One day, a package appeared in my mailbox: brown paper-wrapped with a dozen mismatched stamps from a secondhand bookseller in Sweden. A surprise birthday gift.
With a little reverence and my heart making skippy hops, I opened it. Translated the epigraph, then immediately determined to translate the entire book. It seemed the poet was speaking directly to me and to my life--across oceans and decades, but there she was in my living room. Marie Lundquist and her 1992 debut collection I Walk Around Gathering Up My Garden for the Night.
Said poet Adam Zagajewski, “[Lundquist’s work has] the purity of the still-lifes of great masters . . . in them, we hear the world tremble.”
These taut, image-driven, aphoristic poems speak in a contemporary voice especially suited to the sound-byte era, and offer clarity and stillness in a frenetic world.
Lundquist has a cinematic eye, not surprising given her experience and interest in photography and dramaturgy. Some poems almost read as stage directions without dialogue. The poems regularly surprise, in quick turns of thought and image: one might suddenly stumble across Judas, a Greek frieze, firefighters, or an old-time circus troupe.
While the emotional terrain explored is intense, devastating even, Lundquist’s tone remains arms-length. The voice is calm but never seeks to comfort. She can be ironic but not cynical. Much of her work carries an erotic charge. Brilliantly, she appropriates scientific or pseudo-scientific language; with the stance of an anthropologist, she makes our own culture seem strange.
Her poems carry a sense of authority and urgency. The logic is sophisticated and clear, not a word wasted or poorly chosen. Each poem quietly accretes in a deep place and the reader ends the book feeling transported, a bit stunned even.
Though her voice is distinctly her own, at times I felt a kinship with Sexton and Szymborska. Or heard echoes of other Swedish poets: Tomas Tranströmer, Edith Södergran, Sonja Åkesson. Then there were moments when I could feel Lydia Davis and Herta Müller.
Strong praise attended the publication of this collection. The reviews frequently commented on her use of language, calling it “inventive,” “skilled,” “a sharp needle,” and “as clear as a running brook, characterized by sensualism and an elegant melancholy.”
Reviews noted the frequent shifts from the everyday world to the surreal and mythological. They lauded her treatment of such fraught topics as longing and shame, ambiguity around gender roles, the pull of memory and the problems of adult love. Her unique style was highlighted as well as her well-drawn and distinct imagery. Reviewers called the book “amazing,” and “fantastic.” Said Marianne Steinsaphir, “[Her] poems open up every time I read them, words that show the [possibilities] of language.” Said Eva Ottosson, “Her poetry… in short, is the kind you’d gladly get lost in.”
- Kristina Andersson Bicher
Philippe Delerm’s writings have been referred to as récits, snapshots, and essays. Sixty-one brief essays—ranging from one to three pages each—comprise the 178-page Le trottoir au soleil ("Sidewalk in the Sun"). A book of essays may or may not contain a narrative arc, but Delerm’s has a definite beginning and end, and the scenes, reflections, and narratives throughout certainly transport the reader from one point to the next. Essays may be read and appreciated in any order, however.
In Le trottoir au soleil, Delerm is an observer who conveys multisensory scenes that become snapshots of thoughts, of a time of life—from childhood to grandfatherhood. Scenes—each essay could be called such—range from a man standing at a kitchen sink doing dishes and listening to the radio, to the same man observing provocative teenagers in a city park, to remembrances of childhood vacations in contrast to grandparents’ outings. Delerm takes a signature approach as he both demonstrates and advocates being a watcher.
In a conversation with publisher Gallimard printed in the liner notes of a CD of recordings of the essays, Delerm is asked about the fact that in these essays he puts himself in the role of observer, more than participant, and furthermore seems a bit withdrawn from life. Having recently turned sixty, Delerm responds that he feels increasingly transparent. Yet he cherishes this transparent onlooker role, which does indeed permeate the collection. His is not a passive gaze, however, but a penetrating curiosity about, reflection on, and celebration of living. The essays are in turn humorous, poignant, provocative.
- Ellen Sprague
Cuba | Poetry | Spanish | United States
April, 2019“Poetry saved me from madness,” Jorge Olivera Castillo once said to describe his time in Guantánamo Prison. Between 2016 and 2018, the poet escaped what remained of his 18-year sentence by living in the United States, first as a writer for the Harvard University Scholars at Risk Program (where I met him) and second as an International Writers Project Fellow at Brown University. The poems featured here were written during the writer’s time in the United States, before he returned to Cuba at the risk of being incarcerated once again.
The primary tensions I see in Olivera’s poems lie between experiences of confinement and imaginaries of travel, evocative of the challenges of migratory communities (past and present), of Olivera’s own physically and psychologically traumatizing time in prison, and of his 1981 journey in a cargo ship to fight in the Angolan Civil War. The sincerity of Olivera’s poetry is reminiscent of Cuban journalist-poet José Martí’s Versos sencillos (1897), but also, more recently, of the works of exiled writer Enrique Labrador Ruiz (1902-1991). Even as they underline confinement, the poems reflect the motifs of transport, both under the auspices of continued captivity (to political regimes, nightmares, desire) and the hope for freedom.
While the difficulty of translating these poems sometimes sprang from their harrowing content and remarkable tonal candor, I took refuge in the poems' structures. Olivera’s lines are often jagged, some extending over the page and then followed by brief two- or three-word lines that appear to retreat into quieted, controlled thought, before extending again into rumination. The use of white space and the poems’ brevity speak equally to an aesthetic of erratically controlled speech marked with the quick imposition of silence. As with the queer Cuban poets Severo Sarduy and José Lezama Lima, the Afro-descendant poet’s works are reflective of concerns that Caribbean poets elsewhere share: the bounds between sea and land, land and body, dream and reality, and the myth of home faced with the reality of exile. In illuminating these bounds in “Endangered,” for instance, the poet’s voices leap between anthropomorphized depictions of the sun to “heaps of sand” embedded in a landscape of “hardened faces.” Indeed, it seems in Olivera’s poems that imaginaries of landscape are often more alive and animated than the bodies that navigate their place within it.
Written from Cambridge, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island, these poems are part and parcel of the ongoing work Olivera has taken up to share his memory of imprisonment and aspirations for uncensored speech and literary discourse in and about Cuba. When I served as an interpreter for Jorge Olivera—at a talk he gave at Harvard University—he shared these objectives with his audience while stating that one of the main poets that provided him sustenance in solitary confinement was a woman from Massachusetts who passed much of her life in solitude: Emily Dickinson.
As Jorge Olivera Castillo has just recently returned to Cuba, he seeks further opportunities to share his voice in English while building literary and political conversations on and beyond the island.
- David Francis
Japan | Japanese | Travel Essay
April, 2019Toriko Wakasugi was a renowned journalist and fiction writer who wrote extensively on traveling alone in Japan as a woman. Though not directly mentioned, this account of her stay at active volcano Mount Asama was primarily to recuperate from ailing health caused by her imprisonment in Tokyo the year before for violating the security maintenance law (which sought to stamp out socialism, labor movements and unions, communism, anarchism, and essentially liberalism) by attending the wake of a socialist contemporary. By publishing the piece in the popular national newspaper Miyako Shimbun in late July of 1934, she managed to share via subtext her post-detainment suffering and refusal to cease reporting on socialist issues such as rural poverty in spite of the oppressive political climate of the time.
- Marissa Skeels
After Marina Tsvetaeva emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1922, she suffered from a sense of homelessness that left her desiring fulfilling relationships. As a romantic, Tsvetaeva felt the rift between reality and fantasy, body and spirit, thought and feeling. She felt an aversion to the physicality of the world, as this physicality was a barrier that prevented a direct connection to the essence of nature and those around her. Her feelings on love reflected this focus on spirit rather than body, as well as the desire for all-consuming love from one person to another rather than mutual love.
Living as a poet in exile, disconnected from her spiritual motherland and audience, Tsvetaeva often despaired in the 1930s that she had lost her creative abilities and was doomed to lose her lofty position as a poet. She relied on correspondences to establish a separate space for her to express intimacy and to escape the spiritual isolation she felt in her self-imposed exile from home. Her greatest inspiration throughout her life came from the intense, one-sided adoration she exhibits in her letters.
In 1936, Baron Anatoly von Steiger, a young Russian émigré, sent her a book of his poems from a sanatorium for tubercular patients in Switzerland. They had met briefly at one of her poetry readings but Tsvetaeva could not fully recall their meeting. However, as a young poet of noble descent, ill and lonely, Tsvetaeva immediately developed a maternal love for Steiger as she fabricated an ideal romantic image of him. In her first letter to him, excerpted below, Tsvetaeva assumes the maternal role and makes clear her desire for this “enclosing and embracing” love, this filial relationship with her young, ill poet. It is over the course of the following two months, after receiving Steiger’s initial correspondence, that she writes the cycle, Poems to an Orphan. Tsvetaeva recreates her former creative power by immersing herself in this constructed romance. She fills the space around the heroine with images of an imaginary lover, while dissolving herself into nature, embedding her own emotions into the natural world around her.
After this cycle, Tsvetaeva wrote only a few more poems before her return to the Soviet Union and subsequent death. Given the significant role that correspondences, particularly with Boris Pasternak, played in inspiring Tsvetaeva’s poetry throughout her life in exile, this last relationship with Steiger was her final attempt to connect with what she felt was her former self.
- Tara M. Wheelwright
Since Chinese nouns don’t indicate quantity, the title of this book could be translated as My Mother’s Parasite or My Mother’s Parasites. So as I translated Wei-Yun Lin’s memoir, a meditation on life, growth and interdependence, I kept asking myself, "Parasite or parasites?"
It isn’t really a question of quantity—there are a lot of parasites in the book. Wei-Yun’s mother is a distinguished scholar of parasitology, which, yes, means she is as smart and eccentric as you might imagine. One of the book’s main elements, and great pleasures, is Wei-Yun’s nuanced and funny insights into her loving, complex relationship with her mom.
Singular “parasite” seems more emphatic: My Mother’s PARASITE. It also suggests the concept of being parasitical rather than the creepy crawlies themselves. And “What makes something a parasite?” is a question the book seeks to answer. The straightforward answer is that, for at least part of their life cycle, parasites derive nutrients from other creatures at their expense. But the book leads us to wonder: Doesn’t everything, maybe even especially humans, more or less live off of other creatures—particularly our mothers? Are we harming them? Do we give them anything in return? (And the questions we all cry from the rooftops.) Do we ever stop relying on our mothers for nutrients? Do we ever stop asking them to make sacrifices for us?
Are we all our mothers’ parasites?!?
In the end I asked Wei-Yun what she thought—parasite or parasites? And she said “parasites,” so I went with that. But, as a translator, I love that this difference between Chinese and English allowed me, above and beyond the richness of Wei-Yun’s narrative, to ask these questions and conjecture these possibilities.
- Emily Goedde
Hungarian | Hungary | Short Fiction
April, 2019My major concern, when I sat down to translate this story, was whether the weight of the post-Soviet bloc and Hungarian history would carry over to an American audience--whether readers would get lost in the many significant dates that are mentioned. At the start of the story, we are told “it was November 16th, 1989, and God could once again step behind the Iron Curtain.” What’s helpful for an American reader to know is that by November 1989, Hungary was well into reforming from a communist state into a democratic republic, with opposition parties already established and with free elections not far on the horizon. Later, we learn that 1947 was the last year God had stepped foot inside a Hungarian pub, which was also the year the Soviets had officially gained governmental power by manipulating the political landscape and holding the last “free elections” the country would see for the next forty-three years. Finally, when the bartender asks God, who clearly looks out of place in the small-town pub, whether he’s a 56-er, he’s referring to the 200,000 Hungarians who fled Hungary after the 1956 Revolution against the Soviet Union, which lasted twelve days, saw the death of nearly three thousand Hungarians during the revolt and the execution of 299 after the Soviets regained power.
What I learned in the process of translating this story is that while knowing the historical significance behind these dates brings with it a richer reading of the work, it is actually the emotional truths that Ferenc Czinki conveys through his characters that make this story so resonant. Czinki makes it easy for readers to empathize with a people who have been forgotten, even by their own God, and readers likewise understand why God feels forgotten, too. Everyone is a stranger to one another here until God meets Somebody, and it is this shared sense of being forgotten that allows them a moment of connection.
The summer I discovered this story, Ferenc Czinki drove me around Inota. The old factory is still running; he pointed out the massive, cylindrical chimneys in the distance. We retraced God’s footsteps into the pub and drank a local Hungarian light beer with the few men who were there that lazy summer afternoon. I can attest to the fact that that countryside still feels rather forgotten, but in this story, as in much of his work, Czinki gives voice to this place and its people.
- Timea Balogh
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
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).