100 Refutations | Nicaragua | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018Joaquín Pasos (1914-1947) was born in Granada, Nicaragua, studied law at the University of Managua, and was part of the Nicaraguan Movimiento de Vanguardia. He wrote plays, poems, and essays, and was occasionally incarcerated for his involvement in satirical work mocking the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza García. In Poemas de un joven, Ernesto Cardenal wrote that Pasos’s poetry was “cheerful, like the Nicaraguan people [who], despite all they have suffered, remain always cheerful.”
100 Refutations | Cuba | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018Juana Borrero was born in Havana in 1877 and died in Key West in 1896 at the age of nineteen. She was born into a family of intellectuals: her father and all her siblings wrote verses which were later compiled and published under the title Versos familiares.
100 Refutations | Poetry | Puerto Rico | Spanish
April, 2018Mara Pastor is a Puerto Rican poet, editor, and translator. Her works include the chapbook As Though the Wound Had Heard (Cardboard House Press, 2017, Tr. María José Giménez), Children of Another Hour (Argos Books, 2013, Tr. Noel Black), and the acclaimed collection Poemas para fomentar el turismo, finalist for the 2013 Premio Internacional Festival de la Lira in Ecuador. Other books in Spanish include Sal de magnesio (2015), Arcadian Boutique (2014), Candada por error (2009), and Alabalacera (2006). Her poems have been translated into more than six languages, and her work has appeared in publications such as Boston Review, 80 grados, Clarín, and El País. Her skill as a live performer of poetry has given her a place in renowned festivals such as Festival de Poesía de Rosario, Argentina; Latinale, Berlin (2016); Festival de la Palabra, San Juan (2015); Festival de la Lira, Ecuador (2015); La Habana International Book Fair, Cuba (2014); and Festival del Caracol, Tijuana (2013). Her poetry has been anthologized in 1,000 millones: poesía en lengua española del siglo XXI (2014), Red de voces: poesía contemporánea puertorriqueña (Casa de las Américas, 2012), and Hallucinated Horse: New Latin American Poets (Pig Hog Press, 2012). Coeditor of the anthology of Puerto Rican contemporary poetry Vientos Alisios, she was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and lives in Ponce, Puerto Rico.
100 Refutations | Mexico | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018José Eugenio Sánchez (Guadalajara, México, 1965) is the author of jack boner & the rebellion (Almadia, 2014), suite prelude: a/h1n1 (Toad Press, 2011), Galaxy limited café (Almadia, 2011), escenas sagradas del oriente (Almadía, 2009), la felicidad es una pistola caliente (Colección Visor de Poesía, España, 2004), and physical graffiti (Colección Visor de Poesía, España, 1998). He is a member of FONCA’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. In 2006, he was invited by the U.S. State Department to participate in The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, receiving an Honorary Fellow Writer grant. He won the Loewe Foundation’s 10th International Prize for Young Poets. In 2014, he curated the Festival de Poesía en Voz Alta at the Casa del Lago at UNAM. Currently, he performs with his poetry and rock band, Un País Cayendo a Pedazos. Their album, por ahí no es amor (sonido sexofónico), was released in 2016.
100 Refutations | El Salvador | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018Aída Párraga is a Salvadorean poet.
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
Poetry | Spanish | United States
March, 2018I am a native English speaker who wrote these poems first in Spanish, then translated them into English. I’ve found this to be a fascinating experience, for it asked me to consider the confluence of the two languages in my head: how the languages feed and inform each other, how they share the same “author.”
In some ways, composing in one’s second language may help to serve the poem with happy accidents and inventions. On the other hand, such a project is problematic, especially when one’s native idioms, and cultural and cosmological orientations, may violate the second language--probably in ways that I’m not even aware of. For a poet in any language, the line between invention and violation is often diaphanous, ephemeral, nonexistent. Far from alleviating the inherent difficulties of the translator’s art, translating oneself introduces an additional range of issues.
The act of bringing the Spanish poems (back?) into English, translating my Spanish self to my English self, was intriguing. Poem by poem these selves may recognize each other clearly, or may find each other irritating strangers. Bringing the two into mutual awareness and respect took patience. At their best, the Spanish self and the English self feed each other’s poems with new surprises, shared discoveries.
This project has also expanded my understanding of what “translation" may mean or entail, and of the parallels between translation and revision. I was struck by the notion that all writing is translation in one way or another, starting with a rendering of the electric impulses of the neurotransmitters, a primal alphabet, perhaps.
I am deeply indebted to my colleagues Phillip Krumrich and Gustavo Osorio de Ita for their generous readings and responses to my efforts. Their caring expertise in both languages has been both instructive and inspiring.
- George Eklund
Mexico | Short Prose | Spanish
July, 2017These brief pieces, originally written for a monthly column in the Buenos Aires newspaper Clarín, were published in one of Fabio Morábito’s more recent books, El idioma materno ["Mother Tongue"] (Sexto Piso, 2014). I happened upon this book when I was living in Buenos Aires a few years ago, though I didn't intend to translate it at the time. When my partner started reading the book, wondering why I was always carrying it around and laughing out loud, she convinced me to at least write Morábito to see whether the book had been translated into English. Not only did Morábito give me permission to translate the collection, but that was also the beginning of his regular and invigorating correspondence with me about his work.
Much like Alejandro Rossi’s book Manual of a Distracted One, Morábito’s El idioma materno is less a book about one theme or subject and more a demonstration of style and the view of a broad, discerning gaze cast over almost every imaginable subject. Instead of pontificating or pushing some moral stance, these texts provide a critical view of literature, literary professionalism, and imprecise language, and the author does not shy away from critiquing such themes as creative writing pedagogy, translation, and the reading practices of academics, three spaces or roles he himself inhabits. Morábito is a writer who believes in the substantive, in the complex idea, and in the rhythms of long, complex phrases; quirky details, of course, are the hallmarks of his work.
What I most appreciate about Morabito’s prose, however, is his fixation on, and deep love for, the languages we speak and how we speak them: each of the eighty four texts in El idioma materno contains a stylistic lesson, sometimes subtle and other times explicit, and represents the author’s effort to reveal the essence of a subject and its place in the world. The selections published here exemplify the breadth of the book. The essay—to give a name to these prose pieces—“The Sirens,” for example, is more than a retelling of Odysseus’s encounter with the dangerous creatures who enchanted nearby sailors with their music and voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island. By varying the syntax of the same phrase, Morábito not only encourages us to look at the story from multiple perspectives, but also asks us to consider how slight shifts in language can open up new meanings inside a text. The “ominous song” of the sirens in one sentence leads us to the “ominous island” in the next, to the “ominous sirens” followed by the “ominous sea,” and on and on until the wax becomes “ominous” at the end of the text and the snapping point for the crew, “tired now, as we know, of their Odysseus, the calm sea, the oars, the mast, the islands and that beautiful song.”
- Curtis Bauer
The rich and varied poetic tradition of Ecuador is often overshadowed by that of its larger neighbors —Chile and Peru, in particular—and its contributions tend to go unrecognized internationally. In spite of this, or perhaps to a certain degree as a direct result of its oft-referenced “national inferiority complex,” Ecuador’s poets continue to produce outstanding, groundbreaking work.
At just twenty-three years old, Juan Romero Vinueza has already developed a poetic voice that is multilayered, intertextual, humorous, and deftly crafted. He began writing his first collection of poems, Revólver Escorpión (La Caída Editorial, 2016) at the age of 16, drawing on a wide range of influences, from Federico García Lorca to Nicanor Parra, and to some extent providing a response to the highly neo-baroque style of the generation of Latin American poets directly preceding him. The section of Revólver Escorpión from which these two poems are taken is entitled Vértigo sobre un paísaje andino (“Vertigo over an Andean Landscape”).
- Kimrey Anna Batts
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
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).