N.N. (the truly "gray," anonymous John Doe of the Communist Polish People's Republic), awakes one day in a dingy hotel room with a nagging question: Who am I? Having existed ("lived" would be an exaggeration) through thirty-three years, N.N. faces an ontological crisis of such dimensions, that he finds himself unable even to go outside, to enter the quotidian reality of the drab rounds of totalitarian oppression, which kills not by showy, dramatic thrusts, but by grinding down the souls of its citizens under the slow, inexorable mill wheels of conformity. N.N. spends his day not only reflecting on his own life, but also on the reality of his nation, and how that reality is packaged for consumption via the state-controlled media. In the bitterly punning verses that make up Artificial Respiration, Stanisław Barańczak creates a critique of propaganda that lays bare the totalitarian deconstruction of meaning. Words cease to have any referent to objective significance, and mean only what the people in power want them to mean, for their own advantage.
As evening falls, N.N. makes a dramatic decision: life is not worth living in this humid, unhealthy bell-jar. He climbs out on the ledge, and spreads wide his arms in an image that suggests the Crucifixion. To Polish readers, his decision also alludes to another "great soul": Konrad, from Adam Mickiewicz's Romantic drama Forefathers' Eve. That great Messianic character wishes to embody his entire nation, and lead it to a happiness greater than what God provided it with. But here N.N. embodies his Communist society all too well: deprived of a voice, deprived of an individual existence, the suicide of such a man would have no salvific sense for anyone who witnessed it; indeed, no one would even hear about it; it would be quietly swept under the rug, like all other attempts at protesting the totalitarian Moloch. In the end, N.N. cannot even "save" himself. He breaks down in tears, returns to his room, falls crosswise on his bed and sobs. Initially circulated in Poland in samizdat, Artificial Respiration was first published in book form in 1978, in London. One of the most stirring texts of modern Polish literature, it is the (anti-)epic of Solidarity.
Marcelo Morales works along boundaries between poetry and prose, with a particular interest in the fragment. These selections from El círculo mágico (The Visionary Circle, 2007) evoke the haunting realities of reorientation and transition that the island confronted at the beginning of the current century: the need to envision the end of an era; to reexamine relations between nation and world, self and society in order to arrive at a new understanding of the present; and to find a language for acknowledging the impact of emigration on everyday life.
Mohamed Metwalli was born in Cairo in 1970. He was awarded a B.A. in English Literature from Cairo University, Faculty of Arts in 1992. The same year, he won the Yussef el-Khal prize by Riyad el-Rayes Publishers in Lebanon for his poetry collection, Once Upon a Time. He co-founded an independent literary magazine, el-Garad, in which appeared his second volume of poems, The Story the People Tell in the Harbor (1998). He was selected to represent Egypt in the International Writing' Program at The University of Iowa in 1997. Later he was Poet-in-Residence at the University of Chicago in 1998. He compiled and co-edited an anthology of offbeat Egyptian poetry, Angry Voices (University of Arkansas Press, 2002). He published his third collection, The Lost Promenades, in 2010 with the independent publisher al-Ketaba al-Okhra. The same collection is forthcoming from the General Egyptian Book Organization (GEBO).
Faleeha Hassan, who is currently in the United States, was born in Najaf, Iraq, in 1967. She earned an M.A. in Arabic literature and has published several collections of poetry in Arabic: Being a Girl, A Visit to the Museum of Shade, Five Titles for My Friend-The Sea, Though Later On, Poems to Mother, Gardenia Perfume, and her collection of children's poetry, The Guardian of Dreams. Her works of prose include Hazinia or Shortage of Joy Cells and Water Freckles (a novella). The first six poems featured here come from Qasa'id Ummi (Poems to Mother), which was published in 2010 by Dar al-Yanabia in Damascus, Syria. Her poems have been translated into English, Italian, German, French, and Kurdish. She has received awards from the Arab Linguists and Translators Association (WATA) and the Najafi Creative Festival for 2012, as well as the Prize of Naziq al-Malaika, the Prize of al-Mu'tamar for poetry, and the short story prize of the Shaheed al-Mihrab Foundation. She serves on the boards of Baniqya, a quarterly in Najaf, Sada al Nahrain (Echo of Mesopotamia), and the Iraqi Writers in Najaf association. She is a member of the Iraq Literary Women's Association, The Sinonu (i.e. Swift) Association in Denmark, the Society of Poets Beyond Limits, and Poets of the World Community.
Gérard de Nerval was born in Paris in 1808. His published works include translations of Goethe and Heinrich Heine, numerous plays and operettas (some of which were co-authored with Alexandre Dumas), the travelogue Voyage en Orient (Voyage to the Orient, 1851), the poetry collection Les chimères (Chimeras, 1854), and the prose work Aurélie (1855). He committed suicide in Paris in 1855.
Brazil | Poetry | Portuguese
March, 2013Caio Meira's 2003 poetry collection Things the First Dog on the Street Can Tell You is a stylistically daring blend of science, philosophy, and pop culture. Meira--a writer, editor, critic, and translator from French into Portuguese--is most interested in the state of "between-ness." His poetry wrestles with limits, both mental and physical, and explores the uncertain, shifting boundaries of modern life.
The collection is divided into three sections: "Epidermatic" (Epidermática), "Other Lives, the Same" (Outras vidas, a mesma), and "Venereals" (Venéreas). "Epidermatic"--referring to that which acts only upon the outer surface of the skin--is a characteristically wry title for a series of poems that delve into the speaker's inner thoughts and bodily processes. "Other Lives, the Same" moves the reader into more domestic territory, dealing with daily life in present-day Rio de Janeiro, where the speaker contemplates all the other paths he might have chosen. The poems in the last section, "Venereals," are told in the persona of three complex female artists who serve as the speaker's muses: Emily Dickinson, Marilyn Monroe, and Billie Holiday. The title is a play on the word's connection to the goddess Venus, who embodies both love and sexuality, in all their beauty and grotesqueness.
Brazilian critic Leonardo Fróes notes that Meira's work is unique among Brazilian poetry not only for its intensity but for its stylistic control. Not a single period is used in the first section. The general lack of punctuation, and the use of commas instead of periods when there are sentence breaks, skillfully mirrors the porousness of the speaker's world. Nothing seems to start or end; instead, we are privy to a stream of consciousness told only in the "space between breaths." In the cinematic prose poems of "Other Lives, the Same," the reader is bombarded by commas, periods, and question marks. Venereals employs long lines, standard capitalization, but no periods. Over and over again, Meira reintroduces the world to us, making it familiar, only to render it strange as soon as we've gotten comfortable.
Dislocation and doubleness, echoing Arthur Rimbaud's famous statement, "I am an other," are recurring themes in Meira's work. The poetic "I" roams uninhibitedly between genders, inner and outer worlds, and the mundane and existential issues of twenty-first-century life. In fact, this "I" can only exist in a state of perpetual formation: a perfect reflection of Brazil's, and of the world's, rapidly changing realities.
Jürgen Becker was born in Köln, Germany, in 1932. He is the author of over thirty books--novels, story collections, poetry collections, and plays--all published by Germany's premier publisher, Suhrkamp. He has won numerous prizes in Germany, including the Heinrich Böll Prize, the Uwe Johnson Prize, and the Hermann Lenz Prize, among others. Becker's work often deals with his childhood experience of WWII and the political consequences of the postwar division of Germany.
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Editor's Foreword
As noted in the previously released Pierre Menard versions of the Alexander Blok lyric "A Girl Sang in a Church Choir," the famous Quixote translator, having relocated to Bexley, in Greater London--the date of this move is unclear, though it was certainly after the summer of 1913, which he spent in Nimes--returned to the study of Russian, a lifelong pursuit, and, not unsurprisingly, turned his attention to the translation of some of the remarkable poetry then being published in Russia and, subsequently, the incipient USSR... (continued in post)
Ariane Drefyfus, born in 1958, has published Les miettes de Décembre (Le Dé Bleu, 1997), La durée des plantes (Tarabuste, 1998 and 2007 (revised edition)), Une histoire passera ici (Flammarion, 1999), Quelques branches vivantes and Les compagnies silencieuses (Flammarion, 2001), La belle vitesse (Le Dé Bleu, 2002), La bouche de quelqu'un (Tarabuste, 2003), L'inhabitable (Flammarion, 2006), Iris, c'est votre bleu (Le Castor Astral, 2008), La terre voudrait recommencer (Flammarion, 2010), Nous nous attendons (Le Castor Astral, 2012), and La lampe allumée si souvent dans l'ombre (forthcoming from José Corti, 2013).
First published in 1924, Pierre Mac Orlan's "Simone de Montmartre" takes us along on a dash through the Paris of the First World War. The underbelly of Paris opens up for our inspection as we follow first Simone, and then her jealous and worried lover Georges and his associate Léon the Marseillais, through the Montmartre night. Penned around the same time as Dashiel Hammet's first published stories, "Simone de Montmartre" is a wonderful example of early French noir stylization packed full of the rich imagery often found in the narrative poetry of the post-Symbolist era.
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).