From our brand-new summer issue, we are thrilled to bring you the English debut of Pedro Novoa’s “The Dive,” winner of Peru’s “Story of 1000 Words” contest. Novoa’s narrative talent and knack for spare but evocative description are in full display here, rendered beautifully into English by translator George Henson. To catalyze the transmission of his work across linguistic borders, we especially commissioned translations into 14 other languages (from Albanian and Bengali to Chinese), all of which you can read for free here.
***
You dive. As you descend you hear your Grandmother Hiromi: “Bring back the algae of the old ways.” The words float around your handmade mask like fish shedding scales of light. Your bet on modern medicine came up empty. The iodine tablets that your brother Yochan took to combat anemia had little effect; at most, they turned his cheeks pink for a few weeks.
Next came your training: aquatics, the progressive submersions, and, of course, the medical checkups to see if your body was responding. You needed to be sure: Mama Misuki had died precisely because she had underestimated science, because she put more trust in myth than in reality. To Grandmother, her daughter hadn’t died, she’d been called back to the sea. No one contradicted her. As was custom, no one cried during the wake. Only Papa Hideo sought refuge in the bathroom, where he broke tradition and burst into tears.
