Posts filed under 'adolescence'

Translation Tuesday: “The Competition” by Mário Araújo

The landscape trembled, like when a person shakes while taking a picture.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you a charming story of a family race on an open field by the Jabuti Prize-winning writer Mário Araújo. In that brief stretch between the starting gun and an imaginary finish line, Araújo captures the kaleidoscopic psyche of a young girl at play. In Elton Uliana’s translation, we glimpse in “The Competition” a nimble adolescent mind figuring out the language to articulate her ambition, fear, affection, in short, her complexity. 

It was their father who, imitating the sound of a gun with his voice, gave the signal to start. The boy lagged behind right from the beginning, while she and her father thrust their legs forward, side by side; she was trying to perfect her incredibly fast steps to compensate for his much longer strides. The boy was behind mainly because, between the excitement and the distraction, he had delayed a couple of seconds before reacting to the starting gun.

Her head only came up to her father’s waist, but the fact is that, at that moment, she was barely looking at him, focused entirely as she was on her own performance. All she could manage was to feel his presence next to her, a dark, solid figure of great size, wearing the trousers he always wore. She was frustrated that his body needed to make much less effort than hers. Her father looked like he was floating in mid-air, but even so he still seemed invincible. It seemed as if he was moving forward, pulled by the power of the real propellers that were her feet, attracting everything around them like magnets. She could swear that he didn’t know where and how his daughter had learned to run as fast as that. The truth is that she learned a lot in the time she spent away from him and her mother. Hour after hour, day after day playing in the open field next to the house, dressed like a boy, wearing trainers—sometimes even barefoot—t-shirt and shorts, very different from the pretty little Beatrice her father saw at night, in pink or light-yellow pyjamas, or on Sundays, when she dressed up or went for lunch at their relatives’ house.

Now they were all in the open, her father, little Luke and her, and that would give her even more advantage, since she knew the field like the back of her hand. Her father shouted something and, by the way the words were framed by his lips, he seemed to be smiling, but she didn’t quite understand as she was concentrating on her task and the wind was howling heavily in her ears. She felt annoyed when she realized that her lazy dad, in addition to being carried on the wings of her jet propellers, still looked relaxed and happy. She quickened her pace even more to the point where her heart was almost touching that little thing in the back of her throat the doctor calls tonsils, and her mother calls bells.

As for little Luke, she didn’t have time for him now, he was such a baby. She only hoped that he wasn’t sitting on the grass crying and forcing their father to interrupt the competition and help him. But she couldn’t hear any crying, perhaps because the wind was blowing in her ears, the wind of that open field, a wind that lived there. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Speed of Gardens” by Eloy Tizón

There are loves that crush those who receive them.

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the titular short story from Eloy Tizón’s Velocidad de los jardines (The Speed of Gardens), which was chosen by El País as one of the hundred best books published in Spanish in the past twenty-five years. A tale of adolescence, the dramatic expansion of life’s possibilities, and its accompanying disappointments—Tizón’s narrator recalls an entire class and their fascination with the luminous Olivia Reyes. All this is told through Tizón’s finely wrought sentences which itself is a kind of spellbinding music. Hear from the translators about the peculiarities and pleasures of Tizón’s baroque style. 

“Eloy Tizón is one of the most important baroque writers working in the Spanish language today. In his language, where the baroque tradition reigns supreme, mastering the baroque style is tantamount to mastering the style of the Spanish language tout court. There have been no shortage of competitors for this title on both sides of the Spanish-speaking Atlantic, and in the Iberian Peninsula, we find such luminaries of the baroque register: Gómez de la Serna and Francisco Umbra, followed by Cristina Fallarás and Juan Manuel de Prada. In these writers, who are equally as prominent fiction writers as they are columnists, we find in them an affected antiquarian prose, a contrarian bravado at the level of ideas, a curated brand of O.K.-Boomerism, with sudden tinges of chauvinism, misogyny, or anti-Trumpism—depending on the day.

Tizón is a stranger to this school. He is worthy of winning the baroque pennant—not that he would care—but he might not be playing the Spanish league. Though a stylist of excess, and a habitual contributor to newspapers, he has shaken off all remnants of regional scruff. His sentences abolish the habitual linguistic ostentation of his contemporaries; there is no old fogey gesturing in his work; he is not known to indulge in that strange form of Iberian competition that consists in piling up subordinate clauses and stringing consonantic polysyllables. This has to do with Tizón’s readings of Clarice Lispector and (I venture) Virginia Woolf. Like them, his style is elastic, image-heavy, allusive rather than exact in a pseudo-philologist kind of way. Like them, he knows when to surrender style to character. Like them, he knows the purpose of curlicues and filigrees: to entertain the reader and not the author’s vanity.

Praised by many of his contemporaries, perhaps the aptest compliment comes from Alberto Olmos, who once described his style as “pouring MDMA on the dictionary.” What dictionary, he didn’t say. Certainly not The Royal Spanish Academy’s.”

Natalia Baizán de Aldecoa and Manuel Antonio Castro Córdoba

Many said the fun ended when we passed into eleventh grade. We turned sixteen, seventeen; everything gained an unsettling speed. Sciences or humanities was the first customs house, the first border crossed, separating friends like travelers commuting from one train to another, their luggage left somewhere between the snow and the porters. Classrooms disbanded. Javier Luendo Martínez broke up with Ana María Cuesta and Richi Hurtado stopped talking to the Estévez twins and María Paz Morago dumped her boyfriend and scholarship—in that order—and Christian Cruz was expelled from school after hurling a flask containing a fetus at the biology teacher. 

Oh, yes; from class to class we towed Plato and something called hylomorphism that belonged to some forgettable school of thought. The Russian Revolution spread itself wide across our notebooks, and on page seventy-something the Tsar was executed between crossed-out scrawls. The economic causes of the war turned out to be complex, not what they look like by a long stretch, even if impressionism brought a fresh palette and a new idea of nature to painting. Mercedes Cifuentes was very fat and didn’t get along with anyone,  but that year she came back crushingly thin and still didn’t get along with anyone.

It was a kind of hecatomb. Half the class fell in love with Olivia Reyes, at the same time or in turns. Every morning she came into the classroom, showered, barely powdered, it was a creaking and vulnerable vision that could hurt you if you dared think about it around midnight. Olivia always arrived forty-five minutes late, and until she made her appearance the syllabus was something dead, a waste, the teacher rambled on about Bismarck, as if painstakingly brushing his tailcoated corpse, the chalk repulsed. Her arrival resuscitated our desks. You couldn’t believe it, Olivia Reyes, something so sponge-like and scented, stepping into the classroom, laughing, providing us with her fabled profile, her light at the prow, you wouldn’t believe it, it hurt so much.

The first days of spring have an amazing air about them, unimaginable, you can’t tell where it comes from. This effect is heightened by the first sightings of summer clothes (the coats strangled in the closet until next year), of bare-armed students carrying decapitations and whole kingdoms inside their folders. We would walk into school through a great red-brick patio with the basketball courts outlined in white, a scrawny tree blessed us; we would jog up the double staircase, hurried on by the dean—who comprised a blonde moustache with a wholehearted dedication to cursingand then the bell would ring, firing the starting signal to our daily race for wisdom and science. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Glass Apples” by Lidmila Kábrtová

So I leaned against him, resting my head on his chest, and looked up. But the sky was like burnt porridge.

A game of magical thinking leads to a teen’s traumatic coming-of-age in Lidmila Kábrtová’s short story “Glass Apples,” this week’s Translation Tuesday selection. Decay and growth surround our speaker as she pursues a crush, though her excitement and anticipation betray her as she discovers a sinister and predatory side to young love. Of note is the speaker’s voice, initially full of hyperbole and youthful naiveté. A first-person narrative of meandering thoughts segues into a moment of subtle disembodiment (CW: sexual assault) as the speaker refers to “the body” instead of “my body,” and all the while rotting “forbidden” fruit provides a literal background to our protagonist’s fear and disillusionment.

It’s pitch black. Even though I’m being very careful, I can still feel myself standing on apples. There are so many that it’s impossible to avoid them, so I don’t. They crunch underfoot, turning into a sticky, sour-smelling mush. They are summer apples, but Gran, who I’m staying with over the summer holidays, calls them glass apples because they have such fine white skins that they almost look like they’re made of glass. They bruise easily—in fact, all you have to do is handle them a bit roughly and almost at once horrid marks appear on their soft apple skin and quickly turn brown. These apples don’t even taste very nice: at first they’re hard, bitter and tart, and then almost instantly they become floury and not nearly as sweet as, say Holovousy or reinettes, so they’re no good for anything except strudel. Gran bakes strudel with them regularly, twice a week. Even with the bashed and rotten ones. Which is just about all of them. The two of us always have a lot of coring to do. Gran even knows how to core the really, really bad ones. But not even Gran could make anything out of these ones.

My skin is really delicate too. Like glass. Gran says it’s like those apples. She says it all the time. I liked her saying it to me when I was ten, but now that I’m sixteen it’s really annoying. It’s also annoying how she’s always checking up on where I’m going, who with, and what time I’ll be back. I’m sixteen and I don’t want my Gran on my back all the time!

Last year I could still talk to her about a lot of things. But now I don’t want to talk to her about anything. Not about apples and certainly not about Štěpán. Definitely not him. Or anything to do with tonight. I just want to get home quietly so Gran doesn’t hear me. I’ll have to wash my shoes too, as they’ll be filthy from all of the apple mush.

I know I promised Gran I wouldn’t go to the dance. And then I climbed out my bedroom window. It’s on the ground floor, so you don’t have to jump from very high up. I’ve never tricked Gran before—well, at least never this much. But I just had to. Going out was a matter of life and death. Gran wouldn’t have understood. She would have said: Tereza, there’ll be other dances. In a year or two when you’re older and more responsible . . .

But how could Gran know what it was like not to see Štěpán, when it was obvious he’d be at the party? How could I lie under the duvet and try to close my eyes when all I could see going round my head were all the girls around him squealing, just so he’d notice them?

I didn’t have to squeal. He whistled over to me this afternoon when I was in the garden: “Are you coming, Tereza? It’s just a stupid dance, but better than nothing . . .” And he had his head tilted to one side in a really cute way and was kicking a stone on the ground.

Štěpán, the best-looking boy in the village. All of the girls were after him. Of course I was aware of him too, but the past two years he had acted as if I meant less than nothing to him. As if he didn’t register me. As if I didn’t exist.

“Yeah, I’ll come.”

“See you at nine then,” he said and disappeared. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: ‘So Long, Adolescence!’ by Réka Mán-Várhegyi

We’ll leave our mum and dad behind, we’ll leave their poverty and their slothfulness, their gestures and their misery all behind.

Full of dark humor and vibrant details, today’s Translation Tuesday, by Réka Mán-Várhegyi and translated by Owen Good, shows the inner workings of a Hungarian family. Dealing with obesity, sibling relationships, and emerging sexuality, this gripping story captures that uncomfortably liminal time known as adolescence.

‘It’ll be beach weather at the weekend,’ our mum squeaked. ‘Get your swimming costumes ready, we’re going to the lake. Dad, have you checked the batteries in the cooler bag? Does it still work? We’ll not miss it if we don’t buy a new one. No point in wasting money.’

Panni was staring at her hand. I was counting the strips in the rotting wainscot on the dining room wall. We didn’t put up any protest but we didn’t want to go to the lake and they knew it. We didn’t want to lie in the sun in swimsuits, we didn’t want to soak in the water, and, most of all, we didn’t want to gawp at jet-skis. Every summer, jet-skis tore up and down the puddle-sized lake with pornstar-esque girls and boys on them, our classmates, but at least in school they didn’t shriek all day long.

I was born into a fat, hemorrhoidal family as the younger member of fraternal twins. By our teenage years, Panni and I had turned into sluggish potato sacks, we’d become our own parents one size smaller. Later on it became clear that our features weren’t overly similar, but the differences between us were hidden by the fat, just like our parents. When I was seventeen the spare pounds didn’t hurt so much as the fact that I didn’t have any distinguishing features. After class Panni and I often went to the wood, we sat on our coats at the foot of a tree, smoked a cigarette each and scratched our faces with thorns. We both wanted a proper scar. But these were just pathetic thin scratches. They healed in half a day. Especially on my skin—which was positively brown compared to Panni’s milky white—when I wiped the blood off you couldn’t even see them.

READ MORE…