Poetry (excerpts) | Spain | Spanish
November, 2019An explosion of the microscopic and a journey into the post-apocalyptic, Pilar Fraile Amador’s Breach bears witness—to environmental destruction, climate change, exodus, war, and xenophobia. But more than catastrophe itself, these poems plumb our impulse to document the aftermath, the human mechanisms of testimony that make false claims at objectivity. On a surreal road trip through a world in flames, the poet encounters multiple supposedly neutral observers—scientists, mathematicians, documentarians, philosophers, an uncanny double of herself—and becomes aware of the inherent flaws and subjectivities in each attempt at understanding.
- Lizzie Davis
Colombia | Short Fiction | Spanish
November, 2019Like every other writer of his generation of Colombian writers, Roberto Burgos Cantor labored in the long shadow cast by Gabriel García Márquez. Although Roberto was one of Colombia’s most celebrated writers, he remains little known outside the country. He and others in his cohort staked out a fictional imaginary independent of García Márquez, paving the way for a later generation of more urban, realist writers, such as Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Jorge Franco, Pilar Quintana, and Margarita García Robayo.
But Roberto was an important Colombian writer in his own right. Cartagena, the coastal Caribbean city of his birth, was at the center of his literary universe, and the most marginalized of its inhabitants, his protagonists. The author rendered his solidarity with the poor and powerless in a lyricism that embraced equally the horrors and the beauty of life among Cartagena’s dispossessed. La ceiba de la memoria, his novel dealing with the city during its heyday as a center of the slave trade in the 17th century, the Holocaust, and contemporary political violence in Colombia, received the José María Arguedas Prize awarded by Cuba's Casa de las Americas in 2007. Roberto’s polyphonic novel of 20th century Cartagena, Ver lo que veo, won Colombia’s National Novel Prize in 2018, shortly before his death. During a writing career that spanned more than fifty years, the publication of a new work by Roberto was always an event of great public interest.
“Stories of Singers” is part of the collection Lo Amador (1981), Roberto’s first published volume. It is comprised of seven linked stories that narrate life in the eponymous hard-luck Cartagena neighborhood. Critics agree that these vivid, heartbreaking, and lyrical stories are among Roberto’s best work, among seven short story collections and seven novels. As one critic wrote of Lo Amador, “Few books can make us journey, amazed and compassionate before the spectacle of life, as this one.” “Stories of Singers” is the first English translation of Roberto’s work.
An interesting coincidence: I moved to Lo Amador in the late 1980s and early 1990s to do anthropological research. When neighborhood residents learned what I was doing, they referred me to the book, as if everything that could possibly be known about their lives were contained in it. Never having heard of the book, I eagerly went out and bought it.
Lo Amador so beautifully captured the life and language of the people as I understood them in the little time I’d spent there that I nearly abandoned my fieldwork. Time and deeper understanding only confirmed my initial impression. His work has been an inspiration to my own, first in anthropology, then as a translator, and now as a writer of fiction. And, of course, the grief that his death caused in the nation’s literary circles, and the enduring popularity of Roberto’s fiction among his fellow Colombians, speak for themselves.
- Joel Streicker
I first came across Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s work while participating in the Art Omi: Writers Translation Lab with Daniel Saldaña París. In between working on the proofs of my translation of his novel Among Strange Victims, our conversations were a way of getting to know more about each other, and when I expressed my interest in using images and text in a form of semiotic translation, Daniel suggested that I should get in touch with Verónica. That introduction not only flowered into a firm friendship but also led to my translating Empty Set, and collaborating with Verónica on various other exciting projects, among which stands out Palabras Migrantes/Migrant Words, which started its life as a bilingual audio guide to an exhibition in Jackson Hole and was later published in book form with images from the exhibition by the amazing Mexican artisan publishers Impronta.
When Verónica sent me Almadía’s beautiful edition of Mudanza, from which the essay “Origami” is taken, I fell in love with its unique movement between personal narrative and the appropriation of the narratives of the other artist-writers whose works and lives the book addresses. Indeed, I remember that I spent an inordinately long time reading the essays as I was constantly either researching its “characters” or stopping to consider what I had just read.
Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s genius lies in her passion for communication, which has led her to explore the boundaries of language and its interface with the image to open new spaces for expression. As a translator, it is extremely exciting to have the opportunity to occupy those spaces.
- Christina MacSweeney
Fiction (excerpts) | Italian | Somalia/Italy
November, 2019Il comandante del fiume is the coming-of-age story of Yabar, an eighteen-year-old, second-generation immigrant dealing with the post-memory trauma of the Somali civil war; uncovering secrets about his absent father, destructive clan divisions, and Italy’s colonial past; and coming to terms with what it means to be black in Rome. This particular excerpt, which I've titled "Flunking Out and Overflowing," is sourced from a few different chapters, and centers on the theme of school and Yabar's relationship with his "sister."
- Hope Campbell Gustafson
Catalan | Poetry (excerpts) | Spain
September, 2019I first encountered about a dozen poems of Gemma Gorga in an anthology of contemporary Catalan poets translated into English while I was at an artist’s residency in Barcelona. I was struck by the lucid transparency of her language and syntax as a means for revealing transcendent states. I spent the next few years translating her book of prose poems, Llibre dels minuts (Book of Minutes, Field Translation Series, Oberlin College Press, 2019). Yet I still felt compelled by the rest of her work, which makes abundant use of the verse line. Now I am translating poems from her six other books, and eventually newer uncollected poems, which I hope to edit and translate into a volume of her Selected Poems, tentatively titled Late to the House of Words.
The selection of poems here are all from her third book, Instruments òptics (Brosquil Edicions, 2005). Even its title underlines Gorga’s central preoccupation with poems as being themselves “optical instruments” that can help us see what even a telescope or a microscope cannot: that is, the workings of the human soul through memory.
Yet Gorga’s poems are obsessively focused on words themselves: their enigmatic palpability as well as their sound. Thus, in a poem such as “In Alphabetical Order,” Gorga finds the magic key to certain words by their proximity in the dictionary to others. There was no way to achieve in English the same effect that Gorga could do, where the search for “you” in the final line: (“tu, tul, tulipa, túmul, turment”) is constructed from the letters of tu (you), something I could only approximate in English and instead found myself compensating and resorting to homophony: “you: yarrow, yaw, yawp, yew.” In writing this introduction, I had a moment of translator’s regret. I believe that a translation is never finished, merely abandoned--to repurpose Valéry. I thought about changing the line to “we,” a word whose two-letter form earlier in our alphabet would have allowed me more room to do an analogous architectonic procedure, but at too great an expense to the sense of this crucial final line. For it is the very search for the Other through language that underpins the entire poem, and which forms part of Gorga’s lyric project. In many of these poems, even when they evoke solitude, there is the assumption of the other. In “Pomegranates,” the solitary act of peeling and extracting its seeds effects a powerful inversion of number and agency, where instead of the singular narrator eating seeds, it is the seeds of “Time” that “gobble us up.”
The poems comprising her “Book of Hours” are, of course, concerned with cycles of Time passing, of mortality. In “The Book of Hours: October,” for example, Gorga uses the season to allude to the Classical theme of souls falling like leaves, an image found as far back as Dante and Virgil. She transforms it slightly by comparing the leaves to angels falling, who are then able to escape from the endless repetition “to transport them to another/less painful dimension.” In the very act of creating these secular prayers, Gorga is able to achieve a momentary transcendence for herself and, by reading them, for the reader.
- Sharon Dolin
Biography (excerpt) | Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese
September, 2019Marighella: O guerrilheiro que incendiou o mundo is a biography of one of the most controversial and divisive figures in 20th-century Brazil. A communist activist from a young age, an elected state representative, and the founder of the largest armed organization opposing the ruling military dictatorship, this mixed-race poet raised in poverty in Salvador, Bahia would be declared public enemy number one by the country's political police.
The incident described in the excerpt featured here, Margihella's arrest in a Tijuca movie theater roughly one month after the military seized power in 1964, dominated the nation's headlines, shocking the general public for the details of wanton violence and repression. It would turn out to be a mere inkling of the grim future awaiting Brazil under military rule.
Brazil is a nation that has failed to adequately come to terms with this chapter in its history, having opted for sweeping amnesty rather than prosecuting those responsible for human rights violations. The lack of condemnation or a clear resolution has led, in the wake of recent corruption charges against elected officials, to a mood of dangerous nostalgia among many Brazilians currently disillusioned by the failures of democracy. This dangerous nostalgia is partially responsible for the outcome of last year's presidential election, when Brazilian voters chose a far-right candidate who favors torture as a law-enforcement tactic, praises the dictatorship's strong men for their brutal effectiveness, and calls for a return to the good old days when might was right, protest was outlawed, dissidents were exiled and executed, and elections were non-existent.
Written by veteran journalist Mário Magalhães (currently of The Intercept Brasil), Marighella: O guerrilheiro que incendiou o mundo is equal parts historical nonfiction and political thriller, meticulously researched and rich in context, surveying the country's social and political evolution from the World War I era through to the late 1960s. Published in Portuguese by Companhia das Letras in 2012 and winner of the Prêmio Jabuti for biography, the book served as the basis for Wagner Moura's biopic Marighella, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February of this year.
- Matthew Rinaldi
Vladimir Vertlib’s play on the current refugee crisis ÜBERALL NIRGENDS lauert die Zukunft ("The Future Lurks Everywhere and Nowhere") was first performed in April 2016 to sold-out houses in Salzburg and Hallein, Austria. In this drama, Vertlib connects the plight of the displaced Jews at the end of World War II with the refugee crisis that is unfolding in Europe. Himself a migrant, Vertlib followed his parents from country to country for ten years; what is happening now has had a deep emotional impact on him.
He volunteered from September 2015 to February 2016, at the height of the crisis, to assist the waves of refugees that came over the border into Salzburg, only to continue their journey to Germany and other Northern European countries. Besides publishing a diary of his experiences at the border in the anthology Europa im Wort. Eine literarische Seismographie in sechzehn Aufzeichnungen, he also wrote a novel based on his volunteer experience called Viktor hilft, and this drama, in which refugees themselves, among other professional actors, portray their plight on stage.
In the play, David, a survivor of the Holocaust who currently lives in Israel, comes back to an unnamed city somewhere in Germany or Austria. He is looking for the displaced persons’ camp where his lover Hanna died of starvation shortly after the war. He had promised her he would bring her bones home to Palestine and arrives in the city to fulfill this promise. David is disoriented because he encounters the displaced persons of today in the very camp where he and Hanna were waiting for placement. Refugees from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan enter into a dialogue with David, with the lyrical voice of the dead Hanna coming in over the loudspeakers. Other players in the drama are the mayor of the town; the head of a right-wing political movement, based on PEGIDA (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes), which is opposed to these newcomers in society and perceives them as a threat; busybody volunteers who are looking out more for themselves than their protégées; and the general population, which wants to benefit from cheap undocumented labor.
The play addresses highly relevant topics that are under current discussion not only in Europe but also in the United States, and it examines questions relating to national memory and individual and collective guilt. It suggests a way forward to resolving long-held animosities between groups of peoples, and illuminates the human qualities that we share and that can help us find peace with the past.
- Julie Winter
Short Fiction | Spanish | Uruguay
September, 2019After an unpromising beginning ("What on earth is this?!"), in recent years the work of Armonía Somers has come to play a defining role in my professional life. Having had her writing recommended to me by a couple of learned friends (neither of whom, it eventually transpired, had read much of her), I picked up a copy of her first novel, La mujer desnuda (The Naked Woman, available in English from Feminist Press). Ignoring said initial reaction (a secondary impulse that has served me well in my reading), I persevered and, some way in, was rewarded with that click of connection that will be familiar to readers of all shapes and sizes. From then on, I was hooked.
In probably the most famous essay to date about Somers’ work, the critic Ángel Rama describes her, admiringly, as a weirdo in a generation of Uruguayan weirdos that also included writers such as Felizberto Hernández and Juan Carlos Onetti. Somers, however, was reserved a special place among them, something of weirdo’s weirdo, if you like. And when you open one of her books, you can see why she was afforded the distinction: her writing weaves sinuously from thought to thought, from vivid realism to wild surrealist fantasy, with little quarter given to exposition or, indeed, punctuation. But her perceived difficulty belies a taut sense of purpose. She knew exactly what she wanted to write about, and often this included subjects that few of her contemporaries were addressing at the time: a fierce defense of women’s rights, especially in the realm of sexuality, the accompanying denunciation of male stupidity and viciousness, and wider philosophical, religious, and political meditations that reveal, almost in spite of herself, an extraordinarily erudite and brilliant mind. But perhaps the most salient qualities of Somers’ work are her sense of humor and lust for life, the way she embraces its manifest pleasures and ambiguities with a chuckle or cry of joy. Never afraid to get her hands dirty, she has a talent for reaching into the sludge and pulling out whatever she finds has spawned there, be it monstrous or beautiful. Or both.
"The Man from the Tunnel" is a case in point—on a whim, a seven-year-old girl crawls through a sewer pipe, unwittingly headed for an encounter that will prove revelatory in all manner of ways. It’s an excellent introduction to Somers’ work, and one that I hope will encourage more readers in English to seek her out.
- Kit Maude
Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born in 1911 in Kala Qader, British India (present-day Pakistan). He studied Arabic and English literature at Government College and Oriental College. A dedicated member of the Communist Party, Faiz often found himself afoul of Pakistan's ruling elites, leading to his exile and imprisonment. While he primarily wrote in Urdu, with few exceptions of Punjabi, Hindustani, and Persian verse, Faiz's body of work reaches deep into the fecund linguistic soil of the Indian subcontinent to draw nourishment from Hindustani, Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962 and the Lotus Prize for African and Asian Literature in 1976, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize before his death in 1984 at the age of 73.
Faiz stands alongside Mahmoud Darwish (who recounts their shared exile in Beirut in Memories of Forgetfulness), Nazim Hikmet (whom Faiz translated into Urdu), and Pablo Neruda (a friend) as an iconic figure of twentieth-century world literature. Urdu idiom on either side of the India-Pakistan border has absorbed his poetry to such a degree that it’s not uncommon to hear people quoting him in everyday conversations. His ghazals have been performed by many of South Asia’s most prominent singers. Yet despite his popularity and international profile, Faiz has largely remained unknown to Western readers. “To have to introduce Faiz’s name” to Western readers, Agha Shahid Ali writes in a review of Naomi Lazard’s 1988 translation of Faiz’s work, “a name that is mentioned in Pakistan . . . as often as the sun is, seem[s] a terrible insult.”
In his essay “The Mind of Winter: Reflections of Life in Exile,” Edward Said calls Faiz a poet of exile, engaged in lending “dignity to a condition legislated to deny dignity—to deny an identity to people.” I have the difficult privilege of being an émigré. I migrated from Pakistan to the United States in 1998. My paternal and maternal grandparents migrated from India with my young aunts and uncles at Partition. Dissolution of “home”—a place of familiarity, kinship, and historical continuity—has been the defining experience of my life. And Faiz’s poetry, in no small way, has helped me grapple with a condition that is terrifying, liberating, and above all, fugitive from settled notions about identity.
- Umair Kazi
Guatemala | Prose Poem | Spanish
September, 2019I met the Garifuna poet Wingston González in the fall of 2013 when I was living in Berlin and he was passing through for a poetry festival. We ended up collaborating on the translation featured here and the years passed. Earlier this year, I was overjoyed to see that Ugly Duckling Presse had published a book of his poetry. I'm happy to add “Whiskey against the Rage Machine” to his body of work now available in English.
- Priscilla Posada
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