Novel (excerpts) | Spain | Spanish
November, 2011Diana Blanco is the best "bait" on the Madrid police force, a woman trained to attract the most dangerous psycho-killers. But she is sick of her job and tenders her resignation. She wants to live a normal life, after spending months unsuccessfully trying to attract the attention of the "Spectator," a serial killer who has tortured, mutilated, and murdered more than fifteen women. But when the Spectator kidnaps Diana's sister, she is forced to race against the clock to save her. She doesn't know where to start, and she doesn't know that hidden behind this murderer is a terrifying plot that directly affects her closest friends and family. Diana can't trust anyone--not her mentor, her boyfriend, her best friend, not even her colleagues on the force--if she wants to save her sister and put a stop to the series of monstrous crimes that have Madrid in an uproar.
In 2007, Olvido García Valdés won Spain's Premio Nacional for her poetry collection Y todos estábamos vivos. The book explores life from the viewpoint of death, or the dead, and the intensity of such a perspective. A primary technique for achieving this intensification is what García Valdés calls her supresión de elipsis. This suppression of ellipsis, or intentional exclusion of an element--often grammatical--works in these poems to prevents us from discerning basic narrative elements. Her poetry gains much of its power from omission. We rarely know anything about the viewpoint character of a poem: gender, age, physical appearance seem unavailable. The entire book begins in the middle of a sentence with no implied subject beyond a verb in the third person singular. Often a poem ends with no punctuation. The author also uses white space as the language of the unsaid.
Arabic | Kuwait | Short Fiction
October, 2011Fatima Yousef al-Ali is known for her stories about Kuwaiti women. She praises her father’s encouragement for her career and says that while she is happily married, few of her characters are. She portrays the lives of women from different strata of Kuwait society, whether the school assistant in “Behind a Locked Window,” the schoolgirl in “Nothing Shameful,” or the wealthy sophisticate in “A Woman’s Pains Never End.”
Being a pioneering Kuwaiti woman author has meant a degree of marginalization, evidenced by a need to improvise publishing arrangements. One benefit of writing beneath the radar of public scrutiny, though, has been her ability to describe and discuss human sexuality in a candid fashion.
Fatima Yousef al-Ali’s short stories open a window on a world that seems a bit mysterious to some Americans. The heroine’s spouse in “Vote for Me!” is not overtly abusive but will certainly not be voting for her. The administrator of public grants detects so many flaws in the applicants that he decides to award all of them to himself. Lismira, in her story, is stranded in a gloomy city far from Kuwait and from her lover and her spouse. The heroine in “A Woman’s Pains Never End” is as much a predator as the self-righteous religious admirer who climbs in bed with her in a hotel room in Asia and scratches her with his beard. It is hard to strike the right balance in considering the status of women in Kuwait. Fatima Yousef al-Ali's depictions of women from many walks of life help the reader better understand the challenges facing them, and thus helps us learn more about ourselves, too.
Multiple Countries | Multiple Genres | Multiple Languages
July, 2011We salute all of the NEA's FY 2012 awardees, and extend especially warm congratulations to those whose work has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail and InTranslation:
Geoffrey Brock
Kristin Dykstra
Michelle Gil-Montero
William Hutchins
Pierre Joris
Alex Zucker
Tedi López Mills was born in Mexico City in 1959. She studied philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and literature at the Sorbonne. She has published ten books of poetry, several of which have received national prizes in Mexico: Cinco estaciones, Un lugar ajeno, Segunda persona (Premio Nacional de Poesía Efraín Huerta), Glosas, Horas, Luz por aire y agua, Un jardín, cinco noches (y otros poemas), Contracorriente (Premio Nacional de Literatura José Fuentes Mares), Parafrasear, and Muerte en la rúa Augusta (Premio Xavier Villaurrutia). Her other honors include a 1994 Young Artists grant from the Fondo Nacional para las Culturas y las Artes, a 1995 translation fellowship from the U.S./Mexico Fund for Culture, and, in 1998, the prestigious inaugural poetry grant awarded by the Octavio Paz Foundation. She has translated into Spanish the work of numerous American, English, and French poets and, very recently, Anne Carsons's Autobiography of Red. A selection of her poems, While Light is Built, translated by Wendy Burk, was published by Kore Press. López Mills has been a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores since 2009.
France | French | Short Fiction
July, 2011In a collection of six short stories, Véronique Bizot explores, with humor and a remarkable eye for the absurd in daily life, the themes of solitude and anxiety. In "The Gardeners," an old man living on a grand estate watches the gardeners around him with mistrust. In "The Hotel," young newlyweds under the watchful eye of an elegant elderly lady have their honeymoon disrupted by an invasion of rats. "George's Wife" tells of two friends, the tragic accident that leaves one paralyzed, and the ensuing and unavoidable vengeance. Another story tells of Lamirault, a sworn enemy of the narrator: his funeral proves that loathing, like loving, is stronger than death.
In a review of El cutis patrio, from which the three poems featured here are taken, the acclaimed Cuban Poet Jose Kozer states that Eduardo Espina is "perhaps the most imaginative living Spanish-language poet" (Letras Libres, 2007). El cutis patrio was originally published in 2006 by Editorial Aldus (Mexico City), and was reissued in 2009 by Mansalva (Buenos Aires). It has been the subject of various dissertations and scholarly studies, including a 2009 book by Spanish linguist Enrique Mallen called Poesia del lenguaje: de T.S. Eliot a Eduardo Espina (Editorial Aldus, 2009). For its complexity and originality, Mallen situates El cutis patrio in the same category as John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and Lyn Hejinian's My Life.
Arabic | Novel (excerpt) | Switzerland
July, 2011Ibrahim al-Koni, like Joseph Conrad, has found international acclaim as a novelist while publishing primarily in his second language, Arabic, which he learned to read and write at the age of twelve. The Tuareg language, Tamasheq, has its own alphabet, Tifinagh, that dates back at least to the third century BCE. The American scholar and translator Elliot Colla, in a piece written for al-Ahram after al-Koni's most recent award, remarked that "Al-Koni's reception with Arab audiences is particularly significant since it reminds us of one of the oldest strengths of Arabic literature, namely that for its entire history, the Arabic language has served as a universal literary language."
In the same article, Colla also commented: "By now, al-Koni has earned as many literary awards as any other living Arab author, and he has done so across the entire breadth of the Arab world, from the Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean. Unlike most Arab novelists who still tend to be read as national writers (Egyptians, Lebanese, Iraqis and so on), al-Koni is one of a few whose reception has effectively transcended the national borders that divide the Arab world."
The excerpt featured here is the final chapter from the final volume of a trilogy consisting of "New Waw," "The Puppet," which was released by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin in 2010, and "The Scarecrow." This trilogy traces the rise (first volume), flourishing (second volume), and destruction of a Tuareg (nomadic Saharan Berber) oasis community. The novel is set in the mythological past, but the oasis also represents the modern state of Libya. The final ruler of the oasis is literally a demon who has adopted a human form, which he sheds when the armies of the world are besieging the oasis. Some readers may choose to understand the portrait of this final ruler of this oasis community, which was named for the lost paradise of the Tuareg people, the original Waw, as a caricature of a current head of state.
France | French | Short Fiction
July, 2011In September 2007, a group of ethnic minority authors in France released a literary manifesto under their group's name, Qui fait la France?. In it, they call into question the premise and intention of mainstream, introverted fiction in France, and ask for a place in the world of French letters as authors who believe in committed and realist fiction. In keeping with their literary manifesto and intention, the authors of the collective Qui fait la France? engage in outwardly committed writing that explores broadly the themes of human suffering and aspiration.
Simultaneous to the publication of their manifesto in two French magazines, Les Inrockuptibles and Le Nouvel Observateur, the authors of the collective headed by Mohamed Razane released a livre-manifeste with Editions Stock, Chroniques d'une société annoncée, in which each member of the collective contributed a story. For their second collective publication, each author of Qui fait la France? decided to write a short story revolving around the same imagined fait divers: "The following day, the papers will publish Agence France Presse content in their headlines: ‘An eighteen-year-old man was sentenced to prison for eight months on the charge of breaking storefront windows during an anti-Sarkozy demonstration, which unraveled Monday evening in the Bastille neighborhood' AFP 11/05/07." Mohamed Razane has tied his story to the incident that provoked the riots in 2005 on the periphery of France's largest metropolitan centers.
In Mohamed Razane's story, "Au loin, près de nous" ("So far so close by"), the unnamed narrator's identity remains less important than the identity and circumstances of the two male characters, Toni and Abdel, who ultimately are confounded in her mind. Toni is a young man of North African descent who has an accrued sensibility to the injustices around him; the primary space he occupies in the story is the Parisian subway system, where he takes stock of a disempowered humanity and lashes out against the political class. Abdel is a young Moroccan man whose backstory we learn much more about: the narrator falls in love with Abdel during a trip to Morocco, then convinces him to join her in France. Abdel's outcome is tragic, and part of the narrator's dilemma is to decide if she is in some way guilty for his demise. Meanwhile, through the story's juxtaposed narration, Toni comes before a judge in France, who has to decide if he is guilty of vandalism and violent conduct. What brings the two male characters together is their powerlessness to change their destiny. What separates them in the context of the story are two very different registers, poetic and militant.
In the end, the alienation expressed by the story's title resonates doubly in Abdel's alienation from his homeland of Morocco, which becomes a sort of lost idyll, and Abdel's inner alienation. Razane's story is at once committed writing (through its themes), artistic exploration (through its juxtaposed images, registers, and narration), and a call to action--to attend to those near and far.
Mohamed Metwalli was born in Cairo in 1970. He was awarded a BA in English Literature from Cairo University, Faculty of Arts in 1992. The same year, he won the Yussef el-Khal Prize by Riyad el-Rayes Publishers in Lebanon for his poetry collection Once Upon a Time. He co-founded an independent literary magazine, el-Garad, in which his second volume of poems, The Story the People Tell in the Harbor, appeared in 1998. He was selected to represent Egypt in the University of Iowa's International Writing Program in 1997, and served as Poet-in-Residence at the University of Chicago in 1998. He compiled and co-edited Angry Voices, an anthology of offbeat Egyptian poetry published by the University of Arkansas press in 2002. His most recent collection, Lost Promenades, was published by al-Kitaba al-Ukhra in 2010.
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).