For the second year in a row, InTranslation is partnering with the New Literature from Europe Festival to present samples of translated work by the festival's featured authors.
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.
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.
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.
Ecuador | Short Fiction | Spanish
May, 2011Jorge Velasco Mackenzie was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in 1949. In 1983, he was awarded First Prize in the José de la Cuadra Concurso Nacional. He is the author of the novels El Rincón de los Justos (1983), Tambores para una Canción Perdida (1986), and El Ladrón de Levita (1990); the fiction collections De Vuelta al Paraíso (1975), Como Gato en Tempestad (1977), Raymundo y la Creación del Mundo (1979), Músicos de Amaneceres (1986), and Clown y Otros Cuentos (1988); the poetry collection Algunos Tambores que Suenan Así (1981); the anthology Palabra de Maromero (1986); and the play En Esta Casa de Enfermos (1983).
Ecuador | Short Fiction | Spanish
May, 2011Francisco Proaño Arandi was born in Cuenca, Ecuador, in 1944. In 1982, he was awarded Segunda Mencion in the Plural Concurso Internacional de Cuentos in Mexico for his story "Oposición a la Magia," and in 1984, the Jose Mejia Lequerica Premio Nacional del Municipio de Quito for his novel Antiguas Caras en el Espejo. He is the author of the additional novels Del Otro Lado de las Cosas (1993), and La Razón y El Presagio (2003); the short fiction collections Historias de Disecadores (1972), Oposición a la Magia (1986), La Doblez (1986), and Historias del País Fingido (2003); the poetry collection Poesías (1961); and the anthologies Cuentos: Antología (1995) and Perfil Inacabado (2004). His short fiction has appeared in anthologies in Ecuador, Germany, Cuba, Colombia, Spain, and Portugal. He has served as a diplomat representing the Embassy of Ecuador in Colombia (1972-1973), the former U.S.S.R. (1973-1977), Cuba (1980-1984), Yugoslavia (1990-1992), Nicaragua (1995-1997), Costa Rica (1997-2000), El Salvador (2004-2006), and Argentina (2006-present).
Ecuador | Short Fiction | Spanish
May, 2011Raúl Pérez Torres was born in Quito, Ecuador, in 1941. He is a founding member of La Bufanda del Sol magazine and the Frente Cultural of Ecuador. He won the Casa de las Américas Prize in Cuba for his book En la Noche y en la Niebla. In 1981, he was awarded the José Mejía Lequerica del Municipio de Quito National Prize, and that same year, he served as a juror for the Casa de las Américas Prize in La Habana, Cuba. He is the author of the novel Teoría del Desencanto (1985), and the short fiction collections Da Llevando (1970), Manual para Mover las Fichas (1973), Micaela y Otros Cuentos (1976), Musiquero Joven, Musiquero Viejo (1977), Ana, La Pelota Humana (1978), and Un Saco de Alacranes (1989).
Ecuador | Short Fiction | Spanish
May, 2011Marco Antonio Rodríguez was born in Quito, Ecuador, in 1941. He has published essays about Ecuadorian painters, and been a contributing writer for specialized publications in and outside of Ecuador. His stories have been translated into multiple languages, and his books have been published in many editions. He is the author of the essay collections Rostros de la Actual Poesía Ecuatoriana (1963), Benjamín Carrión y Miguel Angel Zambrano (1966), and Isaac J. Barrera, the Man and his Work (1969), and the short fiction collections Historia de un Intruso (1976), Un Delfín y la Luna (1985), and Jaula (1992).
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).