Germany | Kurdish | Northern Kurdistan | Poetry
January, 2020On October 13, just four days after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan tweeted his announcement of his pending invasion of Rojava, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, under the vilely euphemistic name Operation Peace Spring, I received an invitation to edit a new Google document from my friend and colleague Jiyar Homer, with whom I have been co-translating the short stories of the Kurdish polymath Farhad Pirbal. The note that accompanied the invitation was to the point: “Urgent translation.” Over the following days, we workshopped our translation of “The Tale of Hungry Dogs,” a short poem by the Ferîd Xan, a Kurd born in present-day Turkey. The poem, first published in 2006, seems as fresh as if it had been written that week. Indeed, the oppression and statelessness faced by the Kurdish people is not a new phenomenon—this is merely the latest chapter in a history of centuries of persecution and survival, as Xan suggests, “like a dog.” It’s our hope that this translation from the Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish, spoken in both Rojava and Southern Turkey, contributes toward a collective remembrance of what continues to unfold in Rojava, now that the relentless news ticker has moved on. With over 150 civilians killed and over 300,000 displaced, the plight of the Kurds and Rojava’s other residents remains an urgent humanitarian crisis, and US betrayal of the predominately Kurdish peshmerga who served on the front lines of the battle against the Islamic State feels like just the latest kick to a gaunt but proud dog’s ribs.
- David Shook
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
January, 2020The premise of Dual Nationality is nonconformist: take the (im)migrant’s identity crisis, but make it . . . funny. It’s a rare approach. Displacement, whether willing or unwilling, is usually handled soberly as a literary topic, in strains of melancholy, drama, or even bitterness. Nina Yargekov is unusual in that she brings no small amount of irreverence to her narrative. The quest for identity in the novel is rendered satirically literal: our protagonist is an amnesiac who wakes up in an airport with two passports, two wallets, two phones, two sets of keys, no memory of who she is or where she’s going, and the suspicion that she’s dolled up like the walking stereotype of a prostitute. What she sees is what she knows. Thankfully, she’s blessed with excellent reasoning skills, and what emerges is a sort of choose-your-own-adventure story, a mental escape room, as our protagonist gropes for clues about her life and her belonging.
Her name, we discover at the same time as she does, is Rkvaa Nnoyeig. She’s thirty-one years old. She works as (what else?) a translator. She’s the dual national of two countries that may or may not be real, depending on where she’s quite literally standing. Rkvaa’s world is a barely exaggerated caricature of a global order revolving around the split between West and East, between winners and losers, between first-world countries and immigrant underdogs. She, as a child of political refugees, as a bilingual translator-interpreter, uneasily has a foot in each camp. She spends the novel trying to meticulously reject one in favor of the other–striving, naturally, to solve her identity crisis, to feel uncomplicated and whole.
Despite the novel’s sustained tone of irony, I read it as coming from a place of deep empathy. There is great and genuine concern at the novel’s core: how does one act like an engaged, empathetic global citizen in a world that’s coming apart at the seams, complicating identities all around and making the concept of belonging a much more tenuous one? It’s not surprising that the Algerian War of Independence weaves in and out of the plot like a leitmotif, and that, towards the end of the book, we get a scene of the 2015 migrant impasse in Budapest’s train station. Perhaps the most troubling question the novel raises is how to reconcile your love for your country with the wrongs your country has committed–and whether it’s even possible to do so.
Dual Nationality grasps the big things in a completely subversive and comical way. As a Russian-American, I find lots to cackle at. Perhaps, in these times, it’s essential to not only empathize and worry, but also to be able to laugh a little–at ourselves, at the world’s absurdities, at our deepest questions and searches for meaning, and of course at our mortal inability to arrive at definite answers.
- Daria Chernysheva
Mexico | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
January, 2020Paula Abramo’s poetry collection Fiat Lux, winner of Mexico’s 2013 Premio de Poesías Joaquín Xirau Icaza for the best book of poetry by a writer under 40, is a tightly woven cycle of poems evoking the poet’s ancestors, political refugees first from Italy and Eastern Europe to Brazil at the turn of the twentieth century, and then from Brazil to Bolivia and finally Mexico in later eras. At the same time, the book is a meditation on the act of writing poetry and bringing characters to life with fidelity and imagination.
I discovered Fiat Lux when Paula and I were both at the Banff Literary Translation Centre as translators (she translates, prolifically, from Portuguese to Spanish). During an evening we devoted to reading our original works, she read one of the poems from Fiat Lux, “In memory of Anna Stefania Lauff, match factory girl,” and its combination of imagery and narrative force blew me away. When I got to read the whole book, I saw how, throughout, the image of striking a match—whether to shed light, or start a fire—forms the hinge between the two themes of the cycle.
In its own unique way, Fiat Lux reminds me of Rita Dove’s Sonata Mulatica, my favorite historical/biographical poem cycle. It’s whimsical, committed, sometimes fierce, sometimes political, and always concerned with words, language, and languages.
I’ve found that I’m not alone in my enthusiasm for the book and the poet. In the Mexico City installment of the Words Without Borders feature series on "The City and Writer," writer and translator Lucia Duero, in answer to the question “What writer(s) from here should we read?,” selects a single poetry book by a living author: “Fiat Lux by Paula Abramo, a great story about the human journey and courage, marvelously captured in the poetics of everyday life.”
Translation challenges include switching among the poetry’s various modes: narrative, introspective, biographical, at times philosophical, at times making use of cryptic but evocative bits of ancestors’ journals and handed-down lore. Also, the poet delights in surprising the reader with new meanings that playfully undermine what the reader has just constructed out of the line before, and these shifts need to be made to work in English syntax with equal measures of rhythm, comprehensibility, and surprise. Also, as a classics major in college and a literary translator by profession, Abramo naturally invokes the border-crossing and time-travel involved in telling family history by the use of multiple languages, including bits of Portuguese, Latin, and Greek. Since English is farther from Romance language roots than Spanish is, I have helped English readers by translating some of these phrases, while leaving others as they were.
The poems included here are numbers 2, 5, 6, 7, and 9 in the book, out of a total of 19.
- Dick Cluster
Austria | German | Short Fiction
January, 2020Robert Müller (1887-1924) was a many-sided cultural activist in early 20th-century Vienna–Expressionist writer, editor, critic, publisher, and promoter (he organised Karl May’s last public appearance in 1912).
Still in his early 20s, Müller spent the years 1909-11 traveling. For several months he worked for a German-language newspaper in New York, but his other whereabouts are poorly attested. (He claimed, among other activities, to have worked on ships between North and South America, and as a gaucho in Mexico.)
"Manhattan Girl" (written around 1920) presents New York through an Expressionistic consciousness, imbued with Müller’s career-long interest in questions of race, gender, and identity.
- C D Godwin
Tatiana Oroño is widely acknowledged as an essential voice in contemporary Uruguayan poetry. I first became aware of her when I was in Uruguay in 2014, looking for poets to include in América invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets. As I met with people, gathering suggestions for this anthology of poets under 40, her name kept coming up as someone—outside the anthology—that I just had to read. On that trip, I was lucky enough to meet Tatiana, who arranged for me to receive a copy of her book La piedra nada sabe. I immediately fell in love with her inventive, experimental voice.
Since then, we have met often and I have translated her poetry, publishing it in US and UK magazines such as Ploughshares, Guernica, World Literature Today, Stand, and the Western Humanities Review. We often meet in Montevideo at the cafe El Sportman across from the National Library, or for tea in her home in Malvin, a neighborhood of Montevideo long favored by writers and artists. I have been lucky enough to read her poems and poetic prose pieces ahead of their publication in her latest books, Estuario and Libro de horas, as well as her book-in-progress, Neblina, or—luckier still—to listen to her read them out loud to me.
Oroño’s subject matter is deeply felt, deeply personal to her, with poems about motherhood, the losses during the Uruguayan dictatorship of the 1980s, and, most of all, the natural world. A passionate environmentalist, Oroño finds her palate of images in nature. She is also a feminist and her poems show a consciousness of her own body, of being a woman in the pain and wonder of the everyday. But most of all, Oroño has a special awareness of language as a body of its own. Time and again she writes poems about poetry, poems that reclaim for poetry the power to give meaning to life.
- Jesse Lee Kercheval
Arabic | Iraq | Memoir (excerpt) | Sweden
January, 2020Dr. Manhal Sirat was born in Mosul, Iraq, and has lived in Sweden since 1991. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Mosul in 1977 and his M.S. in Geology from Baghdad University in 1982, graduating first in his class. He was then arrested and sentenced to life in prison by a Revolutionary Court. He was imprisoned in a special section of Abu Ghraib prison, one reserved for political prisoners. He was released under a general amnesty proclaimed in 1986, after serving forty-five months in prison. He left Iraq after the Desert Storm (aka Gulf) War and sought political asylum in Sweden. He was awarded his Ph.D. in Earth Sciences by the renowned Uppsala University in 1999. Since then he has worked in numerous universities in Sweden, the US, Jordan, Germany, and finally in the United Arab Emirates. He has also served as a petroleum expert for the international firm Schlumberger in the UAE, and as a Geomechanics and Alternative Energy Specialist for the Abu Dhabi Company for Onshore Operations and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Currently he is a geological and renewable energy consultant in Sweden. He has published three scientific books and more than forty articles in scientific journals.
The Migratory Bird is Manhal Sirat’s first literary work. A book of his poetry is awaiting publication. He has exhibited works of art in several shows, and one of these was purchased for the Public Library in Uppsala.
- William Hutchins
France | French | Italy | Poetry (excerpt)
January, 2020Monstres tièdes, Benoît Gréan's second volume of poems, was published in 2003 and has since been translated into Italian, Greek, and German. Behind the book's "splendidly oxymoronic" title, observes poet Valerio Magrelli in his introduction to the Italian translation, lurks "a direct heir of Lautréamont"; an heir sired on a matrix of characteristically French rigor and concision of form, in a book of 60--four groups of 15--very short, unpunctuated poems.
The cultural matrix for these four sequences is palpably Mediterranean, the two millennia of tension between pagan and Christian moralities, with their resultant space between "imperious desire" and its "cleavers," the "slight distance" between "desire and horror": the futile desires of the "tail-chasing" subject, of youthful beauty and the aging body's "well assigned wrongs."
In the long view the poet's long residency in Rome affords, the desiring subject "mammals on," in "high time to come late." The vignettes range between recognizably current urban realities and phantasmagoria under the "blue-green sun," told in the light of a "radiant doubt" that seeks to root out the vain fictions "chatty cadavers" tell well into the Beyond.
Just as this gallery of miniature grotesques ends with an emblematic "drunken widow," the dense verses themselves often ring changes on French words and phrases that survive in a single form. Thus, from the book's first poem, "à perte de": "à perte de vue" means as far as the eye can see; Gréan's final phrase, "à perte de mémoire" extends the phrase to mean as far as memory spans--or, simply, amnesia. "Peaux amères" is the title of the first group of poems, and the poet's method is also to scratch at, flay, stock expressions: to "strip the dead/ to dwell in words."
- David Jacobson
This selection presents verses by Osip Mandelstam written in 1937, just one year before his second arrest and subsequent disappearance in a labor camp. The premonition of imminent death left its imprint on them. But these lines are not a cry of despair; rather they express recognition of the tragedy of being, concern for the preservation of Russia's cultural and moral heritage, and faith in the poet's mission.
- Boris Kokotov
Xurxo Borrazás is, without doubt, one of the funnest writers in Galician literature. He’s also one of the most unique, and the most restless, with an unmistakable voice through his widely varying books. The material you have here is selections from his 2002 collection of “miscellany," Pensamentos impuros ("Impure Thoughts"). This book has so much of what I love about his writing: his characteristic warmth, humor, intelligence, humility, and strangeness, condensing it into these short little treatises on all manner of things from libraries to the nature of reality, and vignettes of various encounters with eccentric, neurotic friends.
In classic Borrazás fashion, while these are mostly standalone pieces, the further you read, the more the references intertwine, building and branching off from previous ideas. I’ve tried to showcase this in my selection, the way he uses them to layer the book and add even more depth and humor.
I think it’s also worth pointing out that Borrazás has developed a sort of reputation as an enfant terrible (this is what he was called in the Best European Fiction introduction to his work). I’m not sure I agree with this characterization, however, at least insofar as it associates him with the likes of polemical writers such as Michel Houellebecq. To be sure, Borrazás certainly likes to be provocative, to raise eyebrows, but he does so not through sexism or racism or xenophobia or Islamophobia, but rather by other means, which are, to be sure, still unconventional.
For example, To Be or Not To, probably his best book, is narrated by a curmudgeonly Gen-X’er who hides away in an abandoned Galician village, only to meet an elderly woman and begin a passionate, quite sexual love affair. The novel is full of pornography, bestiality and digressions about prostitution, but if anything I’d describe it as sex-positive. It’s also one of the few pieces of literature I’ve read which takes elderly female desire seriously, at the same time as it creates in her one of the most delightfully idiosyncratic, complex characters I’ve encountered before. All this to say that while he may be provocative, his writing is nothing if not warm, deeply felt, and utterly human.
Nowhere is that more the case than in Impure Thoughts. These musings show Borrazás to be a writer who delights in the beauty, amusement, and absurdity of life, people, and the world we live in. He’s never glib, nor condescending, and for all his intellect, reading him makes you think he’s the kind of person you’d like to get a beer with. And I can attest to that. It has always given me pleasure that, after living in Vigo for a year and meeting occasionally with him and his wife, I've found Borrazás to be much like his writing: open-hearted, curious, affable, generous, and above all, a damn good time.
- Jacob Rogers
Mexico | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
January, 2020Adiós, Casilda! forms Part II of the Mexican poet Ivan Palacios Ocaña's Cosas inútiles y otras poemas ("Useless things and other poems"), published in 2018 as part of the reward for the author's having won the first UNAM Premio de Poesía Joven. Adiós, Casilda! deals with the aftermath of the poet's loss of his pet cat, the eponymous Casilda.
The poems make no attempt to conceal their family lineage: they are nieces and nephews of Frank O’Hara, Erik Satie, David Lynch, and haiku anthologies. They remind us that the pain of loss is tempered by the non-uniqueness of the missing, which is to say: none of us moves through a vacuum, and in returning to the poems and songs that formed those lost to us, we may find them again.
- Noah Mazer
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).