100 Refutations | French | Haiti | Poetry
May, 2018Clément Magloire-Saint-Aude (1912-1971) was a surrealist poet who published several volumes, including Dialogue de mes lampes y Tabou (1941), Déchu (1956), and Dimanche (1973). He was also a member of the black nationalist movement Noirisme, and one of the founders of Les Griots, a quarterly scientific and literary journal.
100 Refutations | French | Haiti | Poetry
May, 2018Carl Brouard (1902-1965) was an influential figure in Haitian literature despite having published just one book in his lifetime, Écrit sur du ruban rose. Brouard practiced Vodou and belonged to Les Griots, a group whose goal was to reclaim the value of Haitian folklore.
100 Refutations | French | Haiti | Poetry
April, 2018The identity of Serge St. Jean is unknown. This poem was previously published in Collection Hounguénikon and later anthologized in Ayiti Cheri: Poésie Haïtienne (1800-2015).
100 Refutations | French | Quechua | Spanish | Verse drama (excerpts)
April, 2018Over the years there has been debate regarding the true origins of this play, whether certain similarities with European theatrical structure (e.g a "fool," three acts) reveal a forgery, coincidence, interference by a translator, or a colonial rewrite which infused an older text with new European influences. Many continue to maintain that it remains one of the few and last Incan dramas, and its appearance in Peru in colonial times may make it a vital part of early American literature, regardless of its mixed heritage.
According to F. Pi y Margali (Madrid, 1885), Ollántay is a play "in Quechuan verse from the time of the Incas, [...] one of the few literary compositions left from the ancient Americas. It is written in Quechua, the language of the Incas, […] there is nothing in it that reveals European thought or feeling, nor anything in it that does not fit the institutions, the customs, and the social state of that vast empire […] which extended from shores of the Ancasmayu to those of the Mauli.”
The play, writes Jorge Basadre in Literatura Inca (1938), is named after its protagonist, Ollántay, a great military leader who, for his courage and despite being a member of the lower classes, has been raised far, far above his station. Not far enough, however, to be able to pursue his beloved, the king’s daughter, who is forbidden to mix her royal blood with that of a mere commoner, regardless of love or valor.
Ollántay was initially translated into French by Gabino Pacheco Zeguerra. The Spanish translation was undertaken by G. Madrid in 1886.
100 Refutations | French | Haiti | Poetry
April, 2018Marie-Ange Jolicoeur (1947-1976) died at the age of 29 in Lille, France, having already authored four volumes of poetry, Guitare de vers (1967), Violon d’espoir (1970), Oiseaux de mémoire (1972), and Transparence en bleu d’oubli (published posthumously in 1979). According to Saint-John Kauss in La poésie féminine haïtienne, “She was, to the best of our knowledge, after Queen Anacaona, the second ‘cursed’ poetess in Haitian literary history.”
Belgium | French | Song Lyrics
December, 2017For this labor of love, I set ambitious goals: to translate 50 songs, preserving Brel’s meter and rhyme schemes, as well as the essence of his imagery, moods, and caustic humor, without ever being a slave to the original lyrics. That is, I put lyricism and naturalness of phrasing ahead of word-for-word equivalency. I chose a mix of songs that have not been translated before and songs that have poor English versions. I am currently translating all the songs on his famous last album, which he recorded in secret shortly before his death.
- Michele Herman
French | Poetry (excerpts) | Québec
September, 2017The latter two sections of Samuel Mercier’s poetry collection The War Years ("Keep Singing Vera Lynn" and "Suite for Bomber Harris") invoke a strategic military dialogue and rhetoric, referencing, for example, the 2012 Quebec student protests against tuition increases led by student unions such as the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante, particularly the events of May 6, 2012, during a demonstration in Victoriaville that eventually turned into a riot. At least ten people were injured, including some police officers, and two protesters were very seriously injured (the first one lost an eye, and the second sustained head trauma and a skull fracture). The last section also reads as a complicated address to Bomber Harris (Sir Arthur Travers Harris, who assisted British Chief of the Air Staff Charles Portal in carrying out the United Kingdom's most devastating attacks against the German infrastructure and population, including the Bombing of Dresden).
These sections of The War Years are concerned with war as historical event as well as metaphor for human consciousness, as if to be conscious means to be conscious of not only history’s underlying tensions and conflicts (“the memory of happy wars”; “the prolongation of buried wars”), but the constant threat of societal implosion. Not without deeply ironic humor (“you must know how to taste/the sudden peace//in the quiet coolness/of the meat department”), The War Years uses poetic recursion—beginning lines repeating near the ending—to establish a haunting poem-cycle that disrupts rather than describes what it means to be alive in late capitalism’s eco-apocalypse, wherein the “enemy” or absolute other is no longer identifiable, let alone, at times, corporeal, belonging to terrorist networks and cyber-worlds. Seemingly straightforward yet deceptively complex, Mercier’s language play destabilizes the senses (“no rhyme nor reason/for neither words nor bombs”), as well as time-honored modes of restitution such as poetry and spring. What else can we expect from a text that turns on itself, until “we no longer really know very well/what comes next/or who is not/the enemy”?
Forgetting in order to remember, The War Years, as a whole, puts its faith not in “former dictators,” the “carrion” of time, institutions, or institutionalized violence, but in a poetics that exculpates no one, not even the poet, who seeks instead “to find/in his deepest hiding places/the contours of the enemy within.”
- Virginia Konchan
French | Mauritius | Poetry (excerpts)
September, 2017Khal Torabully’s language is playful, inventive, and peppered with neologisms, which makes it especially challenging to translate. Another challenge I have faced when translating Torabully is to honor the music infused in his poems. I map the sounds of the original text (assonance and alliteration), and try to replicate patterns (though not necessarily exact sounds, nor placement in stanzas) in my translation.
After the NEA awarded me a literature translation fellowship, they interviewed me concerning my “sound mapping” technique, in NEA Arts.
- Nancy Naomi Carlson
French | Poetry (excerpts) | Québec
July, 2017War is more than a political conflict–in late capitalism, it’s a way of life. From Kandahar, Afghanistan, to Rivière-du-Loup, Québec, this war is constellated by concrete acts of terrorism, such as 9/11, and also by a state of near-constant alert, or traumatic consciousness. “History doesn’t exist, it collapses,” the speaker says, moving between mediated images of war and the violence–some symbolic, much of it physical–we encounter every day. It’s tempting to return, in mind, to a time in modernity free from war, but other than a brief gasp between WWII and Vietnam, that time is a phantasm. The speaker of The War Years counsels the reader to continue to move forward, from an age where “we have buried God,” and no longer have a need for poetry, epic or otherwise: “don’t forget but don’t think/ go straight ahead/ carried by what was.” “What was,” is history; “what is,” includes, in this worldview, a confusion between worlds, languages, and us/them binaries wherein the enemy is identified with the path of waged destruction, and “us,” by adherence to “the way of champions.” The champions “eat prize-winning cows/ and all the biggest swordfish,” and “defend the highways/ where our blood flows.” As for the “enemy,” the semantic coordinates are blurred in translation, as they would be in any process of transposition or examination of the language and pronouns used to demarcate, identify, and possess: “you don’t know what they’re capable of/ they will insert themselves into your silence/ until you can no longer tell/ how many we are.” Within this maelstrom, there remains our inheritance of beauty, as preserved in the gaze of another: “and in your eyes…/ I see it already, smoking and beautiful/ Kandahar under the bombs.”
– Virginia Konchan
France | French | Radio play (excerpt)
May, 2017The play, Fossoyeurs (Gravediggers), was written by Cécile Cotté upon her return from Rwanda, where she’d put up a production about the genocide with Rwandan actors (video excerpts of the show can be found on Cécile Cotté’s website: www.cecilecotte.fr). Gravediggers is thus haunted by her stay in Rwanda, where she visited death sites and saw piles of corpses stacked in school classrooms and other public places. Murambi is one of the sites she visited: a vision of horror that stayed with her forever and that she tries to exorcize in this play.
Fossoyeurs was produced as a radio play by France Culture in October 2006.
Gravediggers is a collective translation done by New York University B.A. students under my supervision in the spring semester of 2016, as part of an advanced literary translation workshop.
- Emmanuelle Ertel
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).