Classical Persian | Iran | Poetry
December, 2017These poems are selections from an ongoing project to translate Hafez’s collection of ghazals. Rather than attempting in vain to recreate the form, turns of phrase, and connotations of the fourteenth-century Persian, these translations aim instead to give the English speaker a taste of the experience of reading the original. Hafez’s ghazals span the sensual, social, and spiritual, with radical, anti-conformist social critique nestled amid reverence in equal part of the lover and of God. Despite the tightly structured meter and rhyme of each ghazal, and a complete lack of classical enjambment, scenes and perspectives shift erratically at the level of the individual line. These translations aim to preserve the evocative power of the spaces that open up between each such unit by linking disparate images in a contemporary voice.
- Patrick Sykes
Norway | Norwegian | Poetry (excerpts)
December, 2017The translation of these poems was sometimes challenging, as the book was published in 1904, prior to Norway’s secession from Sweden in 1905 and the subsequent process of Norwegianization of the written language that followed. Formerly, written Norwegian was basically Danish in orthography due to Norway’s having been part of Denmark for more than 400 years. Though the text is for the most part readable in Norwegian, there are often words spelled using an older form of Danish than is used today. Hamsun would go on to heavily revise The Wild Chorus in his collected works to reflect these national changes. Written Norwegian is today called Norwegian Bokmål (“book tongue”).
- Peter Dahlstrand
German | Germany | Short Fiction
December, 2017I first encountered the work of Ödön Von Horváth one pleasant summer afternoon in Berlin, on an outdoor remainder table. I was looking for some light reading, and an old-fashioned paperback anthology of short pieces on the theme “Autumn” seemed exactly to fit the bill. Goethe, Fontane, Brecht—and a little piece by someone named Von Horváth, dating from the 1920s, that I found unexpectedly moving and well written. It had an unreliable and increasingly hapless narrator through whose distorted lens we can see truths about his motivation and feelings towards women that he tries, but fails, to understand.
I had been looking for a lyrical, even sentimental writer, and instead found a political one. Passionately antifascist, Von Horváth sought in his plays and prose to explore the complacency and indifference that made possible the Nazi victory of the 1930s. His subject is the struggle between consciousness and the unconscious, and its manifestation in the cruelty of men towards women in a patriarchal society.
“A human being only comes alive in speech,” he once said. Rejecting the convention that German literature could only be written in “high German,” he imitated the speech of characters low on the social scale. Rendering this speech in an English appropriate to its time was one of the translation challenges of “A Family Saved,” also from the 1920s. A second challenge was doing justice to Von Horváth’s stated aim of creating a “synthesis of irony and realism.” Like other works, “A Family Saved” seeks to do this in depicting a post-World War I Austria in which societal trust, once destroyed, cannot be restored.
Like all major writers in German of his generation, Von Horváth was forced into exile, where he died. I find it noteworthy and timely that he emphatically rejected the Nazi definition of a German as a person of German blood. For Von Horváth, who was partly Hungarian, being German was a matter of identifying with German culture. Nietzsche, he pointed out, was half Polish; Dürer, half Hungarian.
- Linda Frazee Baker
German | Germany | Short Fiction
December, 2017“Window in Flames” is the titular story of a volume of short stories Carmen-Francesca Banciu wrote during the height of the Ceaușescu regime. One of the stories in this volume resulted in a publication ban for Banciu in 1985 because of the way in which the author took aim at the abject poverty and indignities that characterized the Ceaușescu government. That same story was also awarded the International Arnsberg Prize and brought Banciu international acclaim. My English translation of this story, “The Beaming Ghetto,” appeared in The Brooklyn Rail in 2005. The volume was first published in Germany with the title of “Fenster in Flammen” in 1992.
I was drawn to this story because of its chilling and complex portrait of a female survivor of a grotesque dictatorship. Physical and emotional abuse, psychological torture, and authoritarian deceit populate the canvas of cruelty that the narrative’s young female protagonist, La ventana en llamas, inhabits. Implementing surrealistic visual imagery and rich literary symbolism, Banciu foregrounds these powerful themes in an evocative dreamlike narrative. The recurrent window, Banciu’s locus of choice here, is also worth considering, for it plays a key role in Banciu’s literary imaginary. Windows invoke the possibility of passage into a different reality, a boundary crossing. A keen preoccupation with borders and boundaries has permeated, and continues to permeate, much of Banciu’s work. Contemplating separate yet simultaneous realities and perspectives is one of her hallmark themes. In her 2002 collection of short stories, Berlin Is My Paris, she explores the ideals as well as the everyday realities that differentiated Eastern and Western Europe in the wake of the collapse of the Iron Curtain and German Reunification. Here the window represents a transparent border between La ventana en llamas’s perceived struggle with the threats that vex her from her real-life oppressors in the outside world and her own inner demons. Haunted by enduring trauma and the ongoing menacing violence of party tactics and party-sympathizing patriarchs, the protagonist learns to transform intense emotional wounds and psychological scarring into a life-affirming agency.
- Elena Mancini
Takarai Kikaku was a Japanese haikai poet and among the most accomplished disciples of Matsuo Bashō. His father was an Edo doctor, but Kikaku chose to become a professional haikai poet rather than follow in his footsteps. Kikaku's poetry is known for its wit and its difficulty. Whereas Basho, especially in his later years, focused on the countryside and espoused an aesthetic of simplicity, Kikaku preferred the city and the opportunities it provided for extravagant play. He also preferred a more demanding form of poetry, one laced with wordplay, allusions, and juxtapositions of images that defy easy explanation. At the time of his death, he was perhaps the leading poet in Edo (today's Tokyo), which then had a population of around one million, making it perhaps the largest city in the world at the time.
- Joshua Gage
French | Poetry (excerpts) | Québec
September, 2017The latter two sections of Samuel Mercier’s poetry collection The War Years ("Keep Singing Vera Lynn" and "Suite for Bomber Harris") invoke a strategic military dialogue and rhetoric, referencing, for example, the 2012 Quebec student protests against tuition increases led by student unions such as the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante, particularly the events of May 6, 2012, during a demonstration in Victoriaville that eventually turned into a riot. At least ten people were injured, including some police officers, and two protesters were very seriously injured (the first one lost an eye, and the second sustained head trauma and a skull fracture). The last section also reads as a complicated address to Bomber Harris (Sir Arthur Travers Harris, who assisted British Chief of the Air Staff Charles Portal in carrying out the United Kingdom's most devastating attacks against the German infrastructure and population, including the Bombing of Dresden).
These sections of The War Years are concerned with war as historical event as well as metaphor for human consciousness, as if to be conscious means to be conscious of not only history’s underlying tensions and conflicts (“the memory of happy wars”; “the prolongation of buried wars”), but the constant threat of societal implosion. Not without deeply ironic humor (“you must know how to taste/the sudden peace//in the quiet coolness/of the meat department”), The War Years uses poetic recursion—beginning lines repeating near the ending—to establish a haunting poem-cycle that disrupts rather than describes what it means to be alive in late capitalism’s eco-apocalypse, wherein the “enemy” or absolute other is no longer identifiable, let alone, at times, corporeal, belonging to terrorist networks and cyber-worlds. Seemingly straightforward yet deceptively complex, Mercier’s language play destabilizes the senses (“no rhyme nor reason/for neither words nor bombs”), as well as time-honored modes of restitution such as poetry and spring. What else can we expect from a text that turns on itself, until “we no longer really know very well/what comes next/or who is not/the enemy”?
Forgetting in order to remember, The War Years, as a whole, puts its faith not in “former dictators,” the “carrion” of time, institutions, or institutionalized violence, but in a poetics that exculpates no one, not even the poet, who seeks instead “to find/in his deepest hiding places/the contours of the enemy within.”
- Virginia Konchan
Italian | Italy | Poetry (excerpts)
September, 2017Andrea Raos was my Italian language teacher in Chicago. But he could have easily been my English, French, or Japanese instructor as well. His passion and talent for languages are prodigious. His poetry strikes me with its inexorable, almost tactile construction of everyday images that paint a sonorous but often painful picture of bodily or cerebral experiences. Andrea Raos’ poetry is indeed cerebral--both intellectual and visceral, it touches you emotionally and it makes your spine tingle, as Vladimir Nabokov would put it. At the same time it addresses questions that lie at the heart of our existence in a global society and the subjectivities this existence produces. Does language constitute identity, and, if so, how? What is the relationship between self, body, and language? Is speaking a new language reinventing your psychic and physical self? Where is language located as you pronounce foreign words? Do we perceive the world differently when reality is filtered through another language? Translating from Italian his poem “The Moment Just Before” was both challenging and exhilarating, as I too navigate between languages, feeling always at sea, my body adjusting to different vocal and corporeal demands, my mind juggling grammatical constructions and foreign lexicons. I am a native speaker of Bulgarian. My adopted languages are English, Russian, and Italian. And somewhere in the background lurk a handful of other modern and ancient languages. Thus when translating this poem, I could relate to the lyric speaker’s attitude, his attempt to articulate the embodied experience of language, and in doing so, to embrace his mother tongue and find a home inside it.
- Stiliana Milkova
Jun Tsuji’s mother was born in Edo--old Tokyo--to the mistress of a daimyo advisor. His father, a one-time government official, came from an affluent farming family in Saitama. Tsuji grew up prosperously until the age of thirteen, by which time his father, prone to illness and bad business bets, and his mother, prone to lavishness, had squandered the family’s money. Tsuji thus ended his formal education, and began a lifelong course of self-study--reading broadly, taking night courses in English, working menial jobs, socializing and playing his flute on the streets of Asakusa, a neighborhood historically renowned both for its religious institutions and festivals, and for its entertainment offerings (revue shows, cinemas, theatres, bars, nightclubs, hostess clubs, and brothels).
Though perhaps most famous for his seminal influence in Japanese Dadaist circles, Jun Tsuji was, at different times in his life, infatuated with Christianity (during his stint in Sunday school as a boy) and, later in life, with German philosophy and Buddhism. In the early 1920s, just before the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, Tsuji encountered Dadaism and did much to popularize this European school of thought across Japanese intellectual and artistic circles, christening himself “Japan’s first Dadaist,” a title more fairly belonging to a group of publishers and writers, including, most crucially, the poet Shinkichi Takahashi (1901-1987), with whom Tsuji had a supportive relationship that soured over time due to Tsuji's zealous support for German philosopher Max Stirner’s egoist anarchist philosophy--which Takahashi dismissed--and to Takahashi’s gravitation away from Dadaism toward Zen Buddhism and a life of productive domesticity with his wife and two daughters. While hospitalized for alcohol-induced psychosis in the 1930s, Tsuji came to embrace his own brand of Buddhism, inspired by Shinran, founder of Jōdo Shinshū, a rival sect to Zen (now one of the most popular in Japan), which bears a degree of similarity to Christianity in its belief in a savior, grace, and a world beyond this life.
- Ryan C. K. Choi
Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Short Fiction
September, 2017When I first met Marcílio França Castro at a coffee shop during Brazil’s 2016 winter, he showed up toting a bag full of presents for me. When he dumped the bag onto the table, out came books, like he was some sort of mix between Jorge Luis Borges and Santa Claus. What most impressed me was his eagerness to promote Brazilian literature in general; his own books were joined by several from his peers. And perhaps Borges is a good comparison for Marcílio; indeed, his writing calls to mind Borges, Calvino, and Cortázar. Yet he does not simply imagine other worlds; he brilliantly perceives unsuspected oddities in places of absolutely no interest. In his short stories, which range from traditional length to flash fiction, and with a prose that is at once economical and yet never lacking in precision, Marcílio França Castro transforms his culture’s most unsuspecting spaces into fantastic reading. The author and I have worked together in producing translations for many of his stories, overcoming differences in idioms, metaphors, sentence structures, and other obstacles found in the passage from Portuguese to English. Most importantly, this project kept me sane during the subsequent North Dakotan winter of 2017.
- Heath Wing
Ya Hsien wrote “Chicago” in 1959, along with several other “city poems” that reflect his backlash against the unrelenting ascent of industrialization. Through disjointing, violent, and often surreal imagery, Ya Hsien captures a dystopian vision of a Chicago that has been rendered “coarse” and “illiterate” by the steel heart of modernity. This is a poem that is framed by desolation, a poem about a city where love and poetry have become a matter of pressing buttons.
While translating “Chicago,” I mostly struggled with relaying the semantic meaning of particular words and phrases while trying to preserve the aural and thematic qualities of the poem. I often compromised on a semantic level by introducing new words into the poem. For example, I translated “橋” (bridge) as “station” so that it could rhyme with “desolation,” the way “文化” (culture) end-rhymes with “橋下” (below the bridge) in the original couplet. I also used “aromatic” to rhyme with “mathematics” to compensate for the end-rhyme between 星光 (xing guang, starlight) and 芬芳 (fen fang, fragrance) that is lost in my translation.
On a more thematic level--to retain the sense of ferocity conveyed by “狼” (wolf) in “狼狽” (a situation that is embarrassing, awkward, and perhaps even pathetic), I described the whistle of the steam engine as a “wolf whistle” to keep the “wolf” in the poem. This predator joins the other violent images in the poem (autumn being “electrolyzed,” the tender hands of angels “snapped off”) to represent Ya Hsien’s portrayal of a harshly industrializing city.
Ya Hsien had not been to Chicago prior to writing this poem, but he need not have; “Chicago” reimagines the heartbeat of the city with such strong sensory detail that it is as if Ya Hsien were imagining a new Chicago for us, one that is interlocked with his past, evolving in the present, and set in the future.
- May Huang
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to InTranslation, where we feature English translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing from around the world. InTranslation is a showcase for works in translation that have not yet been acquired for book publication. Learn more »