Greece | Modern Greek | Short Fiction
August, 2012Something Will Happen, You'll See, the 2010 short fiction collection by Christos Ikonomou from which "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" is taken, is a wrenching yet optimistic elegy to Greece's working classes. It won the prestigious Best Short Story Collection State Award and was the most-reviewed Greek book of 2011.
Ikonomou takes us to the heart of the western suburbs of the port of Piraeus and builds sixteen luminous stories around characters such as pensioners, protesters, laborers, and the unemployed. The author's greatest strength lies in his ability to convey silences, to interpret gestures and the unseen, and translate them into images both vivid and haunting.
Something Will Happen, You'll See has been translated into Italian (Editori Riuniti, 2012), and the Italian newspaper La Repubblica described Christos Ikonomou as "the Greek Faulkner." A German edition (C.H. Beck) is forthcoming.
Italian | Italy | Short Fiction
August, 2012Monica Sarsini was born in Florence, where she lives and teaches writing. She is also an artist who has shown her work in Italy and other countries. Libro Luminoso (Exit Edizioni, 1982) was followed by Crepacuore, Crepapelle and others. A collection of her work was published in English under the title of Eruptions (Italica Press, 1999).
Not long ago, a few poems surfaced from the Dun Huang archives--five short poems that are attributed to Xuanzang. Prior to the rediscovery of these poems, Xuanzang's literary reputation primarily rested on his status as a hero of legend in the pages of Journey to the West, where his pilgrimage to India provides the narrative thread for Wu Cheng En's great epic tale. Xuanzang has also been highly regarded as an author in his own right. In the seventh-century travel narrative entitled The Great Tang Record of the Western Territories, he provides a no less remarkable account of his journey traversing countless mountain passes, encountering peoples of more than a hundred different tribal nations, finding holy scriptures, and visiting stupas that glowed with mysterious light all along the way.
The rediscovery of these five poems rounds out our picture of Xuanzang as a poet, too. We now can understand Xuanzang's journey as real, legendary, and metaphorical all at the same time, an inner and outer voyage for enlightenment that's fully described in these lines.
Greece | Modern Greek | Novel (excerpt)
August, 2012George Pavlopoulos' second novel evokes the ideological crisis of Europe, its ambivalence about its glorious past, and its mounting crisis of identity. The author takes us into the heart of a fragile Europe plagued by the death of -isms and the struggle between collectivism and individualism. Why do Europeans seem to be steeped in melancholy? What does the future hold for the next generation?
The story unfolds in a nameless city of unspecified locale, which in turns evokes Paris, London, and Berlin. It all starts at the historic cinema Steam, which is about to close down in order to be replaced by a contemporary museum: the brainchild of ruthless plutocrat Max Plinkie. At the core of the heterogeneous group that decides to spend the last night at the cinema as an act of protest is a group of close friends, former children of the wild '60s. That night will turn out to be a unique opportunity for them to reminisce on the past and redefine their position in an ever-changing present. For young Lis, who stands as their natural successor, that night will serve as the impetus for a peculiar quest into her own identity. Armed with her camera, she will try to keep alive the images of a gradually vanishing world by embarking on a lonely and evocative journey whose path will be irrevocably marked by the presence of legendary artist, Flogenis.
Catalan | Short Fiction | Spain
August, 2012No Third Parties Are Involved is a collection of ten stories about the follies of modern life. They feature a mix of odd situations--ridiculous, decadent, comic, or endearing--and a broad array of characters that includes a Nobel Prize-winning writer, a journalist who doesn't use a tape recorder or notebook, a late-night game show host, and an actress who has turned the corner into middle age. Author Empar Moliner presents--as she usually does--sketches of the everyday whose authenticity can touch a nerve, as many people, men and women alike, can easily recognize aspects of themselves in her characters. With her customary energy, she portrays situations of contemporary urban life through a filter of perceptive irony: Empar Moliner strips the world naked, amid wine, music, the internet, drugs and the city.
Contemporary Concrete Poetry (in Finnish: Nykykonkreettista runoutta) presents traditional concrete poetry and YouTube comments. The book seeks to highlight how YouTube comments sometimes evoke the aesthetics of early concrete poetry (especially the writing of Eugen Gomringer).
The concrete movement was very international, and one of its goals was to create poetry that was universal and understandable even if the poet and the reader did not speak the same language. The YouTube comments area is likewise international. Maybe the urge to be understood by other commentators from all over the world is the reason behind YouTube comments' occasional resemblance to concrete poetry? Or maybe it is just our natural impulse to play with letters, words, and images. In a literary context such play is called art, and in other contexts it's called...well, nothing. In this book, hopefully, the boundary between high and low is blurred, not so that concrete poetry is seen as trivial, but so that the reader can perceive the poetical dimensions in YouTube comments.
Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
June, 2012This transposition of "The Nose" by Russian writer Nikolai Gogol represents the first publication of a story in this newly developed genre. It takes Gogol's original narrative (about a man who loses his nose) and shifts it from Saint Petersburg, Russia in the 19th century to New York City in the 21st century on a systematic basis similar to translation.
In the essay accompanying his transposition, Henry Whittlesey explains some of the differences between translation, transposition, and adaptation, since transposition falls between translation and adaptation. The transposition of "The Nose" represents a purely literary transposition that retains the form and shifts the content of the original story. This essay looks into five important aspects related to a transposition of content: character, setting, consciousness, identity, and the narrator's voice. As the content shifts from 19th-century Saint Petersburg to 21st-century New York, these five elements undergo various degrees of transfiguration, depending on the extent to which their manifestation in the original is commensurate with the given phenomenon in the present day.
Croatia | Croatian | Short Fiction
June, 2012Buddy lives in a provincial town in Croatia with his elder brother, sister-in-law, and father, whose mind is deteriorating. Buddy's mother died when he was small. Soccer is his big love, and he dreams of becoming a professional player after school. The monotony of family life is interrupted one day when Buddy is approached by an agent from one of the country's big soccer clubs--with an enticing proposition that poses big challenges for Buddy and his family.
Irse (English translation: "To Leave") is Isabel Cadenas Cañón's first poetry book. It was awarded the 2009 Caja de Guadalajara-Fundación Siglo Futuro Award for young poets and published in 2010. The book is divided into three parts, and it explores the consequences of leaving, of being abroad, and the impossibility of returning. The book was one of the ten best-selling poetry books in Spain for twelve consecutive weeks.
Critical Essay | English | United States
June, 2012"Clemens Berger, the Austrian playwright," writes Damion Searls, "was telling the audience one of those stories--you know the kind--about 'untranslatable' words, in this case a word from an indigenous language in southern Patagonia, and the word means, well, when a man and a woman are in a bar, and he looks at her, and she looks at him, and they look at each other and their looks say okay I'm interested in you but you need to make the first move and come over to me? The word means that. Everyone laughed, Clemens Berger is charming and tells a good story. I was on the panel as the translator, of his play Angel of the Poor, and he'd told the audience the story because I had just said that as a translator I didn't like to admit that anything was untranslatable, and now I said: 'See, you translated it! You told us in English and everybody laughed!' He said: 'But you can't translate it in one word--' and I said: 'Well, what matters more to you, how many words it has or whether everybody laughs?'"...
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