Aleksey Khomyakov (1804–1860) was a Russian religious philosopher, historian, economist, poet, painter, engineer, and inventor. He was the leader of the Slavophiles and promoted the idea of Pan-Slavism based on the principles of Orthodoxy. His early poems, created within the framework of romanticism, are concerned with the inner unity between the spirit and nature. Later he drew the most important source of his poetry from Orthodox Christianity. His theological writings influenced Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Solovyov. Khomyakov’s poetry remains largely untranslated.
Catalan | Novel (excerpt) | Spain
April, 2010Mill Town Memories is a captivating novel that holds the reader's attention with a skillful non-linear narrative technique. It immerses the reader in an industrial era, depicting life in one of the textile colonies that were such a vital part of Catalonia in the 1950s (the author lived in the Colonia Vidal from the age of six months until she was 20). It is a portrait of the heartland of Catalonia: its traditions, customs, and pressures to conform.
Catalan | Novel (excerpt) | Spain
March, 2010Due to the physical after-effects of a fateful traffic accident, a waiter in a roadside bar finds himself forced to give up his job and withdraw into himself. In this situation and out of the need to do something—anything—he resumes his old pastime of voracious reading, and begins to write. In an exercise of reminiscence superimposed on the most immediate present, the story becomes a magnificent and careful intertwining of crossed paths, encounters and misunderstandings among a wide variety of characters that were once part of the microcosm of the roadside bar. When he was working there he unwittingly became a witness to the ever-complicated human psyche, and to an everyday reality verging on decadence and disillusionment with a changing world shrouded in an atmosphere of pessimism. Ramon Erra's extraordinary literary precision establishes him as one of the best current writers of Catalan fiction.
Catalan | Novel (excerpt) | Spain
March, 2010A Lake in Flames is a first novel, and also the first part of a trilogy that continues with The Sea of Minsk (La mar de Minsk) and Towers of Clay (Torres d'argila) and marks Hilari de Cara's birth as a novelist. In this chronicle of characters and stories that touch on life, memory, hopes and ambitions, and sex, the author addresses his themes with sarcasm and, above all, a certain sense of terminus. The parallel plots are set in a village in present-day Mallorca and the Mallorca of the past; in the Barcelona of the 1970s and the Spanish Civil War. The novel is grounded in its author's own personal experience, but is developed with irony and a style close to contemporary English-language fiction.
French | Morocco | Novel (excerpt)
March, 2010From Pierre Joris's memoir of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine:
During a dinner at La Coupole in Paris (circa 1979)...I turned to my neighbor, Kathy Acker, and started to tell her everything I knew about Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, what an absolutely superb poet he was, the greatest of his generation in Morocco, how powerful his prose was, how violently he had disemboweled the colonizer’s language in order to be able to put it to accurate new uses, how he had turned it into a truly alive counter-language and how especially in Moi l’aigre he had done that with a brilliance that bordered on genius. I sang Mohammed’s praises for as long as she and anyone else at the table would listen—I wanted them to know, but, maybe before all, I wanted to reassure myself, as I knew without knowing it, that this was the last time I would see him. And it was. Except that from time to time when I sit down to write a poem I try to think through him, Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, and try to gather that way some of the absolute intensity and fearlessness necessary for a true guérilla poétique.
When I heard of his death, the line of poetry that came to mind was not his, but this one, by Guillaume Apollinaire: soleil cou coupé / sun throat cut.
Finnish search-engine poet Tytti Heikkinen is the author of two books, 2008's Täytetyn eläimen lämpo (Taxidermied Animal's Warmth) and 2009's Varjot astronauteista (Shadows From Astronauts), both from poEsia. Helsingin Sanomat nominated her first book for its book prize, saying in the accompanying review that her work "challenged poetry to a new level." Heikkinen uses new digital media to tackle issues of authorship in brave and often funny ways, and for this she has been critically praised.
Heikkinen's poems have a total effect at once light and devastating. They are overlaid with both a classic, quiet, characteristically Nordic dark, and a bloggy, confrontational, postmodern self-awareness. This duality is what first attracted me to Heikkinen's work, and it is also at the center of our collaboration, which goes something like this: Heikkinen sends me an enthusiastic email. I retreat to process the information quietly. Heikkinen sends me a pithy reply and tells me to get shit done.
Our correspondence has been reckless, wordy, occasionally drunken, and always passionate. It has become exceedingly clear that neither of us is perfect, but the poems stubbornly push past all personal matters, and what they invoke is pure.
The translations featured here began to take shape in the spring of 2009, and portions of the project are found or forthcoming in At-Large Magazine and PRECIPICe.
(Niina Pollari)
Hindi | India | Short Fiction
March, 2010Poor children witness the destruction of their neighborhood. While playing, they build their own small replica of what had been destroyed and guard it from destruction.
The Word Exchange: U.S./Mexico Playwright Exchange Program was created by the Lark Play Development Center in collaboration with Mexico’s Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA). The Lark annually hosts playwrights from Mexico and pairs them with American playwrights for a ten-day translation and development residency designed to create stage-worthy translations of new works from Mexico; it also introduces the writers to New York’s theater scene, industry leaders, and the Lark community. Public readings of these works are presented each November, followed by a closing night Celebración. In 2009, the Lark launched a reciprocal program where U.S. writers develop Spanish translations of their work with artists in Mexico City.
The Sadness of the Limes is the story of Rite Pool, a bitter formerly successful comedian, who is now tired and depressed from a life that isn't funny anymore. He spends his life talking to parking meters and thinks repeatedly about quitting comedy, but an unexpected encounter with his former sidekick, the happy innocent Izzy Dedley, makes him think that there is still hope on a laughing track. The comic duo plan a comeback at their favorite gig joint, the Three Trapped Tigers, but Rite Pool's own legs run away from him and decide to steal the show.
The Word Exchange: U.S./Mexico Playwright Exchange Program was created by the Lark Play Development Center in collaboration with Mexico’s Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA). The Lark annually hosts playwrights from Mexico and pairs them with American playwrights for a ten-day translation and development residency designed to create stage-worthy translations of new works from Mexico; it also introduces the writers to New York’s theater scene, industry leaders, and the Lark community. Public readings of these works are presented each November, followed by a closing night Celebración. In 2009, the Lark launched a reciprocal program where U.S. writers develop Spanish translations of their work with artists in Mexico City.
A poetic, chaotic, and moving tale of evolution and adaptation in the modern world, Events with Life’s Leftovers follows the residents of an apartment building as they celebrate insomnia, and life’s beginnings and endings.
Minimalism? Stevens, “the nothing that is”; Williams, “a machine made of words.” Economy of means, focus on surfaces, concreteness, eschewing figuration, making silence and absence present, self-effacement, and the spareness of Suprematism. In the American context, Robert Morris, “Maximum resistance to…perceptual separation” inviting the viewer's participation and co-production in the creation of meaning. Donald Judd's “Specific Objects” and their “indeterminancy of arrangement” making for unclassifiable art “between” painting and sculpture, challenging the poetry/not poetry distinction, non-Art references and the use of industrial materials akin to citation, cliché, common speech, public announcement, advertising slogan, proverb, etc. But also Zen, a nearly spiritual pursuit, and human voice as sound sculpture. Not a movement: “Minimalism is not really an idea; it ended before it started” (Sol LeWitt). In the Russian context of the ‘60s and ‘70s, a resumption of the ‘30s generation's Absurdism, the naïve populist lyric of the war generation with its creation of a sphere for private utterance, a truly subversive act, parody of ‘50s Socialist Realism through coding, implication by omission, and ironic critique of the Soviet status quo. The emergence of Russian Conceptualism and so called SotsArt (Russian Pop Art). Yes Irony, but also pathos and a kind of aesthetics of exhaustion, both of the personal and of the historical kind. Minimalism: that legal definition of pornography: I know it when I see it. Enough said.
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 »