Translations

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Ghayath Almadhoun

All the metaphors in this poem are based on a true story that has not happened before

This Translation Tuesday, prose poems come in from Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun, translated with care by Catherine Cobham. A warning label alerts us to the peculiar nature of the metaphors in “Poet in Berlin”. Almadhoun’s poet starts, stops, and starts over, as if trying to get the metaphors in his head to express the correct thing. His slow progress perplexes the detective trapped in the poem’s dense and mazey interior—he needs that warning as much as we do. In “Everything’s the Same” the sorrow of a sudden disappearance is ‘green’, ‘still fresh’, and we find grief and shock doing their customary thing. The poet stalks the house he once shared with the absent presence. Time is either stopped dead or winding backwards, his senses are heightened, and household objects take on a sudden, dangerous redolence.

Poet in Berlin

All the metaphors in this poem are based on a true story that has not happened before

A lonely man with green eyes and a blue gaze, searching for a woman carrying a forest, who went into the sea and did not return.

Lonely as a bench in a public park, most of those who have touched his wound think he is a poet from Berlin, but he is in fact a poet in Berlin.

He resembles a park bench, and therefore, he used to swear to passers-by that a woman he loved took him to the sea and brought him back thirsty, and in another account, in a poem they found in a pocket of his blue shirt, he said she brought him back from the sea thirsty, but she did not return. On the other hand, the Poetry Foundation in Chicago has not been able to verify the truth of the information contained in this poem.

A lonely man, in a city crowded with lonely people, he assured the German police that he took full responsibility for the disappearance of a woman as ripe as a peach tree.

The detective asked him to stop using metaphor, because the investigation report was not a postmodern poem, and in any case the sea could not possibly be a crime scene in this city, for even in David Bowie’s most defiant songs there was no sea in Berlin, then he added as calmly as an abandoned house, I cannot bring any charges against you at the present time, for as of the date of the writing of this poem, no official reports have been submitted about the disappearance of a woman who looks like the sunset, walks like a herd of gazelles, and loves summer and children. Furthermore, according to German law, there is no crime if there is no body.

A lonely man with green eyes and a blue gaze went into the sea to look for a woman who went into the sea and did not return, and he did not return.

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Translation Tuesday: “Parwana” by Lida Amiri

One glance at the sky finally connects her with infinity, where she belongs.

This Translation Tuesday—three days before International Women’s Day—we bring you a tragic story self-translated by former Afghan refugee Lida Amiri—centering on the plight of a woman who is not free to pursue love. In her language, parwana refers to a creature that has wings but cannot fly. It is a fitting name for our despairing protagonist, who, up against forces larger than her, stages her escape. 

The night is her sole protector, her only companion. It represents shelter from the stares and noiseless chatter of passersby on the streets. People who recognize her whisper, “That’s the general’s daughter that I saw with another young man! How dare she stain the impeccable reputation of a national hero?”

To Parwana[1], her father’s military background has become a curse. With a swift and vigorous hand motion, she desperately tries to delete each of these stinging judgments from her mind.

Suddenly, Parwana stops her agonizing train of thought and notices her immediate surroundings. She sighs and has a last look around her lovingly furnished room. She is just one step away from a pile of mattresses without a bedframe, which she sometimes fell off of when the nightmares reminded her of her wrongdoings. The only piece of furniture in her room is the wooden chest of drawers next to her bed, which is decorated with her perfume bottle and her Surmi—a Kohl used daily to protect her from evil looks because, according to her neighbors, she has all a young woman could wish for: a loving family, a room in her parents’ house, a job as a midwife. Is she actually willing to risk it all? While her heart races as she reminisces, she looks in the small mirror on the chest of drawers before taking a deep breath addressing herself. “The situation can’t continue like this, and you know it. He will be the right one,” she says softly while sighing heavily.

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Translation Tuesday: “Dymov” by Yuri Serebriansky

The parachutes activated, and Dymov swung from the cords, examining the lines of the converging rivers below. . .

This Translation Tuesday, a hostile confrontation ensues when an astronaut inadvertently kills a cow—or two—during his Earth-landing. Here is translator Sarah McEleney on Serebriansky’s startling work of imagination: “This short story by Kazakhstani author Yuri Serebriansky reflects upon the indirect costs of space travel. While the story is meant to take place somewhere in Russia, Serebriansky considers it very much connected to Kazakhstan, as it was inspired by his trip to an area near the Baikonur cosmodrome. The author was traveling in the middle of spring when people were tending to their gardens in the countryside, and suddenly, he noticed shiny silvery containers everywhere, which reminded him of the tripods belonging to the aliens in H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. People had gathered parts of rockets that had fallen to the Earth and were using them instead of typical garden containers. At the time, Serebriansky already knew that these pieces of rockets emitted geptil, a rocket propellent hazardous to human health and the environment. With this in mind, a contemplation of the unforeseen consequences of space travel is embedded in “Dymov,” in which the protagonist’s thirst for personal heroism is dashed by his calamitous reentry to Earth.”

I’m a bird in a cuckoo clock. Soon I’ll jump out and say my “cuckoo!” to everyone. No. Not aloud. Because, after all, everything is recorded. The whole country considers you a hero, and you’re the next laboratory mouse in line, and everything is recorded. More important than a dog, of course. Dymov. The “cuckoo!” will be long, since I’ve got something to say. They’ll write: “he conducted experiments.” And really, I conducted them. I beat my heart when I had to, I ran blood through my veins. I was in a spaceship for three days without a spacesuit. Every one of us is the first in something. And what I am is a cuckoo bird, and also, codename “Fog”. Do I want anything else? Yes, I want to go to the moon. I want to climb out of here in a spacesuit, I want to go home. To my daughter. And to church. To Father Anisim, to Anisim.

 Fog, we’re going to prepare for descent, put on your spacesuit, we’re checking the telemetry before braking. Everything’s in order here.”

“Got it. I’m getting back into my spacesuit.”

That impossible silence is broken. Come on, speak, guys. I’d listen to your sputtering for a century. In an airplane you at least feel the engine, but here there’s just inertia. Space. It’s a heavy word. But howl. Everything is recorded.

The cabin of the spaceship becomes more claustrophobic in zero-gravity. But what can you do? There’s a lever attached to a cord, flying like they had warned. The planet below looks astonishingly lifeless, no traces of life from here—who says that on the radio? Maybe I didn’t hear it there? The globe above the control panel seems like it was made by Neanderthals. But you have to believe in it. Falling to it out of curiosity, into the clouds, from this, not even height, but rather, void—its scary, comrades. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: The Garden of Tomatoes by Esther Karin Mngodo

Tuntufye had already made clear that he didn’t believe in such nonsense. Blood drinkers didn’t exist.

This Translation Tuesday, we deliver gripping fiction from Tanzania, a short story of domestic deception that spawns an unspeakable being, a sinister spirit. Who is to say who is at fault? Hear from translator Jay Boss Rubin on bringing Esther Karin Mngodo’s The Garden of Tomatoes into the English:

“In this story, I was fascinated with how it contains genre elements but is not really genre fiction. There’s a genre element, for sure, but we stayed away from terms such as “vampire” and “zombie” because of all the associations those carry. There’s also an element of free indirect discourse, one that I was aware of in the Swahili, but that came out more in the translation, toward the end of the revision process. Esther was also especially helpful in drawing my attention to moments in the story where the main character’s own words, or her words and actions, might contradict each other. These moments of ambivalence, or rich ambiguity, really, are central to my understanding of the characters in “Atuganile,” the forces that push and pull on them.“

Tuntufye Mwasakyeni raised his cup of milky tea to his mouth and sipped. The house was quiet, different than most Saturdays. Two days had passed since his wife, Atuganile, had left to go see her mother’s ailing brother over in Chunya District—around two hours away by automobile.

Tuntufye placed the index finger of his left hand on the table in front of him so it mimicked the second hand of the clock on the wall. Departing for her trip, Atuganile had promised that she’d be back by Saturday at nine. It was now eight minutes to 9am. He wasn’t worried that something bad had happened to her—not in the least. He was well aware that if there were some shrewd, intelligent women there in Isyesye, Atuganile was one of them. She was a known quantity, especially in Uyole, where she vended fruits and vegetables. But it wasn’t like her to be late.

When it reached nine on the dot, Tuntufye stood up and went outside through the door in the living room. He leaned against one of the white, exterior pillars, keeping his eyes peeled for Atuganile. When he saw her, he grinned. She was striding forward like a champion athlete, her kanga coming undone and starting to fall down as she ran. Colonnades of trees to Atuganile’s left and to her right framed the scene of her arrival. Their branches swayed in the wind like giant claws—as if to swipe at her and sneer, today, Atu, you’re going to get it.

Once she’d drawn close, Atuganile set down the load she’d been carrying on her head and began explaining the reasons for her delay. “Forgive me, my husband. Forgive me, Baba,” she gasped. “The bus broke down. I had to hop aboard a different one. You know how difficult transportation can be here in Mbeya. Forgive me, Baba, for being late.”

Her husband said nothing. He jutted his lip forward, returned to the kitchen, sat down at the table and poured himself another cup of tea. Then he took his Bible and began reading. Atuganile sat with him and started sorting kisamvu, separating the good greens from the bad. In the middle of sorting, she picked up a sheet of Isyesye Oye!, the newspaper that had been used to wrap the cassava leaves. Alert: Blood Drinker on the Loose in Isyeye, the headline warned. Atuganile read on:

An individual in Isyesye is being sought by police for abducting children younger than twelve. According to the information available, five children have now disappeared as a result of coming into contact with the suspect, who is said to be a drinker of blood. Parents are advised to keep close watch over their children, and see that they don’t roam about after dark.

The newspaper described the child of one woman, known as Mama Samweli, who’d been missing for five days. When Mama Samweli went for a consultation with a local healer, the mganga advised her not to bother searching—her child had already had the life sucked out of them. When news of the blood drinker reached the Regional Police Chief, he stated that the government does not officially recognize witchcraft, so he was unable to comment on the rumor any further. But he assured the citizenry that efforts were ongoing to locate Samweli, along with the other four children who had gone missing over the past five months.

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Translation Tuesday: “Is That You, Seryozha?” by Mikhail Zemskov

He exhaled into the receiver one more time and smiled happily. The tip of his nose trembled slightly.

This Translation Tuesday, a short story from Kazakhstani author Mikhail Zemskov, brought into English by Yuliya Gubanova. Alone in his dirty apartment, an oddball takes a creepy enjoyment from cold-calling strangers on his Soviet-era landline. Never speaking, only breathing suggestively into the receiver, he becomes the missing, longed-for person in another family’s domestic drama – a ghost, even – before hanging up and dialing his next victim. A grim prank, inflicting his loneliness on others.

He set his plate aside. The Korean-style carrots from a nearby cooking shop turned out to be just carrots, finely chopped, dusted with red pepper, and drizzled with vinegar. And stale, too. He suspected they would be… but for some reason he craved something spicy today.

He turned on the TV (an old Soviet one, still functioning, so why should he throw it away?). He switched channels, and turned the TV off.

He rubbed his stubble, which was coming up in gray patches. “I’d better shave, or it’ll be harder to do in a few days. Or should I grow the beard again?” But with those specks of gray, the beard – even when washed and carefully brushed – looked shaggy and unkempt.

It would have been nice to clean the flat today. But he was tired and did not want to get up from the deep armchair which had already been sagged by his parents. In fact, it had been a week since he first thought of tidying up. But in previous days, he had been just as reluctant to get out of the deep armchair.

He pulled up an old disc telephone set, also left over from his parents. He took a stack of small bills out of his jeans pocket, pulled one out at random. A ten-ruble bill. He put it on the table next to the telephone. He picked up the receiver. He dialed the numbers from the serial number of the dark green paper carefully and slowly. He cleared his throat.

Three rings, and somebody answered on the other end.

“Hello. Hello?” there was the uncertain voice of a young guy. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Rice” by Alejandra Kamiya

Everything I hadn’t asked over the years comes back to me. Every question comes and brings others.

This Translation Thursday, we deliver gentle prose from Argentina, a subtle study of inter-generational difference, migration, and hyphenate identity in the form of a weekly lunch date between father and daughter. Hear translator Madison Felman-Panagotacos’ impression of Japanese-Argentine author Alejandra Kamiya’s affecting Rice:

“… a precise, austere story that explores what is named, what is spoken, and, most importantly, what is left unsaid…, ‘Rice quietly explores quotidian experiences as a means of capturing life’s tensions and discomfort. Her brevity in narration, so uncommon for the long-winded prose of the Argentine canon, is disquieting and moving.”

XXXToday is Thursday and on Thursdays we have lunch together.
XXXWe talk a lot—or a lot for us. Neither of us is a person others consider talkative.
XXXSometimes we even have lunch in silence. A comfortable silence, light, like the air it’s
made of, and which best expresses the flavor of what we’re eating.
XXXOther times, when we do talk, the words form little mounds that slowly become
mountains. Between one and the next we leave long silences: valleys in which we think as if we were walking through them.
XXXWe choose a restaurant in an old house in San Telmo. It has a patio in the center, a square with its own sky, always different clouds.
XXXThe conversation with my father moves at a relaxed pace.
XXXSuddenly, in the middle of a phrase, he says, “…to wash rice…” and joins his hands, making a ring with his fingers, and moves them as if he were hitting something against the edge of the table.
XXXWhat happens suddenly isn’t him saying these words but me realizing I don’t know how rice is cleaned. What happens suddenly is me realizing I know many things like this from him, without knowing them, only intuiting them.
XXXI know that my father must be holding a bunch of something in his hands that I don’t see. I search my memory for the fields of rice that I saw in Japan, and I imagine that the bunch must be that type of green reeds.
XXXI clumsily deduce that the rice must be adhering to the plants and by shaking it, it should fall. Like tiny fruits or seeds.
XXXSeeing my father’s gestures I can get to the past, to Japan, or to my father’s history, which is mine. Like the impressionists, without looking for the details but rather the light, like I am familiar with the trees on the path to my house, not knowing their names, but without being able to imagine my house without them.
XXXThis is how I talk with my father: safely but blindly.
XXXHe says, for example, that this country is “just 200 years old,” “an infant country,” he says, and next to the infant I see an old Japan, with hands whose skin covers and reveals the shape of its bones.
XXXIf he holds his head when he says that they used to run through fields of tea, I know that planes pass through the sky that I don’t see and that drop bombs.
XXXWe look at the menu and choose plates that we will share. My father never got used to eating just one dish. It was my mother who adjusted to preparing various dishes for meals.
XXXLater we talk about books. He is reading Mozart, by Kolb, and carries it with him wherever he goes. My father always carries a book and a dictionary with him.
XXXFor me, who was born and raised in Argentina, I can’t be bothered to look up words in a dictionary. But not him. My Japanese father’s Spanish is vaster and more correct than mine.
XXXHe tells me that he went to get some tests that the doctor ordered and while he waited, he read a few pages.
XXX“What tests?” I ask him. “A biopsy,” he responds.
XXXI’m worried. I feel what is lurking, and a certainty like knowing night will fall each day, a type of vertigo. Everything I hadn’t asked over the years comes back to me. Every question comes and brings others. I want to know why my father chose this country, this infant country. I want to know what it was like the day he learned the war had started, what every one of the days that followed was like until the day he got to this land. I want to know what his toys and his clothes were like, what it was like to go to school during the war, what the port of Buenos Aires was like in the 70s, if he wrote letters to my grandmother, what did they say. I want to know the colors, the words, the smell of foods, the houses he lived in. Once he told me that shortly after he had arrived, he didn’t get into the bathtub but instead washed himself beside it and only submerged himself in the water when he was clean because that is how they do it in Japan. Like that, I want him to tell me more. Much more. Everything. I want him to tell me about every day, so no time is wasted. Maybe to write it: leave it to take root with ink on paper forever. Where to start? Where do the questions start? Which is the first?
XXXI look inside, as if I were lost running in this valley of silence that had suddenly opened between words. To lose yourself in a place so vast seems like a prison.
XXXWhen I stop looking, I see the question before me as if it had been waiting for me. I look at my father and ask my question.
XXXHe smiles, takes a paper from between the pages of his book and a black pen out of the pocket of the cardigan he is wearing. He draws lines very close together, some parallel and others that cross. Then another, perpendicular and wavy, that cuts through them close to one end. They are the rice plants in water. Then he makes some very small circles at the ends: the grains. He tells me that they fill up and retraces the lines but instead of straight, they’re curvy at the ends: the plants when the rice matures. “The fuller one is, the more cultivated it is, the humbler,” he says. “One bows like the rice plant under the weight of the grains.” Then he reaches out his hands and his arms and moves them in parallel to the floor. “They would lay big cloths over the field,” he says. I imagine them white, barely rippling, like water moves when it’s calm.
XXXHe goes back to holding his hands as if he were holding a bundle and shakes it like before, against the edge of the table. Now I see it clearly, I can almost touch, the grains of rice that fall away.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Thief” by Osamu Dazai

I didn’t know any French. No matter the question, I intended to write “Flaubert was a spoiled little rich boy.”

A sensitive college flunker enacts sweet, obscure revenge in this excellent short story by Osamu Dazai. Here’s how it’s done: saunter into the finals of a year you’ve as good as failed; sit triumphant among your more studious peers; inflict an essay on your professor that pantses his sacred cows. The rush of emotions touched off by this act of gratuitous non-conformity is exhilarating, palpable, and very possibly contagious—anomie-struck flunkers, take note; professors of said flunkers, prepare yourselves. Major credit must go to Laurie Raye for rendering Dazai’s Japanese in a vivid, sparking English.

Dazai’s works are filled with irreverence, animus, and snippets of autobiographical detail. Knowledge of his life enhances readings of his works, as Raye explains in their translator’s note:

“I’ll stab him! I thought. What an absolute scoundrel!” So Dazai wrote to Yasunari Kawabata, one of the judges for the first Akutagawa Prize, when his story Retrogression failed to win. A collection of intertwined autobiographical tales from the author’s life, Retrogression starts with the protagonist’s death as an ‘old man’ of twenty-five and regresses back through a life of sin and decadence. Out of all these stories, The Thief is the odd one out. It was added later, as part of his first short story collection paradoxically named The Final Years. This paradox defined his career, culminating in fiction that explored what it meant to feel world-weary, disassociated from conventional society, and—in the titular spirit of his most famous book—‘no longer human’.

Dazai fills his autobiographical stories with obscure references and The Thief is no exception. The red-faced professor was most likely Yutaka Tatsuno, professor of modern French literature at Tokyo University from 1921 to 1948. Based on what we know about Tatsuno’s students, the ‘number one poet’ could have been a reference to Tatsuji Miyoshi who studied French literature with Tatsuno from 1925-1928. The ‘number one literary critic’ seems likely to have been Hideo Kobayashi, generally regarded as one of Japan’s foremost literary critics, but could also refer to Hidemi Kon, another critic and essayist who studied in this fateful cohort. Given how Dazai left us with enough breadcrumbs to work out the identities of the aforementioned students, it is unfortunate that the up-and-coming, rabbit-hearted writer remains a mystery. It is tempting to think he was based on Ibuse Masuji, his longtime friend whom he met the same month the story is set. Though older than Dazai, Ibuse studied French and was known to be so shy as to avoid eye contact when talking to others.

Laurie Raye

The Thief

There was no doubt that I’d failed the year, but I was still going to take the exam. The beauty of a worthless effort. I was fascinated by that beauty. This morning I had woken up early, and for the first time in a year I put my arms through my school uniform and walked through those bright iron gates, big and tall and emblazoned with the Imperial chrysanthemum. I found myself passing under them with some trepidation. Immediately upon entering the grounds there are rows of gingko trees. Ten trees on the right side and another ten trees on the left, all of them giants. When the leaves are in full bloom the road ahead becomes so dim that it’s like a tunnel. Now, though, there isn’t a single leaf. At the end of the boulevard there sat a large, red-bricked building. This was the auditorium. I had only seen the inside of this building once, during the entrance ceremony, and it had given me the impression of a temple. I looked up at the electric clock on the top of the auditorium tower. There were still fifteen minutes left until the exam. Affection filled my eyes as I passed the bronze statue dedicated to the father of a detective fiction novelist and headed down the gentle slope to my right, coming out into the park. Once upon a time this had been the garden of a renowned daimyo. In the pond were common carp, scarlet carp and softshell turtles. Around five or six years ago a pair of cranes were seen frolicking here, and snakes still slither in the grass. Migratory wild geese and ducks also stop to rest their wings in this pond. The whole garden is actually less than 200 tsubo in size, but looks more like 1000 tsubo – an excellent landscaping trick. I sat down on the bamboo grass by the edge of the pond, put my back against the stump of an old oak tree, and stretched both legs out in front of me. Where the path forked lay a line of rocks of various shapes and sizes, beyond which spread the wide open water. The surface of the pond shone white under the cloudy sky and rippled as if tickled by the furrows of tiny waves. After casually crossing my legs, I muttered to myself.

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Translation Tuesday: “Mixed Media on Galvanized Tin” by Zmira Poran Zion

rectangle like a leash with a yellow bird at its end

This Translation Tuesday, celebrated activist Zmira Poran Zion vividly conveys the silencing and marginalization she has faced as a Mizrahi Jew born to Iraqi-Jewish parents. In imagistic, concise verse, translated by Yoni Hammer-Kossoy, we see a voiceless existence ‘cast aside just because’. Read and recognize.

Mixed Media on Galvanized Tin

Bright ocher tin thick black stain
center of a wide rectangle
thin wordless bird wire-perched over mouth
she cannot sleep.

Dark ocher tin wine-red stain
rectangle like a leash with a yellow bird at its end
she cannot touch.

Her horizon is far
she hangs
over nothingness.

Clear ocher without stain
bird with no walls no windowsill
cast aside just because.

Translated from the Hebrew by Yoni Hammer-Kossoy.
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Translation Tuesday: “His Type” by Laura Marcos

Everything was set up: the chains, the handcuffs, the gag, and the bath, one of those adapted ones for disabled people.

We’re in sunny rural Asturias on the northern tip of Spain this Translation Tuesday, courtesy of Laura Marcos, where a happy afternoon with pals is starting to drag on. It really has been nice, but David has to go. He makes his excuses, bats away the protests of his mates, and hurries home in quiet relief. The lie that David offers his mates is unconvincing, but the truth, the real reason he must leave so abruptly, is scarcely believable.

Marcos’s characters chatter, banter, spar, and deflect; their speech has been translated from the Asturian by Robin Munby into a kinetic, quipping English with a marked Scouse inflection. He explains:

“One of the great pleasures in working on this piece was building a textual bridge stretching across the thousand or so kilometres that separate Mieres from my own hometown of Liverpool. […] This is the English I most commonly speak myself, and so it is the form that comes most naturally to me when rendering the kind of informal dialogue present in Laura’s story. Choosing to use it here was also a conscious attempt to forge a textual link, to narrow distances, as well as to reject the universality of supposedly ‘standard’ forms of English.”

The afternoon had passed by in a happy haze of sunshine, laughter and more than a few drops of sidra, but for the last while, David had been shuffling about in his seat, stealing glances at his watch. He was getting restless. As well as his frustration at having to go home so soon, he knew he’d be in for some grief. It was always the same when he made an early exit. The best he could do was to let it all wash over him, try and get through it as quickly as possible without it turning into an argument. Arguments weren’t his thing, even if the others – Frechi especially – seemed to treat them as sport. Without them noticing, David had been gently edging his chair back with his bum so he’d have enough room to stand up. He waited for the opportune moment – one of those slight pauses between conversations – then said:

‘Okay, time for me to head off…’

‘What? We’ve only been here five minutes!’ Frechi shot back.

‘Yeah, yeah, but I’ve got Paula waiting at ours…’

‘Why don’t you call her and tell her to come and join us? We can go and get some food, it’s ages since we’ve seen you,’ said Tamara, Frechi’s girlfriend.

‘I know, it’s just I can’t today. Next weekend, maybe…’

‘I can’t, I can’t. Go on then, why can’t you?’ said Frechi. ‘Give her a call! And if she wants to stay in, no problem, but at least you can stay here. Just for once, try being your own man…’

‘Thing is we’re up at the crack of dawn tomorrow…’ David was standing now, and he was getting tired of having to explain himself.

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Translation Tuesday: Immortal by Miklós Vámos

if possible, I’d rather not talk about the awkward details, I did horrible things, and pretended to do even worse ones

How do you say goodbye to those you love? In Immortal, one man concocts a desperate plan: to mistreat his wife and daughters in the hope that it will lessen their pain when he inevitably dies from terminal illness. An emotional rollercoaster, full of twists, jokes, ironic digressions and absurd scenarios, this dark, comedic stream-of-consciousness by the prolific Miklós Vámos swells with feeling, dexterously captured in Ági Bori’s translation from the Hungarian. Read on to slip into a mindset irreversibly eroded by anguish.

XXXXXlet’s have a man to man conversation
XXXXXdon’t tell me you’re doing everything that is humanly possible
XXXXXit’s been nine months since I first came to see you, they sent me here with my lab results since you’re a nationally renowned expert, aren’t you, doctor, and you looked deep into my eyes with that nationally renowned expertise of yours, let out a long sigh, and told me: this is where your knowledge ends, given that my case is not operable, but you wanted me to believe that you’re doing everything that is humanly possible, and you might also recall that I received the news quietly, and only asked, how much time do I have left? you tried to dodge the question, you beat around the bush, saying you’re not a psychic, the same illness could manifest itself in numerous ways, there is no universal rule, but when I cornered you, you finally spit out that I had about six months to live, and I thanked you
XXXXXon my way home I reflected on what still remained for me, what my realistic expectations should be, and I refrained from swearing, because the larger the problem, the more calmly my brain operates, it turns into a sober and reliable computer, back then I was working on my doctoral dissertation, The French Enlightenment and its Hungarian Relations, which still needed two to three weeks of work before it would be complete, was it even worth finishing, I pondered, but then I decided to devote the necessary time to it, let it be finished, order has been important to me all my life, why would I back out on my own principles now? as soon as I type up the final copy, I’ll bid a proper farewell to everyone and everything, people and things I loved…then let…let it come READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Yehuda Halevi

all the Nile’s fields a mosaic . . . as if jewels shining on the high priest

The Hebrew poetry produced in Andalusia during its height is a startling instance of cultural synthesis. Jews participating in the prosperity of Islamic Spain enjoyed unusual mobility and integration under a protected if second-class status. Poetry was central to Islamic culture, prized and woven throughout social life, and the Hebrew poetry was in both conversation and competition with its Arabic counterparts. Following Arabic models, Jewish poets created a body of work which stands as the high point of Hebrew poetry between the Bible and the revival of Hebrew in the 20th Century.

The Arabic and Hebrew poetries of the period are written within a dense set of formal constraints. They employ an exacting quantitative meter, and primarily the qasida form of mono-rhymed lines divided into hemistiches. And as Islamic poetry used only classical Arabic of the Quran, so the Andalusian Hebrew poets wrote in strictly Biblical Hebrew, bypassing a millennia of linguistic development. This makes the work profoundly hypertextual, in conversation with the body of canonical Hebrew literature at the same time as with their Arabic contemporaries. It is also highly ornamental: sonically lush with alliteration, assonance and interwoven consonants and vowels; and syntactically dense with double and triple puns, homonyms and other wordplay.

As a poet reading these I experience above all an utter reveling in the materiality of language. My goal is to create versions that approach some of this sonic richness. In this light I privilege the music over form and precision of content. I aim to render this music as immediate as possible, which means I sometimes adapt archaic images and terms to ones with more resonance in contemporary language.

—Dan Alter

[Has time taken off its troubled]

Has time taken off its troubled clothes。。。 & put on finery
& the earth in silks & brocade。。。 has made quilt-work pillowed in gold
& all the Nile’s fields a mosaic。。。 as if jewels shining on the high priest
Oases laid out with dyed linens。。。 cities carpeted pure gold & silver
& by the banks young women。。。 would be light-footed as gazelles
But slowed down by bangles。。。 anklets hemming their steps
& the heart is drawn to forget its years。。。。 & remember other children
While Eden’s river runs through。。。 Egypt’s fields & riverbank gardens
& gold-red fields of grain。。。 wearing their embroidery
Sway in the sea-wind。。。 as if bowing down in praise READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Peter Nielsen

One lives, / or goes feral in other ways.

Moments from the lives of small animals are captured and made into poetry by Peter Nielsen (tr. Matt Travers). In “A Little Understanding” a story emerges from tracks in thick snow. A mouse’s footprints meet those of something larger, and then the footprints disappear. Cooperation is surmised—an unexpected and heart-warming interpretation of the spoor. The titular bench of Nielsen’s second poem peeks out from a thicket of scenes and memories, where we see people together and birds in concert, each spreading messages with their bodies.

A Little Understanding

Animals help each other. It’s not always seen,
but if one goes out when there’s newly fallen snow,
you’ll often be able to follow a trail. You’ll see, for example,
the faint trace of a mouse that has come running.
Further on you may see another larger set of tracks
cross the mouse’s path. Often, you’ll now experience that the big
animal has helped the little animal on its way in the
cumbersome snow, since it’s only the big tracks
that continue. This is how the animals help each other.

A Parsley-green Bench

I anxiously greeted a friend who passed with the car window rolled down.
He registered me fleetingly and proceeded to stop in the middle of the traffic,
but I waved him on. Can you spread a message in any other way? A comforting
letter perhaps? Besides, my masseuse is waiting. And she doesn’t wait. She’s kind of there,
dawdling across the body, finding what the rest of us are looking for shortly before we begin
to search.

The episodes in one’s day like to go along, not across. One lives,
or goes feral in other ways. A bench peeks out from the edge of the forest.
The waders are flying up in formation, passing close together
in a rush over the sandbank. White undersides. After a lightning fast
twist of the body: black-grey. The moment after: white again.

Translated from the Danish by Matt Travers

Peter Nielsen is a Danish poet’s poet. Educated as an administrator in
the local counci’s wages department, Nielsen began to write full-time after earning the three-year Danish Arts Foundation Grant in 1980 for his first major poetry collection ‘Kan sparsommelighed redde proletariatet?’ (‘Can Economising Save the Proletariat?’). Since then, he has been extremely productive writer who has published over twenty poetry collections, half a dozen novels, a set of children’s books and is the Danish translator for several major poets of international repute, including Paul Celan and the Swedish Nobel prize winner, Tomas Tranströmer. He was awarded the Danish Arts Foundation Lifelong Honorary Grant in 1999, and was the recipient of the Adam Oehlenschlaeger, Emil Aarestrup, Herman Bang and Johannes Ewald Fund in 2016. 

Yet despite critical renown, he has also proved extremely reluctant to play along with the literary promotions machine and is consequently largely unknown to the wider Danish reading public. Instead of engaging in public readings of his work, which he believes spoils a reader’s internal understanding of a poem, he lives with his wife in a distant country suburb of Aarhus and divides his time between writing poetry, translating literature and pursing a keen amateur interest in ornithology, with all three activities arguably being a part of a singular overlapping creative practice, as if his poetry is always only out there in the rushes, waiting for their time to take flight.

The poems here come from his later works. A LITTLE UNDERSTANDING comes from his 2003 collection ‘Livet foreslår’ (’Life Advises’, nominated for Nordic Council Literature Prize) and A PARSELY-GREEN BENCH can be found in his most recent 2020 collection ‘Inden årstiderne; Regnlys’ (Before the Seasons; Rainlight).

Matt Travers is a poet and translator whose works have featured in 3:AM magazine, Tripwire Journal, Firmament Magazine, Minor Literature(s), and Mercury Firs, among others. Originally from Huddersfield, England, he now lives and dwells in Aarhus, Denmark.

***

Read more from Translation Tuesdays on the Asymptote blog:

Translation Tuesday: “The Fly” by Linda Lê

Cervantes, Panizza, Soseki, and Hoffmann had all talked of dogs and cats; why shouldn’t I make a fly my muse?

A writer is stuck, buzzing with contempt for his departed wife. Suddenly, he is liberated by an uncommon muse. Words fly! stories swarm! This Translation Tuesday, we present an at once deeply sympathetic and totally absurd short story by Linda Lê. Hear from translator Alex Nelson on the influence of diaspora on the author’s repertoire, including The Fly:

“Within the ranks of other diasporic writers, Lê recontextualizes her postcolonial exile in her work by considering the blurred lines between language, representation, and form. Lê addresses themes such as the figure of the double, of the relationship between hosts and guests, of the danger of strangers through unexpectedly light-hearted prose, resulting at once in an entertaining story for the reader and a glimmer of the profound. This quality of Lê’s writing was both my priority to translate with fidelity and my greatest challenge when translating.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Tomas Venclova

So death recedes. Morning approaches with a rooster’s cry / And a swallow takes heed

This Translation Tuesday, we find Lithuanian master Tomas Venclova sea-watching in a pair of entrancing poems, translated with beauty and guile by Diana Senechal. Lashes of brine, mist and cloud rise up from these chilly autumn seas, as do—so often the case—a soft sadness, and the observer’s most tender preoccupations.

August Elegy
For Z. B.

How are you, how is it to live
in the zone unknown to us still?
Forgetful and wet to the full,
the seasons float over the gulf.

Heat presses the narrow pavement,
the helicopter hones its direction,
takes notice: someone is absent.
This barely was able to happen.

Caught in the battered ships’ crush,
the whirlpools thrash the pavement,
and midyear soon comes to the seventh
year of your growing absence.

From that silent place what will I glean
on the balcony, pouring my wine
without you—who conquered alien
beds and bodies, you, skeptic, twin,

soul-likeness of mine? Almost always
you guessed what I had up my sleeve.
Now nature is all you have left—
the one God in whom you believed,

who always offered a safe
retreat from the State and its madness,
and whom—thrush’s skill, lynx’s craftiness—
you held higher than yourself.

Perhaps you are really in the fog,
in the film of glittering oil,
in scattered letters and logs,
by the promenade, where yachts jostle,

where road-loops are etched on the slope,
where the bell is contained in a breath
(a friend does not stay there long,
while an enemy stays to the death).

Perhaps you are really in the rays
where mollusks polish the deep,
in Vingis’s rusty pines,
and in Kotor’s salt molecules,

over here, where the sea vapor clears,
and in sands a thousand versts away.
“It is good,” you yourself would say,
“that nature gets by without tears.”

READ MORE…