In the essay below, originally published in the online journal archphoto.it, the psychologist Calogero Lo Piccolo presents some immediate but psychically sensitive reflections on the current Italian experience of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as its political implications, tentatively approaching intimate issues of subjectivity while nevertheless attempting to regain a vanishing objectivity. Lo Piccolo takes a step back, as it were, even while the world imposes the need to throw one metre’s distance between everyone. The act of urgent translation here takes on a strange role in the combined and uneven undevelopment of the crisis. In translation, the “ambassadors” from the future to whom the title refers become twofold: not only the young men in Japan to whom Lo Piccolo himself refers, but also we here in Italy, who have the uncanny role of bringing a message from an imminent future to the United States and elsewhere, exploiting the fortnightly gap in time that we have all now learned falls between exposure and symptom.
- Richard Braude
To all our contributors and readers,
We’d like to send you, your authors, and your loved ones our warmest wishes for your health and safety.
With our March issue, we’re one month away from the thirteenth anniversary of InTranslation. Our entire archive of 72 issues is online and accessible for free. As we take cover in our homes around the world, avoiding travel and gatherings, minimizing our contact with others, and shrinking the boundaries of our daily lives, may the literature published in our pages since April 2007 help transport you to other places and connect you to the people, landscapes, and stories found there.
Be well,
Jen and Donald
Kingdom of Serbs Croats and Slovenes | Poetry | Serbo-Croatian
March, 2020Branko Ve Poljanski (1898–1947) was a leading figure in Zenithism, a 1920s avant-garde movement unique to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. The movement was founded by Poljanski’s brother, the writer and editor Ljubomir Micić, and promoted through the journal Zenit, the press Biblioteka Zenit, and numerous exhibitions across Europe. Poljanski was the movement’s emissary in Prague, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris.
The central tenet of Zenithism was to attack bourgeois, western Europe through Micić’s concept of the “barbarogenius”—an archetypal, decivilizing figure pushing for the barbarization of a decadent Europe. Shades of this sentiment are found in the images of blood and barricades in Poljanski’s poems “Arise,” “Dusk,” and “Joyous Poem.”
A hallmark of the movement was its synthesis of futurism, expressionism, Dada, and constructivism into a pan-avant-garde aesthetic. Though Poljanski’s work best embodied the movement’s embrace of the various avant-gardes sweeping 1920s Europe, his poems are most rooted in expressionism, as evidenced in the melancholy-inflected poems “Eros,” “Longing,” and “At the Hair Salon.”
The untamed “Blind Man Number 52” and “Dada Causal Dada,” which first appeared in his single-issue anti-Dada journal Dada-jok (Dada-Nope) in response to Yugoslav Dadaist Dragan Aleksić’s one-off journals Dada Tank and Dada Jazz, best showcase Poljanski’s impish humor.
Our task as translators was to capture Poljanski’s tonal range, what made his work avant-garde for its time, and the spirit of Zenithism: in short, the essence of Poljanski’s poetics. The biggest challenge to this charge could be found in his shortest poem “Arise.” A literal translation of the poem’s conclusion is:
We build Balkan towers
Oh Europe
Your roads will crave the Balkan Man.
In the original, “Balkan Man” is Balkanac, a noun; however, it is rendered as a noun phrase in English. We felt that the repetition of the adjective “Balkan” somewhat flattened the language and tone of the lyric poem, an issue absent in the original. Also, to a present-day, American reader, the Balkan Man as a barbarogenius concept would be lost on its own, being divorced from its century-old milieu. We believe that our version resolves that problem by evoking a barbarian horde storming the bulwark of civilization, an image that would have been implied in its original context.
To date, these eight translations are the largest collection of Branko Ve Poljanski’s poems in English. The crush of the barbarogenius is at the barricades.
- Steven Teref and Maja Teref
In general, satire is known to bear relation to politics, and Shrilal Shukla himself is best known as a political satirist. But, in fact, Fifty Years of Ignorance (1997) exemplifies the broad range of his style and subject matter. The form of these ranges from essays of direct socio-political commentary, to fake interviews, fake government reports, fake scholarly articles, as well as lightly fictionalized anecdotes about real people. For content, these pieces treat political matters, such as in “Interview with a Defeated Politician” and “More like a Swami than a Swami.” They treat the author himself as an object of self-satire, such as “One Happy Day.” They also treat literary matters, such as a piece on the Rushdie Affair. They also document one of Shukla’s favorite subject matters: the society of North Indian small towns and villages. While satire in European literature is most commonly thought to focus on changing society through revealing in an exaggerated fashion the social ills that are so commonplace as to escape unnoticed, satire in Hindi is a broad, umbrella genre; this volume demonstrates the breadth of the genre, from trenchant, strident objections to political and social ills, to self-deprecating and innocuous shows of wit about 1970s-1990s Indian society. With postcolonial India increasingly showing signs of slipping toward fascism, Shukla’s satire is overdue for a full consideration as one important chapter in the history of literary critique of governance and society.
- Matt Reeck
Austria | German | Novel (excerpt)
March, 2020Alfred Döblin singled out the young Viennese cultural activist Robert Müller (1887-1924) as a “dazzling wordsmith.” Yet for over half a century after his suicide, this remarkable Expressionist writer was forgotten. Only in 1990 did his major novel Tropics: The Myth of Travel (1915) reappear in print, and only in the last decade or two have Germanist academics and critics begun to give serious attention to his writings. (The collected works now cover 14 volumes!)
Tropics is an extraordinary tour de force. Ostensibly a report from a German engineer about an expedition by three white men (Slim the Yankee, Van den Dusen the Dutch colonial officer, and Brandlberger the German) to the upper Amazon in search of lost Conquistador gold, it quickly blossoms into increasingly manic disquisitions on “civilisation” vs. “barbarism, ”European “normality” vs. the life-ways of “primitives,” Freudianism vs. “healthy instincts,” benevolent imperialism vs. murderous plunder, reason vs. mysticism, reality vs. illusion. It draws heavily on reports from the Amazon by the German anthropological explorer Theodor Koch-Grünberg (1872-1924), only to subvert their subtext of western superiority.
This excerpt occurs about halfway through the novel, when the three westerners have spent long enough in an Indian village to lose their aura of superiority, and have become figures of some scorn to the Indians.
- C D Godwin
Novel (excerpt) | Serbia | Serbian
March, 2020Death of Descartes (1996) is a late novel of the Serbian writer, philosopher, and public intellectual Radomir Konstantinović, increasingly considered to be his literary masterpiece and swan song. Konstantinović finished writing the text in 1993, during the height of internationally imposed sanctions on Serbia and a series of brutal wars in the neighboring Yugoslav republics, although the idea of exploring larger philosophical ideas through the relationship between father and son originated much earlier in the 1960s. Described by Konstantinović’s biographer Radivoj Cvetićanin as a “postmodern family novel” and a companion piece to his last literary work, Beckett, A Friend (2000), Death of Descartes freely combines fiction, biography, and philosophical reflection while retaining a taut dramatic structure. In many ways, the novel represents Konstantinović’s temporary withdrawal from anti-nationalist and anti-war political engagement in order to interrogate the common places of modern western philosophy, rooted in the apparent autonomy and rationality of the ego. As such, the novel partakes in the broader postmodern project to renegotiate the foundations of human subjectivity on the basis of our shared bodily vulnerability and openness to one's own and other's mortality. The text offers particular challenges to any attempts at translation because Konstantinović, first of all, inflects and estranges the Serbian language with classical French stylistic forms while--in a modernist register--radically breaking down conventional syntax.
- Vladislav Beronja
Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Poetry
March, 2020The young Brazilian poet Yasmin Nigri’s critically acclaimed debut collection Bigornas ("Anvils") features 70 short and long poems from different moments in her career. The book is divided into four sections: “Yesterday’s Street,” “Receipts,” “Malevich Woman,” and “Anvils.” The first section, drawing on Rilke, comprises longer confessional poems that are both witty and anguished. “Receipts” is about writers and artists who impacted Nigri, including Angélica Freitas, Ana Martins Marques, and Alejandra Pizarnik; the section’s closing poem, “Death,” depicts the author’s mother, their childhoods, and their conversations. “Malevich Woman” is composed of poems that describe a love relationship between two women. The final section, “Anvils,” is composed of 20 hard-hitting short poems. The translations featured here are from the third section, “Malevich Woman.” The poems in this section range from lyrical to erotic, interweaving humor, antithesis, internet memes, and literary citations (the long line in “I Like the Desert,” for instance, was taken from the experimental Portuguese poet Herberto Helder) with social and ecological issues. In selecting and translating these five poems, I have tried to provide a brief window into the beauty and diversity of Nigri’s work.
- Robert Smith
German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
March, 2020Ulrike Draesner is one of Germany’s most prominent authors. She is particularly interested in societal and scientific discourses, multilingualism, and the inner tensions of the modern human subject. I communicated with her throughout this translation project.
This extract is the final chapter of her novel Sieben Sprünge vom Rand der Welt (Seven Leaps from the Edge of the World, 2014), which deals with the forced migration and expulsion of Germans from, and Poles to, Silesia in 1945, and the trauma inherited and expressed by subsequent generations. It is a multi-narrator novel told from nine different first-person perspectives. Its main focus is a German family evacuated from the small town of Oels near Breslau in Silesia. Lilly and her sons, Eustachius (14) and Emil (23), flee from Oels in January 1945 in the direction of Bavaria. Their father has to remain in Breslau and fight for the Wehrmacht. Emil, who is fascinated by the SS, has learning and speech difficulties and a clubfoot, but his parents have managed to evade the authorities and prevent his euthanasia as part of the Nazi eugenics programme. His forced sterilisation is alluded to but not explicitly narrated. He goes missing on the night of April 8-9, 1945 during the family’s flight to the West as they are trying to get through Sondershausen, a town in Thuringia in Germany, which is undergoing severe aerial bombardment. He is presumed dead, although his disappearance is unresolved and unnarratable. None of the characters who were with him that night are able to articulate what happened. This loss is the central trauma in the novel, a blind spot symbolic of the many refugees who lost their lives, the trauma of expulsion, and the loss of homeland. Emil appears only indirectly, reflected and refracted through the other characters’ narratives, until here in the final chapter we hear his voice–the gap and silence he represents is performed in the form of a prose poem, a letter he writes to his father from the bombed-out streets of Sondershausen, on the night he goes missing.
His letter marks a shift from prose to something that looks like poetry. The lines extend and retract, sometimes flowing, sometimes erupting into monosyllabic stuttering. The shape is unsettling and strange. I had to resist the temptation to clarify the punctuation: sentences are running together, coming quickly, not bound by rules. Emil has a learning disability–he is different; he represents a challenge to his family, society, the orderly, homogeneous National Socialist worldview, and the reader.
Another temptation was to abstract the vocabulary or make it more coherent. My first translation of “auf den Straßen passierte ein Massenungeheuer” was “There was a mass atrocity on the streets.” In the end, I went for something more literal and physical and kept the oddness of the verb: “A mass monster happened on the streets.” The line is now more bodily, disconcerting, and harrowing; it is this concreteness and urgency, I believe, that draws readers to Draesner’s work.
- Marielle Sutherland
Norway | Norwegian | Prose Poem
March, 2020The work of Sigbjørn Obstfelder is challenging to translate today because of the interlingual nature of late-19th century Norwegian. As Norway was still a young nation, Norwegian at the time was heavily Danish but emerging as modern Bokmål. Beyond that, stylistically, Obstfelder has a jerky hyphenated style that says much with few words. The former quality reveals his nervous nature and the latter puts him firmly in the Norwegian tradition.
"Høst" (Autumn) was originally published in Samtiden 7 in 1896 by John Griegs Forlag in Bergen. Samtiden is a Norwegian literary journal that's been in print since 1890. Obstfelder had two contributions to this edition, the other being his essay officially defending Edvard Munch.
"Høst" is a peek into the type of conversations that would have been going on in the 1890’s Norwegian bohème scene of Kristiania. The young artists of the time were seized with a desire to express life in its truest form, with suffering and death so close at hand. Hans Jaeger and Edvard Munch were among the strongest voices in the scene.
- Jordan Barger
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).