Argentina | Short Fiction | Spanish | United States
July, 2020I think this story is the first translation of mine that came about almost entirely thanks to social media. I’m not, or at least I wasn’t, a social media person. I’ve been known to abruptly leave a gathering because someone wanted to take a selfie. I can’t understand how people handle the amount of information (and opinion) that comes swarming out at you from the average Facebook page. But I’d also been feeling bad that I never did anything to promote the books and publications I was involved in, especially because they tended to be independent concerns for whom every little bit helps. So when my siblings ganged up on me to give me a smartphone so I could join the familial WhatsApp group it seemed time to dip my toes into the water and Instagram seemed the least intrusive of the different options available. Thus the account peoplewhoreadinbars was born with the intention of creating a small community of people who like to bring books to bars (it’s currently peoplewhomissreadinginbars, which I do, very much). That never really worked out, but over the past couple of years I have enjoyed the experience much more than I thought. One of my discoveries has been that a lot of writers, quite a few you wouldn’t expect, are also on the network. It’s become a reflex to see whether the author of writing I’ve enjoyed has an account.
This turned out to be true of Lolita Copacabana when I was intrigued by her text in the anthology Bogota 39: New Voices from Latin America, published by the Hay Festival and Oneworld in English. Although I was mildly disappointed to discover that LC wasn’t the six-foot-six drag queen of my imagination, I soon found plenty to enjoy about her posts: she has a sharp eye for the absurdities and beauty of everyday life and is disarmingly frank about her blueberry slushy habit. Best of all, she has a wonderfully angry sense of humor. All of these are highly encouraging traits in a writer and I resolved that I’d ask permission to translate something by Copacabana whenever an opportunity came up. So when I saw “Domestic Manners of the Americans” published in Spanish in the Rio Grande Review, I was quick off the mark.
To an extent, the story is a faithful reflection of that Instagram account, albeit far more erudite and profound and even more fun. An old school, substance-fueled road trip, it is the vivid chronicle of a professor’s madcap journey across the Midwest at the behest of an increasingly deranged bunny rabbit. Although there are obviously numerous precedents for such a quest in American literature, it is typical of Copacabana that the books she foregrounds are memoirs of travels through the U.S. by Simone de Beauvoir and Vladimir Mayakovsky (the quotes are my translations from the Spanish–in part because the narrator cites the Spanish editions specifically but mostly because, ummm . . . it didn’t occur to me to seek out the English translations until the brilliant InTranslation editor Jen suggested it and it turns out that the respective translations from Russian and French into Spanish are slightly different from their English counterparts. All part of the wonderful world of translated lit). It’s a heady, and brilliant, mixture that I’m sure readers will enjoy.
- Kit Maude
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
Argentina | Poetry | Spanish | United States
November, 2018What makes Silvina López Medin’s poetry complicated is its philosophical, impressionistic, associative qualities. Often her language steers us away from noticing the despair behind her images by forcing us to work with nuances of abstraction. To some degree, translating the words suffices to render that complexity: present it as she’s presented it. But I have also tried to select words that point to what is missing. Often, López Medin’s poems are more about what is not there than what is there—the missing man, his missing eyes, the missing laughter, the touch that doesn’t happen. This, to me, makes López Medin’s poems consummately Argentinean: it’s a country where there is almost more missing than present, where the stifled voice rings after the spoken falls silent. André Lefevere wrote, “The word does not create a world ex nihilo. Through the grid of tradition it creates a counterworld, one that is fashioned under the constraints of the world the creator lives and works in, and one that can be explained, understood better if these constraints are taken into account.” López Medin creates a counterworld out of the one that exists, her world peopled by what is missing and the language that has survived people’s disappearance. If ever a country needed poets to create a counterworld from the language that has survived its violence, Argentina does.
- Jasmine V. Bailey
100 Refutations | Argentina | Poetry | Spanish
June, 2018Pedro Bonifacio Palacios (1854-1917) was an Argentine artist, writer, teacher, librarian, translator, and journalist who lived at the turn of the twentieth century and published under several different pseudonyms. His most well-known pseudonym was "Almafuerte," which translates to "strong soul."
100 Refutations | Argentina | Poetry | Spanish
May, 2018Carlos Guido y Spano (1827-1918) was a poet and political activist who strongly opposed Argentina’s war against Paraguay. During his lifetime he worked as the director of the General Archive of the Nation, served as a member of the National Council on Education, and co-founded the Human Society in Argentina.
100 Refutations | Argentina | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938) was serendipitously born in Sala Capriasca, Switzerland during a brief family trip abroad. She is considered one of the foremost poets in all of Latin American literature. She had to earn a living from a very early age and worked as a traveling actress at the age of thirteen, later as a school teacher at nineteen, and as a salesgirl in Buenos Aires until the age of twenty-five. Her luck changed after the publication of her first book, which rightfully received wide acclaim. According to the Antologia de la Poesia Hispanoamericana, she spoke alongside Gabriela Mistral and Juana de Ibarbourou at a 1938 event hosted by the Ministerio de Instrucción Pública de Urugay. That same year, at the age of 46 and knowing herself to be incurably ill with breast cancer, Storni committed suicide in Mar del Plata, Argentina.
Argentina | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
May, 2017The poetry featured here will appear in an in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the above post for editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida's introduction to the project.
Argentina | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
May, 2017The poetry featured here will appear in an in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the above post for editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida's introduction to the project.
Argentina | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
May, 2017The poetry featured here will appear in an in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the above post for editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida's introduction to the project.
Argentina | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
May, 2017The poetry featured here will appear in an in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the above post for editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida's introduction to the project.
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.
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