China | Chinese | Poetry (excerpts)
September, 2017Yu Xiang is a key figure of the post-'70s Chinese poets. Laureate of several major literary prizes in China, she is the author of multiple collections, including Surging toward Them (Chongqing University Press, 2015) and Poem in a Pocket (Shandong Literature and Arts, 2016). Her first bilingual volume I Can Almost See the Clouds of Dust (Zephyr/The Chinese University Press, 2013; translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain) was longlisted for the 2014 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. As a visual artist, she has exhibited oil paintings at various venues. A new bilingual chapbook Trace (in Sze-Lorrain’s translation) is forthcoming in 2017.
Drama | Haiti | Haitian Creole
September, 2017*
“Everywhere and always there could be a young Antigone who says no. A King Creon who doesn’t want to hear advice.”
Antigone in Haiti, trans. Edith Gold
Felix Morisseau-Leroy wrote Antigòn in the late 1940s and early ’50s, a period just following the United States’ occupation of Haiti (1914-1934) and just prior to the rise of the Duvalier regime (1957). Haiti at the time of Antigòn’s composition was grappling with both immediate and centuries-long colonial legacies and also with its legacy as the first sovereign nation to emerge from a slave uprising. Morisseau-Leroy brought Antigone into Creole and into the Haitian national context to process the struggles and potentials of these legacies. The Greek gods become the Haitian loa, a pantheon of deities whose “horses” are “ridden,” and who each bring out (god in man, man in god) various potentials. The exacting rhetorical jostle of Antigone yields in Antigòn to sudden incantation--men and gods calling up power through rhythm as well as rhetoric to achieve their aims. True to its source, the play maintains a correspondence between familial and societal dysfunction, while casting Antigone as the figure of uncompromising revolution and absolute fidelity. It is noteworthy that, in an effort to raise political and philosophical questions about oppression and its overcoming in Haiti, Morisseau-Leroy chose to adopt a canonical Western text rather than disavowing Western reference points along with his abandonment of the French. As Moira Fradinger says, “The Greek Antigone thus became a Haitian ancestor–not because she was born in Haiti, but because she could speak the language of the radical difference that gave birth to Haiti.” Antigòn was first performed in 1953 in Port-au-Prince. In 1959, newly in exile during the Duvalier regime’s ascendance, Morisseau-Leroy staged a performance at the Théâtre des Nations, Paris, an event that made him a key figure of the Haitian Renaissance.
Antigòn posed some challenges to us as translators. Because Morisseau-Leroy wrote Antigòn before Creole was made an official language, the text’s orthography and vocabulary is not entirely consistent with Creole dictionaries and grammars. Additionally, our primary text was a 1970 reprint based on a photocopy of a 1954 typescript; spelling was not always consistent or trustworthy. After we drafted our translation, we found Edith Gold’s English translation, titled Antigone in Haiti. We know that it was published in Pétion-Ville, Haiti, but we have not determined the year. We noticed differences between the Gold translation and our reprint of the 1954 script. Our epigraph, for instance, appears in the prologue to the Gold translation but not the prologue to our Creole text. We had read about a 1963 English translation by Mary Dorkonou, which was commissioned by Morisseau-Leroy for a performance in Ghana, where he lived out part of his exile as “National Organizer of Drama and Literature,” but we have not located a copy of the Dorkonou version. It looks as if Antigòn has a rich textual history, replete with variants spurred by new stagings and new translations. Ultimately, we hope to produce an edition of Antigòn that gathers these variants for performance as well as study. Our translation of Antigòn is partly motivated by our desire to see more of his work in circulation. More than that, we stand with scholars of Morisseau-Leroy and Caribbean literature in our belief that Antigòn is a unique work of political theatre.
– Blake Bronson-Bartlett and Robert Fernandez
Johar Buang is a gifted poet who writes in Malay, the national language of Singapore. His works in various genres have won awards and received much recognition in the Malay Archipelago. "Love on Mount Palmer" is an important poem that narrates a nation that values progress and pragmatism, at times forcing other aspects of life to take a back seat. Progress is often arduous and competitive; and some things must be sacrificed. One wonders then where race, religion, and language stand, beyond the national pledge. Profoundly woven and succinctly depicting the journey of the Self in this world, the poem unravels the soul of a poet who espouses Sufi teachings but never ceases to share his concerns for worldly struggles. This poem transcends the subliminal realm of faith to seek refuge in one’s identity and physical existence on this earth. One feels the evocativeness of the words the poet uses to break silences that enable the reconciliation of past and present. The Scriptural references are juxtaposed with one of the most sacred sites in Singapore, the poet’s homeland. Set on a hill, the shrine of a faithful soul provides solace for a multicultural and multifaith society where the pursuit of success and wealth is depicted by many skyscrapers bearing the names of banks and housing an extensive list of major economic stakeholders. One wonders whether the highway was constructed around the hill instead of cutting across it as a mark of respect, or as the legends claim--no one can touch the revered one. In a competitive and at times ruthless race, faith and beliefs are put on trial. Will the tide of development be a threat to domes and mountains that are synonymous with spirituality? Or is the temple of God to be found in the Self? The poem seeks to enlighten and liberate us so that we can comprehend the Self first before we seek to elevate or bury God.
- Annaliza Bakri
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
French | Poetry (excerpts) | Québec
July, 2017War is more than a political conflict–in late capitalism, it’s a way of life. From Kandahar, Afghanistan, to Rivière-du-Loup, Québec, this war is constellated by concrete acts of terrorism, such as 9/11, and also by a state of near-constant alert, or traumatic consciousness. “History doesn’t exist, it collapses,” the speaker says, moving between mediated images of war and the violence–some symbolic, much of it physical–we encounter every day. It’s tempting to return, in mind, to a time in modernity free from war, but other than a brief gasp between WWII and Vietnam, that time is a phantasm. The speaker of The War Years counsels the reader to continue to move forward, from an age where “we have buried God,” and no longer have a need for poetry, epic or otherwise: “don’t forget but don’t think/ go straight ahead/ carried by what was.” “What was,” is history; “what is,” includes, in this worldview, a confusion between worlds, languages, and us/them binaries wherein the enemy is identified with the path of waged destruction, and “us,” by adherence to “the way of champions.” The champions “eat prize-winning cows/ and all the biggest swordfish,” and “defend the highways/ where our blood flows.” As for the “enemy,” the semantic coordinates are blurred in translation, as they would be in any process of transposition or examination of the language and pronouns used to demarcate, identify, and possess: “you don’t know what they’re capable of/ they will insert themselves into your silence/ until you can no longer tell/ how many we are.” Within this maelstrom, there remains our inheritance of beauty, as preserved in the gaze of another: “and in your eyes…/ I see it already, smoking and beautiful/ Kandahar under the bombs.”
– Virginia Konchan
Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
July, 2017In a recent interview, Russian writer Igor Sakhnovsky relayed what could be taken as the author’s literary credo: “Life’s cornucopia of nonfictional material renders fantasy unnecessary.” His short story “The Jealous God of Chance” puts this precept into practice. Sakhnovsky’s peculiar breed of realism evolves out of his own life. In each of the six parts of the story, the narrator (the author’s alter ego) reflects on an autobiographical episode and imagines what could have happened along with what actually did. Rather than lamenting what might have been, Sakhnovsky relates these events in wry, staccato prose, full of irony and self-reproach. Each vignette explores a decisive moment of action, inaction, or, as the title suggests, chance. They include a near-death experience in the narrator’s childhood, a hasty marriage proposal in his early adulthood, and a fateful encounter with a Russian mobster in middle age. The last episode finds the narrator in the present, sitting at his desk, contemplating an offer from a stranger he’s been chatting with on the Internet which concerns whether or not the two should spend the rest of their lives together. An ambiguous final paragraph seems to suggest that the God of Chance is, as the narrator suggests, a jealous one.
- Michael Gluck
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 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
Pakistan | Short Fiction | Urdu
July, 2017Azra Abbas’s short fiction is known for its enigmatic descriptions and unusual points of view. Whether it is the memoir of a hapless chameleon who gets inadvertently crushed by a group of schoolchildren, or a woman who walks across town wondering when she can scratch her tailbone without attracting notice, Abbas’s stories are always whimsical and mysterious. In this tale, a man contemplates crossing the street, and, it would appear, ultimately fails to do so.
- Daisy Rockwell
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).