In the late summer of 1830, Alexander Pushkin traveled to Boldino, a town four hundred miles east of Moscow, to settle the business of coming into legal ownership of the family estate which would complete the dowry he needed to marry his betrothed, Natalia Goncharova. Due to an outbreak of cholera, Pushkin was unable to return to the capital as soon as he had hoped: the roads were blocked by quarantine checkpoints or altogether closed by a cordon sanitaire. During three months of what turned out to be the legendarily productive “Boldino autumn,” Pushkin wrote the final chapters of Eugene Onegin as well as a number of other works, including The Tales of Belkin (considered the birth-site of all Russian fiction), and four short verse plays known collectively as “The Little Tragedies,” one of which is Feast During the Plague.
This short play draws on Scottish writer John Wilson’s lengthy drama The City of the Plague, from an 1816 collection of the same title. Wilson, who served for many years as chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, was a poet in his youth and was friendly with William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Thomas de Quincey, and Sir Walter Scott. He also wrote voluminous criticism, stories, and novels, primarily for Blackwood’s, a well-known conservative miscellany that often published the British Romantics. So, the original of Feast During the Plague is itself a translation of sorts, from English into Russian; a not uncommon example of a translation, or a very free imitation (and a severe abridgment) that became an acknowledged classic in its new context, outliving its source.
I translated Pushkin’s play in the spring of 1999 to serve as a libretto for an operetta by the émigré Russian composer Sergei Dreznin. I edited and even composed parts of the translation at his piano as he played and sang the melodies I was to accommodate. I saw the operetta performed only once in New York City, staged by Garik Chernyakhovsky (1944-2015), a legendary and much-beloved Moscow theater director who had recently emigrated to New York. I believe it was later performed in Vienna and perhaps elsewhere in Europe.
The peculiar musical circumstances necessitated that I keep close to Pushkin’s iambic blank verse in the speeches as well as the meter and rhyme of the two songs. Two decades later, finding some charm in this earnest early effort and resisting the retrospective urge to move away from the formal approach, I have made only small corrections and, partly thanks to poet Steven Zultanski’s suggestions, a few minor improvements.
- Matvei Yankelevich
The entire translator's note can be found at the beginning of the post, before the play.
Eritrea | Italian | Italy | Poetry
May, 2020Ribka Sibhatu, one of Eritrea’s most indefatigable writer-activists, was born in Asmara in 1962, the year Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia unilaterally annexed the former Italian colony of Eritrea, triggering a liberation war that would last for the next three decades. In 1979, at the age of seventeen, Sibhatu was sentenced to a year in prison for criticizing the government, on false charges trumped up by an Ethiopian politician whom Sibhatu had refused to marry. Adopting a false identity, Sibhatu fled to Addis Ababa upon her release from prison and finished her education in the Ethiopian capital, where she later married a Frenchman, relocating to the latter’s native country in the mid-1980s. Once that marriage ended, Sibhatu moved again, this time to Rome, where she published her first collection of poems, Aulò! Canto Poesia dall’Eritrea (Sinnos, 1993), a volume of confessional lyrics written in both Tigrinya and Italian. Despite falling into various different genres—poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—Sibhatu’s work essentially represents a reconstruction of Eritrea’s cultural heritage in exile. The poems featured here are drawn from a collection-in-progress.
- André Naffis-Sahely
Argentina | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
May, 2020La llave marilyn was born on a Sunday, when the Argentinian poet Laura Yasan was thinking about killing herself. She had called a suicide hotline repeatedly, only to hear the message: “All lines are busy.” She remembered Marilyn Monroe, found dead in her hotel room, hand on the telephone. Instead of committing a parallel suicide, Yasan began to write what would become the first poem of llave. Read as a whole, the poems tell the disjointed story of a woman’s final moments before suicide, interspersed with oneiric scenes of urbanity and bursts of dark humor. Marilyn hovers throughout, not so much a companion as a symbol for her desperation. The collection is a solitary meditation on depression and isolation, yet its very existence, each poem a renewed attempt to establish communication, stands as a testament to one woman’s determination to stay alive.
Published in 2009, this is Yasan’s seventh book, for which she won the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize. As a primarily self-taught poet, she developed a distinctive voice that does not fit neatly into a particular tradition of Argentine or Latin American poetry. In some ways she is the heir of Alejandra Pizarnik’s enclosed melancholy, but Yasan infuses this with a thread of playfulness: an enduring delight in the possibilities of language. It is this feature that presented me with the greatest challenge in translating Yasan’s work. I didn't make it past the title before encountering the multiplicity of meaning enfolded in her words. “Llave” seems at first to mean “key.” But in the poems its other meaning surfaces: a chokehold. By translating the title as “the marilyn hold,” I lost one connotation, but gained another: being stuck “on hold” when all the phone lines are busy. My aim throughout these selections was to leave open the rich ambiguities that define Yasan’s poetry, while reimagining in English its tension between the everyday and the strange.
- Phoebe Bay Carter
Bosnia and Herzegovina | Bosnian | Nonfiction
May, 2020Dragan Bursać and I share a last name, though we are not, so far as I know, related. The first time I ran into his reporting was while I was working at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague and saw a piece he'd written about the tragic events that happened around the city of Prijedor, something I knew far too much about from my work at the Tribunal. His was the first article I'd seen, by a journalist from that part of Bosnia, which spoke frankly about what had happened there. I was moved to tears that someone, moreover someone with whom I shared a name, had the courage to speak of such things. Since then I have followed his writing, and he has not disappointed. In 2018, he published a collection of what he refers to as “scraps” in PTSP Spomenar (PTSD Scrapbook): brief sketches about his family, his childhood, the time he spent serving in the Republika Srpska armed forces, his grief at the current state of affairs in Bosnia. He hasn't buried his book away in the dusty corner of a library, indeed he has held some 40 well-attended book launches and readings all across Bosnia and Herzegovina--and beyond, in Zagreb, Belgrade, and Copenhagen. At his Sarajevo launch he said: “I realized that the fate of someone such as myself who suffers from PTSD is not just mine, but is the fate of an entire generation, not just within Bosnia and Herzegovina, but across the Balkans. This book is for all of us.”
- Ellen Elias-Bursać
Arabic | Iraq | Short Fiction
May, 2020I have translated one novel by Mahmoud Saeed and several of his short stories during the past decade. On two occasions we did a joint reading at ALTA conferences, and these both proved memorable for me, because Mahmoud is such a lively raconteur, even when his subject matter is heartbreaking. The short story featured here was the first he wrote after he took a brief trip home to Mosul, Iraq to see his sisters, after the city was liberated from ISIS, only to find that his beloved Mosul no longer exists. An account of his devastating trip home, also in my translation, precedes his short story.
- William Maynard Hutchins
Ecuador | Short Fiction | Spanish
May, 2020“The Women’s Ward” is the first English translation from the Spanish and North American appearance of “Pabellón de Mujeres,” by the Ecuadorian author, Carlos Béjar Portilla. This text is the title story from a translation-in-progress of a volume of interrelated stories titled Pabellón de Mujeres: Cuentos, and was published by Editorial Libresa, Quito, Ecuador, in 2003.
- Harry Morales
I’ve “discovered” most of the contemporary francophone poets I’ve translated through reading their poems in anthologies, and feeling that I absolutely had to bring their work to the attention of an English-speaking audience . . . that their words were just too important to be heard only by French speakers. I felt this way when I was introduced to the Djiboutian writer Abdourahman A. Waberi while reading a wonderful anthology of poets from French-speaking Africa and the Arab world, edited by Patrick Williamson. But in the case of the author featured here, I was literally introduced to Louis-Philippe Dalembert by way of Waberi! It’s really not such a big world at all, as the pandemic reminds us.
Dalembert was born in 1962 in Port-au-Prince. He spent his early years living in a Haiti still under the totalitarian control of François Duvalier (“Papa Doc”), and was raised by his mother’s female relatives, including his no-nonsense, Bible-thumping maternal grandmother. His mother had to travel during the week to teach in the countryside, and his father, a school principal, died shortly after Dalembert’s birth. Dalembert’s childhood—especially his religious upbringing—infuses much of his writing: Old Testament references abound. One can also see in his work his literary influences, which include René Char, Paul Éluard, Nâzim Hikmet, and Pablo Neruda.
In 1986, Dalembert left for France, after studying literature and journalism and working as a journalist in Haiti, and he later completed his doctoral studies in comparative literature at the Sorbonne. A self-proclaimed nomad, he speaks seven different languages, and has lived and taught in such varied cities as Brazzaville, Kinshasa, Nancy, Berlin, Munich, Bern, Rome, Florence, and Jerusalem, with extended stays in South America and Africa. In addition, he served as a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he taught Caribbean literature, French film, and creative writing, as well as a Visiting Professor at Scripps College.
To date, Dalembert has authored six poetry collections, ten novels, three short story collections, and two essay collections. He is no stranger to the international stage, as his work has been translated into many different languages, including Danish, German, Portuguese, Romanian, and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. Edwidge Danticat, in her foreword to Dalembert’s first novel to be published in English, The Other Side of the Sea (2014), expressed surprise that it had taken so long for Dalembert’s prose to be translated into English. I’m surprised it has taken so long for Dalembert’s poems to be translated into English, and delighted to be the one to do so!
- Nancy Naomi Carlson
Iulia Militaru's poems combine different types of speech, from medical and philosophy textbooks to “newspeak,” witness accounts, police reports, obituaries, and other written forms. Militaru turns on their head concepts about what we know and accept as poetry, truth, historical fact, philosophy, and language. By juxtaposing a variety of speech fragments, Militaru creates a collage that forces us to look at the world with new eyes. The result is a text that draws surprising conclusions, points out hypocrisies and absurd realities, and laughs in the face of norms. The reader is left wondering what happened—but at the same time dazzled and wanting more.
- Claudia Serea
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).