Poetry | Russia | Russian | United States
October, 2020“David and Orpheus” juxtaposes the archetypal musicians of Abrahamic and Graeco-Roman religion. David and Orpheus are paralleled throughout: via their instruments, harp and lyre; their certainty–David’s in his god, Orpheus’s in his art (their uncertainty is vice versa); their woodland location; and their situation just after a crossroads in their stories–David’s anointing as King of Israel, and Orpheus’s return from Hades. The paralleling also happens on a formal level: the pair occupy separate stanzas, but are united through rhyme, which operates across–not within–stanzas (I have replicated the rhyme scheme in my translation). But whereas David sees a future, embodied in the tradition-bearing “tree” of his people, Orpheus, having lost Eurydice, has a fatalistic disregard for life. This is reflected in the imagery of the second part: whereas David’s extends to the twentieth century through Christian imagery, Orpheus’s remains resolutely classical.
From a wasp trapped in a clock, “The Wasp in the Hour” spins an allegory of our implication in time. Kutik admits this is “a difficult poem”–its flow of images can be baffling. In part 1, the clock becomes a cuckoo, then a seed, while the wasp becomes a zero (a non-existent numeral on a clock); the Roman numerals on the clock face turn it into the shield which Horace famously dropped at Philippi, when the triumvirs defeated the Republican army; then the clock hands – which are also ancient arrows–turn into a sewing needle, moving time forward. In part 2, this needle is thread, which becomes Zeus’s golden rain, which impregnated Danaë; the clock becomes a spinning wheel, with the wasp a spindle inside it, and Zeus its thread; Zeus attempts to drown the clock, which is his father Cronus (Time), to avenge his siblings, eaten by Cronus; finally, the clock turns into a ball of yarn, and its hands are knitting needles. In part 3, this yarn is stripy socks worn by the wasp; the clock becomes a football, then semen, then a cup; the wasp is a zero again, and therefore “nil-time,” or our present, which is represented by open mouths (zeros); finally, the clock turns into a round table, then the firmament, then a person–and the wasp drowns in the cup/Time. Kutik’s ultimate message is that “living here means wasting Time,” and that “we must accept ourselves as numerals (‘golden tsars’) of a much bigger 'round table’ than a clock face, that is the sky itself.”
In “Cats’ July” Kutik looks into the dreams of cats and sees their great and terrible history before their decline into creatures of luxury. The domestication of the cat in Ancient Egypt is equated with first the seduction of Cleopatra and then the assassination of Julius Caesar. The final stanza is a feline Actium–the deciding battle of the Roman Civil Wars–with cats cast both as the fighting ships and as Mark Antony.
“In Memory of Anton and Allen” is Kutik’s obituary for his Persian blue cat Anton and his friend Allen Ginsberg.
- Georgina Barker
Arabic | Iraq | Poetry | United States
October, 2020Faleeha Hassan and I have news we find exciting: she has signed a contract with Amazon Crossing to write a memoir for them entitled The War & Me, and she has written, and I have already translated, its first three chapters. The doorways to this opportunity for us were her novella Butterfly Voice, which I have translated but which we have not published, and my translation of I’m in Seattle, Where Are You?, the new memoir by Iraqi author Mortada Gzar, forthcoming from Amazon Crossing in April 2021.
- William Hutchins
Argentina | Short Fiction | Spanish | United States
July, 2020I think this story is the first translation of mine that came about almost entirely thanks to social media. I’m not, or at least I wasn’t, a social media person. I’ve been known to abruptly leave a gathering because someone wanted to take a selfie. I can’t understand how people handle the amount of information (and opinion) that comes swarming out at you from the average Facebook page. But I’d also been feeling bad that I never did anything to promote the books and publications I was involved in, especially because they tended to be independent concerns for whom every little bit helps. So when my siblings ganged up on me to give me a smartphone so I could join the familial WhatsApp group it seemed time to dip my toes into the water and Instagram seemed the least intrusive of the different options available. Thus the account peoplewhoreadinbars was born with the intention of creating a small community of people who like to bring books to bars (it’s currently peoplewhomissreadinginbars, which I do, very much). That never really worked out, but over the past couple of years I have enjoyed the experience much more than I thought. One of my discoveries has been that a lot of writers, quite a few you wouldn’t expect, are also on the network. It’s become a reflex to see whether the author of writing I’ve enjoyed has an account.
This turned out to be true of Lolita Copacabana when I was intrigued by her text in the anthology Bogota 39: New Voices from Latin America, published by the Hay Festival and Oneworld in English. Although I was mildly disappointed to discover that LC wasn’t the six-foot-six drag queen of my imagination, I soon found plenty to enjoy about her posts: she has a sharp eye for the absurdities and beauty of everyday life and is disarmingly frank about her blueberry slushy habit. Best of all, she has a wonderfully angry sense of humor. All of these are highly encouraging traits in a writer and I resolved that I’d ask permission to translate something by Copacabana whenever an opportunity came up. So when I saw “Domestic Manners of the Americans” published in Spanish in the Rio Grande Review, I was quick off the mark.
To an extent, the story is a faithful reflection of that Instagram account, albeit far more erudite and profound and even more fun. An old school, substance-fueled road trip, it is the vivid chronicle of a professor’s madcap journey across the Midwest at the behest of an increasingly deranged bunny rabbit. Although there are obviously numerous precedents for such a quest in American literature, it is typical of Copacabana that the books she foregrounds are memoirs of travels through the U.S. by Simone de Beauvoir and Vladimir Mayakovsky (the quotes are my translations from the Spanish–in part because the narrator cites the Spanish editions specifically but mostly because, ummm . . . it didn’t occur to me to seek out the English translations until the brilliant InTranslation editor Jen suggested it and it turns out that the respective translations from Russian and French into Spanish are slightly different from their English counterparts. All part of the wonderful world of translated lit). It’s a heady, and brilliant, mixture that I’m sure readers will enjoy.
- Kit Maude
English | Introductory Essay | United States
November, 2019For our November issue, InTranslation is pleased to partner with Art Omi: Writers, whose annual writing residencies, offered in the fall and spring, and Translation Lab, held every November, provide authors and translators much-needed space and time to think, work, and create in picturesque Ghent, New York.
The authors and translators featured in this issue are Translation Lab alumni. In the first post, Carol Frederick, Deputy Director of Art Omi: Writers, and DW Gibson, Director, provide an overview of the Translation Lab's vision and history.
- InTranslation
English | Essay | United States
June, 2019Cuba | Poetry | Spanish | United States
April, 2019“Poetry saved me from madness,” Jorge Olivera Castillo once said to describe his time in Guantánamo Prison. Between 2016 and 2018, the poet escaped what remained of his 18-year sentence by living in the United States, first as a writer for the Harvard University Scholars at Risk Program (where I met him) and second as an International Writers Project Fellow at Brown University. The poems featured here were written during the writer’s time in the United States, before he returned to Cuba at the risk of being incarcerated once again.
The primary tensions I see in Olivera’s poems lie between experiences of confinement and imaginaries of travel, evocative of the challenges of migratory communities (past and present), of Olivera’s own physically and psychologically traumatizing time in prison, and of his 1981 journey in a cargo ship to fight in the Angolan Civil War. The sincerity of Olivera’s poetry is reminiscent of Cuban journalist-poet José Martí’s Versos sencillos (1897), but also, more recently, of the works of exiled writer Enrique Labrador Ruiz (1902-1991). Even as they underline confinement, the poems reflect the motifs of transport, both under the auspices of continued captivity (to political regimes, nightmares, desire) and the hope for freedom.
While the difficulty of translating these poems sometimes sprang from their harrowing content and remarkable tonal candor, I took refuge in the poems' structures. Olivera’s lines are often jagged, some extending over the page and then followed by brief two- or three-word lines that appear to retreat into quieted, controlled thought, before extending again into rumination. The use of white space and the poems’ brevity speak equally to an aesthetic of erratically controlled speech marked with the quick imposition of silence. As with the queer Cuban poets Severo Sarduy and José Lezama Lima, the Afro-descendant poet’s works are reflective of concerns that Caribbean poets elsewhere share: the bounds between sea and land, land and body, dream and reality, and the myth of home faced with the reality of exile. In illuminating these bounds in “Endangered,” for instance, the poet’s voices leap between anthropomorphized depictions of the sun to “heaps of sand” embedded in a landscape of “hardened faces.” Indeed, it seems in Olivera’s poems that imaginaries of landscape are often more alive and animated than the bodies that navigate their place within it.
Written from Cambridge, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island, these poems are part and parcel of the ongoing work Olivera has taken up to share his memory of imprisonment and aspirations for uncensored speech and literary discourse in and about Cuba. When I served as an interpreter for Jorge Olivera—at a talk he gave at Harvard University—he shared these objectives with his audience while stating that one of the main poets that provided him sustenance in solitary confinement was a woman from Massachusetts who passed much of her life in solitude: Emily Dickinson.
As Jorge Olivera Castillo has just recently returned to Cuba, he seeks further opportunities to share his voice in English while building literary and political conversations on and beyond the island.
- David Francis
Memoir (excerpt) | Poland | United States | Yiddish
February, 2019Di vos zaynen nisht geblibn: dertseylungen (Those Who Didn’t Survive: Stories) (New York and Tel Aviv, 1972) is a memoir by Rachmil Bryks (1912-1974) of his shtetl Skarżysko-Kamienna, Poland, as refracted through the figure of his great-uncle Reb Mendl Feldman. Bryks presents the shtetl’s folk traditions and an extended cast of characters, while always deftly returning the thread to Reb Mendl. In the process, a vivid collective portrait of an annihilated Jewish community emerges. His approach is unconventional—there are no chapter breaks or readily apparent chronology. The book is more a panorama chock full of anecdotes, customs, details, and personalities than a traditional memoir with a linear narrative drive. Known widely for his pioneering use of dark humor in his Holocaust fiction, Bryks’ non-fiction displays his powers of description and empathic observations. In this excerpt, we meet two of the shtetl’s particularly colorful characters. Those Who Didn’t Survive is one of three memoirs by Rachmil Bryks I am translating as a 2018-2019 Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow. I thank Bella Bryks-Klein for her enthusiastic support of this translation project; the Yiddish Book Center and all of the program’s staff, fellows, and instructors; my mentor Elizabeth Harris; Justin Cammy for his feedback; and Ri J. Turner for her assistance with the translation of some challenging Yiddish words and expressions.
- Yermiyahu Ahron Taub
Argentina | Poetry | Spanish | United States
November, 2018What makes Silvina López Medin’s poetry complicated is its philosophical, impressionistic, associative qualities. Often her language steers us away from noticing the despair behind her images by forcing us to work with nuances of abstraction. To some degree, translating the words suffices to render that complexity: present it as she’s presented it. But I have also tried to select words that point to what is missing. Often, López Medin’s poems are more about what is not there than what is there—the missing man, his missing eyes, the missing laughter, the touch that doesn’t happen. This, to me, makes López Medin’s poems consummately Argentinean: it’s a country where there is almost more missing than present, where the stifled voice rings after the spoken falls silent. André Lefevere wrote, “The word does not create a world ex nihilo. Through the grid of tradition it creates a counterworld, one that is fashioned under the constraints of the world the creator lives and works in, and one that can be explained, understood better if these constraints are taken into account.” López Medin creates a counterworld out of the one that exists, her world peopled by what is missing and the language that has survived people’s disappearance. If ever a country needed poets to create a counterworld from the language that has survived its violence, Argentina does.
- Jasmine V. Bailey
100 Refutations | Costa Rica | English | Poetry | United States | Uruguay
June, 2018John Manuel Arias is a gay Costa Rican and Uruguayan poet back in Washington, DC after many years. He is a Canto Mundo fellow and bookseller at Politics and Prose. His poetry has appeared in Sixth Finch, the Journal, and Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, and his fiction has been published by Akashic Books, the Acentos Review, and Cardinal Sins Journal. Before living in DC, he lived in Costa Rica with his grandmother and four ghosts.
100 Refutations | Dominican Republic | English | Poetry | United States
May, 2018Maria Farazdel is a native of the Dominican Republic who has lived and worked in New York since the age of 17. She received her BA from Hunter College, MA in Education from Fordham University, and PhD in School District Administration from Long Island University. Formally an Assistant Principal, she has taught English as a Second Language and Bilingual Education. She is a member of Dominican Poets USA and the literary group Camila Enriquez Ureña. She is the author of the books My Little Paradise, Amongst Voices and Spaces, and Laberinto de la Espera.
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.
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