English | Introductory Essay | United States
November, 2019For our November issue, InTranslation is pleased to partner with Art Omi: Writers, whose annual writing residencies, offered in the fall and spring, and Translation Lab, held every November, provide authors and translators much-needed space and time to think, work, and create in picturesque Ghent, New York.
The authors and translators featured in this issue are Translation Lab alumni. In the first post, Carol Frederick, Deputy Director of Art Omi: Writers, and DW Gibson, Director, provide an overview of the Translation Lab's vision and history.
- InTranslation
Short Fiction | Spain | Spanish
November, 2019Cristina Fernández Cubas is recognised as one of Spain’s foremost short story writers, especially of the “uncanny,” “fantastic,” and Gothic variety. Berna González Harbour could be talking about virtually all of Fernández Cubas’ work when she describes the most recent collection of short stories as “[r]ich and full of spark . . . a book that disrupts and surprises, that tenses up the distance between what we have, what we fear and reality” ("Babelia," El País). And the American academic Phyllis Zatlin comments that “her stories tend to explore the mysteries of both external reality and of the human psyche. Most of them, including some that fall outside the fantastic mode, explore inner worlds of fantasy and unconscious desires" (Hispania, Vol. 78, No. 1).
My first encounter with Fernández Cubas’ writing was her collection of short stories entitled Los altillos del Brumal (1983). I was particularly struck by two things: her ability to turn a seemingly ordinary object or situation into something terrifying, yet possible, and her overall mastery of the short story genre--a genre which had been widely (and well) practiced by earlier generations of Spanish writers, but which seemed to be far less visible by the time Fernández Cubas appeared on the literary scene. Not long after I read those first stories, as part of my first-ever sabbatical research project, I was able to meet and interview her in her extraordinary attic apartment in Barcelona. Like the character in “Absence,” she cannot imagine living in any other sort of apartment. I still have a copy of that interview, and we have remained in contact ever since.
“Absence” is one of several stories contained in Con Agatha en Estambul (1994). The manner in which Fernández Cubas relates the events and characters in each story is often so down-to-earth and ordinary that, at least initially, they seem entirely plausible and quite credible. It is when the reader’s imagination kicks in that the stories become eerie and dark. In the case of “Absence,” it could be argued that most of us have experienced at least a momentary loss of context and sense of self, quickly dismissed with a (mental) shake of the head. Fernández Cubas’ skill lies in taking such a moment to its extreme limits, and exploring its impact and after-effects on the victim, who ultimately returns to normal. The challenge for the translator is to capture the ordinary everyday tone, language, and descriptions of this moment in the life of Elena Vila Gastón, while at the same time conveying how extraordinary, unnerving, uncanny it is.
Fernández Cubas’ works have been translated into ten languages, but sadly, translations into English are few and far between--only the odd short story, a play, and her most recent work, Nona’s Room (Peter Owen, 2017). Hopefully this translation will assist in making her better known to English readers.
- Lilit Žekulin Thwaites
Austria | Drama (excerpt) | German
November, 2019I prepared this translation for a student production I directed at Knox College in October 2018, which allowed me to refine the text during the rehearsal process. I had previously translated three other plays by this acclaimed Austrian playwright, who is known for a stylized approach to language and a storytelling technique that often presents a significant challenge to audience-members. Before Sunrise—which premiered in Basel, Switzerland in 2017—is based on Gerhart Hauptmann’s groundbreaking 1889 Naturalist play of the same title, Vor Sonnenaufgang. Palmetshofer retained much of the story told by Hauptmann, and dramatized his updated version in a more straightforward manner than is characteristic of his plays. Palmetshofer’s 2007 play hamlet is dead. no gravity, for instance, also revolves around events happening within a family; but those events are told in retrospect, requiring the audience to piece together the story from fragments.
This scene is the last of several between two men who were close friends as university students, but have evolved in contrasting directions. The play takes place in the house of Hoffmann, who has taken over his in-laws’ business, and is now running for the local council on a conservative platform; Loth has sought him out in order to write about him for a left-wing journal, and has begun a relationship with Hoffmann’s sister Helene.
Palmetshofer’s plays typically feature dialogue in which the characters leave many sentences unfinished, and monologues in which single sentences can go on for half a page at a time. The lacunae in the dialogue often pose a challenge to me as the translator since I have to guess how each unfinished sentence might have continued; being able to confer directly with Ewald has been invaluable. And of course, English syntax frequently doesn’t allow me to simply keep the same word order as in the German. For the most part, there were fewer such difficulties with Before Sunrise than in the other plays I’ve translated by Palmetshofer. But the shape of the sentences in the original departs from standard usage, and it was important for me to carry that over into the English. For example, in this excerpt, Loth says: “what’s up with that, Thomas? / tell me / is it a habit? / a reflex? / to assume the worst of others / but of yourself of course / somehow / not at all.” In part, such lines reflect the way people actually talk, yet Palmetshofer aims less to capture the rhythms of everyday speech than to create a kind of musicality in the theatrical language. By laying out his dialogue in short lines like verse, and (extensively in this case) incorporating dashes to indicate silence, Palmetshofer formats the text like a score.
In a note he wrote for our production of Before Sunrise at Knox, Palmetshofer wrote: “I believe theatre’s task is to pose questions and to open up a space in which both thoughts and feelings are generated.” Even in this unusually conventional family drama, he pursues that aim by means of carefully crafted language, and I’ve striven to retain that flavor and texture in the English version.
- Neil Blackadder
China/France | Chinese | Poetry
November, 2019Song Lin is the most open and self-effacing Chinese-language poet I have ever met. He suffered for democratic causes, and after two years of imprisonment, migrated to France, “flee[ing] with beautiful wounds.” This was something he stood up for and he simply did what he had to do, and then literally, with light-handed humor, moved on. He asked for no laurels for his civil disobedience. Once overseas, he did not dwell on nostalgia and his chosen isolation, rather, “the fugue marches on,” displacing alienation with an “encyclopedia of the sky.” He looked up and forward. Symbolist and Surrealist touches are increasingly evident in his poems, and forms like the couplet enter his repertoire, as he “turns sorrow into craft.” He did not look back and assume an “exile” label. In fact, he has no labels. His labels, or rather, labors, are words; his true struggle, “the tribulation of a word, until it spits you out.” The natural world is turned to; museums are visited; the circus becomes a gaze on the poetic craft; words become sperm whales; the bell is tolled in the ear; there is fainting; and there is fainting again. The agony of a poet wandering in words and worlds strikes:
the fallen, lifted by our hands, leaking through our fingers
that once belonged to the stars are sands that boil like tears
What better description is there for a poet that blows wounds into wonders! This dazzling, he leaves to these lines of gold. He lets others shine. Through his poetry editorship at the important literary magazine Jintian (Today), he has been bringing foreign and unsung works to Chinese readers. He was an early advocate for classical Chinese and translation. He champions underrepresented masters, aspiring young writers, and everybody else, except himself. “Strangled / by the umbilical cord,” he takes seriously where Chinese poetry came from, and cares even more about where it is going. In SONG Lin’s poems, the strange becomes stranger, the familiar turns familiar again, the quiet becomes quieter and explodes. With understated restraint and exploratory openness, this is a poetry that strikes and burns. It is perhaps safe to say SONG Lin is the last centaur of contemporary Chinese avant-gardists, a rare poet that straddles the liminal space of words and wounds.
- Dong Li
Fiction (excerpts) | Greece | Modern Greek
November, 2019Amanda Michalopoulou’s Baroque, the source of the three excerpts presented here, is a book centered around a simple narrative concept that has complex consequences for the translator. Baroque traces the arc of a life, and one that resembles its author’s in countless details, including the incorporation of family and personal photographs. Only this novel—memoir?—moves backwards, from year fifty to year zero, with a chapter corresponding to each age. Not only do characters’ experiences, obsessions, cultural and historical surrounds change as we move backwards in time, but so too does the language of the book, until we arrive at the interior monologue of a two-year-old whose doll, fallen in a goldfish pond, will no longer sing—“Lala heavy. Sit open eyes cling clang. Lessgo steet. Sun dry Lala.”—and even another step back to a baby on her first birthday, still mostly outside of language as a means of communication: “from the moment she opened the box she won’t let go of the doll. She called her Lala. And then she said, ‘Atiti, na, atiti,’ which we don’t know what it means.”
In reading the book, I was reminded of one of my favorite stories by Amanda, “Teef,” from the volume I’d Like, which I translated over a decade ago. A new mother has been confined to a psychiatric institution with a rare condition that involves a rapid regression, a shedding of years as she speeds headlong toward the experience of her infant, shedding language and even her teeth along the way. Baroque felt like a slow-motion, defictionalized version of this story. It also felt like a kind of bildungsroman in reverse, one that challenged the teleology of a narrative form in which change would implicitly figure as growth. As an experiment in autofiction, the book resonates with Amanda’s life, to be sure, but it also resonates with her body of fiction: the story told in the chapter titled “Earthquake,” included here, appears in other clothes in the novel Why I Killed My Best Friend. It is this novel that Amanda and I were working on together at the inaugural Translation Lab in fall of 2012, an experience that opened us to forms of collaboration and friendship—between us, and with other participants—that we hadn’t foreseen would emerge from that brief but formative week. It is with great pleasure that I share these latest fragments of Amanda’s work, and of our shared life in, before, and between languages.
- Karen Emmerich
Poetry (excerpts) | Spain | Spanish
November, 2019An explosion of the microscopic and a journey into the post-apocalyptic, Pilar Fraile Amador’s Breach bears witness—to environmental destruction, climate change, exodus, war, and xenophobia. But more than catastrophe itself, these poems plumb our impulse to document the aftermath, the human mechanisms of testimony that make false claims at objectivity. On a surreal road trip through a world in flames, the poet encounters multiple supposedly neutral observers—scientists, mathematicians, documentarians, philosophers, an uncanny double of herself—and becomes aware of the inherent flaws and subjectivities in each attempt at understanding.
- Lizzie Davis
Colombia | Short Fiction | Spanish
November, 2019Like every other writer of his generation of Colombian writers, Roberto Burgos Cantor labored in the long shadow cast by Gabriel García Márquez. Although Roberto was one of Colombia’s most celebrated writers, he remains little known outside the country. He and others in his cohort staked out a fictional imaginary independent of García Márquez, paving the way for a later generation of more urban, realist writers, such as Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Jorge Franco, Pilar Quintana, and Margarita García Robayo.
But Roberto was an important Colombian writer in his own right. Cartagena, the coastal Caribbean city of his birth, was at the center of his literary universe, and the most marginalized of its inhabitants, his protagonists. The author rendered his solidarity with the poor and powerless in a lyricism that embraced equally the horrors and the beauty of life among Cartagena’s dispossessed. La ceiba de la memoria, his novel dealing with the city during its heyday as a center of the slave trade in the 17th century, the Holocaust, and contemporary political violence in Colombia, received the José María Arguedas Prize awarded by Cuba's Casa de las Americas in 2007. Roberto’s polyphonic novel of 20th century Cartagena, Ver lo que veo, won Colombia’s National Novel Prize in 2018, shortly before his death. During a writing career that spanned more than fifty years, the publication of a new work by Roberto was always an event of great public interest.
“Stories of Singers” is part of the collection Lo Amador (1981), Roberto’s first published volume. It is comprised of seven linked stories that narrate life in the eponymous hard-luck Cartagena neighborhood. Critics agree that these vivid, heartbreaking, and lyrical stories are among Roberto’s best work, among seven short story collections and seven novels. As one critic wrote of Lo Amador, “Few books can make us journey, amazed and compassionate before the spectacle of life, as this one.” “Stories of Singers” is the first English translation of Roberto’s work.
An interesting coincidence: I moved to Lo Amador in the late 1980s and early 1990s to do anthropological research. When neighborhood residents learned what I was doing, they referred me to the book, as if everything that could possibly be known about their lives were contained in it. Never having heard of the book, I eagerly went out and bought it.
Lo Amador so beautifully captured the life and language of the people as I understood them in the little time I’d spent there that I nearly abandoned my fieldwork. Time and deeper understanding only confirmed my initial impression. His work has been an inspiration to my own, first in anthropology, then as a translator, and now as a writer of fiction. And, of course, the grief that his death caused in the nation’s literary circles, and the enduring popularity of Roberto’s fiction among his fellow Colombians, speak for themselves.
- Joel Streicker
I first came across Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s work while participating in the Art Omi: Writers Translation Lab with Daniel Saldaña París. In between working on the proofs of my translation of his novel Among Strange Victims, our conversations were a way of getting to know more about each other, and when I expressed my interest in using images and text in a form of semiotic translation, Daniel suggested that I should get in touch with Verónica. That introduction not only flowered into a firm friendship but also led to my translating Empty Set, and collaborating with Verónica on various other exciting projects, among which stands out Palabras Migrantes/Migrant Words, which started its life as a bilingual audio guide to an exhibition in Jackson Hole and was later published in book form with images from the exhibition by the amazing Mexican artisan publishers Impronta.
When Verónica sent me Almadía’s beautiful edition of Mudanza, from which the essay “Origami” is taken, I fell in love with its unique movement between personal narrative and the appropriation of the narratives of the other artist-writers whose works and lives the book addresses. Indeed, I remember that I spent an inordinately long time reading the essays as I was constantly either researching its “characters” or stopping to consider what I had just read.
Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s genius lies in her passion for communication, which has led her to explore the boundaries of language and its interface with the image to open new spaces for expression. As a translator, it is extremely exciting to have the opportunity to occupy those spaces.
- Christina MacSweeney
Fiction (excerpts) | Italian | Somalia/Italy
November, 2019Il comandante del fiume is the coming-of-age story of Yabar, an eighteen-year-old, second-generation immigrant dealing with the post-memory trauma of the Somali civil war; uncovering secrets about his absent father, destructive clan divisions, and Italy’s colonial past; and coming to terms with what it means to be black in Rome. This particular excerpt, which I've titled "Flunking Out and Overflowing," is sourced from a few different chapters, and centers on the theme of school and Yabar's relationship with his "sister."
- Hope Campbell Gustafson
Catalan | Poetry (excerpts) | Spain
September, 2019I first encountered about a dozen poems of Gemma Gorga in an anthology of contemporary Catalan poets translated into English while I was at an artist’s residency in Barcelona. I was struck by the lucid transparency of her language and syntax as a means for revealing transcendent states. I spent the next few years translating her book of prose poems, Llibre dels minuts (Book of Minutes, Field Translation Series, Oberlin College Press, 2019). Yet I still felt compelled by the rest of her work, which makes abundant use of the verse line. Now I am translating poems from her six other books, and eventually newer uncollected poems, which I hope to edit and translate into a volume of her Selected Poems, tentatively titled Late to the House of Words.
The selection of poems here are all from her third book, Instruments òptics (Brosquil Edicions, 2005). Even its title underlines Gorga’s central preoccupation with poems as being themselves “optical instruments” that can help us see what even a telescope or a microscope cannot: that is, the workings of the human soul through memory.
Yet Gorga’s poems are obsessively focused on words themselves: their enigmatic palpability as well as their sound. Thus, in a poem such as “In Alphabetical Order,” Gorga finds the magic key to certain words by their proximity in the dictionary to others. There was no way to achieve in English the same effect that Gorga could do, where the search for “you” in the final line: (“tu, tul, tulipa, túmul, turment”) is constructed from the letters of tu (you), something I could only approximate in English and instead found myself compensating and resorting to homophony: “you: yarrow, yaw, yawp, yew.” In writing this introduction, I had a moment of translator’s regret. I believe that a translation is never finished, merely abandoned--to repurpose Valéry. I thought about changing the line to “we,” a word whose two-letter form earlier in our alphabet would have allowed me more room to do an analogous architectonic procedure, but at too great an expense to the sense of this crucial final line. For it is the very search for the Other through language that underpins the entire poem, and which forms part of Gorga’s lyric project. In many of these poems, even when they evoke solitude, there is the assumption of the other. In “Pomegranates,” the solitary act of peeling and extracting its seeds effects a powerful inversion of number and agency, where instead of the singular narrator eating seeds, it is the seeds of “Time” that “gobble us up.”
The poems comprising her “Book of Hours” are, of course, concerned with cycles of Time passing, of mortality. In “The Book of Hours: October,” for example, Gorga uses the season to allude to the Classical theme of souls falling like leaves, an image found as far back as Dante and Virgil. She transforms it slightly by comparing the leaves to angels falling, who are then able to escape from the endless repetition “to transport them to another/less painful dimension.” In the very act of creating these secular prayers, Gorga is able to achieve a momentary transcendence for herself and, by reading them, for the reader.
- Sharon Dolin
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).
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