100 Refutations | Mexico | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
June, 2018Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana (1648-1695), or as she is better known, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, was a self-educated poet, philosopher, and composer during the colonial period in Mexico—then called the territory of New Spain. She was fluent in Latin and Nahuatl in addition to her native Spanish. She is considered one of the most important and influential writers of the period, not merely within the Mexican or Hispanic American traditions, but in the entire Spanish-speaking world. She was forced to join a nunnery in her late teens by her own confessor and later lifelong antagonist the Bishop of Puebla. In a letter years later she would recall this, writing, “If you had known I was to write verses you would not have placed me in the convent but arranged my marriage.” The cloistered life afforded her time, access to books, and a cell of her own, and thus it became her most prolific period. The poetry she composed there would make her famous in the world well beyond the convent walls, and allow her to reel the world back into those walls, receiving many visitors and admirers and earning the protection and patronage of the viceroys of De Mancera, the archbishop viceroy Payo Enríquez de Rivera, and the marquises de la Laguna de Camero Viejo. Her work has long been honored by the Mexican government, and her life and works have inspired numerous authors, composers, and filmmakers. Carlos Fuentes once called her "the first great Latin American poet." She died at age 43 of an unknown plague while caring for a sister of her religious order, shortly after writing the now-famous letter to Sor Filotea de la Cruz, the pen name for the Bishop of Puebla.
100 Refutations | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
May, 2018Chimalpahin, or Domingo Francisco de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin (1579-1660), was born in Chalco, in what is now central Mexico. He is best known for writing the history of Mexico in both Nahuatl and Spanish. The better known of his surviving works is Relaciones, or Anales, which includes testimonies from indigenous people and descriptions of the events before and after the colony was established. He died in Mexico City.
Poetry (excerpts) | Ukraine | Yiddish
March, 2018The poems featured here are excerpts from Debora Vogel’s collection Day Figures (1930), comprised of 68 poems in total, arranged into four smaller collections: Rectangles (1924), Houses and Streets (1926), Weary Dresses (1925-1929), and Tin (1929).
The difficulty in translating these pieces lies in the fact that Vogel’s idiom is visual--she “paints” for her reader in a manner similar to Picasso, El Lissitzky, or Fernand Leger. Her cityscapes are filled with geometrical figures, colors, and numbers that are frequently repeated. Repetition, stark minimalism in vocabulary, and experimentation with syntax and punctuation are distinctive qualities of Vogel’s style.
At times certain words are repeated incessantly (“sticky,” “renunciation”), the reiteration of word combinations is identical (“sticky smell”), at other times these are slightly transformed syntactically, to underscore the significance of changes that occur even with the slightest modifications. This poses a challenge, since Vogel insists on a certain glossary that does not always allow for diversification. The synonyms, especially for adjectives in epithets, need to be chosen carefully: they cannot be too extravagant, and have to be limited. The approach to punctuation has to be balanced. At times the punctuation needs to be domesticated, at other times preserved, in order to keep the strangeness of the text. Vogel utilizes the colon in a different way than is accepted in English usage; the period is used when you might prefer a comma; and the comma is used when you would logically expect a period. Some punctuation marks, such as question marks, are absent. The word order needs to be rearranged at times, to reflect the English word order of a sentence, with the subject being in the first position, the verb in the second. Vogel’s articles in Yiddish do not always make sense in English, so I worked on them as well.
- Anastasiya Lyubas
Poetry (excerpts) | Slovene | Slovenia
March, 2018Slovenian writer Aleš Šteger has published seven books of poetry, three novels, and two books of essays. A Chevalier des Artes et Lettres in France and a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, he received the 1998 Veronika Prize for the best Slovenian poetry book, the 1999 Petrarch Prize for young European authors, the 2007 Rožanč Award for the best Slovenian book of essays, and the 2016 International Bienek Prize. His work has been translated into over 15 languages, including Chinese, German, Czech, Croatian, Hungarian, and Spanish. He has published four books in English: The Book of Things appeared from BOA Editions in 2010 as a Lannan Foundation selection and won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award; Berlin, a collection of lyric essays, appeared from Counterpath Press in 2015; Essential Baggage, a book of prose poems, appeared from Equipage in England in 2016; and the novel Absolution appeared in England in 2017. He also has worked in the field of visual arts (most recently with a large-scale installation at the International Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India), completed several collaborations with musicians (Godalika, Uroš Rojko, Peter N. Gruber), and collaborated with Peter Zach on the film Beyond Boundaries.
Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Poetry (excerpts)
March, 2018Losango Caqui (1926) is one of Mário de Andrade’s poetry collections published within the period of Brazilian Modernism. This slender volume is situated in an important phase of rupture, written and published in between his two most influential poetry books—Paulicéia Desvairada (
Paulicéia Desvairada, published in English as Hallucinated City (trans. Jack E. Tomlins, 1968), is often critically placed within the Anthropophagy theory, inspired by the native indigenous Brazilians, who were known to have practiced cannibalism on their war captives as a means of absorbing the strength of their enemies. Subverting the idea of the indigenous as being colonized, modernist narrative portrays the indigenous as the powerful ones, therefore able to devour and synthesize diverging sources, digesting what’s European not out of subjugation but in order to create something better.
Losango Caqui ("Khaki Diamond") is, in many ways, a continuation of some of the same themes and avant-garde formal ideas from Hallucinated City. Andrade’s use of free meter introduced revolutionary European ideas into Brazilian poetry, which was previously strictly formal. At the same time, his focus was slowly shifting to a more nationalistic agenda. In this book, one can foretell the author’s subsequent turn to primitivism, as his exploration of national identity would consolidate itself in his following poetry volume, Clã do Jabuti(1927).
My intent while translating these poems was to further explore the ambiguity of Andrade’s poetic discourse, as well as the harlequin’s conflicting views on urbanization, multiculturalism, immigration, and colonialism, amongst other things.
- Ana Paula
Norway | Norwegian | Poetry (excerpts)
December, 2017Anne is a long poem, or a "bullet-pointed novel," as Paal-Helge Haugen calls it. He writes in his “Note to Self” (in the final pages of Anne) that the book should be constructed collaboratively by its author and its readers. He goes on to explain that he has termed Anne a bullet-pointed novel because it is made up of poetic sections and sections of found text; Anne is not meant to be either cohesive or complete. (These sections of found text range from Bible citations, hymns, medical text and documents, excerpts from children's textbooks, and public records.)
The book follows Anne as she goes from being a girl to a young woman,while also showing her declining health due to tuberculosis. It is set in Norway around the beginning of the twentieth century.
This is perhaps Haugen's most well-known book of poetry in Norway, and it was very well received upon publication in 1968. It was one of the first books where Haugen explored his interest in using religious texts in his creative work. It's an important book because of its experimental and collaborative nature. U.S. readers of Roland Barthes will recognize some of his philosophy in Haugen's approach and thoughts about the relationship between reader and author. What U.S. readers will not be familiar with is the landscape and culture on the west coast of Norway, which Haugen describes beautifully. Norwegian and Scandinavian literature has been gaining popularity in the English-speaking world, through authors such as Karl Ove Knausgård, Tomas Espedal, and Kjell Askildsen, and I believe the time is right to introduce this iconic Norwegian poet.
Haugen is similar to famous Swedish poet and Nobel Prize winner Tomas Tranströmer in his evocative but unadorned language, as well as the investigation of and engagement with the unknowable and transcendental, visible in Anne when Haugen explores her feverish dreams, inner longings, and experience of disease, in part II of the book.
The number that follows each excerpt is the number of the page on which it appears in the book.
- Julia Johanne Tolo
Norway | Norwegian | Poetry (excerpts)
December, 2017The translation of these poems was sometimes challenging, as the book was published in 1904, prior to Norway’s secession from Sweden in 1905 and the subsequent process of Norwegianization of the written language that followed. Formerly, written Norwegian was basically Danish in orthography due to Norway’s having been part of Denmark for more than 400 years. Though the text is for the most part readable in Norwegian, there are often words spelled using an older form of Danish than is used today. Hamsun would go on to heavily revise The Wild Chorus in his collected works to reflect these national changes. Written Norwegian is today called Norwegian Bokmål (“book tongue”).
- Peter Dahlstrand
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
Italian | Italy | Poetry (excerpts)
September, 2017Andrea Raos was my Italian language teacher in Chicago. But he could have easily been my English, French, or Japanese instructor as well. His passion and talent for languages are prodigious. His poetry strikes me with its inexorable, almost tactile construction of everyday images that paint a sonorous but often painful picture of bodily or cerebral experiences. Andrea Raos’ poetry is indeed cerebral--both intellectual and visceral, it touches you emotionally and it makes your spine tingle, as Vladimir Nabokov would put it. At the same time it addresses questions that lie at the heart of our existence in a global society and the subjectivities this existence produces. Does language constitute identity, and, if so, how? What is the relationship between self, body, and language? Is speaking a new language reinventing your psychic and physical self? Where is language located as you pronounce foreign words? Do we perceive the world differently when reality is filtered through another language? Translating from Italian his poem “The Moment Just Before” was both challenging and exhilarating, as I too navigate between languages, feeling always at sea, my body adjusting to different vocal and corporeal demands, my mind juggling grammatical constructions and foreign lexicons. I am a native speaker of Bulgarian. My adopted languages are English, Russian, and Italian. And somewhere in the background lurk a handful of other modern and ancient languages. Thus when translating this poem, I could relate to the lyric speaker’s attitude, his attempt to articulate the embodied experience of language, and in doing so, to embrace his mother tongue and find a home inside it.
- Stiliana Milkova
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
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).