Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
October, 2020Elena’s best stories evidence a peculiar knack of showing us characters who seem to shift in and out of conventional reality and yet at the same time make us knock into our own very real hopes, fears, insecurities, peculiarities. It’s a good idea when considering her material to put aside the either/or questions we instinctively ask: Is this taking place in some interior world or the tangible exterior world? Are we dealing with real actions taking place within normal time or with a timeless, symbolic piece happening in some place slightly shifted to one side? Are these two people two different characters or different aspects of just one? With Elena, there is no either/or, nor will she offer you her own answers to your questions. You are delightfully on your own, feeling your way by a kind of echolocation, meeting strange people who, even when they are superficially unlike you, your loved ones, or your circle of acquaintances, nonetheless trigger strong feelings of recognition. All this she does with a beguiling naturalness, an apparent effortlessness and artlessness, a complete lack of apology, self-doubt, or explanation.
The joy of translating Elena is that of going for a ride and just hanging on, wherever she takes you. And remaining faithful to prose that reflects in its lexis and syntax the combination of simplicity and unexpectedness that marks her characterisation.
- Richard Coombes
Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
October, 2020I was first introduced to the Soviet cartoon Малыш и Карлсон [Junior and Karlsson] when I was studying Russian during the summer of 2013. The cartoon follows the adventures of a shy but imaginative boy who is pushed to daring-dos by Karlsson, a plump man who flies around with a jelly-powered propeller on his back. The cartoon was beloved in the USSR and continues to be a staple in Russian households. The story is whimsical, charming, and a little fear-inducing (so much playing atop—and in the air between—roofs!). And like many cherished Soviet cartoons—take Vinni Pukh, for example, the Soviet cartoon adaptation of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh—it is an adaptation of a translation, based on the Swedish story Karlsson på taket [Karlsson on the Roof] by Astrid Lindgren, who also wrote Pippi Longstocking.
Years later, it is an honor to tackle a collection of stories with a titular reference to this beloved character, who in adaptation became as Soviet as he was originally Swedish. The story presented here has the same title as the collection by prolific author and playwright Natalia Rubanova: Karlsson, Dancing the Flamenco. The character here is a woman, whose pudgy form as a girl earned her the nickname after the cartoon character. The nameless narrator seeks her out, this girl with whom he experienced his first sexual awakening as a boy, the plump girl who danced around his head and continues to push him out the door to adventures, not with a jelly-powered propeller, but with the flamenco. Perhaps she is not so unlike the cartoon Karlsson, after all.
Rubanova’s prose is challenging. This collection of stories, which largely depict queer narratives but, as she has said to me, are “just about love,” is forbidden to be published in Russia since it is illegal to publish works that depict what is termed by the state as “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations.” Fashioned as a symphony, each piece named for a style of music, the reader is taken through a collection that defies genre, thus challenging while at once delighting the reader. Rubanova’s writing is informed by so many different factors, but musicality and its breakage is a great one of them, as Rubanova is a classically-trained pianist. (I myself played the French horn for six years, which is a long time to be bad at a heavy instrument.) How to navigate the musical intervals of her work, how to render the dissonance?
One of my favorite lessons I’ve learned from Soviet cartoons that there is a letting-go crucial to wonder. As in the translation of these texts, there is an openness to learn: listen to the dissonance, let the strange note ring out, play with it. Crack open the jelly. Power up the propeller. Let the flamenco fly.
- Rachael Daum
Indonesia | Indonesian | Short Fiction
July, 2020“Joshua Karabish” is one of the seven short stories that make up The People of Bloomington (Orang-Orang Bloomington)—a haunting and darkly humorous collection originally published in 1980. Reissued in 2004, and released again in 2016, it is one of the most beloved and influential literary works in Indonesia today.
Human nature in all its peculiarity and contradiction takes center stage in these tales. The characters feel their loneliness acutely and yet deliberately estrange others. They unconsciously crave human affection and approval, yet act in inexplicably reprehensible ways. Throughout the collection, pestilence snakes among and through the characters, with people suffering from mysterious illnesses, believing themselves to be gravely ill, or terrified of contracting diseases from others.
The stories are nominally set in Bloomington, Indiana, where the author lived as a graduate student in the 1970s. But the Bloomington of the stories is an otherworldly, almost surreal, town. It’s an environment, alienating and bordering on alien, sectioned into apartment units and rented rooms, and gridded by streets and partitioned from other towns by distances traversable only by car. A place where the solitary can all too easily remain solitary. Where people can at once be obsessively curious about others, yet fail to form genuine connections with anyone.
Eerie, estranging, yet comic and profoundly sympathetic, The People of Bloomington broke new ground content-wise and voice-wise in Indonesia, and is still utterly distinctive, and strange, in the present.
- Tiffany Tsao
Argentina | Short Fiction | Spanish | United States
July, 2020I think this story is the first translation of mine that came about almost entirely thanks to social media. I’m not, or at least I wasn’t, a social media person. I’ve been known to abruptly leave a gathering because someone wanted to take a selfie. I can’t understand how people handle the amount of information (and opinion) that comes swarming out at you from the average Facebook page. But I’d also been feeling bad that I never did anything to promote the books and publications I was involved in, especially because they tended to be independent concerns for whom every little bit helps. So when my siblings ganged up on me to give me a smartphone so I could join the familial WhatsApp group it seemed time to dip my toes into the water and Instagram seemed the least intrusive of the different options available. Thus the account peoplewhoreadinbars was born with the intention of creating a small community of people who like to bring books to bars (it’s currently peoplewhomissreadinginbars, which I do, very much). That never really worked out, but over the past couple of years I have enjoyed the experience much more than I thought. One of my discoveries has been that a lot of writers, quite a few you wouldn’t expect, are also on the network. It’s become a reflex to see whether the author of writing I’ve enjoyed has an account.
This turned out to be true of Lolita Copacabana when I was intrigued by her text in the anthology Bogota 39: New Voices from Latin America, published by the Hay Festival and Oneworld in English. Although I was mildly disappointed to discover that LC wasn’t the six-foot-six drag queen of my imagination, I soon found plenty to enjoy about her posts: she has a sharp eye for the absurdities and beauty of everyday life and is disarmingly frank about her blueberry slushy habit. Best of all, she has a wonderfully angry sense of humor. All of these are highly encouraging traits in a writer and I resolved that I’d ask permission to translate something by Copacabana whenever an opportunity came up. So when I saw “Domestic Manners of the Americans” published in Spanish in the Rio Grande Review, I was quick off the mark.
To an extent, the story is a faithful reflection of that Instagram account, albeit far more erudite and profound and even more fun. An old school, substance-fueled road trip, it is the vivid chronicle of a professor’s madcap journey across the Midwest at the behest of an increasingly deranged bunny rabbit. Although there are obviously numerous precedents for such a quest in American literature, it is typical of Copacabana that the books she foregrounds are memoirs of travels through the U.S. by Simone de Beauvoir and Vladimir Mayakovsky (the quotes are my translations from the Spanish–in part because the narrator cites the Spanish editions specifically but mostly because, ummm . . . it didn’t occur to me to seek out the English translations until the brilliant InTranslation editor Jen suggested it and it turns out that the respective translations from Russian and French into Spanish are slightly different from their English counterparts. All part of the wonderful world of translated lit). It’s a heady, and brilliant, mixture that I’m sure readers will enjoy.
- Kit Maude
Macedonian | North Macedonia | Short Fiction | Slovenia
July, 2020The excerpts featured here are from Lidija Dimkovska’s work When I Left Karl Liebknecht. The book comprises twenty-seven stories, narratives by more than thirty people about migration, tragedy, escape, sorrow, and redemption as they move around the globe. The thread connecting them is their relationship to a street, a school, a stadium, a bridge, something named in honor of the German socialist Karl Liebknecht. Kristine, from the borderland between Germany and Poland, attended a high school bearing his name; Irena lived on a street named after Karl Liebknecht in Skopje, Macedonia; Frederik lived on Karl Liebknecht Street in Schneeberg, Germany. The speakers recount the events that led to their movement away from Karl Liebknecht. In translating, I have sought to capture the sadness, loss, and isolation of the individual presenters as they tell their stories at the Karl Liebknecht House in Leipzig, Germany. Lidija Dimkovska was awarded a “Special Mention for European Cultural Heritage” by the European Union for five of the tales from When I Left Karl Liebknecht.
- Christina E. Kramer
Arabic | Iraq | Short Fiction
May, 2020I have translated one novel by Mahmoud Saeed and several of his short stories during the past decade. On two occasions we did a joint reading at ALTA conferences, and these both proved memorable for me, because Mahmoud is such a lively raconteur, even when his subject matter is heartbreaking. The short story featured here was the first he wrote after he took a brief trip home to Mosul, Iraq to see his sisters, after the city was liberated from ISIS, only to find that his beloved Mosul no longer exists. An account of his devastating trip home, also in my translation, precedes his short story.
- William Maynard Hutchins
Ecuador | Short Fiction | Spanish
May, 2020“The Women’s Ward” is the first English translation from the Spanish and North American appearance of “Pabellón de Mujeres,” by the Ecuadorian author, Carlos Béjar Portilla. This text is the title story from a translation-in-progress of a volume of interrelated stories titled Pabellón de Mujeres: Cuentos, and was published by Editorial Libresa, Quito, Ecuador, in 2003.
- Harry Morales
Austria | German | Short Fiction
January, 2020Robert Müller (1887-1924) was a many-sided cultural activist in early 20th-century Vienna–Expressionist writer, editor, critic, publisher, and promoter (he organised Karl May’s last public appearance in 1912).
Still in his early 20s, Müller spent the years 1909-11 traveling. For several months he worked for a German-language newspaper in New York, but his other whereabouts are poorly attested. (He claimed, among other activities, to have worked on ships between North and South America, and as a gaucho in Mexico.)
"Manhattan Girl" (written around 1920) presents New York through an Expressionistic consciousness, imbued with Müller’s career-long interest in questions of race, gender, and identity.
- C D Godwin
Short Fiction | Spain | Spanish
November, 2019Cristina Fernández Cubas is recognised as one of Spain’s foremost short story writers, especially of the “uncanny,” “fantastic,” and Gothic variety. Berna González Harbour could be talking about virtually all of Fernández Cubas’ work when she describes the most recent collection of short stories as “[r]ich and full of spark . . . a book that disrupts and surprises, that tenses up the distance between what we have, what we fear and reality” ("Babelia," El País). And the American academic Phyllis Zatlin comments that “her stories tend to explore the mysteries of both external reality and of the human psyche. Most of them, including some that fall outside the fantastic mode, explore inner worlds of fantasy and unconscious desires" (Hispania, Vol. 78, No. 1).
My first encounter with Fernández Cubas’ writing was her collection of short stories entitled Los altillos del Brumal (1983). I was particularly struck by two things: her ability to turn a seemingly ordinary object or situation into something terrifying, yet possible, and her overall mastery of the short story genre--a genre which had been widely (and well) practiced by earlier generations of Spanish writers, but which seemed to be far less visible by the time Fernández Cubas appeared on the literary scene. Not long after I read those first stories, as part of my first-ever sabbatical research project, I was able to meet and interview her in her extraordinary attic apartment in Barcelona. Like the character in “Absence,” she cannot imagine living in any other sort of apartment. I still have a copy of that interview, and we have remained in contact ever since.
“Absence” is one of several stories contained in Con Agatha en Estambul (1994). The manner in which Fernández Cubas relates the events and characters in each story is often so down-to-earth and ordinary that, at least initially, they seem entirely plausible and quite credible. It is when the reader’s imagination kicks in that the stories become eerie and dark. In the case of “Absence,” it could be argued that most of us have experienced at least a momentary loss of context and sense of self, quickly dismissed with a (mental) shake of the head. Fernández Cubas’ skill lies in taking such a moment to its extreme limits, and exploring its impact and after-effects on the victim, who ultimately returns to normal. The challenge for the translator is to capture the ordinary everyday tone, language, and descriptions of this moment in the life of Elena Vila Gastón, while at the same time conveying how extraordinary, unnerving, uncanny it is.
Fernández Cubas’ works have been translated into ten languages, but sadly, translations into English are few and far between--only the odd short story, a play, and her most recent work, Nona’s Room (Peter Owen, 2017). Hopefully this translation will assist in making her better known to English readers.
- Lilit Žekulin Thwaites
Colombia | Short Fiction | Spanish
November, 2019Like every other writer of his generation of Colombian writers, Roberto Burgos Cantor labored in the long shadow cast by Gabriel García Márquez. Although Roberto was one of Colombia’s most celebrated writers, he remains little known outside the country. He and others in his cohort staked out a fictional imaginary independent of García Márquez, paving the way for a later generation of more urban, realist writers, such as Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Jorge Franco, Pilar Quintana, and Margarita García Robayo.
But Roberto was an important Colombian writer in his own right. Cartagena, the coastal Caribbean city of his birth, was at the center of his literary universe, and the most marginalized of its inhabitants, his protagonists. The author rendered his solidarity with the poor and powerless in a lyricism that embraced equally the horrors and the beauty of life among Cartagena’s dispossessed. La ceiba de la memoria, his novel dealing with the city during its heyday as a center of the slave trade in the 17th century, the Holocaust, and contemporary political violence in Colombia, received the José María Arguedas Prize awarded by Cuba's Casa de las Americas in 2007. Roberto’s polyphonic novel of 20th century Cartagena, Ver lo que veo, won Colombia’s National Novel Prize in 2018, shortly before his death. During a writing career that spanned more than fifty years, the publication of a new work by Roberto was always an event of great public interest.
“Stories of Singers” is part of the collection Lo Amador (1981), Roberto’s first published volume. It is comprised of seven linked stories that narrate life in the eponymous hard-luck Cartagena neighborhood. Critics agree that these vivid, heartbreaking, and lyrical stories are among Roberto’s best work, among seven short story collections and seven novels. As one critic wrote of Lo Amador, “Few books can make us journey, amazed and compassionate before the spectacle of life, as this one.” “Stories of Singers” is the first English translation of Roberto’s work.
An interesting coincidence: I moved to Lo Amador in the late 1980s and early 1990s to do anthropological research. When neighborhood residents learned what I was doing, they referred me to the book, as if everything that could possibly be known about their lives were contained in it. Never having heard of the book, I eagerly went out and bought it.
Lo Amador so beautifully captured the life and language of the people as I understood them in the little time I’d spent there that I nearly abandoned my fieldwork. Time and deeper understanding only confirmed my initial impression. His work has been an inspiration to my own, first in anthropology, then as a translator, and now as a writer of fiction. And, of course, the grief that his death caused in the nation’s literary circles, and the enduring popularity of Roberto’s fiction among his fellow Colombians, speak for themselves.
- Joel Streicker
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).