Austria | German | Novel (excerpt)
March, 2020Alfred Döblin singled out the young Viennese cultural activist Robert Müller (1887-1924) as a “dazzling wordsmith.” Yet for over half a century after his suicide, this remarkable Expressionist writer was forgotten. Only in 1990 did his major novel Tropics: The Myth of Travel (1915) reappear in print, and only in the last decade or two have Germanist academics and critics begun to give serious attention to his writings. (The collected works now cover 14 volumes!)
Tropics is an extraordinary tour de force. Ostensibly a report from a German engineer about an expedition by three white men (Slim the Yankee, Van den Dusen the Dutch colonial officer, and Brandlberger the German) to the upper Amazon in search of lost Conquistador gold, it quickly blossoms into increasingly manic disquisitions on “civilisation” vs. “barbarism, ”European “normality” vs. the life-ways of “primitives,” Freudianism vs. “healthy instincts,” benevolent imperialism vs. murderous plunder, reason vs. mysticism, reality vs. illusion. It draws heavily on reports from the Amazon by the German anthropological explorer Theodor Koch-Grünberg (1872-1924), only to subvert their subtext of western superiority.
This excerpt occurs about halfway through the novel, when the three westerners have spent long enough in an Indian village to lose their aura of superiority, and have become figures of some scorn to the Indians.
- C D Godwin
Novel (excerpt) | Serbia | Serbian
March, 2020Death of Descartes (1996) is a late novel of the Serbian writer, philosopher, and public intellectual Radomir Konstantinović, increasingly considered to be his literary masterpiece and swan song. Konstantinović finished writing the text in 1993, during the height of internationally imposed sanctions on Serbia and a series of brutal wars in the neighboring Yugoslav republics, although the idea of exploring larger philosophical ideas through the relationship between father and son originated much earlier in the 1960s. Described by Konstantinović’s biographer Radivoj Cvetićanin as a “postmodern family novel” and a companion piece to his last literary work, Beckett, A Friend (2000), Death of Descartes freely combines fiction, biography, and philosophical reflection while retaining a taut dramatic structure. In many ways, the novel represents Konstantinović’s temporary withdrawal from anti-nationalist and anti-war political engagement in order to interrogate the common places of modern western philosophy, rooted in the apparent autonomy and rationality of the ego. As such, the novel partakes in the broader postmodern project to renegotiate the foundations of human subjectivity on the basis of our shared bodily vulnerability and openness to one's own and other's mortality. The text offers particular challenges to any attempts at translation because Konstantinović, first of all, inflects and estranges the Serbian language with classical French stylistic forms while--in a modernist register--radically breaking down conventional syntax.
- Vladislav Beronja
Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Poetry
March, 2020The young Brazilian poet Yasmin Nigri’s critically acclaimed debut collection Bigornas ("Anvils") features 70 short and long poems from different moments in her career. The book is divided into four sections: “Yesterday’s Street,” “Receipts,” “Malevich Woman,” and “Anvils.” The first section, drawing on Rilke, comprises longer confessional poems that are both witty and anguished. “Receipts” is about writers and artists who impacted Nigri, including Angélica Freitas, Ana Martins Marques, and Alejandra Pizarnik; the section’s closing poem, “Death,” depicts the author’s mother, their childhoods, and their conversations. “Malevich Woman” is composed of poems that describe a love relationship between two women. The final section, “Anvils,” is composed of 20 hard-hitting short poems. The translations featured here are from the third section, “Malevich Woman.” The poems in this section range from lyrical to erotic, interweaving humor, antithesis, internet memes, and literary citations (the long line in “I Like the Desert,” for instance, was taken from the experimental Portuguese poet Herberto Helder) with social and ecological issues. In selecting and translating these five poems, I have tried to provide a brief window into the beauty and diversity of Nigri’s work.
- Robert Smith
German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
March, 2020Ulrike Draesner is one of Germany’s most prominent authors. She is particularly interested in societal and scientific discourses, multilingualism, and the inner tensions of the modern human subject. I communicated with her throughout this translation project.
This extract is the final chapter of her novel Sieben Sprünge vom Rand der Welt (Seven Leaps from the Edge of the World, 2014), which deals with the forced migration and expulsion of Germans from, and Poles to, Silesia in 1945, and the trauma inherited and expressed by subsequent generations. It is a multi-narrator novel told from nine different first-person perspectives. Its main focus is a German family evacuated from the small town of Oels near Breslau in Silesia. Lilly and her sons, Eustachius (14) and Emil (23), flee from Oels in January 1945 in the direction of Bavaria. Their father has to remain in Breslau and fight for the Wehrmacht. Emil, who is fascinated by the SS, has learning and speech difficulties and a clubfoot, but his parents have managed to evade the authorities and prevent his euthanasia as part of the Nazi eugenics programme. His forced sterilisation is alluded to but not explicitly narrated. He goes missing on the night of April 8-9, 1945 during the family’s flight to the West as they are trying to get through Sondershausen, a town in Thuringia in Germany, which is undergoing severe aerial bombardment. He is presumed dead, although his disappearance is unresolved and unnarratable. None of the characters who were with him that night are able to articulate what happened. This loss is the central trauma in the novel, a blind spot symbolic of the many refugees who lost their lives, the trauma of expulsion, and the loss of homeland. Emil appears only indirectly, reflected and refracted through the other characters’ narratives, until here in the final chapter we hear his voice–the gap and silence he represents is performed in the form of a prose poem, a letter he writes to his father from the bombed-out streets of Sondershausen, on the night he goes missing.
His letter marks a shift from prose to something that looks like poetry. The lines extend and retract, sometimes flowing, sometimes erupting into monosyllabic stuttering. The shape is unsettling and strange. I had to resist the temptation to clarify the punctuation: sentences are running together, coming quickly, not bound by rules. Emil has a learning disability–he is different; he represents a challenge to his family, society, the orderly, homogeneous National Socialist worldview, and the reader.
Another temptation was to abstract the vocabulary or make it more coherent. My first translation of “auf den Straßen passierte ein Massenungeheuer” was “There was a mass atrocity on the streets.” In the end, I went for something more literal and physical and kept the oddness of the verb: “A mass monster happened on the streets.” The line is now more bodily, disconcerting, and harrowing; it is this concreteness and urgency, I believe, that draws readers to Draesner’s work.
- Marielle Sutherland
Norway | Norwegian | Prose Poem
March, 2020The work of Sigbjørn Obstfelder is challenging to translate today because of the interlingual nature of late-19th century Norwegian. As Norway was still a young nation, Norwegian at the time was heavily Danish but emerging as modern Bokmål. Beyond that, stylistically, Obstfelder has a jerky hyphenated style that says much with few words. The former quality reveals his nervous nature and the latter puts him firmly in the Norwegian tradition.
"Høst" (Autumn) was originally published in Samtiden 7 in 1896 by John Griegs Forlag in Bergen. Samtiden is a Norwegian literary journal that's been in print since 1890. Obstfelder had two contributions to this edition, the other being his essay officially defending Edvard Munch.
"Høst" is a peek into the type of conversations that would have been going on in the 1890’s Norwegian bohème scene of Kristiania. The young artists of the time were seized with a desire to express life in its truest form, with suffering and death so close at hand. Hans Jaeger and Edvard Munch were among the strongest voices in the scene.
- Jordan Barger
Germany | Kurdish | Northern Kurdistan | Poetry
January, 2020On October 13, just four days after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan tweeted his announcement of his pending invasion of Rojava, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, under the vilely euphemistic name Operation Peace Spring, I received an invitation to edit a new Google document from my friend and colleague Jiyar Homer, with whom I have been co-translating the short stories of the Kurdish polymath Farhad Pirbal. The note that accompanied the invitation was to the point: “Urgent translation.” Over the following days, we workshopped our translation of “The Tale of Hungry Dogs,” a short poem by the Ferîd Xan, a Kurd born in present-day Turkey. The poem, first published in 2006, seems as fresh as if it had been written that week. Indeed, the oppression and statelessness faced by the Kurdish people is not a new phenomenon—this is merely the latest chapter in a history of centuries of persecution and survival, as Xan suggests, “like a dog.” It’s our hope that this translation from the Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish, spoken in both Rojava and Southern Turkey, contributes toward a collective remembrance of what continues to unfold in Rojava, now that the relentless news ticker has moved on. With over 150 civilians killed and over 300,000 displaced, the plight of the Kurds and Rojava’s other residents remains an urgent humanitarian crisis, and US betrayal of the predominately Kurdish peshmerga who served on the front lines of the battle against the Islamic State feels like just the latest kick to a gaunt but proud dog’s ribs.
- David Shook
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
January, 2020The premise of Dual Nationality is nonconformist: take the (im)migrant’s identity crisis, but make it . . . funny. It’s a rare approach. Displacement, whether willing or unwilling, is usually handled soberly as a literary topic, in strains of melancholy, drama, or even bitterness. Nina Yargekov is unusual in that she brings no small amount of irreverence to her narrative. The quest for identity in the novel is rendered satirically literal: our protagonist is an amnesiac who wakes up in an airport with two passports, two wallets, two phones, two sets of keys, no memory of who she is or where she’s going, and the suspicion that she’s dolled up like the walking stereotype of a prostitute. What she sees is what she knows. Thankfully, she’s blessed with excellent reasoning skills, and what emerges is a sort of choose-your-own-adventure story, a mental escape room, as our protagonist gropes for clues about her life and her belonging.
Her name, we discover at the same time as she does, is Rkvaa Nnoyeig. She’s thirty-one years old. She works as (what else?) a translator. She’s the dual national of two countries that may or may not be real, depending on where she’s quite literally standing. Rkvaa’s world is a barely exaggerated caricature of a global order revolving around the split between West and East, between winners and losers, between first-world countries and immigrant underdogs. She, as a child of political refugees, as a bilingual translator-interpreter, uneasily has a foot in each camp. She spends the novel trying to meticulously reject one in favor of the other–striving, naturally, to solve her identity crisis, to feel uncomplicated and whole.
Despite the novel’s sustained tone of irony, I read it as coming from a place of deep empathy. There is great and genuine concern at the novel’s core: how does one act like an engaged, empathetic global citizen in a world that’s coming apart at the seams, complicating identities all around and making the concept of belonging a much more tenuous one? It’s not surprising that the Algerian War of Independence weaves in and out of the plot like a leitmotif, and that, towards the end of the book, we get a scene of the 2015 migrant impasse in Budapest’s train station. Perhaps the most troubling question the novel raises is how to reconcile your love for your country with the wrongs your country has committed–and whether it’s even possible to do so.
Dual Nationality grasps the big things in a completely subversive and comical way. As a Russian-American, I find lots to cackle at. Perhaps, in these times, it’s essential to not only empathize and worry, but also to be able to laugh a little–at ourselves, at the world’s absurdities, at our deepest questions and searches for meaning, and of course at our mortal inability to arrive at definite answers.
- Daria Chernysheva
Mexico | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
January, 2020Paula Abramo’s poetry collection Fiat Lux, winner of Mexico’s 2013 Premio de Poesías Joaquín Xirau Icaza for the best book of poetry by a writer under 40, is a tightly woven cycle of poems evoking the poet’s ancestors, political refugees first from Italy and Eastern Europe to Brazil at the turn of the twentieth century, and then from Brazil to Bolivia and finally Mexico in later eras. At the same time, the book is a meditation on the act of writing poetry and bringing characters to life with fidelity and imagination.
I discovered Fiat Lux when Paula and I were both at the Banff Literary Translation Centre as translators (she translates, prolifically, from Portuguese to Spanish). During an evening we devoted to reading our original works, she read one of the poems from Fiat Lux, “In memory of Anna Stefania Lauff, match factory girl,” and its combination of imagery and narrative force blew me away. When I got to read the whole book, I saw how, throughout, the image of striking a match—whether to shed light, or start a fire—forms the hinge between the two themes of the cycle.
In its own unique way, Fiat Lux reminds me of Rita Dove’s Sonata Mulatica, my favorite historical/biographical poem cycle. It’s whimsical, committed, sometimes fierce, sometimes political, and always concerned with words, language, and languages.
I’ve found that I’m not alone in my enthusiasm for the book and the poet. In the Mexico City installment of the Words Without Borders feature series on "The City and Writer," writer and translator Lucia Duero, in answer to the question “What writer(s) from here should we read?,” selects a single poetry book by a living author: “Fiat Lux by Paula Abramo, a great story about the human journey and courage, marvelously captured in the poetics of everyday life.”
Translation challenges include switching among the poetry’s various modes: narrative, introspective, biographical, at times philosophical, at times making use of cryptic but evocative bits of ancestors’ journals and handed-down lore. Also, the poet delights in surprising the reader with new meanings that playfully undermine what the reader has just constructed out of the line before, and these shifts need to be made to work in English syntax with equal measures of rhythm, comprehensibility, and surprise. Also, as a classics major in college and a literary translator by profession, Abramo naturally invokes the border-crossing and time-travel involved in telling family history by the use of multiple languages, including bits of Portuguese, Latin, and Greek. Since English is farther from Romance language roots than Spanish is, I have helped English readers by translating some of these phrases, while leaving others as they were.
The poems included here are numbers 2, 5, 6, 7, and 9 in the book, out of a total of 19.
- Dick Cluster
Austria | German | Short Fiction
January, 2020Robert Müller (1887-1924) was a many-sided cultural activist in early 20th-century Vienna–Expressionist writer, editor, critic, publisher, and promoter (he organised Karl May’s last public appearance in 1912).
Still in his early 20s, Müller spent the years 1909-11 traveling. For several months he worked for a German-language newspaper in New York, but his other whereabouts are poorly attested. (He claimed, among other activities, to have worked on ships between North and South America, and as a gaucho in Mexico.)
"Manhattan Girl" (written around 1920) presents New York through an Expressionistic consciousness, imbued with Müller’s career-long interest in questions of race, gender, and identity.
- C D Godwin
Tatiana Oroño is widely acknowledged as an essential voice in contemporary Uruguayan poetry. I first became aware of her when I was in Uruguay in 2014, looking for poets to include in América invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets. As I met with people, gathering suggestions for this anthology of poets under 40, her name kept coming up as someone—outside the anthology—that I just had to read. On that trip, I was lucky enough to meet Tatiana, who arranged for me to receive a copy of her book La piedra nada sabe. I immediately fell in love with her inventive, experimental voice.
Since then, we have met often and I have translated her poetry, publishing it in US and UK magazines such as Ploughshares, Guernica, World Literature Today, Stand, and the Western Humanities Review. We often meet in Montevideo at the cafe El Sportman across from the National Library, or for tea in her home in Malvin, a neighborhood of Montevideo long favored by writers and artists. I have been lucky enough to read her poems and poetic prose pieces ahead of their publication in her latest books, Estuario and Libro de horas, as well as her book-in-progress, Neblina, or—luckier still—to listen to her read them out loud to me.
Oroño’s subject matter is deeply felt, deeply personal to her, with poems about motherhood, the losses during the Uruguayan dictatorship of the 1980s, and, most of all, the natural world. A passionate environmentalist, Oroño finds her palate of images in nature. She is also a feminist and her poems show a consciousness of her own body, of being a woman in the pain and wonder of the everyday. But most of all, Oroño has a special awareness of language as a body of its own. Time and again she writes poems about poetry, poems that reclaim for poetry the power to give meaning to life.
- Jesse Lee Kercheval
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