Posts filed under 'aphorism'

Translation Tuesday: “Short Tales” by Pere Calders

Between going to heaven and staying at home, he preferred the latter.

This week’s Translation Tuesday presents a series of absurdist snapshots from one of the modern masters of Catalan literature. In this collection of contes breus (Catalan ‘short stories,’ often only a few sentences in length), Pere Calders embraces fragmentary quips as a mode of subversive storytelling. At times aphoristic, we’re taken through a series of disjointed narratives that shift between a satirical third-person to a self-referential first-person. We can follow this surrealism and satire as a kind of montage, connecting pieces of ironic wisdom to a kind of irreverent philosophical theme. Alternatively we can read the tales as a collage, allowing the shift in point-of-view to reorient ourselves to a new (and again, ironic) life lesson. Like a master class in non-sequiturs, Miller’s translation invites us to laugh and scratch our heads at the hapless soul who speaks here in mordant proverbs.

Biographical Note

My name is Pere plus two surnames. I was born the day before yesterday and it is already the day after tomorrow. Now, I only think about how I will spend the weekend.

Balance

Just as he was about to take hold of the pail, his leg gave way and he plunged into the well. As he fell, he experienced that well-known phenomenon of seeing one’s life flash before one’s eyes. And he found it so predictable, monotonous, and commonplace (to remain strictly between us, of course) that he let his lungs fill with water and drowned with exemplary resignation.

Obstinacy

Between going to heaven and staying at home, he preferred the latter, despite the powerful propaganda against it and the fact that his house was full of leaks and a whole host of privations. READ MORE…

Swedish Camels

An ignoble literary translator’s journal by André Naffis-Sahely

We were driving along the Sheikh Zayed Road from Abu Dhabi to Dubai, a hundred and fifty kilometres of desert back then unmarked by a single building or feature from one city limit to the next. It was the mid-1990s, and my father, an architect, had just relocated the family to the United Arab Emirates, where we joined the tribe of impermanent aliens that constitute over eighty-five percent of the country’s population and workforce. At the top of this pyramid: the Emaratis themselves, former Bedouins who shuffled back and forth between town houses and their farms in distant oases in their 4x4s, safely ensconced behind blackened glass. The couple of decades since the oil crisis in 1973 had seen the establishment of one of the world’s most lavish welfare states, whereby Emaratis were being gradually etherized with “sit-down money”—an expensive version of what has also befallen Australia’s Aborigines, among others—meaning that if your grandfather had once lived in a tent and dined on dates, bread, and salted fish, attuning his life to the rhythm of the sea and the sands, you would instead have gone to Yale on a scholarship and found a managerial post at some state-owned corporation waiting for you on your return; you might never go to the office, but that wouldn’t get in the way of your salary, your house, your satellite television. It all happened in the space of a single generation.

It was either our second or third weekend excursion to Dubai, but this one was special. My father had promised me a rare sight: a Swedish camel. They were blonde and had blue eyes, but you couldn’t inspect their irises up close, as they were even grumpier than your average camel and would probably tear away a finger or two. My father’s warning left a vivid impression. I spent the two-hour trip with my nose glued to the window as my father pointed out three or four of the beasts, barely visible in the blurry distance. “Are they really blonde?”—“Yes!”—“And blue-eyed?”—“Yes!”—“Why did they leave Sweden?”—“Because it was cold!”

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Issue Spotlight: “Brief Notes on Science”

"We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science."

Gonçalo M. Tavares’ “Brief Notes on Science,” translated by Rhett McNeil in our newest issue, is a curious venture into the semantics of scientific enterprise. With wit, insight, and exactitude, the allegorical tries on a technical job: defining and sketching out the surprisingly ambiguous nature (and purpose) of science. READ MORE…