Translations

Translation Tuesday: Excerpts from Proofs of the Living by Andrée Chedid

November 26, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Lauren Peat

Groan / without a voice / in our accents

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the work of Andrée Chedid. Expertly translated for sound and content by Lauren Peat, these poems crack like a conceptual whip—the poet writes, “The cry of being / Rattles our targets / Unweaves our wefts.” With a density of imagery and sound as well as a commitment to a somber reflection on modern consciousness, these poems recall the poetry of the French Symbolists, who constructed dense systems of meaning that evoke magnitudes from the mundane or eerie. The vaguely mathematical nature of the poems, captured in “proofs,” means that the reader is driven towards a certain point, or climax, without realizing exactly where they have arrived. Sometimes the subject matter is haunting; at all times it is captivating.

proofs of being

The call of every birth
Cracks the world order

Its verb looks for us
Its breath divests

Planted into marrow
Pulling speech from the field of words
The cry of being
Rattles our targets
Unweaves our wefts
Flips the streaming hourglass
Holds us to the path———— READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Theory of Affections” by Luca Argel

November 19, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Daniel Persia

I always thought that this was a universal truth.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, Luca Argel spins a simple observation into a theory of relation and attachment. Trafficking in clichés that are made vivid by honest prose, this piece of micro-fiction outlines an order of love in what is often considered an extremely sterile place, devoid of culture: the supermarket. For the narrator, the simple task of prioritizing food on a shelf based on the date it was produced or purchased leads to a revelation about duration and relationships. It is not often that fiction so accurately represents the metonymic understandings that are developed at young ages by considering relations between things and people. Argel’s writing suggests that metaphor is alive and well in the mind of a child; and these metaphors stay with us as comforting touchstones throughout our lives.

I’ve enjoyed supermarkets a lot more ever since I left my parents’ house. I remember my mother telling me that they always place the almost-expired products in the front, and the newer ones in the back. I always thought that this was a universal truth: “all supermarkets have a policy of storing newer products in the back and older products in the front, so customers grab the older ones first.” But that’s not always the case. Today, for instance, the peas on the back of the shelf have the same expiration date as the peas on the front of the shelf. Generally, in the canned goods section, this rule doesn’t apply. But it does in the bakery section; in the bakery section, it never fails! You always need to look for the fresher products, for the ones that will last longer. When we got home, my father would arrange the groceries like that: recently purchased food went to the back of the pantry, while everything that had been there for a while came to the front. At a certain point in my childhood, I began to suspect that my parents had met at a supermarket. One day, she was looking for the freshest heart of palm; he was in the aisle behind her, looking for the freshest mayonnaise, and when they got to the back of the shelf, they realized that the shelf didn’t have a back, one looking right at the other.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Most Solemn Song” and “Asleep in a Haze” by Nadia Anjuman

November 12, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Diana Arterian and Marina Omar

No one reads the book of your heart’s happy anthems

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the devotional work of Nadia Anjuman. Under pressure, the poems sing out—but not so much to the divine Patriarch as do many religious songs. Created under political pressure in Afghanistan, Anjuman’s poems speak to a feminine subject free from repressive structures. When she says “If one strand of hope finds me” one gets the impression that the “me” is the subject who speaks free of the restraints of strict gender norms. The self is shuttled into wispy metaphors of string and haze, surviving, on the back of lyric, as opaque lightness. The style of Islamic mystics is breathlessly combined with resolutely feminist concerns—the result is a dire urgency. Anjuman ultimately died under the same oppression she was writing against, and her poems give testament to the pervasiveness and resilience of song. The stakes are high here—read carefully. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Hot-Air Balloon” by Vassilis Alexakis

November 5, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Rebecca Dehner-Armand

In reality, it’s like all words, with good and bad attributes, capable of protecting a thought as much as betraying a meaning.

This week’s Translation Tuesday features microfiction by Vassilis Alexakis. “The Hot-Air Balloon” begins and ends in an ambiguity, thickly described. The prose is structured around a choice without mooring, a choice that presents itself only to give way to the realization that a language system is something that only appears all-encompassing. By intellectualizing the feeling of infinite choice within a closed system and the eventual choice to leave it, Alexakis acutely describes a weightlessness only obtainable by those who walk between epistemologies. In the end, it is the feeling of the transcendence of the system, thematized as an air-balloon, that prevails. It is only through a meditation on words that we can unmoor ourselves from a system. This airy story depicts well the critical posture, especially of those with multiple languages to rely on.

I was asked to write a definition for a word without knowing which one. I had no hesitation. The more arduous a task, the more it fills me with joy. If I’d been given a word, I would’ve felt some pressure; I would’ve felt trapped. Now that I’ve briefly surveyed the entirety of the lexicon, I feel free as if I were being carried in a hot-air balloon.

Is it a masculine or feminine-gendered word? From my point of view, this question is of no concern. Besides, it’s not uncommon for a word’s synonyms to be of the opposite gender. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Woman by the River” by Nguyễn Đức Tùng

October 29, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Thuy Dinh

I have already promised the baby to someone else, she told my mother, but don’t you worry I’ll save the next one for you.

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the harrowing work of Nguyễn Đức Tùng. Illustrative language supports a narrative of unbelievable realism, as the speaker relates the acts of necessity during the Vietnam War that reverberated through the coming generations. Specific lives are pulled out of the polarizing and stereotyped recounting typical of that terrible war, and the author seizes on every chance to give intimate details of lives affected and bowled over. The narrator’s travels to a forgotten home, occupied by a woman who cannot keep but only gives, mirrors and subverts colonial narratives of inaccessibility and backwardness. In the end, the “The Woman by the River” thematizes hope and testifies to the possibility of stories surviving war and the smothering narratives that surround it.

My mother needed to find someone who would sell her a child. It would not be for her; she had given birth to several children, been provided with both boys and girls. The child would be for her cousin who lived in town and had been married for ten years but was still barren. One time my mother took me to the river for this mission, thinking a five-year-old boy like me wouldn’t understand grown-up affairs, or if I learned anything I would forget it as soon as I grew up.

But my mother was wrong.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Viola Couple” by Gyrðir Elíasson

October 22, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Mark Ioli

I am alone (apart from the cat), and only those who have endured being alone for an extended period of time can understand the effect.

This week’s Translation Tuesday features microfiction by Gyrðir Elíasson. “The Viola Couple,” translated into a familiar monologue style by Mark Ioli, renders a melancholic protagonist in the throes of loss and ennui. What begins as a mindset typical of a sort of modernist masculinity slowly morphs as the character’s observations reverberate through the prose, changing the concerns from a self-conscious banalness into a metaphoric repose. The change in mood is expertly reflected by the expanding sentence length and conceptual language that increases in complexity. The story seems to suggest that what we focus on can help to shape thought and that singular problems appear different depending on the objects that we hold close to our psyches.

Dedicated to ÓJS

My cat isn’t dead, but he is on a hunger strike. It’s taking a toll on him. I bought him this premium food that was insanely expensive, but he wants nothing to do with it and demands his generic Bónus food back. It’s been several days, and we’re both locked in a battle of wills. No resolution is in sight. The cat mainly lies around inside on the couch, casting accusatory glances at me if I walk past him.

These have been trying times for me, both on account of the cat and various other things. I am alone (apart from the cat), and only those who have endured being alone for an extended period of time can understand the effect it has on your psyche.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Don’t Cry” by Mohamed M. Farrag

October 15, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Essam M. Al-Jassim

“Men don’t cry, whatever happens.” And then he wiped my tears.

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the work of Mohamed M. Farrag. The prose is short, succinct, and hits like a hammer—much like the vision of masculinity embodied in the story. Enigmatic messages, the codes that construct subjects along certain lines, flow freely between a boy and his grandfather. These messages transport generational models of masculine repression as they are passed down; in just a few lines, Farrag aptly demonstrates the ways in which the social codes that dictate behavior are transferred. However, the end of the story leaves us with a question: can the script of behavior be broken by reflection and release? Or is this too a planned movement, derived from what came before? Regardless, the emotions captured here are delivered with an uncanny availability: the rhythms that the translator pulls from the original present an ordinary scene that makes one feel as if the answer to some pressing, universal question is close at hand. But the true answer is only a choice: to show or to hide.

He sat beside his dying grandfather; a man known for his cruel heart. He’d never seen him cry. ‎Gently, the grandfather caught his grandson’s hand. “Do you know, son, what my father ‎told me when he saw me crying on the day of my mother’s death?”‎

“No.” The young boy shrugged.

He said, “Men don’t cry, whatever happens.” And then he wiped my tears. “When my wife died your ‎mother was still young. Her death stung me, but I didn’t cry in front of her. I didn’t want her to fall apart. I ‎kept my tears inside.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Hedgehog” by Anastasia Afanas’eva

October 8, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Alla Vilnyanskaya

About the dead, we cannot speak / for they are completed.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, Anastasia Afanas’eva constructs a world of shapes, shadows, and sensations that thematize dread and longing. The poem raises up images from the page in a maelstrom—a deluge of realizations that impress themselves on the reader like a flood. But the images’ actions are unreal; they are strung together in uncanny ways. In this poem, language acts absurdly, mirroring the unmistakable confusion of loss and of reckoning. The Hedgehog and its shadow are central, and show, in verse, how the most innocuous of things can become sutured with the weight of the universe.

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Translation Tuesday: “Homecoming” by Badai

October 1, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Saul Thompson

Eventually, at the edge of his vision, where the fog begins to thin, a figure of a person emerged.

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the work of Badai—an indigenous Taiwanese writer. “Homecoming” probes at themes of reunion, service, and loss through the eyes of a young man torn between the traditional ways of his family and the projects of the nation-state. Juxtapositions between the mountains where the protagonist lives and the flatlands with the military bases, government projects, and different linguistic groups are drawn into tension. This tension is extended for the protagonist as roads, schools, and parks show the growing homogeneity of the national culture. Pride in one’s service—to family and to the state—are complicated things for young men and women. Moments like those expressed here show the complex interrogation that the short story form provides. Here, the interrogation revolves around one’s implication in the changing social fabric of Taiwan. 

A young man was on a bus, heading home. His name was Dumasi. Dumasi had already transferred buses once; this was the second leg of his journey, and he was forcing himself to nap because he still had the final leg ahead of him. The bus would drop him off at the last stop, and then he would hike for two hours up mountain trails. Not that he felt the slightest bit tired. Every inch of him was bursting with the excitement of returning home. Nonetheless, he shut his eyes to rest.

A voice said: “Hey, mister bus driver, this is my stop!”

Dumasi opened his eyes: there was a middle-aged man walking unsteadily up the aisle, laden with bags and bellowing good-naturedly in the direction of the driver’s seat. For Dumasi, the sight and sound of this man was deeply familiar, comforting even—from his broad shoulders to the way he spoke Mandarin with a thick, mountain-man accent.

Dumasi reached down to his luggage and ran his hand along a bulge in the bag. Good—the two bottles of sorghum liquor he’d bought for his homecoming were intact—all was in order. Father will be so happy, he thought to himself. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Du Ya

September 24, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Anni Liu

He recalls darkness: changes in earth over hundreds of millions of years / It astounds him: black, plummeting, set in motion eons ago

This week’s Translation Tuesday features two labour-centric poems by Du Ya. “The Coal Miner” could be construed as a multivalent metaphor aligning the work of a coal miner with an unbearable lack of clarity regarding one’s position in the world. On another register, however, “The Coal Miner” shows how one’s occupation and environment can be written on and in the body, as well as the mind. “Copper” looks at the quality of the sub-strata itself. It is an homage to the hidden beauties and forms that underpin all that happens upon a surface. Copper’s stability, its cycles, and their accumulations might be related to translation itself, a conceptual attitude that recalls the archaeological cultural exercises of Walter Benjamin and the re-working of source materials to gain new insight or expression. Time can be read in the changes in striation and the different iterations of copper, constantly moving beneath the surface and in the hands of artisans, as a poem or thought too changes—and stays the same—as it moves.

The Coal Miner

He means to tell people about the light
but each part of his body revolts
disobeys the center, speaks only of darkness

Having gnawed so long on that mighty seam, he has no idea
that his lungs, liver, and intestines are now made of coal
The textbooks teach this: “change in quantity leads to change in quality”

His body is such a fitting exhibit, it needs no explanation
It wears pitch black shadowless silk
like a government official donning a tailored uniform

Yet he still speaks of light—and for light
he daily lowers himself underground (and time flows unchanging)
Not even the nightfish has seen such darkness

Sometimes, in the subterranean depths, he is frightened
He recalls darkness: changes in earth over hundreds of millions of years
It astounds him: black, plummeting, set in motion eons ago

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Basketball, Tennis, and Swimming” by Régis Jauffret

September 17, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Jonathan Woollen

Since then, everything has filled me with wonder. I dumped my entire fortune into this company, which doesn’t produce any more than it sells.

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the work of Régis Jauffret, a French writer working since the 1980s. “Basketball, Tennis, and Swimming” is a micro-fiction that takes a look into the lived experience of depression—specifically a depression borne under a lack of inspiration and connection. Deep colors, sweeping juxtapositions, and a certain simplicity of thought feed into a narrative that questions schedules, labor, and purpose. An anti-capitalist vision of work opposed to melancholic states gives purpose to the purposeless. Uplifting narratives do not always have to be grand, this story shows, and the structures of neoliberal life worlds and traditional values can be tweaked with the help of a proper and poetic angle (and some odd desires!).

The staff have access to basketball hoops, three tennis courts, and a big pool with a sunroof, allowing them to enjoy some fresh air over the summer. It matters to me that everyone’s happy. I didn’t create this company to earn money, but to let the hopeless reacquire a taste for life.

I myself have known periods when I’ve risen at five in the afternoon, only to immediately lie back down after drinking some orange juice and eating a slice of bread. Those were the only times I saw my children, when they weren’t with their soccer team or at school. I came in contact with my wife’s body whenever she’d happen to be in bed, but I spent whole weeks without seeing her face in broad daylight. Medications in every color were piled up on the bedside table. I swallowed them without counting, and recognized them by their shape or their taste. I had gray dreams, without peaks or valleys, without sea, snow, night, or sun. Dreams like landscapes so flat, so desolate, that to my eyes nothing like them exists on our planet. I didn’t even think about death, it was too desirable for me to think possible. I slowly sank into the mattress, which cradled me like a cockle shell cast around my imprint.
READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An excerpt from “Death is vertical (Pain: chanted)” by Normand de Bellefeuille

September 10, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Hilary Clark

because there is no economy / of pain / nothing but thunder

These poems by Quebecois luminary Normand de Bellefeuille take the swelling rhythm of the sea as their guide. Translator Hilary Clark skillfully brings out the crash of waves beneath the verse, and this pulse of continuity is used to mirror the throbs of pain—and the bursts of poetry that spring from it. The tension between pain in life and the recording of pain is brought to the surface—a surface that is both the broil of the sea and the page, which covers and gives evidence to the drownedness of silence and the forgotten excesses of speech and sexuality that the poem can only trace. The impossibility of poetry to reify the body in pain is a hopeful one, though: as the poems give evidence of the subject, distilled, the inability to ever truly capture the depths of the body becomes the poem’s “inadmissibility.” The reader is tasked with trying to uncover the shining positive of that deficit.

7

There are other pains
even on the rivers
one thinks of Dante’s boat
or of the little crabs
in Ophelia’s hair
of the blind one’s swim
against the heavy wave
there are other pains
even under the sea
the seahorses’ grotesque gallop
the drowned women amorous
dead, still amorous
with breasts opened by the narrow teeth
of fat monkfish
for there are other pains
without screams, under the sea
one thinks of the children under the sea
lead at the ankles
mouth full of seaweed
anus full of seaweed

for there are also pains
that are unspeakable.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “At the Hotel” by Tripura

September 3, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Goutam Piduri

Soft, dark, infant-faces. Secret fox-faces. The faces of a tiger, who had just killed a buffalo and was stripping it to the bone.

This week’s Translation Tuesday features a befuddling slice-of-life translation from the Telugu Writer Tripura. The movement of the dialogue is through a flow of floating statements and people that occurs over an hour in the dining room of a hotel. As if the hotel itself is listening, snippets of conversation drop readers into mid-century southern India. The effects of modernism inform the layout of this story, and the semi-public space of the hotel demonstrates the use—and imposition—of English in speech, as well as the untranslatable cultural particulars of the Telugu. It is a statement to the density of subjectivity and the messiness of codes. Sparse narration and memorable voices place the reader well within the confines of a time of great change and exploration in this genre-bending piece. 

At the Hotel

Eight in the morning. The patter of rain above. Wet inside.

“My pop said he’d bury me if I did shit like this. Brainless.”
“That’s old people, ra. These old hags need to be shot by a firing squad, like Hitler
massacred the Jews.”
Empty cups in front, cigarettes at the ends of lips.

#

“Have you guys read Dharma Bums?”
“Leave it. These Beatniks are just rootless fellows. The Angry Young Men seem better.”
In the cups, coffee getting cold.

#

“Fucking idiot. Said there was no touching the file if I didn’t give him a tenner. And a kid, an upstart to boot. Got him to sign it after throwing the ten at his idiot face. What to do. Can’t die, no.”
“Idiots nowadays are like that only. Work’s done only if the money’s in their hands.”

Empty idli plates on the table. The first man’s pockets are searched for a beedi. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Within the Precincts of the Cliché” by Moyosore Orimoloye

August 27, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Moyosore Orimoloye

Lion heads are not that strange a buy in Dugbe.

This week’s Translation Tuesday features a poem in the Yoruba language by Moyosore Orimoloye, a beacon of Yoruba language revival. A product of self-translation, the English version of this poem presents a condensed sound-system that captures the digressions and rhythm of the original. The poem demonstrates the disjunction between a slogan and the material reality that subtends it. The precinct or region as an ideal becomes parallel with the lofty axiomatic that support it, but the reality of the place, the city, the precinct, never quite squares with its regarded name, and, under the cover of the quotation, material misdeeds are perpetrated. This is a sociologically minded poem and a political one; its power lies in its succinctness as it asks to be read again and again. 

Within the Precincts of the Cliché

“Mother is priceless gold which cannot be bought with money”

Except in Dugbe,
where everything is up for sale.
In fact—
Lion heads are not that strange a buy in Dugbe.
In the year that just passed,
the thieves who sought to be elected
as crafters of law shared-
five loaves of bread and two fish
to my goons in Dugbe.
They looked left, and then right,
and sure they were in the clear,
sold the country. 

Translated from the Yoruba by the poet

Moyosore Orimoloye is a poet from Akure, Nigeria. His poems have been featured in the following online literary journals: The Ilanot Review, Transition, The Kalahari Review, Brittle Paper, The Rising Phoenix Review, Afridiaspora and Arts and Africa. His poem, “Love is a Plot Device and your Insecticide is Not” co-won the Babishai Niwe Poetry Award in 2016 and his chapbook of poems, Love is a Plot Device, was published in 2019. Moyosore believes that the most potent antidote to the decay of languages is continuous use, not just in everyday conversation but also in the creation of art—song, poetry and drama. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Agbowo, an afrocentric literary and visual arts journal.

*****

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