Argentina | Short Fiction | Spanish | United States
July, 2020I think this story is the first translation of mine that came about almost entirely thanks to social media. I’m not, or at least I wasn’t, a social media person. I’ve been known to abruptly leave a gathering because someone wanted to take a selfie. I can’t understand how people handle the amount of information (and opinion) that comes swarming out at you from the average Facebook page. But I’d also been feeling bad that I never did anything to promote the books and publications I was involved in, especially because they tended to be independent concerns for whom every little bit helps. So when my siblings ganged up on me to give me a smartphone so I could join the familial WhatsApp group it seemed time to dip my toes into the water and Instagram seemed the least intrusive of the different options available. Thus the account peoplewhoreadinbars was born with the intention of creating a small community of people who like to bring books to bars (it’s currently peoplewhomissreadinginbars, which I do, very much). That never really worked out, but over the past couple of years I have enjoyed the experience much more than I thought. One of my discoveries has been that a lot of writers, quite a few you wouldn’t expect, are also on the network. It’s become a reflex to see whether the author of writing I’ve enjoyed has an account.
This turned out to be true of Lolita Copacabana when I was intrigued by her text in the anthology Bogota 39: New Voices from Latin America, published by the Hay Festival and Oneworld in English. Although I was mildly disappointed to discover that LC wasn’t the six-foot-six drag queen of my imagination, I soon found plenty to enjoy about her posts: she has a sharp eye for the absurdities and beauty of everyday life and is disarmingly frank about her blueberry slushy habit. Best of all, she has a wonderfully angry sense of humor. All of these are highly encouraging traits in a writer and I resolved that I’d ask permission to translate something by Copacabana whenever an opportunity came up. So when I saw “Domestic Manners of the Americans” published in Spanish in the Rio Grande Review, I was quick off the mark.
To an extent, the story is a faithful reflection of that Instagram account, albeit far more erudite and profound and even more fun. An old school, substance-fueled road trip, it is the vivid chronicle of a professor’s madcap journey across the Midwest at the behest of an increasingly deranged bunny rabbit. Although there are obviously numerous precedents for such a quest in American literature, it is typical of Copacabana that the books she foregrounds are memoirs of travels through the U.S. by Simone de Beauvoir and Vladimir Mayakovsky (the quotes are my translations from the Spanish–in part because the narrator cites the Spanish editions specifically but mostly because, ummm . . . it didn’t occur to me to seek out the English translations until the brilliant InTranslation editor Jen suggested it and it turns out that the respective translations from Russian and French into Spanish are slightly different from their English counterparts. All part of the wonderful world of translated lit). It’s a heady, and brilliant, mixture that I’m sure readers will enjoy.
- Kit Maude
Argentina | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
May, 2020La llave marilyn was born on a Sunday, when the Argentinian poet Laura Yasan was thinking about killing herself. She had called a suicide hotline repeatedly, only to hear the message: “All lines are busy.” She remembered Marilyn Monroe, found dead in her hotel room, hand on the telephone. Instead of committing a parallel suicide, Yasan began to write what would become the first poem of llave. Read as a whole, the poems tell the disjointed story of a woman’s final moments before suicide, interspersed with oneiric scenes of urbanity and bursts of dark humor. Marilyn hovers throughout, not so much a companion as a symbol for her desperation. The collection is a solitary meditation on depression and isolation, yet its very existence, each poem a renewed attempt to establish communication, stands as a testament to one woman’s determination to stay alive.
Published in 2009, this is Yasan’s seventh book, for which she won the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize. As a primarily self-taught poet, she developed a distinctive voice that does not fit neatly into a particular tradition of Argentine or Latin American poetry. In some ways she is the heir of Alejandra Pizarnik’s enclosed melancholy, but Yasan infuses this with a thread of playfulness: an enduring delight in the possibilities of language. It is this feature that presented me with the greatest challenge in translating Yasan’s work. I didn't make it past the title before encountering the multiplicity of meaning enfolded in her words. “Llave” seems at first to mean “key.” But in the poems its other meaning surfaces: a chokehold. By translating the title as “the marilyn hold,” I lost one connotation, but gained another: being stuck “on hold” when all the phone lines are busy. My aim throughout these selections was to leave open the rich ambiguities that define Yasan’s poetry, while reimagining in English its tension between the everyday and the strange.
- Phoebe Bay Carter
Ecuador | Short Fiction | Spanish
May, 2020“The Women’s Ward” is the first English translation from the Spanish and North American appearance of “Pabellón de Mujeres,” by the Ecuadorian author, Carlos Béjar Portilla. This text is the title story from a translation-in-progress of a volume of interrelated stories titled Pabellón de Mujeres: Cuentos, and was published by Editorial Libresa, Quito, Ecuador, in 2003.
- Harry Morales
Mexico | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
January, 2020Paula Abramo’s poetry collection Fiat Lux, winner of Mexico’s 2013 Premio de Poesías Joaquín Xirau Icaza for the best book of poetry by a writer under 40, is a tightly woven cycle of poems evoking the poet’s ancestors, political refugees first from Italy and Eastern Europe to Brazil at the turn of the twentieth century, and then from Brazil to Bolivia and finally Mexico in later eras. At the same time, the book is a meditation on the act of writing poetry and bringing characters to life with fidelity and imagination.
I discovered Fiat Lux when Paula and I were both at the Banff Literary Translation Centre as translators (she translates, prolifically, from Portuguese to Spanish). During an evening we devoted to reading our original works, she read one of the poems from Fiat Lux, “In memory of Anna Stefania Lauff, match factory girl,” and its combination of imagery and narrative force blew me away. When I got to read the whole book, I saw how, throughout, the image of striking a match—whether to shed light, or start a fire—forms the hinge between the two themes of the cycle.
In its own unique way, Fiat Lux reminds me of Rita Dove’s Sonata Mulatica, my favorite historical/biographical poem cycle. It’s whimsical, committed, sometimes fierce, sometimes political, and always concerned with words, language, and languages.
I’ve found that I’m not alone in my enthusiasm for the book and the poet. In the Mexico City installment of the Words Without Borders feature series on "The City and Writer," writer and translator Lucia Duero, in answer to the question “What writer(s) from here should we read?,” selects a single poetry book by a living author: “Fiat Lux by Paula Abramo, a great story about the human journey and courage, marvelously captured in the poetics of everyday life.”
Translation challenges include switching among the poetry’s various modes: narrative, introspective, biographical, at times philosophical, at times making use of cryptic but evocative bits of ancestors’ journals and handed-down lore. Also, the poet delights in surprising the reader with new meanings that playfully undermine what the reader has just constructed out of the line before, and these shifts need to be made to work in English syntax with equal measures of rhythm, comprehensibility, and surprise. Also, as a classics major in college and a literary translator by profession, Abramo naturally invokes the border-crossing and time-travel involved in telling family history by the use of multiple languages, including bits of Portuguese, Latin, and Greek. Since English is farther from Romance language roots than Spanish is, I have helped English readers by translating some of these phrases, while leaving others as they were.
The poems included here are numbers 2, 5, 6, 7, and 9 in the book, out of a total of 19.
- Dick Cluster
Tatiana Oroño is widely acknowledged as an essential voice in contemporary Uruguayan poetry. I first became aware of her when I was in Uruguay in 2014, looking for poets to include in América invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets. As I met with people, gathering suggestions for this anthology of poets under 40, her name kept coming up as someone—outside the anthology—that I just had to read. On that trip, I was lucky enough to meet Tatiana, who arranged for me to receive a copy of her book La piedra nada sabe. I immediately fell in love with her inventive, experimental voice.
Since then, we have met often and I have translated her poetry, publishing it in US and UK magazines such as Ploughshares, Guernica, World Literature Today, Stand, and the Western Humanities Review. We often meet in Montevideo at the cafe El Sportman across from the National Library, or for tea in her home in Malvin, a neighborhood of Montevideo long favored by writers and artists. I have been lucky enough to read her poems and poetic prose pieces ahead of their publication in her latest books, Estuario and Libro de horas, as well as her book-in-progress, Neblina, or—luckier still—to listen to her read them out loud to me.
Oroño’s subject matter is deeply felt, deeply personal to her, with poems about motherhood, the losses during the Uruguayan dictatorship of the 1980s, and, most of all, the natural world. A passionate environmentalist, Oroño finds her palate of images in nature. She is also a feminist and her poems show a consciousness of her own body, of being a woman in the pain and wonder of the everyday. But most of all, Oroño has a special awareness of language as a body of its own. Time and again she writes poems about poetry, poems that reclaim for poetry the power to give meaning to life.
- Jesse Lee Kercheval
Mexico | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
January, 2020Adiós, Casilda! forms Part II of the Mexican poet Ivan Palacios Ocaña's Cosas inútiles y otras poemas ("Useless things and other poems"), published in 2018 as part of the reward for the author's having won the first UNAM Premio de Poesía Joven. Adiós, Casilda! deals with the aftermath of the poet's loss of his pet cat, the eponymous Casilda.
The poems make no attempt to conceal their family lineage: they are nieces and nephews of Frank O’Hara, Erik Satie, David Lynch, and haiku anthologies. They remind us that the pain of loss is tempered by the non-uniqueness of the missing, which is to say: none of us moves through a vacuum, and in returning to the poems and songs that formed those lost to us, we may find them again.
- Noah Mazer
Short Fiction | Spain | Spanish
November, 2019Cristina Fernández Cubas is recognised as one of Spain’s foremost short story writers, especially of the “uncanny,” “fantastic,” and Gothic variety. Berna González Harbour could be talking about virtually all of Fernández Cubas’ work when she describes the most recent collection of short stories as “[r]ich and full of spark . . . a book that disrupts and surprises, that tenses up the distance between what we have, what we fear and reality” ("Babelia," El País). And the American academic Phyllis Zatlin comments that “her stories tend to explore the mysteries of both external reality and of the human psyche. Most of them, including some that fall outside the fantastic mode, explore inner worlds of fantasy and unconscious desires" (Hispania, Vol. 78, No. 1).
My first encounter with Fernández Cubas’ writing was her collection of short stories entitled Los altillos del Brumal (1983). I was particularly struck by two things: her ability to turn a seemingly ordinary object or situation into something terrifying, yet possible, and her overall mastery of the short story genre--a genre which had been widely (and well) practiced by earlier generations of Spanish writers, but which seemed to be far less visible by the time Fernández Cubas appeared on the literary scene. Not long after I read those first stories, as part of my first-ever sabbatical research project, I was able to meet and interview her in her extraordinary attic apartment in Barcelona. Like the character in “Absence,” she cannot imagine living in any other sort of apartment. I still have a copy of that interview, and we have remained in contact ever since.
“Absence” is one of several stories contained in Con Agatha en Estambul (1994). The manner in which Fernández Cubas relates the events and characters in each story is often so down-to-earth and ordinary that, at least initially, they seem entirely plausible and quite credible. It is when the reader’s imagination kicks in that the stories become eerie and dark. In the case of “Absence,” it could be argued that most of us have experienced at least a momentary loss of context and sense of self, quickly dismissed with a (mental) shake of the head. Fernández Cubas’ skill lies in taking such a moment to its extreme limits, and exploring its impact and after-effects on the victim, who ultimately returns to normal. The challenge for the translator is to capture the ordinary everyday tone, language, and descriptions of this moment in the life of Elena Vila Gastón, while at the same time conveying how extraordinary, unnerving, uncanny it is.
Fernández Cubas’ works have been translated into ten languages, but sadly, translations into English are few and far between--only the odd short story, a play, and her most recent work, Nona’s Room (Peter Owen, 2017). Hopefully this translation will assist in making her better known to English readers.
- Lilit Žekulin Thwaites
Poetry (excerpts) | Spain | Spanish
November, 2019An explosion of the microscopic and a journey into the post-apocalyptic, Pilar Fraile Amador’s Breach bears witness—to environmental destruction, climate change, exodus, war, and xenophobia. But more than catastrophe itself, these poems plumb our impulse to document the aftermath, the human mechanisms of testimony that make false claims at objectivity. On a surreal road trip through a world in flames, the poet encounters multiple supposedly neutral observers—scientists, mathematicians, documentarians, philosophers, an uncanny double of herself—and becomes aware of the inherent flaws and subjectivities in each attempt at understanding.
- Lizzie Davis
Colombia | Short Fiction | Spanish
November, 2019Like every other writer of his generation of Colombian writers, Roberto Burgos Cantor labored in the long shadow cast by Gabriel García Márquez. Although Roberto was one of Colombia’s most celebrated writers, he remains little known outside the country. He and others in his cohort staked out a fictional imaginary independent of García Márquez, paving the way for a later generation of more urban, realist writers, such as Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Jorge Franco, Pilar Quintana, and Margarita García Robayo.
But Roberto was an important Colombian writer in his own right. Cartagena, the coastal Caribbean city of his birth, was at the center of his literary universe, and the most marginalized of its inhabitants, his protagonists. The author rendered his solidarity with the poor and powerless in a lyricism that embraced equally the horrors and the beauty of life among Cartagena’s dispossessed. La ceiba de la memoria, his novel dealing with the city during its heyday as a center of the slave trade in the 17th century, the Holocaust, and contemporary political violence in Colombia, received the José María Arguedas Prize awarded by Cuba's Casa de las Americas in 2007. Roberto’s polyphonic novel of 20th century Cartagena, Ver lo que veo, won Colombia’s National Novel Prize in 2018, shortly before his death. During a writing career that spanned more than fifty years, the publication of a new work by Roberto was always an event of great public interest.
“Stories of Singers” is part of the collection Lo Amador (1981), Roberto’s first published volume. It is comprised of seven linked stories that narrate life in the eponymous hard-luck Cartagena neighborhood. Critics agree that these vivid, heartbreaking, and lyrical stories are among Roberto’s best work, among seven short story collections and seven novels. As one critic wrote of Lo Amador, “Few books can make us journey, amazed and compassionate before the spectacle of life, as this one.” “Stories of Singers” is the first English translation of Roberto’s work.
An interesting coincidence: I moved to Lo Amador in the late 1980s and early 1990s to do anthropological research. When neighborhood residents learned what I was doing, they referred me to the book, as if everything that could possibly be known about their lives were contained in it. Never having heard of the book, I eagerly went out and bought it.
Lo Amador so beautifully captured the life and language of the people as I understood them in the little time I’d spent there that I nearly abandoned my fieldwork. Time and deeper understanding only confirmed my initial impression. His work has been an inspiration to my own, first in anthropology, then as a translator, and now as a writer of fiction. And, of course, the grief that his death caused in the nation’s literary circles, and the enduring popularity of Roberto’s fiction among his fellow Colombians, speak for themselves.
- Joel Streicker
I first came across Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s work while participating in the Art Omi: Writers Translation Lab with Daniel Saldaña París. In between working on the proofs of my translation of his novel Among Strange Victims, our conversations were a way of getting to know more about each other, and when I expressed my interest in using images and text in a form of semiotic translation, Daniel suggested that I should get in touch with Verónica. That introduction not only flowered into a firm friendship but also led to my translating Empty Set, and collaborating with Verónica on various other exciting projects, among which stands out Palabras Migrantes/Migrant Words, which started its life as a bilingual audio guide to an exhibition in Jackson Hole and was later published in book form with images from the exhibition by the amazing Mexican artisan publishers Impronta.
When Verónica sent me Almadía’s beautiful edition of Mudanza, from which the essay “Origami” is taken, I fell in love with its unique movement between personal narrative and the appropriation of the narratives of the other artist-writers whose works and lives the book addresses. Indeed, I remember that I spent an inordinately long time reading the essays as I was constantly either researching its “characters” or stopping to consider what I had just read.
Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s genius lies in her passion for communication, which has led her to explore the boundaries of language and its interface with the image to open new spaces for expression. As a translator, it is extremely exciting to have the opportunity to occupy those spaces.
- Christina MacSweeney
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).