잠수

Pedro Novoa

Illustration by Andrea Popyordanova

너는 물 속으로 잠수한다. 물 속으로 빠져들어가면서 히로미 할머니의 음성이 들린다: “전통의 갈조를 도로 가져오라.” 빛의 비늘을 벗는 물고기처럼 그 말씀이 너의 손으로 만든 수중 마스크의 주변에 뜬다. 현대의술의 확신은 실망으로 변했다. 빈혈을 고치려고 동생 요우짱이 먹었던 요오드약은 별 효과가 없었다; 요우짱의 볼은 몇 주 동안 분홍색이였을 뿐이었다.

그 다음은 훈련이었다: 해양 생물학, 진보적인 잠수, 그리고 몸의 변화를 관찰할 의학 시험들. 확인을 해야 됐었다: 미수끼 엄마는 정확히 말해서 과학을 얕잡아 보시고, 현대의학보다 신화를 믿으셔서 돌아가셨다. 할머니는 엄마의 죽음을 받아드리지 않고 바다로 돌아갔다고 생각하셨다. 할머니의 말씀을 아무도 거역하지는 않았다. 우리는 관습를 따라서 장례식에서 울지 앓았다. 히데오 아빠는 그 관습를 따르지 않으시고 화장실에서 몰래 눈물을 흘리셨다.

아빠는 멋대로셨다. 중력의 힘이 우리를 땅으로 떨어뜨리면, 아빠는 공중으로 붕 뜨셨다. 지구가 왼쪽으로 돌면, 아빠는 반대쪽으로 달리셨다. 아빠는 앞으로 어떻게 될줄 충분히 아시면서도, 건조한 날씨가 요우짱의 건강을 향상시키길 기대하시면서, 초시까로 우리를 보내는걸 의사선생님의 허락을 승락하셨다.

할머니는 그 사실을 아시고 아빠와의 관계를 부인하시고 짐을 싸셨다. “난 집으로 돌아갈 거야”라고 말씀하시면서 팔십년의 인생의 짐을 지고 공항으로 가셨다; 그리고 일본으로 떠나셨다. 고집센 할머니는 전기 없이, 카드 없이, 슈퍼마켓 없이, 직접 바다에서 잡으신 생선, 해물, 그리고 미역을 드시면서 혼자 사셨다. “나는 전 세계 태평양 바다를 가졌다”라고 일년 후에 말씀하셨다.

초시까의 날씨는 요우짱한테는 아무 도움이 안 되고 그 대신에 해를 끼치는 사실을 발견한 후, 우리는 까야오로 돌아갔다. 할머니를 설득하여 돌아오게 한 사람은 바로 너였다. 그리고 그 때가 배신할 때였다, 네가 저지렀던 배신: 좋은 회사에 취직해서 쿠스코로 이사갔지만, 할머니한테는 집에서 한 시간 거리정도 되는 리마에 산다고 말했다. 그래서 식구들이 모일 때마다 넌 엉뚱한 핑계를 대었다. 그리고—절대로 인정 안 하셨지만—넌 할머니가 가장 좋아하시는 손자였기 때문에 네가 아무리 헛소리 해도 결국은 받아 주셨다. 그러나 전화를 붙잡고 이야기하다가 요우짱의 상태가 더 심각해지고 의사들이 희망을 잃은 사실을 알게 되고 넌 리마로 출발하는 첫 비행기를 탔었다. 그 다음에 넌 거기서 있었다; 의학이 요우짱이 죽을 거라는 사실을 선언한 다음에 넌 할머니가 쓰셨던 갈조를 찾으려고 바다속으로 뛰어들어갔다.

요우짱이 여덟살이였을 때엔 할머니가 잠수하셨다; 엄마는 열여섯살에 하시고 이제 그 의무는 스물네살 된 너, 다음 세대의 너에게 왔다. 올케가 너 대신에 하려고 제안했지만, 본인의 핏줄엔 그 의무의 과거가 안 들어가 있었다. 우리 가정의 여인들은 굴과 진주를 찾으려고 몇 천년동안 바다 속으로 들어갔었다. 올케는 슬픔에 빠진 상태로 너에게 전화를 걸었다, 지금 네 허리에 묶어있는 밧줄을 필사적으로 잡고 있는 것처럼. 올케는 배 위에서 땀을 흘리는 고통을 겪고 있었다: 너의 물로 잠긴 몸은 어떻게 그의 몸과 같았다.

그리고 스노콜이 뿔처럼 니 입에서 나오면서, 캄캄한 우유같은 우주 속으로 가라앉고 엎드린 너. 그리고 랜턴에서 나오는 고통스러운 빛은 너의 급슥의 틀이었고, 표면 밑의 밤이 밤보다 어두웁다는 사실을 증명했다. 지느러미 없이, 잠수복 없이, 젖가슴 다 내놓고 팬티만 입은 너는 찾아야 될 그 유명한 푸크스 갈조, 그 노르스름한 갈색의 갈초가 있는 곳, 그 끝없는 암초로 출발했다. 너의 조상들, 곧 아마들, 진주조개를 채쥐하는 고대의 잠수부들이 연약함의 악마를 쫓아내려고 먹었던 생갈조. 불행히도 그 갈조은 수중의 적대적인 절벽 밑에 집을 만들기 좋아한다. 이제 삼십 미터로 내려간 너는 돌들의 삐죽함을 느꼈다.

플랑크톤의 덤불과 외피들의 집단을 관통하면서 넌 특별히 조심했다. 그리고 결국 푸크스 갈조의 부어 오른 소낭들이 너의 손과 팔을 스치고 젖가슴의 둘레를 그리는 걸 느꼈다. 작은 철망 봉투를 채우려고 뽑을 수 있는 만큼 뽑고 넌 할 것을 다 했다: 전투의 전반에선 이겼다.

일분 반 동안 숨을 쉬지 안 했다: 수중엔 끝없는 시간. 가끔 네 혀가 커지고 꼬이고 도는 것을 느꼈다:엄마는 귀향의 폭력을 계산하지 못해서 그 이유로 돌아가셨다. 너도 그렇게 죽을 수 있다. 너의 몸을 이산화탄소로 포화시키지 않으려고 안 움직이도록 했다. 너의 팔은 허벅지에 매달렸다. 그 다음엔 발뒤꿈치에 생긴 매듭이 너의 계획을 변경하였다. 너는 밧줄에 엉키게 되었다.

물고기들이 마스크 앞에 남아있는 빛을 집어삼키면서 할머니가 가끔 하셨던 말씀이 들린다: “바다를 두려워하지 말라. 가슴 깊히 사랑하는 것을 위해 싸우길 두려워하지 말라.” 지친 올케는 위에서 필사적으로 밧줄을 잡아당기고, 밧줄이 흐늘흐늘 되진 후에 찢어지는 것을 보고 섬뜩하였다.

너의 횡격막을 치고있는 보이지 않은 강타, 이 세상에서 너를 떼어놓는 잠잠한 어지러음을 느낀 후에 넌 매듭을 풀고 납 벨트에 벗어나고 표면으로 거의 본능적으로 올라갈 수 있었다. 너의 귀향은 느렸지만 끊임없었다, 표면 밑 오미터이하에 배의 용골이 커지고 분명하게 되는 것을 본다. 울퉁불퉁한 기름 얼룩같이 뜨고 있는 너의 인생의 조각들을 본다. 그 중에 아빠가 요우짱의 얼굴에 그렸던 창백한 볼, 첫 진주를 찾았던 엄마의 미소, 그리고 모든 것을 올바르게 하는 할머니의 엄격한 목소리를 알아본다. 너의 팔이 그 순간에 굳어진다; 혀는 입천장을 막는 거대한 뱀이다. 그 빛이 다른 빛으로 변한다: 더 하얗고 더 맹렬한 빛. 꿈 꾸길 시작한다. 그리고 그 꿈 속에는 네 발에 지느러미가 나타나고 산소는 단지 미신일뿐이다.

Read the original in Spanish

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Listen to the author read the text in the Spanish:

Winner of the “Story of 1000 Words” contest sponsored by Peru’s Caretas magazine, Pedro Novoa’s “The Dive” does not fit neatly into any genre. At 997 words, it lives on the margin of the cuento (short story), the cuento breve (short short story), and the microcuento (micro-story).

I posed the question of genre to the author in an email: “There is a very thin line between cuento and cuento breve that makes a sharp delineation difficult. I use devices common to the cuento, but also poetic devices like metaphor, similes, or symbols, which allow me to save space.” “Ultimately,” he concluded, “I think it’s a cuento breve because, unlike the microcuento, it forces the reader to take a breath, a brief but necessary pause before resuming the story.”

Written in the second-person tú, “The Dive,” whose first line is “Te sumerges” (You dive), is reminiscent of Carlos Fuentes’ Aura, whose opening line, “Lees ese anuncio” (You read the advertisement), has become of the most memorable, if not haunting lines in Spanish literature. This comparison is appropriate, however, for another reason: the novella, like the cuento breve, is a genre that demands linguistic economy.

As a translator, my immediate task was to honor the 1000-word limit. This meant, for example, avoiding periphrasis wherever possible and applying a scalpel to remove any excess.

Another consideration was the translation of the title, “Inmersión,” a polysemic noun, meaning at once “immersion,” “diving,” and even “under-water fishing.” This polysemy, of course, is intentional. No single English word, however, contains the same semantic values. In the end, I chose “The Dive” to echo my translation of the story’s first line.

In a final email, Novoa confessed that the story is based on his own experience of losing consciousness while taking diving lessons. “But,” he wrote, “following Vargas Llosa’s recommendation to not ‘parasitize’ our lives, I decided to use the experience in a way that demanded that I do research. That’s how I arrived at the pearl divers.” My translation, then, required that I also carry out research on Japan’s ama, which, like Novoa, I opted to leave in Japanese.

Novoa ended his email confession, saying, “Writing this story was part of an exorcism,” adding, “I wanted those demons that I had immersed to be known by as many people as possible.”

Consider, then, this translation an effort to help Novoa exorcize those demons.

Pedro Novoa (b. 1974, Lima) has won numerous literary prizes in his native Peru, including the Premio Nacional de Dramaturgia, in 2004, and the Premio Internacional de Cuento Corto Dante Alighieri for short stories. He has published the novel Seis metros de soga (Ediciones Altazor), which was awarded the Premio Nacional Horacio 2010 in the short novel category, and the novel Maestra vida (Alfaguara), winner of the Premio Internacional Mario Vargas Llosa. He has contributed to anthologies published in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Spain, and Peru. His story “Inmersión,” which appears here as “The Dive,” recently won first prize in the XXVII Edición del Concurso de las 1000 Palabras, organized by the magazine Caretas. He is a professor at the Universidad César Vallejo.

George Henson is a translator of contemporary Latin American and Spanish prose. He has translated works by many notable writers, including Elena Poniatowska, Andrés Neuman, Claudia Salazar, Raquel Castro, Leonardo Fuentes, and Luis Jorge Boone. His translations have appeared variously in Words Without Borders, Buenos Aires Review, BOMB, Literal, and The Literary Review. His translations of Alberto Chimal have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Flash Fiction International, and World Literature Today. His book-length translations include Sergio Pitol's The Art of Flight and The Journey, both with Deep Vellum Publishing. George is a member of the Spanish faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he is affiliated with the Center for Translation Studies. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Dallas.

Alketa Halilaj (1990) is a young journalist and translator from Albania. She started her career in 2013 by co-funding and working as the Editor-in-Chief of Pa Fokus online magazine (Albania). Currently, she manages some online platforms on investments and entrepreneurship. She is also translating two books on Semiotics. During her short but intensive career, Alketa has been part of many translation projects—mainly in the literature field. She is very passionate about literature, semiotics and languages as she can speak Albanian, English, Italian, Spanish and German. During her free time, she takes online courses and reads literature blogs.

Eunice Kim is a schoolteacher and novelist who received her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design and her BA from Amherst College. Previously, she has been published in Lumen and Canyon Voices. In her free time, she advocates a sustainable lifestyle that seeks beauty in all its material and spiritual manifestations. Her fiction and nonfiction works are inspired by fairytales, meditation practices, and improvised music, and revolve around place, object, symmetry, and abstraction. Originally from New York, she is currently living in Los Angeles with her pet turtle Soren.

Fabrizio Mas was born in Lima, Peru. He has had instruction in different forms of art, but he is mainly a writer and a translator. As a writer, he has been published a number of times in literary magazines like Os Fazedores de Letras (Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, Portugal). His most recent work is included in an anthology of young Latin American writers called Apuntes Sudacas (Ayni—Cooperativa Editorial, 2016), which will be published this year in Barcelona, Spain. He is currently working on a book of short stories and on a translation, from Portuguese into Spanish, of a Brazilian writer and composer. He is also part of an art collective in Peru called Sapos y Culebras. Besides his literary work, he has also worked as a scriptwriter for shortfilms in Peru, combining his work as a writer with his interest in cinema.

Sohini Basak has poems and short stories in the Missing Slate, Ambit, Lighthouse, Paris Lit Up, Helter Skelter, Emma Press and Poetrywala anthologies, and elsewhere. She won second prize at the inaugural RædLeaf India Poetry Prize in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Melita Hume and the Jane Martin poetry prizes in 2014. She studied literature and creative writing at the universities of Delhi, Warwick, and East Anglia, where she was awarded the Malcolm Bradbury continuation grant for poetry. She is one of the social media managers for Asymptote and works as an editor in Delhi.

Sylva Ficová is a freelance translator, editor, lecturer, and photographer. Professionally, she specializes in subtitling, academic translation and localization, but she has also translated more than 15 book titles, including The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake, a novel by Patrick McCabe, a comic by Alison Bechdel and books on literary theory by Northrop Frye. She lives in Brno, Czech Republic.

Avgi Daferera is a translator to/from English from/to Greek, and occasionally from Spanish. She was born in South Africa and raised in Greece. She studied English Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and holds an MA in Writing from the University of Warwick, UK, and an MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia, UK. Apart from Greece and the UK Avgi has also lived in Spain and Belgium. She has worked as a freelance translator for over five years. Her translations have been published in various print and online magazines. Avgi was the Greek mentee during the first year of the British Centre for Literary Translation Mentorship Programme in 2012. She is currently working as a Children`s Rights Assistant at the Ersilia Literary Agency in Athens.

Rosy D'Souza is a poet, translator, teacher and a development professional and cofounder of Sunoh, an online radio station. In the past she has taught English literature to graduate students and has worked with internationally renowned NGOs to improve the quality of teaching-learning in primary schools in rural India. Currently, she has taken a sabbatical to be with her baby girl, Misuni. Her poetry has won many prizes and her anthology Manna Bisupu (Warmth of the Soil) is critically acclaimed. Her translation of H. Y. Sharada Prasad's Quit India Prison Dairy, Arivina Adumbola (A Playground of Wisdom) is a vital historic document of India's freedom struggle. Her translation of Jeremy Seabrook's essays into Kannada, Swargakke Moore Maili (Only Three Miles to Paradise) is forthcoming.

N. Kalyan Raman is a translator of contemporary fiction and poetry in Tamil, a major language of south India, into English. He has so far published nine volumes of Tamil fiction in translation, including Mole! (2004), Manasarovar (2010), The Arena (2013), Farewell, Mahatma (2014), Still Bleeding from the Wound (2016) and The Ghosts of Meenambakkam (2016). His poetry translations have appeared in several anthologies of literature in Indian languages and in journals such as Poetry Internetional, Circumference, Indian Literature, Caravan and The Little Magazine, among others. He has just completed translation of two novels by Poomani, the distinguished chronicler of subaltern lives, and is currently translating a collection of short stories by Salma. He has translated relatively little from English to Tamil, his mother tongue, but would like to do a lot more in future. In 2014, he published a Tamil translation of Grace Paley’s story, “The Long Distance Runner.” “The Dive” is only his second attempt in this direction.

Aňa Ostrihoňová studied English, American and French language and literature at Charles University in Prague and has a PhD in translating studies from Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra. After living abroad for several years, including working as a translator for the European Commission and the European Parliament, she returned to Slovakia in 2011 and founded her own publishing house, INAQUE. She writes essays and book reviews and translates fiction and non-fiction from English, French and German.

Francis Li Zhuoxiong is a contributing editor at Asymptote. A critically acclaimed and platinum-record lyricist, he was the subject of an interview in the Jan 2011 issue of Asymptote. Songs he has written include the 2012 Olympics song for China (sponsored by Coca Cola), the Chinese version of the 2010 FIFA World Cup song "Wavin' Flag," the theme song to the movies "Red Cliff I & II" (directed by John Woo), and the Karen Mok songs "愛" and "不見不散,“ which won him Golden Melody Awards for Best Lyrics in 2003 and 2015 respectively. Click here for his website.


Lectures d'ailleurs is an alternative Spanish/French—French/Spanish literary translation initiative and publisher conceived and run by Professor Caroline Lepage of the University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre-La-Défense in France. With no commercial aim and comprised of both high school and university students and professors as well as professional translators—all of whom are passionate about literature and translation—this project has as its aim the diffusion of short literary forms. Only a few stories or micro-stories from a given author are published in order to give greater visibility to as many authors as possible. Stories do not need to be previously published or fit any thematic criteria; all that matters is that they are untranslated. The members of the team then read the stories and proceed to select some of them. The translation is then produced collaboratively in different workshops. Lectures d'ailleurs was created on November 4, 2012. It has produced 32 anthologies organized by country or theme and in the process translated more than 700 authors.

Poupeh Missaghi, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Iran, has a PhD in English, Creative Writing, from University of Denver and an MA in Translation Studies. She works and has published as a writer, translator, editor, and educator.

Nazanin Mehrad has a PhD in Hispanic literature from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. She has worked as a translator and interpreter for many years and has teaching experience at the university level as well.

Sim Yee Chiang is a contributing editor at Asymptote. He was born in Singapore, received an undergraduate education and a master's in English from Stanford University, and researched issues of English-Japanese and Japanese-English literary translation under the auspices of the University of Tokyo, where, seduced by the praxis itself, he now hopes to contribute to the exponentially growing mass that is world literature.

Sayuri Okamoto is a contributing editor at Asymptote. She holds degrees in art history and Japanese literature and works as a translator, writer, and curator. Born and raised in Shizuoka, Japan, she is currently living and working in London (UK) and Padua (Italy). In 2014, she received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for her translation of Gozo Yoshimasu's "post-3.11" poetry series Dear Monster.

Machiel van Veen developed a liking for languages while working as a conductor on Dutch Railways, where he learned English, French, and German. He has translated John Barth’s The Sotweed Factor into Dutch as well as several other books from English and Scottish English. Based in Amsterdam, he also specializes in decoding works written using the Fractur-Alphabet.