Austria | Essays (excerpt) | German | Novel (excerpt)
November, 2010The City: Discoveries in the Interior of Vienna
The City... is a collection of essays documenting Gerhard Roth's extensive exploration of the city of Vienna. He takes the reader behind the scenes of the Natural History Museum and the Austrian National Library. He reports on the extensive art and treasure collections of the Habsburgs, visits the Josephinum, the historic Vienna School of Surgeons with its Museum of Forensic Medicine, and the famous Clock Museum. Roth complements these essays, which explore humanity's fight against transience, with reports of his visits of the institutes for the blind and the deaf and the refugee camp of Traiskirchen. In these essays, he portrays the challenges facing humanity in a new global world.
The Plan
Dr. Konrad Feldt, a bibliophile and an employee of the Austrian National Library, discovers the theft of a rare handwritten Mozart musical score. The culprit, a fellow employee, hands over the score to Feldt and commits suicide. Feldt decides not to return it to the library, but to follow through with his colleague's plan to sell it to a rich collector from Japan. Under the pretext of a lecture tour, he travels to Japan to meet the collector. The rarity and value of the manuscript complicates the transaction, however, attracting criminals. And when Feldt arrives at the collector's shop he finds him dying, the victim of an assault. Feldt finds himself now a murder suspect. Embedded in the detective story plot are rich descriptions of the Japanese traditions, cityscapes, and landscapes, and the constant danger of earthquakes and volcano eruptions.
The Mountain
The journalist Viktor Gartner travels to Greece in order to write a story about the Greek Orthodox cloisters on the holy mountain Athos. The real reason for his trip however, is to find the Serbian author Goran R., whom he had met during the war in Bosnia and who is rumored to be hiding in the cloister Chilandar. Goran R. has witnessed a massacre similar to that committed by General Mladić in Srebrenica, and he fears for his life. Gartner's search for Goran R. is accompanied by a series of mysterious, disorienting, and ominous events. One of Gartner's contacts is murdered; others want nothing to do with him after they find out the real reason for his trip. The journey takes Gartner across the Balkans to Istanbul, where he finally is able to locate Goran R.
Czech | Czech Republic | Novel (excerpt)
November, 2010This eccentric, grotesque, and thrilling story of a murder and a fatal connection between a man and a woman who are both drowning in the misgivings of their solitude might have happened anywhere. Its theatre setting provides a unique space for the expression of deep passions and hysteria. The theatre is a stage on which the curtains will draw for ever--for the energetic actors, the passive voyeurs, the backstage manipulators. There is no possibility of actors stepping in to play our lives. We are not acting in a one-man-show. Our past and our distress cannot be stripped off like a costume. Even the smallest "role" of one's life should be played with the utmost conscientiousness. Visiting director Buch has only a strange suspicion that this is so, but writer and dramatist Birgit knows it very well. And those whose knowledge is so true are in the danger of being silenced.
Novel (excerpt) | Poland | Polish
November, 2010The title Runners is taken from a nineteenth-century religious sect in Russia, extremists who believed the only way to remain free of the devil's influence (embodied by the established church and state) was to remain ceaselessly on the move. The book, made up of interwoven fragments of narrative and essay on a wide variety of distinct topics and set in a wide variety of periods and places, revolves around the ways in which all people are always attempting to escape something by never being fully at rest. Preoccupied with the workings of the human body, the mechanism of death, and how people connect with and disconnect from each other, Runners is an unsettling, thought-provoking, and elegant work. Another excerpt from Runners, also translated by Jennifer Croft, recently appeared in eXchanges.
Novel (excerpt) | Romania | Romanian
November, 2010At the center of Wasted Morning is Vica Delcă, a simple, poor woman in her 70s who has endured the endless series of trials and tribulations that was Romanian history from WWI to the end of the twentieth century. She's a born storyteller, chatting and gossiping tirelessly. But she also listens, and it is through her that the author is able to show us a panoramic portrait of Romanian society as the fortunes of its various strata shift violently. Rich or poor, honest (more or less) or deceitful, all of the characters in this polyphonic novel come vividly to life. From Bucharest's aspirations to be the Paris of Eastern Europe to the darkest days of dictatorship, the novel presents a sweeping vision of the personal and collective costs of a turbulent century.
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
August, 2010Anne Plantagenet is the author of two previous novels and biographies of Marilyn Monroe and Manolete. Her latest book was a collection of short stories, Pour des siècles et des siècles, published by Éditions Stock in 2008.
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
August, 2010Patrick Besson published his first book at the age of 17. He has since published a total of 40 books, including Dara, winner of the Prix de l'Académie Française in 1985, and Les Braban, winner of the Prix Renaudot in 1995. He is also a journalist for leading French newspapers Le Figaro, L'Humanité, and VSD.
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
August, 2010Born in 1947 in Poitiers, Michèle Lesbre was a schoolteacher for several years before deciding to take up writing. She published detective novels until 2001, when she published her first work of literary fiction, Nina, par hasard. Since then she has published Boléro (Actes Sud, 2003), Un certain Felloni (Actes Sud, 2004), La petite trotteuse (Sabine Wespieser Editeur, 2005), and Le canapé rouge (Sabine Wespieser Editeur, 2007), which was a finalist for the Goncourt Prize and translated into eight languages.
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
August, 2010Born in Paris in 1979, Minh Tran Huy is a deputy editor of Le Magazine Littéraire and a literary critic. La double vie d'Anna Song is her third novel after La Princesse et le pêcheur (Actes Sud, 2007) and Le Lac né en une nuit (Actes Sud, 2008).
Novel (excerpt) | Ukraine | Ukrainian
August, 2010Natalka Sniadanko is one of the most vibrant voices in Eastern Europe today. Translated into German, Polish, Russian, and Spanish, Sniadanko is also a translator herself, with such credits as Czesław Miłosz, Günter Grass, and Franz Kafka under her belt. She has received several prestigiuos residencies and fellowships in both Poland and Germany, and her work is marked by her travels. Ever sharp, ever sensitive, Sniadanko possesses a wit and perspicacity that render each of her sentences sparkling and all of her interests contagious. Her first novel, The Passion Collection, funny and touching by turn, tells the story of a young Ukrainian woman falling in love with philology while also experiencing her first crushes and first love affairs. She has published a total of four books in Ukraine since that first, in 2001, and has appeared widely in literary journals and newspapers across Central Europe. At still under forty years old, Sniadanko is a writer to watch and to savor.
Catalan | Novel (excerpt) | Spain
April, 2010Mill Town Memories is a captivating novel that holds the reader's attention with a skillful non-linear narrative technique. It immerses the reader in an industrial era, depicting life in one of the textile colonies that were such a vital part of Catalonia in the 1950s (the author lived in the Colonia Vidal from the age of six months until she was 20). It is a portrait of the heartland of Catalonia: its traditions, customs, and pressures to conform.
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).