Posts filed under 'gothic'

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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An Alternative Valentine’s Day Reading List

St Valentine is the patron saint not only of lovers, but also of beekeepers, greetings, epilepsy, travelers, and the plague.

If Valentine’s Day doesn’t get your heart racing, Asymptote has something different to offer this February 14. Read on for sinister mansions, absent wives, and the ambivalent origins of Valentine’s Day as a celebration of love!

This Valentine’s Day, consider instead the often terrible odds that romantic endeavours will succeed, the relationships that end mysteriously, and the partners that vanish without a trace. This is exactly what happens in Taiwanese author Wang Ting-Kuo’s English debut, My Enemy’s Cherry Tree (Granta Books, April 2019), translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-Chun. First published in 2015, the novel has already won all major Taiwanese literary awards and is set to make a spectacular entrance into the English literary scene.

The novel is a first-person retrospective narrative by an unnamed protagonist who has set up a small cafe by the sea, waiting for his missing wife, Qiuzi, to return to this spot, her favourite along the coast. The initial premise is simple: Qiuzi, dissatisfied with the narrator’s absence, his financial lack, and his unintentional neglect of her, disappears one morning into the arms of Luo Yiming, a philanthropist and Qiuzi’s photography tutor. The unnamed protagonist’s narration is then triggered by Luo’s chancing upon the cafe, setting in motion an encounter that drives Luo mad. As the story unfolds, however, the truth of the matter becomes increasingly less certain, complicated also by the appearance of Miss Baixiu, Luo’s daughter, who haunts the cafe daily in an attempt to ‘heal’ the protagonist’s soul. READ MORE…