Faleeha Hassan, who is currently in the United States, was born in Najaf, Iraq, in 1967. She earned an M.A. in Arabic literature and has published several collections of poetry in Arabic: Being a Girl, A Visit to the Museum of Shade, Five Titles for My Friend-The Sea, Though Later On, Poems to Mother, Gardenia Perfume, and her collection of children's poetry, The Guardian of Dreams. Her works of Arabic prose include Hazinia or Shortage of Joy Cells and Water Freckles (a novella). Her poems have been translated into English, Italian, German, French, and Kurdish. She has received awards from the Arab Linguists and Translators Association (WATA) and the Najafi Creative Festival for 2012, as well as the Prize of Naziq al-Malaika, the Prize of al-Mu'tamar for poetry, and the short story prize of the Shaheed al-Mihrab Foundation. She serves on the boards of Baniqya, a quarterly in Najaf, Sada al Nahrain (Echo of Mesopotamia), and the Iraqi Writers in Najaf association. She is a member of the Iraq Literary Women's Association, The Sinonu (i.e. Swift) Association in Denmark, the Society of Poets Beyond Limits, and Poets of the World Community.
Argentina | Short Fiction | Spanish
January, 2014First published in the Argentine journal Acción in 2011, Jimena Néspolo's short story "La mujer del dorado" narrates the strange case of Virginia Fhury, a woman with yellow-green eyes who breeds Dobermans on a declining, formerly ostentatious farm in a small Argentine town--and who never seems to age. Virginia becomes a point of obsessive interest among the townsfolk, and the narrator reconstructs the details of Virginia's life from the gossip and reports s/he overhears. Told from the point of view of a singular, unnamed narrator, s/he invokes the plural consciousness of the town for emphasis, and betrays a sense of lament at the town's intrusiveness. As the mystery of Virginia's age unravels, the reader might imagine that so, too, does the bickering cohesiveness of the town. The reader is left to wonder: were Virginia's age and life a mystery after all, or did the town invent a myth based on whispers of her identity? Small town politics feature as prominently as the eternally youthful golden woman.
I translated this story in cafes in Argentina while on a Tinker Foundation grant for predoctoral research in the summer of 2012. Jimena generously agreed to correspond with me and meet for coffee to discuss the finer points of her writing style and philosophy, which come alive in her artfully constructed bio note. During a meeting over coffee in Buenos Aires, she stressed the importance of the play on words in the title, something that is difficult to carry over to the English from the original Spanish. The "mujer del dorado" simultaneously invokes a woman made of gold; a woman from the mythical El Dorado of South American legends; and a woman of golden color, much like a "carpa dorada" (goldfish). All three associations are important, given the gilded history of Virginia's family, her mythical status in town, the strange story of the large goldfish passing through her legs, and the way in which she dies. I decided to let the Spanish speak for itself and titled the story "The Dorado Woman" rather than the more literal "The Golden Woman" or "The Woman of Gold," and throughout the text of the story tried to emphasize the three associations Jimena wrote into the Spanish.
- Kristina Zdravič Reardon
Short Prose | Slovene | Slovenia
January, 2014First published as a chapter in her 2009 novel Poletje s klovonom (Summer with the Clown), which is comprised of pieces that might equally be called linked stories or extended prose poems, Nina Kokelj's "Early Butterfly" draws the reader into Besa's hypnotic trance from the very first sentence. The train does not just head toward the exotic-sounding Mongolian lake (Uvs Nuur) but heads there "with a sense of longing" that echoes Besa's. What Besa longs for is not completely revealed in this short piece, though mercy, intoxicating passion, and a sense of feeling all feature as prominent suggestions. The chapter stands alone as a story in its ability to convey fully Besa's sense of longing, however, as it captures a great variety of emotions and subjects but is here concentrated on one subject: the "him" referred to almost exclusively in italics.Who is Early Butterfly? He is a messiah of sorts for passion and love who floats across Europe and Asia an as-yet-undefined archetype, who found eternity in Amsterdam, and who figures directly into what Kokelj calls "the embroidery of women's dreams." As readers, we long to discover who Early Butterfly is alongside Besa--we, too, would like to see him, as Besa states over and over. By the time the collocation is reversed--when Besa is told he would like to see her--the anticipation is palpable, even as we are told that after everything, Besa will leave alone. The days of travel that multiply like grasshoppers lead to this moment: the realization of desire, which is both fulfilled and immediately dissipates. Kokelj explores the contours of longing, love, and what it means to reach a seemingly unreachable destination in alluring detail.
- Kristina Zdravič Reardon
...
Temptations of Translation
It is virtually impossible to render one's visions in poetry, let alone in translating it. Ezra Pound wrote in ABC of Reading, "Poetry...is the most concentrated form of verbal expression." The task gets even more difficult if we take into consideration that Georgy Ivanov's later poetry is marked with a minimalist economy of means. One has to sacrifice something without losing what the great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva once defined as "points of anguish" (bolevyie tochki), that is, the points of tension in the poem. In the first poem featured here, I changed the line that reads "I do not care what is going to be afterwards" into "I don't care if after me there's the deluge." But I believe I preserved the unexpected hit of the last line "There is, finally, suicide." In the second poem, I deemed it necessary to combine two perspectives: the poet's rather skeptical view of life and his restrained and even estranged view of himself.
- Ian Probstein
Essay | Italian | Italy | Memoir (excerpt)
January, 2014Devi Priya's writing recuperates the India of the past, and issues a challenge to the India of the present. Her essay on the Mandala discusses an often faddish or academic subject without conceding to either camp. The author has had an eventful life, and alongside the argument introduced in the essay's opening--setting the record straight about the origins and significance of the Mandala--one finds a profound record of the India of another time, before partition. Her memoir, entitled More than one life (Più di una vita), from which the excerpt here is taken, is a lyrical recounting of the shared past of the author and her country. As Devi writes:
Just as the cane thrown by the beautiful young country girl from Rajputana mortally wounds an enormous wild boar fleeing the royal hunt, and in the same moment pierces the prince's heart, so one is captivated by the memory of a time that is this story's source and inspiration.
The story is not always linear: as it moves through the childhood, adolescence, and youth of the author, it follows the historical period of the '30s up to India's declaration of independence, and beyond. Through an ancient, intimate, and familiar world the reader is shown those ideals, social and cultural, that were transformed into the Beauty celebrated by the mystical poets, and the carefully selective memory of an India that for centuries was adept in preserving the useful and the positive.
In the story, nature, landscapes, aromas, and animals are all living presences, inseparable from the happiest years, rich with knowledge, at school and university, with dear friends and in the good company of many others, at joyful festivals, in the India of the Ganges and the Himalayas. And then among those who practice ancient creative arts, in contact with the local, rural people, discovering their own distant origins.
Memories interweave with the present as in a dance, guiding our protagonist to reveal, according to the rhythm of her intuition, the progressive realization of her "identity."
Riding along in life's carriage, the present appears before one's eyes for a blurred instant, while the past takes on the limpid serenity of a field of flowering mustard, flowers of a shade of yellow called..."basantì," stretching all the way to the horizon, harbingers of spring... The impression remained in my mind like spring personified. "Basant" is spring, "basantì" the soft yellow of the shoot: its color. Like all things, it comes and goes and returns. You await the point of its return in the cycle...
- Nicholas Benson
Witold Szabłowski is now working on a book about people who saved each other's lives in Volhynia during the Second World War. Then part of Nazi-occupied eastern Poland (and now in western Ukraine), Volhynia was the scene of some of the bloodiest events in the entire course of the war. The report featured here was published in Gazeta Wyborcza's "Duży Format" reportage supplement on June 18, 2013, and will feature in the book.
Climate change, one of the most pressing issues concerning humanity's future, is rarely the subject of literary fiction. But in his latest novel, EisTau ("IceMelt"), Bulgarian-German author Ilija Trojanow addresses the problem head-on. In the text featured here, which Trojanow delivered at the 2012 Van der Leeuw Lecture held annually in the Netherlands, the author explains what brought him to his subject.
Italian | Italy | Novel (excerpts)
November, 2013The Crime of a Soldier outlines the complicated relationship between a war criminal and his daughter. He is a man who feels perpetually hounded, followed and spied on. He believes that he is innocent, that he was just obeying orders, and that his only crime is to be a defeated soldier. His daughter disagrees--her father's guilt has been established, without appeal. Theirs is a thwarted bond, which seems to take a turn when the father discovers the Cabala, where letters may also stand for numbers and hint at the future. De Luca depicts his characters with a sustained intensity. In this captivating plot, the rhythm of the narration acutely reflects the daughter's inner disquiet.
Article (excerpt) | France | French
November, 2013...
Note on "Bret Easton Ellis: It's Actually Shakespeare":
Laurent Binet, whose novel HHhH was translated into twenty languages, is cultishly devoted to the author of American Psycho. His tribute to the author he calls BEE is both sexy and precise, with the added bonus of a few literary scoops on his greatest books. This article appeared in the August 2012 issue of Vanity Fair (France).
Note on "Glossary of Literary Received Ideas":
This article appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur in 2011. There are no entries under the letters "E" or "T" in the English translation.
Czech | Czech Republic | Novel (excerpt)
November, 2013Jáchym Topol is the leading Czech author of his generation. Famous in his youth as an underground poet and songwriter, today he is recognized as the writer whose work most successfully and imaginatively captures the jarring changes in society since the end of communism in 1989. The title of Anděl ("Angel Station") refers to the bustling Prague Metro stop located in Smíchov, which was until its recent gentrification a rough, working-class neighborhood. With a cast of characters reflecting the area's diverse residents, including Roma and Vietnamese, Topol's novel, employing sparse, at times near-telegraphic language, weaves together the brutal and disturbing fates of an addict, a shopkeeper, and a religious fanatic as they each follow the path they hope will lead them to serenity: drugs, money, and faith. In the excerpt featured here, Butch, the addict, tries to escape his troubles in Prague by relocating to Paris with a new girlfriend.
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