Translations

Translation Tuesday: “My Shadow Will Comfort You” by ariel rosé

August 12, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Frank L. Vigoda

in the fog I heard your / steps retracing the past / we spoke our mother tongues

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a nostalgic and impressionistic poem from Polish-Norwegian poet ariel rosé, translated from the Polish by Frank L. Vigoda. In “My Shadow Will Comfort You,” the speaker reaches across time to address a loved one, now lost to the past. Wandering through the valley of memory, they search for a connection that once defined their world. The ever-present fog impedes their vision, solidifying the elusiveness of what has slipped away. This lost bond transcends the individual, rooted in shared family history, language, and identity—a private world of meaning that bridged two souls. But the speaker remains suspended between past and present, longing to inhabit both at once, looking for a space between remembrance and the irrevocable passage of time.

 

After Beckett

You see, I’m a dream
collector, you’re a water
carrier and the fog is dense
in the valley I hear someone
knocking
knock
knock
no
it is just a memory
I want to be in many nows at once
I heard the unspoken words
I looked for the dear face

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from West Farragut Avenue by Agnieszka Jelonek

August 5, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Nasim Luczaj

This may have meant: Don’t cry, there’s no need, it’s already happened.

From Chicago to Warsaw is 7,559 km—a long way to travel for the dead. But that is what the protagonist of this Polish novel by Agnieszka Jelonek must do: her boyfriend, Shrimp, has just fallen to his death. To the tragicomic circumstances of his demise—the indefatigable Shrimp accidentally fallen from an open window trying to smoke a cigarette—are now added the bizarre indignities of life as an unwilling and unwelcome traveller, from an odious Polish couple who have assimilated into American life to the hostile bureaucracies of the hospital and the crematorium, capped off by the unexpected appearance of Shrimp’s “other” girlfriend. Translator Nasim Luczaj writes: “Jelonek’s style is a tequila shot. There’s salt, there’s lime, there’s at once delicious and painful heat. The main challenge was to preserve the simplicity of the writing and not succumb to the temptation to ‘clean up’ the frequent repetition or enforce any of the cold elegance often associated with reminiscence—this grief is messy and hot.” Read on!

There’s no difference between a November afternoon and a November night. The car journey lasted six hours. No one said a word, no one cried. Shrimp’s Dad held on to the steering wheel, while his other son kept himself glued to the window. We looked out at the A7, and no one wanted to be in that car, everyone would have preferred somewhere else, anywhere but here. None of us accepted what we’d been told. The information rode with us as a separate passenger, and it, too, stared quietly into the dark.

We parked in front of the tenement and waited in silence for some time. A woman’s shadow passed across the building. Women in Shrimp’s family are slight, girlishly built, and always look younger than they actually are. A hunched, frail aunt wrapped up in her coat got in the car and turned towards us as if to speak but seemed unable to come up with anything.

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Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Baba by Mohamed Maalel

July 29, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Clarissa Botsford

You don't have to do this anymore, Ahmed. Do you want people to laugh at you?

It is a cliche that no one struggles with an overabundance of paternal love—that children are more likely to lack it than to have it in excess. In Baba, the debut novel of Tunisian-Italian writer Mohamed Maalel, young Ahmed is confronted with both lack and excess at once—with a loving father whose repeated expressions of care can never amend the traumatic betrayal this excerpt describes. Clarissa Botsford’s translation is haunting, expertly capturing a child’s tilt-a-whirl emotional life and dawning awareness of adult complexities, his simultaneous craving for love and his harsh refusal to forgive. In Botsford’s words, “The narrative microcosm in Baba powerfully embodies the new dynamics of a multicultural, colorful, and contradictory world, giving life to a story about the search for a blended identity amid religion, tradition, and queerness.” Read on!

A Boy Becomes A Man

When I was six, my father made me a man. Back then, I was convinced I could be anything I wanted. First, I wanted to be a superhero, then a fairy, and later a policeman. I watched the kids’ shows on TV. At six, I fell in love for the first time with Céline Dion, with Lara Croft, and with a cow in the yogurt commercials called Fruttolo. At six, I admired my cousins’ Barbies from afar, imagining what it would feel like to hold something with a figure like my mother’s. When I was six I was a child, with all the typical imperfections of children. When I was six I experienced intense pain. I tried to give it some kind of ironic significance over the years, but pain can only be ironic when it’s not your own. The pain is set against a Tunisian backdrop.

We were traveling with the usual food parcels for my father’s family. Outside, the high temperatures made the car windows scorching hot. My father was listening to the Koran on the radio, which made the air even more sultry tense. My ears received the unintelligible sounds as an annoying hum. During the whole the car ride, he insisted my brother memorize them. He couldn’t do it; he lowered his eyes when my father reminded him how immoral his life as an unbeliever was. He didn’t bother me. Instead, he’d ask me to choose a song on the radio. “You listen nice music Ahmouda, not like your brother’s haram junk,” he’d say.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Unruly Grass” by Nermin Kamal

July 22, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Anne Thompson-Ahmadova

It was child’s play for him to do what many people had tried to do and failed—bring a smile to the face of the deeply grieving woman.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present to you a short story by decorated Azerbaijani author Nermin Kamal, translated from the Azerbaijani by Anne Thompson-Ahmadova. In it, a man and a woman—both married, but not to each other—commiserate about their respective marital woes.  His wife can’t seem to recover from grief; her husband is lost in the interminable throes of depression. Meanwhile, the machinery of the city churns on. As the couple take solace in their clandestine connection, the man’s wife finds her own comfort in an unexpected animal visitor. Kamal playfully jumps between various perspectives among the city’s residents to depict their entanglements with a broad vision.

Late one afternoon a man and woman were sitting talking in George Enescu Park in the Eighth Residential District. ‘Cover your ears. Don’t listen to them,’ an old street vendor on a nearby bench told her granddaughter. The man was complaining about his wife and the woman about her husband. Tedious though the conversation was, they were listening intently to each other.

‘How long can this go on? How much longer can we live like this?’ the man grumbled. ‘I come home exhausted from work and find her sitting there crying. She put her father’s pictures on the wall and I didn’t say a word. Now she’s wearing her father’s clothes. I tell her, you shouldn’t keep a dead man’s clothes in the house, take them to the charity. Your father was a big strapping bloke, you’re a petite woman, how can you wear the dead man’s jumper in front of your husband? But does she listen? She’s been crying for six months. I could understand it then—her father had just died, but what can I say to her now?’

‘Mine’s the same,’ the woman grumbled. ‘The house is falling apart. All the cupboard doors are hanging off their hinges. Whatever you touch, it’s broken. He doesn’t fix anything or get anyone else to fix things, he just sleeps all day. Not that his father has died. He says, I’m tired, really tired. You might be fed up of life—that’s up to you, but I’m not. Life is wonderful.’ 

Though he was just a statue, George Enescu couldn’t bear it. He swept his bow over the strings of his violin. When the man was speaking, the noble instrument growled like a bear, but when the woman was speaking it twittered incessantly like a nightingale. But no one except the violinist could hear it.

‘At least there’s a grave. We gave him a proper burial, laid flowers. I said to her, the world is heading for hell in a handcart. By the time we die we might envy those who are already dead!’

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Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Danae Sioziou

July 15, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Panagiota Stoltidou

the locking of the door, the alarm, / and my own passage from fire to ice.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you two poems from the Greek writer Danae Sioziou, translated by Panagiota Stoltidou. In the first, “Athenian Days”, we’re transported into the commotion of daily life in the Greek capital. Sioziou balances familiar images (insects, breakfast, untrustworthy-seeming people you encounter in the streets) with a more mystical register: “kaleidoscopic / entropies, shells of dreams”. In a melancholic voice, the city hints at an inner vitality, buried by long years of decay.  The second poem, “Tropicalities”, is a philosophical meditation on paradoxes, and impossibilities reminiscent of Heraclitus. Various objects are listed in turn, but they are defined by their inability to fulfill the functions for which they were designed. In contrast, time’s incessant march seems all-powerful.

Athenian Days

Athenian days: flirtations
of cockroaches and shady characters,
eggs sunny side up, totems, kaleidoscopic
entropies, shells of dreams.

I know nothing of rising
stars, the eye is fixed on the first
hour, I am the center of the city,
the bustle, you say, of the here and now.

And if I saw you yesterday, my little light-eating
nightmare, boomerang, brought back
from nothing, shining messenger,

you, moon, I remain dead
only in terrible depths does the drowned
tree of life shine within me.

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Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from That Any Might Be Saved by Panni Puskás

July 8, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Austin Wagner

I told them no mercy, you must be destroyed, because violence is the only path to happiness

Ready to dig deep? The narrator of Panni Puskás’s novel That Any Might Be Saved is, as demonstrated by this dizzying excerpt, brilliantly translated from the Hungarian by Austin Wagner. Asked by their psychotherapist to recall their childhood, the narrator draws up their very first memory: a tantrum provoked by their inability to find a plastic ball to play with. From here the narrator’s monologue unfurls in a dazzling spiral, transitioning seamlessly from their childhood recollections to their frustrating relationship with their perpetually unemployed friend and finally to the liberatory violence of vandalism and of the destruction of their mother’s possessions—an apparent rejection of their own richly remembered past, which frees them from the strictures of polite society and psychotherapy alike. Read on!

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Translation Tuesday: “Dear Italian School” by Marilena Delli Umuhoza

July 1, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Monica Martinelli

That Whiteness is taken for Italianness itself represents the very beating heart of this privilege.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present to you a powerful essay by Italian-Rwandan author Marilena Delli Umuhoza, translated from the Italian by Monica Martinelli. A moment of casual racism in her daughter’s school play inspires the narrator to reflect on her own memories of bigotry as an African-origin woman growing up in 1990’s and 2000’s Italy. She traces how racial prejudice is passed down through children’s books, advertising, TV shows, and teachers; Black men and women depicted as criminals or sex objects, always, in some way, dirty. These tropes spill into modern immigration debates, where refugees are stripped of dignity, their suffering sensationalized: “And so there they were, those bodies, taking over my entire television screen without any respect for people in their most vulnerable moment: dead, naked, washed up on Italian shores.” Against this erasure, Delli Umuhoza insists on the significance of writing, of inscribing the truth of Black lives into history. Childhood racism leaves deep scars precisely because it is so pure; children, innocent yet perceptive, directly reflect the biases of society. Blending incisive cultural analysis with raw emotion, the essay makes clear why antiracist education must begin early.

A letter from an African-Italian mother

Last week I attended a musical at my daughter’s school. The show they put on was Around the World in Eighty Days, inspired by the movie recounting the adventures of Phileas Fogg.

After visiting European countries like France and Spain, welcomed by songs of joy and rather coquettish dancers, our hero comes to Africa. Welcoming him there is a person whose foolish way of speaking reminds me of the Italian dubbing actors in the film Gone with the Wind, with their mispronounced monosyllables in a typical “African” accent. I dug my nails into the fabric of my seat’s armrest, as I always do when I am nervous.

The journey continues toward the heart of Africa, where Fogg is chased by a group of Africans for unclear reasons (the acoustics were terrible and the representation pretty confusing). I thought to myself, I’m so glad they cut it. I was thinking of a scene that I had reported to the teacher six months earlier, after my daughter had come home in tears and asked me: “Mom, does grandma eat people?”

“Baby,” I replied, “what are you talking about? Of course not.”

“So why do they make us play African cannibals who eat Fogg at school?” 

“What do you mean?”

“In the scene where he gets to Africa, we have to say, ‘Mmmm … It smells so tasty! What do you say, shall we cook him?’”

I was speechless. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Riversong by Wendy Delorme

June 24, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Kathryn Raver

I seek only those flammable things from which a story might be made.

Ever kept a secret way longer than you thought you would? A year? Two? What about seven? In this novel excerpt from French author Wendy Delorme, brilliantly translated by Asymptote’s own Kathryn Raver, a story of a love unspoken becomes a story about the nature of literature itself, and the parallels between writing and self-creation. Isolated in a mountain cabin, an unnamed writer reflects back on the years leading up to their relationship with their now-lover. At first hesitant to confess her feelings, she instead watches her friend’s gender transition unfold over the course of several years, only to find that as their voice and appearance change, her feelings for them deepen. When, after a an encounter on a rainy night, her feelings finally come to light, it sparks an epistolary conversation that will change both their lives. Read on!

A restless night. Sleep escapes me, but the words don’t come either. What does come is the thought of writing to you. I’m thinking again of how we met. How we really met. That night where I knew I wanted you.

Sometimes, a person comes along and we see them. Truly see them, I mean. Our perspective changes. Our line of sight suddenly sharpens, like that of an animal scrutinizing the brush to see what moves within. Our retinae focus, taking in details that up until that point had blurred together into a hazy landscape. The eye becomes curious and searches for more, latches onto a mouth, the clean line of an eyebrow, the velvety texture of a cheek, a shoulder muscle, a manner of smiling. This sort of gaze, when it lands on another, radically changes the bond two people share.

What turned my gaze on its head, that night? READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The Elements

June 17, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Michelle Clayton

I said I wished I had voted, and the three of them burst out laughing.

Pedro Mairal’s 2005 El año del desierto [The Elements] is a novel for our times: a beautifully-written, grippingly-narrated, and lucidly-plotted story of how easy it is for a civilization to fall back into barbarism. It begins in an Argentina in the grip of the financial, political, and social crisis of December 2001, and it goes on to narrate the collapse of civil society: a collapse that takes place over the span of a calendar year, but that involves the implacable unraveling of some five hundred years of history. As history and geography rewind beneath the feet of the nation’s horrified inhabitants, one woman lives through its regressive stages, just barely surviving to tell a tale that resonates with dystopian imaginings everywhere. It is told from a resolutely female perspective, that of the clear-eyed and plain-spoken heroine, Maria Valdés Neylan, the descendant of Irish immigrants to Argentina. (Not just any immigrants: her great-grandmother is the title character of James Joyce’s short story “Eveline” – left on the docks by Joyce, but imagined here by Mairal as having traveled on to Argentina). Maria’s narration alternates between the laconic and the lyrical, testifying in vivid and moving but never salacious ways to the violence she sees unfolding around her, and that is visited on her own body – as we see in this excerpt, in which she thinks back over the line of fierce female figures from whom she is descended, in ironic parallel with the unraveling of women’s rights in a society barreling backward.

—Michelle Clayton, translator

“The Comet”

I wasn’t able to bathe until the third day. There was a tub with cold water in a tiny room at the back of the house with a bolt on the door. It wasn’t the cleanest, and of course it was hard to see anything, but just to have some privacy felt like luxury to me; I could finally cry without being seen, not to mention take my clothes off and let down my hair. It had been months since I had done either: I always felt like I was being spied upon, with unseen men milling around me. Now I bathed standing up in the big metal tub; I washed my hair with soap, luxuriating in it despite the freezing water. Other residents sometimes left a garden hose filled with water coiled in the sun on the patio through the day, so as to have lukewarm water when they bathed in the evening. But I didn’t wait to heat up the water; as soon as I learned that the bath was free, I went straight in.

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Translation Tuesday: “A Proper Lady” by Arbër Selmani 

June 10, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Suzana Vuljevic

Come with us, let’s shapeshift, let’s resist the expectation to be beautiful in front of the cameras

“A proper lady” (Zonja, in Albanian) is many things, but more than any other, she is expected to be obedient. For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you an incendiary prose-poem against the patriarchy, written by the queer Kosovar poet Arbër Selmani and translated by Suzana Vuljevic. In this mordant poem, a chorus of unnamed women turn society’s expectations upside down, their harsh refrain of “if we were proper ladies” calling attention to the abuse and exploitation inherent in the class aspiration of being “a proper lady.” In the words of the translator: “Proper ladies in the context of the poem largely refers to the kind of women that are forced to follow the rules as it were, becoming inured to male dominion, fulfilling a submissive, obedient role, and falling prey to misogynistic men. At the same time, there is an overtly rebellious undercurrent that calls out the indecencies of societies that take advantage of, abuse and demean women.” Implicit in the poem’s collective point-of-view is an alternative aspiration, a solidarity that can resist the oppression of a misogynist society. Read on!

If we were dignified ladies, we’d have to wake up at the crack of dawn and wash the feet of the patriarchy. If we were proper ladies, we’d be off filling jugs with water, heating them up with the dark bits of our souls. If we were ladies, we’d have to be sure not to make a sound at night. We’d have to fake orgasms, swallow the pain, and then go on to tell ourselves we had it coming. If we were the kinds of ladies society wanted us to be, we’d be in the habit of rolling our eyes and accepting our husbands’ slaps like ordinary boxes of chocolate. If we were ladies, we’d have to cook around the clock to fill the hairy bellies of wretched husbands—husbands long ago turned masters.

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Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Park Ju-taek

June 3, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Heinz Insu Fenkl

In the night, all arustle with flights of falling leaves, / the wind opens its mouth to read my eulogy / and blows my will away.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we’re presenting two highly evocative poems by Korean poet Park Ju-taek. The first, “Missteps”, portrays a group of men, “hard as insomniac stones”, whose fragile companionship seems to be threatened by an overwhelming yet nebulous existential dread. “I Am Not an Atheist” forcefully buffets us with its speaker’s emotional turmoil; a hyperawareness of “the cyanic death that comes with mortality” provokes a confrontation with the divine. But the poems escape clear interpretation, and perhaps feel most similar to paintings—the mysterious cityscapes of Giorgio de Chirico or Edward Hopper come to mind. Heinz Insu Fenkl’s sensuously renders Park’s distinctive atmospheres, bringing his unsettling afterimages into high relief.

Missteps

No one kept track of the time.
The men who needed a long talk did not return to their homes.
A car drove by, its headlights on.
And then—those men of few words—disappeared into a bar;
a brief silence settled in.
It was a starless night,
our natures hard as insomniac stones
and tainted, just like the world.
One man stepped out of the bar,
and as he walked along the visible street—
the dark street, with its open lips—
he saw shadows still trapped in the bar
and insects dead on the cement floor.
The wind blew. The remaining men all rose.
Afterwards, darkness engulfed
the street toward which they walked,
their many hands fluttering in the air.

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Translation Tuesday: “Good Girls” by Olga Campofreda

May 27, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Federica Silvi

That ... is how snakes leave their old skins behind: they crawl out of their nest and keep rubbing against the ground, until they’re finally free.

For this Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poignant and introspective excerpt from Olga Campofreda’s novel Ragazze Perbene, translated from the Italian by Federica Silvi. A woman returns to her hometown for a simple mission: attending her cousin’s wedding. But her journey provokes uneasy reflections, as she tracks the trajectory of her cousin’s life, which has adhered to the conventional “good girl” narrative ingrained in their community, and measures its distance from her own. As much as she cherishes her life of openness and freedom, her homecoming resurrects the ghosts of other possibilities—and worse, the fear of not being able to maintain her new identity under the suffocating pressure of the past. Campofreda’s prose brims with quiet tension, exploring the friction between the selves we create for ourselves and the ones we can’t escape.

In the end, no one cheered. The plane glimmered in the sunset-red windows of the business district’s skyscrapers, then landed smoothly in Naples, but none of the usual hand-clapping followed. A single, half-hearted burst had all but died down by the time the wheels touched the ground. Some might blame it on the low season: at this time of year, all the passengers are foreigners, taking advantage of lower prices to visit the islands and hike on the Amalfi Coast. It’s the outfits that give them away, the summer clothes they start wearing before it’s even hot, the shorts and linen vests they bring out as good omens for the weather in the days to come. In the holiday dream world they purchased, there’s nothing but sunshine. They’ll find it even when it eludes them: a power they can only wield in the places they’re seeing for the first time.

“Are you from here?” the delicate woman sitting next to me asked, in English.  

Her husband had woken her when Vesuvius appeared out of the window. She kept pressing her finger on the glass in its direction, ecstatic, a white-haired child. 

“Are you from Naples?”

I nodded; she replied with a contented sigh, then turned away to gape at the scenery some more.   READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Shin Kyeong-nim

May 20, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Shane Ingan

If a human shows any interest at all in pigs, / It’s to snatch one up at random for slaughter.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present a selection of poems by Shin Kyeong-nim, translated from the Korean by Shane Ingan. In “For fallen things,” the speaker reflects on a life spent with the downtrodden, where “the shattered of dreams of fallen things” remain unredeemed. Accepting the bleakness of such a life brings a contentment that grand narratives could never give them. Meanwhile, “Lucky dream” follows a pig farmer who dreams of living as a pig herself. Though her porcine lifestyle would allow her new freedoms, she’s overwhelmed by the reality of the random violence that all dehumanized beings are vulnerable to. Both poems are suffused with quiet dignity as well as an acerbic undertone, which naturally intermingle among meditations on power, fate, and the unseen costs of collective indifference.

For fallen things

Somehow or other, I made my home in the shadows.
I did not take the side of the victorious wrestler,
But stood instead with the defeated, my fist in the air.
I skipped that rally where the multitudes gathered,
And listened instead to the man in the tattered suit
Surrounded by outcasts and orphans.
And so I have always been a bit melancholy, a bit mournful,
But I never thought of myself as unfortunate.
All that time I was happy.
It was the way people lived.

Never once did I believe that the shattered dreams of fallen things
Would be pieced back together by some benevolent hand.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The River and the Sea” by Abdoul Ali War

May 13, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Patrick Williamson

The sea is first / The sea is mother

That a poem so brief can contain a world may seem incredible to some, but here, Mauritanian poet Abdoul Ali War has accomplished just that. In this poem of fourteen short lines, elegantly translated by Patrick Williamson, Ali War offers a sparing vision of the interplay between river and sea, the water of life and the vast, world-separating lacuna from which all life once came, and to which all will, eventually, return. In a brilliant turn, Ali War inverts the traditional movement between the two forces, positing “The river is a branch / The sea is a tree,” calling our attention to the cyclical processes of the natural world, in which all that we the living depend on emerges from a greater, primordial body. Implicit in the brief, plainspoken lines and lack of punctuation is a deep appreciation for the delicacy of the relationship between these forces; we disregard the river and the sea at our peril. Read on!

The river goes to the sea
The sea has its own
space
It has its own
depth
The sea is first
The sea is mother

READ MORE…