Brazil | Flash Fiction | Portuguese
March, 2013Brazilian writer Adriana Lisboa's honors include the José Saramago Award, the Japan Foundation Fellowship, a fellowship from the Brazilian National Library, and the Newcomer of the Year Award from the Brazilian section of IBBY (the International Board on Books for Young People). She has published ten books, including novels, children's books, and a collection of short stories and prose poetry. Her fourth book, Caligrafias, collects her short stories written between 1996 and 2004, including those featured here. Lisboa holds a BA in Music from Rio de Janeiro Federal State University (UniRio), an MA in Brazilian Literature, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Rio de Janeiro State University (Uerj). Born in Rio de Janeiro, she now lives in Colorado.
Jürgen Becker was born in Köln, Germany, in 1932. He is the author of over thirty books--novels, story collections, poetry collections, and plays--all published by Germany's premier publisher, Suhrkamp. He has won numerous prizes in Germany, including the Heinrich Böll Prize, the Uwe Johnson Prize, and the Hermann Lenz Prize, among others. Becker's work often deals with his childhood experience of WWII and the political consequences of the postwar division of Germany.
...
Editor's Foreword
As noted in the previously released Pierre Menard versions of the Alexander Blok lyric "A Girl Sang in a Church Choir," the famous Quixote translator, having relocated to Bexley, in Greater London--the date of this move is unclear, though it was certainly after the summer of 1913, which he spent in Nimes--returned to the study of Russian, a lifelong pursuit, and, not unsurprisingly, turned his attention to the translation of some of the remarkable poetry then being published in Russia and, subsequently, the incipient USSR... (continued in post)
German | Germany | Short Fiction
January, 2013Fleeing a bad economy, the narrator of "Here, It's Quiet" leaves her beloved Berlin to take a job in a sedate, southern German city. Adjusting to her new home, she misses the noise and grittiness of the city she left behind, as well as the boyfriend who refused to come with her. She spends her evenings at the opera and visits the museum during her lunch hour, engaging with art as a way of escaping her banal work life and inuring herself from her personal turmoil. This story from a 2004 collection touches on themes author Anna Katharina Hahn continued to explore in her most recent novel, Am Schwarzen Berg, in particular the conflict between a lifestyle centered on an appreciation for art and the economic choices necessary to support that lifestyle.
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.
Arabic | Libya | Novel (excerpts)
December, 2012Women of the Wind is the tale of a desperate Moroccan who works as a domestic servant in Tripoli, Libya, before the Libyan Revolution. She raises money from her friends to buy a place on a human trafficker's ship, but then experiences a rough crossing. Her story is intertwined with the stories of other women, including an Iraqi who negotiates with the smugglers for her, a Libyan novelist, and a child whose mother deserted her.
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))
Ariane Drefyfus, born in 1958, has published Les miettes de Décembre (Le Dé Bleu, 1997), La durée des plantes (Tarabuste, 1998 and 2007 (revised edition)), Une histoire passera ici (Flammarion, 1999), Quelques branches vivantes and Les compagnies silencieuses (Flammarion, 2001), La belle vitesse (Le Dé Bleu, 2002), La bouche de quelqu'un (Tarabuste, 2003), L'inhabitable (Flammarion, 2006), Iris, c'est votre bleu (Le Castor Astral, 2008), La terre voudrait recommencer (Flammarion, 2010), Nous nous attendons (Le Castor Astral, 2012), and La lampe allumée si souvent dans l'ombre (forthcoming from José Corti, 2013).
German | Germany | Novel (excerpts)
November, 2012Dennis and Mark have been friends since high school. Mark vacillates between becoming a writer or a teacher, but Dennis discovered early on his calling as a sculptor of body parts in concrete and supports himself with work in a porno movie theater and other odd jobs. But catastrophic TV coverage of his first exhibit changes everything, both his career as an artist and his friendship with Mark.
Catalan | Novel (excerpt) | Spain
November, 2012The Silent Woman is a novel that traces the events of the twentieth century and their dramatic influence on people's lives. Sylva, half-German and half-Czech, is born into an aristocratic family in a sumptuous castle near Prague. With her husband, an ambassador in Paris, and later with her Russian boyfriend, Sylva witnesses the joyful madness of the 1920s and then the Nazi period of the '30s and '40s. During the Communist era, she loses all of her property and all of her loved ones. In the '70s, a lonely old woman forgotten by all, she ends up living in a poor neighbourhood. That's when she discovers the fate of her long-lost boyfriend: the Soviet regime had banished him to a Gulag. Sylva's search for him begins...
We also follow Sylva's son Jan, a world-famous mathematician who immigrates to the U.S. He earns a fortune, but struggles for understanding in his marriage to a beautiful Russian parvenu.
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).