Novel-in-Verse | Romania | Romanian
September, 2013Eclogue is the story of Lavinia, a widow who travels with her two young daughters from her port city on the Black Sea to the village of her husband's kin: a small rural community in the Romanian Carpathians. Lavinia succeeds to raise her daughters through strength of character and hard work as the village seamstress; in the second half of the poem, the story of the younger daughter, Lena, becomes a focus as well. The featured excerpts, in fact, concern the grown-up Lena more than her mother Lavinia, although as the future continuation of Lavinia's being and, in many ways, her attitudes and values, Lena's story is of course an extension of the primary one.
Throughout Eclogue, however, it is Lavinia who is the protagonist, bearing her own life, but she also serves as a shrewdly perceptive witness who knows everybody and lets us hear her muted voice as we hear the villagers' voices. To them, she is paradoxically an outsider, the other, in turn respected and distrusted, and likewise an insider who gradually became part of this mountain locale with its pastoral heritage. The events take place at a margin of space on the still-remembered border between the former Austrian and Ottoman empires. And they fill a thin, transitional margin of time: the Soviet takeover of Romania following World War II.
With its ironic title, Ioana Ieronim's Eclogue is, to the author, a kind of novel in verse, a book intended to preserve and understand one small place, subject to traumatic change, as a lens for much more than itself.
Novel-in-Verse | Russia | Russian
August, 2012Gnedich (Vremya, Moscow, 2012) is a novel-in-verse about the first Russian translator of the Iliad, the romantic poet and librarian Nikolai Gnedich (1784-1833), who was also the author of the first Russian Gothic fiction. His brilliant translation, still the standard one in Russia, was both highly praised and mocked by Alexander Pushkin. Gnedich has been awarded the Anthologia prize and the Russian Prize (II category), was the finalist for the NoS and the Andrei Bely literary awards, and is currently nominated for the Bunin prize. Since Gnedich spent almost his entire life translating Homer's epic poem, Maria Rybakova (usually a writer of prose) has chosen verse as the most appropriate stylistic means in recreating his life. To the English-speaking world, this genre of poetic biography is best exemplified by Ruth Padel's Darwin: A Life in Poems. Gnedich consists of 12 songs (cantos). The novel depicts the lives of Gnedich and his best friend, Batyushkov, who is slowly losing his sanity, among the motifs from their poetry and the archaic imagery of the Homeric world. The space of the novel extends from St. Petersburg and Vologda to Paris and Naples, and from the boudoir of the famous actress (and Gnedich's unrequited love) Semyonova to the Petersburg public library and the cubbyhole of Gnedich's superstitious maidservant. The novel culminates in Batyushkov's final breakdown in the lunatic asylum in Pirna (later a Nazi killing center) and Gnedich's ruminations on the future tragic fate of Russia. Two excerpts of the novel have appeared on the Contemporary Russian Literature at the University of Virginia website.
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).