Flash Fiction | Poland | Polish
November, 2012Poland's Borgesian bibliophile, publisher, and writer Jan Gondowicz considers Agnieszka Taborska's series of short reflections and vignettes in The Whale, widely reviewed in Poland, as "found objects," reflecting Taborska's long interest as a scholar and a writer in surrealism. She collects these brief works reflecting the idea of "objective chance" as they appear to her, and she says that they appear in waves. She may go several months without writing anything in this form, and then suddenly the appearance of one flash fictional found object orients the mind for the reception of new stories. They come from life, but from an enhanced awareness of "objective chance," capturing the coincidences, absurdities, and barely perceptible rules hidden behind the marvelous surprises of everyday reality as she moves between Europe and the United States.
Critical Stories | France | French
November, 2012Les Invisibles brings together texts written by Luc Lang over the last fifteen years: a selection of pieces that together seem best to express the coherence and the particular obsession of a certain way of thinking. It is a way of thinking that develops over time and by means of a certain group of works and artists that together come to define a posteriori something like a force field, a shared sensibility and certain modes of questioning belonging to it. We have here twelve narratives. The author is, after all, a novelist, someone whose approach to these works involves first and foremost a narrative form of thought or, in other words, an approach to reality, a way of capturing reality, that is specific to the novel.
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.
Novel (excerpts) | Romania | Romanian
November, 2012A love affair between the main character/narrator and Milena/Mailena, a Slovak writer, comes into being in the virtual world, thanks to an assiduous exchange of emails that intersect with the narrator's messages to his wife, Marianne, who is in New York to treat a mysterious illness. In parallel, the narrator invents Tsvetan, a macho Bulgarian truck driver who is making his way across Europe, and Beatrice, an inscrutable dancer and lover of hedgehogs. Dumitru Tsepeneag weaves together the lives of these two characters invented by his narrator in a way that is strange and wholly unique. But behind the sound of the book, there is a more solemn story, one of emotions and lost illusions. For, ultimately, The Bulgarian Truck is a story of old age, and of preparing oneself to meet death.
Critic Eugen Simion wrote: "From the outset, Dumitru Tspeneag opted for experimental prose, and almost all his narratives are narratives of a text, rather than texts of a narrative, if we accept the distinction made by the theorists of the Nouveau Roman. In The Bulgarian Truck he goes further: he places all his cards on the table, he depicts the conventions of the experimental novel, he reveals the tricks of narrative, he converses with his characters about the construction and deconstruction of the novel he is trying to write. Finally, he turns his hesitations into an epic and rather than offering a unitary and coherent work, he presents its building site. In this new textual adventure, the writer wagers on the reader's curiosity to discover the secrets of an atypical novelist. It must be said that he succeeds."
Austria | German | Novel (excerpts)
November, 2012Lily's Impatience is a family story. Lily, a 24-year-old student, leaps to her death from a bridge. Her father, architect Sebastian Zinnwald, stops working and ensconces himself in his farmhouse in Switzerland. He breaks off all contact with the outer world. In a psychotic crisis, he loses his ability to speak.
Zinnwald also breaks off his relationship to his older daughter Veronika, single mother of two sons and a successful pediatrician in Berlin. Veronika suffers under her father's silence. She wants to be able to speak with him about Lily and the circumstances leading to her death, but he rejects her.
Zinnwald had once been quite successful as a painter, and in his solitude he begins to paint again. Again and again he paints Lily's dead body as he saw her lying on a gurney in the department of forensic medicine. A gallery owner who had exhibited Zinnwald's paintings in the past plans to include these new pictures in a major retrospective exhibition.
Twelve years after Lily's death, Zinnwald, now 71 years old, asks his daughter Veronika to visit him. Veronika travels from Berlin to Switzerland. But their conversations end in mutual accusations: grief has made both of them lonely and callous. It turns out that, above all, Zinnwald needs Veronika to participate in his exhibition. Veronika is doubly disappointed.
During a visit by a journalist who is gathering material about Zinnwald's paintings, a bitter argument about art arises. Zinnwald delivers a monologue about portrayals of sorrow in Christian iconography. He laments the fact that, in contrast to the numerous portraits of the grieving Mary, there exist no portraits of grieving fathers.
The story reaches its climax some months later in the Dinosaur Halls of the Museum of Natural History in New York.
First published in 1924, Pierre Mac Orlan's "Simone de Montmartre" takes us along on a dash through the Paris of the First World War. The underbelly of Paris opens up for our inspection as we follow first Simone, and then her jealous and worried lover Georges and his associate Léon the Marseillais, through the Montmartre night. Penned around the same time as Dashiel Hammet's first published stories, "Simone de Montmartre" is a wonderful example of early French noir stylization packed full of the rich imagery often found in the narrative poetry of the post-Symbolist era.
Novel-in-Verse | Russia | Russian
August, 2012Gnedich (Vremya, Moscow, 2012) is a novel-in-verse about the first Russian translator of the Iliad, the romantic poet and librarian Nikolai Gnedich (1784-1833), who was also the author of the first Russian Gothic fiction. His brilliant translation, still the standard one in Russia, was both highly praised and mocked by Alexander Pushkin. Gnedich has been awarded the Anthologia prize and the Russian Prize (II category), was the finalist for the NoS and the Andrei Bely literary awards, and is currently nominated for the Bunin prize. Since Gnedich spent almost his entire life translating Homer's epic poem, Maria Rybakova (usually a writer of prose) has chosen verse as the most appropriate stylistic means in recreating his life. To the English-speaking world, this genre of poetic biography is best exemplified by Ruth Padel's Darwin: A Life in Poems. Gnedich consists of 12 songs (cantos). The novel depicts the lives of Gnedich and his best friend, Batyushkov, who is slowly losing his sanity, among the motifs from their poetry and the archaic imagery of the Homeric world. The space of the novel extends from St. Petersburg and Vologda to Paris and Naples, and from the boudoir of the famous actress (and Gnedich's unrequited love) Semyonova to the Petersburg public library and the cubbyhole of Gnedich's superstitious maidservant. The novel culminates in Batyushkov's final breakdown in the lunatic asylum in Pirna (later a Nazi killing center) and Gnedich's ruminations on the future tragic fate of Russia. Two excerpts of the novel have appeared on the Contemporary Russian Literature at the University of Virginia website.
Greece | Modern Greek | Short Fiction
August, 2012Something Will Happen, You'll See, the 2010 short fiction collection by Christos Ikonomou from which "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" is taken, is a wrenching yet optimistic elegy to Greece's working classes. It won the prestigious Best Short Story Collection State Award and was the most-reviewed Greek book of 2011.
Ikonomou takes us to the heart of the western suburbs of the port of Piraeus and builds sixteen luminous stories around characters such as pensioners, protesters, laborers, and the unemployed. The author's greatest strength lies in his ability to convey silences, to interpret gestures and the unseen, and translate them into images both vivid and haunting.
Something Will Happen, You'll See has been translated into Italian (Editori Riuniti, 2012), and the Italian newspaper La Repubblica described Christos Ikonomou as "the Greek Faulkner." A German edition (C.H. Beck) is forthcoming.
Italian | Italy | Short Fiction
August, 2012Monica Sarsini was born in Florence, where she lives and teaches writing. She is also an artist who has shown her work in Italy and other countries. Libro Luminoso (Exit Edizioni, 1982) was followed by Crepacuore, Crepapelle and others. A collection of her work was published in English under the title of Eruptions (Italica Press, 1999).
Not long ago, a few poems surfaced from the Dun Huang archives--five short poems that are attributed to Xuanzang. Prior to the rediscovery of these poems, Xuanzang's literary reputation primarily rested on his status as a hero of legend in the pages of Journey to the West, where his pilgrimage to India provides the narrative thread for Wu Cheng En's great epic tale. Xuanzang has also been highly regarded as an author in his own right. In the seventh-century travel narrative entitled The Great Tang Record of the Western Territories, he provides a no less remarkable account of his journey traversing countless mountain passes, encountering peoples of more than a hundred different tribal nations, finding holy scriptures, and visiting stupas that glowed with mysterious light all along the way.
The rediscovery of these five poems rounds out our picture of Xuanzang as a poet, too. We now can understand Xuanzang's journey as real, legendary, and metaphorical all at the same time, an inner and outer voyage for enlightenment that's fully described in these lines.
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).