Translations

Translation Tuesday: “An Autumn Evening’s Tale” by Okamoto Kanoko

April 29, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Elena Paulsen

...Their neighbors naturally did not suspect a thing, so they treated Father as a little girl and regarded Mother as a boy.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a short story by Okamoto Kanoko, one of several notable feminist writers who flourished in Japan’s prewar period. In “An Autumn Evening’s Tale,” translated from the Japanese by Elena Paulsen, when a family pauses on their journey back to their hometown, the parents take it as an opportunity to reveal a long-held secret. As they recount their pasts with a mixture of nostalgia and resignation, their children begin to question the underpinnings of their seemingly conventional lives. Okamoto’s equally elegant and playful tale unravels notions of gender, identity, and love against a backdrop of familial pressures and societal expectations. In doing so, she presents a vision for living true to a fluid self which is sparklingly radical even today.

A middle-aged father and mother went on a trip with their son and daughter, who were in their early twenties. 

They took lodgings at almost exactly the halfway point of their trip, a quiet hotel in a lakeside town. It was somewhere between the capital city of that country and the countryside village they had come from, a distance of one hundred and fifty leagues. 

I say “of that country”—but is it Japan or a foreign country, in the present or the past? What will the author decide? But really it doesn’t matter whether it happened in Japan or elsewhere, recently or long ago. The fact of this story, the truth of it, rides upon the craft of the author without a care for those details, and the truth is what I would like to convey to the reader. But it’s hard on anyone who might try their hand at illustrating this story, as they haven’t a clue whether to draw black eyes or blue, curly or long, straight hair. Actually it need not even be humans, it could be grass or trees or wildlife or flowers. Anything at all is fine, so long as it corresponds to the feeling that arises when reading this story. With that said, surely the skill and sensitivity of an artist is such that even with no further instructions the illustrator will be able to convey the essence of the story and have it ring true—so, with your permission, I will go ahead and begin. 

The season was autumn. The harsh evening wind had completely died down, leaving the quiet atmosphere from before what little foliage remained was jostled by the wind. The moon, bright but not too bright, came into view on the peak of the night-time mountain. From the hotel window only the edge of the lake was visible. Yet the complete serene clarity of that edge was enough to give an impression of  jade-like translucence to the whole vast surface, soothing the eyes of the four members of the family. Served in the many dinner plates that the waitstaff set upon the table were fresh, fragrant fish only just taken from the waters of the lake. Here and there amongst the plates were figs picked from the surrounding mountains, the ripe flesh of the fruit seeming fit to burst, barely covered by the glossy skin. The fruits were placed in large bowls and carried out together with strong, aromatic tea. 

—— Father. Tonight we should tell the truth about ourselves to the children, don’t you think? 

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Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Buckle by Nirha Efendić

April 22, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Ellen Elias-Bursać

I don’t think that having to prove oneself is right; you break yourself but the people around you see only what they care to see.

Too often, stories about war sensationalize the trauma it inflicts—the dead reduced to numbers, the survivors to lists of symptoms. Not so the work of Bosnian writer Nirha Efendić, whose autobiographical novel Buckle, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać, offers a compelling vision of what such narratives often omit: the shunning of refugees, the punishments of a post-war economy, the daily psychic grind of living as an undesired and unforeseen survivor. The nature of the narrative is best described by Bosnian author Faruk Šehić, as “. . . a documentary-like, autobiographical work of prose with elements of fiction”—the early chapters narrated by various members of the protagonist Nirha’s family, the later narrated by Nirha alone, following the death of her father and brother in the Srebrenica genocide. The excerpts below are taken from the middle of the novel, following Nirha’s attempts to find her footing after she is finally separated from her father and brother. Of these passages, Elias-Bursać writes: “The challenge in working on this translation was to convey the nuanced sense of the narrator’s grace, strength and gentility as she speaks of such wrenching, tragic subjects.” Read on—

All morning long, Mama and I worked on stitching sturdy yellow cloth for rucksacks. Mama had a Singer sewing machine that my grandfather bought her while she was still in elementary school so she could learn the trade over summer vacation.

Now she was determined to teach me how to sew.

She thought it might come in handy at some point. We knew we had to stuff our whole past into the backpacks, at least the most important parts of it, and set off into the unknown.

This wasn’t easy. There were shells raining down all around us.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Boat” by Rabindranath Tagore

April 15, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Anushka Sen

Who is that approaching, singing, rowing to the shore? / When I set my eyes on her, I think we’ve met before.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a lyrical meditation on longing, loss, and ephemeral encounters by India’s eternal poet laureate, Rabindranath Tagore. Set against a monsoon-drenched landscape, “The Boat” captures a moment of solitude as the narrator, tired after a long day of harvesting, watches a mysterious boatwoman pass by. There is a haunting nostalgia in the stranger’s presence, yet she vanishes as quickly as she arrives, leaving behind empty hands and unanswered questions. Tagore infuses his songlike verses with his signature blend of natural symbolism and emotional subtlety. Translated gracefully from the Bengali by Anushka Sen, the poem illuminates a world where human connection is as fleeting as the rains.

The Boat

Through thickets of thunder runs the rapid rain.
I sit alone and helpless by the shore.
The harvest heaped in heavy rows,
draws my labour to a close.
The brimming river grows
to a sickled roar.
The rains arrived as I was threshing grain.

I sit alone in a little field of rice
with little rivers rippling all around.
Smudged against the distant stroke
of watersky, a village glows
through forest fog and cloudy smoke—
So it was I found
myself alone in a little field of rice.

Who is that approaching, singing, rowing to the shore?
When I set my eyes on her, I think we’ve met before.
She hurtles past with streaming sail,
never glancing either way
as desperate waves assail
her boat and turn to spray.
I see her, and feel as though we may have met before.

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Translation Tuesday: “Melonpan” by Sachiko Kishimoto

April 8, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Yui Kajita

Is everyone holding on to a piece of their dreams in secret, like this indigo ball of my dream that I’d kept for myself?

What if the price of a better world was the loss of your dreams? That’s the question that Japanese author Sachiko Kashimoto asks in this week’s Translation Tuesday, translated by Yui Kajita. In this spare, subtly plotted short story, an unnamed narrator goes for a short walk to pick dandelions, only to retreat to their apartment after experiencing sudden drowsiness. There, in conversation with their neighbor, the true nature of the narrator’s condition is revealed: their unremembered dreams are the physical substance from which their idyllic world is made. As they begin, once more, to dream, they find themself in an unexpected place, their elusive vision drawing a faint but powerful connection between their utopia and the altogether more painful world of the audience. Read on!

Today I’ll pick a hundred dandelions, I decided and walked out to the riverbank.

The sun was shining bright, the surface of the water glimmering in the warm breeze. It might’ve been a good day for picnicking by the river, too, I thought fleetingly.

All over the bank, green was shooting up from the ground, piercing through the round rocks, and there they were, blazing yellow dandelions, so vivid they almost stung my eyes, thriving everywhere. I would’ve felt sorry to pick five or six from the same clump, so I set a rule that I’d leave at least half of each cluster untouched, then started picking the flowers while counting each one in my head.

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Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The Voice of Sulina by Anneleen Van Offel

April 1, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Fiona Graham

The baby churns in a maelstrom, her heart rate is high, it’s high tide, high time to get her out.

Few people go through the all-obliterating pain of childbirth and retain enough presence of mind—or even the desire—to portray the experience. But that’s exactly what Belgian writer Anneleen Van Offel sets out to do in this excerpt from her novel The Voice of Sulina. Through prose that ripples, churns, and overflows, the reader is plunged into the narrator’s mind, which leaps wildly between the hospital room, Greek myths, her increasing pain, and the feeling of the nascent life inside her. Van Offel’s entrancing stream-of-consciousness style mirrors the fluidity and chaos of labor, dissolving the distinction between the female body and bodies of water. Fiona Graham‘s electrifying translation of the original Dutch adeptly captures the deepest transformation a person can undergo: a “primal dance of compression and resistance.”

Body of Water

Thinking back to that time, the walls are white, but of course they’re not white, they’re covered in grainy, pale yellow wallpaper, and on them are devices with wires poking out, papers full of procedures and guidelines and a poster showing various labour positions, and there’s an old armchair, and a tile hanging loose from the dropped ceiling, yet when I think of the room, it’s a white room, and it’s empty. Leon and I are standing in the middle of a plain, there’s no vegetation, and it’s silent.
      Utterly silent. For hours on end.

We sit on the bed and walk around a bit, read through all the procedures and guidelines, and from time to time someone comes in to ask if anything’s happening yet, but nothing’s happening, I took the tablets two hours ago with plenty of water, the tablets that will set off the labour pains – it’s better to call them waves, said the midwife on the course we took, they’ll hurt less then. I’m not far gone enough, I think, we’re not ready, and the course didn’t tell us anything about this, even though we studied and practised diligently, on an exercise ball and a yoga mat, and went through the various options, on five consecutive Saturday mornings. Naturally I highlighted passages in the course book and made notes and comments in the margins, because that’s the way I am, and now we’re running through the scenario from beginning to baby. But nothing’s happening.
      A few hours ago I found out that my body is poisoning itself. The gynaecologist rang with the results of my blood test; my liver’s failing and there’s protein in my urine, the HELLP syndrome, she said; you don’t want to hear your doctor utter a name like that, but it’s not a disaster, she added, your pregnancy is far enough advanced. It’s best to give birth as soon as possible.
      This has to do with Leon’s antigens, as I understand it, it’s an auto-immune reaction to his presence in my body. The blood vessels feeding into the placenta are constricted and my body has to pump more blood round, raising the pressure, like water behind a dam, while my own organs are drying out and slackening, meekly making a maternal sacrifice.
      For several days now, a band beneath my breasts has been gradually tightening, a phantom corset, and there’s a tingling in my fingers that I try to squeeze out, clenching my fists until my skin whitens with subcutaneous ink. Now, of all times, the baby is still, as if there were no tablets on their way to drag her by the scruff of her neck out of the bubbling primeval swamp.

But it’s inescapable.

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Translation Tuesday: “Auntie with Two Laughing Braids” by Hoda AbdelKader Mahmoud

March 25, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Jennifer Jean and Mohamed ElSawi Hassan

My vast darkness is lit with memories of my mother's hand

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poem by Egyptian writer Hoda AbdelKader Mahmoud, translated by Mohamed ElSawi Hassan and Jennifer Jean. Simultaneously delighted by the temerity of a young interlocutor and agonizing over her own age and childlessness, the unnamed narrator of this poem faces herself in the mirror and worries about her frown lines, takes pleasure in the perfect skirt, and feels a wash of nostalgia at the sound of an old song. Torn between comfort in her new identity—the Auntie!—and anxiety over her future, she finds solace in the memory of her own mother and female ancestors, with whom she shares a bond through time, and beyond age.

You are old, Auntie!
This phrase delights, then turns me to face the mirror.
My heart is obliged to follow, every time, and
I catch it red-handed, in a small panic.
I joke with it about the idea of wrinkles and sagging breasts.
My hormones are still the same from late childhood!
And the fact that aging does not come.
If it does, it confirms my beloved will never arrive,
and that Auntie will never be replaced with Mom. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Seven Poems by Manglesh Dabral

March 18, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Nisarg P.

Opening the invisible doors of air, water, and dust, you have left for a mountain, river, or star, to become a mountain, a river, a star yourself.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a selection of works by Indian poet and journalist Manglesh Dabral. Dabral wrote in deceptively simple yet precise language; his artistic sensibility, which comes across as modest and humble in its ambitions, inquired into some of the most pressing questions of postcolonial India. Ranging from social themes, like the way postcolonial modernity blinds itself to its own past, to themes of personal memory, the experience of displacement, and the unending longing for home, Dabral embraced a vast spectrum of human emotions. A line from “In Memory of my Father” could serve as a statement for his poetic vision: “Within empty containers[,] torn-up books[,] and things infested with granary weevil, whatever life was left in them[,] you used to believe in it.” Translated from the Hindi by Nisarg P., the seven poems featured here are perfect representations of Dabral’s poetics―in their language, their form, and the themes with which they engage.

Here was that River

She wanted to reach there in haste
the place where a man
was heading for a bath in her water
a boat
was waiting for its travelers
and a line of birds
were approaching in search of her water

In that river of our childhood
we used to see our faces moving
on her shore were our houses
always over-flooded
she loved her islands and her stones
days used to begin from that river
her sound
audible at all the windows
her waves knocking on the doors
calling us incessantly
we remember
here was that river [,] in this very sand
where our faces once moved
here was that awaiting boat

now there is nothing
except at night when people are asleep
a voice is sometimes heard from its sand.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Silent Bird” by Csenge Fehér

March 11, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Dorottya Mária Cseresnyés

I vanished too. Bird’s wing, crone’s water, old man’s beard—nothing could hide me.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a haunting short story by Hungarian author Csenge Fehér, translated by Dorottya Mária Cseresnyés. In this eerie tale, A young woman, ostracized for her otherworldly beauty by the inhabitants of her small town, flees into the forest at the exhortations of her abused and overworked mother. There, she is pursued by a huntsman, here transformed from the noble rescuer of Western fairy tales into a rapacious brute, with none but the creatures of the forest to protect her—men and women whose transformations have left them barely human, ravaged by time. But even they cannot protect her forever—not from the violence the huntsman brings.

There lived I, a girl with black nails and pale soul, in a raven ravine, deep into the woods. My small village―bones banging―was wrapped in a thicket. I was so pretty that I was pelted with dung if I dared to speak, was chased by hounds if I dared walk alone. You’re such a treasure, not even pigs would desire you, they said. In vain did the moonbeams weave your skin. In vain does your river of hair flow after your feet. In vain do your eyes mirror the ashes of the nights―no one will desire you. You’ll be of no use, bear no fruit, grow old alone, what a shame.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Unknown” by Marianna Vitale

March 4, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Laura Venita Green

It reminds her of when she was a kid and she used to swim into open water, out to where she couldn’t reach, abandoning herself to it.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present a delicate story of young love from Italian writer Marianna Vitale, translated by Laura Venita Green. We accompany high schoolers Sara and Lorenzo on their first date, which unfolds in fragments—clinking glasses, tentative touches, and finally, the shared thrill of a ride on a Ferris wheel. The freshness of their budding relationship imbues every moment with a tense beauty. But as their connection deepens, a sudden encounter with death shifts Sara’s perspective, forcing her to confront life’s essential ephemerality. Struggling to articulate her emotions to Lorenzo, she finds herself overwhelmed by the desire to let go. With its subtle exploration of first love and the inevitability of loss, the story intertwines themes of youthful passion and untimely death with lyrical elegance.

Leaning against a wall, his hands in his jeans pockets, Lorenzo has by now stopped tracking the minutes. He’d been told that girls make you wait, but Sara should have been there half an hour ago and he’s beginning to worry she’s changed her mind. 

The San Giuliano streetlamps tint the alleys with warm light, and the Saturday evening crowd mixes with the Rimini neighborhood locals. Lorenzo checks his phone again. Then he goes back to staring at his white Nikes and the frayed hem of his jeans. He unrolls his shirt sleeves because the air is growing cooler and more humid. 

When he looks up, he finally sees her: thin, straight legs moving in a hurry, wrapped in dark tights and shorts, a satin blouse that falls softly on her chest, revealing small freckles just above her breasts.

“I’m late,” Sara says.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, greeting her with a kiss on both cheeks. “Want to get a drink?” He points to the entrance of Retroborgo and guides her there, resting a hand between her shoulder blades, barely touching her. “I’ll go ask if we can sit outside.” 

She waits on a stool between barrel-shaped tables. Across the street, two little boys are playing soccer outside a house with red shutters. Sara thinks she’d like to live in this area, so close to downtown. Then she wouldn’t be stuck having her parents drive her around everywhere. 

“Okay, I ordered two spritzes,” Lorenzo says when he returns, sitting down next to her. “And they’re bringing something to eat.” 

“Great.” Sara smiles and exposes her imperfect teeth. They’re one of the first things Lorenzo noticed about her—her slightly crooked right canine overlapping her incisor. 

“You look really nice tonight…I mean, you always look nice.” 

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Translation Tuesday: “A New System” by Ahmad Al-Khamisi

February 25, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Huwaida Issa

"I must live as if nothing has happened, while acknowledging that something has indeed occurred."

In a repressive regime, freedom of speech is one of the first casualties. But what happens when we simply can’t help ourselves? This Kafkaesque short story, by Egyptian writer Ahmad Al-Khamisi, follows an Egyptian academic, Dr. Fakhry, who speaks out and ends up facing unexpected charges. Rather than traditional imprisonment, he is thrust into something far more complex, and far more insidious—the “new system,” where those deemed criminal continue their daily lives without physical confinement, bound only by the knowledge of their status. As Dr. Fakhry struggles to comprehend his ambiguous position, he grows increasingly paranoid, scrutinizing strangers for signs of similar captivity. Translated from the Arabic by Huwaida Issa, this haunting tale reveals how systems of oppression don’t need physical barriers; the mere suggestion of surveillance can transform citizens into their own jailers.

Dr. Fakhry Al-Fayyoumi regarded anyone who spoke to him with deep suspicion, his gaze as wary as someone inspecting a dubious commodity. On rare occasions, he would cautiously venture to ask, in a low, polite voice: Are you, sir, a new system?

To which the other, in confusion, would respond: A new system? What do you mean?

Dr. Fakhry lowered his eyes with a faint, bitter smile, as if silently saying: “Leave this meanness behind,” and then murmured: “The current system.”

In most cases, he received the same response, tinged with surprise: What do you mean? I don’t understand!

Dr. Fakhry grew silent, focusing inward and folding into his perplexity, before he changed subtly the subject of the conversation.

The story of suspicion began six months ago when Dr. Fakhry was unexpectedly subpoenaed by the General Directorate of Investigation. This followed a tense university meeting, where in a moment of fervour, zeal pulled him aside and made a few remarks that crossed well beyond the bounds of what was acceptable. He deeply regretted it afterward. His wife said to him: “You, Fakhry, you’re a renowned professor with your books and research. Why do you concern yourself with the talk of the young?” He responded: “You’re right.” On the appointed day of his subpoena, he arrived at the Interior Office building on time, where a polite and kind officer greeted him and escorted him to a small room. In an apologetic tone, the officer said: “Dr.…I’m very sorry…We’re obliged to arrest you!”

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Translation Tuesday: “The Mighty Gaucho” by Tamara Silva Bernaschina

February 18, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Tim Benjamin

For Vicente, the mighty Gaucho is all the terrors of this world in a single individual.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poignant story of youth, manhood, and mental illness by Uruguayan writer Tamara Silva Bernaschina, translated by Tim Benjamin. Young Vicente lives with his family in a small town, right across the street from the Gaucho—”all the terrors of this world in a single individual”—a gigantic man famed for his physical strength and rumored cruelty to children. Yet even as Vicente’s uncle and mother threaten him with stories about the Gaucho, the only violence Vicente has seen from him is self-directed: he has repeatedly attempted to hang himself from the tree outside his house. When the Carnival comes to Vicente’s town and Vicente finally experiences the violence and recklessness that have made the Gaucho a figure of local legend, he makes a choice that, small as it may seem, will change both their lives forever. Read on!

They’re going to ask me why.
—José Watanabe

I
He liked to wonder if the moments when his dad had to sprint across the street, wrestle down the enormous Gaucho from the tree from which he’d once again hung himself, were moments of life in the world, or of death. There must have been minutes that ticked by in which more people were born than died. And vice versa. Someone, somewhere, must be keeping count. This is what he thinks, he’s got an image in his head of a little bead with the Gaucho’s name on it attached to a wooden abacus, swinging back and forth between dead and alive. He watches the Gaucho through the kitchen window, big, gigantic, now crumpled in the dirt and gasping for breath, like Aunt Ermilda’s epileptic dog. His mother and Uncle Thomas are there too, standing behind him, breathing down his neck as they watch his dad and the Gaucho disappear into the little shack across the street, and then they all sit back down at the kitchen table and wait for him to come back with the details. His father comes through the door in a state, sweat soaking through the front of his shirt, glazing his brow. He wipes away the sweat and they all stare at him as he mumbles an I’m coming or something like that but none of them totally understand what he says, and nobody responds. Finally, he sits back down at the table, takes a knife to the food on his plate.

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Translation Tuesday: “I Wonder Whether” by Anita Harag

February 11, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Marietta Morry and Walter Burgess

I don’t know whether I’m in love. I do know where these words must appear in a sentence.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a captivating short piece by Anita Harag, translated from the Hungarian by Walter Burgess and Marietta Morry. Although our narrator is immersed in the bliss of romance, she finds herself relentlessly questioning the foundation of her happiness. Does her partner truly love her, though he appears to be drawn to other women? Does she genuinely love him in return? More fundamentally, how can she even be certain of her own feelings? Her efforts to impose a logical structure on the messy, unpredictable nature of love disrupt the lushly intimate moments she shares with her lover. With its playful linguistic twists and staccato rhythms, “I Wonder Whether” masterfully captures the sensation of being both within and without, suffused with pleasure and unease.

His hands are warm, my thighs cold; I’m chilly. It’s autumn, the AC is on. The cinema is full, I’m sitting on the aisle; the cool air is blowing on me. He asks me whether we should switch seats. I like to sit on the aisle; I don’t want to switch. I would like his palm to be bigger, to warm a bigger area of my cold thighs. I like it when he doesn’t only touch my thigh, but my shoulder and my behind, too. When he takes my hand on the street, in a store or on the bus. He takes my hand anywhere and at any time. Mine is cold; he warms it. His is always warm, mine always cold. At the bus stop he breathes on my neck, so that I won’t be cold. Women stare at him. When I look at them; they turn their eyes away.  

There are handsome men. This sentence is declarative. “Handsome” is the adjective attached to men. Not to all men, that would be “men are handsome”. Not all men are handsome; for me only the ones with prominent noses and muscular calves. In this I differ from my girlfriend, who likes men with strong arms and blue eyes. Those are also handsome; yet I don’t like them. I should say: I like some men, and some I don’t. The ones I don’t like, my girlfriend might. It’s also possible that we both like the same man, with blue eyes and muscular calves; that’s a problem.  Fortunately, my girlfriend doesn’t like men with prominent noses. They repel her; I think the reason for this is to make sure we won’t end up liking the same man, even by accident. Sometimes, I find a man with blue eyes and strong arms attractive. That makes me feel bad, and I try to find fault with him. Some of them can look at me with those blue eyes and make me forget to speak. Him, too, he hasn’t got a prominent nose nor muscular calves, yet I like him. He likes women with brown hair and brown eyes, like me. He also likes women with green or blue eyes, with large or small breasts. He finds something pretty in each of them. I can see myself falling in love with several women at the same time, he says. This is a declarative sentence. It doesn’t contain “perhaps” nor “maybe”, nor anything conditional. “Perhaps” and “maybe” are modifiers expressing uncertainty and possibility. Perhaps I could fall in love with several women, at the same time.  

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Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from “Alone” by Nesrine Slaoui

February 4, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Frances Egan

She was tormented by the gap between what she wanted to look like and her modest and underwhelming reality.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you an excerpt from “Alone,” Nesrine Slaoui‘s intricate portrait of immigrant life in modern France, translated by Frances Egan. In these three spare, plainspoken vignettes, the lives of two women intertwine: Anissa, the child of two Moroccan immigrants in the Argenteuil banlieue, and Nora, a Maghrebi businesswoman in Clichy. Despite their various attempts to assert control over their own lives—despite Anissa’s attempt to bond with a new classmate, despite Nora’s attempts to stand up for herself and advocate for change in her workplace—their actions are continually circumscribed by greater social forces, by the historical inertia manifest in the petty cruelty and unexamined prejudice of their classmates and colleagues. What follows is a forceful examination of racism and economic inequality in modern France—and a challenging reminder that none of us is as free as we would like to believe.

3 September 2021
Cité Champagne, Argenteuil

In Marseille’s Quartiers Nord, Bricarde and Castellane, the drug dealing hotspots where a kid dies every fortnight from a Kalashnikov bullet, the windows offer a dreamy and unobstructed view of the Mediterranean Sea. A tease, an enviable and deceptive skyline, since the only place you can actually access the beach is from one small spot at L’Estaque. Here, in the much quieter cité Champagne, about twenty kilometres northwest of Paris, the balconies of the social housing block offer a panoramic view of the capital and its monuments, the Eiffel tower, sparkling at night, in prime position. The day they moved in, Karim kept this view until last, as a surprise for his wife Yamina. They had both been amazed that such luxury could penetrate this isolated spot. It made you wonder if the town planners and architects of these housing estates were trying to maximise the contrast between here and there, or if they wanted to soften the dreary dereliction of this Argenteuil ghetto. Perhaps they imagined the residents gazing into the distance and forgetting the reality at their feet: the broken lifts, the lobbies smelling of urine.

On the ninth floor of her tower, Anissa wasn’t thinking much about the skyline. Locked away in her room, she was trying to take a photo of herself on her phone. But even standing on her tiptoes, so that her legs looked longer, and arching her back, to emphasise her bum, she didn’t have one shot she could post on Instagram. And that’s despite knowing every tip there was to enhance your figure: stand slightly side-on, tuck your tummy with a hand to your waist. Expression wise, she made sure not to smile and kept her mouth slightly open to hold her delicate features in place. All those hours spent scrolling social media, day after day, meant she followed the rules without even realising it. But it didn’t matter. The reflection in the rectangle mirror in her bedroom wouldn’t do what she told it to, and she couldn’t make her body match the profiles that flitted across the screen. Without filters, without tricks, her body and her face were ordinary; her imperfections, her asymmetries were there for everyone to see. None of it looked like the calibrated social media ideal, like the apparitions, the fantasies. She couldn’t compete, she couldn’t fight. And she was tormented by the gap between what she wanted to look like and her modest and underwhelming reality. The only thing she liked was her flat teenage stomach. Everything else was too small, too skinny, not woman enough.

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Translation Tuesday: “A Stranger in Town” by Zinaida Shakhovskaya

January 28, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Theo Barnett

Chickens and vultures are all that’s left of the official bodies; as for this thing you’ve come up with, that’s news to me.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a thrilling tale of international espionage and intrigue from Russian émigré writer Zinaida Shakhovskaya, deftly translated by Theo Barnett. Arriving in an unnamed country, veteran spy Loris feels completely secure—he speaks the language perfectly, can name every place of the town, knows exactly what he needs to do—that is, until he runs across an old friend. What follows lays bare the true conflict in Loris’s heart, a deep pessimism beneath the mask of a devoted professional. Yet even as Loris admits his despair, the world around him hums with activity: children at play, a girl meeting her partner in a restaurant, new foliage casts dappled shadows on the streets. Together, these moments paint a picture of the world in “its breathtaking benevolence and fixity,” which stands against Loris’s despair and finally empowers him to act. Read on!

Loris knew the town, where he was arriving for the first time, down to its last detail. He had undergone such extensive preparations before being sent there that he knew the place inside out: every bend in its labyrinthine streets, the name of every hotel and caffè, the address of every library, museum, tavern and concert hall in the town, of its every abattoir, square and monument. Any passer-by could ask him for any directions, and, with native fluency, Loris could supply them. He recognised all these things as he saw them for the first time.

On his way from the station, carrying a light holdall, he entered a hotel and requested a room (even his accent didn’t betray his identity). On a paper slip he wrote down his name (not his own), verifying this by making unsubtle glances at his passport (also not his own) … After a wash and a freshen-up, he left straight for the town.

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