Alighieri; and by his knowledge of the vast tradition of Spanish poetry, particularly the poets of the Spanish Golden Age and Ruben Darío, one of his most important literary references. A descendant of Lebanese immigrants, he is also deeply acquainted with Middle Eastern poetic traditions, and specifically with the work of poets such as Omar Khayyam, Farid Uddin Attar, and Ferdowsi, who have also greatly influenced his work. Quessep’s poetry is the result of an improbable mixture of faraway elements that come together to create a unique voice both indisputably Colombian and universal.
I started working on this project in 2015, with Quessep's permission, and I have been collaborating with Ranald Barnicot since the beginning of this year, following the advice of some editors who told me that my translations could benefit from a collaboration with a native English speaker, preferably a poet or poetry translator, as Ranald is, and they certainly have.
- Felipe Botero
It has been a privilege and a challenge to work with Felipe on these richly allusive, mysterious, deeply felt and moving poems. I feel that Quessep exemplifies Eliot’s First Voice of Poetry. The poet is primarily addressing himself in the hope of working through profound, personal, and painful issues. Perhaps we are left feeling that we have not completely understood, but, in Eliot’s oft-quoted and memorable words, poetry can communicate before it is understood. Indeed, perhaps it is impertinent to suppose that we have a right to complete understanding.
- Ranald Barnicot
Armenia | Armenian | Short Fiction
August, 2018Susanna Harutyunyan began her literary career when the Soviet Union was collapsing. She belongs to the generation of writers who were tasked with the critical and inevitable role of recording the fall of the Soviet Union, the transition period, and post-Soviet afterlife. She is best known for her short stories, some humorous, others verging on the macabre and a special kind of ruthlessness, reminiscent of the notable Soviet writer Vsevolod Ivanov. The story featured here (Original title: "Aysteghov antsel e astvatse") was first published in a collection titled Zharangabar pokhantsvogh garun ("Hereditary Spring") in 2007.
- Shushan Avagyan
The two poems featured here come from Andrea Cote Botero’s first book, Puerto calcinado [Port in Ashes] (2013), winner of the Puentes de Sturga International Poetry Prize. At first glance, this title seems out of place given that the poet’s native Barrancabermeja conjures up no images of coastline, but rather is most known for a 1998 civilian massacre, one of the most deadly of Colombia’s armed conflict. The poetic voice’s reflection around the port as a place of both arrival and departure, turns illusory, no more than a fleeting bridge to someplace else, or perhaps this place itself. What most stands out, then, is uncertainty, destruction of space, searches for lost identities, labyrinthine memory, and longings for gods--and others--gone missing. The poems take on rhythm and pace while the poetic self explores all this from every possible angle. For Cote Botero’s poetic subject, the port is connection--to now barren terrain, a lost homeland, and María--a connection only truly achieved in the ephemeral uttering of a poem.
Likewise, emphasis on connection, on bridge-building, guides my approach to translating Cote Botero. She has been doubly underrepresented in translation: first, as a woman, given that women are far less likely than men to be translated into English (and even less frequently by a woman); and, second, as a Colombian, since poetry from the region is the second-least translated into English among all Spanish-speaking countries. In fact, according to the Three Percent Translation Database, from 2008 to 2018 no book-length translation of a Colombian woman poet has been published in the United States. Given these conditions, I view the choice of who to translate as an act of bridge-building, forging connections between places and readerships that might not otherwise come into contact. The question of how to translate this voice, then, becomes bridge-crossing, the process of carrying what makes Cote Botero’s poetry so compelling into English, allowing its complexity to find its footing in new linguistic terrain. In this way, the bridge Cote Botero and I build through translation is far from illusory: these two poems intend to highlight marginalized voices, complicate notions of how Colombians--and women--are expected to write, and forge strong, long-lasting literary connections.
- Olivia Lott
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).