Bosnia and Herzegovina | Bosnian | Short Fiction
April, 2014The two stories featured here were published as part of the 2001 collection Pisma iz ludnice ("Letters from the Madhouse"), whose short stories were written during the author's years as a refugee in the United States and originally published in the Bosnian-Herzegovinian weekly newspaper Slobodna Bosna. Džamonja spoke of his inability to adjust to his new life, as well as his longing for a Sarajevo that could no longer exist, making him a refugee not only in the physical sense, but also in the temporal sense.
- Aleksandar Brezar
Russian | Short Fiction | United States
January, 2014"Wish You Were Here" is a delightful memoiristic short story by Pavel Lembersky. It brings together the grungy old 42nd Street porn theaters, the New York City blackout of '77, JD Salinger, John Lennon, Central Park, American tourists in Moscow, and an immigrant's gradual acculturation in one of the most exciting cities in the world, to form a work of beauty, humor, and intelligence.
The story is a cacophonic symphony that celebrates all the ugliness and prettiness and nastiness and love that make New York City such an interesting place to live. Con Ed goes bust one day and the streets go dark, but for a young Russian immigrant who's just learning to make the city his own, there's no need for panic. In the small armies of men breaking into stores and stealing vacuum cleaners, televisions, and lamps, he divines a sign of salvation: at least the criminal faction believes the electricity will eventually go back on. "Wish You Were Here" is also a romantic picaresque about a guy who's just trying to find a place to make it with his girlfriend: a movie theater, a dark alley, his parents' home. The story ends, as all New York stories should, with a miserable apartment search and a wall that looks out onto nothing. We are told, at one point, that "to stay in Brooklyn is to stay an immigrant forever." This is a million-dollar line, but one that's also bankrupt--for immigrant, as Lembersky shows, is just as much state of mind as street address.
- Ross Ufberg
Argentina | Short Fiction | Spanish
January, 2014First published in the Argentine journal Acción in 2011, Jimena Néspolo's short story "La mujer del dorado" narrates the strange case of Virginia Fhury, a woman with yellow-green eyes who breeds Dobermans on a declining, formerly ostentatious farm in a small Argentine town--and who never seems to age. Virginia becomes a point of obsessive interest among the townsfolk, and the narrator reconstructs the details of Virginia's life from the gossip and reports s/he overhears. Told from the point of view of a singular, unnamed narrator, s/he invokes the plural consciousness of the town for emphasis, and betrays a sense of lament at the town's intrusiveness. As the mystery of Virginia's age unravels, the reader might imagine that so, too, does the bickering cohesiveness of the town. The reader is left to wonder: were Virginia's age and life a mystery after all, or did the town invent a myth based on whispers of her identity? Small town politics feature as prominently as the eternally youthful golden woman.
I translated this story in cafes in Argentina while on a Tinker Foundation grant for predoctoral research in the summer of 2012. Jimena generously agreed to correspond with me and meet for coffee to discuss the finer points of her writing style and philosophy, which come alive in her artfully constructed bio note. During a meeting over coffee in Buenos Aires, she stressed the importance of the play on words in the title, something that is difficult to carry over to the English from the original Spanish. The "mujer del dorado" simultaneously invokes a woman made of gold; a woman from the mythical El Dorado of South American legends; and a woman of golden color, much like a "carpa dorada" (goldfish). All three associations are important, given the gilded history of Virginia's family, her mythical status in town, the strange story of the large goldfish passing through her legs, and the way in which she dies. I decided to let the Spanish speak for itself and titled the story "The Dorado Woman" rather than the more literal "The Golden Woman" or "The Woman of Gold," and throughout the text of the story tried to emphasize the three associations Jimena wrote into the Spanish.
- Kristina Zdravič Reardon
Catalan | Short Fiction | Spain
September, 2013Toni Sala (b. 1969, Sant Feliu de Guíxols, Girona) is an author of fiction and nonfiction as well as a secondary school teacher of Catalan literature. His books include the short story collections Entomologia (1997) and Bones notícies (2001); the novels Pere Marín (1998), Goril·la blanc (2002), Rodalies (2004, Sant Joan Prize and the National Prize for Catalan Literature), and Quatre dies a l'Àfrica (2005); and the book-length essay Petita crònica d'un professor a secundària (2001), a controversial bestseller in which the author exposed the frustration prevalent among educators with disarming sincerity and raw candor.
Egypt | Hungarian | Short Fiction
September, 2013Like most of Sándor Jászberényi's fiction, "How Ahmed Salem Abandoned God" is a story steeped in a violent reality. Drawing on his experiences as a journalist in Middle East conflict zones, Jászberényi's stories read like dispatches from the human side of war. It is the kind of writing that keeps good company with great journalist-observers of wars past, such as John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Graham Greene. His settings range from Libya to Syria, Egypt to Sudan, but his writing is always rooted in universal questions of faith, fidelity, and personal responsibility.
Short Fiction | Spain | Spanish
September, 2013Patricia Esteban Erlés (b. 1972 in Zaragoza, Spain) completed her studies in Hispanic Philology at the University of Zaragoza and specializes in chivalric literature. Her own literary production, in contrast, is firmly rooted in contemporary society, as she represents the age in which she lives, with all the technological innovations and personal uncertainties of our postmodern world. Her work has been described as gothic, with a marked influence from film, featuring a disarming sense of the mysterious as she explores the points of contact between reality and fantasy. The story featured here, "Cantalobos," comes from Manderley en venta (Tropos, 2010), which won the 2007 University of Zaragoza literary award for short fiction and was named one of the top ten books of short stories of 2008.
Arabic | Germany | Short Fiction
September, 2013Zuhdi Al-Dahoodi is a Kurdish Iraqi author who has published many short stories and novels in Arabic. His university studies were in Germany, and he has taught there and in Iraq and Libya.
The short story "Two Friends" comes from his first short story collection and draws on his experiences as a young primary school teacher. In this story, the narrator, who is a very young primary school teacher, receives a lesson in hunting and in life from a sixteen-year-old student who began primary school fully grown.
Argentina | Short Fiction | Spanish
September, 2013Romina Doval teaches at the University of Buenos Aires. She has translated several books from French into Spanish, including Isabelle Rimbaud's Mon frère Arthur. Her short stories and essays have appeared in a wide range of magazines, newspapers, and anthologies, including the featured story, which appeared as "La edad de la razón" in La joven guardia. Nueva narrativa argentina (The Youthguard: New Argentine Fiction).
Poland | Polish | Short Fiction
September, 2013Sylwia Siedlecka teaches at the University of Warsaw and in the Collegium Civitas. Trained as a Czech and Bulgarian scholar, she knows seven living languages and three dead ones. "Children" is taken from her debut book of fiction, Szczeniaki (Puppies), which appeared in 2010. A recurring motif in the collection is death; Siedlecka is interested in particular in exploring the feelings of the bereaved in her work.
Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
July, 2013Anatoly Gavrilov is a contemporary Russian writer of short stories. Born in Ukraine, and a graduate of the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute, Gavrilov now lives in Vladimir and works as a postman. His work was not published in the USSR until 1989. A writer of modest output, Gavrilov's laconic style and experimental narratives have left their mark on modern Russian prose, particularly the so-called "new prose" movement. The mood of his works is pessimistic. His heroes are despondent and confounded by unexpected twists of fate. His basic theme is the futility of the little man's existence--the writer has little faith in his heroes' attempts to change the world. His artistic approach is one of unwavering authenticity and specificity.
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.
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Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).