Arabic | Egypt | Short Fiction
November, 2018In my recent article published in World Literature Today, “Sheltering Words: Collaboratively Translating Montasser Al-Qaffash,” I write: “One of the reasons I love living in Cairo is the fact that everyone spins yarns: the porter, the maid, the taxi driver. No one has the corner on stories—many of these stories rely on rumor, humor, and hyperbole. Still, the problems of daily life are real and life is hard: many Egyptians vent their frustrations through anecdotes and jokes.” Montasser Al-Qaffash’s collection of short stories, At Eye Level, does just this—he takes humdrum problems and spins yarns around them. For example, in his story “To Describe It a Little More,” the narrator describes the relationships of tenants in a building through the eyes of one of its inhabitants. The narrator describes his father’s fascination with a ground-floor apartment, his dream residence. As a mature adult, looking back, the narrator understands that his father’s obsession with the ground-floor apartment masked an attraction to the widow who owned it, and his help in selling the apartment provided an excuse to call old friends. The complexity of his father’s relationship to the ground floor apartment--and of social relationships more broadly--is mirrored by the crossword puzzles the son would solve with his father.
- Gretchen McCullough
Armenia | Armenian | Short Fiction
August, 2018Susanna Harutyunyan began her literary career when the Soviet Union was collapsing. She belongs to the generation of writers who were tasked with the critical and inevitable role of recording the fall of the Soviet Union, the transition period, and post-Soviet afterlife. She is best known for her short stories, some humorous, others verging on the macabre and a special kind of ruthlessness, reminiscent of the notable Soviet writer Vsevolod Ivanov. The story featured here (Original title: "Aysteghov antsel e astvatse") was first published in a collection titled Zharangabar pokhantsvogh garun ("Hereditary Spring") in 2007.
- Shushan Avagyan
Short Fiction | Spain | Spanish
March, 2018My collaboration with Spanish writer, poet, and filmmaker Pilar Fraile Amador began through an old professor of mine at Brown University, writer and translator Forrest Gander. In his work as the editor of Panic Cure: Poetry from Spain for the 21st Century, he first discovered an up-and-coming Amador through her poetry, known for its innovative and surreal flavors. After Amador published a book of short stories (Los Nuevos Pobladores, Ediciones Traspiés, Granada, 2014), Forrest put the two of us in contact, and what would follow was a giddy stream of emails bubbling from one continent to the next for over a year. We finally left the technological plane behind in 2016 when Amador accepted a translation residency at the Omi International Arts Center in New York. My visit was short, and aside from translation involved just as much time spent walking together across wide, empty sculpture fields, staring at oddities such as a small house that spun like a barometer in the blustery fall wind.
When reading Amador’s fiction, one might think she lived full-time in such a place, removed from society yet imagining the shadows of daily life strangely twisted, hauntingly similar at the edges of her vision. The small universes encapsulated inside each of Amador’s short stories are as familiar as a word on the edge of your tongue, as comforting as paranoid glances over your shoulder. Her fiction seeks to challenge the quotidian, to shade the expected with sharp, nervous doubt honed on a modern edge. In my translation of her short story collection, which is titled The New Tenants, I strive to embody her blunt style that both entices and discomforts with its casual disregard for convention, its logical jumps that challenge the reader to not just read between the lines, but build a whole world from her constellations. The piece published here, The Island, is a showcase of her unique style and unforgettable poise.
- Heather D. Davis
Greece | Modern Greek | Short Fiction
December, 2017This short story is one of thirteen that appear in Konstantinos Poulis’ acclaimed fiction debut Ὁ Θερμοστάτης [Thermostat] (Melani Editions, 2014). Poulis and I met on the remote Aegean island of Icaria in the heady Greek summer of 2015—the summer of the “Greferendum” and capital controls, when the fate of Europe seemed to hang in the hands of a tiny nation on the continent’s margins. When I passed through Athens on the way back to the United States, I made a point of stopping by Poulis’ favorite bookstore, Politeia, to pick up a copy of Ὁ Θερμοστάτης. On the plane ride home I read “The Leonardo DiCaprio of Exarcheia” and quickly realized that, without knowing it, I had just met one of the country’s most unique new creative voices.
Today Greece is best known for an illustrious antiquity and ongoing financial crisis. Traces of both appear in the stories collected in Ὁ Θερμοστάτης, yet in oblique and unexpected ways. In «Θρίαμβος» [“Triumph”], the narrator recounts a memory of how one teacher, a philologist, handled an awkward classroom moment by asking a student to read out loud from a piece of pornography—pornography written in the most elevated Greek literary style. In «Νά πῶς μὲ λὲν ἐμένα!» [“That’s what my name is!”], a man frustrated by his inability to understand conversations about the economy sets out to educate himself through impenetrable financial news articles—only to find true satisfaction between the covers of a poetry anthology.
But while these stories were written during the Greek crisis, they are not motivated by or about the crisis. They are stories, above all, about imagination, in the broadest, most thrilling and even perilous (as in the case of “The Leonardo DiCaprio of Exarcheia”) sense of the word. Throughout the collection, Poulis himself also imaginatively experiments with literary form: «Ἑνάμισι τετραγωνικὸ μέτρο» [“One and a half square meters”] is as short as the space it describes is small. In both architecture and dialogue, the stories also bear signs of their author’s decades spent as a theater practitioner: fresh from his degree (and to his mother’s dismay) Poulis first earned money by putting on impromptu performances in front of Athens’ Monastiraki metro station.
As the first piece in the collection, “The Leonardo DiCaprio in Exarcheia” is in many ways programmatic. Its main character, Takis, is a boy with a dream. But it is a wild, insistent dream that soon takes a life of its own—and Takis’ life along with it. The story steadily transforms into its own kind of dreamscape, its contours shaped by a narrator who, through digressive anecdotes and first- and second-person interjections, lures the reader into a contract of complicity in Takis’ fate. For unlike Takis, who is at first exhilarated, then baffled and imprisoned by, his dream, both narrator and reader know from the start that “this is just how dreams are—a land where 1 + 1 = 5 and dogs recite Milton.”
- Johanna Hanink
German | Germany | Short Fiction
December, 2017I first encountered the work of Ödön Von Horváth one pleasant summer afternoon in Berlin, on an outdoor remainder table. I was looking for some light reading, and an old-fashioned paperback anthology of short pieces on the theme “Autumn” seemed exactly to fit the bill. Goethe, Fontane, Brecht—and a little piece by someone named Von Horváth, dating from the 1920s, that I found unexpectedly moving and well written. It had an unreliable and increasingly hapless narrator through whose distorted lens we can see truths about his motivation and feelings towards women that he tries, but fails, to understand.
I had been looking for a lyrical, even sentimental writer, and instead found a political one. Passionately antifascist, Von Horváth sought in his plays and prose to explore the complacency and indifference that made possible the Nazi victory of the 1930s. His subject is the struggle between consciousness and the unconscious, and its manifestation in the cruelty of men towards women in a patriarchal society.
“A human being only comes alive in speech,” he once said. Rejecting the convention that German literature could only be written in “high German,” he imitated the speech of characters low on the social scale. Rendering this speech in an English appropriate to its time was one of the translation challenges of “A Family Saved,” also from the 1920s. A second challenge was doing justice to Von Horváth’s stated aim of creating a “synthesis of irony and realism.” Like other works, “A Family Saved” seeks to do this in depicting a post-World War I Austria in which societal trust, once destroyed, cannot be restored.
Like all major writers in German of his generation, Von Horváth was forced into exile, where he died. I find it noteworthy and timely that he emphatically rejected the Nazi definition of a German as a person of German blood. For Von Horváth, who was partly Hungarian, being German was a matter of identifying with German culture. Nietzsche, he pointed out, was half Polish; Dürer, half Hungarian.
- Linda Frazee Baker
German | Germany | Short Fiction
December, 2017“Window in Flames” is the titular story of a volume of short stories Carmen-Francesca Banciu wrote during the height of the Ceaușescu regime. One of the stories in this volume resulted in a publication ban for Banciu in 1985 because of the way in which the author took aim at the abject poverty and indignities that characterized the Ceaușescu government. That same story was also awarded the International Arnsberg Prize and brought Banciu international acclaim. My English translation of this story, “The Beaming Ghetto,” appeared in The Brooklyn Rail in 2005. The volume was first published in Germany with the title of “Fenster in Flammen” in 1992.
I was drawn to this story because of its chilling and complex portrait of a female survivor of a grotesque dictatorship. Physical and emotional abuse, psychological torture, and authoritarian deceit populate the canvas of cruelty that the narrative’s young female protagonist, La ventana en llamas, inhabits. Implementing surrealistic visual imagery and rich literary symbolism, Banciu foregrounds these powerful themes in an evocative dreamlike narrative. The recurrent window, Banciu’s locus of choice here, is also worth considering, for it plays a key role in Banciu’s literary imaginary. Windows invoke the possibility of passage into a different reality, a boundary crossing. A keen preoccupation with borders and boundaries has permeated, and continues to permeate, much of Banciu’s work. Contemplating separate yet simultaneous realities and perspectives is one of her hallmark themes. In her 2002 collection of short stories, Berlin Is My Paris, she explores the ideals as well as the everyday realities that differentiated Eastern and Western Europe in the wake of the collapse of the Iron Curtain and German Reunification. Here the window represents a transparent border between La ventana en llamas’s perceived struggle with the threats that vex her from her real-life oppressors in the outside world and her own inner demons. Haunted by enduring trauma and the ongoing menacing violence of party tactics and party-sympathizing patriarchs, the protagonist learns to transform intense emotional wounds and psychological scarring into a life-affirming agency.
- Elena Mancini
Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Short Fiction
September, 2017When I first met Marcílio França Castro at a coffee shop during Brazil’s 2016 winter, he showed up toting a bag full of presents for me. When he dumped the bag onto the table, out came books, like he was some sort of mix between Jorge Luis Borges and Santa Claus. What most impressed me was his eagerness to promote Brazilian literature in general; his own books were joined by several from his peers. And perhaps Borges is a good comparison for Marcílio; indeed, his writing calls to mind Borges, Calvino, and Cortázar. Yet he does not simply imagine other worlds; he brilliantly perceives unsuspected oddities in places of absolutely no interest. In his short stories, which range from traditional length to flash fiction, and with a prose that is at once economical and yet never lacking in precision, Marcílio França Castro transforms his culture’s most unsuspecting spaces into fantastic reading. The author and I have worked together in producing translations for many of his stories, overcoming differences in idioms, metaphors, sentence structures, and other obstacles found in the passage from Portuguese to English. Most importantly, this project kept me sane during the subsequent North Dakotan winter of 2017.
- Heath Wing
Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
July, 2017In a recent interview, Russian writer Igor Sakhnovsky relayed what could be taken as the author’s literary credo: “Life’s cornucopia of nonfictional material renders fantasy unnecessary.” His short story “The Jealous God of Chance” puts this precept into practice. Sakhnovsky’s peculiar breed of realism evolves out of his own life. In each of the six parts of the story, the narrator (the author’s alter ego) reflects on an autobiographical episode and imagines what could have happened along with what actually did. Rather than lamenting what might have been, Sakhnovsky relates these events in wry, staccato prose, full of irony and self-reproach. Each vignette explores a decisive moment of action, inaction, or, as the title suggests, chance. They include a near-death experience in the narrator’s childhood, a hasty marriage proposal in his early adulthood, and a fateful encounter with a Russian mobster in middle age. The last episode finds the narrator in the present, sitting at his desk, contemplating an offer from a stranger he’s been chatting with on the Internet which concerns whether or not the two should spend the rest of their lives together. An ambiguous final paragraph seems to suggest that the God of Chance is, as the narrator suggests, a jealous one.
- Michael Gluck
Mexico | Short Fiction | Spanish
July, 2017Translating Nadia Villafuerte’s work is a pleasure and a challenge. I am very fortunate that she and I are friends and I can easily ask her to clarify passages for me. This time my particular challenge was finding the character of Micaela’s voice, something with which Nadia couldn’t help me. What a person whose first language is Ch'ol sounds like when speaking Spanish has no obvious equivalent in English. My research took me to various schools of thought about dialects in translation, furthering my education and helping me to make my choice, which was simply to create a dialect rather than to try to copy one in English. “Getting Ahead” is a work of fiction, but it is also a tribute to all the Micaelas who have died and are still dying, many anonymously without even a story to mark that they once lived. Micaela is not a perfect person; although she’s admirable, she’s not even particularly likeable. We can have some sympathy for the abandoned child who is the narrator, but she is also a bit of a brat. And yet it is a joy to enter their world for the little time they have together.
The original story, "Salir Adelante,” has just been published in the anthology Los pelos en la mano. Cuentos de la realidad actual, edited by Rogelio Guedea (Lectorum, 2017).
- Pennell Somsen
Pakistan | Short Fiction | Urdu
July, 2017Azra Abbas’s short fiction is known for its enigmatic descriptions and unusual points of view. Whether it is the memoir of a hapless chameleon who gets inadvertently crushed by a group of schoolchildren, or a woman who walks across town wondering when she can scratch her tailbone without attracting notice, Abbas’s stories are always whimsical and mysterious. In this tale, a man contemplates crossing the street, and, it would appear, ultimately fails to do so.
- Daisy Rockwell
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).