Translations

Translation Tuesday: “Blind Spot” from Brief Cartography for Places of No Interest by Marcílio França Castro

September 5, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Heath Wing

"We banished from cartography all lions, mermaids, pygmies, and dragons. The sterilization of maps only confirms the disdain we have for nature."

When I first met Marcílio França Castro at a coffee shop in Brazil during the winter of 2016, he showed up toting a bag full of presents for me. When he dumped the bag onto the table, out came books, like he was some sort of combination of Jorge Luis Borges and Santa Claus. What most impressed me was his eagerness to promote Brazilian literature in general; several of the books were from his peers and not just ones he had authored. And perhaps Borges is a good comparison for Marcílio; indeed, his writing is in line with the likes of Borges, Calvino, and Cortázar. Yet he does not simply imagine other worlds, he perceives with brilliance unsuspected oddities in places of absolutely no interest. In his short stories, which range from traditional length to flash fiction, and with a prose that is at once economic and yet never lacking in precision, Marcílio França Castro transforms his culture’s most unsuspecting spaces into fantastic reading. The author and I have worked together in producing translations for many of his stories, overcoming differences in idioms, metaphor, sentence structure and other obstacles found in the passage from Portuguese to English. Most importantly, this project kept the translator sane during the subsequent North Dakotan winter of 2017. 

—Heath Wing. 

The manuals say such devices are made to take anything. Bumps, turbulence, high winds, lightning. Even crashes and hurricanes. It’s said they come out unscathed from the most intemperate of weather. You know the protocols. For every inconvenience there is a plan, an automatic fix. An aircraft like this one, with all its resources, ought to be, according to the manuals, practically uncrashable. That’s why, if it were up to manuals and manufacturers, our role would be merely to maintain course and keep her steady, taking advantage of the dignity of flight and the charm of our profession. And that’s really what we do here, before this gorgeous instrument panel, full of buttons and colorful lights: with the prudence it conveys, we relax and commend our fate and everyone else’s to the invisible wisdom of the display.

Look ahead. The sky’s magnificent, full of stars; someone might say it’s a painting commissioned to decorate the cockpit. A captain, from the moment of departure, always has his beard well-groomed, his uniform impeccable; he pilots the plane with swan-like indifference. That’s how the passengers see you. We fly calmly. The seats are anatomic and dinner well-balanced. An almost anesthetic experience. The Pacific is nothing more than an enormous tapestry of black silk that clips the horizon. We think and act as if the world outside no longer existed, as though the clouds and the ocean below us were but unfailing radar bleeps or a set of geographical coordinates. In truth, as we fly we simply ignore the substance found in Earth’s elements. Try this coffee, it’s wonderful.

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The Postcolonial Kitchen: Vietnamese Recipes from Marguerite Duras’ Childhood

August 31, 2017  |  in Food and Literature, Translations  |  by Caitlin O'Neil

Duras’ recipes illustrate how cooking—like literature, like memory—is a subjective experience in a continual state of being perfected.

The prolific French writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras is perhaps best known for her novel The Lover, winner of the 1984 Prix Goncourt, as well as for her 1959 Oscar-nominated screenplay Hiroshima mon amour. In 1987, she published a collection of texts entitled La vie matérielle (Practicalities), in which she relates “everything and nothing” relating to her life, from her work to everyday thoughts. Duras was an avid cook and had intended to include some of her recipes in the collection, too. Ultimately, though, while some recipes made it into La vie matérielle, most did not. After Duras’s death in 1996, her son Jean Mascolo sought to rectify this by publishing the slim volume La Cuisine de Marguerite (Benoît Jacob), a collection of his mother’s recipes as recorded in her handwritten notebook. After a false start in 1999 when Duras’s literary executor blocked its sale, the book was finally republished and circulated in 2014.

The recipes in La Cuisine de Marguerite are a captivating mix of flavors and influences. This can be expected from any collection of recipes curated over a lifetime. However, given her international experiences, Duras’s collection ranges wider than many others. Traditional French fare is sparsely represented in her recipe book, with leek soup, vichyssoise, and chicken liver pâté scattered here and there among the more plentiful offerings of further-off origins: nasi goreng from Indonesia, rougail sauce from Réunion, spare ribs from the U.S. The recipes are mostly brief, though some are characterized by spirited notes, such as her instructions for Dublin coddle (“The Irish will tell you: add more wine […] Don’t listen to them.”) and gazpacho (“The Spanish use broth in the place of water. They’re wrong.”). In the preface to the book, Jean Mascolo writes that the book “has no other pretense than to evoke Marguerite Duras in a daily activity that she did not hesitate, with a smile, to make as creative as her writing.”

Among the most personal recipes in the book are those originating from the place of Duras’s birth in 1914: the Gia Định province in French Indochina, near what is now known as Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Duras was the middle child and only daughter of two schoolteachers who had answered the French colonial government’s call for volunteers. Her father died early on, plunging the family into poverty, after which her mother allowed the children near-complete freedom. Unlike the other colonists, the siblings were allowed to play with Vietnamese children, and Duras spoke fluent Vietnamese. She had no taste for French foods—the Normandy apples and the meat that her mother occasionally served the family—preferring rice, soups from street vendors, and fresh fish cooked in nuoc-mâm, Vietnamese fish sauce.

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Translation Tuesday: The Judgement of Richard Richter by Igor Štiks

August 29, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Ellen Elias-Bursać

An excerpt from acclaimed writer Igor Štiks' soon-to-be-published novel, in translation.

Igor Štiks is no stranger to Asymptote. As his April 2012 interview with us states, he was born in Bosnia, wrote his books in Croatia, and now divides his time between Edinburgh and Belgrade. The title character of Štiks’ soon-to-be-published novel, The Judgement of Richard Richter, is a Viennese writer and journalist who retreats from Paris and a painful divorce to his childhood home of Vienna just as he’s turning fifty, in 1992. In the midst of remodeling the apartment where he’d been raised by his aunt Ingrid, he stumbles on a letter written by his late mother, hidden in a blue notebook, tucked behind a bookcase in a wall he’d been demolishing.

From the unsent letter, he learns that his father was a man Richard had never heard of—someone called Jakob Schneider, a leftist Jewish antiwar activist from Sarajevo. Just then, in April of 1992, the war is breaking out in Bosnia. Moved by this unexpected information about his parentage and the mounting hostilities in Bosnia, Richter decides to go to Sarajevo to report from there as a war correspondent and, while he’s there, to search for more information about his father.

Once he arrives he is quickly caught up in the reality of the war and, at first, he sets aside his search for his father. Instead he finds a student, Ivor, to serve as his guide and translator, and he and Ivor decide to shoot a film about a play which is being rehearsed, amid the terrifying conditions of the siege, by a Sarajevo theater, based on a script adapted from the novel, Homo Faber, by Max Frisch. While working on the play he falls in love with Alma, the play’s leading actress. It is from this love affair and the outcome of the search for his father that he flees with such shame and horror, as described in the opening sentences of the excerpt, which we’re thrilled to present to you today in contributing editor Ellen Elias-Bursac’s excellent translation.

When the United Nations transport aircraft took off from Sarajevo on the morning of July 7, I was convinced that shame would strike me dead right there if I looked back once more at the city. I stayed in the seat I’d been assigned and fended off the desire to gaze one last time through the window at Sarajevo as I fled. I held my face in my hands, dropped my head to my knees, and didn’t even rise to lift a hand and wave to the besieged city I’d arrived in as a journalist in mid-May—only to desert it that day like a coward running from my own personal catastrophe, which had intertwined so strangely with the city’s calamity. Coward-like, I repeat, with no word of farewell. Or better, like a beggar in disguise, because there was nothing left of the old Richard Richter but, perhaps, the name on the accreditation ID that allowed him to board the aircraft as simply and painlessly as if hailing a cab to whisk him away from a war he had no tie to whatsoever.

And the tears that dripped onto the grimy iron deck of the aircraft, finding their way through his tightly squeezed fingers, might be perceived as nothing more than a perfectly reasonable human response to what he’d been through, a reaction to the stress that is invariably a part of the work of a journalist, a release of emotions now that the danger had finally passed, after our famous writer, valiant correspondent, and shrewd analyst of this tragic European war at the century’s end had chosen to withdraw. Perhaps to write a fat new book about his experiences and the bravery it took to be there, on the spot, before anybody else could, to open the eyes of Europe—as long as the honorarium was generous enough. No one knew that the man they took pains to extract from the plane that hot day in Split when the plane had landed was no longer the man listed on the ID attached to his shirt. No longer did he answer to that name.

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Translation Tuesday: Archilochus on the Solar Eclipse, 648 BC

August 22, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Aaron Poochigian

All that we human beings have assumed will be in doubt

In tribute to the total solar eclipse that was visible across the United States on Monday, we’re excited to present a poem written nearly 2500 years ago on April 6, 648 BC by Archilochus, a Greek lyric poet from the island of Paros who was well-known for composing poems based on his emotions and experiences. What remains of the poem Archilochus composed is a fragment that recounts a solar eclipse, where, needless to say, things get very weird very quickly. Translated by Aaron Poochigian. 

Nothing’s unreasonable, nothing too much, nothing stunning,

now that Zeus the Father of the Gods has cloaked the light

to make it night at noontime, even though the sun was shining.

Terrible dread has fallen upon men. From here on out

all that we human beings have assumed will be in doubt,

and no one should be shocked to see, in briny acres, land

animals, walking creatures, having sex with dolphins, when

their four legs come to love the sounding waves more than the sand,

and dolphins with their flippers come to love a mountain glen.

*****

Aaron Poochigian is the author of the thriller in verse Mr. Either/Or (www.mreitheror.com) and the poetry collection Manhattanite (www.aaronpoochigian.com).

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Translation Tuesday: “The Lost” by Jan Čep

August 15, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Mike Baugh and Tereza Baugh

“Quite a detour,” said the old man shaking his head. “You must have gotten lost.”

Today we’re thrilled to present a story by Jan Čep, a Catholic Modernist whose stories depict characters lost both spiritually and geographically. Weaving together deep mysticism and delicate realism, his style of writing has earned him a reputation as one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth century Czech prose.

That afternoon the house emptied out, the voices in the neighboring rooms fell silent, the wagon of a child stood overturned in the yard, and inside the half-open gate peeked someone’s goat. Clouds covered the sky and hills encircled the ravaged and vindictive countryside; the trails led nowhere and the steel surface of the pond shimmered with hostility.

Petr Kleofáš left the house and set out on the first trail he found without meeting a single soul. On a marshy meadow with dry grass, stumps of old willows stood over black pools. Grey groves, blasted by the breath of age and death, bit maliciously into the barren hillsides. Past the pond on the other side, crooked roofs from the village hunched beneath the dismal sky.

Petr Kleofáš found himself in a grassy ditch below an empty stubble field with two stunted pine trees. A bit further stood a forest, full of dry needles and fallen cones. The only sounds were the rustle of dry grass and the bloodless whisper, like fire consuming paper, inside Petr Kleofáš. He half-knelt, half-lay on the cold earth; eyes closed, he silently counted the beat of his slowing heart. The sense of sheer nothingness and the proximity of death caused a poisonous and grotesque sweetness to spring inside him. Damp and cooling colors flowed before his eyes…

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Translation Tuesday: “Periyamma’s Words” by B. Jeyamohan

August 8, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Suchitra Ramachandran

I felt that manners were nothing more than knowing to say the appropriate English words at the right times.

Continuing our spotlight on Close Approximations contest winners, we present today the top entry in the fiction category, notable for being the first Asian translation to receive the top award in the history of our contest, now into its third edition. (Find the official results and citations by judges David Bellos and Sawako Nakayasu here.) From 215 fiction and 128 poetry submissions, these six best emerging translators were awarded 3,000 USD in prize money, in addition to publication in our Summer 2017 edition. Judge David Bellos says: “There were several contenders for second place, but I have absolutely no doubt that the prize itself must go to the charming, wonderful, unusual story of “Periyamma’s Words” by the Tamil writer B.Jeyamohan in Suchitra Ramachandran’s translation. It is a witty and heart-warming tale illustrating the paradoxical position of translation itself, as a way of crossing boundaries and as a way of understanding what boundaries cannot be crossed.”

Come, go, stop, food, clothes, son, daughter, road, house, sky, earth, night, day—these words came rather easily to her. If I said those words in Tamil, Periyamma would reply with the corresponding English words. It was only when Periyamma jumped to say ‘cat’ before I could say poo– that I realized I was quizzing her in order. So I changed the order. But then Periyamma started saying the English words just by looking at my eyes. So I pointed at different animals and asked what they were. Periyamma said naai, poonai, kozhi in Tamil and then translated them—‘dog,’ ‘cat,’ ‘hen.’ It was only after Periyamma had mastered a hundred basic words—she would say them even before I could ask—that I moved on to concepts. That was when all hell broke loose.

Periyamma was not my periy-amma, big-mother, a name usually reserved for one’s maternal aunt. But everybody in our town called her that. Her house, they called the Big House. Situated in the town centre, that bungalow was built by Periyamma’s grandfather Thiruvadiya Pillai a hundred and fifty years ago. The word about town is that when it was built, the glass for the house sailed in from Belgium, the teak came from Burma, the marble from Italy, and the iron from England. The people who came to grind limestone for its walls stayed on permanently in our town, and as a result our town acquired a Lime Street. Our carpenters also moved in during that period. Periyamma’s wedding took place in that bungalow. That was the first time a mottaar came to our town. The newlyweds were paraded about town in that Ford motor car. Periyamma was not to step foot into that car ever again.

It has been forty years since Periyamma’s husband passed away. Her only son Arumugam Pillai had been a lawyer in Madurai, and he died there. His four sons were variously placed in Chennai and Delhi and Calcutta. None of them are alive now. A daughter of the oldest grandson is a doctor in America. She is the only person who has some semblance of a relationship to Periyamma. Periyamma went on living in that town, an ancient relic in the eyes of its fourth-generation inhabitants. In the olden days their family had six thousand acres of land to their name. Over the years, it had shrunk in various ways to a hundred acres. Those hundred acres had been neatly partitioned and sold over thirty years ago. In the end, all that was left over for Periyamma was that house, two acres of land around it, a good sum in the bank, and her jewelry. But that was more than enough for her to live in state.

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Translation Tuesday: “What No Longer Exists” by Krishna Monteiro

August 1, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Adam Morris

“Where is everyone?” They’re not here, I reply. They no longer exist, I proclaim.

Today’s Translation Tuesday feature is from Brazil. Adam Morris’s skillful translation brings out the haunting quality of the piece, a stunning meditation on life and the afterlife. 

“In the desert of Itabira
the shadow of my father
took me by the hand.”
—Carlos Drummond de Andrade

The first time I saw you since you died, you were in the living room, in front of my bookcase. The same immaculate beige overcoat as always, the firm press of your shoes crushing the surface of the carpet. You were reordering my books, removing volumes, violating pages, polluting my silence, my secrets. You were pulling from the shelves authors who had taken shelter there long ago, characters and dreams long since forgotten. Without realizing the distance between the two worlds that separated us, without considering that perhaps the cognac and cigarettes or the nightly fumes in which I indulged might be responsible for your return, I went down the stairs into the living room of the big house on Rua da Várzea where you and I and she (do you remember her?) had lived for so long. I ran down the stairs possessed, threw myself in front of you and addressed you with a courage that had never pulsed in me during the entire time you remained among the living.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Suicide of the Fish” by Agustín Cadena

July 25, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Patricia Dubrava

A school of suicidal fish. A lonely poet. A jilted wife.

A desperately unhappy woman pining for her ex-husband visits a solipsistic, lonely poet. In turns funny, intriguing and menacing, today’s story translated by Patricia Dubrava is a surreal love triangle. 

“Forgive the mess. I didn’t know…” Lopez said to his guest after switching on the light.

She observed the room while he closed the door and locked it with his key.

“No worries.”

The living room was full of household objects and cardboard boxes of all sizes, some big file cases. There was a computer, many CDs scattered on the rug, a CD player, a black sofa, an exercise machine and a stationary bike. A large aquarium with a variety of fish commanded the top of one cabinet.

While he took his sport coat and her jacket and purse to the bedroom, she continued looking around: in contrast to the floor, the walls were bare; a bookcase stood beside the sofa; topping a stack of magazines was one about fish.

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Translation Tuesday: “wrong connections” by Andra Rotaru

July 18, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Anca Roncea and Andra Rotaru

she sits on a tuft of grass: drying under her.

The results of our Close Approximations contest winners are in! Find the official citations as well as links to the winning entries here. For the next two months, we will spotlight these contest winners as well as their work. First up, we present an excerpt of the top entry in the poetry category. Judge Sawako Nakayasu says: “I’m thrilled to have selected this year’s winner for poetry: ‘wrong connections’ by Andra Rotaru, in Anca Roncea’s excellent translation from the Romanian. I love how this work reads like a film that can only take place in the mind of the reader. The scenes (I read them like scenes) carry you through a changing landscape that can be menacing, historical, scientific, or downright violent— all in torqued connection with each other like the ‘incorrect connections’ of the tribar.”

“In the British Journal of Psychology R. Penrose published the impossible ‘tribar.’” Penrose called it a three-dimensional rectangular structure. But it is certainly not the projection of an intact spatial structure. The ‘impossible tribar’ holds together as a drawing purely and simply by means of incorrect connections between quite normal elements. The three right angles are completely normal, but they have been joined together in a false, spatially impossible way.”

—Bruno Ernst, The Magic Mirror of M. C. Escher

she sits on a tuft of grass: drying under her. even her clothes dry on her. make some wishes when throwing something in the water. rust solders iron under water, no one passes, sounds of bursts of water.

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Translation Tuesday: “Initials” by Xurxo Borrazás

July 11, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Jacob Rogers

A Borgesian metafiction featuring a twelve-kilogram head of lettuce

This week’s Translation Tuesday treat comes by way of translator Jacob Rogers—step into the Borges-infused metafictional world conjured by Galician author Xurxo Borrazás, in which literary analysts play crime detectives, and the rug can be pulled from under one’s feet by unreliable narrators.

The policeman grasped the folder, flipped it open with his fingers, and contemplated the note.

“What might you all know about Pierre Menard?”

It was blank on the back and had no return address. He considered throwing it into the trash, but in the end decided to pass it on to the commissioner, who was reading the papers in his office. He typed Menard into the computer, then Pierre, French, psychopath, and pervert, without the name appearing in any file, neither in anonymous nor in see here.

While drinking coffee with a colleague they determined that there was a question in it, and that such things are formulated in search of answers. The matter found them in a playful mood, and as always they turned to the mainstream media to sound it out. They fabricated a report that a French farmer, Pierre Menard, had grown a head of lettuce which would enter The Guinness Book of Records for its twelve kilograms of weight and its eighty centimeters of diameter, with a photoshoot and statements from the proud record-holder included. A letter arrived two days later:

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Postmortem: A Poem by Maya Tevet Dayan

July 4, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Maya Tevet Dayan and Rachel Tzvia Back

you were no longer breath/ just the hovering wing beat/ of a fluttering heart.

Maya Tevet Dayan’s poem lays bare the loneliness of grief. Uniquely about the state of being un-mothered, it is universal in conveying intense emotional loss. The nuances of feeling and sentiment have been expertly translated from the Hebrew by Rachel Tzvia Back. 

1.

It was evening, it was chaos, it was edge of the abyss.

And the quiet stood still.

A young doctor walked in and walked out

and was unable to say

if you had left or if

you were still here. Because at your end

you were no longer breath

just the hovering wing beat

of a fluttering heart.

Remember?

Exactly as I once was

in your belly. Heart and heart,

no breath.

 

My beginning was a fetus of life.

Your ending was a fetus of death.

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Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Kimo Armitage

June 27, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Kimo Armitage

Recollect this moment, when obstructed/ Observed by the beach-goers of Kaloko

The poems by Kimo Armitage bring alive Hawai’i gently: through effortless descriptions of the rain and honey creepers, the mist and breadfruit. It is a intimate portrait painted by one who is most familiar with the landscape’s myths and realities.

Haliʻa Aloha | Remembrances

Kakuhihewa’s Oʻahu Beholds 

Kakuhihewa’s Oʻahu beholds
The woman of the heavenly mist

The woman of Kalimukele sits
With her filled calabash

The star, Keawe, shimmers in the lofty heavens
Casting a light on her face

She is adorned with the anise-scented fruit
Giving greetings to Laka, the deity of dance

Glance toward the Kilihune rain
That dampens the leaves of the breadfruit and pandanus

Majestically, the ‘Āpuakea rain reaches toward Mololani
Relax to the enchantment of the honeycreeper

For you is this affection
A name song for Noelani

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Translation Tuesday: “Punctuation of Life” by Lidija Dimkovska

June 20, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Ljubica Arsovska and Patricia Marsh

Now we meet in front of the immigration desks

In this poem by Lidija Dimkovska, the full stops at the end of each word raise more questions than the simple answers they appear to be. These categories create both lack and excess in meaning when stripped from their contexts—there is a sense of isolation but at the same time a certain kind of clarity that in life, for better or worse, we often move from having just one home to having many. 

Punctuation of Life                                                 

“Those who forgot me would make a city.”
Joseph Brodsky, May 24, 1980

Home.
Fatherland.
Language.
Family tree.
Individual and collective memory.
Archetypes.
Atavism.
Uniqueness.

Ah, a misprint.

Home?
“Fatherland”
Language!
Family tree;
Individual and collective memory…
Archetypes –
Atavism:
Uniqueness.

Complaint.

Those who have forgotten me, Joseph,
would make not one but three cities,
except the citizens have either died or moved away.
Now we meet in front of the immigration desks
at the border of the earthly, or the heavenly kingdom.
One alien is akin to another,
so we all fill in the forms together
passing the same pen from one to another.
It’s only the punctuation of life
that we all, covering the form with our hand,
write
for ourselves.

Translated from the Macedonian by Ljubica Arsovska and Patricia Marsh

Lidija Dimkovska was born in 1971 in Skopje, Macedonia. She is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. She competed her PhD in Romanian literature at the University of Bucharest, Romania where she worked as a lecturer of Macedonian language and literature. She lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia and translates Romanian and Slovenian literature to Macedonian. She has published six books of poetry and three novels, translated to more than 20 languages. She received the German poetry prize “Hubert Burda,” the Romanian poetry prizes “Poesis” and “Tudor Arghezi”, the European Prize for Poetry “Petru Krdu” and the European Union Prize for Literature, among others. In the States, The American Poetry Review in 2003 dedicated the cover page and the Special Supplement to her. In 2006 Ugly Duckling Presse from N.Y. published her first collection of poetry in English, Do Not Awaken Them with Hammers, and in 2012 Copper Canyon Press published her second book of poetry pH Neutral History (short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award 2013). 

Ljubica Arsovska is editor-in-chief of the long-established Skopje cultural magazine Kulturen Život and a distinguished literary translator from English into Macedonian, and vice versa. Her translations from English into Macedonian include books by Isaiah Berlin, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, and plays of Lope De Vega, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Tom Stoppard, and Tennessee Williams. Her translations from Macedonian into English include works by Lidija Dimkovska, Dejan Dukovski, Tomislav Osmanli, Ilija Petrushevski, Sotir Golabovski, Dimitar Bashevski, Radovan Pavlovski, Gordana Mihailova Boshnakoska, Katica Kulafkova, and Liljana Dirjan, among others. 

Patricia Marsh is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, author of The Scribe of the Soul and The Enigma of the Margate Shell Grotto, and translator of a number of plays and poems from Macedonian into English. She lectured in English at the University of Skopje for a long period before returning to live and work in the UK in 1992. 

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Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Andrés Sánchez Robayna

June 13, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Arthur Dixon and Daniel Simon

far away, the shapeless clouds slide off at their leisure

Andrés Sánchez Robayna’s poems are a treat — in delicately constructed verses, they evoke deeply visual associations. The lines are startling in their clarity, and yet succeed in wrapping the reader in their complex ambiguities. 

The Sleeper Who Heard the Most Diffuse Music

The delicate backstrokes of sleep
rise red over the ocean,

thick, warm clouds
on the far side of the vaulted day,

the sea in this summer breeze.
The most diffuse music, in a dream,

the most intense vision, he dreams
the ebbing waves, the sun, the pines

twirling amidst these swells and drafts.
His back dissolves into clouds.

Neither the sun nor the dawn will be for him
the illusion of sun or dawn or blue.

On a Swimmer’s Shadow

not in living rock: out of granite
sculpted angles of the pool

the shadow on the mosaic below
sketches the figure above

far away, the shapeless clouds
slide off at their leisure

in the blind light of the edges
labile light, still shadow

so his written body flees
sculpted thus, the light dives deep

 Translations from the Spanish by Arthur Dixon & Daniel Simon

Editorial note: From Al cúmulo de octubre: antología poética, 1970–2015 (Madrid: Visor Libros, 2015). Translated by permission of the author.

A prolific author, editor, critic, and translator, Andrés Sánchez Robayna has published more than sixty books of poetry, essays, and translations. He completed a PhD in philology at the University of Barcelona in 1977, directed the magazines Literradura and Syntaxis, and is currently professor of Spanish literature at the University of La Laguna.

Arthur Dixon works as a translator and as managing editor of World Literature Today’s affiliated journal Latin American Literature Today. His translation of Andrés Felipe Solano’s The Nameless Saints (World Literature Today, September 2014) was nominated for a 2014 Pushcart Prize. His most recent project is a book-length translation of Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza’s Cuidados intensivos (World Literature Today, September 2016). He is Asymptote’s Spanish Social Media Manager. 

Daniel Simon is a poet, translator, and the editor in chief of World Literature Today. His latest verse collection, After Reading Everything, has been nominated for the Forward Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, a Pushcart, and several other awards. His translation credits include Ramón Gaya, Eduardo Mitre, Mario Arteca, José Mateos, Abdellah Taïa, and Boualem Sansal.

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