This week’s Translation Tuesday brings you three poems from Romanian poet Traian T. Coșovei (1954-2014), a member of the 1980s generation of poets and a major influence on postmodern Romanian poetry. Of note in these selections is Coșovei’s use of indentation to flout the margin’s gravity, thereby providing the reader a sense of movement; given the speaker’s fixation on static moments in time, this motion feels paradoxical and almost dizzying. In “The Accursed Wheel,” the poet uses repetition, visceral and kinetic imagery, and rhythmic indentation to replicate a sense of thwarted progress. In “State of Mind,” autumnal imagery locates our speaker’s love amidst an awareness of the violent history that surrounds him. And in “The Last Supper,” a moment of heartbreak is preserved like a holy image when a scene of contemporary, mundane occurrences unfolds within a lover’s recollection as something almost eternal–again, repetition is deftly deployed to convey the speaker’s sense of temporality.
Translations
Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Traian T. Coșovei
This autumn has dyed all the lovers in the park yellow
Translation Tuesday: “Whalesong” by Aurélia Lassaque
And her child would have asked her one day why isn’t the Earth called Sea when it’s covered by all that water?
In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a mother’s heartbreak echoes the mournful music of the Earth in Aurélia Lassaque’s hybrid story “Whalesong.” Our protagonist is a prodigious scholar processing a loss so excruciating and traumatic that our narrator frames it via global atrocities and cataclysms. The Earth’s persistent gravity seems absurd, even obscene. Mass extinctions are viewed as unimportant. Through the speaker’s close-third reveries, we witness the massacre of the French Cathars—a gnostic community burned alive by the Church—and meditate upon the world’s cruelty as their ashes are washed away by a seemingly divine rain. Even the sea’s withdrawal evokes a desert’s emptiness. Excerpted from Lassaque’s forthcoming novel, “Whalesong” marries poetry with music, verse with prose—its aural artistry is preserved and accented by Madeleine Campbell’s exquisite translation, which strategically leaves passages in French, Occitan, and Latin to preserve bits of the source language’s sound. Just as our protagonist writes love poems in Occitan (the “language of secrets”), Lassaque’s prose itself reads like verse. A hauntingly beautiful selection by a contemporary troubadour.
She doesn’t know what to pack in her suitcase . . . Toothpaste. A translucent comb with a broken tooth.
When do milk teeth start to grow in? Why this amnesia of our early years? Why don’t our memories reach back to our birth? We are born, and then we step out on a tightrope without a net. We survive infancy. It takes so much effort there’s no room left to remember them. No room either for the future save for the thirst.
What is she to do with all the things they’ve given her? If only she could track the objects passing from nursery to nursery, outgrown in a matter of weeks. Why do people discard them so readily? What would a map of their journey look like?
She has fluoride toothpaste. She thinks it’s silly to deny herself a microwave yet use a toothpaste that causes cancer.
To lose your parents is to become an orphan. To lose your child, what is that? Why is there no word to express it?
*
Outside, it’s pelting down. In the South it rains less than in Paris. The rain is striking. In the tongue of Oc they say it’s raining millstones, raining anvils. A Christian god wouldn’t pelt them with anvils. Mind you . . . He did allow men, women, and children to gather in his temple, be massacred in his temple, even though the stones bleached out, all the blood had dried off centuries ago. That god had let it be known: Kill them all, God will know His own. The river of blood might be flowing still. There may be the odd mistake. A tiny martyr disappears down the river. Does God really welcome all innocents? The god who imposes baptism to save one’s soul, what does he do with the stillborn?
Dehors il pleut à coup de pelles. Plòu a palas.
It’s raining shovels. READ MORE…
Translation Tuesday: “The Tide of Time . . . and the Phone Receiver” by Ping Lu
The floor is slippery, take it slow, one step at a time, let’s go a little slower.
For this week’s Translation Tuesday, writer and cultural critic Ping Lu illustrates the power of unspoken familial love in her memoiristic essay “The Tide of Time . . . and the Phone Receiver.” Through a sequence of personal anecdotes about the speaker’s stoic parents, we witness how a natural anxiety over the aging process can beget silence and emotionally oblique conversations. Affection is unuttered but demonstrably present through the speaker’s physical acts of care; in turn, her parents pass over the harsh truths of aging in silence, their aches and injuries covered as much as possible by a loving pride.
On the phone, Mother casually tells me that her back hurts. Then: an abrupt yelp, and I can clearly hear the phone being dropped, falling and landing, somewhere.
Mother has probably turned to talk with Father. One moment she is speaking to me, and the next, to him—it’s perfectly integrated, the flow of words seamlessly maintained. And where did the phone land? In the gaps between the cushions of the couch? On the corner of the coffee table? Or did it slip down to the floor? Mother won’t remember to pick it back up—she has all but forgotten the receiver, and the fact that I’m still on this side of the phone call. I can only keep my hold on the phone, waiting patiently, afraid that she will later remember and resume our previous conversation.
At my end of the receiver, as I wait, I hear it, with startling clarity: her conversation with Father.
In truth, it’s nothing much. Mother continues to talk about her sore back; their dialogue centers around domestic trivialities.
With my ear pasted to the phone, I become suddenly aware that I am eavesdropping, and that this doesn’t seem ethical. I want to put down the phone, but at the same time I feel a compulsion to continue. What if, after a while, Mother again picks up the receiver only find that I’m not here? READ MORE…
Translation Tuesday: Selections from A Woman Awaiting (The pandemic from a garret) by Agnieszka Taborska
When the world goes back to 'normal,' how quickly will we regain middle age?
Writer, translator, and scholar Agnieszka Taborska reflects upon the literary and historical precedents of the global lockdown in these excerpts from A Woman Awaiting (The pandemic from a garret), our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. In coping with the trauma and uncertainty of the current pandemic, Taborska offers a bookish yet personal perspective, one informed by an expansive breadth of literary knowledge as well as familial accounts of another historical tragedy: the Nazi occupation of Poland. Paradoxically, the speaker’s isolation takes us on a necessarily cosmopolitan journey through books, recontextualizing the pandemic through the lenses of Gabriel García Márquez, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Bram Stoker, and Spalding Gray, among others. With candid, irreverent wit, Taborska chronicles her daily thoughts about the absurdities, losses, and shared anxieties of our current global crisis.
What was a day, measured for instance from the moment you sat down to your midday meal to the return of that same moment twenty-four hours later?
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain [1]
Friday, April 3
With every passing day our activities take on more of the characteristics of ritual. In the morning we top up the humidifiers on our radiators, rolling up the blinds to let the plants soak up the sun from the first minute, and wiping down with a wet cloth the leaves that haven’t had time to gather dust since we last cleaned them. For the umpteenth time we move the flowerpots around to make their residents feel as comfortable as possible. The tiles, the bathroom, the bathtub, and sink have been scrubbed raw. We recall with relief that there are still windows to be cleaned. We have shifted the furniture around, surprising ourselves with the audacity of our experimental solutions. Our new routine makes us laugh at the previous one. We strive to create hothouse conditions in our limited space. When all this is over, will we deliberately let our flat go to seed? Will we stick to a daily agenda or—on the contrary—will we turn day into night, drop in on our friends unannounced, wake up our neighbours by playing loud music at dawn, will we ditch every schedule?
The habit of checking the weather forecast is now a thing of the past. The degree of air pollution has also become irrelevant. A million dollars to anyone who, asked out of the blue, can name today’s date and day of the week without having to stop and think. On the other hand, we are getting expert at telling the hour. We have our hand on the pulse. We are aware of the days getting longer. We are familiar with the path of the rays of the sun as they move across the floor. We could tell the shadows out in the street where and how far to fall.
Our window looks out onto a small grocery store. We have noticed a pattern: young people go in wearing gloves and face masks, the old behave as if nothing was happening. Our activist neighbour picks up litter from the pavement as usual. A sight that takes me back to the past.
The dogs waiting outside the shop are surprised that their two-legged friends have suddenly been spending so much time with them. Two Labradors who came with a gentleman on a bike kill time by simulating copulation, as always. They mount each other and make rubbing motions, too brief for ‘anything’ to really happen. The infection has not impaired their erotic fantasies. READ MORE…
Translation Tuesday: “Glass Apples” by Lidmila Kábrtová
So I leaned against him, resting my head on his chest, and looked up. But the sky was like burnt porridge.
A game of magical thinking leads to a teen’s traumatic coming-of-age in Lidmila Kábrtová’s short story “Glass Apples,” this week’s Translation Tuesday selection. Decay and growth surround our speaker as she pursues a crush, though her excitement and anticipation betray her as she discovers a sinister and predatory side to young love. Of note is the speaker’s voice, initially full of hyperbole and youthful naiveté. A first-person narrative of meandering thoughts segues into a moment of subtle disembodiment (CW: sexual assault) as the speaker refers to “the body” instead of “my body,” and all the while rotting “forbidden” fruit provides a literal background to our protagonist’s fear and disillusionment.
It’s pitch black. Even though I’m being very careful, I can still feel myself standing on apples. There are so many that it’s impossible to avoid them, so I don’t. They crunch underfoot, turning into a sticky, sour-smelling mush. They are summer apples, but Gran, who I’m staying with over the summer holidays, calls them glass apples because they have such fine white skins that they almost look like they’re made of glass. They bruise easily—in fact, all you have to do is handle them a bit roughly and almost at once horrid marks appear on their soft apple skin and quickly turn brown. These apples don’t even taste very nice: at first they’re hard, bitter and tart, and then almost instantly they become floury and not nearly as sweet as, say Holovousy or reinettes, so they’re no good for anything except strudel. Gran bakes strudel with them regularly, twice a week. Even with the bashed and rotten ones. Which is just about all of them. The two of us always have a lot of coring to do. Gran even knows how to core the really, really bad ones. But not even Gran could make anything out of these ones.
My skin is really delicate too. Like glass. Gran says it’s like those apples. She says it all the time. I liked her saying it to me when I was ten, but now that I’m sixteen it’s really annoying. It’s also annoying how she’s always checking up on where I’m going, who with, and what time I’ll be back. I’m sixteen and I don’t want my Gran on my back all the time!
Last year I could still talk to her about a lot of things. But now I don’t want to talk to her about anything. Not about apples and certainly not about Štěpán. Definitely not him. Or anything to do with tonight. I just want to get home quietly so Gran doesn’t hear me. I’ll have to wash my shoes too, as they’ll be filthy from all of the apple mush.
I know I promised Gran I wouldn’t go to the dance. And then I climbed out my bedroom window. It’s on the ground floor, so you don’t have to jump from very high up. I’ve never tricked Gran before—well, at least never this much. But I just had to. Going out was a matter of life and death. Gran wouldn’t have understood. She would have said: Tereza, there’ll be other dances. In a year or two when you’re older and more responsible . . .
But how could Gran know what it was like not to see Štěpán, when it was obvious he’d be at the party? How could I lie under the duvet and try to close my eyes when all I could see going round my head were all the girls around him squealing, just so he’d notice them?
I didn’t have to squeal. He whistled over to me this afternoon when I was in the garden: “Are you coming, Tereza? It’s just a stupid dance, but better than nothing . . .” And he had his head tilted to one side in a really cute way and was kicking a stone on the ground.
Štěpán, the best-looking boy in the village. All of the girls were after him. Of course I was aware of him too, but the past two years he had acted as if I meant less than nothing to him. As if he didn’t register me. As if I didn’t exist.
“Yeah, I’ll come.”
“See you at nine then,” he said and disappeared. READ MORE…
Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from Hwang Chini by Hong Sŏkchung
Satisfying one’s curiosity is like drinking salt water: the more of it you take, the thirstier you become.
This week’s Translation Tuesday transports us to sixteenth-century Korea in this excerpt from Hong Sŏkchung’s historical novel Hwang Chini. In this particular passage, our titular protagonist dons a disguise and explores the common neighborhoods of her city. Raised within an aristocratic family but soon to be made aware of her mother’s outcaste status, Chini is shocked and frightened by this formerly hidden underbelly of society. The legendary figure’s wit and daring are outpaced only by her curiosity, but the more she sees and hears, the more she is overwhelmed and unprepared. In language that is comedic, anachronistic, and surprisingly transgressive, Hwang Chini offers a contemporary take on a legendary historical figure. The novel’s fame also breaks political precedents: author Hong Sŏkchung received the Manhae Literature Prize, marking the first time a major South Korean literary award was bestowed upon a North Korean writer.
Part One, section 12
After Chini has offered greetings of the evening to her mother she visits the kitchen maid’s room. This room has been kept heated, even now in the dog days of summer, ever since the maid suffered a stroke. Granny is there trying to sweat out a cold.
Chini feels a blast of heat as she opens the door to the cavernous room. Granny has burrowed into her bedding on the warmer section of the heated floor.
“How are you feeling?”
“Well, look who’s here! You came by earlier, and here you are again?” But Granny, face streaming with perspiration, is happy like a child at the sight of Chini.
“I gave Igŭm some ch’ŏngshimhwan for you,” says Chini. “It’s supposed to work miracles—did you try it?”
“I did! And I’ve broken into a good sweat and feel much better. But I’m afraid you’ll have to sleep without me tonight. You’ll have Igŭm, though.”
“That’s fine. Just make sure to take care of yourself!”
Chini stops in the kitchen to ask the maid to look after Granny, then leaves for her quarters. The moment she sets foot in the rear gardens, her proper-young-lady persona evaporates and the seething vigor and bursting vitality of a curious teen reveal themselves in a naughty, sparkling grin. She scurries off. READ MORE…
Translation Tuesday: “My Friend Daniele’s Flight” by Ernesto Franco
His hands were so clenched on the wheel that the knuckles stood out white from the force and concentration.
A flying lesson allegorizes the lifework of Italian writer Daniele Del Giudice in “My Friend Daniele’s Flight,” our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. In this philosophical essay, writer and editor Ernesto Franco recounts Del Giudice’s views on the writer’s vocation, a discipline defined by the responsibilities of precise language and careful attention to the world. Del Giudice gives Franco the controls of his plane—upon which we are guided through Del Giudice’s philosophies on writing, friendship, and ways of knowing the world. Franco turns to three key words to describe Del Giudice’s enterprise: Sentire, the feeling that relies upon lived knowledge and experience to avoid sentimentality; Mania, the obsessive energy that demands precision and allows one to know the world; and Phantasia, a creative contrast to shallow, mimetic ways of writing. Franco’s memoir comes to a tragic revelation, but the allegory nonetheless has Del Giudice safely returning us from our flight, illustrating what his philosophies can teach us outside of literature.
“Here, now you take it,” Daniele tells me, continuing to look straight ahead while at the same time taking both hands off the controls. It is a cold, sunny autumn morning toward the end of the nineties. We have just taken off from Nicelli Airport in Venice-Lido aboard a single-engine touring plane, whose model I don’t remember, and which Daniele has stabilized to maintain altitude. I had just experienced the words that I have not forgotten and that I won’t ever forget: “The run-up to take-off is a metamorphosis; here is a pile of metal transforming itself into an aeroplane by the power of the air itself, each take-off is the birth of an aircraft, this time like all the others you had had the same experience, the same wonder at each metamorphosis.” The precise, imaginative words of Staccando l’ombra da terra for something I had never experienced before, because taking off on the grass aboard a small airplane, a small “machine” as Daniele would say, sitting beside the pilot, is something completely different from taking off on a normal airliner. Among other things, with the title Staccando l’ombra da terra he formulated for all of us non-pilots an action and an emotion that did not exist before, and did so with the paradoxical effect (how can a shadow take off from the ground?) of the precision of the words concurrent with the added “shadow” of meaning which they alluded to. I actually felt as if wings had sprouted from my shoulders, but I didn’t dare move. “Go on . . .” Daniele says with a knowing smile. And I place two hands on the control wheel, remaining stock-still amidst the roar of the “machine.” Who knows why, but I feel like I have to be ready to make a move and resist with a decisive, forceful action. Perhaps, simply, my body is thinking about the powerful, rotational thrust of the rudder of a sailboat, with which I am much more familiar. But that’s not the case. The flight control is very light. You can practically move it just by thinking of moving it, but doing so moves the entire world in which we find ourselves. Steering on the edge of a subtle, brand new sense of equilibrium. That’s the sensation that I will have the whole time spent inside Daniele’s mania.
When I think of Daniele, of his books, his writing, his idea of literature, his way of thinking and understanding, even when I think of our friendship, the feeling I had at that moment comes back to me. I think about it even now, when I arrive in Venice and instead of San Polo or the hangar, I head for Giudecca, make my way through the maze of calle to the residence where he is housed, and speak my name into the intercom. Everyone here is very kind, the grounds, which overlook the lagoon and the Lido, are beautiful, but of no use to Daniele now, whom I always find in his room. A room that I could not distinguish from the outside, a room that is his, so to speak, in a neutral way: containing him, but without any trace of him. It seems strange only to me. His traces can be found, however, not only in his books, but in some universal words that speak of Daniele Del Giudice better than any other utterance. I will choose three. Sentire, to feel, to experience, has been one of “his” words since Lo stadio di Wimbledon and Atlante occidentale in fact. He applies it, I’ve always thought, not so much as an antidote to sentiment, but to sentimentality employed as an element, as recourse, rhetoric, to compensate for the aphasia of a lack, or absence, of experience. Sentire, on the other hand, is like improvisation in jazz: you can’t do it if you don’t know all the music, but you can’t do it if you don’t venture to the edge of the music you know, and from there love and know in one sound, in one action. READ MORE…
Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from Naulakhi Kothi by Ali Akbar Natiq
Maulvi Karamat would be furious and ask him why he had returned so late. Sometimes, he would give him a few whacks in anger.
For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a slice of rural life frames decades of a family’s history in this excerpt from Ali Akbar Natiq’s acclaimed novel, Naulakhi Kothi. We’re treated to an abridged biography of Maulvi Karamat, an imam at a small village mosque. Maulvi Karamat is heir to his patriarchs’ accumulated knowledge, which he bestows upon his dutiful (but much abused) son, Fazal Din. An arduous errand to collect food (and consequently, money) unfolds into a lively character study of a mother, a father, and a street savvy son. Natiq deftly contextualises the present by manipulating narrative time, weaving generations into concise pockets of exposition.
“Maulvi Karamat”
When Maulvi Karamat left home, he could barely walk straight. Every few minutes, he would lean his full weight on his staff, and had a sharp headache. He had developed a slight fever because of being on an empty stomach for long. At intervals, he felt a renewed bout of anger against Fazal Din, who had still not returned with the rotis. Maulvi Karamat was afraid he might fall while leading the prayer. It was hard to sustain oneself till Zuhar on the glass of sweet buttermilk he had had at Fajr. As a result, he wasn’t too sure of what he had recited during prayer. In fact, at one point, he had said one verse out of place. It was a good thing that Zuhar prayers were not recited aloud, otherwise, he would have suffered a lot of humiliation, and the attendees would have begun to doubt his sanity. Performing the motions of sujood, ruqooh, and qayaam, he swore at Fazal Din countless times, and also thought ill of the attendees behind him, who were content to line up in prayer behind him, but could not tell whether he was hungry or not. In this state, he thought of the hadith that said, ‘If the time for prayer conflicts with the time for a meal, take your meal first, for one cannot pray on an empty stomach.’
For the past thirty years, Maulvi Karamat was the head imam of this small mosque. More than a village, it was a small cluster of around fifty to a hundred houses. Maulvi Karamat’s great grandfather, Khudayaar, had come here first, seeking alms from people who lived here. At that time, this mosque was an empty and unmarked spot. He was the first to mark the precincts as his own by throwing his patched quilt of rags on the floor here, and started saying a prayer. At first, the villagers would give him two square meals out of pity. Then slowly, some more people, seeing the earlier ones, began to join him there for prayers. Khudayaar had spent a year attending religious lectures in an institution. As a result of that experience, he had memorised some verses of the Quran, and also knew how to pray. On the basis of this knowledge, he started performing his duties as imam, and declared himself the maulvi of the village. Little by little, the functions of the mosque began to shape up around this. After his death, Maulvi Karamat’s father, Ahmed Din, succeeded him. Since that day, from generation to generation, they had remained here. Showing great foresight, Ahmed Deen had taught Karamat a few initial books of the Quran, and sent him off to attend religious lectures in Qasoor. Maulvi Karamat spent six years here. By the time he was fifteen, he was fairly fluent in Urdu, Arabic, and Persian. During this time, Maulvi Karamat’s father, Ahmed Din, passed away at the age of sixty. After his father’s death, instead of going elsewhere, he had preferred to stay in this humble mosque at Chak Rahra. He was sixty-five years of age now.
Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Jacques Viau Renaud
opening a furrow/to pour our blood/and maybe,/who knows, our lives.
This week’s Translation Tuesday brings you two poems by Haitian-Dominican poet and revolutionary fighter Jacques Viau Renaud. In “Man Awakens,” our speaker pledges his lifeblood to resurrecting hope (an “assassinated seed”), urging his compatriots to appreciate the majesty of their homeland in the face of socioeconomic injustice. In “We Take Refuge,” the seed metaphor becomes even more corporeal, as the roots of love embed themselves in peoples’ hearts despite their “mutilated lives”—the speaker now pledges not only his blood, but his voice. Written during the rise of another U.S.-backed dictatorship (the Dominican Republic was still recovering from the terror of the Trujillo Era), Viau Renaud’s verse channels the natural beauty of his country to inspire resistance. Ariel Francisco’s superb translations sublimates the visceral and sometimes violent imagery of these poems into an enduring love in the speaker’s voice, a testament to Viau Renaud’s gifts as a poet who celebrated his homeland’s fragile democracy and honored those who defended it.
MAN AWAKENS
Man awakens sewing the assassinated seed
hope curdling in a cry.
Light escapes his hands.
The washer’s stream throws its loud laughter
rinsing in the trees
tightening the earth
possessing it
leaving the internal seed in the roots;
injecting his spirited youth
unearthing the buried love
all the tightened silences in the streets of my homeland
razed by hunger
assaulted by thieves
led towards the banks in fragments
where pieces of shit in disguise
monopolize the lilies and bread.
Translation Tuesday: “Night, wife, detergent” by Kaori Ekuni
I love my wife . . . But if she's asking for something that they don't sell at the convenience store, I don't know what to do.
For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a husband construes his stubbornness as miscommunication in Kaori Ekuni’s “Night, wife, detergent.” Ekuni’s trademark wit guides us through this unreliable narrative: a self-assured husband thinks he’s tried everything to understand his wife—everything, that is, except actually listen to her. This messy “misunderstanding” reveals an even more unsettling truth about our narrator: he sees his relationship as a contest for dominance. A probingly comic take on gender dynamics and dysfunctional relationships.
My wife said she wanted to leave me. “We have to talk,” she said.
It was after 10:00 p.m. I was tired. We’ve been married five years, no kids.
“You can get along by pretending not to notice,” my wife said. “But pretending not to notice won’t make it go away.”
When I didn’t reply and kept looking at the TV, she turned it off. I had no idea what I was supposed to be pretending not to notice, or what wouldn’t go away. As always.
As she stood over me, glaring at me, I noticed that her pedicure was chipped. “Do you need nail polish remover?” I blurted out, with hope and relief mingled in my voice. You can’t remove nail polish without nail polish remover. Is that why she’s upset?
My wife shook her head.
“Well, then it must be those square cotton wipes. The ones you said you couldn’t do without, when I told you to use tissues instead—you’ve run out of those wipes.”
My wife sighed. “No. I don’t mean anything like that. I have nail polish remover and cotton wipes. The only reason my nail polish is chipped is that I’m so busy I haven’t had time to do my nails.” READ MORE…
Translation Tuesday: “The Death of the Doll” by Viktor Dyk
. . . she asked the doll whether she loved her and the doll very clearly said yes
This week’s Translation Tuesday brings you a modern moral fable from the nationalist Czech writer and politician Viktor Dyk. In “The Death of the Doll,” a child copes with loneliness and perpetual familial strife by finding kinship and love in a cherished doll; in the child’s imagination, the doll even becomes a voiced character. Dyk’s prose is deceptively sparse, mimicking the naïve and heartbreaking simplicity of the child’s worldview, which is brilliantly contrasted with the vitriolic dialogue of the parents. Translator Frances Jackson writes: “In another writer’s hands this could have all too easily descended into melodrama, but instead there is something satisfyingly understated about the text.”
The doll was very beautiful, all slender and white in a little pink dress. Her name was Edda and she could move both her head and her eyes. She could be seen in the window from the street and often made passing children envious because of her great size and beauty. Otilka sat with her by the window for that very reason; it pleased her to know that, in spite of everything, someone could be envious of something of that belonged to her.
If it were not for the doll, Otilka would have been sad most of the time. The room was dim and gloomy; she did not like to be in here. The sun did not shine this way: there was a tall building directly opposite. And the street outside was straight and inhospitable. Really, Edda was all that she had.
Twice a day, of course, she had to take the dismal stairs to get to school. And it was always torture to Otilka. People frightened her and so did school. There was nobody there to play with, nobody who might comfort her; the other children did play games, but she didn’t like it when they did. The games were unpleasant and rough, and the children unpleasant and spiteful. It gave them pleasure to hurt her; Otilka often found herself crying. It was probably all down to the malice of a bad wizard who had cast her among bad people.
And lately, in particular, it was no different with her mother. She used to play with her sometimes, tell her fairy tales and would even laugh every now and again, but now it was as if she did not have any time or just a smile for Otilka. And yet it was just the three of them there. READ MORE…
Translation Tuesday: “What I see” by Beatrice Cristalli
You see, even if I don’t see you / I know you’re breathing inside of us.
Love in the time of lockdown is given voice in Beatrice Cristalli’s “What I see,” this week’s Translation Tuesday selection. Written in response to the COVID-19 crisis in Italy, the poem’s speaker prefaces the piece with a philosophical declaration about fate—through subtle and clever enjambment (the power of the poem’s one punctuated line: “Right?”), this musing becomes the speaker’s guiding question. The poem flows through possibilities and memories, to and from that one pivotal inquiry. Seemingly mundane objects—a toothbrush, a comb, a jumper—are charged with new emotive meaning as they evoke the processes brought about by the lockdown: leaving. Absence. And remembering. The speaker, trapped in the moment when these objects were fixed in place by circumstance, longs for the safety of a missing love.
What I see
They say all’s subjective
But things play parts in fate
Right?
READ MORE…
Translation Tuesday: “Anatomy of a Servant” by Allan N. Derain
“If you could only see me now, Mother,” she said to the only photograph stuck to the frame of her mirror.
In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a young woman’s sense of self-worth is prey to the forces of contemporary domestic servitude in Allan Derain’s “Anatomy of a Servant”. What begins as an endearing epistolary abruptly shifts to the perspective of our narrator, Asunta, as she seeks to build a better life for herself. The servant’s body becomes the target of dehumanization on the basis of class, gender, and nationality, until Asunta’s consciousness comes to internalize these repeated acts of violence as “necessary” and even “deserved”. Across these three short sections, Derain explores the classed anxieties of a dutiful daughter who longs for a brighter, freer future, though who also longs for home.
I. Empty-Headed
May 4, 2004
My Dear Asunta,
Before anything else, how is my good daughter? I hope you’re doing well. Are you eating on time? If you’re wondering, don’t worry about us. Marissa will be in high school the following school year. Your sister is looking for cash, so she now mans Tonga’s store. The money you have sent is enough, but we know that you are saving for something important. More people are asking me to sew, now that school is about to start.
You wrote in your last letter that the old man you attended to has already passed away. Does that mean that you can now come back home? Our fiesta will begin next week. I am part of the dancing group who will perform the Alembong in the parade. Don’t worry, and I’ll send you a picture so that it’ll be as if you were here in the fiesta . . .
This was what she always did: gazing out the window early in the morning. It was only yesterday she received the letter but by now, she had already read it countless of times as she faced the window. She glanced at her watch. She had thirty more minutes left to have the world to herself. READ MORE…
Translation Tuesday: “Flickers of Light” by Yasumi Tsuhara
“In that case, you should avoid that tunnel. It’s known for ghost sightings.”
This week’s Translation Tuesday brings you a contemporary ghost story from best-selling author Yasumi Tsuhara. In “Flickers of Light,” our everyman protagonist believes he’s stumbled across a stroke of good fortune when the car of his dreams comes into his possession. But this supposed luck harbours a decidedly unlucky secret. Warned to avoid Kaerimi Tunnel, our protagonist finds himself encountering a chilling memory that may not actually be his own.
In Omiya lives a man dubbed “Count Dracula”—he goes by “Count” among his friends. He makes a living churning out mystery novels. They say he’s well known in his field; you might recognize his name if I were to mention it.
On the other hand, I’m a ne’er-do-well thirty-something man who has never held a regular job, partly because a succession of calamities befell me while I was still in my twenties. Needless to say, my life has nothing whatsoever to do with the publishing industry. Even so, whenever the Count and his hangers-on invite me to unofficial after-parties following movie premieres and award presentations named after somebody famous, I show up just for the fun of it, feeling like a fish out of water. Once I’m there, various hands shove their business cards into mine, dazing me with their illustrious names and titles, while I shove back my card that lists no job title and give them a self-mocking sneer while thinking my life isn’t bad at all.
Speaking of mystery, I met the Count under mysterious circumstances. I almost ran over him. Even though I wasn’t drunk or half asleep behind the wheel, I didn’t see him until it was almost too late. A tall, black-coated figure stood in the flood of crisscrossing headlights as if sprouting out of the road’s surface.
The near miss took place inside a tunnel on the outskirts of Omiya. I was on my way back to Tokyo after removing the sound equipment from an event site. I drove a company-branded Toyota HiAce that belonged to a former college classmate of mine. The president and only full-time employee, he often sent me to this kind of gig.
As I braked hard and skidded to a screeching halt, all the equipment went flying toward the driver’s seat. Even though the Count nimbly stepped aside, I ended up grazing him with the front bumper, pushing him down to the ground. When I jumped out of the car, he was already on his feet.