France | French | Novel (excerpt)
July, 2020Eugène Sue owed his immense popularity to the series of sensational novels of Parisian low life he began in 1842 with Les Mystères de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris). The book appeared as a serial novel, or feuilleton, in the conservative newspaper Le Journal des Débats. It provided readers with an examination of working-class and criminal Paris that no novel had until then portrayed. With its portraits of prostitutes, criminals, and villains of all stripes, who speak in their own language and move about in their own milieu, the book caused a scandal upon its release. Unlike his contemporaries, Sue abandoned the drawing rooms of the beau monde for the dive bars and cabarets of central Paris, the Ile de la Cité, where the story is set.
There had, of course, been fictional descriptions of urban life before, but their focus had been on the Parisian bourgeoisie and its interaction with the remnants of the French aristocracy. Sue upset the codes of contemporary action and introduced a dark, violent underworld, a secret Paris as exotic, as foreign as any city portrayed in Sue’s popular maritime novels. Although colorful characters and cunning criminals were not unknown in French fiction, Sue’s brand of insistent realism was more in keeping with the methods of a social worker or journalist. His gritty depictions of the poor and the criminal classes eschew the elements of the fabulous and the burlesque to portray characters in their natural setting. There are elements of Dickens in his work, but without the latter’s good-natured bonhomie and humor. And while our attitudes of what is acceptable or appropriate in literature have broadened considerably since the 1840s, there was nothing picturesque about the book at the time of its appearance. The scandal was real, and Sue was reviled by conservative literary critics of his day for having shoved their noses into the gutters of Paris. He was also accused of literary speculation and said to have profited from a depiction of the poor and the downtrodden. This was to be expected. Elements of the socialist press took Sue at his word, however, and championed the book as a denunciation of poverty and a plea in favor of the common man, those who were referred to as les classes populaires.
- Robert Bononno
The entire translator's note can be found at the beginning of the post, before the excerpt from the novel.
Satire operates on the largest levels of social identification and social structure, and the smallest: the smallest detail is used to exemplify the social structure’s problems, or the oddness, or particularity, of a social formation—a custom, a manner, a rite, a ritual. In one way, you could say that cultural satire operates still on the rubric of premodern anthropology, but with the sizable difference that the writers of satire write from inside the culture and society being described and critiqued. The problem of translating satire—thought of as the problem of translating culture—is brought back to the colonial problem as identified in postcolonial times: cultural appropriation and cultural stereotyping.
The translator is an interpreter, as well as a publicist for the text being brought into a new cultural setting. It is one thing for a culture to laugh at itself, to critique itself, but it might be another thing for one culture to laugh across the borders of social division at another culture. This fraught tension of who is laughing at whom is sensed within Shrilal Shukla’s work: while Shukla paints amusing, critical portraits of middle-class, semi-Westernized individuals of Indian cities from the 1960s through the 2000s, his best-known satire concentrates on the Indian countryside and village life. In this case, is Shukla, a Brahmin from the city, laughing at the villagers, and so manifesting the city dweller’s prejudice against the villager’s backwardness, the villager’s primitiveness? (There is even an official social designation attached to some country dwellers in India called “other backward classes,” or OBCs.) Or is he laughing with them?
The question is complicated by the fact that Shukla also satirizes the city dwellers who go to the villages and small towns of the countryside through their activities in rural development or “village uplift” work. The history of independent India is in part the history of the interactions of the political and cultural elites of the cities, complete with their historical legacies reaching back into colonial times, with the political infrastructure of the villages and small towns, with its distinctly different hues. That Shukla satirizes both poles of the political structure in post-Independence India suggests that: 1) no one is ever above ridicule, and 2) the structure itself, with all its member parts, is the actual focus of his satirical depictions. Moreover, the distinction between the village and the city is never as clear-cut in India as it might seem. When I lived in Lucknow, the same city as Shukla did, the joke was that Lucknow was the biggest village in the world. This is the same joke told in every “mid-sized” Indian city (mid-sized means over a million people). Only a minuscule percentage of Indians can claim to be from “old money,” or claim to be from families who have lived for generations in cities. While there is a split in consciousness between the city and village, the reality is that city dwellers still have ties to the countryside. Yet, since the city is a social staging ground of mobility, city dwellers are constantly denying or repressing their village pasts (and presents). No doubt, this repression is part of the reason why village uplift movements have been so filled with corruption, doublespeak, and poor implementation. Someone higher on the chain of social mobility can strengthen their position by keeping those under them where they are. The city-dwelling do-gooder is not free from the desire (and pressure) of moving up on the social food chain.
Translating humor is thought to be among the most difficult forms of translation. In translating Shukla’s humor, I think it helps that I have spent time in the Indian countryside and that I identify strongly with the position of a country boy in the city. (I have to go back just two generations to get to my grandparents who left the farms, who left the countryside, for the big city. Moreover, some of my formative memories are wandering around in summer fields, turning over rocks, looking for ringneck snakes.) So, just as Shukla’s subject position is imbricated in the complex social interactions that he describes, and while the particular social makeup of the Indian countryside is unique to itself, I feel a sense of engagement and identification in the template of city and village that constitutes the core of Shukla’s satire. While translating, I feel as though I am laughing with the text, and laughing at myself. Looking at the first scene from “Several Days in Umraonagar,” you might say that it’s not just that I have experienced riding in buses full of livestock, but that, if you would allow me to admit it, I prefer it.
Translating texts that present exaggerated and humorous caricatures of Indian “types” isn’t necessarily a nefarious “colonial” activity. If the question of whether there is a sort of humor shared by all cultures is too difficult to address here, perhaps then the value of satire translations is the question that must be addressed to each reader who exists outside of the source text’s cultural ambit, namely, to what extent does the reader lay aside cultural prejudices and biases, to what extent does the reader allow an opening of worldview and subjectivity, in order to try to find the humor funny, and funny in the way of laughing with and not at.
- Matt Reeck
Indonesia | Indonesian | Short Fiction
July, 2020“Joshua Karabish” is one of the seven short stories that make up The People of Bloomington (Orang-Orang Bloomington)—a haunting and darkly humorous collection originally published in 1980. Reissued in 2004, and released again in 2016, it is one of the most beloved and influential literary works in Indonesia today.
Human nature in all its peculiarity and contradiction takes center stage in these tales. The characters feel their loneliness acutely and yet deliberately estrange others. They unconsciously crave human affection and approval, yet act in inexplicably reprehensible ways. Throughout the collection, pestilence snakes among and through the characters, with people suffering from mysterious illnesses, believing themselves to be gravely ill, or terrified of contracting diseases from others.
The stories are nominally set in Bloomington, Indiana, where the author lived as a graduate student in the 1970s. But the Bloomington of the stories is an otherworldly, almost surreal, town. It’s an environment, alienating and bordering on alien, sectioned into apartment units and rented rooms, and gridded by streets and partitioned from other towns by distances traversable only by car. A place where the solitary can all too easily remain solitary. Where people can at once be obsessively curious about others, yet fail to form genuine connections with anyone.
Eerie, estranging, yet comic and profoundly sympathetic, The People of Bloomington broke new ground content-wise and voice-wise in Indonesia, and is still utterly distinctive, and strange, in the present.
- Tiffany Tsao
As the U.S. once again confronts its inability to fulfill its legal and moral obligations to all its citizens, it is perhaps a good moment to revisit Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poem “Poet of the Ashes,” which Italy’s greatest 20th-century poet produced in the wake of his first visit to New York City in 1966, after being invited to appear at the New York Film Festival. He summed up his impressions of the city in an interview with the journalist Oriana Fallaci: “New York is not an evasion: it’s an engagement, a war. It gives you the urge to do, to confront, to change: it pleases you like the things that please you when you’re twenty.” Pasolini would later refine his thoughts in an essay published not long after his stay: “In America, even in my very brief stay, I spent many hours in a covert climate of struggle, of revolutionary urgency, of hope, reminiscent of the Europe of 1944 and 1945. In Europe everything is finished: in America you have the impression that everything is about to begin. I don’t mean to say there is no civil war in America, perhaps not even anything like it, nor do I mean to predict it: one lives there, however, as if on the eve of great things.” Excited by the Civil Rights Movement, Pasolini was pleased to discover that unlike in his native Italy, a desire for change still existed among the people. Pasolini’s entire life, after all, had been shaped by tyranny. He was born in 1922, when Mussolini's Fascists stormed to power, bringing three years of post-war revolutionary fervor to a complete halt and beginning a twenty-year-long campaign of tyrannical repression that drove the country’s poor and working classes into greater misery than ever before. “Poet of the Ashes” unpacks what Alberto Moravia meant when he called Pasolini a sentimental communist: in this poem we find the entirety of Pasolini’s life analyzed in what the poet himself called a “bio-bibliographical poem,” which discusses his childhood, his tortured relationship with his father, the death of his younger brother Guidalberto (1925-1945) during the Resistance in WWII, the roots of his political commitment, the failure of the post-WWII era to create real social change, his literary beginnings, and finally, his relocation to Rome, where he initially lived in the city’s poverty-stricken neighborhoods. The poem also discusses the trials and lawsuits that dogged Pasolini in his more successful years, as well as his artistic output. This complex narrative–or series of narratives–is interspersed with sharp commentary on his host country, the U.S., and his motherland, Italy. Readers will encounter references to Greek mythological heroes, the medieval Italian poet Tasso, the American anthropologist Oscar Lewis, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the Soviet dissidents Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, and even John Lennon.
- André Naffis-Sahely
Poetry (excerpts) | Russia | Russian
July, 2020In early 1937, during his third year of exile in the southern Russian city of Voronezh in the "black earth" region, Osip Mandelstam’s desperation grows as he becomes increasingly uncertain that he can save himself and his wife, Nadezhda. He has by this time learned about the purges and has heard on the radio news that Kirov's murderers had been "found"—the show trials were in full swing. The Great Terror is beginning as he completes the second of the three Voronezh notebooks.
- John High and Matvei Yankelevich
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
The translations featured here are the result of a collaboration between a poet (Don Boes) and a translator (Gaby Bedetti). Our project has been to translate a few poems from each of Meschonnic’s nineteen collections for a Selected Poems of Henri Meschonnic. We chose this sampling from that manuscript. These poems represent four of his nineteen collections: Puisque je suis ce buisson (Since I Am This Bush, Arfuyen, 2001); Tout entier visage (Whole Face, Arfuyen, 2005); De monde en monde (From World to World, Arfuyen, 2009); and L’obscur travaille (The Dark Works, Arfuyen, 2012). These four poems only suggest the richness, range, and intensity of his poetic output.
Until recently, only six poems from Voyageurs de la voix (Voyagers of the Voice) were translated in “Jewish Poets of France,” Shirim: A Jewish Poetry Journal, vol. 7, no. 2, Oct. 1988. Our English translations seem to be the first since then of Meschonnic’s diaphanous, stripped-down voice. As with the poems of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jacques Réda, the rhythm of Meschonnic’s poems exposes the subject. He follows Montaigne’s practice: “I do not describe being. I describe the passage . . . from minute to minute.” Untitled and unpunctuated, his poems are kin to W. S. Merwin’s “climbing out of myself/all my life.” Meschonnic writes, “I am not in what/I seek but in what escapes me.”
Our challenge as translators was to capture the continuous movement of the poems, a movement that suggests the possibility of passing energeia from subject to subject, of inventing within language new ways of being with oneself, others, and the world. Replicating this movement in English texts was difficult. We could hear and feel the rhythm of the French. We thought Meschonnic’s minimal vocabulary and relative lack of poetic features, such as images and metaphors (his poems are nearly adjective-free), suggested a somewhat clear path from French to English. We soon realized, however, that his rhythms and condensed language were in the service of mapping voices, not poems. His use of enjambment and only the most colloquial verbs and nouns made us take a hard look at individual words (no matter their simplicity), and therefore the world. In translating these poems, like Meschonnic, that accomplished innovator, we became “patients of life.”
- Gabriella Bedetti and Don Boes
Macedonian | North Macedonia | Short Fiction | Slovenia
July, 2020The excerpts featured here are from Lidija Dimkovska’s work When I Left Karl Liebknecht. The book comprises twenty-seven stories, narratives by more than thirty people about migration, tragedy, escape, sorrow, and redemption as they move around the globe. The thread connecting them is their relationship to a street, a school, a stadium, a bridge, something named in honor of the German socialist Karl Liebknecht. Kristine, from the borderland between Germany and Poland, attended a high school bearing his name; Irena lived on a street named after Karl Liebknecht in Skopje, Macedonia; Frederik lived on Karl Liebknecht Street in Schneeberg, Germany. The speakers recount the events that led to their movement away from Karl Liebknecht. In translating, I have sought to capture the sadness, loss, and isolation of the individual presenters as they tell their stories at the Karl Liebknecht House in Leipzig, Germany. Lidija Dimkovska was awarded a “Special Mention for European Cultural Heritage” by the European Union for five of the tales from When I Left Karl Liebknecht.
- Christina E. Kramer
In the late summer of 1830, Alexander Pushkin traveled to Boldino, a town four hundred miles east of Moscow, to settle the business of coming into legal ownership of the family estate which would complete the dowry he needed to marry his betrothed, Natalia Goncharova. Due to an outbreak of cholera, Pushkin was unable to return to the capital as soon as he had hoped: the roads were blocked by quarantine checkpoints or altogether closed by a cordon sanitaire. During three months of what turned out to be the legendarily productive “Boldino autumn,” Pushkin wrote the final chapters of Eugene Onegin as well as a number of other works, including The Tales of Belkin (considered the birth-site of all Russian fiction), and four short verse plays known collectively as “The Little Tragedies,” one of which is Feast During the Plague.
This short play draws on Scottish writer John Wilson’s lengthy drama The City of the Plague, from an 1816 collection of the same title. Wilson, who served for many years as chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, was a poet in his youth and was friendly with William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Thomas de Quincey, and Sir Walter Scott. He also wrote voluminous criticism, stories, and novels, primarily for Blackwood’s, a well-known conservative miscellany that often published the British Romantics. So, the original of Feast During the Plague is itself a translation of sorts, from English into Russian; a not uncommon example of a translation, or a very free imitation (and a severe abridgment) that became an acknowledged classic in its new context, outliving its source.
I translated Pushkin’s play in the spring of 1999 to serve as a libretto for an operetta by the émigré Russian composer Sergei Dreznin. I edited and even composed parts of the translation at his piano as he played and sang the melodies I was to accommodate. I saw the operetta performed only once in New York City, staged by Garik Chernyakhovsky (1944-2015), a legendary and much-beloved Moscow theater director who had recently emigrated to New York. I believe it was later performed in Vienna and perhaps elsewhere in Europe.
The peculiar musical circumstances necessitated that I keep close to Pushkin’s iambic blank verse in the speeches as well as the meter and rhyme of the two songs. Two decades later, finding some charm in this earnest early effort and resisting the retrospective urge to move away from the formal approach, I have made only small corrections and, partly thanks to poet Steven Zultanski’s suggestions, a few minor improvements.
- Matvei Yankelevich
The entire translator's note can be found at the beginning of the post, before the play.
Eritrea | Italian | Italy | Poetry
May, 2020Ribka Sibhatu, one of Eritrea’s most indefatigable writer-activists, was born in Asmara in 1962, the year Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia unilaterally annexed the former Italian colony of Eritrea, triggering a liberation war that would last for the next three decades. In 1979, at the age of seventeen, Sibhatu was sentenced to a year in prison for criticizing the government, on false charges trumped up by an Ethiopian politician whom Sibhatu had refused to marry. Adopting a false identity, Sibhatu fled to Addis Ababa upon her release from prison and finished her education in the Ethiopian capital, where she later married a Frenchman, relocating to the latter’s native country in the mid-1980s. Once that marriage ended, Sibhatu moved again, this time to Rome, where she published her first collection of poems, Aulò! Canto Poesia dall’Eritrea (Sinnos, 1993), a volume of confessional lyrics written in both Tigrinya and Italian. Despite falling into various different genres—poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—Sibhatu’s work essentially represents a reconstruction of Eritrea’s cultural heritage in exile. The poems featured here are drawn from a collection-in-progress.
- André Naffis-Sahely
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