This week’s Translation Tuesday pays homage to the books that grant us sanctuary amid chaos and absurdity. In “The Battle,” acclaimed poet and translator Ana Luísa Amaral deploys her Dickinsonian wit and wordplay to construct a humorous tale about literature and survival. A young girl’s personal library becomes a literary battlefield, book contra book, each title a moment in time seeking its own sentient survival. Renowned translator Margaret Jull Costa captures Amaral’s waggish metaphors and allusions as the poet anthropomorphizes the Great Books of history. A respite for fearful times and a tribute to the books that have become our friends when we need them most.
The Battle
Once upon a time,
in a young girl’s bedroom,
a drawer full of books
lay under permanent threat
of possible occupation
by a trousseau.
What to do?
Should they just sit quietly
waiting for a lot of silly sheets
and useless towels
to come and invade their territory?
Or fight to hold on to
their hard-won
rights?
A summit was called,
the only solution in such situations,
but there was no way
they could reach agreement.
As you see: when the problem
is of a general nature . . .
Opinions can become heated.
The Outsider,
who disapproved
of all violent behaviour,
attacked The Little Prince,
ruthlessly, pitilessly tearing out
his middle pages.
Frankenstein,
a master of the slow, silent approach,
and the proud bearer of a plasticised cover,
violently tore the colourful jacket
of an anthology of French poetry,
who, given her inferior strength,
could do nothing but recite an alexandrine,
in a pathetic
moving manner.
In the end,
no one escaped unscathed.
Secretaries and orators,
with a mixture
of pain and pride,
exhibited
their glorious scars.
Until Oedipus, the President,
in an attempt to call for calm,
was stripped of his dust jacket
and dragged more than ten centimetres through the drawer,
where he lay motionless, pages splayed:
almost crippled.
Now, the problem wasn’t
the invader, but the internal divisions,
the seething hatreds.
Now, what mattered
was to survive,
to be a book.
A conclusion instantly
grasped by the
translated, annotated edition of Hamlet,
sitting in a corner
forgotten and bemused,
observing
the howling mob, and murmuring:
To be or not to be, that is the question,
To be or not to be, that is the question.
Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa.
Ana Luísa Amaral has written over twenty books of poetry, fiction, and theatre, as well as books for children. Translated into several languages, her work has brought her many prizes, including the 2008 Grande Prémio from the Portuguese Writers’ Association and the PEN Prize for Fiction. She is also a translator, notably of the poetry of John Updike, Emily Dickinson, and William Shakespeare. A collection of her poetry, What’s in a Name, was published by New Directions in 2019.
Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for nearly forty years and has translated works by novelists such as Eça de Queiroz, José Saramago, and Javier Marías, along with the poets Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Ana Luísa Amaral. In 2013 she was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2014 was awarded an OBE for services to literature.
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