Translations

Translation Tuesday: “Midnight Falls Like a Bird” by Félix Francisco Casanova

October 17, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Adelaida Vida

wounded with sleeplessness...

This Translation Tuesday, a poem from the Canary Island poet Félix Francisco Casanova charts a journey from exhaustion to the brink of a balmy doziness. A page is turned, and the process begins. All the forces of wakefulness are surmounted by the dreamy, inexorable course of a perfect poem read on the cusp of dawn.

Midnight falls like a bird

wounded with sleeplessness,
tediously you turn the page
and the poem wends its course
like a river without end,
it dilates and narrows the eyes
enrages and pacifies you
while the wood’s burning wanes
drowsiness arrives with the dawn.

translated from the Spanish by Adelaida Vida

Félix Francisco Casanova was born in Santa Cruz de la Palma, in the Canary Islands, in 1956, and passed away in 1976 at the age of nineteen. In 1973, at the age of seventeen, he won the Canary Islands’ main poetry prize, Julio Tovar, with his book El conservatorio. In 1974 he won the Pérez Armas novel with Demipage’s reissued work, El don de Vorace. A month before his death, he won a contest sponsored by the newspaper La Tarde for his poetry collection, A suitcase full of leaves. The translated poem, “Midnight Falls Like a Bird,” is from Félix Francisco Casanova’s book, Cuarenta contra el agua, compiled by Francisco Javier Irazoki, and published by Demipage.

Adelaida Vida is a writer, translator, and student in San Francisco, California. She first read Casanova’s work when she was living in the Canary Islands.

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Translation Tuesday: From “A Bathtub in the Desert” by Jadd Hilal

October 10, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Bryan Flavin

His shell was gigantic and green, with glints of bronze, copper, and gold.

This Translation Tuesday, we present a fairy tale encounter amid dark signs of a war’s beginning, elegantly entwined and counterposed by Jadd Hilal. The lonely Adel discovers two improbable creatures in his wardrobe, and they become his first real friends. In the outside world, meanwhile, something horrible is unfolding: school is cancelled, the local protests are turning ugly, shots ring out at night, and militias have begun to roam the streets. 

We reproduce here a note from Hilal’s translator, Bryan Flavin, who tells us more about the author and his work. 

A note from the translator:

L’Orient du Jour described A Bathtub in the Desert, Jadd Hilal’s acclaimed second novel, as “The Other Little Prince…[its] endearing narrator reminiscent of Saint-Exupéry.” Yet while Saint-Exupéry and Hilal both confront the expectations assigned to childhood and adulthood, Hilal does so within a different context, one of war and exile:

When war breaks out, Adel’s life changes forever. Fortunately he still has his two giant imaginary insect friends, Darwin and Tardigrade, to help him escape. Strained to make decisions beyond his maturity, Adel finds himself at a desert outpost where the combatants act like children, and the sheikh, leader of the outpost, forces him to grow up. Throughout, Adel must learn what it means to be an adult, traversing war and exile, friendship and isolation, innocence and identity.

With emotion and stylistic minimalism, the novel challenges the typical Bildungsroman in two ways: 1) it asks readers to re-examine and contextualize the biases surrounding childhood and adulthood; and 2) it subverts the Bildungsroman’s gradual trajectory, instead marked by Adel’s navigation of traumatic experience. The following translation is an excerpt, starting when Adel first meets Darwin and ending right before the start of the war.

A Bathtub in the Desert

When I say I didn’t have any real friends, that’s not entirely true—I did have one friend: my giant beetle. He appeared the night my parents announced their divorce. I still remember that night—I opened the door to my massive wardrobe and found him there, next to the toy plane my father had given me for my third birthday, the dozens of stones I’d collected on the roads, and the cardboard box decorated with lentils I’d made for my mother at school, along with a number of other memories.

I should say, I only ever used my wardrobe for this—for keeping memories. I had convinced my parents to buy me a dresser for my clothes, but in exchange, I had to give up my large jar filled with the Chiclets I used to collect. Not a bad deal. Besides, I ended up needing the space. Without it, I would’ve missed out on my very first friend.

Even though he was definitely a beetle, the thing that made me slam the wardrobe shut and rush back to my bed—the thing I forgot to mention—he was as big and as tall as a grown-up.

“Who are you?”

I remember fumbling back to the wardrobe door and opening it. He was still there.

“What do you want?”

He didn’t speak, but his eyes told me he was scared. Now that I think of it—he didn’t really look like a beetle at all. Instead of tiny little legs, he had two long ones, like us. He wore midnight blue dress pants with white pinstripes and white polished shoes. Above that: nothing. All black with only a pair of eyes at the very top. Blue eyes with wrinkles around the corners. As if he were smiling.

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Principle of Decision: Translation from Swahili

October 5, 2023  |  in Principle of Decision, Translations  |  by Albert Mwamburi, Hassan Kassim, Idza Luhumyo, Jay Boss Rubin, and Wambua Muindi

. . . the auditory and visual imagery that gather as you read the Swahili version . . . How [to] transfer the same to the English version?

This edition of Principle of Decision—our column that highlights the decision-making processes of translators by asking several contributors to offer their own versions of the same passage—provides a look at how translators render the subtleties of a poem with multiple layers of meaning in a new language. This round, Asymptote contributor Wambua Muindi leads our Swahili edition of the column.

Ken Walibora’s Kufa Kuzikana was originally published in 2003 and just clocked two decades since publication. For this edition of Principle of Decision, I chose the first two paragraphs of Walibora’s novel partly to celebrate it but also to appreciate the story it follows in the context of what occupied the first half of 2023 in Kenya—the cycle of anti-government and cost-of-living protests, the ensuing police brutality, and the ethnic targeting and profiling.

I also found these paragraphs appropriate here given that introductions are always novel and always set the tone for a story. In this case not only do the two paragraphs borrow the geography of Kiwachema, the fictional country the novel is set in, they also illustrate the constant movement and consequent contact that is the backdrop against which Walibora animates post-colonial Kenya. The friendship between Akida and Tim—the novel’s main characters—becomes a fable for the nation and demonstrates the exclusionary logic of national politics despite the promise of nation-building. 

I wanted to see what different translators’ English renditions of the novel’s opening lines would sound and feel like. Of particular interest was the auditory and visual imagery that gather as you read the Swahili version, and the way these sentences introduce the tone of the narration. How does a translator transfer the same to the English version?  This is also a question many of the translators asked themselves. Phrases like ‘dhahiri shahiri’ and ‘miinamo ya vilima’ which embody the particularity of Swahili sounds, posed an interesting challenge. The particularity with which the translators supply the tonality of Swahili is fascinating. Take for instance the last word: It is translated differently by each of the translators below, showing the different interpretations given and techniques employed in English translation.

—Wambua Muindi

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Two Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke

October 3, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Wally Swist

and I shall stand at its edge: / where there is nothing else, pain once more

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you a meditation on aloneness in the form of introspective poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, elegantly translated from the German by Wally Swist. Grappling with the immense and unspeakable, The Solitary and The Lonely One are indicative of the Austrian poet’s diverse repertoire on disbelief and mysticism. Read on and ruminate.

The Solitary

Like one who sailed on strange seas,
so I’m with the eternal natives;
the full days stand on their tables,
but to me the disgrace is full of figure.

A world reaches into my face,
which may be uninhabited as the moon,
but they leave no desire alone,
and all their words are occupied.

The things that I took far with me,
look rare, compared to yours—:
in their great home they are animals,
here they hold their breath in shame.

The Lonely One

No: there shall be a tumble out of my heart,
and I shall stand at its edge:
where there is nothing else, pain once more
and the unspeakable once more in the world.

Another thing in the immensity,
which becomes dark and light again,
one last longing face
in the never-to-be-satisfied,

another utter face on stone,
willing to its inner weights,
that the expanses that silently destroy it,
force it to be ever happier

Translated from the German by Wally Swist

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Translation Tuesday : “Little Sow” by Yi Hyosŏk

September 26, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Young-Ji Kang

Where could she be, my little Puni?

A quotidian tale of a young man and his sow in the idyllic Korean countryside is not all that it seems. Translator Young-Ji Kang captures the disquieting undertones that pervade Yi Hyosŏk’s writing, as we learn of our main character’s growing discontent with his little Puni and Little Sow. This Translation Tuesday, become a spectator to the breeding grounds, meander through the market, and follow the railroad tracks. 

The ruins of a fortress wall, a willow crowned by a magpie nest, a squat beryl blue sky. Below, a hutch containing a rabbit that in color is white but whose huddled form and spiky fur give it the appearance of a hedgehog. The onshore wind sweeps over the fields, tickling the crab-apples before swirling through the barley field where the breeding grounds still sit under a layer of snow, to buffet the pigsties.

Beside the pigsties, exposed to the wind and squealing at the top of its lungs, a sow is tethered, each splayed leg to a stake. Around those four stakes stalks the stud boar, its livid maw frothing, and then up go its front legs and it mounts. The sow, resembling a turtle pinned beneath a dark boulder, shrieks and wiggles frantically, dislodging the boar. Ever ready, the boar begins stalking again. From the sties all around comes the squealing and bellowing of mating pigs—it’s a raucous afternoon at the breeding grounds.

A crowd has gathered to cheer on the boar, but after witnessing half an hour of wasted effort, they begin to stir. And then one last time the boar comes crashing down on the sow—the stakes snap clean off, and the sow manages to slip free and scamper off.

“Poor little runt,” chuckles one of the breeding-grounds handlers. “Like trying to mate a hen with a bull—it’s unnatural, I tell ya.”

“Yeah,” says a farmer. “She must have had the scare of her life.” So saying, the farmer goes out behind the pigsty and corners the sow.

“I had her serviced here last month, I guess it was, but nothing happened,” says Shigi, the color rising on his face. “So here we are again.”

“Even animals have to be old enough to know better, but your sow’s still way too young.”

At the farmer’s words, Shigi gets even more red in the face. “Goddamn animal!” he mutters.

And if that were not enough, the annoying beast has broken free and is once againrunning loose. Humiliated, Shigi flares up and gives chase, the farmer close behind. One of Shigi’s rubber shoes comes off in the muck and his pants begin to slide down.

At last he manages to grab the tether circling the sow’s midsection and out of pique yanks it hard, bringing the sow up short. He whips the animal furiously with the tether, and the young sow wiggles and jumps every which way, squealing all the while. Yes, he will surely feel remorseful later on for lashing the pitiful beast, the family’s lifeline for the farm year in that the proceeds from its sale will cover their first tax payment of the year as well as keeping them stocked with provisions until the early-summer potato harvest. But losing face in front of the stand of onlookers is too much for him to bear, and he takes out his anger on the pathetic animal.

“C’mon, let’s give it another try.” After re-setting the stakes and ramming them in, the farmer beckons Shigi.

This time, Shigi and the farmer tether the terror-stricken creature to the stakes all the more securely, then position the wooden lever beneath the sow’s belly so that it’s suspended in air and can’t budge.

Shigi feels the boar’s hairy body as it squirms and paces, and then the moment he steps back, the boar charges the sow like a piston on a coal-fired locomotive, a lusty bellow issuing from its crimson maw. At the throat-rending squeals of the helpless sow, the onlookers’ laughter is stilled—for the moment their jokes are forgotten.

The image of Puni flits through Shigi’s mind and he looks away.

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Translation Tuesday: “Mirror” by Blagoja Ivanov

September 19, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Pavlina Manavska

An earthquake is an indescribable event.

This Translation Tuesday, we present a short story from Macedonian author Blagoja Ivanov, about the niggling twists of fate in the wake of the earthquake that flattened Skopje in 1963. A young couple buy an antique mirror from a family about to leave for a holiday. The earthquake happens; the family’s apartment is leveled; miraculously, the mirror survives. The catastrophe is too enormous, too terrible for words, and it blurs accordingly in the memory, but its suddenness sharpens and sweetens the memories of the times before. We see the old Skopje in a hot summer, a city of “comfortable homes” and people with happy aspirations, heedless of the disaster.

“The summer of 1962 began with intense heatwaves. Everything was melting from the heat, acquiring a gray color, occasionally interspersed with the shades of dried grass. And yet,” says Martin, “for me and my wife, it was the start of a beautiful season. So, after a few years, in collaboration with a few friends, we built small houses at the foot of Gazi-baba, thus replacing the damp rented rooms with comfortable homes. After so many years since getting married, we still hadn’t had children, and today it seems funny that we were so unhappy wandering around the old neighborhoods of Skopje, searching for a more comfortable room, which, at a minimum, wouldn’t be in the basement and would have some sunlight. No matter how much our memory may have betrayed us, those difficulties are forgotten, just as we forget many unpleasant things from our youth.

“At first, we stayed at my parents’ place, not worrying about work, food, or clothing, but a person still feels constrained in such moments, struggling to reconcile their needs with those of the community they have lived in for so many years. It is, perhaps, the urge we know from birds — as soon as they hatch, they fly away from the nest. My wife and I were very happy in our new apartment,” says Martin. “Around the little house, there was a small garden or rather a place that still needed to be transformed into a garden. We were completely drained of money, two rooms remained empty, and the garden also required some funds, but the easy part was already ahead of us after we had passed the tricky part. We marveled at the view we had from the balcony — in front of us, below, the city extended towards the fortress Kale and the French cemeteries, while on the left, distant high-rise buildings showed us where the river Vardar was.

“When a person is young, there are so many trivial things that make life difficult. For example, arranging the apartment. We somehow arranged the few objects and furniture we had in the kitchen and two rooms, while the others remained empty. During the first winter, in one room, we pondered earnestly about what to do next. Ideas were born and multiplied. To be this way or that way. In any case, it would be best if it happened immediately. If not immediately, at least by tomorrow. Those conversations were, in fact, essentially wonderful. We constantly drew sketches of furniture pieces and rearranged parts of the apartment. We knew by heart all the measurements of the rooms, all the angles and uneven spots. Sometimes there would be disagreements between my wife and me, but they passed quickly. Nervousness and impatience would sometimes take hold, then pass like a spring breeze, with one side always giving in… which one? It doesn’t matter,” says Martin, smiling, as he takes a bite of the mezze and sips on the rakija.

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Translation Tuesday: “Hems” by Ana María del Río

September 12, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Justin Sergi

Each day she appears to get larger. More thunderous in her love. More outrageous in her furies.

This Translation Tuesday, a short story about an odd couple. A husband is shrinking—physically eroded by the force of his domineering wife. In a lesser author’s hands, things would quickly turn risible: think grimacing stories of shrews and their nebbishes, or cheap, queasy raunch with betas and Amazons. But Chilean author Ana María del Río elevates the material by treating it with a disturbing, straight-faced intensity. Wife is elemental: she loves, cares, rages, panics, resents, and fucks with the same unremitting, meteorological violence. She is”thunderous” a natural disaster, yet possessed also of a brute guile for suffocation with which she strips her husband of his independence and dignity, as exhausted sentences attest.

Suddenly, I feel myself getting smaller. Little by little. I took my pants to the tailor to get the hem raised. She told me that it’s because of my shoes. In the summer people change to wearing low-tops or flats which make the pants seem longer. It isn’t that you’re getting smaller, she jokes, and tells me not to worry. She’s sweet. Her eyes are the color of roasted chestnuts. She raises the hem a bit anyway, just to humor me. She doesn’t seem to notice.

Still, I feel myself getting smaller. My wife tells me it’s nonsense.

It’s because of her. Each day she appears to get larger. More thunderous in her love. More outrageous in her furies. Larger eyes opening wider in the heat of more extreme panics. She’s on medication, but there are days when it doesn’t take. It’s because you don’t love me as you ought to, she says. And how ought I? Suddenly, I notice that I can barely get my arms around her, trembling with a violence I haven’t seen even in the most horrific withdrawals. Her muscles seem to slap against the bone. She kicks wildly. Her eyes, terrified, dart around the room, ah, that room, which is slowly becoming my prison. She knows. She bought padlocks for the closet. To protect us, she says, you should thank me. She fears they will come to kill her in the night. The tenants we evicted are murderers and drug-addicts, capable of anything, she says. It’s true we heard gunshots once or twice from down river. But it’s possible they were hunting rabbits. They were left homeless, after all. They were rude, she says. And if someone is rude to me, well, they’re in trouble. She hired a lawyer. Informed me we would split the bill. To throw them out. In the end, we did. All that’s missing is the judge’s order. When that day comes, she says, I’m gonna throw a fiesta. But who knows what fresh hell will arise that day. I’m exhausted, always a little more exhausted, waiting for days that never come and nice moments that only exist in the future. But she dreams of those moments constantly. When you realize all that I’ve done for you and return the favor. Scares the hell out of me. I don’t think we’re ever going to begin. Everything for us seems either to wither or to end completely. Or, in her case, to get larger. When the judge finally makes it official, I think we’re gonna find rats, huge ones, in the tenants’ place. But at least we’ll be able to go in—why are you always so negative that you have to wreck my dreams, she says. You don’t know how difficult it was to watch you fall off the wagon. Of course I know. She tells me all the time.

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Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from “Something Folksy” by Krisztián Grecsó

September 5, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Fruzsina Gál

although I’m always full of pregnant suspicions, I didn’t think up until the pine cone battlefield that God had challenged us with that kitten

A memory of a journey along a riverbed told in a singular, unabating sentence gives new meaning to ‘stream of consciousness’ this Translation Tuesday. The following excerpt from Krisztián Grecsó’s Something Folksy is exemplary of the unique voice and experimental approach of the celebrated contemporary writer, as revealed by translator Fruzsina Gál: “Something Folksy – and Grecsó’s writing style in general – reminds me of the power of language, the precise, delicious craft of writing, and it made me want to instantly translate and share these stories with the wider world. I decided to translate this particular chapter as I was fascinated by the way he made it work in Hungarian, and I was intrigued to find out if the same effect could be replicated in English. The challenge was making his localised language understandable to a wider audience, all the while keeping its decidedly Hungarian style integral to the end result.”

You carried me in your arms for years
Pine cone slivers lay on the bottom of the dried up riverbed, covering it like a rug woven from knots the size of a baby’s fist, but if I managed to shift perspectives, and I didn’t even have to squint my eyes to be able to do so, then I could see from the imagined altitude of a drone camera that this section of the National Blue Trail is in reality a battlefield, the space after a winning or losing combat, it doesn’t matter which, there lay the pine cone corpses, victims, then with time heroes, but I couldn’t keep playing with perspectives, we wandered on, it was already questionable what I was staring at for so long and I didn’t want to ruin the afternoon, because we had just emerged from the first challenge of our budding love, the kitten that had joined us next to a forest ranger’s loft, and it really was lovely, gentle and vulnerable, and you were set on bringing it home, but there was no such thing as home, you still lived in a studio apartment on the outskirts of Miskolc, while I was once again sleeping on the couch of a friend, where I always end up when my life comes off its hinges, or to put it more simply, when I’m in trouble, that palatine building and the windy corridor of the quay in Újpest being the Golgotha for me, so where could the ranger’s stolen kitten have come home to, but you had dug your heels in, you thought that the forest, destiny, or the Creator himself had sent us that puny animal, “we can’t leave it behind” you kept saying, while I kept pointing at the ranger’s wallpapered home, saying that maybe a grandchild, a loving little girl comes here to pet it each afternoon, and of course I was just looking for excuses, because I couldn’t have brought cat litter to my friend’s apartment, but with the image of a crying child I surprised even myself, and I was moved by how creative and empathetic I was being, but you couldn’t believe that I didn’t feel that it wasn’t just a kitten, but a challenge, a question, a deep dive of an interview, and God was curious about us, you were so sure that this animal had been born because of us, and we had to bring it home, it couldn’t be fateless, an orphan, and I had finally played my ace as a last resort, that it would be stealing, after which you kept walking in silent despondence in the riverbed, like someone who’d lost something, like someone who’d miscarried, and in the first house of Óbánya, in the old post office’s courtyard, matted horses were eating grass, the water in their buckets ebbing, at that time you were still going horse riding to the mountain, you weren’t afraid to sit on a horse, you sought the saddle, and I hadn’t been afraid either, although I’m always full of pregnant suspicions, I didn’t think up until the pine cone battlefield that God had challenged us with that kitten, in reality I was happy to settle for the small things, for example the fact that I finally lived and existed in a moment without wishing to be elsewhere, at that point I had been surrounded by lies for close to a decade, in a constant state of remorse, and I always wanted to be somewhere different, so it was a cellularly new experience to be able to exist entirely there with you, where I’d chosen to be, and no matter how hard I try to remember it differently, that kitten hadn’t been a bad omen to me even past the pine cones, or at least not any worse than the pine cone battlefield in-between the river’s pebble-cliffs, after all, there was something ominous about that too, and there, as I surveyed the expanded land from high up I shuddered, that it was too much, that something bad was to follow, we were too happy and the binding balance of good and bad was missing, and the riverbed was beginning to look like a model of a movie being filmed, and our eyes were level with the slowly receding aerial shot, two thirsty people drunk on love, who, in the village’s only pub, when they slotted the first coin into the vinyl jukebox and sat down next to the crackling tiled stove, already knew that they were going to live out their lives together, which was guaranteed by Attila Pataki’s sublime voice, you pressed the button and the bartender piped up, “forty-three,” and took a sip of his beer, “Edda blues,” and I couldn’t believe that you’d chosen the band Edda, you hadn’t yet known that you were going to leave the city, there was no subtle metaphor in that musty old hit, there was only us, and the regulars, and with us a naked, impudent happiness, that in an abandoned village’s only pub we’d be listening to Edda on a jukebox, which can’t get any better, we were choking on laughter, and then silence, silence again, and I thought to myself in the bathroom, with my eyes trained on the endless depth of the urinal, that I needed to change, that I couldn’t continue to expect the worst during the happiest moments, that it shouldn’t be a problem when something fits so perfectly, or when for once it happens so easily, like a long awaited resolution; so we picked our way through the riverbed towards the empty village, the old church of Óbánya gleaming like a crone dressed in her Sunday best, and I had already forgotten or wanted to forget the kitten, but I could still see a captivating sadness in your eyes, and I realised only years later, once I’d pricked your belly full of injections, and once they’d put me in that mesh mask of historic horrors for the first time, wheeling me into the machine under the burn of radiation, I realised only then that all our hopes for a child were gone, and just how naive I’d been, but by then I was only envious of our necessarily and rightfully infantile hopes of the past, we walked on in the pine cone pellets, in the view of a seriously thought-out, long and happy life, knotted sounds floating from the mountain, our shoes sticky with resin, and it didn’t even occurr to me that God could’ve shaken his head when we left that kitten, shaken it and turned his eyes from us for years, and now I know that it was the last time we’d been childishly and cluelessly untouchable, and every subsequent explanation and over-thought suspicion about pine cone corpses and kittens had been in vain, we wouldn’t have believed it truly and deeply even if the Prophet himself told us, even if he appeared on our way home and sat down next to us at the small pub, slotting a coin into the jukebox himself and pressing forty-four, and Slamó would’ve thundered you carried me in your arms for years, and I was a prisoner of your will in vain, because if Jesus himself had revealed it under the truth of that song, we still wouldn’t have believed that something wouldn’t work for us, something all-important, not the way we would want it, not the way it should be, nor, as people would whisper about it in the stairwell, the proper way.

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Translation Tuesday: H-A-N-N-A by Hanna Riisager

August 29, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Kristina Andersson Bicher

Blissfully mute, / infatuated babbling / from a marble mouth.

An entrancing poem on babyhood commands our devotion this Translation Tuesday–a fitting muse for poet and critic Hanna Riisager, whose first collection wields overtly feminine symbols to subvert gender norms. In H-A-N-N-A, precisely translated from the Swedish by Kristina Andersson Bicher, a small subject wields a gravitational pull, overwhelming us in equal parts bewilderment and wonderment.

You are a plank you
are a bridge you are a bronze
railing. You are a
landing you are a
nook. You are a ramp
for baby carriages.
Head down feet up
Child’s position.
Perpendicular dominance
trimmed in lead. An
H in the heart.
Think: the scope
of this walk!

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Translation Tuesday: “She Sits Beneath Her Father’s Olive Tree” by Audefroi Le Bastart

August 22, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Timothy Perry

Whoever has love’s grief and pain / Should also have love’s joy.

This Translation Tuesday, a melodic love story for the ages floats in the air, transporting us to a time of dueling knights and castle towers. Hear from Timothy Perry, translator of “She Sits Beneath Her Father’s Olive Tree” by Audefroi Le Bastart, on appropriation in the layered histories of France’s medieval weaving songs: an oral tradition of working women recorded in writing by men:

“The weaving songs of medieval France do not survive. Which is to say, the traditional songs of women engaged in textile work—a largely oral tradition—do not survive. In their place, we have approximations to this genre written by men in a purely literary context. These literary weaving songs, with their themes of courtly love, (artfully) simple language, and repetitive rhythms, attempt to preserve the ‘feel’ of the oral tradition, but their appropriation of it results in a problematic shift in perspective—narratives involving the objectification and abuse of women take on an entirely different tenor when taken from a context of women’s work and transformed into a male literary exercise. The resulting poems have been considered among the finest lyrical creations of medieval French literature, but their casual misogyny raises timely (and timeless) questions about how we should read aesthetically accomplished but morally tarnished works, and how we should translate them.

The ‘weaving song’ translated here tells the story of Idoine and the obstacles to her love. The poem upends the conventions of courtly love by presenting everything—even martial pursuits—though Idoine’s eyes, resulting in a complex layering of gender: a male poet writing in a female genre presents male activities through the eyes of a female character. Despite this complexity, the misogyny outlined above remains very much present and I have tried both to draw attention to and undercut it. For example, the French text mentions the aesthetic qualities of Idoine’s hair even as she is being dragged by it, but in an unemphatic way: ‘[the queen] takes her by the hair, which she has blonde like wool’. I have heightened this aestheticization of Idoine’s suffering by overtranslating the prosaic ‘takes’ as ‘grasps’ and by expanding the description of the hair from half a line to a whole line and setting it off between dashes. Elsewhere, however, I employ vocabulary not found in the French to undercut the poem’s ‘happy’ ending. Twice my translation describes Idoine as the ‘captive’ of her love Garsiles. On the first occasion, the French simply says that her love for him ‘preoccupies’ her; on the second, which occurs at a point in the poem when her father is literally holding her captive in a tower, the French simply says that she is still ‘taken with’ Garsiles. And when Garsiles fights to rescue Idoine, after which they will marry, I describe him as ‘an iron tower of strength’, though the French says merely that he has ‘prowess and strength’. By presenting Garsiles as a tower and Idoine as his captive, I try to suggest that Idoine’s plight as a wife may not be so different from what it was as a daughter.

Despite these changes in emphasis, my translation attempts to preserve the straightforward vocabulary and syntax of the original; to reflect the importance of rhythm in weaving songs, I have employed a fairly strict iambic pentameter.”

She sits beneath her father’s olive tree
And carries on a quarrel with her love.
Her sighing heart complains: ‘Such suffering!
No song, no flute, no music moves me now:
Without you here I have no will to live.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

How long must I endure this misery?
How long, my love, tormented by your love?
I am your captive, Count Garsiles, and I
Will waste my youth on weeping and on tears,
With no escape unless I feel your touch.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

I curse the hour in which my father called
For war, a war that brought your army to
This place, a war that you, by strength of arms,
Soon turned to peace—but not before it took
The lives of many knights. I curse the hour!
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

But all this country would have been laid waste
And all the common people left to die
If you had not brought peace—if you had not
With reckless charges, wild assaults, brought peace.
And now, in love, I lie awake at night.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

War at an end, peace in the land, and you,
Your army waiting, ready to depart,
Offered yourself, a blameless man, to me—
A blameless man, the robber of my heart.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

To trace your beauty is my greatest joy:
So elegant, so noble and refined—
You never seek to do me any harm.
Such is my love that I could never be
Distressed, or wish my heart my own again.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

What can I do, my love? I am in such
Distress! Your beauty, strength—your gentleness—
Have lodged love’s wounding arrow in my heart;
No one but you can cut it out again,
For both the arrow and the heart are yours.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

While beautiful Idoine weeps and laments
The man she loves, the man she would consume…
But look! Her servant, searching anxiously,
Comes running down the grassy path and finds
Her lady, overcome by misery.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

‘My lady, please, you must rein in your heart—
You have indulged your anger and your pain
Too much today. The king and queen have seen
How you behave. They say it lacks good sense.’
Too late! Now all is lost—her mother comes.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

The queen now grasps her hair—she has blonde hair,
Pale as a fleece—and makes her stand before
The king; she lists her faults—she knows them well—
And he replies: ‘Take her at once and lock
Her in the highest tower. But beat her first.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

He has the girl ungirdled and undressed
And any part of her his rein can reach
He strikes; he turns her flesh from white to red.
At last, believing that her punishment
Is just, he has her locked in a high tower.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Now beautiful Idoine is left alone,
Locked in the tower; but even there her heart
Remains unchanged—such is her love for Count
Garsiles that she holds nothing dearer in
The world. He holds her captive and she weeps.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Three years Idoine is kept locked in the tower,
Three years, three mournful, tearful, rueful years.
‘My love,’ she says, ‘how long I wait for you!
Such is my love—such is my rage—they hold
Me in this tower, where I will die for you.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

She cries aloud again; she weeps; she says:
‘Locked in this tower, my love, I have endured
For you so many weeks of pain-filled love…
I’m overcome by weakness…cannot stand…’
She speaks; she faints; she—voiceless, breathless—falls.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

The king now hears the cries and stands amazed—
He wonders that they do not die away.
Quick as a deer he comes, runs to the tower,
And finds Idoine, his daughter, in her faint.
He takes her in his arms, no longer glad.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

The king is speechless in his grief; the queen
Approaches, anguished, overcome. At last,
When beautiful Idoine, sighing, revives,
He says: ‘This love, Idoine, it sickens you.’
And when she can reply: ‘I know, my king,
That I must die, and die in misery.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

‘Daughter, how pale you have become, how changed—
This is no feigned, no counterfeited love!
A love so true that it will be your death.’
‘Without Garsiles I am already dead.
There is no need for this imprisonment.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

‘But if you wish to marry I could find
Some royal son, some proud and powerful prince.’
‘I will not marry any man but him,
The count Garsiles—so wise, so beautiful,
And (but for you) as brave as any knight.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

At last he understands—she will not look
Elsewhere. The king declares a tournament—
Why wait?—to be held there in the broad space
Beneath the tower. He offers as a prize
Idoine, refined, beyond the least reproach.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Word of the trial—word of the prize—soon spreads,
More pleasing to the ear than harp or viol.
All say that they will go to win the girl,
To shatter lances in the name of love.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

The knights arrive from many far off lands—
Driven by love, not one remains behind.
Their gorgeous banners crowd around the tower—
Garsiles is there, and all his company.
The tournament begins and all fight hard.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Idoine—is there a purer name in France?—
Now watches from her window as the knights
Advance and, out of love, she gives her love
Her sleeve; he throws himself into the fight—
No purer knight has ever held a lance.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

The Tournament beneath the Ancient Tower—
A noble tournament. Each does his best
To win Idoine, but she cries out for help:
‘Garsiles, you must not hesitate to fight
With any knight and throw him from his mount.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

An iron tower of strength, Garsiles fights well;
He breaks the shield of every knight he meets—
Breaks it like bark—and with the shield the man;
All this for love of beautiful Idoine.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Garsiles has won the tournament; the king
Gives him the prize; the prize becomes his wife.
He takes her back in honour to his lands.
Their love is faithful, sweet, and true—at last
Idoine has won all that her heart desires.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Translated from the French by Timothy Perry

Audefroi le Bastart was from Arras in Northern France and was active in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, but beyond that little is known of his life. Of the twenty or so poems identified as belonging to the genre of weaving song, five have been securely attributed to him, more than to any other poet. Arras was an important literary centre during Audefroi’s life and he may have had ties with other well-known poets from the town, including Jean Bodel, Conon de Béthune, and Adam de la Halle.

Timothy Perry is the Medieval Manuscript and Early Book Librarian at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. He holds a PhD in Classics and has published on ancient and medieval Greek literature and the history of the book. His current project is a translation of the complete surviving corpus of Old French weaving songs.

***

Read more from Translation Tuesdays on the Asymptote blog:

Translation Tuesday: “Matryoshka” by Marzia Grillo

August 15, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Julia Pelosi-Thorpe and Lourdes Contreras

Mothers’ lease contracts are printed in tiny, almost illegible fonts, punctuation arbitrary.

Rounding off our Translation Tuesday feature’s little Italian sojourn, we present the lilting prose of Marzia Grillo. “Mother” and “shelter” are her twinned themes—each contains the other perfectly, like synonyms, tautology, or an infinite matryoshka, and she demonstrates her point neatly with a text full of recursions, in which a mother’s housing houses housing mothers. Cosy!

My mother called to tell me my mother is dead?
—A.M. Homes

Houses were this: mothers. And matryoshkas were: continents, countries, cities, and wooden apartments—mothers’ furnished rooms.

All around she could see women carrying the future forward. Newborns hiding newborns yet to come, life germinating deep in springtime.

*

Seated at a coffee shop belonging to another generation, she leafed absent-mindedly through PortaPortese. The rentals section was filled with ads for mothers—one-bedroom apartments, studios, central heating, fireplaces. She’d have liked some above-fireplace shelving, for knick knacks and keepsakes. As she warmed herself she could watch a parade of her old mothers inside the Panasonic frame they’d given her years ago. Mothers small, big, bright, ancient. Mothers different to one another; some welcoming, others bare. She’d not need a television.

On her finger she wore a wedding ring that wasn’t hers: inheritance or hereditary? Her parents had been as mistaken about her as they had about themselves, cradling after their own bad choices as if she could right a wrong. And since apples don’t fall far from the trees that nourished them, she’d decided to live in a rose garden. She’d covered herself with thorns, starving but intoxicated by her self-sufficiency.

*

Since receiving the eviction notice, she’d started losing weight. At first strikingly, and then gradually, one pound at a time. Her first step was to stop drinking alcohol, as if she were pregnant. She’d say to waiters: “I can’t drink. It’s not official yet, but…” They’d congratulate her, serve more attentively, with fervour, voraciously beaming, dazzled by life. Since hearing she’d no longer have a home, she’d become hope in the eyes of the world. She carried this in her womb as she dwindled.

Do you remember sardines? she’d say to the mirror. She remembered this was what you called the residents of crowded houses but it was a misnomer. Cans aren’t mothers. They are just cans, no matter how crowded. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Alberto Pellegatta

August 8, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Marco Malena

I will inhabit / luminous infrastructures.

Three glittering space-time poems from Alberto Pellegatta are in the spotlight for Translation Tuesday. The poems’ ambitions are vast: using words to give definition to the scale and depth of the universe, as if applying a coating of dust to an invisible wall. Pellegatta’s imaginative particulate adheres to and notices things beyond “intermittent actuality”: edges of space, time and experience. They make you feel very small, and very cold.

Pinwheels of gas in the concave vacuum
that contains us all. There is no centre and the rim
is sewn onto itself. Time is space, expanding.
Time is hunger and space is cold. I will inhabit
luminous infrastructures.
We will be further apart, worlds from worlds
and it will be colder, until it’s reabsorbed into a hole.
Or it will refocus until it reignites.

But now, this very moment, is the capital of Time.

*

In the beginning it was barely a stain
a neon. It was not vacuum
nor was it matter, or fire.
Now it expands and contracts
it refocuses. The mechanism, as a whole
is spherical, musical. Yet quantic
fragile and infinitesimal
in detail.

*

Memory has enormous rooms
rooms filled with mirrors
unviable dust. Whereas
actuality is intermittent
like a broken image.

Translated from the Italian by Marco Malena

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “to make a world habitable” by Mireille Gansel

August 1, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Joan Seliger Sidney

A Heimat-country. Where to put your cries without words emotions memories traumas beyond all languages.

This Translation Tuesday, we present Mireille Gansel’s account of a visit to a “Heimatmuseum” in Montafon, Austria, whose purpose it is to change what we mean by “Heimat”—a charged, tainted word—and to demonstrate its kinder, hearth-like, more inclusive connotations. We present also a note from the translator, Joan Seliger Sidney:

After reading several of Mireille Gansel’s poems about the Holocaust—we are both second generation survivors—I chose to translate them. The more I read, the more I saw how broad her scope, including translating all of Nelly Sachs’ poems, as well as the correspondence between Sachs and Celan; also translating and anthologizing Vietnamese poets; in addition, writing her own poems about refugees, and about their migrations as well as bird migrations, and our everyday environment. Gansel is a much-awarded poet, translator, and memoirist. Her Traduire Comme Transhumer (translated by Ros Schwartz) has contributed significantly to the field of translation studies. Translating her poems is an honor.

to make a word habitable focuses on centuries of “migrations of misery and survival,” and how this Heimatmuseum—once taken over by the Nazis but since restored by its director and the community—with its “humble objects” bears witness to these migrations. This poem also shows us how these “asylum seekers” were welcomed by their neighbors and have become contributing partners to their new village. This poem makes us question, why, in our country, founded by both indigenous peoples and immigrants, refugee populations are being randomly picked up coming home from doing jobs Americans refuse to do, and being deported.

We have much to learn from this Heimat country and from Mireille Gansel’s poems and memoir.

— Joan Seliger Sidney

to make a word habitable

                                                                                                     a thousand times more native…
              the earth where all is free and fraternal
my earth
—Aimé Césaire

like a letter to Bruno Winkler
historian and educator at Montafon in the Vorarlberg

this winter morning. The village of Schruns of the municipality of Montafon. Mountains around and narrow streets all buried in the snow. And up to the small square where one finds the museum. Heimatmuseum: how to translate this word? and then Heimat? The native country and the house, home, the home. A word where there is intimacy: perhaps because in the Middle Ages the strong accent was put on the vowel that preceded the “t,” and was pronounced “o,” thus creating a misunderstanding with Mut. A word that speaks of qualms.

Heimat oscillates between the intimate and the collective, between the spiritual and the terrestrial. A “sensitive” word of the sort that exists in every language, marked with the stamp of a History. So the German language forged in the spiritual, moral, political hearth of the translation Luther made of the Bible.

Yes, how to translate today: Heimatmuseum? And first, how to understand it? Doubtless by taking into account the layers of history deposited in the word Heimat and this museum subjugated by Nazism. Perhaps also by on-the-spot visits. Taking the pulse. In the field.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Invasion” by Diego Lama

July 25, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Rose Facchini

The throng grew. There were people with greatcoats, mantles, furs, swords, sandals, wigs…

This Translation Tuesday, we present an oblique scrap of fiction from Diego Lama, translated into compact, equivocal English by Rose Facchini. An apparition disturbs Alfio from his espresso: his grandfather, dapper, smiling, and back from the dead. In the space of four hundred words, things only get stranger.

Alfio was sitting in the café when all of a sudden, he saw an old man appear. It was his grandfather.

“Hi, grandpa.” Alfio stood up, holding his demitasse.

His grandfather was a tall, thin gentleman of respectable appearance. He had big, blue eyes and a kind expression, reassuring, always elegant, always in a suit, always with polished shoes.

“Hi, grandpa,” Alfio repeated.

His grandfather had been dead for more than fifteen years. Alfio perfectly remembered the shoes and jacket they put on him the day of the funeral.

“Hi, grandpa,” he repeated a third time. “Weren’t you…?”

“Yes, I was,” the grandfather said, smiling in his own way, as if everything—even death—could be resolved with a witty remark. “I was. But now I’m alive!”

“I don’t get it.” Alfio sat down. “I just don’t get it.”

“Me neither, but I’m happy.” His grandfather remained standing. “Your grandmother’s also come back!”

“Grandma?” Alfio placed the demitasse on its saucer. “But… Grandma died more than sixty years ago, when dad was only a little boy.”

“A tragedy.” The grandfather smiled. “The important thing is that everything ended in the best possible way. We’ll just have to make do for a little while. Grandma and I need a place to stay, Alfio.”

“Go to dad’s house!”

“He’s too old. If he sees us, he’ll have a heart attack,” the grandfather smiled. “You’re not going to leave us high and dry, are you?”

“Of course not, grandpa. Where’s grandma?”

“There.” READ MORE…