Arabic | Iraq | Memoir (excerpt) | Sweden
January, 2020Dr. Manhal Sirat was born in Mosul, Iraq, and has lived in Sweden since 1991. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Mosul in 1977 and his M.S. in Geology from Baghdad University in 1982, graduating first in his class. He was then arrested and sentenced to life in prison by a Revolutionary Court. He was imprisoned in a special section of Abu Ghraib prison, one reserved for political prisoners. He was released under a general amnesty proclaimed in 1986, after serving forty-five months in prison. He left Iraq after the Desert Storm (aka Gulf) War and sought political asylum in Sweden. He was awarded his Ph.D. in Earth Sciences by the renowned Uppsala University in 1999. Since then he has worked in numerous universities in Sweden, the US, Jordan, Germany, and finally in the United Arab Emirates. He has also served as a petroleum expert for the international firm Schlumberger in the UAE, and as a Geomechanics and Alternative Energy Specialist for the Abu Dhabi Company for Onshore Operations and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Currently he is a geological and renewable energy consultant in Sweden. He has published three scientific books and more than forty articles in scientific journals.
The Migratory Bird is Manhal Sirat’s first literary work. A book of his poetry is awaiting publication. He has exhibited works of art in several shows, and one of these was purchased for the Public Library in Uppsala.
- William Hutchins
France | French | Italy | Poetry (excerpt)
January, 2020Monstres tièdes, Benoît Gréan's second volume of poems, was published in 2003 and has since been translated into Italian, Greek, and German. Behind the book's "splendidly oxymoronic" title, observes poet Valerio Magrelli in his introduction to the Italian translation, lurks "a direct heir of Lautréamont"; an heir sired on a matrix of characteristically French rigor and concision of form, in a book of 60--four groups of 15--very short, unpunctuated poems.
The cultural matrix for these four sequences is palpably Mediterranean, the two millennia of tension between pagan and Christian moralities, with their resultant space between "imperious desire" and its "cleavers," the "slight distance" between "desire and horror": the futile desires of the "tail-chasing" subject, of youthful beauty and the aging body's "well assigned wrongs."
In the long view the poet's long residency in Rome affords, the desiring subject "mammals on," in "high time to come late." The vignettes range between recognizably current urban realities and phantasmagoria under the "blue-green sun," told in the light of a "radiant doubt" that seeks to root out the vain fictions "chatty cadavers" tell well into the Beyond.
Just as this gallery of miniature grotesques ends with an emblematic "drunken widow," the dense verses themselves often ring changes on French words and phrases that survive in a single form. Thus, from the book's first poem, "à perte de": "à perte de vue" means as far as the eye can see; Gréan's final phrase, "à perte de mémoire" extends the phrase to mean as far as memory spans--or, simply, amnesia. "Peaux amères" is the title of the first group of poems, and the poet's method is also to scratch at, flay, stock expressions: to "strip the dead/ to dwell in words."
- David Jacobson
This selection presents verses by Osip Mandelstam written in 1937, just one year before his second arrest and subsequent disappearance in a labor camp. The premonition of imminent death left its imprint on them. But these lines are not a cry of despair; rather they express recognition of the tragedy of being, concern for the preservation of Russia's cultural and moral heritage, and faith in the poet's mission.
- Boris Kokotov
Xurxo Borrazás is, without doubt, one of the funnest writers in Galician literature. He’s also one of the most unique, and the most restless, with an unmistakable voice through his widely varying books. The material you have here is selections from his 2002 collection of “miscellany," Pensamentos impuros ("Impure Thoughts"). This book has so much of what I love about his writing: his characteristic warmth, humor, intelligence, humility, and strangeness, condensing it into these short little treatises on all manner of things from libraries to the nature of reality, and vignettes of various encounters with eccentric, neurotic friends.
In classic Borrazás fashion, while these are mostly standalone pieces, the further you read, the more the references intertwine, building and branching off from previous ideas. I’ve tried to showcase this in my selection, the way he uses them to layer the book and add even more depth and humor.
I think it’s also worth pointing out that Borrazás has developed a sort of reputation as an enfant terrible (this is what he was called in the Best European Fiction introduction to his work). I’m not sure I agree with this characterization, however, at least insofar as it associates him with the likes of polemical writers such as Michel Houellebecq. To be sure, Borrazás certainly likes to be provocative, to raise eyebrows, but he does so not through sexism or racism or xenophobia or Islamophobia, but rather by other means, which are, to be sure, still unconventional.
For example, To Be or Not To, probably his best book, is narrated by a curmudgeonly Gen-X’er who hides away in an abandoned Galician village, only to meet an elderly woman and begin a passionate, quite sexual love affair. The novel is full of pornography, bestiality and digressions about prostitution, but if anything I’d describe it as sex-positive. It’s also one of the few pieces of literature I’ve read which takes elderly female desire seriously, at the same time as it creates in her one of the most delightfully idiosyncratic, complex characters I’ve encountered before. All this to say that while he may be provocative, his writing is nothing if not warm, deeply felt, and utterly human.
Nowhere is that more the case than in Impure Thoughts. These musings show Borrazás to be a writer who delights in the beauty, amusement, and absurdity of life, people, and the world we live in. He’s never glib, nor condescending, and for all his intellect, reading him makes you think he’s the kind of person you’d like to get a beer with. And I can attest to that. It has always given me pleasure that, after living in Vigo for a year and meeting occasionally with him and his wife, I've found Borrazás to be much like his writing: open-hearted, curious, affable, generous, and above all, a damn good time.
- Jacob Rogers
Mexico | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
January, 2020Adiós, Casilda! forms Part II of the Mexican poet Ivan Palacios Ocaña's Cosas inútiles y otras poemas ("Useless things and other poems"), published in 2018 as part of the reward for the author's having won the first UNAM Premio de Poesía Joven. Adiós, Casilda! deals with the aftermath of the poet's loss of his pet cat, the eponymous Casilda.
The poems make no attempt to conceal their family lineage: they are nieces and nephews of Frank O’Hara, Erik Satie, David Lynch, and haiku anthologies. They remind us that the pain of loss is tempered by the non-uniqueness of the missing, which is to say: none of us moves through a vacuum, and in returning to the poems and songs that formed those lost to us, we may find them again.
- Noah Mazer
English | Introductory Essay | United States
November, 2019For our November issue, InTranslation is pleased to partner with Art Omi: Writers, whose annual writing residencies, offered in the fall and spring, and Translation Lab, held every November, provide authors and translators much-needed space and time to think, work, and create in picturesque Ghent, New York.
The authors and translators featured in this issue are Translation Lab alumni. In the first post, Carol Frederick, Deputy Director of Art Omi: Writers, and DW Gibson, Director, provide an overview of the Translation Lab's vision and history.
- InTranslation
Short Fiction | Spain | Spanish
November, 2019Cristina Fernández Cubas is recognised as one of Spain’s foremost short story writers, especially of the “uncanny,” “fantastic,” and Gothic variety. Berna González Harbour could be talking about virtually all of Fernández Cubas’ work when she describes the most recent collection of short stories as “[r]ich and full of spark . . . a book that disrupts and surprises, that tenses up the distance between what we have, what we fear and reality” ("Babelia," El País). And the American academic Phyllis Zatlin comments that “her stories tend to explore the mysteries of both external reality and of the human psyche. Most of them, including some that fall outside the fantastic mode, explore inner worlds of fantasy and unconscious desires" (Hispania, Vol. 78, No. 1).
My first encounter with Fernández Cubas’ writing was her collection of short stories entitled Los altillos del Brumal (1983). I was particularly struck by two things: her ability to turn a seemingly ordinary object or situation into something terrifying, yet possible, and her overall mastery of the short story genre--a genre which had been widely (and well) practiced by earlier generations of Spanish writers, but which seemed to be far less visible by the time Fernández Cubas appeared on the literary scene. Not long after I read those first stories, as part of my first-ever sabbatical research project, I was able to meet and interview her in her extraordinary attic apartment in Barcelona. Like the character in “Absence,” she cannot imagine living in any other sort of apartment. I still have a copy of that interview, and we have remained in contact ever since.
“Absence” is one of several stories contained in Con Agatha en Estambul (1994). The manner in which Fernández Cubas relates the events and characters in each story is often so down-to-earth and ordinary that, at least initially, they seem entirely plausible and quite credible. It is when the reader’s imagination kicks in that the stories become eerie and dark. In the case of “Absence,” it could be argued that most of us have experienced at least a momentary loss of context and sense of self, quickly dismissed with a (mental) shake of the head. Fernández Cubas’ skill lies in taking such a moment to its extreme limits, and exploring its impact and after-effects on the victim, who ultimately returns to normal. The challenge for the translator is to capture the ordinary everyday tone, language, and descriptions of this moment in the life of Elena Vila Gastón, while at the same time conveying how extraordinary, unnerving, uncanny it is.
Fernández Cubas’ works have been translated into ten languages, but sadly, translations into English are few and far between--only the odd short story, a play, and her most recent work, Nona’s Room (Peter Owen, 2017). Hopefully this translation will assist in making her better known to English readers.
- Lilit Žekulin Thwaites
Austria | Drama (excerpt) | German
November, 2019I prepared this translation for a student production I directed at Knox College in October 2018, which allowed me to refine the text during the rehearsal process. I had previously translated three other plays by this acclaimed Austrian playwright, who is known for a stylized approach to language and a storytelling technique that often presents a significant challenge to audience-members. Before Sunrise—which premiered in Basel, Switzerland in 2017—is based on Gerhart Hauptmann’s groundbreaking 1889 Naturalist play of the same title, Vor Sonnenaufgang. Palmetshofer retained much of the story told by Hauptmann, and dramatized his updated version in a more straightforward manner than is characteristic of his plays. Palmetshofer’s 2007 play hamlet is dead. no gravity, for instance, also revolves around events happening within a family; but those events are told in retrospect, requiring the audience to piece together the story from fragments.
This scene is the last of several between two men who were close friends as university students, but have evolved in contrasting directions. The play takes place in the house of Hoffmann, who has taken over his in-laws’ business, and is now running for the local council on a conservative platform; Loth has sought him out in order to write about him for a left-wing journal, and has begun a relationship with Hoffmann’s sister Helene.
Palmetshofer’s plays typically feature dialogue in which the characters leave many sentences unfinished, and monologues in which single sentences can go on for half a page at a time. The lacunae in the dialogue often pose a challenge to me as the translator since I have to guess how each unfinished sentence might have continued; being able to confer directly with Ewald has been invaluable. And of course, English syntax frequently doesn’t allow me to simply keep the same word order as in the German. For the most part, there were fewer such difficulties with Before Sunrise than in the other plays I’ve translated by Palmetshofer. But the shape of the sentences in the original departs from standard usage, and it was important for me to carry that over into the English. For example, in this excerpt, Loth says: “what’s up with that, Thomas? / tell me / is it a habit? / a reflex? / to assume the worst of others / but of yourself of course / somehow / not at all.” In part, such lines reflect the way people actually talk, yet Palmetshofer aims less to capture the rhythms of everyday speech than to create a kind of musicality in the theatrical language. By laying out his dialogue in short lines like verse, and (extensively in this case) incorporating dashes to indicate silence, Palmetshofer formats the text like a score.
In a note he wrote for our production of Before Sunrise at Knox, Palmetshofer wrote: “I believe theatre’s task is to pose questions and to open up a space in which both thoughts and feelings are generated.” Even in this unusually conventional family drama, he pursues that aim by means of carefully crafted language, and I’ve striven to retain that flavor and texture in the English version.
- Neil Blackadder
China/France | Chinese | Poetry
November, 2019Song Lin is the most open and self-effacing Chinese-language poet I have ever met. He suffered for democratic causes, and after two years of imprisonment, migrated to France, “flee[ing] with beautiful wounds.” This was something he stood up for and he simply did what he had to do, and then literally, with light-handed humor, moved on. He asked for no laurels for his civil disobedience. Once overseas, he did not dwell on nostalgia and his chosen isolation, rather, “the fugue marches on,” displacing alienation with an “encyclopedia of the sky.” He looked up and forward. Symbolist and Surrealist touches are increasingly evident in his poems, and forms like the couplet enter his repertoire, as he “turns sorrow into craft.” He did not look back and assume an “exile” label. In fact, he has no labels. His labels, or rather, labors, are words; his true struggle, “the tribulation of a word, until it spits you out.” The natural world is turned to; museums are visited; the circus becomes a gaze on the poetic craft; words become sperm whales; the bell is tolled in the ear; there is fainting; and there is fainting again. The agony of a poet wandering in words and worlds strikes:
the fallen, lifted by our hands, leaking through our fingers
that once belonged to the stars are sands that boil like tears
What better description is there for a poet that blows wounds into wonders! This dazzling, he leaves to these lines of gold. He lets others shine. Through his poetry editorship at the important literary magazine Jintian (Today), he has been bringing foreign and unsung works to Chinese readers. He was an early advocate for classical Chinese and translation. He champions underrepresented masters, aspiring young writers, and everybody else, except himself. “Strangled / by the umbilical cord,” he takes seriously where Chinese poetry came from, and cares even more about where it is going. In SONG Lin’s poems, the strange becomes stranger, the familiar turns familiar again, the quiet becomes quieter and explodes. With understated restraint and exploratory openness, this is a poetry that strikes and burns. It is perhaps safe to say SONG Lin is the last centaur of contemporary Chinese avant-gardists, a rare poet that straddles the liminal space of words and wounds.
- Dong Li
Fiction (excerpts) | Greece | Modern Greek
November, 2019Amanda Michalopoulou’s Baroque, the source of the three excerpts presented here, is a book centered around a simple narrative concept that has complex consequences for the translator. Baroque traces the arc of a life, and one that resembles its author’s in countless details, including the incorporation of family and personal photographs. Only this novel—memoir?—moves backwards, from year fifty to year zero, with a chapter corresponding to each age. Not only do characters’ experiences, obsessions, cultural and historical surrounds change as we move backwards in time, but so too does the language of the book, until we arrive at the interior monologue of a two-year-old whose doll, fallen in a goldfish pond, will no longer sing—“Lala heavy. Sit open eyes cling clang. Lessgo steet. Sun dry Lala.”—and even another step back to a baby on her first birthday, still mostly outside of language as a means of communication: “from the moment she opened the box she won’t let go of the doll. She called her Lala. And then she said, ‘Atiti, na, atiti,’ which we don’t know what it means.”
In reading the book, I was reminded of one of my favorite stories by Amanda, “Teef,” from the volume I’d Like, which I translated over a decade ago. A new mother has been confined to a psychiatric institution with a rare condition that involves a rapid regression, a shedding of years as she speeds headlong toward the experience of her infant, shedding language and even her teeth along the way. Baroque felt like a slow-motion, defictionalized version of this story. It also felt like a kind of bildungsroman in reverse, one that challenged the teleology of a narrative form in which change would implicitly figure as growth. As an experiment in autofiction, the book resonates with Amanda’s life, to be sure, but it also resonates with her body of fiction: the story told in the chapter titled “Earthquake,” included here, appears in other clothes in the novel Why I Killed My Best Friend. It is this novel that Amanda and I were working on together at the inaugural Translation Lab in fall of 2012, an experience that opened us to forms of collaboration and friendship—between us, and with other participants—that we hadn’t foreseen would emerge from that brief but formative week. It is with great pleasure that I share these latest fragments of Amanda’s work, and of our shared life in, before, and between languages.
- Karen Emmerich
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