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Temptations of Translation
It is virtually impossible to render one's visions in poetry, let alone in translating it. Ezra Pound wrote in ABC of Reading, "Poetry...is the most concentrated form of verbal expression." The task gets even more difficult if we take into consideration that Georgy Ivanov's later poetry is marked with a minimalist economy of means. One has to sacrifice something without losing what the great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva once defined as "points of anguish" (bolevyie tochki), that is, the points of tension in the poem. In the first poem featured here, I changed the line that reads "I do not care what is going to be afterwards" into "I don't care if after me there's the deluge." But I believe I preserved the unexpected hit of the last line "There is, finally, suicide." In the second poem, I deemed it necessary to combine two perspectives: the poet's rather skeptical view of life and his restrained and even estranged view of himself.
- Ian Probstein
Essay | Italian | Italy | Memoir (excerpt)
January, 2014Devi Priya's writing recuperates the India of the past, and issues a challenge to the India of the present. Her essay on the Mandala discusses an often faddish or academic subject without conceding to either camp. The author has had an eventful life, and alongside the argument introduced in the essay's opening--setting the record straight about the origins and significance of the Mandala--one finds a profound record of the India of another time, before partition. Her memoir, entitled More than one life (Più di una vita), from which the excerpt here is taken, is a lyrical recounting of the shared past of the author and her country. As Devi writes:
Just as the cane thrown by the beautiful young country girl from Rajputana mortally wounds an enormous wild boar fleeing the royal hunt, and in the same moment pierces the prince's heart, so one is captivated by the memory of a time that is this story's source and inspiration.
The story is not always linear: as it moves through the childhood, adolescence, and youth of the author, it follows the historical period of the '30s up to India's declaration of independence, and beyond. Through an ancient, intimate, and familiar world the reader is shown those ideals, social and cultural, that were transformed into the Beauty celebrated by the mystical poets, and the carefully selective memory of an India that for centuries was adept in preserving the useful and the positive.
In the story, nature, landscapes, aromas, and animals are all living presences, inseparable from the happiest years, rich with knowledge, at school and university, with dear friends and in the good company of many others, at joyful festivals, in the India of the Ganges and the Himalayas. And then among those who practice ancient creative arts, in contact with the local, rural people, discovering their own distant origins.
Memories interweave with the present as in a dance, guiding our protagonist to reveal, according to the rhythm of her intuition, the progressive realization of her "identity."
Riding along in life's carriage, the present appears before one's eyes for a blurred instant, while the past takes on the limpid serenity of a field of flowering mustard, flowers of a shade of yellow called..."basantì," stretching all the way to the horizon, harbingers of spring... The impression remained in my mind like spring personified. "Basant" is spring, "basantì" the soft yellow of the shoot: its color. Like all things, it comes and goes and returns. You await the point of its return in the cycle...
- Nicholas Benson
Witold Szabłowski is now working on a book about people who saved each other's lives in Volhynia during the Second World War. Then part of Nazi-occupied eastern Poland (and now in western Ukraine), Volhynia was the scene of some of the bloodiest events in the entire course of the war. The report featured here was published in Gazeta Wyborcza's "Duży Format" reportage supplement on June 18, 2013, and will feature in the book.
Climate change, one of the most pressing issues concerning humanity's future, is rarely the subject of literary fiction. But in his latest novel, EisTau ("IceMelt"), Bulgarian-German author Ilija Trojanow addresses the problem head-on. In the text featured here, which Trojanow delivered at the 2012 Van der Leeuw Lecture held annually in the Netherlands, the author explains what brought him to his subject.
Italian | Italy | Novel (excerpts)
November, 2013The Crime of a Soldier outlines the complicated relationship between a war criminal and his daughter. He is a man who feels perpetually hounded, followed and spied on. He believes that he is innocent, that he was just obeying orders, and that his only crime is to be a defeated soldier. His daughter disagrees--her father's guilt has been established, without appeal. Theirs is a thwarted bond, which seems to take a turn when the father discovers the Cabala, where letters may also stand for numbers and hint at the future. De Luca depicts his characters with a sustained intensity. In this captivating plot, the rhythm of the narration acutely reflects the daughter's inner disquiet.
Article (excerpt) | France | French
November, 2013...
Note on "Bret Easton Ellis: It's Actually Shakespeare":
Laurent Binet, whose novel HHhH was translated into twenty languages, is cultishly devoted to the author of American Psycho. His tribute to the author he calls BEE is both sexy and precise, with the added bonus of a few literary scoops on his greatest books. This article appeared in the August 2012 issue of Vanity Fair (France).
Note on "Glossary of Literary Received Ideas":
This article appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur in 2011. There are no entries under the letters "E" or "T" in the English translation.
Czech | Czech Republic | Novel (excerpt)
November, 2013Jáchym Topol is the leading Czech author of his generation. Famous in his youth as an underground poet and songwriter, today he is recognized as the writer whose work most successfully and imaginatively captures the jarring changes in society since the end of communism in 1989. The title of Anděl ("Angel Station") refers to the bustling Prague Metro stop located in Smíchov, which was until its recent gentrification a rough, working-class neighborhood. With a cast of characters reflecting the area's diverse residents, including Roma and Vietnamese, Topol's novel, employing sparse, at times near-telegraphic language, weaves together the brutal and disturbing fates of an addict, a shopkeeper, and a religious fanatic as they each follow the path they hope will lead them to serenity: drugs, money, and faith. In the excerpt featured here, Butch, the addict, tries to escape his troubles in Prague by relocating to Paris with a new girlfriend.
Armenia | Armenian | Personal Essay
September, 2013"The Man" is a short autobiographical sketch set in Paris, in 1896, during Zabel Yesayan's second year of study at the Sorbonne. It was published in 1905 in the Armenian literary magazine Masis as a response to a text examining the phenomenon of terror from an aesthetic point of view. The sketch explores the psychological effects of alienation and isolation of women as foreigners in a Parisian dormitory.
French | Morocco | Novella (excerpt)
September, 2013Once he crosses the hospital's iron doorway, the narrator is trapped. And thus begins Ahmed Bouanani's novella, The Hospital, wherein an unnamed guide navigates the labyrinthine world of a hospital on the outskirts of Casablanca. Despite scant details about the institution or the narrator's illness, we understand that his stay is less than voluntary.
What emerges is a story of Casablanca's beggars and madmen. As the narrator struggles to differentiate between reality and imagination, and maintain his sanity, he records the minutiae of the wards of one wing of the hospital. Through a series of short vignettes, the narrator describes events in wing C that transpire over a period of weeks, months, or even years. The portraits that emerge reveal his fellow patients' simplicity, depravity, and naiveté without ever verging into pity or caricature. Relying heavily on colloquial dialogue, Bouanani creates a contained universe where God, sex, and family are equally lauded, condemned, and mocked.
The narrator himself alternates between remarkable lucidity, offering his observations with grim irony and detachment, and vivid hallucinations. Bouanani uses vibrant imagery to its best effect when describing the narrator's descent into a dizzying fantasy world--one where his younger self and the incarnation of death both have speaking parts. Modeled after the author's own stint in a tuberculosis sanatorium, The Hospital offers the reader a focused, almost claustrophobic look at the patients of wing C--some (the sexual predators and parricidal killers) abhorrent but nonetheless compelling. In short, Bouanani's novella is a story of contrasts: health/disease, pureness/perversion, control/chaos, and lastly, resignation/rebellion. But more than a portrait of a single man's odyssey through madness, the work offers a larger glimpse into one of Morocco's darkest periods. Reflecting Bouanani's experiences as a writer living in a climate of political unrest and harsh government repression, The Hospital is an allegory of the position of the artist and the conditions of the production of art in Morocco in the second half of the 20th century.
Since Bouanani's death in 2011, artists in Morocco have been trying to revive interest in his works. So far, their efforts have resulted in a re-edition of The Hospital in both Morocco and France, and an upcoming Arabic translation of the novella. Bouanani's writings should be framed within a broader, post-colonial aesthetic movement that sought to valorize Moroccan literature and film. The Hospital is an undeniably important work within that corpus. Beyond its historical significance, however, the novella stands out as a compelling and unique narrative characterized by Bouanani's acerbic, engrossing, and magical prose.
Catalan | Short Fiction | Spain
September, 2013Toni Sala (b. 1969, Sant Feliu de Guíxols, Girona) is an author of fiction and nonfiction as well as a secondary school teacher of Catalan literature. His books include the short story collections Entomologia (1997) and Bones notícies (2001); the novels Pere Marín (1998), Goril·la blanc (2002), Rodalies (2004, Sant Joan Prize and the National Prize for Catalan Literature), and Quatre dies a l'Àfrica (2005); and the book-length essay Petita crònica d'un professor a secundària (2001), a controversial bestseller in which the author exposed the frustration prevalent among educators with disarming sincerity and raw candor.
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).