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).
Antonio Gamoneda was born in 1931. He is one of the most widely read contemporary Spanish poets. His most successful early work, Blues castellano, dates to the period 1961-66. He then entered a long period of self-protective censorship, from which he emerged upon the death of Franco with the publication of Description of the Lie (León 1977). In 1986, with the publication of the first five sections of Book of the Cold // Libro del frío, he became recognized for the originality of his language and the way in which it enacts psychological processes of personal loss and responds to the conflicted emotions needed for survival. Book of the Cold // Libro del frío is considered to be most vital and innovative volume in Antonio Gamoneda's body of work. In 1992, a new edition of Libro del frío appeared, including the major poem featured here, "Cold of Limits," inspired by and written in collaboration with the painter Antoni Tapies. In 2006, Gamoneda received the Cervantes Prize, an honor bestowed annually upon a distinguished Spanish-language author.
Description of the Lie, Book of the Cold, and another of Gamoneda's works, Gravestones (all of which were translated by Donald Wellman), are deeply marked by the dark years of the Franco dictatorship. Gamoneda's poetry can be read as a form of witness, but the work itself is conceived and should be understood as poetry marked by distinctive compositional values of a musical order, both in terms of rhythms and interlaced imagery.
Donald Wellman's translation of Description of the Lie is forthcoming from Talisman House Press.
Novel (excerpt) | Spanish | Uruguay
July, 2013Who Among Us: A Novel narrates the history of a classic love triangle, but with the variation that it is the husband who encourages the wife to take a lover. The novel consists of three parts--three different versions of the same sentimental conflict that culminate in the story each character relates from his or her own perspective. The novel takes place in Montevideo, but this is merely circumstantial; the most prevalent element of the work is the delving into each character's mind, not the monitoring of a social atmosphere. With effective subtlety, Benedetti creates opposing mirrors of the three characters' lives and, at the novel's climax, explicitly asks its underlying question: "Who among us judges whom?"
Marcelo Morales works along boundaries between poetry and prose, with a particular interest in the fragment. These selections from El círculo mágico (The Visionary Circle, 2007) evoke the haunting realities of reorientation and transition that the island confronted at the beginning of the current century: the need to envision the end of an era; to reexamine relations between nation and world, self and society in order to arrive at a new understanding of the present; and to find a language for acknowledging the impact of emigration on everyday life.
Mexico | Spanish | Verse Novel (Excerpts)
March, 2013After being pensioned off for his unstable behavior, Mr. Gordon experiences a fracture of his spirit in an artificial, Californian Eden. In the shade of the tree of a thousand leaves, at the edge of a swimming pool, Gordon transcribes his thoughts, memories, and questions while striving to sort out the harassment he experiences from his wife and his best friend, engaging all the while in a dialogue with an interior voice determined to finish off what remains of his sanity.
Death on rúa Augusta is the diary of a person who cannibalizes his own self. In this narrative poem, Tedi López Mills masterfully delves into the machinery of consciousness in order to exhibit, boldly, that slender thread that keeps us attached to the world. A masterful work of contemporary Mexican literature, which shares both the human depth of Zbigniew Herbert's Mr. Cogito and the teasing ambiguity of Johann von Goethe's Elf King, it does showcase one truth at the heart of all human life: No person is to be despised as worthless; no person can ever be deprived of her or his dignity. Even the "zeros" among us are all "classics after our own fashion."
Latin American literature is world renowned for its richness in a variety of genres--poetry, the essay, the short story and, of course, the novel. Spanish-language literature in diary form seems less well known. Ocosingo War Diary is the first-ever English translation of one well-known writer's twelve-day ordeal, which took place in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, near Guatemala. Efraín Bartolomé gives an eyewitness account of the New Year's Eve massacre of 1994. Published to critical acclaim in Spanish in 1995, Ocosingo is part of a now classic tradition of testimonial literature in the vein of Elena Poniatowska's Massacre in Mexico (1971). Part pastoral elegy, part eyewitness reportage, Bartolomé's artful war diary is as much a prose poem as it is a memoir.
Novel (excerpts) | Spanish | Uruguay
December, 2012Primavera Con Una Esquina Rota is a testimonial hybrid novel centered on the experience and effects of exile. It chronicles the lives of five family members and the true experiences (for example, health problems) of the author himself interspersed at random along parallel and joining narrative lines. Benedetti uses many points of view (first-person, third-person, interior monologue, stream of consciousness, free indirect) and different styles (conversational, epistolary, poetic) along with delayed information and word games.
The novel begins about eight months before the release of Santiago, a militant serving a five-year prison term in the Libertad de Montevideo prison for attempting to overthrow the government, and who, upon his release and return home to resume his family life, discovers the impossibility of resuming any previous personal relationships. Santiago's family members include Don Rafael, his father; Graciela, his wife; and Beatriz, their daughter. Rolando, a friend to all of them, and lovestruck, wanders through the novel, eventually becoming Graciela's lover. They're all Uruguayan, and except for the prisoner, Santiago, reside in what appears to be Mexico City.
Santiago is present in the novel through his letters, which like most prisoner's letters express hope for the future. Don Rafael represents the historical memory of the city of his exile, while reflecting on the wisdom gained by those who are able to live in the present. Graciela, a militant in her own right, feels despair and exhaustion, a sickness of the soul that doesn't have to do with loyalties or treachery, but with the need to be useful and feel alive. Rolando is known as "Uncle Rolando" to Beatriz and offers unselfish and focused support to Graciela, who, although she is increasingly independent, is nevertheless confused or perhaps disoriented by her life. And just like her imprisoned father Santiago, who intervenes in the novel through his letters, young Beatriz does so through texts that could be a form of interior monologue, entries from a diary, or compositions written in school.
Primavera Con Una Esquina Rota is not only a magnificent exercise in literary style, lightly hampered by the incorporation of texts that are a bit foreign to the nucleus of the novel, but rather, principally, a remarkable display of patriotic literary courage on Benedetti's behalf. Having been vaccinated against intimidation long before, he wasn't afraid to present several unheroic, weak, and contradictory men and women while knowing that a good portion of expatriates would read the novel with a hypercritical military eye.
(A slightly different version of this translator's note originally appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review (Issue #48, Spring/Summer 2011))
Novel (excerpt) | Spain | Spanish
November, 2012Ricardo Menéndez Salmón is one of the most respected writers in the Spanish literary scene. Born in Gijón (Asturias) in 1971, he studied philosophy and has written eight novels, a book of short stories, and a literary travel book. He regularly publishes articles in newspapers, and cultural and literary journals. His work has been translated into Catalan, French, Italian, Dutch, and Portuguese, and he has received numerous literary awards. Praised unanimously by critics in Spain, his prose, rich and cultivated, has been described as having "a personal style, strong and close to expressionism" (El País); "a mature writer with the air of a classic" (ABC Cultural); "no writer today can compare to Ricardo Menéndez Salmón" (Qué Leer); "Goyaesque imagery" (Revista de Letras); "the best of a generation of writers" (La Razón). His latest novel Medusa was published in September 2012.
Irse (English translation: "To Leave") is Isabel Cadenas Cañón's first poetry book. It was awarded the 2009 Caja de Guadalajara-Fundación Siglo Futuro Award for young poets and published in 2010. The book is divided into three parts, and it explores the consequences of leaving, of being abroad, and the impossibility of returning. The book was one of the ten best-selling poetry books in Spain for twelve consecutive weeks.
Dominican Republic | Prose Poetry | Spanish
June, 2012Death juxtaposed with amorous love becomes a creative force that fuels life as a never-ending cycle in this short, inventive prose poem originally published in Spanish in the literary journal La Poesia Sorprendida (No. IV, January 1944).
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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