I wanted to write something. I picked up paper and pen, and I walked out to the terrace. What I call terrace is on the top floor of the hotel where I live. The weather was spitefully tempting. A warm March sun penetrating all the way to your bones. Weather like this makes many a person happy at the end of winter. What is happiness? Has everyone in the world known it? Questions like this can be debated at length. Who knows, maybe if I did debate this one, I would take back what I said. So what if I imagine myself to be happy every once in a while? Since it seems certain that I won’t be getting my share of great fortune, I’ll make do with whatever comes my way.
Translations
Translation Tuesday: “Spring’s Doings” by Orhan Veli Kanık
Just a few days ago, I overheard a woman. 'In my opinion, poetry,' she said, 'is a white automobile.'
Translation Tuesday: Poems by Ronny Someck
"In his painted eyes you can see a whole herd, / the prey in his dream’s forever-forest."
Bloody Mary
And poetry is a gun moll
in the back seat of an American car.
Her eyes pressed like triggers, her pistol hair firing blond
bullets down her neck.
Let’s say her name is Mary, Bloody Mary,
words squeeze out of her mouth like the juicy guts of a tomato
whose face was knifed just beforehand
on the salad plate.
She knows that grammar is the police force of language—
her earring transmitter
detects the siren at a distance.
The steering wheel will shift the car from question mark
to period
when she’ll open the door
and stand on the curb as a metaphor for the word
prostitute.
Translation Tuesday: “Night Visit” by Emmanuel Bove
His eyes left the comforting flame of the lamp, seemed to follow the flight of a bird, then landed on me.
What was making me sad? My books—all my books—were sleeping on the shelves. No one had spoken badly of me. My family and friends had no particular worries. I found myself in the midst of all things. So I did not need to fear that events, in my absence, would take a turn I would be unable to change. I was not unhappy with myself. And, even had I been, this intensity of feeling was different.
It was eleven o’clock at night. A lamp without a shade lit my desk. I had not gone out all day. Whenever fresh air has not put color in my cheeks, I don’t feel at ease. My wrists are smoother and I notice, with some displeasure, that the down covering them is silkier, and when I go to bed, my unexpended energy makes me uncomfortable.
I was dozing in an armchair. At the seam where the red velvet meets the wood, golden tacks form a border. One of them was missing and, there, the edge sagged a bit. I sat motionless. My hand tugged at this seam without my being aware of it, as it sought unconsciously to pull out the next tack.
It was only once I had managed to pull it out that I became aware of what I was doing. I felt a small joy at this discovery, as I feel each time I catch myself doing something without realizing it, or when I bring to light a sensation in me of which I was unaware. It makes me as happy as a ray of sunshine or a kind word. Anyone who would criticize me for this tiny joy will never understand me. I think that seeking knowledge of oneself is a pure deed. To criticize me for digging too deep into myself would be to criticize me for being happy.
I have to say, though, that this joy is very fragile. It really is not equal to the joy a ray of sunshine gives us. Quickly it disappears, and I have to look for something else inside me to bring it back to life. Then, in the intervals, it seems that everything is hostile to me and that the people around me, with their simple joy, are in reality happier than I am.
*
I was reading when there was a knock at the door. It was my friend Paul. He rushed in and the door, which he had yanked behind him so it would close, stopped half-way.
“What’s the matter, Paul?”
“Nothing.”
His face was pale, and his eyes darker than usual. He dropped onto the sofa, which he knew was soft.
“But what is it?”
He stood, walked around the room as I put my book down, and lit a cigarette, then sat again. He was smoking the way nervous people do, his cigarette drooping from his mouth. From time to time, he would spit out bits of tobacco.
“Please, Paul, tell me what’s happened to you.”
I looked at him. I tried to find a gesture, an expression, something in his bearing that would reassure me. But there was nothing. If he had been holding some object, his fingers would have trembled. He must have realized this because he avoided touching anything whatsoever.
“Paul, I’m your friend. Tell me everything. You know if there’s anything I can do for you, I’ll do it. It hurts me to see you like this, without being able to help you.” READ MORE…
Translation Tuesday: “Amigos Mexicanos” by Juan Villoro
I was afraid he was going to ask me to give him back the money (...) I told him I was busy because a witch had put the evil eye on me.
1. Katzenberg
The phone rang twenty times. The caller must have been thinking that I live in a villa where it takes forever to get from the stables to the phone, or that there’s no such thing as cordless phones here, or that I experience fits of mystic uncertainty and have a hard time deciding to pick up the receiver. That last one was true, I’m sorry to say.
It was Samuel Katzenberg. He had come back to Mexico to do a story on violence. Last visit, he’d been traveling on The New Yorker’s dime. Now he was working for Point Blank, one of those publications that perfume their ads and print how-to’s on being a man of the world. It took him two minutes to tell me the move was an improvement.
“In Spanish, point blank is ‘a quemarropa.’” Katzenberg hadn’t grown tired of showing off how well he spoke the language. “The magazine doesn’t just publish fluff pieces; my editor looks for serious stories. She’s a very cool mujer, a one-woman fiesta. Mexico is magical, but confusing. I need your help to figure out which parts are horrible and which parts are Buñuel-esque.” He tongued the ñ as if he were sucking on a silver bullet and offered me a thousand dollars.
Then I explained why I was offended.
Translation Tuesday: “Mr. Crane Takes a Wife” by Elek Benedek
A Hungarian fairy tale in verse, translated by Mark Baczoni
There was and there was not, over sevenfold seven lands beyond the Sea of Far Away, there was once a great bed of reeds, and on the edges of these reeds were two little houses, one on either side. In one lived a Crane, alone, and in the other a Wild Duck, alone; alone and frightfully forlorn.
*
One day the Crane thought and thought,
and thinking to himself of what he ought
to do, he croaked aloud:
“Oh! How sad my life! How sorrowful with strife,
for I have no one: father, mother, or a wife.
It isn’t worth a tinker’s cuss,
just to go on living thus.
Life’s so dull and never merry, that’s it!
It’s time for me to go and marry.”
The Crane did not delay,
but preened himself to fine array,
and gathered all his pluck
to go and see the Wild Duck.
He landed in a trice and knocked three times
– or maybe twice – upon her door.
“Are you home, dear Duck?”
“I am indeed, O Mr. Crane!”
“Well then, will you come and be my wife?”
“I never heard such rot in all my life!
Mr. Crane, I’ve seen you fly,
you’re not that strong;
your wing’s too short and your leg’s too long.
What crossed your mind when here you came?
If I married you, I’d die of shame!
There’s a window, there’s the door,
pray don’t pester any more!”
She died quietly, she died the death of those who love stubbornly, angrily, jealously, secretly, and
elephantishly. At a neighbour’s urge, she treated rheumatoid arthritis with crude oil. The therapy resulted in second-degree burns. On the inside of my eyelids I sketch her knees – two magical orbs of glass – and I rub them with devil’s claw unguent. Prayer and displeasure spill softly in the room in which we are alone and furtive, for
where, why, and for whom does the devil
make unguent from his claw? She died quietly, to render loud some mornings that had tumbled down and stuck into me like hedgehogs. I sketch those mornings as a
crooked bicycle tyre. I push the bicycle uphill into the whitish dawn, I hurry to spill before her the smell of the lead from the newspaper, the smell of the pastry which is a crumbled sketch of her face on the inside of my eyelids. The way I close the distance between us is like the way her eyebrows come together in a frown, she pushes hard sugar cubes into my mouth, and I buzz in the garden for hours and I sip the sap of a liquorice. I sketch her as READ MORE…
Translation Tuesday: “The Awaiter” by Duanwad Pimwana
We coexisted in close proximity on this planet. Even so, we led a solitary existence... What right did a person have to demand something of others?
I never had any luck, perhaps because I never thought of it, and it probably didn’t think of me. Yet something now lay at my feet. That it had to show up there was no mere contingency. I could have easily stepped over it or veered to the side. Somebody whisking about in the vicinity would have picked it up; he probably would have grinned and chalked it up to his lucky day. But I hadn’t moved aside, and as long as I stood in place and glanced calmly at it down by my feet, others could only steal a wistful glimpse. Some might have regretted walking a tad too fast; if they had been slower, they could have become its possessor. Some might have reasoned, siding with themselves, that they spotted it even before I did, but they were a step too slow. Regardless, I picked up the money, without concluding as of yet whether it was my luck or not.
That evening at the tail end of the monsoon season, I happened to walk by a crowded bus stop even though it was not on my way home and I had no purpose for taking that route. The money lay fallen behind a bus. When I bent down to pick it up, the hot air from the exhaust pipe spurted onto my face as I unfurled myself back to standing. A pair of eyes darted at me. Its owner walked toward me with a face painted with an uncertain smile. I knew his intentions immediately. While I myself was unsure of my status in relation to the money at that instant, one thing of which I was absolutely certain was: the man approaching was not the owner of the money—but he wanted to be.
THE SPIDERS
To Odette Bost
Into the houses where children die
Go some very old people.
They sit down in the antechamber
Their sticks between their black knees.
They listen, nod their heads.
Every time the child coughs
Their hands clutch their hearts
And make big yellow spiders
And the cough, rising through the furnishings,
Is shredded, listless as a pale butterfly.
They have vague smiles
And the child’s cough stops
And the big yellow spiders
Rest, shaking,
On the polished boxwood handles
Of the sticks, between their hard knees.
And then, when the child is dead
They get up, and go elsewhere…
From the Archives: “Resistance Is Futile” by Walter Siti
In this ongoing series, a look at fiction from our January 2015 issue translated by Antony Shugaar
What is “autofiction?”
I don’t know. I really don’t. “Autofiction” belongs to the category of words I’ll habitually skim over in lieu of context clues. (Also in this category: “antifiction,” “matron literature,” “ergodic literature”—any ideas?). Critics toss around categories such as these so flippantly, practically taunting their readers to look them up on Wikipedia, but unless I get the sense that the term is particularly operative, I am likely to continue reading.
I came across “autofiction” more recently: after reading the incredible excerpt from Walter Siti’s Resistance is Futile from our latest issue (translated from the Italian by longtime blog contributor/superstar translator Antony Shugaar). In his translator’s note, Shugaar says that Siti’s “approach is called autofiction” and that “Siti seems to swing it over his head recklessly like a heavy gold chain.”
I’m intrigued. But first and foremost, I’m intrigued by the excerpt itself, because Resistence is Futile is incredible. Written in increasingly circular retrospect, the story’s more a taut deferral of linearly cruel memory than anything resembling realist fiction, but that’s not to say it isn’t visceral, gutting, utterly material, and wrenching, as it recounts the youth of an unfortunately corpulent young boy, Tommaso.
The boy’s fat—that’s because he was a slow eater as an infant—and worse still, even that’s because the mother may or may not have “somehow been jinxed, conceived under a bad star” after she “got it stuck in her head that the child had been generated the very night that her husband came home drunk (and as far as that went, nothing out of the ordinary), cursing and washing the blood off himself.” READ MORE…
Mother Earth
Mother earth, much trodden, sun-washed,
dark slave and mistress
I am, beloved.
From me, the humble and the sullen,
you burst forth—a powerful stem.
And like the eternal stars, and as the flame from the sun,
I circle in long and blind silence
through your roots, through your branches
and half in vigil, and half in slumber,
I search, through you, for the high sky. READ MORE…
An Acorn Gives Birth to a Tree, the Tree Gives Birth to a Fiddle
An acorn gives birth to tree, the tree gives birth to a fiddle
and you give birth to my star, so the night will be true.
You give birth to it far from here, its light belongs to me and to you,
you give birth to it where no leaf fades, nor anyone’s smile.
We haven’t been of this world for a score of silences now,
a heroic cosmos will not allow our joint death.
The earthly, the real, is real as earth and valid
and death no longer has any power over our breath.
His kingdom does not extend to the green Tree of Life,
what is past has not passed, time is not yet ripe.
Escaped from the clamor, our silence is love,
new images stream from the weeping eye of the soul.
The paired twitch of two silences in one
approaches perfection on a rung of its own.
This wonder-without-a-name tells of its deeds,
the language of atoms has a folksong’s simplicity.
*****
Translation Tuesday: “The Seafarer,” from the Book of Exodus
Translated from the Old English by Spenser Santos
The Seafarer
May I utter truth for myself,
to say of trials, how in the times of toil
I often withstood wearisome times,
bitter breastcare, how I have bided,
come to know on a ship, abode of much care,
the terrible seawave’s rolling often held me there,
anxious nightwatch at the boat’s prow,
when it pitched against cliffs. Pinched by cold
were my feet, frostbound
with cold fetters, there the sighs of care
were hot around the heart; hunger tore from within
the mereweary mood. That the man,
to whom the most pleasant on earth befalls, knows not
how I, wretched and sorrowful, on the ice-cold sea
dwelled in winter in the paths of an exile,
bereft of beloved kinsmen and
hung with icicles; hail flew in showers.
There I heard naught but the sea to roar,
the frigid wave. Sometimes the swan’s song
did I take for entertainment, the gannet’s cry
and curlew’s sound for men’s laughter,
the seagull’s singing for mead.
Storms there beat the stony cliffs, where
the tern, the icy-feathered one, answers him,
very often the eagle screamed round about,
the dewy-feathered one; not any protecting kinsmen
could comfort the wretched spirit. READ MORE…
Under Black Sails
questioning why the fog’s green
is my goodnight to the godless
and my good evening
to a hasty summer
of trains that don’t run on time
and rain that always wants to be first
with the freshest of the fresh
so the dance can bloom
on the great sloom’s deck
as it heads straight into a glare of cold
where the comatose lie
awaiting passage home to the dull life
the superficial love
because they don’t think
there’s anything else
when a person can’t be
like a garbage truck in paradise
that’s forgotten its way
to the incinerator
from YOUTH
The way the snow falls
and covers the plain
that’s how I grew up
at the hearts of your eyes.
*** READ MORE…