Translations

Translation Tuesday: “The Progress of Josef K.’s Trial and the Appearance of a Tiger Hornet” by Phu Kradat

April 27, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Peera Songkünnatham

Barely had Josef K. begun to touch on the progress of his trial when that one tiger hornet flew into the room.

Why was Kafka’s The Trial never completed? Critic Michael Masiello has suggested that the master chronicler of bureaucracy “struggle[d] to give any beginning-middle-end narrative shape to what is essentially dead and undistinguished time—time spent waiting, vainly seeking answers from different-yet-the-same sources, time lost in futility and longing and empty hope,” adding that Kafka himself probably did not realize how eerily what he conjured would “come to life in our modern bureaucratic hellscapes.” In the following story that takes place in The Trial’s parallel universe, Thai author Phu Kradat skillfully stages an encounter between Josef K. and “you” to reflect Thailand’s political reality in the twenty-first century—one that is similarly pierced with fear and paranoia. By introducing a very local motif—the dangerous tiger hornet—Phu Kradat, who published the story in 2018 in response to the ongoing abuse of judicial power under military rule in Thailand, makes the story fully his own.

Josef K. hobbled his way through the valley to the cement brick cabin where you reside one afternoon, about an hour before a tiger hornet flew right in and precisely ten years after you started residing in this cabin here.

The sunlight scattering in through the breeze block wall that afternoon had exerted itself to the point of fatigue. The lazy coos of the pigeons who shared your roof. The sharp smell of their droppings jabbing at your nostrils. Three geckos lying flat on the wall in serenity. Cobwebs wrapped around corners and breeze blocks just like fishnets expertly set down in the shallows. The cold blast barreling on relentlessly with none of its reputed wind chill effect. You were waking up with a pang of hunger and thirst. With sticky, bleary eyes you sat around in a stupor for a long while. A bitter taste in your mouth lingered from the painkillers you’d consumed before flopping down for a siesta right around noon.

A knock on the door made you get on your feet and shake off your sluggishness. Today was your day off. Same as yesterday and the days before. You had to take a break from your job cutting grass on the eucalyptus plantation after having come down with the flu. You’d remained bedridden for days on end, until today when the fever subsided somewhat. As the door opened, you were taken aback by one small-framed scrawny creature. Popping rib cage. Disheveled hair. Old clothes torn to rags. Strong body odor. A step back to recompose. A silent stare at the visitor’s face. When finally your ability to process returned, enough of it anyway, you asked, “Who are you?”

The gaunt, small-framed man moved his trembling lips and out came in broken syllables:

“Ka . . . My . . . name . . . is . . . Josef . . . Ka . . .”

You stared hard and motionless. Little by little, a story the landowner used to tell you over and over took shape in your mind’s eye. Now filled with certainty you said, “Oh my . . . Ka, it’s you. It’s really you, Josef Ka. You’re still alive?”

In that instant, K. threw himself in your arms. You embraced him in return, still without any explanation from him to clear your suspicion.

After a while, K. slid from the embrace and collapsed in a heap on your feet despite your concerted effort to keep him upright. It was all in vain: there wasn’t enough energy in your limbs. So you dropped to your knees and embraced K. once more.

“Look how skinny you are now. Skin and bones, Ka. I can hardly recognize you.”

Josef K. could only nod with difficulty.

You fetched water for yourself and K. Vitality restored and hunger gone into hiding, you examined every nook and cranny of the man all over again. K. sat with his eyes closed a wingspan away from you in the middle of the stifling room stuffed with a day’s worth of sun rays. The pigeons no longer cooed, though their droppings continued to saturate your nostrils, leaving no hint of K.’s body odor.

Unbelievable. How does a bank accountant with a promising future end up like this? You can’t tell this one apart from a mangy stray dog. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “How I Went to War” by Miguel Gila Cuesta

April 20, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Will Carr

So he said, “Go on, get killing. In this company we kill hard 9:00 to 1:00 and 4:00 to 7:00.”

Gila’s star-making monologue “How I Went to War” (1951) broke a tacit taboo of postwar Spanish society. For twelve years, public discussion of the civil war had limited itself to the Franco regime’s mythos of a Glorious National Uprising, but Gila, with pitch-perfect working-class vernacular, replaced saintly heroes with indignant aunts, petulant commanders, and innocent spies dressed in drag. The diametrical contrast has led critics to hail Gila’s war routines as a comedic takedown of Franco’s official story. And yet the comedian never suffered reprisals—not even when he performed for the Generalissimo himself.

Gila’s comedic monologues present atypical challenges even for translators used to working with humor. Rather than relying on wordplay and culture-specific references, “How I Went to War” creates incongruities through clashes of tone and aspect. The comedian tells his war story in a casual, un-military style. The blue-collar narration and dialogues sometimes morph into exchanges that evoke children playing at soldiers. I’ve attempted to carry over the informal tone of Gila’s oral performances, with his hesitations and false starts, and to choose words and phrasing that would maintain the uncanny juxtapositions of a war narrated as work and play. Part of Gila’s genius is that he crafts a war story in which the words war and killing feel out of place both contextually and grammatically. When he uses matar (kill / killing), he breaks conventions of aspect in the same way that kill does when used instead of work or do (“How you killing?” “Killing good, how about you?”). I’ve tried to surround these words with a consistent baseline of idiomatic speech so that wherever Gila hammers matar into his workaday Spanish, kill fractures U.S. English along similar lines.

–Will Carr, translator

“How I Went to War”[1]

I’m going to tell you the story of how I went to war.[2]

I was working as an errand boy for . . . for some pharmacy warehouses.[3] And one day I accidently broke an aspirin tablet and they fired me.

So I went home and sat down in a chair we had for when we got fired, and my Uncle Cecilio came in with a newspaper with a want ad for the war: “Prominent War Seeks Hardkilling Soldier.” And . . . and my mom said, “You’re quick on the uptake, you should apply.”

And I said, “Me? Why do I have to go to war?”

She said, “Well you have to work somewhere.”

So I said, “But I . . . I don’t kill so good.”

She said, “They . . . they’ll teach you to kill good soon enough.”

Then my aunt said, “But now we’re going to have to buy him a horse.”

And my . . . my mom said, “Nonsense, the army gives you one when you join up.”

My aunt says, “No thank you, God knows who’s been sitting on that thing. He’s better off packing his own horse.”

So we went to buy a horse, but you couldn’t buy them separate. You had to get the cart and the flies with it.

And my mom said, “No, you’re not bringing flies to the war. At least as a foot soldier you’ll keep things clean.”

So I packed myself a hot lunch and went off to war. I showed up Monday at 7:00 AM, and the war was closed because it was too early. And there was this lady outside selling churros and bread and stuff. And I said, “Hey, is this the war of ’14?”

And she said, “This is ’16; ’14’s just down the street.”

So I went to the other war, and when they opened the war at 9:00 I went in. And there was this soldier killing there. I said, “How . . . how you killing?”

He says, “Killing good, how about you?”

I said, “Me, not too good right now, but once I get trained up . . .”[4] READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Swings” by Oswaldo Estrada

April 13, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Sarah Pollack

Sometimes Sophie calls me mamá. Poor thing. She gets confused, even though my skin’s as dark as my luck.

Oswaldo Estrada’s story, “The Swings,” is one of twelve pieces of short fiction from his 2020 collection Las locas ilusiones y otros relatos de migración [Wild Dreams and Other Stories of Migration], winner of the International Latino and Latin American Book Fair Prize at Tufts. “The Swings” poignantly captures the dilemma of mothers who care for other women’s babies in order to support their own sons and daughters whom they have had to leave behind. The narration stitches together snippets of conversation over time of an anonymous nanny from Mexico who speaks with a new nanny at the park where they push “their kids” on the swings. The story offers haunting insight into the offloading of domestic labor and love to vulnerable immigrant women. I find particularly compelling Estrada’s representation of the paradoxical monetizing and stigmatization of Spanish, and the precarious position of caregivers who simultaneously need to forge a strong bond with children while never posing an emotional threat to the parents who employ them. In translating this story, I was challenged to find a balanced oral register with a decidedly Mexican lexicon. It was a rare pleasure to revise this translation with Estrada in a gentle back-and-forth process befitting the title of the story.

—Sarah Pollack, translator

Each generation paints them
a different color
(highlighting their childhood)
but leaving them as they are

—Fabio Morábito “The Swings”

 

I like these cold, early mornings, bathed in sunlight. The trees begin to fill with a pretty green, and even the park seems painted a different color. Maybe it’s all the kids who are drawn outside after the winter, like birds leaving their nests. Those who were crawling only a few months ago are already walking, and those who barely toddled around like ducks are now up to mischief.

You’re new, right? From miles away, it’s easy to see that you’ve just arrived. Here, we all know each other. My girl’s the little blonde running around over there. How old is yours? She’s still in diapers? You should take them off, take advantage that it’s hot. Trust me. Here they train them when they’re about to go to school. Some baloney that children will let you know when they’re ready. That it’s best not to rush them. That they’ll be traumatized. Nonsense. Look at them. Little whoppers with shit up their backs. It doesn’t bother you now, but imagine in a year.

I trained mine in a week. Because it was summer, I put her in undies. That’s how they learn. They feel when they’ve wet themselves and don’t like it, and they’re the ones that ask to be taken to the bathroom. She doesn’t even wear a diaper at night. She wakes herself up, runs to the toilet and goes back to sleep. I hear her because my room is next to hers, but I don’t get up. You have to teach them when they’re young.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Vanished City Hall” by Zsolt Bajnai

April 6, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Diana Senechal

But, well, in the last decades so many beautiful and interesting things have vanished from our midst.

I first read “The Vanished City Hall” one extremely foggy morning, on Mr. Bajnai’s historical blog, as I was just waking up. We had had a series of foggy days, so when I came to the part that mentioned the fog—“With regard to the disappearance of the Szolnok city hall, it is worth noting that that weekend was especially cold and so foggy that you couldn’t even see Kossuth Square from the nearby buildings”—I began to wonder whether this had actually happened: whether the city hall had been taken away and I simply hadn’t noticed. As I read further, I found more and more hints that this was a satire (for one thing, it was assigned to the blog’s “Szolnok Stories” category), but on my way to work, I bicycled by the city hall just to make sure. By then the fog had lifted, and the domes glistened in the sun. When translating this story, I tried to convey both the rhythm of the language and the bizarre plausibility of the plot. The former required rearrangement of the sentences at times; the latter required colloquial flexibility. I strove to convey not only the events, but the many voices of the many characters, from the anonymous complainant to the “ridiculed local architect-historian.” I enjoyed the time spent with the words and hope that the English translation will reach many readers.

—Diana Senechal, translator

By Monday morning Szolnok’s city hall had disappeared. To wit: on the plot at the corner of Kossuth Square and Táncsics Street, on the flattened, muddy soil, nothing was left but some construction debris and truck tire marks. And the worn metal fence, which had been erected around the building as early as Friday. What had become of the building was anyone’s guess.

“On Friday afternoon we noticed some people putting up a fence around the city hall,” said a resident of the house across Kossuth Square who requested anonymity. “It didn’t even occur to us that something fishy was up. We thought they were re-renovating the building. My wife even said that this was Brussels all over again. She meant that the union must have funded some newfangled idiocy.”

From neighboring Táncsics Street, on Friday afternoon, someone started placing phone calls to various authorities. He called the police, public places, even the city hall, because, according to later hearsay, he was furious that people would operate enormous machines on the weekend in downtown Szolnok. After the fence-builders left, the excavators, conveyed in the same trailer to the site, got down to work. In retrospect, you could deduce that the perpetrators had been playing it safe. Their demolition of the city hall, built in 1884, began from the courtyard. This way, until Sunday evening, locals could sense that something was happening behind this neoclassical building’s street facades only because huge dump trucks turned up in great density, plowing the cobblestone roads not only around Táncsics street, but around the theatre and Verseghy Park.

The police told the caller on Friday afternoon that this case was outside of their purview until blood flowed or a crime was committed. True, they had sent a patrol once or twice to the site because of the noise. It could later be gleaned from the reports that each time they came, they warned the noisemakers to knock it off, and each time they received a promise in return. So after the fourth or fifth call, the Miskolc center no longer forwarded the notices to Szolnok. They later explained that after so many calls they began to suspect a prank.

With regard to the disappearance of the Szolnok city hall, it is worth noting that that weekend was especially cold and so foggy that you couldn’t even see Kossuth Square from the nearby buildings. Not only that, but it just so happens that this, the city’s main square, is basically deserted except during Advent and a few summer weekends, so hardly anyone heads there on non-workdays. Still more important—and a ridiculed local architect-historian brought this to our attention years ago—is that Szolnok has long been accustomed to weekend demolitions, old buildings disappearing, all sorts of investment projects without any advance announcement or on-site notice. Later it turned out that the perpetrators knew about none of this yet benefited from it. “Probably all of this started with a real estate sale contract that had been switched with another by mistake,” stated the police officer originally in charge of the investigation, who was convinced he had been fired on the go because the facts—forget about how much time he had put into assembling them—seemed so incredible that those with a stake in covering up the case could easily chalk them up to incompetence. “The contract of sale for the apartment building at Kossuth Square 7-8 was carelessly replaced at some time or other with the decades-older contract for number 9, and thus only the transfer of Kossuth Square 9 was valid. This faulty contract then ended up, through an inheritance lawsuit, in the hands of a resourceful local lawyer, who was up to his neck in debt, from which he essentially released himself through the sale of the city hall.” In the former policeman’s seemingly unbelievable report, it appears that, with the sale contract that he had acquired for pennies, the lawyer paid off Serbian creditors, who in turn paid Bulgarian human smugglers with the title to a larger building in the center of an unknown Hungarian city. Later the property, which had never actually been seen by anyone in this succession of deals, and which in the meantime had been described as a “nineteenth-century eclectic office building,” went on paper in a thick dossier to an investor, and from him to an Austrian financial institution as collateral for defaulted loans. Then, during the bank’s year-end balance beautification process, thanks to a recommendation prepared by a Hungarian junior clerk working in Austria and supplemented with photos, topographic identifier, and building history, a Hungarian big businessman became the owner of that basemented, storied, domed building. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Berliner Maqama, or The Hitchhiker from Heidelberg” by Haytham El-Wardany

March 30, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Katharine Halls

The bald man didn’t talk much but he was a big smoker, and he kept rolling spliffs, one after another

The maqama is a trickster tale genre from the classical Arabic tradition. In the Maqamat of Badi’ al-Zaman al-Hamadhani—from whose ‘Maqama of the Blind’ the verses at the end of this text are taken—the itinerant narrator reports from towns and cities across the Middle East and Central Asia, encountering the mysterious rogue Abu al-Fath in a different guise each time. The challenge of evoking this intertextuality and the stylistic specifics of the maqama (which is traditionally written in rhymed prose, a feature that El-Wardany gently plays with here, and like premodern Arabic writing more generally, is not punctuated) offered the opportunity to experiment with visual presentation and stylistic eclecticism in the English translation.

—Katharine Halls, translator

Having travelled a great distance we stopped for a break, took refuge in a petrol station where we filled up the tank and emptied our bladders and stretched our stiff muscles until, refreshed, we got back in the car, determined to cover what distance remained  My wife took the wheel, it being her turn, and before she started the engine she said, Let us roll a spliff, which we did, but then as she turned the key to start the ignition a man appeared, I don’t know where from, bald and clean-shaven and wearing a jacket, and flagged us down, Are you going to Berlin? and we were, we said, so begging our kindness he asked for a lift        I looked at my wife and my wife looked at me, and then, decided, we looked back, Jump in—as long as you’re not a highwayman, God forbid, so he fetched two huge bags from the verge, loaded up, and sat down beside them and then we set off.

The air in the car took a turn for the cagey, for here we were all of a sudden with a stranger          We didn’t know who he was or where he was going, he just sat in the back seat not saying a word, and but for the eyes of the oncoming cars which flashed past like ghosts, it was silent and dark            Then when I glanced across at my wife, I saw she was lighting the spliff we’d just rolled, and it surprised me to see she’d decided to impose this habit of ours on the car as a whole, but no sooner had we taken a puff or two than our bald companion leant forward and plucked it from our hands, saying Man! What a friend for the road. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “a wicked king” by Lucia Marchetti

March 23, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Julia Pelosi-Thorpe and Ligia Pelosi

With Italy in lockdown again as it battles a third wave of COVID-19, Lucia Marchetti urges hope in the following response to the pandemic.

For two and a half months last year, we curated the series: In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak, featuring writers from Argentina to Portugal to Hong Kong. One year on, with Italy in lockdown again as it battles a third wave of COVID-19, we present another piece responding to the pandemic, tinged with hope, by Italian poet Lucia Marchetti in the endangered language of al djalètt pramzàn, spoken in the province of Parma in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region. This poem was published as a voice recording by local newspaper La Gazzetta di Parma at the pandemic’s outbreak last year. Co-translator Julia Pelosi-Thorpe writes: “In it, Marchetti describes COVID as the crown (wordplay with ‘corona,’ ‘crown’ in Italian) on the head of a wicked king. This poem is co-translated by me and my mother, Ligia Pelosi. She grew up near Parma, and migrated with my nonni to Naarm (now known as Melbourne), where I was born, as a young teenager. After I produced a first full draft, my mother and I listened together, capturing any missed or misheard words. I then revised the piece into a final draft.” 

 

a wicked king

reviews a not-too-distant world

a bad king 👑corona👑 on his head

sowed death

among humans

swelling like a moonlit tide and all

the population were divided friends

and kin watching one another from a distance

here a situation very grey yet king

with his 👑corona👑 still advancing

advancing bringing grief and ruin

and bit by bit the people were dismayed

then when they really understood

their lesson all was suddenly recalled

so many seaside trips recalled lovely trips

up and down the mountains and their unrest

to find a place to live a cornucopia

they realised happiness had

been close in so many moments

wishing to go back

from the bottom of their hearts feeling the burst again

wishing to tell all they love them

to embrace the first person found along the street as if a cousin

to celebrate a life renewed

 

Translated from al djalètt pramzàn by Ligia Pelosi and Julia Anastasia Pelosi-Thorpe

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “For T. Tranströmer” by Bei Dao

March 16, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Jonathan Chan

memory of a hurtling night train, how has/it caught up to the darkness ahead?

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we celebrate the start of National Poetry Month (U.S. and Canada) with an ode from one of China’s greatest contemporary poets to one of Sweden’s. Bei Dao’s “For T. Tranströmer” recounts the sights and sounds of Tomas Tranströmer’s home life while channeling the concrete, narrative accessibility of the Nobel laureate’s work. Like a sequence of developing photos, Bei Dao’s vivid imagery creates snapshots that are dreamlike yet somehow worldly: the poet’s creative “center” is likened to echoing church bells and dancing headless angels, while the subject’s piano (a well-known source of solace for the late poet) sits atop a cliff and produces a “roar like thunder.” The subject’s “blue home” (which we also see in Bei Dao’s essay collection Blue House, a philosophical memoir which details his visits with Tranströmer) becomes the setting of a poet’s silent sanctuary—a place where music, poetry, and nature coexist. The artistic comradery between these two literary giants is a fitting launch to National Poetry Month as we recognize the international kinship between poets and translators.

For T. Tranströmer’

you place the final line of a poem
in your heart, locked. that is your center,
like the echo of ringing church bells
or the moment when the headless angels
begin to dance. you have held your balance.

your piano sits perched on a cliff, its
audience gripped, tighter and tighter, by a roar
like thunder, its keys roused to sprint. your
memory of a hurtling night train, how has
it caught up to the darkness ahead? READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: from Pork Ribs by Amarylis de Gryse

March 9, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Jenny Watson

There are few things sadder than a launderette. It’s the perfect place to cry your eyes out without anyone disturbing you.

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a seemingly mundane chore adds to a woman’s existential frustration in this painfully funny excerpt from Amarylis de Gryse’s 2020 debut novel, Pork Ribs. Translator Jenny Watson contextualizes the excerpt’s place in the story: “In the aftermath of her breakup with Blok, the favoured son of a family of butchers, narrator Marieke finds herself living in a hire car in the middle of a heatwave, reflecting on the failure of their relationship, her childhood at the mercy of her mother’s depression and emotional abuse, and her private history of disordered eating.” In the following passage, Marieke finds herself in a no-win situation as a laundromat’s unforgiving policies place her in a nearly Kafkaesque level of bureaucratic helplessness. As misfortunes compile, we’re taken on a narrative journey through minor tragedies in the shadow of major tragedies, shedding light into the humorous but heartbroken mind of our protagonist. As Watson writes in her introduction: “Through her subtle narration, wry humour and flights into vivid fantasy, Amarylis de Gryse offers a raw and moving depiction of shame, love, and human relationships that feels especially pertinent in the context of contemporary fat liberation movements and renewed interest in trauma and physical health.” A tragicomic gem from a rising star of Flemish literature.

As soon as I reach the town centre, a wall of heat hits me through the car window. I could have hired one with air conditioning but I would only have been able to keep it until tomorrow. I drive onto the roundabout, past the primary school and Bermuda’s, the laundrette. I lost all my summer clothes in there yesterday. Maybe “lost” isn’t the right word. I know exactly where they are: in the far recesses of the shop, inside the second to last washing machine.

*

There are few things sadder than a launderette. It’s the perfect place to cry your eyes out without anyone disturbing you. When I went in yesterday, there was an old man there. He was wearing a white vest with a brown stain, and watching the flat screen TV above the washing machines from an uninviting sofa. I suspected it was gravy, the mark on his vest, and wondered why he hadn’t put it in the wash. He looked at me as if he’d heard me thinking.

“Customers doing their washing have priority over the dryer,” he said. He pointed to a sign on the wall that said exactly the same thing.

“I know,” I said. “I’m here for the washer too.”

I smiled but he didn’t. Instead, he tilted his chin back up towards the television, a gesture of disdain rather than necessity, and kept his eyes locked on the screen from then on. On it, people on mute were kissing. I went over to the second machine from the back, heaved a knot of fusty clothes from my cardboard moving box, extricated the underwear, T-shirts and dresses and stuffed them into the drum. I probably should have divvied them up between two machines, but I had just enough change for one wash and one drying cycle. I could feel the old man’s eyes drilling into my back. His arms were probably folded over his big belly in contempt, the stain on his vest still visible.

“It’s quiet in here today,” I called over my shoulder but he didn’t answer so I gave up, walked back to the front of the shop in silence, bought soap and fabric softener from the vending machine, then dropped my coins into the slot on the washer and slid my box in front of it. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Eternal Children” by Satomi Hara

March 2, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Toshiya Kamei

My cells would be cared for and fed to form another human being. Eventually, they would attend school and grow into components forming the system.

This week’s Translation Tuesday presents a coming-of-age science fiction drama from an emerging voice in Japanese literature. Translator and Asymptote contributor Toshiya Kamei introduces this week’s feature: “Set in the near future, Satomi Hara’s ‘Eternal Children’ depicts the subtle, subdued interaction between two adolescents on the eve of their graduation. Trapped within the confines of the dormitory, the ungendered narrator quietly examines their own existence while gazing at their classmate, who dances outside in a carefree manner. Each word, each glance, and each motion become replete with significance. The dormitory setting and somewhat unreliable narration carry echoes of other works in the genre such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. The world created merely with 4,000 Japanese characters lingers in the reader’s mind long after this brief tale concludes.”

One hour after lights-out, I still tossed in bed. Usually, I’d drift into sleep as soon as I pulled my comforter over my head. Something stirred outside the window, and I strained my ears. It wasn’t B7. They snored and gritted their teeth. It wasn’t D25 either. D25 was a sound sleeper and almost always slept through till morning.

Out of habit, I hesitated to peek outside. If somebody found out I was still awake, I’d get into serious trouble. But I decided to peek outside anyway. By this time tomorrow, I would no longer be a student here. Nobody could punish me then. Nothing mattered anymore. I pulled the thick beige curtain open slightly.

It was you, A1. You danced around the pond in the middle of the yard.

You moved your long, sinewy limbs while gliding through the darkness with carefree abandon.

Your graceful movements exuded childlike innocence, and yet, at the same time, reminded me of a fragile work of art.

I held my breath and watched you dance the night away.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Happy Now?” by Merav Zaks-Portal

February 23, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Yaron Regev

I kick the skies with my voice. What do you care? A drop of rain, that’s all I’m asking for. But they just don’t care.

A woman’s impious plea for rain yields calamity in Merav Zaks-Portal’s short story “Happy Now?”, our pick for this week’s Translation Tuesday. Drawing upon the Talmudic story of Ḥoni HaMe’aggel’s rain prayer, our protagonist ensconces herself within her own circle of protest in hopes of similarly ending a drought. Our protagonist’s lofty but aggrieved voice accentuates the story’s humour, though it also provides an ironic moral lesson, cleverly toying with the cliché when it rains, it pours. We’re also treated to a more concrete lesson: never leave your stove unattended.  

They sent this message to Ḥoni HaMe’aggel: Pray, and rain will fall. He prayed, but no rain fell. He drew a circle in the dust and stood inside it
(Taanit 23a, The William Davidson Talmud)

I stir in the electrified air all around me. Prickles in my hands hint at coming rain. I lubricate my raspy throat with my tongue and wait. Wailing birds zigzag in the sky, carving across the canopy of blue hung out to dry by some careless housewife, pockmarked with cloud droppings. Electricity tingles in my hands, legs, bristling the blonde spikes of hair I’d pampered myself with. The news cricket claims the lack of rain is here to stay. Unless something drastic happens, he stresses in his tele-prompter voice, this will be declared a drought year. I entwine, then, abandon an onion to the fire, and go out to the garden to ring-a-ring o’ roses.

The earth is scorched, a cat pants in the shade, its tongue lolling. Wild pansies despairingly clasp each other in a flowerpot. With my kitchen knife, I lovingly draw a generous circle. I will remain inside, like Honi the Circle-Maker. Pleading, I will remain here until the heavens yield, cleave, bring a downpour on our heads. Honi, I beg, throw us a hint, grant me some wisdom. What am I, a long-haired, narrow-minded woman, to do? But Honi is silent, not a word, and I am still encircled, and the sun climbs the ladder of hours in sticky, yolky-yellow, stopping for nothing. And why would the sun, that son of a bitch, even care about some Honi-woman stranded in a circle, begging for rain, just a little, even a crumb, so she can go inside and weave back the day that was suddenly undone by the resolute-toned radio transistor. “Here is the news.”
READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from The Melee by Valentina Maini

February 16, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Sean McDonagh

The morning is a badly drawn sunrise, there are clumps of light to the left of the scene, the canvas is lacerated in several points.

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a young woman loses her hold on reality in the aftermath of her family’s personal and political turmoil in this excerpt from Valentina Maini’s critically-acclaimed 2020 novel, The Melee. Translator Sean McDonagh introduces us to the novel’s protagonists: “Gorane and Jokin are twenty-five-year-old twins and children of ETA militants. Raised without rules, they take opposing and complementary directions: compliant and passive to everything, Jokin, a heroin-addict drummer, seems to follow in his parents’ footsteps, while Gorane, ambiguous and introverted, pulls away seeking refuge in an abstract world. When Jokin runs away and their parents become involved in a tragic event, Gorane finds herself prey to strange hallucinations of her parents.” In the following passage, we see Gorane’s dreamlike world through a powerfully-voiced omniscient narration. Childhood memories careen into present-day hallucinations as we veer further into first person—and deeper into the world of an unstable and unreliable narrator. This meandering stream of consciousness takes life through Maini’s virtuosic prose and masterful ability to warp perspective across numerous narrative threads. A lyrically stunning debut novel from an award-winning poet.

from The Melee

They say they don’t need medicine, they keep repeating that they’re healed. They look at her as if they were thirsty, but as soon as Gorane offers them a glass of water, they shake their heads and say: take us home. It’s impossible to make them stop. She signs some sort of verification form with her typically illegible handwriting. The nurse is called Robledo, she has blonde hair gathered in a bun and white latex gloves. Robledo is an open and frivolous surname that weighs a lot less than hers. It’s the surname of someone who cures. The border between Robledo and Moraza is that between Spain and her home planted in the land they call Euskadi. She moves closer to the first bed, her mother’s. As soon as Gorane comes to a halt, her mother raises herself into a seated position. The strain of that elementary motion moves her face, it seems to detach from the neck, distancing itself and fluctuating in the ether like a fish with no eyes. Gorane follows it with her gaze, she almost doesn’t speak, the fish doesn’t see but continues to swim in the air as if it knew by heart every angle of the hospital bedroom, as if its instinct was enough to give it faith, to not lose itself. This is her mother, this blind fish. Then she sees her father curled up on his side, she sees his incredibly lean and broad back and she thinks of the Oma Forest. In her poor repertoire of metaphors, her father was always a tree trunk, an oak. Gorane is a slender and dry branch that won’t break off. Gorane has spent her life fearing the foot that will break the equilibrium, split the frond; the blood of the branch that will sully the earth like an ancient tear. Her blood is now stone because of a sadistic sprite that has tested its pointless powers on her. She touches the cold shoulder of her father who wears a white t-shirt with red hand-drawn writing. The writing proclaims revolutionary words that she knows off by heart and no longer wants to hear. There’s a twisted snake that wraps itself around a badly drawn axe. They will spare her yet another political tirade, the identity that must form itself and grow through the political, which is nothing without a slogan on its backside. Eyes that shine for other people’s words in which to recognise themselves forever. To learn by heart: shout in unison, and keep the rhythm by clapping your hands. Finished sentences, in protest if possible. Without this you are nothing and you can never articulate the revival of your people towards liberty. But this time, her parents don’t attack with the usual slogans because they are tired, because the exertions don’t help to obstruct the path to a swollen body. It’s a kind of struggle that they don’t know, the one against the body that rots. She goes into the bathroom and washes her hands. The first time for Mum who, blind, slams against the furniture of the hospital bedroom, smiling still, saying everything is fine. A second splash for the back of Dad, his wooden head hidden within his jet black hair. The water will wash away all of the sins, if the job is done meticulously, if Gorane will commit herself to scrub at length, to not leave anything to chance and to the stupid belief that a handful of prayers will be enough to receive pardon. She returns to the room where her parents watch each other, smiling, continuing to talk quietly, or to sing. Gorane would like to tell them that the only reasonable option is rest, to close their eyes and await what passes, what heals, but she says it in silence, to herself, before her mother and her father disappear, engulfed by the first, then by the second swollen eyelid.

They walk side by side along the hospital corridor, Gorane keeps her right hand in her father’s left, her left hand in her mother’s right. The beaten bodies are theirs, but it is Gorane who staggers. Strength is applied to the legs, she squeezes her parent’s fingers, which barely reciprocate. The patrons, the relatives of the sick, the patients, watch only her at the centre of that human line that proceeds like an army in an on-the-ground conflict.

“We’ll need to take public transport, you shouldn’t put yourselves under too much strain.”

Gorane pronounces the words in slow motion, expanding each syllable, she makes every consonant snap as if to stamp it in the air, indelible. She continues to look in front of her, the panorama changes, the people enlarge, her body is as weak as theirs.

“We want to walk” they say in unison. “We need to walk.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Fragrance” by S. Vijayalakshmi

February 9, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Thila Varghese

the desire to share everything/stimulated the conversation/while the voice inside cautioned to wait

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, the promises of a domestic paradise belie a need for defendable boundaries in S. Vijayalakshmi’s poem “Fragrance.” We’re guided through a surreal mosaic of images that juxtapose lofty abstraction with quotidian concreteness: the soul leans against the door of a domestic threshold, time (itself concretized in clock hands) peeks and laughs, paradise beckons like a salesperson, and possible lives are stars that bloom corporeally with fragrance. The speaker’s interlocutor, described as having the disarming veneer of a wise man, evokes a sense of risk and relatability—his very speech is depicted as unusually cloying (honey drops with sweeteners) and performative (“courtesy words,” “mask having sloughed off”). Yet the speaker’s trepidation is expressed by dramatic, even violent metaphors: a circus ring of fire, a standoff requiring bullet-proof vests. Through its ironically “delicate” title, S. Vijayalakshmi’s poem confronts the ungentle truths of relationships, vulnerability, and possibility.

Fragrance

The conversation proceeded very smoothly.
In the voice that was preaching to me
like a profoundly wise man,
honey drops were mixed with sweeteners.
The figure hiding behind the rough voice
smiled, the mask having sloughed off.
The night breeze gathered up
the courtesy words and left.
As the desire to share everything
stimulated the conversation
while the voice inside cautioned to wait,
the clock hand peeked out
to check whether everything was going well
and laughed.
Within the boundaries of the conversation,
a thousand bouquets
extended their welcome.
A paradise opened and invited me,
like a sales agent, to come in.
Leaning against the door,
my soul struggled with the weight
of the boundary line’s bouquets,
unable to bear the load.
Even as I contemplated on
which foot to put forward first
to step into the door of the paradise,
an oracle declared,
“Enough with your cautionary instinct and analysis;
just discard them and come in.”
What to do with all the fragrances
from the countless stars
that bloomed within me?
Again, I draw a line.
The flames are burning
like those on the line of a circus ring of fire.
You seem to appear the same as I do,
and both of us are wearing bulletproof vests.
The bullets are waiting
in the tidal wave of conflicts. READ MORE…

A Tribute to Antonín J. Liehm

February 4, 2021  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Aleksander Kaczorowski and Julia Sherwood

I couldn’t have wished for a more ideal guide to Czech history and culture than A.J. Liehm.

Czech journalist Antonín J. Liehm was a leading public intellectual who passed away on December 4, 2020, aged ninety-six. One of the movers and shakers of the cultural and political ferment of the Prague Spring, he left the country after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, and it was largely thanks to Liehm’s tireless work in exile that essays by Václav Havel and many other Czech authors reached readers in Western Europe and the United States before 1989. To help bridge the gap between the East and the West, he founded the ground-breaking journal Lettre International, which in its heyday appeared in thirteen different countries and languages. In this essay, Polish writer and journalist Aleksander Kaczorowski pays tribute to his mentor.

In the spring of 1992 my wife and I went to Sofia for our honeymoon. Don’t ask why, of all places, we picked Sofia: it was a random choice, yet one resulting in one of the major discoveries of my younger years. It was there, in the Bulgarian capital, at the Czech Centre, that I stumbled across a book that I bought and virtually devoured before our holiday was over.

The book, Generace (A Generation), was a collection of interviews with Czech and Slovak writers that was finally able to appear in Czechoslovakia, after a twenty-year delay. It featured many authors whom I had already come to love and whose books had enticed me to study Czech language and literature at Warsaw University: Milan Kundera, Josef Škvorecký, and Václav Havel, as well as many others whose work I would get to know only later, like Ivan Klíma and Ludvík Vaculík, or the great Slovak writer Dominik Tatarka. Many of them had joined the communist party in their youth, and in these interviews conducted by Liehm between 1963 and 1968, they take a critical look at their own involvement, as well as the contemporary social and political situation in Czechoslovakia. They called for political changes (many of them did indeed play a key role in the Prague Spring of 1968) but what interested me most was what they had to say at the time about literature, the sources of their literary inspiration, and their own plans. In particular, the interview with Kundera—whom Liehm had met when they were both young, their friendship lasting nearly seventy years, until his death—was full of extraordinarily interesting biographical details that are hard to find in later interviews with the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the book became unacceptable to the censors. Instead of Prague, it first appeared in Paris in 1970, together with a lengthy preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. German, English, Spanish, and Japanese editions soon followed. Over the next twenty years, several of the writers featured in the book achieved world-wide fame. However, until I encountered in Sofia the reissued Czech edition of A Generation published in 1990, I knew next to nothing about the man who had conducted the interviews: the Czech exile journalist Antonín J. Liehm. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Oyster Pond” by Xosé Anxelu Gutiérrez Morán

February 2, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Xosé Anxelu Gutiérrez Morán

When I swallow saliva I can feel / how it rained the afternoon I first knew about you.

Memories of a family outing are preserved for posterity in Xosé Anxelu Gutiérrez Morán’s “Oyster Pond,” this week’s Translation Tuesday selection. Our speaker’s second-person address captures the intimacy and awe of a parent-child relationship, here a one-sided epistolary written for a hypothetical being (the future adult) recording the experiences of an actual being (the present child). The recurring images of wetness—foam, rain, saliva, the sea—evoke images of nascent life and mimic the ebb and flow of a child’s mind (e.g., the “life or death” urgency of collecting beads). At the metapoetic level, the gift our speaker offers the child is placed into the interim care of the reader—we are witnesses and keepers of a private and cherished memory.

Oyster Pond

To Nora, barely two years old

You are not going to remember this moment,
that is why I am writing it down for you.
You do not know either that you have
all your memory to celebrate
while you bring us
more beads for a necklace
as if your life depended on them. READ MORE…