From Malta to Japan, we continue our island-hopping this week with a new translation from Cyprus. This week’s Translation Tuesday of “Cellophane” by Maria A. Ioannou tells a heartbreaking story of a child dealing with the loss of a father. The young voice filled with both hope and pain comes through beautifully in Despina Pirketti’s translation.
Dad and I chat away at night; he wrapped in cellophane.
When mum goes to bed I open the closet in the guest room. I show him my new toys, the big remote control tractor and my teddy bear—and he fogs up the cellophane with his breath, grooving hearts for me with his nose. I try to come closer and kiss him in the Eskimo way, but I can’t reach him, and before too long the sketches on the cellophane will fade, there’s no room for more. He stands there still, like Tutankhamun’s mummy enclosed in wood. This reminds me of the boxes that keep the dead locked in. “The living can’t stand the dead,” grandma used to say. The living are afraid of the dead, that’s why they shut them in a box, to keep them from waking up and seeking revenge like vampires do! My words.
. . . / Mum keeps to herself / I burnt a hole in the carpet with your lighter / Sorry dad / Aren’t you hot in there? / Why don’t you speak? / Can you wrap me with you in this cellophane from the DIY store? / I love you dad / Today mum told me to shut up! / Yes. I’ll be good / Yes. I promise! / Leave me alone! she said / Me too, dad . . . / Are you hungry? There’s chicken if you want / Goodnight . . . / Will you talk more tomorrow? / I don’t have any friends! Do you? / . . .
I spend several hours in the closet with him. I stroke his cellophane. He can feel it when I touch him, I’m sure he can. I can see the droplets on the cellophane. It’s probably his sweat of joy. If it wasn’t for me, he’d be bored in the dark. He tells me he can still hear the tires squealing.
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek
But I mustn’t talk about that.
I want to tell mum that dad didn’t go away, that she must stop crying at night and yelling at me because dad is still here, with us, and I talk to him and ask him things and he answers. I want so much to tell her how he told me that there are billions of stars in the sky and that I can even be an astronaut if I want to (it doesn’t matter that I’m nearsighted) and that I should never listen to anyone else because if I do I will only become what they want me to, and that the word “gay” means many things and the dictionary says, if I read it closely, that the word is used: “(with a positive connotation) for someone who is happily excited.” I also want to tell her that my having discovered dad wrapped up in cellophane in the closet makes me “happily excited” because if it hadn’t been for me he would have died of hunger, thirst, loneliness, moths, and thousands of other microorganisms.
Last night, dad and I chatted away for hours on end. I asked if he wanted me to take the cellophane off him so that he could move. He kept quiet.
This morning I found dad outside, thrown out in the large container that had SKIP written on it. He was still wrapped in cellophane, one arm sticking out.
I screamed “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah” and started to cry aloud.
Mum yanked me back into the house.
“It’s just a suit, god damn it! A suit . . .” she said and shut herself in the toilet.
Translated from the Greek by Despina Pirketti
Maria A. Ioannou was born in 1982, in Limassol, Cyprus. She studied English Literature (University of Reading, King’s College London) and she is currently a Ph.D. Creative Writing student at the University of Winchester. Her first collection of short stories, The Gigantic Fall of an Eyelash (Gabrielides Publishing, Athens 2011), was awarded the Emerging Writer Literary Prize by the Ministry of Education and Culture of Cyprus. Her second short story collection, Cauldron (Nefeli Publishing, Athens 2015), nominated for the Best Young Writer Award by Klepsydra/Enastron in Greece, was recently selected to be translated into Serbian and Hungarian.
Despina Pirketti (b. Nicosia, 1973) holds a BA in Translation Studies from the Ionian University, Greece, and an MA in English Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies from the University of Cyprus. She works as a literary translator between Greek, English, and French.
*****
Read more translations from the Asymptote blog: