France | French | Novel (excerpt)
August, 2010Born in 1947 in Poitiers, Michèle Lesbre was a schoolteacher for several years before deciding to take up writing. She published detective novels until 2001, when she published her first work of literary fiction, Nina, par hasard. Since then she has published Boléro (Actes Sud, 2003), Un certain Felloni (Actes Sud, 2004), La petite trotteuse (Sabine Wespieser Editeur, 2005), and Le canapé rouge (Sabine Wespieser Editeur, 2007), which was a finalist for the Goncourt Prize and translated into eight languages.
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
August, 2010Born in Paris in 1979, Minh Tran Huy is a deputy editor of Le Magazine Littéraire and a literary critic. La double vie d'Anna Song is her third novel after La Princesse et le pêcheur (Actes Sud, 2007) and Le Lac né en une nuit (Actes Sud, 2008).
Novel (excerpt) | Ukraine | Ukrainian
August, 2010Natalka Sniadanko is one of the most vibrant voices in Eastern Europe today. Translated into German, Polish, Russian, and Spanish, Sniadanko is also a translator herself, with such credits as Czesław Miłosz, Günter Grass, and Franz Kafka under her belt. She has received several prestigiuos residencies and fellowships in both Poland and Germany, and her work is marked by her travels. Ever sharp, ever sensitive, Sniadanko possesses a wit and perspicacity that render each of her sentences sparkling and all of her interests contagious. Her first novel, The Passion Collection, funny and touching by turn, tells the story of a young Ukrainian woman falling in love with philology while also experiencing her first crushes and first love affairs. She has published a total of four books in Ukraine since that first, in 2001, and has appeared widely in literary journals and newspapers across Central Europe. At still under forty years old, Sniadanko is a writer to watch and to savor.
France | French | Short Fiction
August, 2010Jacques Barbéri is a French author of more than fifteen novels and numerous short stories. Thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, or the fringes of literature—nothing is off limits to his perpetually mutating imagination. He is also a musician (with the group Palo Alto), screenplay writer, and translator.
Poetry | Spanish | United States
August, 2010Evgueni Bezzubikoff Diaz was born in Huancayo, Perú in 1978. He studied at the Colegio Salesiano and graduated from the Instituto Pedagógico Nacional Monterrico (IPNM) in 2000 with a degree in Education, majoring in the English language. He has lived in the United States since 2001, but wrote poetry well before his voluntary exile to this country, winning IPNM’s Primer Premio de Poesía, Libertad Bajo Palabra, in 2000. Cartas de Nueva York was published by Hipocampo Editores (Lima, Perú) in 2007. His new book, Crónica del Adiós will be published in 2010 by the same press.
Gujarati | India | Short Fiction
August, 2010A writer’s identity is a fragile thing, but what happens when two writers living in the same city share the same name? Can their voices and styles distinguish them? But the real issue isn’t about credit, but rather who will be remembered in the footnotes of time. There is a certain terseness in the original, an abruptness, that I've struggled to do justice to in this translation. (Mira Desai)
I have a contemporary reaction to the life of Charles Baudelaire. I am reminded of Bob Dylan's "Yonder stands your orphan with his gun/Crying like a fire in the sun." Or of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Or I think of the joke between a friend and me that to "follow your bliss" may lead to homelessness. An adolescent genius, Baudelaire sometimes, like most adolescents, felt weary beyond his years. Seemingly willful and contrary—undoubtedly to protect his role as the soul in revolt—the poet setting out to make great demands on language was intently committed, it seemed, to a certain internal journey. While his biography has romantic connections with various women, you may read in his poetry that his essential nature was that of the poet, a life essentially of solitude, resisting the world.
In the process of translating, one finally walks into the poem as if into a house or a forest and looks around from the inside, because you cannot make the final transition from literal translation to new poem if you are not drenched in the presence and feeling of the original. (Perhaps my inflated language about this only expresses the joy I feel whenever pieces in the English counterpart little by little fall into place.) What a kick to have a dialogue with someone speaking a different language—in the case of Baudelaire, a dialogue across time. We hear Baudelaire colored by the style of English translation during each era since his death, and those past translations lose effect for me, and so I am motivated, as well, to let Baudelaire go on speaking as fresh as in his original by "refreshing" the way he is translated. (James McColley Eilers)
Aleksey Khomyakov (1804–1860) was a Russian religious philosopher, historian, economist, poet, painter, engineer, and inventor. He was the leader of the Slavophiles and promoted the idea of Pan-Slavism based on the principles of Orthodoxy. His early poems, created within the framework of romanticism, are concerned with the inner unity between the spirit and nature. Later he drew the most important source of his poetry from Orthodox Christianity. His theological writings influenced Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Solovyov. Khomyakov’s poetry remains largely untranslated.
Catalan | Novel (excerpt) | Spain
April, 2010Mill Town Memories is a captivating novel that holds the reader's attention with a skillful non-linear narrative technique. It immerses the reader in an industrial era, depicting life in one of the textile colonies that were such a vital part of Catalonia in the 1950s (the author lived in the Colonia Vidal from the age of six months until she was 20). It is a portrait of the heartland of Catalonia: its traditions, customs, and pressures to conform.
Catalan | Novel (excerpt) | Spain
March, 2010Due to the physical after-effects of a fateful traffic accident, a waiter in a roadside bar finds himself forced to give up his job and withdraw into himself. In this situation and out of the need to do something—anything—he resumes his old pastime of voracious reading, and begins to write. In an exercise of reminiscence superimposed on the most immediate present, the story becomes a magnificent and careful intertwining of crossed paths, encounters and misunderstandings among a wide variety of characters that were once part of the microcosm of the roadside bar. When he was working there he unwittingly became a witness to the ever-complicated human psyche, and to an everyday reality verging on decadence and disillusionment with a changing world shrouded in an atmosphere of pessimism. Ramon Erra's extraordinary literary precision establishes him as one of the best current writers of Catalan fiction.
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).