Brazil | Novel (excerpt) | Portuguese
July, 2009Moacyr Scliar was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1937. He is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and the author of more than 60 books published in 18 countries, many of which have won awards or been adapted for the movies, stage, or television. He also writes for newspapers around the world. His books include O centauro no jardim (1980; published in English as The Centaur in the Garden, 2003), Max e os felinos (1981; published in English as Max and the Cats, 2003), A mulher que escreveu a Bíblia (winner of the Prêmio Jabuti, 2000), and Saturno nos trópicos (2003). A majestade do Xingu (1997) received the Prêmio José Lins do Rego from the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
The excerpt featured here begins at page 35 of the novel.
Héctor Hernández Montecinos was born in Santiago, Chile in 1979. His books of poetry that were published between 2001 and 2003 are collected in [guión] (Lom Ediciones: Santiago, Chile, 2008); [coma] (Lom Ediciones, 2009) collects his writings from 2004-2006. His other books include Putamadre (Zignos: Lima, 2005), Ay de Mi (Ripio: Santiago, 2006), La poesia chilena soy yo (Mandrágora cartonera: Cochabamba, 2007), Segunda mano (Zignos: Lima, 2007), A 1000 (Lustra editores: Lima, 2008), Livro Universal (Demonio negro: Sao Paulo, 2008, traducido al portugués), Poemas para muchachos en llamas (RdlPS: Ciudad de México, 2008), La Escalera (Yerba Mala cartonera: La Paz, 2008) El secreto de esta estrella (Felicita cartonera: Asunción, 2008), La interpretación de mis sueños (Moda y Pueblo: Stgo, 2008) y NGC 224 (Literal: Ciudad de México, 2009). He has been invited to present his poetry in Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Peru. Since 2008, he has lived in Mexico where he teaches, and directs a small literary press called Santa Muerte cartonera. He holds a doctorate in literature with a focus in art theory.
Based in Bombay, Suryabala is originally from Varanasi in the northern part of India. She completed her Ph.D. in Hindi Literature at Benares Hindu University. She has been a prolific writer for more than three decades, publishing in all the major Hindi-language magazines and newspapers in the country. Besides satire, she has written novels and short stories, some of which have been adapted for television.
Bolivia | Short Fiction | Spanish
June, 2009Bolivian writer Victor Hugo Viscarra (b. 1958) was an indigent alcoholic in La Paz from the 1970s until his death in 2006, and published five works of literature: Avisos necrológicos (2005), Borracho estaba pero me acuerdo (2003), Alcoholatum y otros drinks: Crónicas para gatos y pelagatos (2001), Relatos de Victor Hugo (1996, 2005), and Coba: Lenguaje secreto del hampa boliviano (1981, 2004). He was honored at Bolivia’s International Book Fair in 2004 and 2005, and each of his books has gone through various printings. He has had an exceptional reception among younger readers.
Ángel Escobar Varela was born in 1957 in Sitiocampo, located in Cuba’s rural eastern province of Guantánamo. As an adult he spent many years on the western side of the island in and around the city of Havana. The publication of a posthumous anthology in 2006 (Ángel Escobar: Poesía completa, Ediciones UNIÓN) symbolizes rising acclaim for his work. Escobar generated the complex field of his poetics out of numerous influences–his training in theater, wide readings in international literature, his autobiography, family trauma, and philosophical reflections on modern life, among other strands. Those who knew him late in his life also see the influence of his worsening battle with schizophrenia: many poems make reference to illness and endurance. They also challenge prevailing notions of rational conduct, and some commentators argue that the spatialization of the late poetry itself performs “schizophrenic” moves. Over the course of his career, Escobar’s articulations of suffering opened some of the richest veins in his poetry. He took his own life in Havana in 1997.
Born Aldo Giurlani to a well-off Florentine mercantile family, Aldo Palazzeschi (1885-1974) was educated as an accountant and trained as an actor. The author of colloquial, absurdist free verse parables of urban-bourgeois life, his early work anticipated Dada and the Surrealists. His novels, particularly Il codice di Perelà (Perelà’s Code, 1911; translated as Man of Smoke) and Le sorelle Materassi (The Materassi Sisters, 1934), were hugely successful in their time. Palazzeschi’s first book of poetry, I cavalli bianchi (The White Horses), was published in 1905 by Cesare Blanc–the poet’s cat, also the publisher of Lanterna (1907) and Poemi (1909). The latter volume includes “Chi sono?” (“Who am I?”), a pointed rejection of the then-dominant D’Annunzian model of bardic national hero that is still among the best-known twentieth-century Italian poems (Chi sono? / Il saltimbanco dell’anima mia; Who am I? / The acrobat of my soul). This was followed in 1910 by L’Incendiario (The Arsonist), published by F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist press, Poesia, from which this selection of poems is taken. With its irreverence, biting parody, and blithe nonsense, The Arsonist resembles works of Apollinaire and Mayakovsky still to come. In a series of grotesque allegories depicting contemporary urban-bourgeois life as timid, conformist, and squalid, Palazzeschi broadens his antic vision in colloquial, dramatic episodes dictated by the “saltimbanco dell’anima mia” (acrobat of my soul) of his prior volume: an exemplary gadabout, ironic boulevardier, and armchair provocateur who guides the reader around the dystopia and eventually disappears into a dilapidated rural castle retreat with a fictive family menagerie. Palazzeschi was a pacifist and political agnostic, and his satire does not spare himself; the poet is portrayed as a poor dunce whose folly nevertheless exemplifies the (pyrrhic) perseverance of individualism in an atmosphere of stultifying conformity. In 1914, Palazzeschi turned away from the Futurist ideology of violence as necessary ‘purification’ (as war had been described in the 1909 Manifesto of Futurism), broke definitively with Marinetti and the Futurists, and took a rare stand in favor of ‘neutralism.’ The poems of this literary hero of the Futurists, whom Marinetti had acclaimed as possessing “a fierce, destructive irony,” are laced with a pungent, subversive humor.
(Nicholas Benson)
German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
June, 2009Carmen-Francesca Banciu’s Song of the Sad Mother is a novel about an anguished mother-daughter relationship set against the backdrop of Communist Romania. Its protagonist Maria-Maria is the daughter of two passionate party loyalists. Her academic aptitude and upbringing seem to destine her to become the embodiment of the party’s utopian concept of the new human. The only problem is that Maria-Maria is intent on writing her own destiny. The predetermined quality of Maria-Maria’s life coupled with the fact that she is tyrannized by a mother who is depressive and deeply distrustful of any type of happiness or pleasure, rob the protagonist of a childhood and cause cruelty and harsh discipline to take the place of maternal nurturing and reassurance. It is thus that Maria-Maria’s mother, whose only indulgence was deprivation, cold-bloodedly destroys her daughter’s dolls only to replace them with books, out of love and to impart upon Maria-Maria the valuable lesson of self-reliance. Armed with this lesson, Maria-Maria is able to take possession of herself and defy every party--and familial--expectation. She does this by leaving the past behind and becoming an émigré writer in post-Communist East Berlin. While the crossing of national and political boundaries proves catalytic for Maria-Maria in that it enables her to discover her autonomy and individuality, it does not wipe the slate clean of her psychic and emotional wounds. It is only by doing the work of remembering that she begins to exorcise her demons and heal the trauma of her painful relationship to her mother and her country.
(Elena Mancini)
Japan | Japanese | Novel (excerpt)
December, 2008One of Japan’s most revered mythological creatures, the tengu is believed to inhabit mountainous regions, where it exacts revenge for wrongdoings committed against community members. It is often blamed for abducting people and animals to later return them endowed with heightened senses and abilities, and for playing pranks on priests who have strayed from Buddhist precepts.
The reader is introduced to Keiichi Michihira—an investigative journalist on a journey to unearth the truth behind a series of murders that occurred a quarter-century earlier in Shikamata. Residents of this secluded hamlet are convinced that the culprit is the fabled tengu, and though Michihira is skeptical, their belief compels him to dig deeper, leading him on a wide-ranging investigation from the supernatural to the geopolitical.
(Christopher Southward)
The Kings (Los Reyes) was published in 1949. It was the first time Julio Cortázar published under his own name. Aside from this text, Cortázar wrote four other short plays that were collected and published in 1995 as Goodbye, Robinson, and other short pieces (Adios, Robinson, y otras piezas breves). One of the plays included in that volume Nothing Goes to Pehuajó (Nada a Pehuajó) had first been published as a single text in the year of his death. This adaptation/translation of The Kings was originally commissioned by The Art Party, Inc. in New York City, and developed with The Internationalists Around the World in the 24 Hours Festival.
(Caridad Svich)
Mohamed Metwalli was awarded a B.A. in English Literature from Cairo University, Faculty of Arts in 1992. The same year, he won the Yussef el-Khal prize by Riad el-Reyes Publishers in Lebanon for his poetry collection, Once Upon A Time. He co-founded an independent literary magazine, El-Garad, in which his second volume of poems appeared (The Story the People Tell in the Harbor, 1998). He was selected to represent Egypt in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 1997. Later he was Poet-in-Residence at the University of Chicago in 1998. He compiled and co-edited an anthology of Modern Egyptian Poetry, Angry Voices, published by the University of Arkansas press in 2002.
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