Posts filed under 'innocence'

David J. Bailey on Translating Jorge de Sena’s “The Green Parrot”

April 6, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

Discover Portugal’s colonial legacy in de Sena’s humorous and heartbreaking account of life under the Estado Novo dictatorship

Featured in the current Winter 2022 issue, “A Tribute to the Green Parrot” by Jorge de Sena manages to be both a humorous and heartbreaking account of life under the Estado Novo dictatorship in Portugal. The story centers around an unlikely friendship between a young boy growing up in a stifling conservative household and the family’s pet parrot, an “impassioned” and “exuberant individual” from Brazil. In his English translation David J. Bailey captures the colorful hues of de Sena’s language and introduces Anglophone speakers to a beautiful piece from one of the greatest Lusophone writers of the twentieth century. I had the opportunity to speak with Bailey over email about his experience translating “A Tribute to the Green Parrot,” and in the following interview we discuss representations of colonialism in language, the power of children in conveying narratives, and the different measures that Lusophone writers have taken to overcome dictatorial censorship in their careers.

Rose Bialer: I wanted to start by asking: How did you first begin translating from Portuguese?

David J. Bailey: I became interested in Portuguese almost by chance, opting to study it at degree level alongside Spanish. I quickly grew fond of the language and culture and eventually took a PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian literature to pursue an academic career. I’ve done commercial translation in the past, but this was my first serious attempt at translating a literary piece.

RB: When did you first come to encounter the work of Jorge de Sena? How did your engagement with his writing develop into your translation of “A Tribute to the Green Parrot?”

DB: When I started lecturing at the University of Manchester, I inherited a course on Portuguese colonialism from my predecessor, Prof Hilary Owen. Some of Jorge de Sena’s stories were on the reading list and I was especially moved by this one, which ends the collection Os Grão-Capitães. De Sena was a key figure in the resistance to the Portuguese dictatorship, on a par with other writers from his generation such as Miguel Torga and José Régio. “A Tribute to the Green Parrot” was something of an anomaly in not having been translated before. I looked at it with some M.A. students last year and ended up translating the entire story during lockdown. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Grandpa’s Little Glove” by Ilka Papp-Zakor

April 2, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Timea Balogh

So I waited there under the tree, and Grandpa was slowly absorbed by the fog, which drizzled and grew ever thicker.

During a routine mushroom-picking expedition in the forest, a wheelchair-bound child gets separated from her grandfather and is left to face the forces of nature on her own. In today’s Translation Tuesday, Ilka Papp-Zakor takes us on a fairy-tale adventure that comes to a surreal and haunting conclusion.

Grandpa’s beard was made of cotton, and his face of crinkled crepe paper. His hands shook, so he almost always spilled his tea, but his eyes were beautiful. I liked to watch him read his old books in the evenings, squinting by the light of the oil lamp—we didn’t have electricity in our shack—rocking back and forth in his rocking chair, the corners of his eyes smiling delicately from time to time, which is how I could tell where he was in his book. I knew all his books by heart. That’s how our evenings would pass. He’d rock in his chair, I’d stare at him, and sometimes, when I’d grow bored of staring, I’d roll around in my wheelchair. Grandpa didn’t like that, because the wheels made an ugly sound on the uneven plank floors. But he loved me anyway.

He said I’d be a beautiful girl if it weren’t for my distorted features, my underdeveloped legs and mangled hands, but I was happy there was something about me that he liked. I had long, curly, golden hair, a little reddish. Grandpa said the bridge of my nose was freckled, though I’d never seen it myself, because our shack didn’t have a mirror either, and I couldn’t lean so far out of my wheelchair over puddles to catch my reflection clearly. In any case, Grandpa said these features were my sex appeal, and that when I’d have kids, I should strive to pass onto them only these two features, because they wouldn’t get very far with the rest. At the time, it was difficult to imagine that I’d someday have a family, and kids of my own, because I didn’t know anyone else besides Grandpa.

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Translation Tuesday: To a Girl Sleeping in the Street by Nazik al-Mala’ika

October 3, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Emily Drumsta

"people are a mask, artificial and fake, their sweet, gentle exteriors hide burning hate"

Though best known as the pioneer of “free verse” in Arabic, Nazik al-Mala’ika was in fact a fervent defender of Arabic meter, both in her poetry and in her criticism. Indeed, her theory of free verse was not very “free” at all, but rather took the undulating metrical feet of classical Arabic verse as the basis for a new prosodic system. Where classical poetry is governed by fixed line lengths and strict monorhyme, al-Mala’ika’s prosody allowed modern poets to vary the number of feet in each line and weave their rhymes as they saw fit. “Meter is the soul that electrifies literary material and transforms it into poetry,” she wrote in the critical text Issues in Contemporary Poetry. “Indeed, images and feelings do not become poetic, in the true sense, until they are touched by the fingers of music and the pulse of meter beats in their veins.”

To honor al-Mala’ika’s belief in meter’s vitality—the way it can anchor meaning in the body, transforming ordinary speech into a form of incantation—I have rendered her metered, rhymed Arabic verse into English metrical forms that reproduce, in some form, the music of the Arabic. Where al-Mala’ika uses the mutadarik or “continuous” meter in Arabic, for example, I use anapestic hexameter, English’s answer to Arabic’s most galloping verse form. Al-Mala’ika’s poetry, with its balance between tradition and innovation, ultimately teaches us not to deal so violently with the past, but rather to tread lightly in poetry’s ancient footsteps. My hope is that my English renderings of her verse might begin to do precisely this.   

— Emily Drumsta

To A Girl Sleeping In The Street

In Karrada at night, wind and rain before dawn,
when the dark is a roof or a drape never drawn,

when the night’s at its peak and the dark’s full of rain,
and the wet silence roils like a fierce hurricane,

the lament of the wind fills the deserted street,
the arcades groan in pain, and the lamps softly weep.

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