Xurxo Borrazás is, without doubt, one of the funnest writers in Galician literature. He’s also one of the most unique, and the most restless, with an unmistakable voice through his widely varying books. The material you have here is selections from his 2002 collection of “miscellany," Pensamentos impuros ("Impure Thoughts"). This book has so much of what I love about his writing: his characteristic warmth, humor, intelligence, humility, and strangeness, condensing it into these short little treatises on all manner of things from libraries to the nature of reality, and vignettes of various encounters with eccentric, neurotic friends.
In classic Borrazás fashion, while these are mostly standalone pieces, the further you read, the more the references intertwine, building and branching off from previous ideas. I’ve tried to showcase this in my selection, the way he uses them to layer the book and add even more depth and humor.
I think it’s also worth pointing out that Borrazás has developed a sort of reputation as an enfant terrible (this is what he was called in the Best European Fiction introduction to his work). I’m not sure I agree with this characterization, however, at least insofar as it associates him with the likes of polemical writers such as Michel Houellebecq. To be sure, Borrazás certainly likes to be provocative, to raise eyebrows, but he does so not through sexism or racism or xenophobia or Islamophobia, but rather by other means, which are, to be sure, still unconventional.
For example, To Be or Not To, probably his best book, is narrated by a curmudgeonly Gen-X’er who hides away in an abandoned Galician village, only to meet an elderly woman and begin a passionate, quite sexual love affair. The novel is full of pornography, bestiality and digressions about prostitution, but if anything I’d describe it as sex-positive. It’s also one of the few pieces of literature I’ve read which takes elderly female desire seriously, at the same time as it creates in her one of the most delightfully idiosyncratic, complex characters I’ve encountered before. All this to say that while he may be provocative, his writing is nothing if not warm, deeply felt, and utterly human.
Nowhere is that more the case than in Impure Thoughts. These musings show Borrazás to be a writer who delights in the beauty, amusement, and absurdity of life, people, and the world we live in. He’s never glib, nor condescending, and for all his intellect, reading him makes you think he’s the kind of person you’d like to get a beer with. And I can attest to that. It has always given me pleasure that, after living in Vigo for a year and meeting occasionally with him and his wife, I've found Borrazás to be much like his writing: open-hearted, curious, affable, generous, and above all, a damn good time.
- Jacob Rogers
Galician | Poetry | Short Fiction | Spain
December, 2016Begoña Paz is, to my mind, a necessary writer for the world to know. She writes about topics that I notice most English-language writers seem to avoid (I could never imagine someone from the US writing “The Weight of My Desire"), and in such a startling, beautiful manner. To me, “The Weight of My Desire” represents some of the best characteristics of flash fiction, and the things that draw me to it: in the space of about a page, Paz is able to evoke so much of the history of this crumbling marriage in such simple ways. For example: “Despite every year’s present, a jar of Pond’s wrinkle cream.” With one image she evokes an uncaring husband, not only giving the same present every year, but a present which is a constant reminder to the protagonist that she is aging, that she no longer satisfies him, that he wishes she were younger, and that she feels emptiness over her inability to do anything about her situation. The story delves deep, probing, moving slowly until, with the last two paragraphs Paz turns a slow, pensive narrative into one with charge, moving at lightning speed. It gallops forward towards its conclusion and ends so fast that the reader is left as confused and disoriented as the narrator, who seems, when it is all over, to be wondering what happened and looking down at the page, or the husband, to check and see if it truly did occur.
One of the challenges of translating her poetry is that she has a great economy of language and beautiful imagery: “And cars like pills/ for anything and/ for nothing,/ and pounds/ of dreams/ that spread/ over sidewalks/ at twilight/ so that we step on them/ on our way to the/ jobschooljail of/ our everyday lives.” There is a sort of vague clarity to these lines from her poem, “Proof,” that sort of foggy clarity one gets if awake around that hour before the sun has fully risen and it’s still dark outside. The challenge of linguistic economy becomes greater when dealing with Galician—the amount of contractions in the language makes English seem tame. The Galician language, too, has such a distinct sound to it that it can be hard to approach the sonority of the original, best exemplified by “Motel Silviculture.” In the original, the last stanza reads “Elixe./ Elixe./ Elixe.” In Galician that “x” has a soft, “shh” sound, which softens the tone of the middle-heavy word (e-LI-xe). The word in Galician has a heavy emphasis, but is softened by the “shh” sound, giving a sense of harshness and pressure at the same time as it has a voice-in-your-head, whispering quality to it. In English, the two best translations of this word, which is an imperative verb conjugation of “elixir,” would be “choose” or “decide.” With “choose” readers get some of that softness from the Galician “x,” with “decide,” readers get that pounding iambic nature of the original—faced with a choice between two words in English which only contain half of the original’s sonority, how does one choose, how does one decide?
- Jacob Rogers
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).