Language: Latin American Spanish

Translation Tuesday: “Some Notes on the Land of the Giants” by Luciano Lamberti

October 22, 2024 | in Translations | by Jordan Landsman

Explorers sent to the country of the giants come back different

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a tale of another world by the Argentine writer Luciano Lamberti, thrilling and poignant in equal measure. In fragments, the land of the giants is disclosed to us: a wilderness of impenetrable jungle, cloud-topped mountains, and carnivorous titans, all hidden behind mirrored portals. But as the years wear on and human explorers venture farther and farther into this new world, the same mysterious giants that they seek are driven out, until nothing is left but their tombs. Of course, Lamberti’s explorers are as loathe to learn from their mistakes as the colonial plunderers of our own devastated world, and what follows is no mere fable of human avarice, but a much subtler examination of how we fail, even in crisis, to see ourselves clearly in the mirror. The world of the giants is vividly rendered in Jordan Landsman‘s translation, as plain-spoken as any researcher’s fieldnotes, but at the same time as powerfully strange as any dream half-remembered before dawn. Read on!

EXPLORATIONS, ORIGIN. 1926. An eight-year-old Russian boy named Irino Shava accidentally discovers the first portal while investigating the basement of an abandoned house on the outskirts of Moscow. The portal is embedded in the southern wall of the basement, and little Irino cautiously passes through its mirrored surface with his finger, then with his hand and his arm, and finally with his whole body. He sees a wide valley covered in jungle surrounded by a huge chain of mountains lost in a blue fog. A flock of black birds cross the sky. Irino hears a noise that at first he mistakes for thunder, but it is the footfalls of an approaching giant, running and squashing trees as if they were tufts of grass. Terrified, Irino takes a step back and tumbles onto the damp basement floor. The following day he returns with his school friends and shows them his discovery. The two bravest boys cross through the portal. They will never return. In 1972, a team of North American explorers finds one of them living in the jungle. He is bearded and disheveled. The explorers try to carry him back, but the man no longer remembers how to speak or use cutlery, and he dies shortly thereafter for reasons unknown. The other one is never heard from again.

Translation Tuesday: “Baby Shower” by Isaura Contreras

August 6, 2024 | in Translations | by Janet M. Izzo

They were surprised when just four months later, Mat and Sara told them the news that they would be living together, for a very special reason.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you an understated comedy of modern manners from the pen of Isaura Contreras, translated from the Spanish by Janet M. Izzo. As the on-again, off-again relationship between Mat and Sara blooms into anticipated parenthood, their coworkers Pablo and Lidia watch first with amusement, then anxiety. Their own relationship, so secure in comparison to Mat and Sara’s initial misfortunes, begins to seem stagnant and decayed in the face of the other couple’s renewed affections, and the prospect of new life. Will they reconcile themselves to their differences, or end up like the formerly-single Mat, whom they once so smugly counseled? If nothing else, the story is guaranteed to amuse anyone who has been forced to endure the antics of baby-crazed friends—read on!

Pablo and Lidia had started seeing each other the year before they saw Mat arm in arm with Sara, who had arrived at the office just three months earlier. They were both glad that Mat was dating someone after the tumultuous breakup with his fiancée. Nevertheless, they couldn’t help but wonder what Sara saw in him, even though they considered Mat a dear friend. Sara was clearly kind and attractive, candid and sweet, compared to a resentful and hostile guy, who took advantage of any opportunity to bring to light others’ misfortunes. Pablo and Lidia disregarded these embittered episodes, keeping in mind the four years they’d known him, especially the compassion that suddenly surfaced after the wedding was canceled. Mat, once recovered from the shock, described in a surge of sincerity, the painful weeks he searched for her without success. Pablo and Lidia rehearsed their best lines and witnessed how he recovered his arrogant walk. They discussed the huge favor they could do for him if they only dared, as good friends, to give him advice. Pablo would tell him how girls should be treated, with signs of affection and attention to small details, with compliments every morning, noticing their different hairstyles and the color of their eye makeup. All activities that, punctually and purposefully, he had managed to accomplish in his own relationship. Lidia would also tell him that it is important to put arrogance aside, to stop being explosive and antagonistic, authoritarian and worried about appearing sensitive. She would tell him that relationships are like plants that need to be watered, day by day, with care and devotion.

Translation Tuesday: from “And Death Shall Have No Dominion / Killing ‘The Mother’”

July 23, 2024 | in Translations | by Honora Spicer

To More Deaths, more glasses raised in secret toasts.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you an excerpt from Victoria Guerrero Peirano’s experimental novel ~~Y la muerte no tendrá dominio~~, translated into English for the first time by Honora Spicer. In surreal and brutal fragments, Guerrero recounts the death of her mother in a state hospital, the two women alienated from each other not only by the physical process of death itself, but by the mediating force of medical bureaucracy. Elsewhere, Guerrero is pursued by thoughts of her pet rabbit, whose “half-dead brood” have similarly consumed her, the process of grief expanding even to overwhelm nonhuman life. Yet even at its most grim, Guerrero remains clinically attentive to the social and political forces that determine embodied experience, her oscillation between passion and restraint serving to heighten the eeriness of her prose. Read on!

Ever since she was admitted to the Emergency Room, I kept a sort of diary. I kept note of everything the attendants baldly said. Under duress, they barely opened their mouths to say, “I’m not the one in charge.”

From that day on, death buckles and becomes something nasty, dramatic, dreadful, defining. I thought about that whole troop in white, green, or plum scrubs who disconnected patients by night, failing to give medications on time, falling asleep or going to drink. About those messengers of mortal death who instead of preparing a smooth way, impose the stoniest. They made it all the more difficult: an emotional test, a test of lucidity and endurance.

To More Deaths, more glasses raised in secret toasts.