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
Biography (excerpt) | Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese
September, 2019Marighella: O guerrilheiro que incendiou o mundo is a biography of one of the most controversial and divisive figures in 20th-century Brazil. A communist activist from a young age, an elected state representative, and the founder of the largest armed organization opposing the ruling military dictatorship, this mixed-race poet raised in poverty in Salvador, Bahia would be declared public enemy number one by the country's political police.
The incident described in the excerpt featured here, Margihella's arrest in a Tijuca movie theater roughly one month after the military seized power in 1964, dominated the nation's headlines, shocking the general public for the details of wanton violence and repression. It would turn out to be a mere inkling of the grim future awaiting Brazil under military rule.
Brazil is a nation that has failed to adequately come to terms with this chapter in its history, having opted for sweeping amnesty rather than prosecuting those responsible for human rights violations. The lack of condemnation or a clear resolution has led, in the wake of recent corruption charges against elected officials, to a mood of dangerous nostalgia among many Brazilians currently disillusioned by the failures of democracy. This dangerous nostalgia is partially responsible for the outcome of last year's presidential election, when Brazilian voters chose a far-right candidate who favors torture as a law-enforcement tactic, praises the dictatorship's strong men for their brutal effectiveness, and calls for a return to the good old days when might was right, protest was outlawed, dissidents were exiled and executed, and elections were non-existent.
Written by veteran journalist Mário Magalhães (currently of The Intercept Brasil), Marighella: O guerrilheiro que incendiou o mundo is equal parts historical nonfiction and political thriller, meticulously researched and rich in context, surveying the country's social and political evolution from the World War I era through to the late 1960s. Published in Portuguese by Companhia das Letras in 2012 and winner of the Prêmio Jabuti for biography, the book served as the basis for Wagner Moura's biopic Marighella, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February of this year.
- Matthew Rinaldi
Vladimir Vertlib’s play on the current refugee crisis ÜBERALL NIRGENDS lauert die Zukunft ("The Future Lurks Everywhere and Nowhere") was first performed in April 2016 to sold-out houses in Salzburg and Hallein, Austria. In this drama, Vertlib connects the plight of the displaced Jews at the end of World War II with the refugee crisis that is unfolding in Europe. Himself a migrant, Vertlib followed his parents from country to country for ten years; what is happening now has had a deep emotional impact on him.
He volunteered from September 2015 to February 2016, at the height of the crisis, to assist the waves of refugees that came over the border into Salzburg, only to continue their journey to Germany and other Northern European countries. Besides publishing a diary of his experiences at the border in the anthology Europa im Wort. Eine literarische Seismographie in sechzehn Aufzeichnungen, he also wrote a novel based on his volunteer experience called Viktor hilft, and this drama, in which refugees themselves, among other professional actors, portray their plight on stage.
In the play, David, a survivor of the Holocaust who currently lives in Israel, comes back to an unnamed city somewhere in Germany or Austria. He is looking for the displaced persons’ camp where his lover Hanna died of starvation shortly after the war. He had promised her he would bring her bones home to Palestine and arrives in the city to fulfill this promise. David is disoriented because he encounters the displaced persons of today in the very camp where he and Hanna were waiting for placement. Refugees from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan enter into a dialogue with David, with the lyrical voice of the dead Hanna coming in over the loudspeakers. Other players in the drama are the mayor of the town; the head of a right-wing political movement, based on PEGIDA (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes), which is opposed to these newcomers in society and perceives them as a threat; busybody volunteers who are looking out more for themselves than their protégées; and the general population, which wants to benefit from cheap undocumented labor.
The play addresses highly relevant topics that are under current discussion not only in Europe but also in the United States, and it examines questions relating to national memory and individual and collective guilt. It suggests a way forward to resolving long-held animosities between groups of peoples, and illuminates the human qualities that we share and that can help us find peace with the past.
- Julie Winter
Short Fiction | Spanish | Uruguay
September, 2019After an unpromising beginning ("What on earth is this?!"), in recent years the work of Armonía Somers has come to play a defining role in my professional life. Having had her writing recommended to me by a couple of learned friends (neither of whom, it eventually transpired, had read much of her), I picked up a copy of her first novel, La mujer desnuda (The Naked Woman, available in English from Feminist Press). Ignoring said initial reaction (a secondary impulse that has served me well in my reading), I persevered and, some way in, was rewarded with that click of connection that will be familiar to readers of all shapes and sizes. From then on, I was hooked.
In probably the most famous essay to date about Somers’ work, the critic Ángel Rama describes her, admiringly, as a weirdo in a generation of Uruguayan weirdos that also included writers such as Felizberto Hernández and Juan Carlos Onetti. Somers, however, was reserved a special place among them, something of weirdo’s weirdo, if you like. And when you open one of her books, you can see why she was afforded the distinction: her writing weaves sinuously from thought to thought, from vivid realism to wild surrealist fantasy, with little quarter given to exposition or, indeed, punctuation. But her perceived difficulty belies a taut sense of purpose. She knew exactly what she wanted to write about, and often this included subjects that few of her contemporaries were addressing at the time: a fierce defense of women’s rights, especially in the realm of sexuality, the accompanying denunciation of male stupidity and viciousness, and wider philosophical, religious, and political meditations that reveal, almost in spite of herself, an extraordinarily erudite and brilliant mind. But perhaps the most salient qualities of Somers’ work are her sense of humor and lust for life, the way she embraces its manifest pleasures and ambiguities with a chuckle or cry of joy. Never afraid to get her hands dirty, she has a talent for reaching into the sludge and pulling out whatever she finds has spawned there, be it monstrous or beautiful. Or both.
"The Man from the Tunnel" is a case in point—on a whim, a seven-year-old girl crawls through a sewer pipe, unwittingly headed for an encounter that will prove revelatory in all manner of ways. It’s an excellent introduction to Somers’ work, and one that I hope will encourage more readers in English to seek her out.
- Kit Maude
Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born in 1911 in Kala Qader, British India (present-day Pakistan). He studied Arabic and English literature at Government College and Oriental College. A dedicated member of the Communist Party, Faiz often found himself afoul of Pakistan's ruling elites, leading to his exile and imprisonment. While he primarily wrote in Urdu, with few exceptions of Punjabi, Hindustani, and Persian verse, Faiz's body of work reaches deep into the fecund linguistic soil of the Indian subcontinent to draw nourishment from Hindustani, Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962 and the Lotus Prize for African and Asian Literature in 1976, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize before his death in 1984 at the age of 73.
Faiz stands alongside Mahmoud Darwish (who recounts their shared exile in Beirut in Memories of Forgetfulness), Nazim Hikmet (whom Faiz translated into Urdu), and Pablo Neruda (a friend) as an iconic figure of twentieth-century world literature. Urdu idiom on either side of the India-Pakistan border has absorbed his poetry to such a degree that it’s not uncommon to hear people quoting him in everyday conversations. His ghazals have been performed by many of South Asia’s most prominent singers. Yet despite his popularity and international profile, Faiz has largely remained unknown to Western readers. “To have to introduce Faiz’s name” to Western readers, Agha Shahid Ali writes in a review of Naomi Lazard’s 1988 translation of Faiz’s work, “a name that is mentioned in Pakistan . . . as often as the sun is, seem[s] a terrible insult.”
In his essay “The Mind of Winter: Reflections of Life in Exile,” Edward Said calls Faiz a poet of exile, engaged in lending “dignity to a condition legislated to deny dignity—to deny an identity to people.” I have the difficult privilege of being an émigré. I migrated from Pakistan to the United States in 1998. My paternal and maternal grandparents migrated from India with my young aunts and uncles at Partition. Dissolution of “home”—a place of familiarity, kinship, and historical continuity—has been the defining experience of my life. And Faiz’s poetry, in no small way, has helped me grapple with a condition that is terrifying, liberating, and above all, fugitive from settled notions about identity.
- Umair Kazi
Guatemala | Prose Poem | Spanish
September, 2019I met the Garifuna poet Wingston González in the fall of 2013 when I was living in Berlin and he was passing through for a poetry festival. We ended up collaborating on the translation featured here and the years passed. Earlier this year, I was overjoyed to see that Ugly Duckling Presse had published a book of his poetry. I'm happy to add “Whiskey against the Rage Machine” to his body of work now available in English.
- Priscilla Posada
I met Yūki Nagae in Tokyo in July 2018, as part of a contingent of international poets invited by Shiga University Professor and scholar Rina Kikuchi to participate in a translation workshop and a multilingual performance in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nara. Each of us was randomly paired with a contemporary Japanese poet, and Yuki and I were fortuitously conjoined.
Since most of us international poets did not speak Japanese and knew neither the logographic kanji nor the syllabic kana, we spent the first part of our time together groping towards a holistic understanding of how poetics are embodied both visually and lexically, and what our partner poet's aesthetic might be. Luckily Yuki does speak English and had translated her poems into the simple phonetic foxtrot that then became clay for my shaping as we conversed. Some words had multiple meanings and allowed for ambiguity and the language was left-branching, accumulating connotation very differently than in English. Those differences notwithstanding, I found that her mind actually worked similarly to my own, employing metaphors from geology and chemistry alongside a formal and playful experimentation. Many of her poems show the incursion of civilization into the natural world and the melancholy of machines. I saw the urbanism of Frank O'Hara and tinges of Neruda in her work, echoes of where the Chilean poet needed a break from "stone and wool, institutions and gardens, commodities, eyeglasses, elevators."
What really helped me polish these translations was performing with Yuki at a launch event for the Tokyo Poetry Journal. She is an amazing performer who has developed an improvisational poetic style that she terms "Steric Poetry," and her work involves movement, intonation, and a responsive fusion of dance and utterance. Seeing the physicality of that work on stage helped me channel the final forms in English. Yuki's translations of my poems were published in one of Japan's most important contemporary poetry journals, Gendai-shi-techo, so I am very pleased that we are able to share two of her poems in English here.
- Ravi Shankar
Short Fiction | Spain | Spanish
September, 2019In Miguel de Unamuno's "The Mirror of Death (A Very Common Tale)," we meet a young woman who suffers from a depression with no explanation, simple or complex. Only in recent years have we accepted this as a defining feature of depression and so treat it with the gravity and respect it demands. But in 1911, the author's understanding of the phenomenon as just one of the many side effects of simply being human allowed him to feel its weight intuitively, to dramatize it, and to tell us all about it in this story, which was first published in the November 27, 1911 edition of El Imparcial.
We've all seen an old medical brochure or educational video and laughed at its ignorance or even gasped, downright scandalized by just how minimizing the past's explanations of grave disorders like depression could be (in fact, the doctor in this story offers his own misguided opinion on the matter). But in the hands of a writer like Unamuno, we can find the very same ailment, this time without a grasping explanation, or even a name, but instead a wealth of compassion and a desire to help us understand. And this is one of the pleasures of looking back at ourselves through the lens of literature: the proof that any experience society or science might sell to us as new, we often have already lived.
- Andrew Adair
Latin | Poetry | Roman Republic
September, 2019The ecstatic cult of Cybele or Cybebe, the Great Mother, was originally based in Phrygia (northern Turkey) and particularly associated with two mountains, Ida and Dindymus. In 204 BC, during the Second Punic War, it was brought to Rome, where it flourished despite legal restrictions. The priests, known as Gallae--who in Catullus’ time were still foreigners--frequently castrated themselves out of devotion to the goddess.
There are various versions of the myth of Attis and Cybele. In this one, Attis is a young Athenian of good family, who falls victim to the cult of Cybele. With a band of like-minded companions, he takes a ship to Phrygia, and, upon landing, castrates himself. We may assume that his companions do likewise. They then set out for the goddess’s shrine on Mount Ida. Upon arrival, exhausted, they fall asleep. The next morning Attis wakes up alone--his companions seem mysteriously to have vanished but this reinforces the dream-like effect--and bitterly regrets his rash action. It is too late.
The original uses a meter called Galliambic, which was associated with the worship of Cybele. I have used terza rima (and at one point rhyming triplets) as I find its rapid movement from stanza to stanza particularly suitable for narrative verse. I break away from it in three places: lines 16-45, where I use short irregularly rhymed lines for Attis’s ecstatic exhortation to his companions; lines 73-103, where I render Attis’s long self-recriminatory soliloquy in rhyming couplets (heroic or not!); and, finally, I revert to short, irregularly rhyming lines in the coda (129-137), a prayer to the goddess from Catullus himself to turn her attentions elsewhere.
In this poem Catullus explores the ancient fascination with, and distrust of, ecstatic cults. Like Euripides’ The Bacchae, it strikes a very modern chord.
Also very modern is the concern with gender identity. It is interesting that Catullus, many of whose poems are expressions of erotic love, has chosen a protagonist who has deliberately castrated himself as an expression of his hatred of Venus. Does this somehow express his own desperate desire to be without the sexual urge that has brought him so much trouble? Or is it that his romantic obsession has--according to traditional Roman thinking--unmanned him, a victim of love in a macho society? And, paradoxically, in this act of sexual renunciation there is a frenzied eroticism, the ultimate masochism.
Even deeper is an almost existentialist panic over the loss of his own identity as a person. If he has lost his identity as a man, then who or what is he? Notice the repetition of "I" in the soliloquy.
- Ranald Barnicot
Mexico | Novel (excerpts) | Spanish
September, 2019Yo, la peor ("I, the Worst of Women") is Mexican writer Mónica Lavín’s 2009 historical novel about the life of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695), who became a nun to enable her writing. Continuing to write after losing viceregal protection, she risked being tortured by the Inquisition. Juana Inés was a brilliant, gifted woman in the New Spain of the 17th-century, a time when most women were illiterate and their education ended at embroidery. Her educated grandfather allowed her to receive basic schooling, which she augmented on her own by using his library.
She became the first great Latin American poet. To find a comparable U.S. poet, we must wait 200 years for Emily Dickinson. The Mexican nun was a female literary pioneer like Mary Wollstonecraft, who published her declaration of women’s rights in 1792 and is regarded as a first feminist in the English-speaking world. Juana Inés complained about the unequal treatment of women a hundred years earlier.
In the novel, Juana Inés is seen through the eyes of other women, those who loved her and those who feared or were jealous of her. We follow the troubles and loves of Refugio, her first teacher; Isabel, her mother; her sisters; Bernarda, a rival lady-in-waiting during Juana’s years at court; Sister Cecelia, a jealous nun who conspires against her; and the two vicereines who were Sor Juana’s patrons, for whom she wrote many of her poems. The excerpts featured here are from Refugio and Juana’s oldest sister, María.
The book is divided into three parts: childhood, court life in Mexico City, and the convent years. Each section is prefaced by a letter written by Juana Inés to a former vicereine, the Marquesa de la Laguna. Those letters are in her own voice, in the language of her time:
"You who have received from my pen evidences of affection and reverence, of my perennial friendship and devotion, give now such lofty evidence of your love for me that it would be impossible for me to match the degree of your gestures of understanding or your strategist abilities to win the battle."
That imitation of 17th century writing—none of Juana’s letters to the vicereine survive—stands in contrast to the register of the rest of the book, like the first chapter included here, in which Juana’s teacher prepares for class:
"Refugio looked out the window at the brightening day, morning fog still threading through the oak trees. So much stillness filled her with melancholy and she yearned for the children’s voices to interrupt her as they trooped in . . ."
Those differences of register and the distinctive perspectives of the numerous narrators are chief among the challenges in translating this novel.
- Patricia Dubrava
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).