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).