Catalan | Novel (excerpt) | Spain
March, 2010Due to the physical after-effects of a fateful traffic accident, a waiter in a roadside bar finds himself forced to give up his job and withdraw into himself. In this situation and out of the need to do something—anything—he resumes his old pastime of voracious reading, and begins to write. In an exercise of reminiscence superimposed on the most immediate present, the story becomes a magnificent and careful intertwining of crossed paths, encounters and misunderstandings among a wide variety of characters that were once part of the microcosm of the roadside bar. When he was working there he unwittingly became a witness to the ever-complicated human psyche, and to an everyday reality verging on decadence and disillusionment with a changing world shrouded in an atmosphere of pessimism. Ramon Erra's extraordinary literary precision establishes him as one of the best current writers of Catalan fiction.
Catalan | Novel (excerpt) | Spain
March, 2010A Lake in Flames is a first novel, and also the first part of a trilogy that continues with The Sea of Minsk (La mar de Minsk) and Towers of Clay (Torres d'argila) and marks Hilari de Cara's birth as a novelist. In this chronicle of characters and stories that touch on life, memory, hopes and ambitions, and sex, the author addresses his themes with sarcasm and, above all, a certain sense of terminus. The parallel plots are set in a village in present-day Mallorca and the Mallorca of the past; in the Barcelona of the 1970s and the Spanish Civil War. The novel is grounded in its author's own personal experience, but is developed with irony and a style close to contemporary English-language fiction.
French | Morocco | Novel (excerpt)
March, 2010From Pierre Joris's memoir of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine:
During a dinner at La Coupole in Paris (circa 1979)...I turned to my neighbor, Kathy Acker, and started to tell her everything I knew about Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, what an absolutely superb poet he was, the greatest of his generation in Morocco, how powerful his prose was, how violently he had disemboweled the colonizer’s language in order to be able to put it to accurate new uses, how he had turned it into a truly alive counter-language and how especially in Moi l’aigre he had done that with a brilliance that bordered on genius. I sang Mohammed’s praises for as long as she and anyone else at the table would listen—I wanted them to know, but, maybe before all, I wanted to reassure myself, as I knew without knowing it, that this was the last time I would see him. And it was. Except that from time to time when I sit down to write a poem I try to think through him, Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, and try to gather that way some of the absolute intensity and fearlessness necessary for a true guérilla poétique.
When I heard of his death, the line of poetry that came to mind was not his, but this one, by Guillaume Apollinaire: soleil cou coupé / sun throat cut.
Argentina | Novel (excerpt) | Spanish
October, 2009Ursula's Dream is a multi-layered construction, a coded journey that redefines the rules of the epic genre. Any outline of the plot would be misleading, since María Negroni’s method is to question the distinction between dream or vision and historical, fictional, and legendary reality, while refusing to respect the limits of chronology. The medieval histories of Ursula that inspired this thoroughly contemporary novel recount the life of a young woman near the end of the first millennium. Heiress to the throne of Cornwall, in order to escape immediate marriage to a suitor and on the advice of an angel, she lays down three conditions: that her suitor be baptized, that she be supplied with eleven ships and eleven maidens to command them, and that she be given three years to make a pilgrimage to Rome. Ursula—according to the many surviving versions of her life—made the pilgrimage with her companions and was killed before her return. Accounts of her death differ; perhaps she died at the hands of Attila the Hun, perhaps her vengeful suitor pursued and killed her.
On the whole, the novel follows these legendary events, depicting Ursula’s youth at the court of Cornwall and the arrival of the suitor’s messengers, then introducing her companions and narrating the progress of their journey while incorporating the characters—from bishops to minnesingers—that they meet along the way. There are debates, crises, and defections among the women, a plot of sorts. Yet the question of Ursula's death remains unresolved. The larger action of the novel takes place out of time, as Ursula’s Dream continually departs from the linear, through apparitions and presentiments, embodying figures from other realms of reality: some who died before the pilgrimage began and others who were to live—and write—of her in future centuries.
Expressing the polyphony of inner life through female voices, the novel reveals the depth and risk of feminine experience in a world controlled by patriarchal institutions. Its concerns are millenary: the confrontation with death, time, love, historical circumstances, and destiny. In endowing them with a contemporary perspective, Ursula’s Dream rediscovers for its readers the spiritual quest that gives a deeper meaning to the epic gesture.
Arabic | France | Novel (excerpt)
August, 2009As an adolescent, Zeina left Iraq for the United States with her family, her father having been accused of conspiracy against the regime of Saddam Hussein. Well-integrated in her country of adoption, but raised in the love of her native land, at the age of thirty she decides to return there as an interpreter with the American army. Convinced of the nobility of her mission, yet slightly ashamed of returning in this uniform, she delays in informing her grandmother, the widow of colonel in the Iraqi army. Given the job of translating and sensitizing the American military to Arab culture, the young woman realizes that her role goes beyond this: with reluctance, she is present at interrogations, or bursts into suspect houses during the night... Uneasiness sets in. And disapproval as well, that of her grandmother, of close ones, and, worse still, her own....
Through the beautiful character of this woman torn between two identities, the author paints the picture of the life of expatriate Iraqis in America and of their intensely close relationship with the mother country. The resentment of Iraqis on the inside toward the American occupier is echoed by the pain of families in mourning in the United States. Written in a pacy, punchy language like a soldier’s logbook, this novel renders with great subtlety the wounds that war inflicts on each individual, whether in uniform or not, and thus is universal in effect.
The novel was published in Arabic by Dar el-Jadid, 2008, and in French by Liana Levi, fall 2009.
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
July, 2009The novel excerpted here, La fin des paysages/The End of Landscape is a suspenseful and obsessive oratorio about brotherhood and affiliation, not only between the twin brothers at the center of the book, and the sisters they love, but also between Africa and Europe, and the ties—affective, artistic, and political—that bind them together.
The setting is Liverpool in the final days of the Thatcher administration, hovering between the rioting youth of an abandoned industrial working class and the burgeoning gentrification of the all-but-abandoned port area and its forlorn population. The symbol of this moment is the opening of a new outpost of the Tate Gallery in the former Albert Dock. Sir Abel Manson is the Irish-born curator of the first exhibit, "A Century of Africanism: 1850-1950."
The novel opens with a gruesome accident on the docks: while unloading a shipment of priceless artifacts on loan from the governments of Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, and Kenya, a chain breaks, a man is swept up by the loose wire of a crane, his body sectioned, and a crate smashes open on the ground. Some sculptures are lost in the space between the boat and the dock. A fallen landscape painting is slashed by an angry worker and some masks are purloined by a mysterious stranger. A narrator describes the scene. His voice is unpunctuated, relentless, and the reader seems to become this man, Martin Finlay, as he tries first to help his employer get the exhibit back on track, and then solve the mystery of the missing masks.
French critic and literary blogger Pierre Assouline on The End of Landscape:
Here is what the author calls venturing into the labyrinth of time—that time which, in the words of Faulkner used by Lang as an epigraph, is "longer than any distance." Revisiting a story he first told fifteen years earlier, Luc Lang has produced a block of prose with an energetic and sinewy rhythm, at times Céline-like and stuffed with narrative detonations reminiscent of Dos Passos. The novel turns on twindom, on doubles and duels: the harbour master and the museum curators, two brothers that everything sets against one another, two sisters standing for two ideas of love.... Lang has not chosen an easy path. So much motion gives rise to a highly visual story. Luc Lang has filmed his own On the Waterfront in his head...a boundless palimpsest. The experiment can take the reader's breath away, and this quite literally: no white space, no extra leading, no paragraphs, no air. No better way, though, to approach a paroxysm. But the reader who feels that this is a mere exercise in bravura will surely suffocate.... Luc Lang clearly enjoys the role of an (anti-)landscape architect on the terrain of the novel.... This was a risky undertaking, but a successful one. It is impossible not to think of both Joyce and Lowry, for both of whom Lang confesses a passion.
Luc Lang on novel writing:
One day in the early 1990s, I heard a news report on the radio. There, in the incandescence of the facts, was a model for fictional narrative.... A woman pulls up in the fast lane of a highway and begins to change a wheel, as though she was on the hard shoulder. Just as she is removing the wheel with the puncture, she is struck by a fast-moving car and killed, borne aloft along with her wheel, her jack, and the rear wing of her car—bone, flesh, and metal exploding on the hood of the other vehicle. Was she stupid? Was her psychological make-up involved? Her mental state at that particular moment? Her age? Sex? Family history? Her psycho-socio-historico blah-blah-blah background? Who cares? We could not care less! From the point of view of the novel we could not care less. Only the act matters, in all its madness, all its intensity. No chatter, no analysis, no glossing, no academic editorializing on universal lessons. And no intellectual detachment either! All null and void. No distance! None! Just the facts! Write inside the fact, the fact in its opacity, its mystery, its chance quality—in its humaness therefore, its, mad, mad unpredictability, partaking of the order of creation. Because the act is all: the act in itself reveals and illuminates the whole world that is ours.
*
Like dance, it seems to me, the novel should forbid itself to think, to think itself, to reflect itself, to theorize itself within its own realm of movement. Failure to abide by this principle means slowing down, unbalancing, or even destroying the movements of writer and dancer alike. Dancers cannot comment on their movements while executing them, for the time in which they move is of great intensity and the sequence of their gestures is part of an irreversible fusion of duration and speed. This is not to say that the novel cannot become a subject of analysis outside its own space: but this must only happen after that space has been traversed and experienced at first hand, along with the characters, their story, and the writing that brings them into being. Like speaking of swimming only after allowing oneself to be swept down a river, and not while still on the bank, imprisoned in some distant, inert form of knowledge.
*
A novel is a black box, closed around its own time yet without beginning or end. A place where what is living speaks and tells of the world to which it belongs from within its own continuum, which is, to say it once more, the coherence not of a subject but of a time, constituting ultimately whatever remains of the universal despite the fury, whatever its source, that strives to silence or instrumentalize its voice.
(From Luc Lang, Notes pour une poétique du roman (Paris: Inventaire/Invention)).
Brazil | Novel (excerpt) | Portuguese
July, 2009Moacyr Scliar was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1937. He is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and the author of more than 60 books published in 18 countries, many of which have won awards or been adapted for the movies, stage, or television. He also writes for newspapers around the world. His books include O centauro no jardim (1980; published in English as The Centaur in the Garden, 2003), Max e os felinos (1981; published in English as Max and the Cats, 2003), A mulher que escreveu a Bíblia (winner of the Prêmio Jabuti, 2000), and Saturno nos trópicos (2003). A majestade do Xingu (1997) received the Prêmio José Lins do Rego from the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
The excerpt featured here begins at page 35 of the novel.
German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
June, 2009Carmen-Francesca Banciu’s Song of the Sad Mother is a novel about an anguished mother-daughter relationship set against the backdrop of Communist Romania. Its protagonist Maria-Maria is the daughter of two passionate party loyalists. Her academic aptitude and upbringing seem to destine her to become the embodiment of the party’s utopian concept of the new human. The only problem is that Maria-Maria is intent on writing her own destiny. The predetermined quality of Maria-Maria’s life coupled with the fact that she is tyrannized by a mother who is depressive and deeply distrustful of any type of happiness or pleasure, rob the protagonist of a childhood and cause cruelty and harsh discipline to take the place of maternal nurturing and reassurance. It is thus that Maria-Maria’s mother, whose only indulgence was deprivation, cold-bloodedly destroys her daughter’s dolls only to replace them with books, out of love and to impart upon Maria-Maria the valuable lesson of self-reliance. Armed with this lesson, Maria-Maria is able to take possession of herself and defy every party--and familial--expectation. She does this by leaving the past behind and becoming an émigré writer in post-Communist East Berlin. While the crossing of national and political boundaries proves catalytic for Maria-Maria in that it enables her to discover her autonomy and individuality, it does not wipe the slate clean of her psychic and emotional wounds. It is only by doing the work of remembering that she begins to exorcise her demons and heal the trauma of her painful relationship to her mother and her country.
(Elena Mancini)
Japan | Japanese | Novel (excerpt)
December, 2008One of Japan’s most revered mythological creatures, the tengu is believed to inhabit mountainous regions, where it exacts revenge for wrongdoings committed against community members. It is often blamed for abducting people and animals to later return them endowed with heightened senses and abilities, and for playing pranks on priests who have strayed from Buddhist precepts.
The reader is introduced to Keiichi Michihira—an investigative journalist on a journey to unearth the truth behind a series of murders that occurred a quarter-century earlier in Shikamata. Residents of this secluded hamlet are convinced that the culprit is the fabled tengu, and though Michihira is skeptical, their belief compels him to dig deeper, leading him on a wide-ranging investigation from the supernatural to the geopolitical.
(Christopher Southward)
Greece | Modern Greek | Novel (excerpt)
December, 2008It is the spring of 1897. Two ships set sail from the port of Gothenburg carrying Salomon Andre, Nils Strindberg, and Knut Fraenkel aboard. With them travels a team of skeptical meteorologists, suspicious journalists, overwrought engineers, and talented cartoonists. Their destination is the Arctic Sea. Soon the journey through the frozen North leads the three men to an enigmatic structure at the edge of the world, inside of which is a hot-air balloon. This is when the real journey begins. As the 20th century approaches and man’s domination over Earth nears completion, the three men seem determined to leave their mark on the new era through a bold undertaking; one which is entirely dependent on the mercy of the Northerly winds. Years later, through a succession of objects, impressions, and visits, the story continues...
(Evangelia Avloniti)
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).
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