German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
November, 2011Finnish detective Kimmo Joentaa's new case involves the murder of a woman who is almost dead already. Found in a coma by the side of a road, she is killed while lying unconscious in a hospital bed. Who is she, and is her death connected to several others in towns nearby?
Her story is connected somehow to a gang rape witnessed 25 years before by a boy who recorded its effect on him in his diary at the time. Now, a quarter of a century later, the guilty parties are being picked off one by one....
Joentaa, involved with a prostitute who refuses to tell him her real name, finds his attention diverted from the investigation when she disappears. This fourth Kimmo Joentaa case by German author Jan Costin Wagner follows the detective down two paths as he searches for a killer and for the mysterious woman he's involved with.
Novel (excerpt) | Poland | Polish
November, 2011Sandomierz is a picturesque town full of churches and museums. Early one morning in spring, a woman's naked body is found outside a former synagogue. Someone has slashed her throat open--and it looks as if it was done with the enormous razor found lying nearby. Quite by chance, Public Prosecutor Teodor Szacki just happens to be on the scene. How come? Six months earlier he broke up a gang of sex traffickers who had a drop-off point in this town. On a wave of short-lived fame, Szacki decided to move there permanently from Warsaw. But a few months after separating from his wife and daughter, and leaving the big city behind, he knows he has made a mistake. The cadaver outside the synagogue is a chance to put an end to his small-town ennui. Szacki conducts the investigation with the help of an aging policeman and a reluctant lady prosecutor. Gradually he discovers the subtle ins and outs of local society and history. In his efforts to solve the mystery he investigates a love triangle, an ancient Jewish ritual, and some Nazi symbols. In this latest detective novel from Zygmunt Miłoszewski, the author takes us to the Polish equivalent of Twin Peaks, where the scenery is colored by present-day emotions and desires, as well as events from the seemingly distant past.
Novel (excerpts) | Romania | Romanian
November, 2011Kill me! is a captivating story about the perverse power of storytelling and the way fiction can become more "real" than reality. The novel tells of the relationship between two women whose friendship begins well--an older woman makes an offer to host a younger one in her apartment. Their shared life ends three years later with a crime. What seems to be the beginning of a love story--the encounter between Vali and Ramona--imperceptibly transforms into a terrifying policier: the main character proves to be Veronica Manea, the sixty-year-old woman who behaves like a vampire and relives the passion of her youth. The web that Veronica Manea weaves around the younger Ramona surrounds both of them. Old ghostly and disquieting love interests are projected against the background of exotic sites. Ramona enters Veronica Manea's dangerous game, and the only way out is a crime; which is, of course, no way out.
Novel (excerpts) | Spain | Spanish
November, 2011Diana Blanco is the best "bait" on the Madrid police force, a woman trained to attract the most dangerous psycho-killers. But she is sick of her job and tenders her resignation. She wants to live a normal life, after spending months unsuccessfully trying to attract the attention of the "Spectator," a serial killer who has tortured, mutilated, and murdered more than fifteen women. But when the Spectator kidnaps Diana's sister, she is forced to race against the clock to save her. She doesn't know where to start, and she doesn't know that hidden behind this murderer is a terrifying plot that directly affects her closest friends and family. Diana can't trust anyone--not her mentor, her boyfriend, her best friend, not even her colleagues on the force--if she wants to save her sister and put a stop to the series of monstrous crimes that have Madrid in an uproar.
In 2007, Olvido García Valdés won Spain's Premio Nacional for her poetry collection Y todos estábamos vivos. The book explores life from the viewpoint of death, or the dead, and the intensity of such a perspective. A primary technique for achieving this intensification is what García Valdés calls her supresión de elipsis. This suppression of ellipsis, or intentional exclusion of an element--often grammatical--works in these poems to prevents us from discerning basic narrative elements. Her poetry gains much of its power from omission. We rarely know anything about the viewpoint character of a poem: gender, age, physical appearance seem unavailable. The entire book begins in the middle of a sentence with no implied subject beyond a verb in the third person singular. Often a poem ends with no punctuation. The author also uses white space as the language of the unsaid.
Arabic | Kuwait | Short Fiction
October, 2011Fatima Yousef al-Ali is known for her stories about Kuwaiti women. She praises her father’s encouragement for her career and says that while she is happily married, few of her characters are. She portrays the lives of women from different strata of Kuwait society, whether the school assistant in “Behind a Locked Window,” the schoolgirl in “Nothing Shameful,” or the wealthy sophisticate in “A Woman’s Pains Never End.”
Being a pioneering Kuwaiti woman author has meant a degree of marginalization, evidenced by a need to improvise publishing arrangements. One benefit of writing beneath the radar of public scrutiny, though, has been her ability to describe and discuss human sexuality in a candid fashion.
Fatima Yousef al-Ali’s short stories open a window on a world that seems a bit mysterious to some Americans. The heroine’s spouse in “Vote for Me!” is not overtly abusive but will certainly not be voting for her. The administrator of public grants detects so many flaws in the applicants that he decides to award all of them to himself. Lismira, in her story, is stranded in a gloomy city far from Kuwait and from her lover and her spouse. The heroine in “A Woman’s Pains Never End” is as much a predator as the self-righteous religious admirer who climbs in bed with her in a hotel room in Asia and scratches her with his beard. It is hard to strike the right balance in considering the status of women in Kuwait. Fatima Yousef al-Ali's depictions of women from many walks of life help the reader better understand the challenges facing them, and thus helps us learn more about ourselves, too.
Multiple Countries | Multiple Genres | Multiple Languages
July, 2011We salute all of the NEA's FY 2012 awardees, and extend especially warm congratulations to those whose work has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail and InTranslation:
Geoffrey Brock
Kristin Dykstra
Michelle Gil-Montero
William Hutchins
Pierre Joris
Alex Zucker
Tedi López Mills was born in Mexico City in 1959. She studied philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and literature at the Sorbonne. She has published ten books of poetry, several of which have received national prizes in Mexico: Cinco estaciones, Un lugar ajeno, Segunda persona (Premio Nacional de Poesía Efraín Huerta), Glosas, Horas, Luz por aire y agua, Un jardín, cinco noches (y otros poemas), Contracorriente (Premio Nacional de Literatura José Fuentes Mares), Parafrasear, and Muerte en la rúa Augusta (Premio Xavier Villaurrutia). Her other honors include a 1994 Young Artists grant from the Fondo Nacional para las Culturas y las Artes, a 1995 translation fellowship from the U.S./Mexico Fund for Culture, and, in 1998, the prestigious inaugural poetry grant awarded by the Octavio Paz Foundation. She has translated into Spanish the work of numerous American, English, and French poets and, very recently, Anne Carsons's Autobiography of Red. A selection of her poems, While Light is Built, translated by Wendy Burk, was published by Kore Press. López Mills has been a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores since 2009.
France | French | Short Fiction
July, 2011In a collection of six short stories, Véronique Bizot explores, with humor and a remarkable eye for the absurd in daily life, the themes of solitude and anxiety. In "The Gardeners," an old man living on a grand estate watches the gardeners around him with mistrust. In "The Hotel," young newlyweds under the watchful eye of an elegant elderly lady have their honeymoon disrupted by an invasion of rats. "George's Wife" tells of two friends, the tragic accident that leaves one paralyzed, and the ensuing and unavoidable vengeance. Another story tells of Lamirault, a sworn enemy of the narrator: his funeral proves that loathing, like loving, is stronger than death.
In a review of El cutis patrio, from which the three poems featured here are taken, the acclaimed Cuban Poet Jose Kozer states that Eduardo Espina is "perhaps the most imaginative living Spanish-language poet" (Letras Libres, 2007). El cutis patrio was originally published in 2006 by Editorial Aldus (Mexico City), and was reissued in 2009 by Mansalva (Buenos Aires). It has been the subject of various dissertations and scholarly studies, including a 2009 book by Spanish linguist Enrique Mallen called Poesia del lenguaje: de T.S. Eliot a Eduardo Espina (Editorial Aldus, 2009). For its complexity and originality, Mallen situates El cutis patrio in the same category as John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and Lyn Hejinian's My Life.
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 »