Poetry | Russia | Russian | United States
October, 2020“David and Orpheus” juxtaposes the archetypal musicians of Abrahamic and Graeco-Roman religion. David and Orpheus are paralleled throughout: via their instruments, harp and lyre; their certainty–David’s in his god, Orpheus’s in his art (their uncertainty is vice versa); their woodland location; and their situation just after a crossroads in their stories–David’s anointing as King of Israel, and Orpheus’s return from Hades. The paralleling also happens on a formal level: the pair occupy separate stanzas, but are united through rhyme, which operates across–not within–stanzas (I have replicated the rhyme scheme in my translation). But whereas David sees a future, embodied in the tradition-bearing “tree” of his people, Orpheus, having lost Eurydice, has a fatalistic disregard for life. This is reflected in the imagery of the second part: whereas David’s extends to the twentieth century through Christian imagery, Orpheus’s remains resolutely classical.
From a wasp trapped in a clock, “The Wasp in the Hour” spins an allegory of our implication in time. Kutik admits this is “a difficult poem”–its flow of images can be baffling. In part 1, the clock becomes a cuckoo, then a seed, while the wasp becomes a zero (a non-existent numeral on a clock); the Roman numerals on the clock face turn it into the shield which Horace famously dropped at Philippi, when the triumvirs defeated the Republican army; then the clock hands – which are also ancient arrows–turn into a sewing needle, moving time forward. In part 2, this needle is thread, which becomes Zeus’s golden rain, which impregnated Danaë; the clock becomes a spinning wheel, with the wasp a spindle inside it, and Zeus its thread; Zeus attempts to drown the clock, which is his father Cronus (Time), to avenge his siblings, eaten by Cronus; finally, the clock turns into a ball of yarn, and its hands are knitting needles. In part 3, this yarn is stripy socks worn by the wasp; the clock becomes a football, then semen, then a cup; the wasp is a zero again, and therefore “nil-time,” or our present, which is represented by open mouths (zeros); finally, the clock turns into a round table, then the firmament, then a person–and the wasp drowns in the cup/Time. Kutik’s ultimate message is that “living here means wasting Time,” and that “we must accept ourselves as numerals (‘golden tsars’) of a much bigger 'round table’ than a clock face, that is the sky itself.”
In “Cats’ July” Kutik looks into the dreams of cats and sees their great and terrible history before their decline into creatures of luxury. The domestication of the cat in Ancient Egypt is equated with first the seduction of Cleopatra and then the assassination of Julius Caesar. The final stanza is a feline Actium–the deciding battle of the Roman Civil Wars–with cats cast both as the fighting ships and as Mark Antony.
“In Memory of Anton and Allen” is Kutik’s obituary for his Persian blue cat Anton and his friend Allen Ginsberg.
- Georgina Barker
Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
October, 2020Elena’s best stories evidence a peculiar knack of showing us characters who seem to shift in and out of conventional reality and yet at the same time make us knock into our own very real hopes, fears, insecurities, peculiarities. It’s a good idea when considering her material to put aside the either/or questions we instinctively ask: Is this taking place in some interior world or the tangible exterior world? Are we dealing with real actions taking place within normal time or with a timeless, symbolic piece happening in some place slightly shifted to one side? Are these two people two different characters or different aspects of just one? With Elena, there is no either/or, nor will she offer you her own answers to your questions. You are delightfully on your own, feeling your way by a kind of echolocation, meeting strange people who, even when they are superficially unlike you, your loved ones, or your circle of acquaintances, nonetheless trigger strong feelings of recognition. All this she does with a beguiling naturalness, an apparent effortlessness and artlessness, a complete lack of apology, self-doubt, or explanation.
The joy of translating Elena is that of going for a ride and just hanging on, wherever she takes you. And remaining faithful to prose that reflects in its lexis and syntax the combination of simplicity and unexpectedness that marks her characterisation.
- Richard Coombes
France | Greece | Hybrid Fiction | Modern Greek
October, 2020“λ” (for λιβελούλα, “libellula” or dragonfly) is one of the 24 chapters of Insect Alphabet (Αλφαβητάρι Εντόμων), each corresponding to a letter of the Greek alphabet and the initial of the name of an insect. Originally published in Greek (Patakis Publishers, 2018), this work cuts across the genres of novel and short story, and provides a glimpse into Europe from the Second World War to the present time, exploring violence, isolation, and the challenge of European identity. Famous or anonymous, no matter whether placed in a picturesque Greek island or in the Calais Jungle, in Paris, Vienna, Jerusalem, or Edinburgh, each of the main characters has an important encounter with an insect. Homeric heroines, Sappho, Rimbaud, Alban Berg, Jung, Pasolini, as well as anthropological material (“telling the bees” when the beekeeper dies, or the presumed affiliation between snakes and dragonflies), children’s questions (“Why don’t insects live in the sea?”), medical discoveries, the story of the loss and the resurfacing of a pioneer lepidopterist’s work that curiously unites the United States and the Soviet Union, have jointly contributed to forming the cocoon of this entomological alphabet that is inspired by the many faces of Europe, those enchanting and those disenchanting, and those that are both at once.
I translated “λ” into English, along with a few other chapters, after the book was awarded two prizes in Greece: the 2019 State Literary Award and the 2019 Anagnostis literary prize.
- Dimitra Kolliakou
Pierre Reverdy (1889–1960) was a widely influential French poet and critic. Born in Narbonne, he moved to Paris in 1910 and began his life as a working poet, publishing his first book, Poems en prose, five years later. His subsequent works included La Lucarne ovale (1916), Les Jockeys camoufles (1918), La Guitare endormie (1919), Coeur de chene (1921), and Cravates de chanvre (1922), but it was his 1924 collection Les Epaves du ciel that brought him greater recognition. During this time he was a key figure in the avant-garde circles that developed Surrealism, Cubism, and Dada, and that included writers and artists such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Louis Aragon, André Breton, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and Georges Braque. With Jacob, Apollinaire, and Vicente Huidobro, he founded the journal Nord-Sud in 1917.
Over time his writing became more mystical, and in 1926 he converted to Catholicism and retreated with his wife to a house near a Benedictine monastery in Solesmes. He lived there for the remainder of this life, writing poetry and criticism, and participating in the French resistance during the German occupation.
The poem featured here, “Locked Away,” is taken from the collection Le Chant des morts [The Song of the Dead], a sequence of broody philosophical poems which Reverdy wrote during some of the worst moments of World War II, and which were accompanied by original illustrations by Picasso when originally published in 1948.
- André Naffis-Sahely
Arabic | Iraq | Poetry | United States
October, 2020Faleeha Hassan and I have news we find exciting: she has signed a contract with Amazon Crossing to write a memoir for them entitled The War & Me, and she has written, and I have already translated, its first three chapters. The doorways to this opportunity for us were her novella Butterfly Voice, which I have translated but which we have not published, and my translation of I’m in Seattle, Where Are You?, the new memoir by Iraqi author Mortada Gzar, forthcoming from Amazon Crossing in April 2021.
- William Hutchins
Nali’s poetic oeuvre, or diwan, is one of the most significant works of Kurdish literature but has not previously been translated into English. In terms of matter and manner, his adaptations of the Classical Perso-Arabic ghazal emphasize sustained correspondence of sounds, usually as end-rhymes, in lines of consistent, equal length; each ghazal addresses a lover of unspecified, indeterminate gender, and closes with a parting signature by Nali’s poetic persona, signaling the poem’s end and reflecting upon the nature of the poem and its addressee. More than mere couplets, his paired lines constitute discrete poetic expressions in their own right, yet remain interdependent in relation to the ghazal as a whole. Every couplet sets up images in tension, emotions straining toward an articulation that seems always to elude reductive treatment. Our translations approximate the Kurdish rhymes with English assonance and half-rhymes, which, in English-language poetry, achieve a less heavy-handed, more palatable effect. We also endeavored to balance the feminine and masculine traits of the addressee, never explicitly indicating whether the Beloved is male or female, to preserve Nali’s deliberate ambiguity on this point. In keeping with this indeterminacy, the ghazal invites supple interpretations, capable of adapting the poem’s sequence of surprising imagery to apply to a human lover, a deity, a homeland.
- Haidar Khezri and Tyler Fisher
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
October, 2020Eugène Sue owed his immense popularity to the series of sensational novels of Parisian low life he began in 1842 with Les Mystères de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris). The book appeared as a serial novel, or feuilleton, in the conservative newspaper Le Journal des Débats. It provided readers with an examination of working-class and criminal Paris that no novel had until then portrayed. With its portraits of prostitutes, criminals, and villains of all stripes, who speak in their own language and move about in their own milieu, the book caused a scandal upon its release. Unlike his contemporaries, Sue abandoned the drawing rooms of the beau monde for the dive bars and cabarets of central Paris, the Ile de la Cité, where the story is set.
There had, of course, been fictional descriptions of urban life before, but their focus had been on the Parisian bourgeoisie and its interaction with the remnants of the French aristocracy. Sue upset the codes of contemporary action and introduced a dark, violent underworld, a secret Paris as exotic, as foreign as any city portrayed in Sue’s popular maritime novels. Although colorful characters and cunning criminals were not unknown in French fiction, Sue’s brand of insistent realism was more in keeping with the methods of a social worker or journalist. His gritty depictions of the poor and the criminal classes eschew the elements of the fabulous and the burlesque to portray characters in their natural setting. There are elements of Dickens in his work, but without the latter’s good-natured bonhomie and humor. And while our attitudes of what is acceptable or appropriate in literature have broadened considerably since the 1840s, there was nothing picturesque about the book at the time of its appearance. The scandal was real, and Sue was reviled by conservative literary critics of his day for having shoved their noses into the gutters of Paris. He was also accused of literary speculation and said to have profited from a depiction of the poor and the downtrodden. This was to be expected. Elements of the socialist press took Sue at his word, however, and championed the book as a denunciation of poverty and a plea in favor of the common man, those who were referred to as les classes populaires.
- Robert Bononno
The entire translator's note can be found at the beginning of the post, before the excerpt from the novel.
Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
October, 2020I was first introduced to the Soviet cartoon Малыш и Карлсон [Junior and Karlsson] when I was studying Russian during the summer of 2013. The cartoon follows the adventures of a shy but imaginative boy who is pushed to daring-dos by Karlsson, a plump man who flies around with a jelly-powered propeller on his back. The cartoon was beloved in the USSR and continues to be a staple in Russian households. The story is whimsical, charming, and a little fear-inducing (so much playing atop—and in the air between—roofs!). And like many cherished Soviet cartoons—take Vinni Pukh, for example, the Soviet cartoon adaptation of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh—it is an adaptation of a translation, based on the Swedish story Karlsson på taket [Karlsson on the Roof] by Astrid Lindgren, who also wrote Pippi Longstocking.
Years later, it is an honor to tackle a collection of stories with a titular reference to this beloved character, who in adaptation became as Soviet as he was originally Swedish. The story presented here has the same title as the collection by prolific author and playwright Natalia Rubanova: Karlsson, Dancing the Flamenco. The character here is a woman, whose pudgy form as a girl earned her the nickname after the cartoon character. The nameless narrator seeks her out, this girl with whom he experienced his first sexual awakening as a boy, the plump girl who danced around his head and continues to push him out the door to adventures, not with a jelly-powered propeller, but with the flamenco. Perhaps she is not so unlike the cartoon Karlsson, after all.
Rubanova’s prose is challenging. This collection of stories, which largely depict queer narratives but, as she has said to me, are “just about love,” is forbidden to be published in Russia since it is illegal to publish works that depict what is termed by the state as “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations.” Fashioned as a symphony, each piece named for a style of music, the reader is taken through a collection that defies genre, thus challenging while at once delighting the reader. Rubanova’s writing is informed by so many different factors, but musicality and its breakage is a great one of them, as Rubanova is a classically-trained pianist. (I myself played the French horn for six years, which is a long time to be bad at a heavy instrument.) How to navigate the musical intervals of her work, how to render the dissonance?
One of my favorite lessons I’ve learned from Soviet cartoons that there is a letting-go crucial to wonder. As in the translation of these texts, there is an openness to learn: listen to the dissonance, let the strange note ring out, play with it. Crack open the jelly. Power up the propeller. Let the flamenco fly.
- Rachael Daum
Italian | Italy | Personal Essay
October, 2020Marosia Castaldi (1950-2019) was a Neapolitan writer who spent most of her life in Milan, and this duality animates much of her work. Naples is vast, beautiful, dramatic, hellenic, bright, manic; Milan is small, dull, obscured in fog, closed in on itself, neurotic. That her work draws on largely abandoned devices like pathetic fallacy or even concepts like environmental determinism makes her a certain kind of contemporary Romantic, a true heir to the sublime strain in Italian literature singularly evident in Giacomo Leopardi. Yet the essay featured here, “Milan, International City,” from the author’s miscellany In mare aperto (Portofranco, 2001), builds this intensity from the everyday. Disillusionment with gray, industrious Milan, a principal destination for internal migration for Italians compelled to relocate from more economically depressed hometowns, is something of a commonplace and a literary topos. Castaldi’s quick walking tour of Milan, by contrasting the present with the recent past, the north with the south, and pointing out a number of rather untouristy landmarks, condenses an entire reading of the city into an ontology of geography. While Milan’s cosmopolitan aspirations are painted as somewhat pathetic, Castaldi’s portrait is nonetheless generous, surprisingly sweeping in its brevity, and from the perspective of someone who lives there, dead on.
- Jamie Richards
Kazakhstan | Poetry | Russian
July, 2020Oral Arukenova is one of a dozen talented Kazakhstani writers whose work I’ve had the pleasure to get to know over the last few years. I became acquainted with Arukenova and her writing when a colleague included her work in our proposal for an anthology of contemporary Kazakhstani women’s prose, recently the fortunate winner of a RusTrans grant for Russian-language fiction in translation. It was surprisingly easy to find enough good short fiction to fill the anthology–and once we had enough, I kept discovering more, all of it wonderful and diverse. I knew Oral as a Kazakh-language fiction writer who crafts stories that take an ironic approach to Kazakh cultural traditions and mores. Thanks to these two poems, I now also know her as a Russian-language poet. Her quarantine poems struck me for their raw, honest examination of the emotional states stemming from the ongoing virus-related quarantine in Kazakhstan’s cities. There, police have zealously enforced restrictions governing who can leave their house, making every visit to the park or run on the riverbank a stealthy act of sometimes desperate self-expression. The first, shorter poem strikes a quiet tone, full of a simple longing for air, beauty, and room, where the narrator wishes to speak and breathe freely, на родном–a phrase I’ve translated for the rhythm as “in my way,” but which usually means “in my native language,” hinting at the tension of multilingualism. The second poem is more of a sweeping survey of emotional types in the city, where people jostle each other in line at the store, plug away at their remote work in isolation, and trade tips for how to navigate an online portal to get their 42,500-tenge government assistance deposit (about $100). Here, paranoia, financial desperation, and even the boredom of a lonely translator (!) can be hidden away in quarantine as easily as a bruise under a face mask, and a snappy refrain can almost help us hold it all together.
- Shelley Fairweather-Vega
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).