Xurxo Borrazás is, without doubt, one of the funnest writers in Galician literature. He’s also one of the most unique, and the most restless, with an unmistakable voice through his widely varying books. The material you have here is selections from his 2002 collection of “miscellany," Pensamentos impuros ("Impure Thoughts"). This book has so much of what I love about his writing: his characteristic warmth, humor, intelligence, humility, and strangeness, condensing it into these short little treatises on all manner of things from libraries to the nature of reality, and vignettes of various encounters with eccentric, neurotic friends.
In classic Borrazás fashion, while these are mostly standalone pieces, the further you read, the more the references intertwine, building and branching off from previous ideas. I’ve tried to showcase this in my selection, the way he uses them to layer the book and add even more depth and humor.
I think it’s also worth pointing out that Borrazás has developed a sort of reputation as an enfant terrible (this is what he was called in the Best European Fiction introduction to his work). I’m not sure I agree with this characterization, however, at least insofar as it associates him with the likes of polemical writers such as Michel Houellebecq. To be sure, Borrazás certainly likes to be provocative, to raise eyebrows, but he does so not through sexism or racism or xenophobia or Islamophobia, but rather by other means, which are, to be sure, still unconventional.
For example, To Be or Not To, probably his best book, is narrated by a curmudgeonly Gen-X’er who hides away in an abandoned Galician village, only to meet an elderly woman and begin a passionate, quite sexual love affair. The novel is full of pornography, bestiality and digressions about prostitution, but if anything I’d describe it as sex-positive. It’s also one of the few pieces of literature I’ve read which takes elderly female desire seriously, at the same time as it creates in her one of the most delightfully idiosyncratic, complex characters I’ve encountered before. All this to say that while he may be provocative, his writing is nothing if not warm, deeply felt, and utterly human.
Nowhere is that more the case than in Impure Thoughts. These musings show Borrazás to be a writer who delights in the beauty, amusement, and absurdity of life, people, and the world we live in. He’s never glib, nor condescending, and for all his intellect, reading him makes you think he’s the kind of person you’d like to get a beer with. And I can attest to that. It has always given me pleasure that, after living in Vigo for a year and meeting occasionally with him and his wife, I've found Borrazás to be much like his writing: open-hearted, curious, affable, generous, and above all, a damn good time.
- Jacob Rogers
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
Poetry (excerpts) | Spain | Spanish
November, 2019An explosion of the microscopic and a journey into the post-apocalyptic, Pilar Fraile Amador’s Breach bears witness—to environmental destruction, climate change, exodus, war, and xenophobia. But more than catastrophe itself, these poems plumb our impulse to document the aftermath, the human mechanisms of testimony that make false claims at objectivity. On a surreal road trip through a world in flames, the poet encounters multiple supposedly neutral observers—scientists, mathematicians, documentarians, philosophers, an uncanny double of herself—and becomes aware of the inherent flaws and subjectivities in each attempt at understanding.
- Lizzie Davis
Catalan | Poetry (excerpts) | Spain
September, 2019I first encountered about a dozen poems of Gemma Gorga in an anthology of contemporary Catalan poets translated into English while I was at an artist’s residency in Barcelona. I was struck by the lucid transparency of her language and syntax as a means for revealing transcendent states. I spent the next few years translating her book of prose poems, Llibre dels minuts (Book of Minutes, Field Translation Series, Oberlin College Press, 2019). Yet I still felt compelled by the rest of her work, which makes abundant use of the verse line. Now I am translating poems from her six other books, and eventually newer uncollected poems, which I hope to edit and translate into a volume of her Selected Poems, tentatively titled Late to the House of Words.
The selection of poems here are all from her third book, Instruments òptics (Brosquil Edicions, 2005). Even its title underlines Gorga’s central preoccupation with poems as being themselves “optical instruments” that can help us see what even a telescope or a microscope cannot: that is, the workings of the human soul through memory.
Yet Gorga’s poems are obsessively focused on words themselves: their enigmatic palpability as well as their sound. Thus, in a poem such as “In Alphabetical Order,” Gorga finds the magic key to certain words by their proximity in the dictionary to others. There was no way to achieve in English the same effect that Gorga could do, where the search for “you” in the final line: (“tu, tul, tulipa, túmul, turment”) is constructed from the letters of tu (you), something I could only approximate in English and instead found myself compensating and resorting to homophony: “you: yarrow, yaw, yawp, yew.” In writing this introduction, I had a moment of translator’s regret. I believe that a translation is never finished, merely abandoned--to repurpose Valéry. I thought about changing the line to “we,” a word whose two-letter form earlier in our alphabet would have allowed me more room to do an analogous architectonic procedure, but at too great an expense to the sense of this crucial final line. For it is the very search for the Other through language that underpins the entire poem, and which forms part of Gorga’s lyric project. In many of these poems, even when they evoke solitude, there is the assumption of the other. In “Pomegranates,” the solitary act of peeling and extracting its seeds effects a powerful inversion of number and agency, where instead of the singular narrator eating seeds, it is the seeds of “Time” that “gobble us up.”
The poems comprising her “Book of Hours” are, of course, concerned with cycles of Time passing, of mortality. In “The Book of Hours: October,” for example, Gorga uses the season to allude to the Classical theme of souls falling like leaves, an image found as far back as Dante and Virgil. She transforms it slightly by comparing the leaves to angels falling, who are then able to escape from the endless repetition “to transport them to another/less painful dimension.” In the very act of creating these secular prayers, Gorga is able to achieve a momentary transcendence for herself and, by reading them, for the reader.
- Sharon Dolin
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
In late 1960, a little-known writer by the name of Mercè Rodoreda entered an unpublished novel, Colometa, for competition in that year’s distinguished Premi Sant Jordi. She did not win. The book did, however, make quite an impression on Joan Fuster, who sat on the prize committee. Convinced the committee had made an awful mistake, Fuster wrote to his good friend Joan Sales. Just five years prior, Sales had co-founded the press Club dels Novel·listes—recently re-baptized Club Editor—and was ever on the hunt for exciting new novelists to add to his roster. “See what you can do,” Fuster said. So Sales sent a letter to this writer whose novel had so dazzled his friend. It was a decision he was not to regret. Two years later, Club Editor published In Diamond Square to instant popular acclaim. More than fifty years later, the novel continues to sell. It has been translated into more than thirty languages, and has seen adaptation to the stage as well as the silver screen. Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel García Márquez even called it the most beautiful novel to be published in Spain since the end of the Civil War.
The letters featured here are culled from the correspondence that brought this novel into being. They represent the early and often tempestuous days of one of the most important friendships in modern Catalan literary history, a relationship that would last for more than twenty years, until Rodoreda’s death. Now, they stand as a testament to the fastidiousness and insight, even the ego, of two of the most beloved figures in this little nation’s exceptionally vast literary tradition.
- Scott Shanahan
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
Galician | Poetry | Short Fiction | Spain
December, 2016Begoña Paz is, to my mind, a necessary writer for the world to know. She writes about topics that I notice most English-language writers seem to avoid (I could never imagine someone from the US writing “The Weight of My Desire"), and in such a startling, beautiful manner. To me, “The Weight of My Desire” represents some of the best characteristics of flash fiction, and the things that draw me to it: in the space of about a page, Paz is able to evoke so much of the history of this crumbling marriage in such simple ways. For example: “Despite every year’s present, a jar of Pond’s wrinkle cream.” With one image she evokes an uncaring husband, not only giving the same present every year, but a present which is a constant reminder to the protagonist that she is aging, that she no longer satisfies him, that he wishes she were younger, and that she feels emptiness over her inability to do anything about her situation. The story delves deep, probing, moving slowly until, with the last two paragraphs Paz turns a slow, pensive narrative into one with charge, moving at lightning speed. It gallops forward towards its conclusion and ends so fast that the reader is left as confused and disoriented as the narrator, who seems, when it is all over, to be wondering what happened and looking down at the page, or the husband, to check and see if it truly did occur.
One of the challenges of translating her poetry is that she has a great economy of language and beautiful imagery: “And cars like pills/ for anything and/ for nothing,/ and pounds/ of dreams/ that spread/ over sidewalks/ at twilight/ so that we step on them/ on our way to the/ jobschooljail of/ our everyday lives.” There is a sort of vague clarity to these lines from her poem, “Proof,” that sort of foggy clarity one gets if awake around that hour before the sun has fully risen and it’s still dark outside. The challenge of linguistic economy becomes greater when dealing with Galician—the amount of contractions in the language makes English seem tame. The Galician language, too, has such a distinct sound to it that it can be hard to approach the sonority of the original, best exemplified by “Motel Silviculture.” In the original, the last stanza reads “Elixe./ Elixe./ Elixe.” In Galician that “x” has a soft, “shh” sound, which softens the tone of the middle-heavy word (e-LI-xe). The word in Galician has a heavy emphasis, but is softened by the “shh” sound, giving a sense of harshness and pressure at the same time as it has a voice-in-your-head, whispering quality to it. In English, the two best translations of this word, which is an imperative verb conjugation of “elixir,” would be “choose” or “decide.” With “choose” readers get some of that softness from the Galician “x,” with “decide,” readers get that pounding iambic nature of the original—faced with a choice between two words in English which only contain half of the original’s sonority, how does one choose, how does one decide?
- Jacob Rogers
Short Fiction | Spain | Spanish
October, 2016Spanish writer Juan José Millás notices what happens when everyone else is looking the other way. His short fiction intrudes upon the intimate, uncomfortable, often shameful but pivotal moments of his protagonists without introduction, warning, or apology, all with a distinct “Millasian” style: he peers upon an isolated human experience, takes a snapshot of it, winks at the reader, and leaves, usually in the span of two pages. Reading his work is much like spying on a voyeur who is simultaneously spying on someone else. It is discomfort, once-removed.
This brief selection from Stories Out in the Open (Cuentos a la intemperie) unfolds on the streets of Madrid at the close of the twentieth century. When our instinct is to avert our gaze, Millás forces us to look closer yet: at a father’s rage on a family road trip, at the adult man who claims to be the son of a pajama-clad stranger, at the Devil perusing religious literature at the European equivalent of Barnes and Noble. This perpetual uncovering, the initial discomfort that results from bearing witness to such private moments, eventually gives way to amusement.
Millás is a household name and public figure of the Iberian Peninsula. He belongs to a generation of writers born at the height of Franco’s dictatorship, but who began writing during the so-called “transition” to democracy. Despite their insistence upon everyday human experience, Millás’ stories are inextricable from their larger historical and political context: they emerge as the products of one who grew up in a dictatorial pressure cooker and who now wants to write about anything but that. Through a deliberate avoidance of key words such as “Spanish civil war” or “Franquismo,” combined with an experimental form and growing emphasis on the effects of the economic crisis, his stories are unmistakably situated in turn-of-the-century Spain. Millás is a rare jewel for the reader; despite his national fame, his work remains largely absent from the Anglophone literary circuit.
- Gabriella Martin
Pilar Fraile Amador's Larva & Hedge is one of those rare collections that affects the reader by both attracting and repelling, that can simultaneously enchant and disturb. Fraile's poems mesmerize and sing; they weave captivating webs. But they are fascinating, too, in their potential for repulsion, in their willingness to inhabit the most unsettling of spaces. The force of the text, then--the way it acts upon the reader's interior--is twofold.
On the one hand, Fraile's poems are magnetic. They read like deftly spun incantations, sonorous lines draped over imagined topographies. But they derive equal force from their readiness to shock and disturb, to wield images that pierce a reader's repose and rearrange one's insides. The poems occupy both dreamscape and night terror; they caress and startle. They situate us in the space between our discomfort and enthrallment at the sight of blood. We cannot turn away.
That Fraile's text both attracts and repels is fitting. It is a collection that deals in dualities, juxtaposing the intimate and the collective, the strong and the weak, the human and the animal; yoking them together to call their differences into question. It is this gesture that begins Fraile's project of blurring lines and traversing borders.
The volume itself is binary, split into two distinct sections that function together. In Larva, Fraile explores the undercurrent of correspondence that exists unnoticed between human beings, the wellspring of the common subconscious. Here, individual and collective memories intermix and alter one another and the living can communicate with objects and the dead. The destruction of the 'I,' then, becomes a generative act that allows the other--or others--to pass into and expand an individual consciousness. Under these circumstances, the lines between past and present, between self and other, grow indistinct. The speaker is a secret essence that mediates the collective, a human distillate in the antechamber of life. The past never dies.
In the second section of the book, Hedge, the individual disappears completely. The poetic subject shifts to plural as Fraile reflects on what binds a community. While both halves of the volume are image-driven, the poems that constitute Hedge are more intricate than the preceding fragments, rich with sensory detail and of longer duration. They take shape as blocks of prose poetry that make use of repetition, compression, and fragmentation and fuse lines into paragraphs. This configuration yields both continuity and a useful sense of isolation: while each poem is visually cloistered as a block of text on its own page, the poems hang together with their consistent form as stages in a continuous meditation.
Fraile cites influences who move "in the border of the border"--from symbolists Baudelaire and Rimbaud with their intuitive associations, unconventional syntax, and indirect expression; to the surrealism of Lorca and Buñuel; to contemporary Spanish classics like Ullán, Valente, and Gamoneda. Her imagistic precision, along with stylistic choices like nonlinear forms and a disjunctive, multivocal timbre, demonstrate a desire to move in literary border areas and to create poetry that is unflinchingly exploratory.
- Elizabeth Davis
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).