The first time I visited Buenos Aires, I was sixteen years old. It was only the second time I'd ever left the States–the first to a country that was not English-speaking–and my experience was meticulously mapped. There were tango shows and treks through the technicolor alleys of La Boca. There were orange trees and street markets and performances at the Teatro Colón. There were handsome waiters not so much older than I was who served me steak, and handsome gauchos who put on the traditional corrida de sortija displays for us—on horseback, armed with thin jousting poles, they'd attempt to pierce the key rings strung with ribbons of white and baby blue that were mounted on an archway overhead. When they speared one, they'd single one of us from the crowd and offer it with a kiss as a souvenir.
This Buenos Aires was the one that lived for many years inside my mind. I was not young or silly or inexperienced enough, even then, that it was lost on me that this had all been carefully curated for an outsider, and yet memories of it still ached with that visceral pang of romance that memories of that age do.
Margarita García Robayo's collection Orquídeas ("Orchids"), on the other hand, offers an entirely different Buenos Aires: one that lives on scaffolds and in backroom bars, at late-night parties and among transgender prostitutes, on mosquito-ridden patios and in butcher shops–in the quotidian, in the ephemeral, as crónicas do. Published daily in newspapers and magazines around the world—but especially in Latin America—this literary genre of short prose may range from witty commentary to melancholic remembrance to fiery political satire. What the best crónicas unfailingly share, however, is that they live in a dark, amorphous space where observance may be faulty, memories may be deliberately amended, character is often irrelevant, tragedy and comedy may coexist, and the reader never quite knows where they stand.
Assembled together between covers like slides in a carousel, García Robayo's crónicas make Buenos Aires begin to look a lot like Brooklyn, or like anywhere, where mundane and absurd observances spin through our heads constantly each day and quickly disappear. And yet the author treats each with such indelible specificity, with such tenderness and disdain, that immersed in each page-long moment, the reader knows it could never have occurred anywhere else but in García Robayo's city, in her world. And so I struggled to translate this book, at first. The words were there but the spirit wasn't. I still wanted the technicolor alleys, the handsome waiters. Never before as a translator have I so struggled to find an author's voice.
In November 2016, two days after the election of Donald Trump, I returned to Buenos Aires. My rose-colored glasses were gone, my guard was down, I was alone, and for a week I spoke to almost no one except shopkeepers and taxi drivers to whom I would struggle to explain the Electoral College in Spanish. I had planned to return to the street fairs, to see some tango, to vacation. Instead, for a week, I walked. From Villa Crespo to San Telmo, Nuñez to the Recoleta, Palermo Soho to the Centro, I walked and walked and there it was: García Robayo's Buenos Aires, in the punk-rock art students and their rustling sketchbooks, in the sex shops in the Retiro, in the tourist traffic across the footbridges over the brown water of the Río Dique, as in the life of any great city seen through a cronista's eyes. I now prefer this version, this vision, the one García Robayo offers, the one glimpsed at in this selection, the one I finally found in her voice upon returning. A Buenos Aires uglier, more pathetic, truer and therefore somehow ever more romantic than the one I had once known.
- Alicia Maria Meier
José Asunción Silva (1865-1896) is credited, through his assimilation of elements of Symbolism and the work of poets such as Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe, with helping inaugurate Latin American modernismo. Silva was born in Bogotá to a wealthy family with a love of literature and a history of tragedy. At nineteen, he visited France, where he met the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, but was forced to return to Bogotá to take control of his father’s failing business. Unable to pay his family’s debts, he took a diplomatic post in Caracas, and in 1892 his sister Elvira died, occasioning the composition of “Nocturne III,” one of the most famous poems in the Spanish language. Silva is also the author of a novel, De Sobremesa, which was reconstructed after first having been lost in a shipwreck on his return from Caracas. On May 23, 1896, after a dinner party, he shot himself in the heart. He was thirty years old. The house where he lived in Bogotá is now the Silva Poetry House, a national monument and an important cultural organization that grants the José Asunción Silva poetry prize for the recognition of a lifetime of poetic work.
While Silva is Colombia’s most famous poet (he appears on the 5000 Peso bill), his poems are virtually unknown in the United States. These translations stay close to the overall sense of Silva’s poems, but nevertheless diverge and take liberties. Readers encountering Silva for the first time should note that that while many of these translations fulfill the mandate of translation as it is usually understood, some, such as “Nocturne III,” might best be described as collaborations. I’d compare them to the paintings of Glenn Brown, whose hallucinatory reworkings of old masters result in something both familiar and uncannily new. But while Brown might adapt, say, a Rembrandt—an image long established in the canon—Silva’s poems are not yet widely available in English, so comparisons can’t easily be made. I’ve taken the risk of introducing some of these poems into English in non-traditional translations because I’m hopeful that more normative translations of Silva will follow, but also because my original intention in translating Silva was more personal: I sought to engage, as an American of Colombian descent, on my own terms with the work of one of Colombia’s most important poets. I was pleased to find not the antisocial, “diseased” modernist many Latin American critics have dismissively accused Silva of being,* but, to the contrary, a poet whose work centers around the question of life—both life as such, in all its scintillation and strangeness, and the complex question of how to live. The questions Silva poses—whether poetry can be lived, whether the price of stability isn’t a forfeiture of life itself, and how life and the numerous deaths-in-life manifest themselves—are as urgent as ever. My primary objective as a translator was thus to convey the urgency and originality of Silva’s vision and the consistency of his thought.
* For an analysis of Silva’s reception in Latin America, see Alfreo Villanueva-Collado’s “Masculine Culture, Feminoid Modernism: José Asunción Silva and ‘El mal metafísico’” (Confluencia, Volume 19, Number 2). Villanueva-Collado looks at Silva and others to explore “the relationship between the paradigm shift called Modernity, understood as a national project gendered as masculine, and the concept of Modernism as a pathogen which feminizes culture,” and argues that “Such a relationship lies at the center of Latin American critical and cultural practice and, operating outside critical consciousness, still shapes and determines cultural and literary criticism, especially with respect to Latin American turn-of-the-century narrative production.”
- Robert Fernandez
Argentina | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
May, 2017The poetry featured here will appear in an in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the above post for editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida's introduction to the project.
Argentina | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
May, 2017The poetry featured here will appear in an in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the above post for editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida's introduction to the project.
Argentina | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
May, 2017The poetry featured here will appear in an in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the above post for editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida's introduction to the project.
Argentina | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
May, 2017The poetry featured here will appear in an in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the above post for editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida's introduction to the project.
The poetry featured here will appear in an in-progress anthology of poetry by women writers living in Argentina. Please see the above post for editor and contributing translator Alexis Almeida's introduction to the project.
Andrea Chapela is the daughter of a physicist and a mathematician, so she naturally studied chemistry. Luckily for me, she’s also a creative writer. The exciting thing about the poems in Fundamentals of Applied Chemistry is that they are a scientist’s exploration of life and relationships through poetry—and at the same time, a poet’s exploration of life and relationships through chemistry! Not only that, but they’re funny, cutting, insightful—and a lot of fun to translate. Ars poetica as lab report? Breakup poem as description of Bond Theory? I’m in. I think I learned more scientific terminology via translating these poems than I ever did in my high school chemistry class! To her credit, Andrea is also a patient teacher and was very helpful in talking me through the structural ideas guiding many of these poems. Though I don’t think intimate knowledge of the laws and structures she references is necessary to reading these poems, her explanations and diagrams were helpful in making sure I translated in such a way as to convey the overall metaphors. Andrea is an accomplished fiction writer, and these poems indicate she has a bright career as a poet as well.
- Kelsi Vanada
Mexico | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
February, 2017The three poems included here are from Arturo Loera’s book La retórica del llanto (Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro, 2014). Apart from one poem in the anthology Poets for Ayotzinapa (Mexico City Lit, 2015), this is the first time his work has appeared in translation.
Loera’s voice is always candid. It treads that risky line where “poetic language” becomes difficult to distinguish from common ways of feeling, thinking, and, in this case, mourning. This is hard as hell to pull off. Often, though, it is a mark of good poetry. The imagery draws almost exclusively from the near-at-hand--place-names, regional attire, childhood memories--but is nevertheless rife with ambiguity. The language is plainspoken even as it works full-gear to perform multiple tasks at once. The simplest moments are the most equivocal. Whenever possible, I have tried to create equivalent effects in English.
On the whole I was strict with the meanings of individual words but not above taking liberties for the sake of sound. Example: replacing the Spanish word for “alcohol” with “liquor” in English just because it sounds better coming after “shatter.” There is a strong rhythm, conversational quality, and incantatory pulse to these poems which I hope feels familiar to American readers.
- Garrett Stanford Phelps
Mexico | Short Fiction | Spanish
December, 2016Italo-Mexican writer Fabio Morábito’s patient, nomadic gaze observes the world through the cracks and fissures of everyday life in order to disclose its discontinuities, uncovering along the way the secret lives of people and things. As a geographic and linguistic immigrant--from Italy to Mexico and from Italian to Spanish--Morábito sets his writing in a perpetually liminal space, seeking anonymous points of convergence made possible at the edges and borders of the surface of things. In order to do so, he purposefully displaces himself, tempting the void, as he states in a poem from De lunes todo el año ("A Year of Mondays"), “In order to feel alive/ we must be standing on a kind of desolation.” (All translations are mine.)
Morábito is the rare author who practices fiction and poetry with equal dexterity, and “The Sailboat” is the first story in his fourth collection of short fiction, Madres y perros ("Mothers and Dogs"), published in 2016 by Editorial Sexto Piso. The fifteen stories spring from quotidian situations and places in Mexico and abroad, but his writing soon reveals unsettling enigmas: two brothers worry more about a dog locked in an apartment who hasn’t been fed than they do about their dying mother; a man’s evening jog on a racetrack turns into a savage battle between runners when the lights go out; a daughter learns to draft business letters as an homage to her mother. The stories leave us with what critic Peio Riaño calls a “deaf question that is never truly answered,” that nevertheless offers new ways of viewing and caring for our world.
I was an ardent reader of Morábito’s poetry before I discovered his fiction and essays. Often-overlooked everyday things and people who are commonly forgotten--for example, a swing set, a group of construction workers, the old pipes running up a bathroom wall, a cow grazing in a field--are given space in his verse to be resignified and to resignify, in turn, the poetic subject and the reader herself. In Morábito’s fiction, this amplified process obliges us to question constructions of order and meaning, and to contemplate the false coherence of systems of knowledge and representation, memory, and narration.
- Sarah Pollack
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).