Arabic | Short Fiction | Tunisia
June, 2012Hassan Nasr was born in 1937 in Tunis. He has been active in Tunisian literary life since Independence in 1956, and started publishing short stories in magazines in 1959. He studied literature in Tunis and Baghdad, and lived for two years in Mauritania. He worked mainly as a high school teacher while writing short stories and novels. He lives in Tunis. The translation by William Hutchins of his novel Return to Dar al-Basha was published in 2006 by Syracuse University Press. His other novels include Sijillat Ra's al-Dik (Mr. Cockhead's Files, 2001), Dahaliz al-Layl (Corridors of the Night, 1977), Khubz al-Ard (Bread from the Earth, 1987) and Ka'inat al-Mujannaha (Winged Creatures, 2010). His short story collections include: Layali al-Matar (Rainy Nights, 1978), 52 Layla (52 Nights, 1979), al-Sahar wa-l-Jurh (Insomnia and the Wound, 1989), and Khuyul al-Fajr (Pipe-dreams, 1997).
Austria | German | Novel (excerpts)
June, 2012The Graveyard of Bitter Oranges, Josef Winkler's sixth book, is an episodic record of the author's travels through Italy. A blend of memoir, fiction, and reportage, it inaugurates an iconological approach to experience that would gain increasing importance in the works that followed it, according to which observations and anecdotes drawn from newspapers and literature serve as codices for the decipherment of the traumatic events of the past.
Dominican Republic | Prose Poetry | Spanish
June, 2012Death juxtaposed with amorous love becomes a creative force that fuels life as a never-ending cycle in this short, inventive prose poem originally published in Spanish in the literary journal La Poesia Sorprendida (No. IV, January 1944).
Tracto ("Tract") is a tunnel-poem, a poem-stairway, an intimate passageway connecting one darkness with others, the origin of light from whence the poetic word, the very essence of language, is interrogated.
Corona Tallo Raíces ("Crown Stem Roots") represents, through the experience of disappearance--a death in the family, the cutting down of a poplar grove that shaded the river--a radical immersion in the landscape, a harsh geography that joins the everyday traces of life and death.
Born into the upper strata of Milanese society, Antonia Pozzi (1912-1938) was educated at the University of Milan, where she studied with the influential philosopher Antonio Banfi. Pozzi's privileged upbringing allowed her to become current with poets such as Eliot and Rilke in the original, but social and intellectual expectations were also a constraint, and she struggled to grow in confidence as an artist. In 1933, her family prohibited her from continuing to see Antonio Maria Cervi, her high school teacher of Latin and Greek fourteen years her senior, ending a six-year relationship. In December 1938, her health eroded by illness, and depressed by the pervasive effects of the increasingly oppressive Fascist regime, Pozzi ended her life by taking an overdose of barbiturates and putting herself to sleep in the snow beside the abbey of Chiaravalle in the newly industrialized outskirts of Milan, where she had been volunteering to help impoverished children. In her last letter to her parents, she explained that "part of my mortal desperation is due to the cruel oppression inflicted upon our faded youth." She was only twenty-six, unpublished, and virtually unknown, but the notebooks she left behind were filled with terse poems of astonishing power. Her work was soon published with an admiring preface by Eugenio Montale, but the sensuality of many poems was erased in her father's editing; the originals have since been recuperated. Pozzi is now placed by many alongside the greatest poets of her day. Her voice is solitary and unmistakable, offering an exceptionally open and intense dramatization of the crisis of the private, pacifist sphere in a time of rising ideological rigidity and aggression. Pozzi's poems constitute a continuous yet tenuous barrier of hope, a "gentle offering" to the reader, witness to the poet's "longing for light things."
Cuba | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
April, 2012The featured texts belong to assignments [tareas], an innovative long poem that has as its core the experiences of otherness, both in Cuba and the United States. assignments ponders the impossibilities of a stable identity, its infeasibility in space and time. On a formal level, assignments constitutes an homage to the number 7. It is made up of 21 sections, divided into 7 stanzas, with 7 verses each.
Just as Virgil's Aeneid represented Rome's answer to Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, so was Gavin Douglas' Scots translation of the Aeneid in 1513 a rival's response to the English version published twenty-three years earlier by William Caxton. The first complete rendition of a classical text to be produced in the Scots vernacular, Douglas' Eneados represented, along with works by William Dunbar and Robert Henryson, the flowering of the golden age of the Northern Renaissance in Scotland. Douglas not only translated the epic poem with a careful attention to scholarly and artistic accuracy, but also added significant prologues to each of Virgil's twelve books. In the two prologue excerpts featured here (from Book One and Book Seven), Douglas first defends his use of the Scots language while blasting Caxton's earlier work, then settles down for a wintry physical description of his translation process. These prologues thus present a rare and fascinating insight into the growth of a poet and his language, literature, and culture, while also providing a thrilling opportunity to translate a translator.
The unspoken cliché that writing should reflect the world in accurate language unveils itself provocatively in Mexican poet Jorge Fernández Granados's poem "Principle of Uncertainty." Its speaker posits that to perceive something like truth in "unreliable hiding-in-plain-sight / reality" you have to witness, and do your best, because "(the closest) proximity or (furthest) / distance are the error / from which we love or judge."
Another unspoken cliché that the collection Principio de incertidumbre (2007) voices aloud is that poetry can speak the world at all, since writing ultimately is a translation of experience. Principio, Granados's seventh book, whose title I translate literally as "Principle of Uncertainty," wishes to suggest that this is not a treatise on Heisenberg, but rather an experiment with how his principle might work in poetry. Thus, we read the "hurried notes" of an observer faced with the uncertainty of knowing anything precisely. And knowingly, Fernández Granados's free verse of mostly unpunctuated lines that wobble between phrases and across line breaks expresses uncertainty, but in ways that lead the reader into surprising detours and notable arrivals.
In a seeming contradiction to the preceding, a matter of punctuation appears in the ars poetica, "F(l)echas en la noche / D(a)rt(e)s in the Night," which underscores the poet's denial that he can write at all, even while he writes. A parenthesis as lexical item opens a window for the use of the same variable in English translation: F(l)echas - fechas" almost mirror each other, as do "Da(r)tes - dates," with the minor enormity of the lazy "e" in "dartes," hence "da(r)t(e)s," a manuever almost compensating for the size differential between "flechas" ("arrows") and "darts." I have calculated that adding an additional "( )" to bound the "e" could be an intelligible, even an aesthetic choice, though I recognize it is a kind of error.
The real issue comes into focus in the variously stated refrain "no podría escribir" / "I could not write," the resulting clause of a statement contrary to fact: "As if there were in words something able /to translate it." The world, that is, and I couldn't, says the poet. But the implied meaning of such "if" statements is present tense, in other words, the poet "can't write," he can only "transcribe / excavate" what the lyric says in the end: "in the difficult words that are nothing / surely but inseparable shadows hard / ruins teeth or darts in the night / that project things / the singular things of this world..." all clarified in the light of another morning. Even though the meaning of the refrain changes in the course of the poem, I (am bound to) render it as written grammatically, and all the while know that its meaning is variable, uncertain, and significant. Though I have done my best, I am not able to translate it, I can only approximate it.
(W. Nick Hill)
Valerio Magrelli was born in Rome in 1957. He is the author of four poetry collections and has received the Mondello Prize, the Viareggio Prize for Poetry, and the Montale Prize. He is a professor of French literature at the University of Cassino. His poems have been widely translated around the globe.
Pakistan | Poems | Punjabi | Urdu
April, 2012Munir Niazi writes wistfully of the past, but he is also a poet of our times. He cherishes both the old and the new, and creates rhythms that evoke the feeling of being on the brink of a possible happy future that remains elusive. In addition to his specific family circumstances, Niazi's migration from East Punjab to West Punjab was a critical event of his early years and affected his life and work deeply. His imaginative world is a living lyric of warm relationships and moments of peace all too often shattered by conflict, violence, or indifference.
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 »