Fiction (excerpts) | Greece | Modern Greek
November, 2019Amanda Michalopoulou’s Baroque, the source of the three excerpts presented here, is a book centered around a simple narrative concept that has complex consequences for the translator. Baroque traces the arc of a life, and one that resembles its author’s in countless details, including the incorporation of family and personal photographs. Only this novel—memoir?—moves backwards, from year fifty to year zero, with a chapter corresponding to each age. Not only do characters’ experiences, obsessions, cultural and historical surrounds change as we move backwards in time, but so too does the language of the book, until we arrive at the interior monologue of a two-year-old whose doll, fallen in a goldfish pond, will no longer sing—“Lala heavy. Sit open eyes cling clang. Lessgo steet. Sun dry Lala.”—and even another step back to a baby on her first birthday, still mostly outside of language as a means of communication: “from the moment she opened the box she won’t let go of the doll. She called her Lala. And then she said, ‘Atiti, na, atiti,’ which we don’t know what it means.”
In reading the book, I was reminded of one of my favorite stories by Amanda, “Teef,” from the volume I’d Like, which I translated over a decade ago. A new mother has been confined to a psychiatric institution with a rare condition that involves a rapid regression, a shedding of years as she speeds headlong toward the experience of her infant, shedding language and even her teeth along the way. Baroque felt like a slow-motion, defictionalized version of this story. It also felt like a kind of bildungsroman in reverse, one that challenged the teleology of a narrative form in which change would implicitly figure as growth. As an experiment in autofiction, the book resonates with Amanda’s life, to be sure, but it also resonates with her body of fiction: the story told in the chapter titled “Earthquake,” included here, appears in other clothes in the novel Why I Killed My Best Friend. It is this novel that Amanda and I were working on together at the inaugural Translation Lab in fall of 2012, an experience that opened us to forms of collaboration and friendship—between us, and with other participants—that we hadn’t foreseen would emerge from that brief but formative week. It is with great pleasure that I share these latest fragments of Amanda’s work, and of our shared life in, before, and between languages.
- Karen Emmerich
Fiction (excerpts) | Italian | Somalia/Italy
November, 2019Il comandante del fiume is the coming-of-age story of Yabar, an eighteen-year-old, second-generation immigrant dealing with the post-memory trauma of the Somali civil war; uncovering secrets about his absent father, destructive clan divisions, and Italy’s colonial past; and coming to terms with what it means to be black in Rome. This particular excerpt, which I've titled "Flunking Out and Overflowing," is sourced from a few different chapters, and centers on the theme of school and Yabar's relationship with his "sister."
- Hope Campbell Gustafson
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We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
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