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
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
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).