I met Yūki Nagae in Tokyo in July 2018, as part of a contingent of international poets invited by Shiga University Professor and scholar Rina Kikuchi to participate in a translation workshop and a multilingual performance in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nara. Each of us was randomly paired with a contemporary Japanese poet, and Yuki and I were fortuitously conjoined.
Since most of us international poets did not speak Japanese and knew neither the logographic kanji nor the syllabic kana, we spent the first part of our time together groping towards a holistic understanding of how poetics are embodied both visually and lexically, and what our partner poet's aesthetic might be. Luckily Yuki does speak English and had translated her poems into the simple phonetic foxtrot that then became clay for my shaping as we conversed. Some words had multiple meanings and allowed for ambiguity and the language was left-branching, accumulating connotation very differently than in English. Those differences notwithstanding, I found that her mind actually worked similarly to my own, employing metaphors from geology and chemistry alongside a formal and playful experimentation. Many of her poems show the incursion of civilization into the natural world and the melancholy of machines. I saw the urbanism of Frank O'Hara and tinges of Neruda in her work, echoes of where the Chilean poet needed a break from "stone and wool, institutions and gardens, commodities, eyeglasses, elevators."
What really helped me polish these translations was performing with Yuki at a launch event for the Tokyo Poetry Journal. She is an amazing performer who has developed an improvisational poetic style that she terms "Steric Poetry," and her work involves movement, intonation, and a responsive fusion of dance and utterance. Seeing the physicality of that work on stage helped me channel the final forms in English. Yuki's translations of my poems were published in one of Japan's most important contemporary poetry journals, Gendai-shi-techo, so I am very pleased that we are able to share two of her poems in English here.
- Ravi Shankar
Short Fiction | Spain | Spanish
September, 2019In Miguel de Unamuno's "The Mirror of Death (A Very Common Tale)," we meet a young woman who suffers from a depression with no explanation, simple or complex. Only in recent years have we accepted this as a defining feature of depression and so treat it with the gravity and respect it demands. But in 1911, the author's understanding of the phenomenon as just one of the many side effects of simply being human allowed him to feel its weight intuitively, to dramatize it, and to tell us all about it in this story, which was first published in the November 27, 1911 edition of El Imparcial.
We've all seen an old medical brochure or educational video and laughed at its ignorance or even gasped, downright scandalized by just how minimizing the past's explanations of grave disorders like depression could be (in fact, the doctor in this story offers his own misguided opinion on the matter). But in the hands of a writer like Unamuno, we can find the very same ailment, this time without a grasping explanation, or even a name, but instead a wealth of compassion and a desire to help us understand. And this is one of the pleasures of looking back at ourselves through the lens of literature: the proof that any experience society or science might sell to us as new, we often have already lived.
- Andrew Adair
Latin | Poetry | Roman Republic
September, 2019The ecstatic cult of Cybele or Cybebe, the Great Mother, was originally based in Phrygia (northern Turkey) and particularly associated with two mountains, Ida and Dindymus. In 204 BC, during the Second Punic War, it was brought to Rome, where it flourished despite legal restrictions. The priests, known as Gallae--who in Catullus’ time were still foreigners--frequently castrated themselves out of devotion to the goddess.
There are various versions of the myth of Attis and Cybele. In this one, Attis is a young Athenian of good family, who falls victim to the cult of Cybele. With a band of like-minded companions, he takes a ship to Phrygia, and, upon landing, castrates himself. We may assume that his companions do likewise. They then set out for the goddess’s shrine on Mount Ida. Upon arrival, exhausted, they fall asleep. The next morning Attis wakes up alone--his companions seem mysteriously to have vanished but this reinforces the dream-like effect--and bitterly regrets his rash action. It is too late.
The original uses a meter called Galliambic, which was associated with the worship of Cybele. I have used terza rima (and at one point rhyming triplets) as I find its rapid movement from stanza to stanza particularly suitable for narrative verse. I break away from it in three places: lines 16-45, where I use short irregularly rhymed lines for Attis’s ecstatic exhortation to his companions; lines 73-103, where I render Attis’s long self-recriminatory soliloquy in rhyming couplets (heroic or not!); and, finally, I revert to short, irregularly rhyming lines in the coda (129-137), a prayer to the goddess from Catullus himself to turn her attentions elsewhere.
In this poem Catullus explores the ancient fascination with, and distrust of, ecstatic cults. Like Euripides’ The Bacchae, it strikes a very modern chord.
Also very modern is the concern with gender identity. It is interesting that Catullus, many of whose poems are expressions of erotic love, has chosen a protagonist who has deliberately castrated himself as an expression of his hatred of Venus. Does this somehow express his own desperate desire to be without the sexual urge that has brought him so much trouble? Or is it that his romantic obsession has--according to traditional Roman thinking--unmanned him, a victim of love in a macho society? And, paradoxically, in this act of sexual renunciation there is a frenzied eroticism, the ultimate masochism.
Even deeper is an almost existentialist panic over the loss of his own identity as a person. If he has lost his identity as a man, then who or what is he? Notice the repetition of "I" in the soliloquy.
- Ranald Barnicot
Mexico | Novel (excerpts) | Spanish
September, 2019Yo, la peor ("I, the Worst of Women") is Mexican writer Mónica Lavín’s 2009 historical novel about the life of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695), who became a nun to enable her writing. Continuing to write after losing viceregal protection, she risked being tortured by the Inquisition. Juana Inés was a brilliant, gifted woman in the New Spain of the 17th-century, a time when most women were illiterate and their education ended at embroidery. Her educated grandfather allowed her to receive basic schooling, which she augmented on her own by using his library.
She became the first great Latin American poet. To find a comparable U.S. poet, we must wait 200 years for Emily Dickinson. The Mexican nun was a female literary pioneer like Mary Wollstonecraft, who published her declaration of women’s rights in 1792 and is regarded as a first feminist in the English-speaking world. Juana Inés complained about the unequal treatment of women a hundred years earlier.
In the novel, Juana Inés is seen through the eyes of other women, those who loved her and those who feared or were jealous of her. We follow the troubles and loves of Refugio, her first teacher; Isabel, her mother; her sisters; Bernarda, a rival lady-in-waiting during Juana’s years at court; Sister Cecelia, a jealous nun who conspires against her; and the two vicereines who were Sor Juana’s patrons, for whom she wrote many of her poems. The excerpts featured here are from Refugio and Juana’s oldest sister, María.
The book is divided into three parts: childhood, court life in Mexico City, and the convent years. Each section is prefaced by a letter written by Juana Inés to a former vicereine, the Marquesa de la Laguna. Those letters are in her own voice, in the language of her time:
"You who have received from my pen evidences of affection and reverence, of my perennial friendship and devotion, give now such lofty evidence of your love for me that it would be impossible for me to match the degree of your gestures of understanding or your strategist abilities to win the battle."
That imitation of 17th century writing—none of Juana’s letters to the vicereine survive—stands in contrast to the register of the rest of the book, like the first chapter included here, in which Juana’s teacher prepares for class:
"Refugio looked out the window at the brightening day, morning fog still threading through the oak trees. So much stillness filled her with melancholy and she yearned for the children’s voices to interrupt her as they trooped in . . ."
Those differences of register and the distinctive perspectives of the numerous narrators are chief among the challenges in translating this novel.
- Patricia Dubrava
English | Essay | Ireland/United States
June, 2019To celebrate Pride Month and Stonewall 50, we’re dedicating the June issue of InTranslation to a folio of translated Russian LGBTQ+ literature entitled Life Stories, Death Sentences, co-edited by author Margarita Meklina and translator Anne O. Fisher.
In this first post, we're featuring Margarita Meklina's foreword to the folio. It's followed by posts containing four translators' English renderings of poetry and prose by eight authors writing in Russian, and an afterword by translator David Louden.
We hope you enjoy this important issue. If you live in the NYC area, please join us on Friday, June 14 for a special bilingual event at The Brooklyn Rail's Industry City headquarters, where we'll present recorded Russian readings by the folio authors and live English readings by the translators, along with commentary by noted scholars of Russian literature and gender/sexuality studies.
- Jen Zoble and Donald Breckenridge, InTranslation Co-Editors
Canada/Belize | Russian | Short Fiction
June, 2019Lida Yusupova is the author of three books of poetry, Irasaliml (1995), Ritual C-4 (2013), and Dead Dad (2016), and co-author with Margarita Meklina of the prose collection Love Has Four Hands (U liubvi chetyre ruki, 2008). Dead Dad was awarded the Difference (Razlichie) poetry prize in 2017, honoring her “books in which poetry becomes an investigation. ... The jury took special note of the innovative and uncompromising language in her discussions of violence.” In 2016, she received an invitation to attend the AATSEEL (the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages) conference, an honor offered annually to a single poet. Her work has been published in the journals Air (Vozdukh), Mitya’s Magazine (Mitin Zhurnal), St. Petersburg Review, Atlanta Review, and others. Her verse has been translated into English, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Hebrew, Czech, and Polish. She has lived in Petrozavodsk, St. Petersburg, and Jerusalem, and now resides in Toronto and on an island off the coast of Belize. Kirill Kobrin has said of Yusupova’s poems, “Their angle of observation and description is nearly impossible for Russian poetry.”
Friedrich Chernyshev (b. 1989) studied at the Donetsk Medical University in Ukraine and currently lives in Kiev. He is an LGBTQI activist and coordinates the transgender program for Insight, a Ukrainian LGBT community organization. His translations from German and Ukrainian have been appearing since 2013 in TextOnly, Air (Vozdukh), and elsewhere. His own poems were first published in the gender issue of ’Nother Man – ’Nother Woman (Yshsho Odin — Yshsho Odna) of Almaty, Kazakhstan. You can find his work on textonly.ru, litkarta.ru, and polutona.ru, and you can read (in Russian) about his coming out on upogau.org.
Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
June, 2019Ilya Danishevsky is a Russian author and publisher for the opposition. He graduated from the Gorky Literary Institute and studied the history of religions at the Russian State University for the Humanities. He is editor-in-chief of the Anhedonia book project (published by AST), dedicated to studying the institution of violence in contemporary Russia. Danishevsky is interested in those who describe reality in spite of official discourse. In 2014, he published his novel Tenderness for the Dead (Nezhnost’ k mertvym), and his book Mannelig in Chains (Mannelig v tsepyakh) came out in 2018.
Poet and artist Nastya Denisova (b. 1984, Leningrad) lives in Saint Petersburg. Her poetry books include There’s Nothing (Nichego net, 2006), Incl (Vkl, 2010), and They Touched and Loved Each Other (Trogali lyubili drug druga, 2019). She co-edited the poetry anthology Le Lyu Li: A Book of Lesbian Love Lyrics (Le lyu li – kniga lesbiyskoy lyubovnoy liriki, 2008). In 2012, she participated in Riga’s Ambassadors of Poetry: North-South program. Her work has been anthologized in 12 Poets from Russia (12 poetov iz Rossii, Latvia, 2017), Windows on the World: Fifty Writers, Fifty Views (USA, 2014), and Tutta la pienezza nel mio petto: Poesia giovane a San Pietroburgo (All the Fullness in my Chest: Young Poetry of Saint Petersburg, Italy, 2015). Her writing has been published in many print and online journals, including Air (Vozdukh), New Literary Review (Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye), The Way Home (Put’ domoy), TextOnly, Colon (Dvoetochie), and elsewhere. As an artist she works in video, text, and image, and samples of her work can be viewed here: vimeo.com/nastyadenisova.
Scholar, editor, translator, and poet Dmitry Kuzmin (b. 1968) has translated poems from English, Ukrainian, and French into Russian, and his own poetry has been translated into over a dozen languages. His scholarship includes the textbook Poetry (Poeziya) (co-author, 2016) and a book-length study of one-line poems (2016). His two poetry collections are It’s Fine to Be Alive (Khorosho byt zhivym, 2008) and Blankets Not Stipulated (Kovdri ne peredbacheny, Ukraine, 2018). Kuzmin founded the Vavilon Union of Young Poets in 1989, and has been the head of poetry imprint ARGO-RISK Publishers since 1993. He is also editor-in-chief of the Vavilon internet project (www.vavilon.ru) and of the poetry quarterly Vozdukh (Air). Kuzmin has compiled several anthologies, most recently an anthology of present-day Russian LGBT writing in Spanish translation (2014). He has been awarded the Andrey Bely prize (2002), and It’s Fine to be Alive won the Moscow Reckoning award for best debut poetry collection. In 2014, Kuzmin emigrated from Russia to Latvia for political reasons and started Literature Without Borders, which fosters translation projects and provides residencies for poets and translators: www.literaturewithoutborders.lv/about. Kuzmin holds a PhD from Samara State Pedagogical University.
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 »