Mexico | Spanish | Verse Novel (Excerpts)
March, 2013After being pensioned off for his unstable behavior, Mr. Gordon experiences a fracture of his spirit in an artificial, Californian Eden. In the shade of the tree of a thousand leaves, at the edge of a swimming pool, Gordon transcribes his thoughts, memories, and questions while striving to sort out the harassment he experiences from his wife and his best friend, engaging all the while in a dialogue with an interior voice determined to finish off what remains of his sanity.
Death on rúa Augusta is the diary of a person who cannibalizes his own self. In this narrative poem, Tedi López Mills masterfully delves into the machinery of consciousness in order to exhibit, boldly, that slender thread that keeps us attached to the world. A masterful work of contemporary Mexican literature, which shares both the human depth of Zbigniew Herbert's Mr. Cogito and the teasing ambiguity of Johann von Goethe's Elf King, it does showcase one truth at the heart of all human life: No person is to be despised as worthless; no person can ever be deprived of her or his dignity. Even the "zeros" among us are all "classics after our own fashion."
German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
March, 2013Forschungsbericht, at less than 40,000 words, is perhaps the most immediately accessible of Fichte's ethnographic novels: set in the coastal Belizean city of Dangriga over the course of a two-week visit in February 1980, it depicts the attempts of Fichte's alter ego, the writer Jäcki, and his companion Irma, the alter ego of Fichte's long-time companion, the photographer Leonore Mau, to investigate the religious practices of the Black Carib (or Garifuna) community in Belize. The centerpiece of the novel is Fichte's unsuccessful attempt to observe the dugu, the Garifuna feast for dead ancestors, which is presided over by the local buyei, or shaman, to placate the departed.
The problems associated with translating this passage are the usual ones encountered when selecting the opening chapter of a longer work: there is a fine line between leaving the reader intrigued or bewildered. Fichte's style, telegraphic and allusive, makes orientation even more difficult.
Despite such difficulties, Forschungsbericht serves, in this regard, as an excellent point of entry into Fichte's ethnographic writing, as meditation on both the consciousness of the writer and the creative process, and as illustration of the epistemological problem of knowing anything outside oneself, especially the foreign. Fichte, who originally meant his life's work to be regarded as a history of tourism in the latter half of the twentieth century (and who might best be thought of as a French writer who wrote in German, a cross between Proust and Lévi-Strauss), is a crucial figure in that century's literature, and deserves to be more widely known outside the German-speaking world.
Brazil | Poetry | Portuguese
March, 2013Caio Meira's 2003 poetry collection Things the First Dog on the Street Can Tell You is a stylistically daring blend of science, philosophy, and pop culture. Meira--a writer, editor, critic, and translator from French into Portuguese--is most interested in the state of "between-ness." His poetry wrestles with limits, both mental and physical, and explores the uncertain, shifting boundaries of modern life.
The collection is divided into three sections: "Epidermatic" (Epidermática), "Other Lives, the Same" (Outras vidas, a mesma), and "Venereals" (Venéreas). "Epidermatic"--referring to that which acts only upon the outer surface of the skin--is a characteristically wry title for a series of poems that delve into the speaker's inner thoughts and bodily processes. "Other Lives, the Same" moves the reader into more domestic territory, dealing with daily life in present-day Rio de Janeiro, where the speaker contemplates all the other paths he might have chosen. The poems in the last section, "Venereals," are told in the persona of three complex female artists who serve as the speaker's muses: Emily Dickinson, Marilyn Monroe, and Billie Holiday. The title is a play on the word's connection to the goddess Venus, who embodies both love and sexuality, in all their beauty and grotesqueness.
Brazilian critic Leonardo Fróes notes that Meira's work is unique among Brazilian poetry not only for its intensity but for its stylistic control. Not a single period is used in the first section. The general lack of punctuation, and the use of commas instead of periods when there are sentence breaks, skillfully mirrors the porousness of the speaker's world. Nothing seems to start or end; instead, we are privy to a stream of consciousness told only in the "space between breaths." In the cinematic prose poems of "Other Lives, the Same," the reader is bombarded by commas, periods, and question marks. Venereals employs long lines, standard capitalization, but no periods. Over and over again, Meira reintroduces the world to us, making it familiar, only to render it strange as soon as we've gotten comfortable.
Dislocation and doubleness, echoing Arthur Rimbaud's famous statement, "I am an other," are recurring themes in Meira's work. The poetic "I" roams uninhibitedly between genders, inner and outer worlds, and the mundane and existential issues of twenty-first-century life. In fact, this "I" can only exist in a state of perpetual formation: a perfect reflection of Brazil's, and of the world's, rapidly changing realities.
Brazil | Flash Fiction | Portuguese
March, 2013Brazilian writer Adriana Lisboa's honors include the José Saramago Award, the Japan Foundation Fellowship, a fellowship from the Brazilian National Library, and the Newcomer of the Year Award from the Brazilian section of IBBY (the International Board on Books for Young People). She has published ten books, including novels, children's books, and a collection of short stories and prose poetry. Her fourth book, Caligrafias, collects her short stories written between 1996 and 2004, including those featured here. Lisboa holds a BA in Music from Rio de Janeiro Federal State University (UniRio), an MA in Brazilian Literature, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Rio de Janeiro State University (Uerj). Born in Rio de Janeiro, she now lives in Colorado.
Jürgen Becker was born in Köln, Germany, in 1932. He is the author of over thirty books--novels, story collections, poetry collections, and plays--all published by Germany's premier publisher, Suhrkamp. He has won numerous prizes in Germany, including the Heinrich Böll Prize, the Uwe Johnson Prize, and the Hermann Lenz Prize, among others. Becker's work often deals with his childhood experience of WWII and the political consequences of the postwar division of Germany.
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Editor's Foreword
As noted in the previously released Pierre Menard versions of the Alexander Blok lyric "A Girl Sang in a Church Choir," the famous Quixote translator, having relocated to Bexley, in Greater London--the date of this move is unclear, though it was certainly after the summer of 1913, which he spent in Nimes--returned to the study of Russian, a lifelong pursuit, and, not unsurprisingly, turned his attention to the translation of some of the remarkable poetry then being published in Russia and, subsequently, the incipient USSR... (continued in post)
German | Germany | Short Fiction
January, 2013Fleeing a bad economy, the narrator of "Here, It's Quiet" leaves her beloved Berlin to take a job in a sedate, southern German city. Adjusting to her new home, she misses the noise and grittiness of the city she left behind, as well as the boyfriend who refused to come with her. She spends her evenings at the opera and visits the museum during her lunch hour, engaging with art as a way of escaping her banal work life and inuring herself from her personal turmoil. This story from a 2004 collection touches on themes author Anna Katharina Hahn continued to explore in her most recent novel, Am Schwarzen Berg, in particular the conflict between a lifestyle centered on an appreciation for art and the economic choices necessary to support that lifestyle.
Latin American literature is world renowned for its richness in a variety of genres--poetry, the essay, the short story and, of course, the novel. Spanish-language literature in diary form seems less well known. Ocosingo War Diary is the first-ever English translation of one well-known writer's twelve-day ordeal, which took place in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, near Guatemala. Efraín Bartolomé gives an eyewitness account of the New Year's Eve massacre of 1994. Published to critical acclaim in Spanish in 1995, Ocosingo is part of a now classic tradition of testimonial literature in the vein of Elena Poniatowska's Massacre in Mexico (1971). Part pastoral elegy, part eyewitness reportage, Bartolomé's artful war diary is as much a prose poem as it is a memoir.
Arabic | Libya | Novel (excerpts)
December, 2012Women of the Wind is the tale of a desperate Moroccan who works as a domestic servant in Tripoli, Libya, before the Libyan Revolution. She raises money from her friends to buy a place on a human trafficker's ship, but then experiences a rough crossing. Her story is intertwined with the stories of other women, including an Iraqi who negotiates with the smugglers for her, a Libyan novelist, and a child whose mother deserted her.
Novel (excerpts) | Spanish | Uruguay
December, 2012Primavera Con Una Esquina Rota is a testimonial hybrid novel centered on the experience and effects of exile. It chronicles the lives of five family members and the true experiences (for example, health problems) of the author himself interspersed at random along parallel and joining narrative lines. Benedetti uses many points of view (first-person, third-person, interior monologue, stream of consciousness, free indirect) and different styles (conversational, epistolary, poetic) along with delayed information and word games.
The novel begins about eight months before the release of Santiago, a militant serving a five-year prison term in the Libertad de Montevideo prison for attempting to overthrow the government, and who, upon his release and return home to resume his family life, discovers the impossibility of resuming any previous personal relationships. Santiago's family members include Don Rafael, his father; Graciela, his wife; and Beatriz, their daughter. Rolando, a friend to all of them, and lovestruck, wanders through the novel, eventually becoming Graciela's lover. They're all Uruguayan, and except for the prisoner, Santiago, reside in what appears to be Mexico City.
Santiago is present in the novel through his letters, which like most prisoner's letters express hope for the future. Don Rafael represents the historical memory of the city of his exile, while reflecting on the wisdom gained by those who are able to live in the present. Graciela, a militant in her own right, feels despair and exhaustion, a sickness of the soul that doesn't have to do with loyalties or treachery, but with the need to be useful and feel alive. Rolando is known as "Uncle Rolando" to Beatriz and offers unselfish and focused support to Graciela, who, although she is increasingly independent, is nevertheless confused or perhaps disoriented by her life. And just like her imprisoned father Santiago, who intervenes in the novel through his letters, young Beatriz does so through texts that could be a form of interior monologue, entries from a diary, or compositions written in school.
Primavera Con Una Esquina Rota is not only a magnificent exercise in literary style, lightly hampered by the incorporation of texts that are a bit foreign to the nucleus of the novel, but rather, principally, a remarkable display of patriotic literary courage on Benedetti's behalf. Having been vaccinated against intimidation long before, he wasn't afraid to present several unheroic, weak, and contradictory men and women while knowing that a good portion of expatriates would read the novel with a hypercritical military eye.
(A slightly different version of this translator's note originally appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review (Issue #48, Spring/Summer 2011))
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