Short Fiction | Spanish | Uruguay
September, 2019After an unpromising beginning ("What on earth is this?!"), in recent years the work of Armonía Somers has come to play a defining role in my professional life. Having had her writing recommended to me by a couple of learned friends (neither of whom, it eventually transpired, had read much of her), I picked up a copy of her first novel, La mujer desnuda (The Naked Woman, available in English from Feminist Press). Ignoring said initial reaction (a secondary impulse that has served me well in my reading), I persevered and, some way in, was rewarded with that click of connection that will be familiar to readers of all shapes and sizes. From then on, I was hooked.
In probably the most famous essay to date about Somers’ work, the critic Ángel Rama describes her, admiringly, as a weirdo in a generation of Uruguayan weirdos that also included writers such as Felizberto Hernández and Juan Carlos Onetti. Somers, however, was reserved a special place among them, something of weirdo’s weirdo, if you like. And when you open one of her books, you can see why she was afforded the distinction: her writing weaves sinuously from thought to thought, from vivid realism to wild surrealist fantasy, with little quarter given to exposition or, indeed, punctuation. But her perceived difficulty belies a taut sense of purpose. She knew exactly what she wanted to write about, and often this included subjects that few of her contemporaries were addressing at the time: a fierce defense of women’s rights, especially in the realm of sexuality, the accompanying denunciation of male stupidity and viciousness, and wider philosophical, religious, and political meditations that reveal, almost in spite of herself, an extraordinarily erudite and brilliant mind. But perhaps the most salient qualities of Somers’ work are her sense of humor and lust for life, the way she embraces its manifest pleasures and ambiguities with a chuckle or cry of joy. Never afraid to get her hands dirty, she has a talent for reaching into the sludge and pulling out whatever she finds has spawned there, be it monstrous or beautiful. Or both.
"The Man from the Tunnel" is a case in point—on a whim, a seven-year-old girl crawls through a sewer pipe, unwittingly headed for an encounter that will prove revelatory in all manner of ways. It’s an excellent introduction to Somers’ work, and one that I hope will encourage more readers in English to seek her out.
- Kit Maude
Short Fiction | Spain | Spanish
September, 2019In Miguel de Unamuno's "The Mirror of Death (A Very Common Tale)," we meet a young woman who suffers from a depression with no explanation, simple or complex. Only in recent years have we accepted this as a defining feature of depression and so treat it with the gravity and respect it demands. But in 1911, the author's understanding of the phenomenon as just one of the many side effects of simply being human allowed him to feel its weight intuitively, to dramatize it, and to tell us all about it in this story, which was first published in the November 27, 1911 edition of El Imparcial.
We've all seen an old medical brochure or educational video and laughed at its ignorance or even gasped, downright scandalized by just how minimizing the past's explanations of grave disorders like depression could be (in fact, the doctor in this story offers his own misguided opinion on the matter). But in the hands of a writer like Unamuno, we can find the very same ailment, this time without a grasping explanation, or even a name, but instead a wealth of compassion and a desire to help us understand. And this is one of the pleasures of looking back at ourselves through the lens of literature: the proof that any experience society or science might sell to us as new, we often have already lived.
- Andrew Adair
Canada/Belize | Russian | Short Fiction
June, 2019Lida Yusupova is the author of three books of poetry, Irasaliml (1995), Ritual C-4 (2013), and Dead Dad (2016), and co-author with Margarita Meklina of the prose collection Love Has Four Hands (U liubvi chetyre ruki, 2008). Dead Dad was awarded the Difference (Razlichie) poetry prize in 2017, honoring her “books in which poetry becomes an investigation. ... The jury took special note of the innovative and uncompromising language in her discussions of violence.” In 2016, she received an invitation to attend the AATSEEL (the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages) conference, an honor offered annually to a single poet. Her work has been published in the journals Air (Vozdukh), Mitya’s Magazine (Mitin Zhurnal), St. Petersburg Review, Atlanta Review, and others. Her verse has been translated into English, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Hebrew, Czech, and Polish. She has lived in Petrozavodsk, St. Petersburg, and Jerusalem, and now resides in Toronto and on an island off the coast of Belize. Kirill Kobrin has said of Yusupova’s poems, “Their angle of observation and description is nearly impossible for Russian poetry.”
Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
June, 2019Ilya Danishevsky is a Russian author and publisher for the opposition. He graduated from the Gorky Literary Institute and studied the history of religions at the Russian State University for the Humanities. He is editor-in-chief of the Anhedonia book project (published by AST), dedicated to studying the institution of violence in contemporary Russia. Danishevsky is interested in those who describe reality in spite of official discourse. In 2014, he published his novel Tenderness for the Dead (Nezhnost’ k mertvym), and his book Mannelig in Chains (Mannelig v tsepyakh) came out in 2018.
Russia/United Kingdom | Russian | Short Fiction
June, 2019Stanislav Lvovsky (b. 1972) was born in Moscow and has worked in advertising, cultural events management, and journalism. Lvovsky is the former editor-in-chief of the “Literature” section of OPENSPACE.RU/COLTA.RU and the winner of several Russian literary awards. He is the author of six published collections of poetry, one short story collection, and one novel (written in co-authorship with Linor Goralik). One of his poems was the basis of the project “Quiet War Songs” (2015) by six contemporary Russian composers. Lvovsky regularly publishes articles on political and social issues as well as on cultural history and contemporary Russian poetry in various periodicals and academic journals. His poetry has been translated into and published in English, French, Chinese, Italian, and other languages. Currently he is finishing his DPhil thesis on Soviet cultural history at the University of Oxford.
Ireland/United States | Russian | Short Fiction
June, 2019Bilingual essayist and fiction writer Margarita Meklina was born in Leningrad and shares her life between Dublin, Ireland, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her English-language articles and short stories have been featured in The Cardiff Review’s queer issue, The Chicago Quarterly Review, and Words Without Borders, while her fiction in English translation has appeared in the Norton Flash Fiction International (2015), The Mad Hatters’ Review, The Toad Suck Review, and Eleven Eleven. Meklina has written six books in Russian (two of them in collaboration with Lida Yusupova and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko) and two in English, the YA novel The Little Gaucho Who Loved Don Quixote and a collection of short stories entitled A Sauce Stealer. Meklina’s awards include the Andrey Bely Prize (2003), the Yeltsin Center’s Russian Prize (2008), the Mark Aldanov Literary Prize (2018), and The Norton Girault Literary Prize’s Honorable Mention (2019).
Bulgaria | Bulgarian | Short Fiction
April, 2019"The Feather" is one my favourite of Vladimir Poleganov’s short stories, and a great example of his style, and the themes and symbols running through his work. I like how economical he is with exposition, or plot, or any characterisation in the classical sense, yet still able to create a deep sense of intimacy between the reader and the fantastical world they are thrown into straight at the deep end. It is a confidently complex, erudite, and compelling piece without ever pandering, which is also an apt description of his writing in general.
I suspect the English translation turned out a little more full of pathos than Vladimir intended, as the original Bulgarian is comparatively sparser, even severe as a language, but I think it rather suits the rich, poetic imagery. I hope you enjoy reading "The Feather" as much as I enjoyed translating it!
- Peter Bachev
Hungarian | Hungary | Short Fiction
April, 2019My major concern, when I sat down to translate this story, was whether the weight of the post-Soviet bloc and Hungarian history would carry over to an American audience--whether readers would get lost in the many significant dates that are mentioned. At the start of the story, we are told “it was November 16th, 1989, and God could once again step behind the Iron Curtain.” What’s helpful for an American reader to know is that by November 1989, Hungary was well into reforming from a communist state into a democratic republic, with opposition parties already established and with free elections not far on the horizon. Later, we learn that 1947 was the last year God had stepped foot inside a Hungarian pub, which was also the year the Soviets had officially gained governmental power by manipulating the political landscape and holding the last “free elections” the country would see for the next forty-three years. Finally, when the bartender asks God, who clearly looks out of place in the small-town pub, whether he’s a 56-er, he’s referring to the 200,000 Hungarians who fled Hungary after the 1956 Revolution against the Soviet Union, which lasted twelve days, saw the death of nearly three thousand Hungarians during the revolt and the execution of 299 after the Soviets regained power.
What I learned in the process of translating this story is that while knowing the historical significance behind these dates brings with it a richer reading of the work, it is actually the emotional truths that Ferenc Czinki conveys through his characters that make this story so resonant. Czinki makes it easy for readers to empathize with a people who have been forgotten, even by their own God, and readers likewise understand why God feels forgotten, too. Everyone is a stranger to one another here until God meets Somebody, and it is this shared sense of being forgotten that allows them a moment of connection.
The summer I discovered this story, Ferenc Czinki drove me around Inota. The old factory is still running; he pointed out the massive, cylindrical chimneys in the distance. We retraced God’s footsteps into the pub and drank a local Hungarian light beer with the few men who were there that lazy summer afternoon. I can attest to the fact that that countryside still feels rather forgotten, but in this story, as in much of his work, Czinki gives voice to this place and its people.
- Timea Balogh
German | Germany | Short Fiction
February, 2019Friedrich Nicolai’s "The Joys of Young Werther" is a fascinating contemporary response to Goethe’s bestselling The Sorrows of Young Werther. Rejecting the uncontrolled passion that leads the hero to commit suicide in Goethe’s novel, Nicolai’s text promotes a more measured and rational approach to life as being more conducive to happiness (albeit possibly less likely to produce a literary hit!). I was asked to produce a translation of the novella by Tze Ping Lim, Visiting Researcher at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, who was investigating the copyright ownership of fictional characters and wished to include Nicolai’s parody in her research (this was recently published as the article “Beyond Copyright: Applying A Radical Idea-Expression Dichotomy To The Ownership Of Fictional Characters” in the Fall 2018 issue of the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law). As I knew the translation and the German original would be read and worked on in parallel, I sought to stay as close as possible to the German text while still producing a readable–perhaps even enjoyable!–English version. The project was generously funded by the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Lucerne, for which both Ping and I would like to extend our thanks.
- Margaret Hiley
Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Short Fiction
November, 2018I first experienced the weird joy of Cidinha da Silva’s fiction in 2015, in a survey of Brazilian prose I audited at Rice University. Da Silva’s writing called out to me, as it will call out to any reader, urgently and without apology. In spite of its buoyancy, though, the joy in writing so evident in the prose, da Silva’s fiction is loudest where it is silent. In her “Dublê de Ogum,” she tells the story of an adolescent boy’s trip to a psychologist. In this psychologist’s office, in the contours of dreams, are the illegible answers to questions never asked. Is fantasy an escape from reality, or an alternative to it? What does it mean to be insane in an insane world? Finally, what does it mean to be black in contemporary Brazil?
“The Stunt Double” demands of its reader some familiarity with Afro-Brazilian culture, especially the Candomblé spiritual tradition. Like Santería in Cuba, Candomblé fused elements of Catholicism with Yoruba and other spiritual traditions governed by the worship of divinities known as orixas. Above (and perhaps beyond) this story’s action stands Ogum, the Candomblé orixa of iron and war who, legend has it, slaughtered disrespectful subjects with a broadsword. It is this narrative tradition, obscure to an American audience but totally familiar to anybody living in da Silva’s Salvador, which makes the story’s title almost impossible to translate. The “dublê” in “Dublê de Ogum” signifies not only a “stunt double,” but a virtual doubling: an embodiment, that is, a literal possession. The boy at the center of this story is split—between New and Old, between cartoon heroes and blacksmith gods—and da Silva’s brilliant language bridges the gap between his two worlds. Similarly untranslatable is the diagnosis with which the story concludes: Filho de Ogum, a Son of Ogum, a sort of elaborate shorthand meaning hot-tempered yet fun-loving, impulsive yet logical, brave yet a bit selfish. In short, this is a story of contradictions.
- JP Gritton
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