German | Germany | Short Fiction
February, 2019Friedrich Nicolai’s "The Joys of Young Werther" is a fascinating contemporary response to Goethe’s bestselling The Sorrows of Young Werther. Rejecting the uncontrolled passion that leads the hero to commit suicide in Goethe’s novel, Nicolai’s text promotes a more measured and rational approach to life as being more conducive to happiness (albeit possibly less likely to produce a literary hit!). I was asked to produce a translation of the novella by Tze Ping Lim, Visiting Researcher at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, who was investigating the copyright ownership of fictional characters and wished to include Nicolai’s parody in her research (this was recently published as the article “Beyond Copyright: Applying A Radical Idea-Expression Dichotomy To The Ownership Of Fictional Characters” in the Fall 2018 issue of the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law). As I knew the translation and the German original would be read and worked on in parallel, I sought to stay as close as possible to the German text while still producing a readable–perhaps even enjoyable!–English version. The project was generously funded by the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Lucerne, for which both Ping and I would like to extend our thanks.
- Margaret Hiley
Born in rural Shandong in 1973, the national award-winning poet, essayist, literary critic, and editor Duo Yu co-founded the prominent “Lower Body” Movement based in Beijing during the early 2000s. Among his multiple books of poetry and prose are Meanings Annoy Us (2004), Chasing Butterflies (2009), and The Last Darkness (2013).
Memoir (excerpt) | Poland | United States | Yiddish
February, 2019Di vos zaynen nisht geblibn: dertseylungen (Those Who Didn’t Survive: Stories) (New York and Tel Aviv, 1972) is a memoir by Rachmil Bryks (1912-1974) of his shtetl Skarżysko-Kamienna, Poland, as refracted through the figure of his great-uncle Reb Mendl Feldman. Bryks presents the shtetl’s folk traditions and an extended cast of characters, while always deftly returning the thread to Reb Mendl. In the process, a vivid collective portrait of an annihilated Jewish community emerges. His approach is unconventional—there are no chapter breaks or readily apparent chronology. The book is more a panorama chock full of anecdotes, customs, details, and personalities than a traditional memoir with a linear narrative drive. Known widely for his pioneering use of dark humor in his Holocaust fiction, Bryks’ non-fiction displays his powers of description and empathic observations. In this excerpt, we meet two of the shtetl’s particularly colorful characters. Those Who Didn’t Survive is one of three memoirs by Rachmil Bryks I am translating as a 2018-2019 Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow. I thank Bella Bryks-Klein for her enthusiastic support of this translation project; the Yiddish Book Center and all of the program’s staff, fellows, and instructors; my mentor Elizabeth Harris; Justin Cammy for his feedback; and Ri J. Turner for her assistance with the translation of some challenging Yiddish words and expressions.
- Yermiyahu Ahron Taub
Middle Scots | Poetry | Scotland
February, 2019It’s not that some issues never change (the same central “y” in misogyny and gynecology, hysteria, and hysterectomy). It’s just that we haven’t rid ourselves of them yet.
Readers will, I hope, forgive me for translating the satire with sincerity and the sincere poem as a satire. I don’t mean that quite literally, of course. But whereas James VI’s “Satire” needs little subtlety to update its conclusive gendered vitriol, and is thus rendered as closely to the original as the simple modernization of its beast-driven vocabulary encouraged, William Dunbar’s “Praise” is of the more insidious kind: equally objectifying, but lovingly so, or so he thought. Dunbar’s 500-year-old homage is entirely innocent of intentional malice, and thus doubled my challenge to present it "strictly" as written, a hymenal hymn, while also nudging at all the obvious institutionalized sexism we see through his eyes but below our own critically furrowed brows (a task made easy by such woefully applied descriptors as “things” in line two, or his unquestioning assumption that pain should be a natural part of procreation for femme folk).
Additionally, the savvy reader will note that I strayed perhaps a bit farther overall in my version of Dunbar than of James, not out of personal egotism, but simply because Dunbar is universally acknowledged the superior poet, and thus deserved a bit more reward in his rendering. (I pray I did not plunge fully overboard in anyone’s estimation.) The pairing of the two poets, separated by almost a perfect century of life, is simply an exercise in examining the ongoing binary portrayal of cis-women by cis-men as being saints or shrews, ideals or irritants, but never as autonomous equals capable of their own self-identification and empowerment. As a cis-man myself, of course, I still can’t make that call on behalf of women—but I can, as I hope I’ve done here, call out my fellow men for their faults, no matter how vivid or visionary (or vile) the verse.
- Kent Leatham
In Stella Díaz Varín’s poems, woman speaks. She speaks as god, as wife, as mother, as poet; she “intone[s] the song of love” and slices society into fine, jagged pieces. She calls to the reader as her confessor, her disappointing lover, her jailer, her child. She asks, flatly, insistently, what choice is hers—“What do you all want me to do with these materials. / Nothing. Except write melancholy poetry.”
Díaz Varín’s materials—her experiences, her words—were vast, and she wrote the poem featured here, “The House,” for her 1959 collection, Time, Imaginary Measure. The book title is apt: her voice is atemporal, daring us to keep her to her generation. Such verse opens itself generously to translation into American English, which prefers directness, wants us to lean in and tell all.
In her introduction to the Collected Work, Chilean poet and academic Eugenia Brito wrote that Díaz Varín’s speaker is a sacred, pagan, archaic figure, one that expresses the poet’s own “fiebre de malestar cultural y de locura reparadora, intuitiva, poética.” This is the motor of her poetry— a fever caused by both her cultural malaise and her intuitive, poetic, healing madness. In translation, the challenge is to let the poems be mad, let them resist sense, without exaggeration or imprisonment.
- Rebecca Levi
Latin | Poetry | Roman Republic
February, 2019Since 17th-century England, why has Catullus been the most translated of Latin poets? In great part, it’s because of the diversity of his poetic subjects, the virtuosic variety of his metrics and poetic forms, the richness and range of his tone and diction. All true, but what imbibes a reader of Catullus most is his ardency. No matter the theme or person or event or other subject of a poem, Catullus seizes it and holds fast with a grappling hook until he yanks the poem out from its watery depths for conspicuous display. Whether, in a given poem, he writes charmingly, hatefully, tenderly, invectively, humorously, erotically, or obscenely, the resulting poem is a huge and conspicuous spear-nosed marlin. I can’t think of another poet from any age or culture, except Shakespeare, who is more remarkable for repeatedly and variously marking the reader’s mind and heart.
- Stanton Hager
Danish | Denmark | Poetry (excerpts)
February, 2019Mikael Josephsen gained recognition in the Danish literary market with his poetry collection BREAK (KNÆK, Gyldendal, 2016), in which he describes life in the various psychiatric wards he has inhabited. What reviewers seemed to like most about the collection was the simple, down-to-earth tone he used to describe his rather tumultuous experiences, and not least, as the title of the collection would suggest, his mental state when admitted. In Danish, as in English, the word knæk ("break") can refer to the experience of having a mental breakdown or to a line break in poetry. In fact, Josephsen's title is a direct reference to knækprosa, which translates as “free verse” in English. His poems are reminiscent of the confessional poetry of the 1960s and describe everyday activities in a matter-of-fact way. Though this is not uncommon in contemporary Danish poetry, what distinguishes Josephsen's poems is their setting, which gives them a certain edge and an element of surprise.
- Nina Sokol
These poems belong to the latest period of Serhiy Zhadan's body of work. As the poet stated a few years ago, his oeuvre may be divided into two parts: 1) work written before the year 2014; and, 2) work written after 2014, the year war broke out in Ukraine. These poems deal with the eternal questions (and quests): home, exile, solitude, love, and faith. These poems also demonstrate unpredictable interactions between people and their native realms. This might be of interest to those who study how poetry observes and mirrors the shifts within a society going through very challenging and, at times, life-changing circumstances, but offers solace as well.
- John Hennessy and Ostap Kin
Armenia | Letters | Western Armenian
February, 2019Glimpses into the intimate lives of both men and women are few and far between in the Armenian literary tradition. Long dominated by cultural attitudes that viewed discussions of sexuality and desire as shameful and indecent, the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Armenian society in which the letters featured here were written essentially silenced such expression in the public sphere.
Conversations of this sort, however, certainly did take place in the private sphere, as we see in these love letters exchanged between two prominent Armenian writers in 1895 Constantinople: Hrand Asadour and Zabel Donelian (more widely known by her pen name Sibyl). At the time, Hrand was the co-editor of Masis, one of the most widely circulated Armenian newspapers in the Ottoman Empire, while Zabel had already earned a reputation for her poetry, fiction, and articles in the Armenian press. Hrand had long been an admirer of Zabel’s work from afar and, in 1892, they began working together on the literary supplement of Masis, giving way to a friendship that slowly blossomed into love.
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Arabic | Poetry (excerpts) | Tunisia
February, 2019The four poems featured here are from Adam Fethi's 2011 collection The Blind Glassblower. I selected the shortest pieces because they condense the major aesthetic and thematic orientations in this volume of poetry. Adam Fethi's consistent use of prose poetry shows a subversive aesthetic stance that confronts the traditional Arabic poem. His texts offer a new arrangement of the poetic textual space wherein rhythm is not necessarily provided by rhymes, but rather created by the visual distribution of lines on the page, the flow and suspension of words, and a playful use of punctuation.
The Blind Glassblower is a chronicle of a poet's life and works. Blindness is used as an extended metaphor to refer to the poet's alienation from a world that claims sight but is completely deprived of insight. Fethi defines poetry as an act of glassblowing, referring, on one level, to poetry as a craft, an idea found in ancient Arabic descriptions of poetry as sina'a (craft, trade, profession). On a deeper level, the act of blowing refers to the divine act of creation. The Islamic story of genesis turns to God's enunciation: "I blow into him [Adam] from my own spirit" (Surat al-Hajar, The Stone). Adam Fethi departs from the Romantic image of the poet-prophet emphasized in Tunisian Abu al-Qasssim al-Shabi's work, to appropriate the divine creative gesture.
Written in a simple language, divested from embellishment, these four poems use the voice of a young girl, who represents innocence and the potential for wonderment. The figure of the child joins the metaphor of blindness to designate a poetic agency free from corruption and capable of innovation. The simple language, however, provokes deep thought and meditation. The three first poems create an eerie world wherein acts of writing and reading are fused. The poet/glassblower, who is engulfed by a hole or lost in a path not trodden, enacts the act of reading wherein the reader may also be engulfed by the poem.
Tunisian poetry in English translation is rather rare. My translation stems from the urge to provide more visibility to Adam Fethi's wonderful work, already translated into French and Spanish.
- Hager Ben Driss
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).