Mexico | Short Fiction | Spanish
June, 2014Using her background in psychotherapy, Glafira Rocha blends genres and fractures forms to introduce us to texts devoid of spatial, temporal, and character delineations, thus fully delving into the psyche of each voice. Like Dan Chaon's Stay Awake and Robin Black's If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, Rocha's Such Tales is a work of fiction intended to disturb and unsettle. Spanning nearly nineteen thousand words in length, the volume centers on human conflict, inviting its audience to examine the catalyst for evil that resides in the relationships among the people Rocha depicts.
The situations explored in Such Tales include, among others: a killer struggling to find his keys after murdering a mother and her two children; a psychopath pondering mass homicides; a dying woman experiencing her final thoughts, visions, and hallucinations; two highly driven women competing for power within the same career and the same mind; private letters describing a father's absence, a wife's loneliness, and the incestuous sexual abuse of their child; people wandering around a town vivid with remnants of the revolution for freedom; the loss of a child testing an elderly woman's faith; a paralytic discussing his shoe fetish; a woman living with depression and struggling to move through her day; the brutal death of a relative affecting everyone and no one equally.
- Gustavo Adolfo Aybar
Victoria Estol was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1983. She holds degrees in sociology and social communication. Bicho Bola, her first book of poetry, and the one from which the poems featured here are taken, has been well received by local literary critics. She earned a commendation from National Pablo Neruda Competition for Young Poets and contributed to the anthology Cualquiercosario, co-edited by Uruguay (Yaugurú) and Spain (Libros de la imperdible).
The poems featured here come from a series entitled "El asalto a las putas," or "Whorehouse Raid," which takes up the old film cliché of gunslingers shooting up a saloon and making off with women thrown over shoulders--an event depicted in the second poem. The cartoonishness of this scene is not downplayed, but it is offset and undermined by the poems that bookend it. The title of the poem that precedes it, "far west will never can forget" is meant to be a Spanish speaker's interpretation of English, implying that Wild West tropes are perhaps more alive now in the cowboy landscape of northern Mexico. The poem acts as a forlorn meditation on the waning of the Wild West mythos in the face of urban modernity. In contrast, the final three surprise us by introducing the rarely heard voices of the women themselves as they sit around telling stories that begin in bravado and jest, but fall silent when the tales turn to sexual subjugation. Their tragedy is framed by an epigraph in which Hollywood's idealized Wild West outlaws--Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid--weigh in from beyond the opening poem's veil of history, saying "did you ever imagine this butch / no sundance this doesn't smell right to me."
Readers may find it helpful to note that Sánchez finds his footing more in rock and roll than the literary establishment, claiming that he only became a poet because he couldn't be a rock star. He's currently rectifying that with the support of his experimental rock band, un país cayendo a pedazos, which describes itself as "a fresh cocktail of humor, criticism, sex, rock, and performance." To check out their performance of "el asalto a las putas," along with other multimedia fun, go to: http://unpaiscayendoapedazos.tumblr.com.
His newest book, jack boner & the rebellion, will be published in February 2014.
- Anna Rosenwong
Argentina | Short Fiction | Spanish
January, 2014First published in the Argentine journal Acción in 2011, Jimena Néspolo's short story "La mujer del dorado" narrates the strange case of Virginia Fhury, a woman with yellow-green eyes who breeds Dobermans on a declining, formerly ostentatious farm in a small Argentine town--and who never seems to age. Virginia becomes a point of obsessive interest among the townsfolk, and the narrator reconstructs the details of Virginia's life from the gossip and reports s/he overhears. Told from the point of view of a singular, unnamed narrator, s/he invokes the plural consciousness of the town for emphasis, and betrays a sense of lament at the town's intrusiveness. As the mystery of Virginia's age unravels, the reader might imagine that so, too, does the bickering cohesiveness of the town. The reader is left to wonder: were Virginia's age and life a mystery after all, or did the town invent a myth based on whispers of her identity? Small town politics feature as prominently as the eternally youthful golden woman.
I translated this story in cafes in Argentina while on a Tinker Foundation grant for predoctoral research in the summer of 2012. Jimena generously agreed to correspond with me and meet for coffee to discuss the finer points of her writing style and philosophy, which come alive in her artfully constructed bio note. During a meeting over coffee in Buenos Aires, she stressed the importance of the play on words in the title, something that is difficult to carry over to the English from the original Spanish. The "mujer del dorado" simultaneously invokes a woman made of gold; a woman from the mythical El Dorado of South American legends; and a woman of golden color, much like a "carpa dorada" (goldfish). All three associations are important, given the gilded history of Virginia's family, her mythical status in town, the strange story of the large goldfish passing through her legs, and the way in which she dies. I decided to let the Spanish speak for itself and titled the story "The Dorado Woman" rather than the more literal "The Golden Woman" or "The Woman of Gold," and throughout the text of the story tried to emphasize the three associations Jimena wrote into the Spanish.
- Kristina Zdravič Reardon
Short Fiction | Spain | Spanish
September, 2013Patricia Esteban Erlés (b. 1972 in Zaragoza, Spain) completed her studies in Hispanic Philology at the University of Zaragoza and specializes in chivalric literature. Her own literary production, in contrast, is firmly rooted in contemporary society, as she represents the age in which she lives, with all the technological innovations and personal uncertainties of our postmodern world. Her work has been described as gothic, with a marked influence from film, featuring a disarming sense of the mysterious as she explores the points of contact between reality and fantasy. The story featured here, "Cantalobos," comes from Manderley en venta (Tropos, 2010), which won the 2007 University of Zaragoza literary award for short fiction and was named one of the top ten books of short stories of 2008.
Argentina | Short Fiction | Spanish
September, 2013Romina Doval teaches at the University of Buenos Aires. She has translated several books from French into Spanish, including Isabelle Rimbaud's Mon frère Arthur. Her short stories and essays have appeared in a wide range of magazines, newspapers, and anthologies, including the featured story, which appeared as "La edad de la razón" in La joven guardia. Nueva narrativa argentina (The Youthguard: New Argentine Fiction).
Antonio Gamoneda was born in 1931. He is one of the most widely read contemporary Spanish poets. His most successful early work, Blues castellano, dates to the period 1961-66. He then entered a long period of self-protective censorship, from which he emerged upon the death of Franco with the publication of Description of the Lie (León 1977). In 1986, with the publication of the first five sections of Book of the Cold // Libro del frío, he became recognized for the originality of his language and the way in which it enacts psychological processes of personal loss and responds to the conflicted emotions needed for survival. Book of the Cold // Libro del frío is considered to be most vital and innovative volume in Antonio Gamoneda's body of work. In 1992, a new edition of Libro del frío appeared, including the major poem featured here, "Cold of Limits," inspired by and written in collaboration with the painter Antoni Tapies. In 2006, Gamoneda received the Cervantes Prize, an honor bestowed annually upon a distinguished Spanish-language author.
Description of the Lie, Book of the Cold, and another of Gamoneda's works, Gravestones (all of which were translated by Donald Wellman), are deeply marked by the dark years of the Franco dictatorship. Gamoneda's poetry can be read as a form of witness, but the work itself is conceived and should be understood as poetry marked by distinctive compositional values of a musical order, both in terms of rhythms and interlaced imagery.
Donald Wellman's translation of Description of the Lie is forthcoming from Talisman House Press.
Novel (excerpt) | Spanish | Uruguay
July, 2013Who Among Us: A Novel narrates the history of a classic love triangle, but with the variation that it is the husband who encourages the wife to take a lover. The novel consists of three parts--three different versions of the same sentimental conflict that culminate in the story each character relates from his or her own perspective. The novel takes place in Montevideo, but this is merely circumstantial; the most prevalent element of the work is the delving into each character's mind, not the monitoring of a social atmosphere. With effective subtlety, Benedetti creates opposing mirrors of the three characters' lives and, at the novel's climax, explicitly asks its underlying question: "Who among us judges whom?"
Marcelo Morales works along boundaries between poetry and prose, with a particular interest in the fragment. These selections from El círculo mágico (The Visionary Circle, 2007) evoke the haunting realities of reorientation and transition that the island confronted at the beginning of the current century: the need to envision the end of an era; to reexamine relations between nation and world, self and society in order to arrive at a new understanding of the present; and to find a language for acknowledging the impact of emigration on everyday life.
Mexico | Spanish | Verse Novel (Excerpts)
March, 2013After being pensioned off for his unstable behavior, Mr. Gordon experiences a fracture of his spirit in an artificial, Californian Eden. In the shade of the tree of a thousand leaves, at the edge of a swimming pool, Gordon transcribes his thoughts, memories, and questions while striving to sort out the harassment he experiences from his wife and his best friend, engaging all the while in a dialogue with an interior voice determined to finish off what remains of his sanity.
Death on rúa Augusta is the diary of a person who cannibalizes his own self. In this narrative poem, Tedi López Mills masterfully delves into the machinery of consciousness in order to exhibit, boldly, that slender thread that keeps us attached to the world. A masterful work of contemporary Mexican literature, which shares both the human depth of Zbigniew Herbert's Mr. Cogito and the teasing ambiguity of Johann von Goethe's Elf King, it does showcase one truth at the heart of all human life: No person is to be despised as worthless; no person can ever be deprived of her or his dignity. Even the "zeros" among us are all "classics after our own fashion."
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).