French | Mauritius | Poetry (excerpts)
September, 2017Khal Torabully’s language is playful, inventive, and peppered with neologisms, which makes it especially challenging to translate. Another challenge I have faced when translating Torabully is to honor the music infused in his poems. I map the sounds of the original text (assonance and alliteration), and try to replicate patterns (though not necessarily exact sounds, nor placement in stanzas) in my translation.
After the NEA awarded me a literature translation fellowship, they interviewed me concerning my “sound mapping” technique, in NEA Arts.
- Nancy Naomi Carlson
Arabic | Poetry (excerpts) | Tunisia
September, 2017The language of Ines Abassi is pregnant with simplicity and at the same time with depth. Her poetry relies on narratorial techniques to convey the pain of memory, trying to gather its bits in a transparent language that is imbued with symbolism and surreal flavours. Abassi’s fascination with storytelling is palpable throughout the body of her poems. She strongly believes in the story's power to expand the poem's investigative abilities, letting her explore the places that live on in her memory and are transformed by it. For instance, “A Whoop of Kohl,” the poem from which the collection takes its title, is written from the persona of an artist, perhaps Ines Abassi herself. In this poem, Abassi contemplates all the objects the artist needs in the art-making practice, relying on details, especially that of kohl, a natural cosmetic product cherished in the Middle East. Not only does the poem’s accumulation of images suggest a picture of a wounded memory, but also its internal rhythm, through the repetition of the word "memory," which heightens the theme of nostalgia that pervades the poem. In translating “A Whoop of Kohl” and the other poems, I have tried my best to preserve the beauty of nostalgia and to convey all those scarred pieces of memories portrayed by the poet. This is a humble attempt to present, in the English language, the wondrous complexity of Abassi’s poetry, which is tied up with poeticity and narration in such a way that it becomes a work of erasure and collage, highlighting the role of memory both in real life and in poetry writing.
- Ali Znaidi
China | Chinese | Poetry (excerpts)
September, 2017Yu Xiang is a key figure of the post-'70s Chinese poets. Laureate of several major literary prizes in China, she is the author of multiple collections, including Surging toward Them (Chongqing University Press, 2015) and Poem in a Pocket (Shandong Literature and Arts, 2016). Her first bilingual volume I Can Almost See the Clouds of Dust (Zephyr/The Chinese University Press, 2013; translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain) was longlisted for the 2014 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. As a visual artist, she has exhibited oil paintings at various venues. A new bilingual chapbook Trace (in Sze-Lorrain’s translation) is forthcoming in 2017.
Drama | Haiti | Haitian Creole
September, 2017*
“Everywhere and always there could be a young Antigone who says no. A King Creon who doesn’t want to hear advice.”
Antigone in Haiti, trans. Edith Gold
Felix Morisseau-Leroy wrote Antigòn in the late 1940s and early ’50s, a period just following the United States’ occupation of Haiti (1914-1934) and just prior to the rise of the Duvalier regime (1957). Haiti at the time of Antigòn’s composition was grappling with both immediate and centuries-long colonial legacies and also with its legacy as the first sovereign nation to emerge from a slave uprising. Morisseau-Leroy brought Antigone into Creole and into the Haitian national context to process the struggles and potentials of these legacies. The Greek gods become the Haitian loa, a pantheon of deities whose “horses” are “ridden,” and who each bring out (god in man, man in god) various potentials. The exacting rhetorical jostle of Antigone yields in Antigòn to sudden incantation--men and gods calling up power through rhythm as well as rhetoric to achieve their aims. True to its source, the play maintains a correspondence between familial and societal dysfunction, while casting Antigone as the figure of uncompromising revolution and absolute fidelity. It is noteworthy that, in an effort to raise political and philosophical questions about oppression and its overcoming in Haiti, Morisseau-Leroy chose to adopt a canonical Western text rather than disavowing Western reference points along with his abandonment of the French. As Moira Fradinger says, “The Greek Antigone thus became a Haitian ancestor–not because she was born in Haiti, but because she could speak the language of the radical difference that gave birth to Haiti.” Antigòn was first performed in 1953 in Port-au-Prince. In 1959, newly in exile during the Duvalier regime’s ascendance, Morisseau-Leroy staged a performance at the Théâtre des Nations, Paris, an event that made him a key figure of the Haitian Renaissance.
Antigòn posed some challenges to us as translators. Because Morisseau-Leroy wrote Antigòn before Creole was made an official language, the text’s orthography and vocabulary is not entirely consistent with Creole dictionaries and grammars. Additionally, our primary text was a 1970 reprint based on a photocopy of a 1954 typescript; spelling was not always consistent or trustworthy. After we drafted our translation, we found Edith Gold’s English translation, titled Antigone in Haiti. We know that it was published in Pétion-Ville, Haiti, but we have not determined the year. We noticed differences between the Gold translation and our reprint of the 1954 script. Our epigraph, for instance, appears in the prologue to the Gold translation but not the prologue to our Creole text. We had read about a 1963 English translation by Mary Dorkonou, which was commissioned by Morisseau-Leroy for a performance in Ghana, where he lived out part of his exile as “National Organizer of Drama and Literature,” but we have not located a copy of the Dorkonou version. It looks as if Antigòn has a rich textual history, replete with variants spurred by new stagings and new translations. Ultimately, we hope to produce an edition of Antigòn that gathers these variants for performance as well as study. Our translation of Antigòn is partly motivated by our desire to see more of his work in circulation. More than that, we stand with scholars of Morisseau-Leroy and Caribbean literature in our belief that Antigòn is a unique work of political theatre.
– Blake Bronson-Bartlett and Robert Fernandez
Johar Buang is a gifted poet who writes in Malay, the national language of Singapore. His works in various genres have won awards and received much recognition in the Malay Archipelago. "Love on Mount Palmer" is an important poem that narrates a nation that values progress and pragmatism, at times forcing other aspects of life to take a back seat. Progress is often arduous and competitive; and some things must be sacrificed. One wonders then where race, religion, and language stand, beyond the national pledge. Profoundly woven and succinctly depicting the journey of the Self in this world, the poem unravels the soul of a poet who espouses Sufi teachings but never ceases to share his concerns for worldly struggles. This poem transcends the subliminal realm of faith to seek refuge in one’s identity and physical existence on this earth. One feels the evocativeness of the words the poet uses to break silences that enable the reconciliation of past and present. The Scriptural references are juxtaposed with one of the most sacred sites in Singapore, the poet’s homeland. Set on a hill, the shrine of a faithful soul provides solace for a multicultural and multifaith society where the pursuit of success and wealth is depicted by many skyscrapers bearing the names of banks and housing an extensive list of major economic stakeholders. One wonders whether the highway was constructed around the hill instead of cutting across it as a mark of respect, or as the legends claim--no one can touch the revered one. In a competitive and at times ruthless race, faith and beliefs are put on trial. Will the tide of development be a threat to domes and mountains that are synonymous with spirituality? Or is the temple of God to be found in the Self? The poem seeks to enlighten and liberate us so that we can comprehend the Self first before we seek to elevate or bury God.
- Annaliza Bakri
Mexico | Short Prose | Spanish
July, 2017These brief pieces, originally written for a monthly column in the Buenos Aires newspaper Clarín, were published in one of Fabio Morábito’s more recent books, El idioma materno ["Mother Tongue"] (Sexto Piso, 2014). I happened upon this book when I was living in Buenos Aires a few years ago, though I didn't intend to translate it at the time. When my partner started reading the book, wondering why I was always carrying it around and laughing out loud, she convinced me to at least write Morábito to see whether the book had been translated into English. Not only did Morábito give me permission to translate the collection, but that was also the beginning of his regular and invigorating correspondence with me about his work.
Much like Alejandro Rossi’s book Manual of a Distracted One, Morábito’s El idioma materno is less a book about one theme or subject and more a demonstration of style and the view of a broad, discerning gaze cast over almost every imaginable subject. Instead of pontificating or pushing some moral stance, these texts provide a critical view of literature, literary professionalism, and imprecise language, and the author does not shy away from critiquing such themes as creative writing pedagogy, translation, and the reading practices of academics, three spaces or roles he himself inhabits. Morábito is a writer who believes in the substantive, in the complex idea, and in the rhythms of long, complex phrases; quirky details, of course, are the hallmarks of his work.
What I most appreciate about Morabito’s prose, however, is his fixation on, and deep love for, the languages we speak and how we speak them: each of the eighty four texts in El idioma materno contains a stylistic lesson, sometimes subtle and other times explicit, and represents the author’s effort to reveal the essence of a subject and its place in the world. The selections published here exemplify the breadth of the book. The essay—to give a name to these prose pieces—“The Sirens,” for example, is more than a retelling of Odysseus’s encounter with the dangerous creatures who enchanted nearby sailors with their music and voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island. By varying the syntax of the same phrase, Morábito not only encourages us to look at the story from multiple perspectives, but also asks us to consider how slight shifts in language can open up new meanings inside a text. The “ominous song” of the sirens in one sentence leads us to the “ominous island” in the next, to the “ominous sirens” followed by the “ominous sea,” and on and on until the wax becomes “ominous” at the end of the text and the snapping point for the crew, “tired now, as we know, of their Odysseus, the calm sea, the oars, the mast, the islands and that beautiful song.”
- Curtis Bauer
The rich and varied poetic tradition of Ecuador is often overshadowed by that of its larger neighbors —Chile and Peru, in particular—and its contributions tend to go unrecognized internationally. In spite of this, or perhaps to a certain degree as a direct result of its oft-referenced “national inferiority complex,” Ecuador’s poets continue to produce outstanding, groundbreaking work.
At just twenty-three years old, Juan Romero Vinueza has already developed a poetic voice that is multilayered, intertextual, humorous, and deftly crafted. He began writing his first collection of poems, Revólver Escorpión (La Caída Editorial, 2016) at the age of 16, drawing on a wide range of influences, from Federico García Lorca to Nicanor Parra, and to some extent providing a response to the highly neo-baroque style of the generation of Latin American poets directly preceding him. The section of Revólver Escorpión from which these two poems are taken is entitled Vértigo sobre un paísaje andino (“Vertigo over an Andean Landscape”).
- Kimrey Anna Batts
French | Poetry (excerpts) | Québec
July, 2017War is more than a political conflict–in late capitalism, it’s a way of life. From Kandahar, Afghanistan, to Rivière-du-Loup, Québec, this war is constellated by concrete acts of terrorism, such as 9/11, and also by a state of near-constant alert, or traumatic consciousness. “History doesn’t exist, it collapses,” the speaker says, moving between mediated images of war and the violence–some symbolic, much of it physical–we encounter every day. It’s tempting to return, in mind, to a time in modernity free from war, but other than a brief gasp between WWII and Vietnam, that time is a phantasm. The speaker of The War Years counsels the reader to continue to move forward, from an age where “we have buried God,” and no longer have a need for poetry, epic or otherwise: “don’t forget but don’t think/ go straight ahead/ carried by what was.” “What was,” is history; “what is,” includes, in this worldview, a confusion between worlds, languages, and us/them binaries wherein the enemy is identified with the path of waged destruction, and “us,” by adherence to “the way of champions.” The champions “eat prize-winning cows/ and all the biggest swordfish,” and “defend the highways/ where our blood flows.” As for the “enemy,” the semantic coordinates are blurred in translation, as they would be in any process of transposition or examination of the language and pronouns used to demarcate, identify, and possess: “you don’t know what they’re capable of/ they will insert themselves into your silence/ until you can no longer tell/ how many we are.” Within this maelstrom, there remains our inheritance of beauty, as preserved in the gaze of another: “and in your eyes…/ I see it already, smoking and beautiful/ Kandahar under the bombs.”
– Virginia Konchan
Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
July, 2017In a recent interview, Russian writer Igor Sakhnovsky relayed what could be taken as the author’s literary credo: “Life’s cornucopia of nonfictional material renders fantasy unnecessary.” His short story “The Jealous God of Chance” puts this precept into practice. Sakhnovsky’s peculiar breed of realism evolves out of his own life. In each of the six parts of the story, the narrator (the author’s alter ego) reflects on an autobiographical episode and imagines what could have happened along with what actually did. Rather than lamenting what might have been, Sakhnovsky relates these events in wry, staccato prose, full of irony and self-reproach. Each vignette explores a decisive moment of action, inaction, or, as the title suggests, chance. They include a near-death experience in the narrator’s childhood, a hasty marriage proposal in his early adulthood, and a fateful encounter with a Russian mobster in middle age. The last episode finds the narrator in the present, sitting at his desk, contemplating an offer from a stranger he’s been chatting with on the Internet which concerns whether or not the two should spend the rest of their lives together. An ambiguous final paragraph seems to suggest that the God of Chance is, as the narrator suggests, a jealous one.
- Michael Gluck
Mexico | Short Fiction | Spanish
July, 2017Translating Nadia Villafuerte’s work is a pleasure and a challenge. I am very fortunate that she and I are friends and I can easily ask her to clarify passages for me. This time my particular challenge was finding the character of Micaela’s voice, something with which Nadia couldn’t help me. What a person whose first language is Ch'ol sounds like when speaking Spanish has no obvious equivalent in English. My research took me to various schools of thought about dialects in translation, furthering my education and helping me to make my choice, which was simply to create a dialect rather than to try to copy one in English. “Getting Ahead” is a work of fiction, but it is also a tribute to all the Micaelas who have died and are still dying, many anonymously without even a story to mark that they once lived. Micaela is not a perfect person; although she’s admirable, she’s not even particularly likeable. We can have some sympathy for the abandoned child who is the narrator, but she is also a bit of a brat. And yet it is a joy to enter their world for the little time they have together.
The original story, "Salir Adelante,” has just been published in the anthology Los pelos en la mano. Cuentos de la realidad actual, edited by Rogelio Guedea (Lectorum, 2017).
- Pennell Somsen
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 »