Since Chinese nouns don’t indicate quantity, the title of this book could be translated as My Mother’s Parasite or My Mother’s Parasites. So as I translated Wei-Yun Lin’s memoir, a meditation on life, growth and interdependence, I kept asking myself, "Parasite or parasites?"
It isn’t really a question of quantity—there are a lot of parasites in the book. Wei-Yun’s mother is a distinguished scholar of parasitology, which, yes, means she is as smart and eccentric as you might imagine. One of the book’s main elements, and great pleasures, is Wei-Yun’s nuanced and funny insights into her loving, complex relationship with her mom.
Singular “parasite” seems more emphatic: My Mother’s PARASITE. It also suggests the concept of being parasitical rather than the creepy crawlies themselves. And “What makes something a parasite?” is a question the book seeks to answer. The straightforward answer is that, for at least part of their life cycle, parasites derive nutrients from other creatures at their expense. But the book leads us to wonder: Doesn’t everything, maybe even especially humans, more or less live off of other creatures—particularly our mothers? Are we harming them? Do we give them anything in return? (And the questions we all cry from the rooftops.) Do we ever stop relying on our mothers for nutrients? Do we ever stop asking them to make sacrifices for us?
Are we all our mothers’ parasites?!?
In the end I asked Wei-Yun what she thought—parasite or parasites? And she said “parasites,” so I went with that. But, as a translator, I love that this difference between Chinese and English allowed me, above and beyond the richness of Wei-Yun’s narrative, to ask these questions and conjecture these possibilities.
- Emily Goedde
Hungarian | Hungary | Short Fiction
April, 2019My major concern, when I sat down to translate this story, was whether the weight of the post-Soviet bloc and Hungarian history would carry over to an American audience--whether readers would get lost in the many significant dates that are mentioned. At the start of the story, we are told “it was November 16th, 1989, and God could once again step behind the Iron Curtain.” What’s helpful for an American reader to know is that by November 1989, Hungary was well into reforming from a communist state into a democratic republic, with opposition parties already established and with free elections not far on the horizon. Later, we learn that 1947 was the last year God had stepped foot inside a Hungarian pub, which was also the year the Soviets had officially gained governmental power by manipulating the political landscape and holding the last “free elections” the country would see for the next forty-three years. Finally, when the bartender asks God, who clearly looks out of place in the small-town pub, whether he’s a 56-er, he’s referring to the 200,000 Hungarians who fled Hungary after the 1956 Revolution against the Soviet Union, which lasted twelve days, saw the death of nearly three thousand Hungarians during the revolt and the execution of 299 after the Soviets regained power.
What I learned in the process of translating this story is that while knowing the historical significance behind these dates brings with it a richer reading of the work, it is actually the emotional truths that Ferenc Czinki conveys through his characters that make this story so resonant. Czinki makes it easy for readers to empathize with a people who have been forgotten, even by their own God, and readers likewise understand why God feels forgotten, too. Everyone is a stranger to one another here until God meets Somebody, and it is this shared sense of being forgotten that allows them a moment of connection.
The summer I discovered this story, Ferenc Czinki drove me around Inota. The old factory is still running; he pointed out the massive, cylindrical chimneys in the distance. We retraced God’s footsteps into the pub and drank a local Hungarian light beer with the few men who were there that lazy summer afternoon. I can attest to the fact that that countryside still feels rather forgotten, but in this story, as in much of his work, Czinki gives voice to this place and its people.
- Timea Balogh
German | Germany | Short Fiction
February, 2019Friedrich Nicolai’s "The Joys of Young Werther" is a fascinating contemporary response to Goethe’s bestselling The Sorrows of Young Werther. Rejecting the uncontrolled passion that leads the hero to commit suicide in Goethe’s novel, Nicolai’s text promotes a more measured and rational approach to life as being more conducive to happiness (albeit possibly less likely to produce a literary hit!). I was asked to produce a translation of the novella by Tze Ping Lim, Visiting Researcher at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, who was investigating the copyright ownership of fictional characters and wished to include Nicolai’s parody in her research (this was recently published as the article “Beyond Copyright: Applying A Radical Idea-Expression Dichotomy To The Ownership Of Fictional Characters” in the Fall 2018 issue of the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law). As I knew the translation and the German original would be read and worked on in parallel, I sought to stay as close as possible to the German text while still producing a readable–perhaps even enjoyable!–English version. The project was generously funded by the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Lucerne, for which both Ping and I would like to extend our thanks.
- Margaret Hiley
Born in rural Shandong in 1973, the national award-winning poet, essayist, literary critic, and editor Duo Yu co-founded the prominent “Lower Body” Movement based in Beijing during the early 2000s. Among his multiple books of poetry and prose are Meanings Annoy Us (2004), Chasing Butterflies (2009), and The Last Darkness (2013).
Memoir (excerpt) | Poland | United States | Yiddish
February, 2019Di vos zaynen nisht geblibn: dertseylungen (Those Who Didn’t Survive: Stories) (New York and Tel Aviv, 1972) is a memoir by Rachmil Bryks (1912-1974) of his shtetl Skarżysko-Kamienna, Poland, as refracted through the figure of his great-uncle Reb Mendl Feldman. Bryks presents the shtetl’s folk traditions and an extended cast of characters, while always deftly returning the thread to Reb Mendl. In the process, a vivid collective portrait of an annihilated Jewish community emerges. His approach is unconventional—there are no chapter breaks or readily apparent chronology. The book is more a panorama chock full of anecdotes, customs, details, and personalities than a traditional memoir with a linear narrative drive. Known widely for his pioneering use of dark humor in his Holocaust fiction, Bryks’ non-fiction displays his powers of description and empathic observations. In this excerpt, we meet two of the shtetl’s particularly colorful characters. Those Who Didn’t Survive is one of three memoirs by Rachmil Bryks I am translating as a 2018-2019 Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow. I thank Bella Bryks-Klein for her enthusiastic support of this translation project; the Yiddish Book Center and all of the program’s staff, fellows, and instructors; my mentor Elizabeth Harris; Justin Cammy for his feedback; and Ri J. Turner for her assistance with the translation of some challenging Yiddish words and expressions.
- Yermiyahu Ahron Taub
Middle Scots | Poetry | Scotland
February, 2019It’s not that some issues never change (the same central “y” in misogyny and gynecology, hysteria, and hysterectomy). It’s just that we haven’t rid ourselves of them yet.
Readers will, I hope, forgive me for translating the satire with sincerity and the sincere poem as a satire. I don’t mean that quite literally, of course. But whereas James VI’s “Satire” needs little subtlety to update its conclusive gendered vitriol, and is thus rendered as closely to the original as the simple modernization of its beast-driven vocabulary encouraged, William Dunbar’s “Praise” is of the more insidious kind: equally objectifying, but lovingly so, or so he thought. Dunbar’s 500-year-old homage is entirely innocent of intentional malice, and thus doubled my challenge to present it "strictly" as written, a hymenal hymn, while also nudging at all the obvious institutionalized sexism we see through his eyes but below our own critically furrowed brows (a task made easy by such woefully applied descriptors as “things” in line two, or his unquestioning assumption that pain should be a natural part of procreation for femme folk).
Additionally, the savvy reader will note that I strayed perhaps a bit farther overall in my version of Dunbar than of James, not out of personal egotism, but simply because Dunbar is universally acknowledged the superior poet, and thus deserved a bit more reward in his rendering. (I pray I did not plunge fully overboard in anyone’s estimation.) The pairing of the two poets, separated by almost a perfect century of life, is simply an exercise in examining the ongoing binary portrayal of cis-women by cis-men as being saints or shrews, ideals or irritants, but never as autonomous equals capable of their own self-identification and empowerment. As a cis-man myself, of course, I still can’t make that call on behalf of women—but I can, as I hope I’ve done here, call out my fellow men for their faults, no matter how vivid or visionary (or vile) the verse.
- Kent Leatham
In Stella Díaz Varín’s poems, woman speaks. She speaks as god, as wife, as mother, as poet; she “intone[s] the song of love” and slices society into fine, jagged pieces. She calls to the reader as her confessor, her disappointing lover, her jailer, her child. She asks, flatly, insistently, what choice is hers—“What do you all want me to do with these materials. / Nothing. Except write melancholy poetry.”
Díaz Varín’s materials—her experiences, her words—were vast, and she wrote the poem featured here, “The House,” for her 1959 collection, Time, Imaginary Measure. The book title is apt: her voice is atemporal, daring us to keep her to her generation. Such verse opens itself generously to translation into American English, which prefers directness, wants us to lean in and tell all.
In her introduction to the Collected Work, Chilean poet and academic Eugenia Brito wrote that Díaz Varín’s speaker is a sacred, pagan, archaic figure, one that expresses the poet’s own “fiebre de malestar cultural y de locura reparadora, intuitiva, poética.” This is the motor of her poetry— a fever caused by both her cultural malaise and her intuitive, poetic, healing madness. In translation, the challenge is to let the poems be mad, let them resist sense, without exaggeration or imprisonment.
- Rebecca Levi
Latin | Poetry | Roman Republic
February, 2019Since 17th-century England, why has Catullus been the most translated of Latin poets? In great part, it’s because of the diversity of his poetic subjects, the virtuosic variety of his metrics and poetic forms, the richness and range of his tone and diction. All true, but what imbibes a reader of Catullus most is his ardency. No matter the theme or person or event or other subject of a poem, Catullus seizes it and holds fast with a grappling hook until he yanks the poem out from its watery depths for conspicuous display. Whether, in a given poem, he writes charmingly, hatefully, tenderly, invectively, humorously, erotically, or obscenely, the resulting poem is a huge and conspicuous spear-nosed marlin. I can’t think of another poet from any age or culture, except Shakespeare, who is more remarkable for repeatedly and variously marking the reader’s mind and heart.
- Stanton Hager
Danish | Denmark | Poetry (excerpts)
February, 2019Mikael Josephsen gained recognition in the Danish literary market with his poetry collection BREAK (KNÆK, Gyldendal, 2016), in which he describes life in the various psychiatric wards he has inhabited. What reviewers seemed to like most about the collection was the simple, down-to-earth tone he used to describe his rather tumultuous experiences, and not least, as the title of the collection would suggest, his mental state when admitted. In Danish, as in English, the word knæk ("break") can refer to the experience of having a mental breakdown or to a line break in poetry. In fact, Josephsen's title is a direct reference to knækprosa, which translates as “free verse” in English. His poems are reminiscent of the confessional poetry of the 1960s and describe everyday activities in a matter-of-fact way. Though this is not uncommon in contemporary Danish poetry, what distinguishes Josephsen's poems is their setting, which gives them a certain edge and an element of surprise.
- Nina Sokol
These poems belong to the latest period of Serhiy Zhadan's body of work. As the poet stated a few years ago, his oeuvre may be divided into two parts: 1) work written before the year 2014; and, 2) work written after 2014, the year war broke out in Ukraine. These poems deal with the eternal questions (and quests): home, exile, solitude, love, and faith. These poems also demonstrate unpredictable interactions between people and their native realms. This might be of interest to those who study how poetry observes and mirrors the shifts within a society going through very challenging and, at times, life-changing circumstances, but offers solace as well.
- John Hennessy and Ostap Kin
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