English | Introductory Essay | United States
November, 2019For our November issue, InTranslation is pleased to partner with Art Omi: Writers, whose annual writing residencies, offered in the fall and spring, and Translation Lab, held every November, provide authors and translators much-needed space and time to think, work, and create in picturesque Ghent, New York.
The authors and translators featured in this issue are Translation Lab alumni. In the first post, Carol Frederick, Deputy Director of Art Omi: Writers, and DW Gibson, Director, provide an overview of the Translation Lab's vision and history.
- InTranslation
English | Essay | Ireland/United States
June, 2019To celebrate Pride Month and Stonewall 50, we’re dedicating the June issue of InTranslation to a folio of translated Russian LGBTQ+ literature entitled Life Stories, Death Sentences, co-edited by author Margarita Meklina and translator Anne O. Fisher.
In this first post, we're featuring Margarita Meklina's foreword to the folio. It's followed by posts containing four translators' English renderings of poetry and prose by eight authors writing in Russian, and an afterword by translator David Louden.
We hope you enjoy this important issue. If you live in the NYC area, please join us on Friday, June 14 for a special bilingual event at The Brooklyn Rail's Industry City headquarters, where we'll present recorded Russian readings by the folio authors and live English readings by the translators, along with commentary by noted scholars of Russian literature and gender/sexuality studies.
- Jen Zoble and Donald Breckenridge, InTranslation Co-Editors
English | Essay | United States
June, 2019Chile | English | Hybrid | Spanish
August, 2018The poems featured here use a limited vocabulary derived from the Fortune 500 list of company names to translate “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” as an exploration of what happens to words in the course of the history of their usage. As an experiment in translation, these poems are meant as an active approach to reading Neruda’s poems anew, to discovering what transformations take place in the history of a language and what role the translator might play in that long process. On its surface my project is to see how far the language of capital is capable of replicating Neruda’s poems and what it means for one’s words to be one’s own. My hope is that I have leveraged the gap between Neruda’s poems and my translation into something akin to an empty dictionary. My hope is that this empty dictionary might contain the “actual” translation without uttering it. If it is somehow like a dictionary it is because it contains the possibilities of language, and if it is somehow empty it is not because its words do not exist but because they are not inscribable.
My goal has never been to translate the poems as they are but to re-read them, to attempt to glimpse which words might actually have been uncovered by Neruda who, according to Raúl Zurita, writing in his introduction to Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), “shows us that in speaking, no one is singular. That the act of speaking is the opportunity for those who have preceded us to return, to be granted words.” If Neruda attempts to recover the language that leaves no trace in history, I am interested in the ghost of a translation that leaves unspoken what cannot be spoken, even as it haunts the gap between my poems and Neruda’s.
My choice of “Alturas” as a source text stems from my discomfort with Neruda’s attempt to recover language acts that may not be his to recover. Nevertheless, I hope that my translation will be taken not as a declamation against Neruda or the consensus of those like Zurita who are moved by Neruda’s attempted recovery of those lost voices, but rather as a re-reading that hopefully sheds new light on what it means for one’s language to be one’s own, ethically and literally. When I devised my constraint, I genuinely did not know which words would be available to me, and I am surprised how well this lexicon has been able to capture the suffering named by the originals.
It is my hope that the reader of this manuscript will agree that my translation is, even if it resembles Neruda’s poems a great deal, an original work.
- Adam Greenberg
100 Refutations | Belize | English | Poetry
July, 2018Samuel Alfred Haynes (1899-1971) was an African-Caribbean soldier, activist, and poet who helped lead the 1919 riot by Belizean World War I veterans protesting the racial discrimination they faced at home. He wrote the lyrics of a song called “Land of the Gods” that later became Belize’s national anthem, "Land of the Free."
100 Refutations | Canada | English | Poetry
June, 2018An award-winning writer of Cree/Métis ancestry, Marilyn Dumont earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her work has been widely published in literary journals around the world. Marilyn’s first collection, A Really Good Brown Girl, won the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award presented by the League of Canadian Poets. This collection is now in its eleventh printing, and selections from it are widely anthologized. Her second collection, Green Girl Dreams Mountains, won the 2001 Stephan G. Stephansson Award from the Writers’ Guild of Alberta. That Tongued Belonging, her third collection, was awarded the 2007 Anskohk Aboriginal Poetry Book of the Year and the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year.
100 Refutations | Costa Rica | English | Poetry | United States | Uruguay
June, 2018John Manuel Arias is a gay Costa Rican and Uruguayan poet back in Washington, DC after many years. He is a Canto Mundo fellow and bookseller at Politics and Prose. His poetry has appeared in Sixth Finch, the Journal, and Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, and his fiction has been published by Akashic Books, the Acentos Review, and Cardinal Sins Journal. Before living in DC, he lived in Costa Rica with his grandmother and four ghosts.
100 Refutations | Dominican Republic | English | Poetry | United States
May, 2018Maria Farazdel is a native of the Dominican Republic who has lived and worked in New York since the age of 17. She received her BA from Hunter College, MA in Education from Fordham University, and PhD in School District Administration from Long Island University. Formally an Assistant Principal, she has taught English as a Second Language and Bilingual Education. She is a member of Dominican Poets USA and the literary group Camila Enriquez Ureña. She is the author of the books My Little Paradise, Amongst Voices and Spaces, and Laberinto de la Espera.
100 Refutations | Canada | English | Poetry | Venezuela
April, 2018María José Giménez is a Venezuelan-Canadian poet, translator, and editor working in English, Spanish, and French. Assistant Translation Editor for Anomaly (fka Drunken Boat), María José is a recipient of the 2016 Gabo Prize for Translation and fellowships from the NEA, The Banff International Literary Translation Centre, and the Katherine Bakeless Nason Endowment. Published translations include Edurne Pasaban’s memoir Tilting at Mountains (Mountaineers Books, 2014), Alejandro Saravia’s novel Red, Yellow, Green (Biblioasis, 2017), and a chapbook of poems by Mara Pastor, As Though the Wound Had Heard (Cardboard House Press, 2017). Learn more at mariajosetranslates.com.
Critical Essay | English | United States
June, 2012"Clemens Berger, the Austrian playwright," writes Damion Searls, "was telling the audience one of those stories--you know the kind--about 'untranslatable' words, in this case a word from an indigenous language in southern Patagonia, and the word means, well, when a man and a woman are in a bar, and he looks at her, and she looks at him, and they look at each other and their looks say okay I'm interested in you but you need to make the first move and come over to me? The word means that. Everyone laughed, Clemens Berger is charming and tells a good story. I was on the panel as the translator, of his play Angel of the Poor, and he'd told the audience the story because I had just said that as a translator I didn't like to admit that anything was untranslatable, and now I said: 'See, you translated it! You told us in English and everybody laughed!' He said: 'But you can't translate it in one word--' and I said: 'Well, what matters more to you, how many words it has or whether everybody laughs?'"...
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).