Listening to Syntax: Eugene Ostashevsky on Lucky Breaks

April 20, 2022  |  in Book Club  |  by Shawn Hoo

[Belorusets] writes in this beautiful, off-kilter, very non-state, non-Russian Russian

Reviewing Yevgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks, Shawn Hoo writes, “The question of what photographs and literature can do in war, I suspect, will not be resolved anytime soon.” Still, as one reads Belorusets’s text of stories from the fringes of wartime, the role of writing within conflict—even if varied and not always discernible—emerges as vital, urgent. Our Book Club selection for the month of March, Lucky Breaks provides a doorway by which the voices and images of Ukrainian women, and their ordinary lives, emerge and connect in unexpected, miraculous ways. In the following interview with Eugene Ostashevsky, whose expert and precise translation of Lucky Breaks has given this title a formidable presence in English, Hoo and Ostashevky discuss the rejections of typical narratives, transitions of impossible grammars, and translating as a pursuit of poetics.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

Shawn Hoo (SH): You have translated mostly Russian avant-garde and absurdist poetry. Were the things that drew you to these poets the same things that drew you to Yevgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks?

Eugene Ostashevsky (EO): I translate as a poet, if that makes sense, which means that translation is vital to my poetic work (which foregrounds translation, which problematises translation) but, more importantly, that my poetics help me make translation choices. I started translating the OBERIU, the so-called absurdists, an avant-garde group in the ’20s and an underground group in the 1930s. The way their work formed me as a reader and a poet, even before I started translating, was their absurdisation of language: the way they took classical poetics and projected avant-garde poetics on them, breaking up classical poetics to build these very beautiful linguistic structures which questioned rather than affirmed language. They questioned rather than affirmed reference or the veracity of statements, and greatly relativised linguistic truth. So here’s the important point: I think maybe what drew me to them was the fact that I’m an immigrant. It was the fact that—I don’t want to say I don’t write in my native language, but—I don’t write in my native language, technically speaking.

With Belorusets, you read Lucky Breaks and there is a lot of Daniil Kharms, member of OBERIU, for the reason that Kharms really reflects on and deconstructs narrative. When Belorusets takes her stories about war and cuts out authorial omniscience, writing about the fog of war, and about interacting with people whom you don’t know much about, she describes these people in this kind of glancing way, often slipping into these Kharmsian rejections of classical narrative.

The second thing is that, like virtually all Ukrainians, she is bilingual. But she writes in Russian because that’s what they speak in her family. Now the Russian language is associated with the Russian state, but there basically used to be, in the twentieth century, two forms of Russian: an émigré Russian and a Soviet Russian. After the Soviet Union collapsed and the émigrés started publishing in Russia—because that’s where the readers were—it turned out that the compromise, the attaching of the language to the political unit of the Russian Federation (even though nobody did it consciously) turned out to be very harmful for the language. [Belorusets] writes in this beautiful, off-kilter, very non-state, non-Russian Russian which has (it sounds like I’m talking about wine) tinges of Austro-Hungarian syntax. Also, she is trained as a translator from German, so that’s also there; beyond that Central Europeanness of her Russian, there is Gogol. You feel that in the ironies, in the way the words and the clauses are not lined up one after another but rub up against each other, the way they are defamiliarised. I just love that.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Four Poems by Jonatan María Reyes

April 19, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Shannon Barnes

a gunshot, popcorn / popping, a bullet tearing / into flesh, the mouth chewing

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you four poems by the Puerto Rican poet Jonatan María Reyes that focus on the minutiae of place and neighbourhood. Resembling photographic snapshots of everyday urban scenes looked at from the different hours of a day, these poems stare at flies, neon signs, garbage bags, dryers. They stare, through the modest crack that each short line pries open, at “what lives / in the background” to borrow the language of Shannon Barnes’s evocative translation, “and demands / of the system another / kind of resistance.”

1.3

a fine steam bursts
from underground.
sparks fly from the neon light
of a giant sign.
somebody at the bus stop
eats cheetos and licks
their orange fingers.
random newspaper pages
crunch and float through the air.
they’re later lost.
a green liquid seeps
out of a garbage bag.
it leaks slowly and flows
towards the sewer.
someone gets off a bus
puts gum in their mouth
and pretends that
everything stops there READ MORE…

A Gesture of Togetherness: An Interview with Ian Russell

April 18, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

I became more comfortable translating the work as a gesture of togetherness with the artist.

In my reading of the current Winter 2022 issue, I was drawn to the vivid and imaginative poetry of Spanish artist Pepe Espaliú. The featured excerpt, translated beautifully by Ian Russell, was taken from Espaliú’s only collection of poetry, En estos cinco años (Through These Five Years). The collection was written in the years preceding his death from AIDS, gracefully exploring the topic of mortality. Russell’s translations introduce a new audience of Anglophone readers to a dynamic activist, who fought to call attention to AIDS through his art while many political leaders refused to even acknowledge the disease. Russell was generous enough to agree to speak with me over email, and in the following interview we discuss Espaliú’s legacy as a performance artist, the communal aspect of translation, and some interesting parallels between birding and poetry.

Rose Bialer (RB): Before we start discussing your translations of Espaliú’s work, I’m curious to know how you became interested in translation in the first place. What was your introduction to the craft?

Ian Russell (IR): I can think of two starts. I got offered some freelance work to translate articles from Spanish to English while I was in grad school and took them purely to make a little extra money. I actually felt like I wasn’t very good at it. But right around that same time I had some friends that wrote poetry ask me to help translate their work. I felt totally unqualified since I had only done these academic articles, but after working on them and talking through the poems it became a really gratifying creative outlet for me.

RB: How did you come across Pepe Espaliú’s art? What initially attracted you to his poetry?

IR: I came across Espaliú’s visual work in researching HIV/AIDS in Spain. Later, I discovered he had written quite prolifically, and I found a copy of the first printing of En estos cinco años in the library (this was before Jesús Alcaide’s stunning 2018 La imposible verdad); I really loved the sort of smallness, the roundness, that I encountered in that short edition. I don’t know if that makes sense—the book is comprised of several different sections that seem pretty hermetic at first read, and many poems have an aphoristic quality. Other prose poems sit in their text blocks on the page. I felt a smallness and roundness that was easily digestible, maybe.

RB: In your translator’s note you mention that a challenge you faced in rendering this excerpt of Espaliú’s poetry was understanding that his poems are only a part of his artistic repertoire—he was also a visual and performing artist. How did you go about translating this poetry with consideration of Espaliú’s larger body of work? Did you translate while immersing yourself in it?

IR: I actually started writing about Espaliú’s performance work first. During the pandemic, I found it more difficult to keep up with that sort of critical analysis, and turned to translating Espaliú as a way to think about his performances, as if translating might offer some clue to approach the visual/performance. I think the main piece that came together for me in that process was how the installation, performance, and poetic pieces all read as a reaching out, a convocation of togetherness. So, in that way, I became more comfortable translating the work as a gesture of togetherness with the artist.

READ MORE…

We Stand With Ukraine: “Charred Snow” by Deborah Kelly

April 16, 2022  |  in We Stand With Ukraine  |  by Deborah Kelly

and all words swallowed hard / on themselves.

In this edition of our column that spotlights literature expressing support for the citizens of Ukraine, we present Deborah Kelly’s poem, “Charred Snow.” Through tightly coiled lines, the poem evokes both the ongoing devastation and the inarticulable grief of victims of war. 

Charred Snow

Who sings a folksong on the steps of ruin
knows, there are words one swallows
under bombardment,
but I, in another town, could cry devastation,
as many times as it fell.
In the charred snow, burnt bread.
The least of it. To say devastation,
I cried sons, daughters.
But then, Bucha,
and all words swallowed hard
on themselves.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 15, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Matilde Ribeiro and MK Harb

Festivals and prizes from India and Lebanon!

This week, our editors from around the world highlight literary festivals, events, and publishing trends in India, along with accolades for previous contributors to Asymptote from Lebanon. Read on to find out more!

Matilde Ribeiro, Copy Editor, reporting from India

Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tomb of Sand was shortlisted on April 7 for the International Booker Prize. This is the first novel written in Hindi to have come this close to winning the prestigious award. The novel was translated to English by Daisy Rockwell, who emphasized the polyphonic nature of the text, which uses loanwords from other Indian languages like Punjabi, Hindustani, Urdu, and Sanskrit.

This linguistic choice, which mimics the way in which speakers of many dialects of Hindi borrow words from other languages, is especially important in light of persistent attempts to “purify” and standardize the Hindi language by removing all non-Sanskrit words. Moreover, in a literary field that is still dominated by twentieth-century authors like Premchand and Yashpal, Shree’s achievement could encourage more contemporary authors writing in Hindi.

However, there remains in general a fundamental disconnect between Indian literary awards and festivals and the choices of the Indian reading public, especially in non-English languages. This was one of the problems addressed during the online discussion “Karimeen for the Soul,” a panel on Malayalam literature hosted by the Bangalore International Centre on March 28, featuring Sahitya Akademi award-winning author Paul Zacharia, publisher Karthika VK, translator Nisha Susan, and journalist Nidheesh M K. Karthika noted that a major problem with regard to “mainstream” publishing and awards is their reliance on the novel as the main form of storytelling, rather than the short story, based on relative sales figures for the two forms. In the meantime, regional newspapers and magazines continue to publish experimental, pathbreaking local-language short stories, a medium that, Zacharia noted, “comes alive when innovation is dead.”

READ MORE…

Strange and Stranger: On Leylâ Erbil’s A Strange Woman

April 14, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Carol Khoury

[Erbil] transcribes the coming-of-age of the protagonist—but also in many ways of the country.

A Strange Woman by Leylâ Erbil, translated from the Turkish by Nermin Menemencioğlu and Amy Marie Spangler, Deep Vellum, 2022

Before jumping to conclusions and judgments stemming from the title of Leylâ Erbil’s debut novel, I consulted Deep Vellum’s take on the book—hoping, or perhaps wishing, that the original Turkish title would give more to go on. Tuhaf Bir Kadın, of which the English title is a direct translation, caused quite a stir in Turkey upon its publi­cation in 1971. Since then, over half a decade has passed—a considerably long time for such a seminal and vital text to appear for the first time in English, by way of Amy Spangler and Nermin Menemencioğlu’s sinuous translation. This is also the first novel by a Turkish woman to ever be nominated for the Nobel, furthering the case for the Anglophone to take notice of this singular author, Leylâ Erbil—or as Amy Marie Spangler calls her, Leylâ Hanım.

A Strange Woman was originally translated by Nermin Menemencioğlu in the early 1970s; herself a scholar and an acclaimed translator of Turkish poetry, Menemencioğlu worked impassionedly to introduce A Strange Woman to a wider audience. However, despite receiving encouraging responses, no publisher was willing to commit. When Amy Marie Spangler stepped in almost half a century later, her contributions to the original translation further advanced the efforts towards publication—although Spangler admits in her preface that “world literature would have been all the richer” if it were published in its original form.

Further complicating the timeline is the fact that over the years, Erbil—in her signature defiance of convention—had “updated” the novel as further editions were released. Spangler worked on incorporating the new passages, only to discover that Erbil had also made additional edits and changes throughout the text. Naturally, these different versions had to be cohered, and one thing led to the other; Spangler found that “the English had been stylistically “smoothed out” in many ways.” The more she put one version against another, the more interventions she made. With both Erbil and Menemencioğlu no longer alive, Spangler and the publisher had to face and continually interrogate the ever-torturing question of how much authority the translator “could justifiably exercise.” She explains:

I decided to attach my name to the translation because the revisions were so substantial that I did not think it right to attri­bute it only to Menemencioğlu. I did not completely retrans­late the book, but neither was the translation Menemencioğlu’s alone. My name, the publisher and I agreed, should be added so that I might bear the brunt of any criticism. I wish only that Erbil and Menemencioğlu were still with us so that we might have collaborated on the text together in real time. […] It seems to me fitting that this translation process was, like its author, rather unconventional.‎

READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

April 13, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Andriana Hamas and Thuy Dinh

A selection of staff reads from Asymptote’s Fortnightly Airmail!

Recently, our staff has been revisiting modernizations of canonical works. Our editors recommend their latest favorite reads from Vietnam and Japan, including a collection of poems meditating on the Vietnam War and a Japanese essay on aesthetics. Sign up for our newsletter to get these recommendations delivered right to your inbox.

Vietnamese book

In May of 1966, Thích Nhất Hạnh, 39 years old and not yet famous, arrived in Nyack, New York, at the invitation of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR)—an American peace organization—to lecture on the escalating Vietnam crisis. He then traveled to Washington, D.C., and throughout the continental U.S., to present a Buddhist-led peace proposal that called for a cease-fire with the North Vietnamese government, followed by humanitarian assistance from the U.S. toward a peaceful reconstruction of Vietnam. Thích Nhất Hạnh’s 1966 peace tour included readings of his folk poetry, which he also translated into English, to portray the raw feelings of Vietnamese who “[could not] speak for themselves; [did not] know or care much about words like communism or democracy but [wanted] above all for the war to end….”  The poems were subsequently published in a chapbook entitled Thơ Việt Nam (Vietnamese Poetry), by Unicorn Press, Santa Barbara, California. Three of them, “Condemnation”, “Our Green Garden”, and “Peace”, also appeared in the June 9, 1966 issue of the New York Review of Books. Visceral and intimate, Thích Nhất Hạnh’s poems define the Vietnam War as a civil war. Beyond the Cold War context, all warring nations are seen as misguided brothers. Thích Nhất Hạnh’s peace sojourn was denounced by his brethren on both sides of the Vietnam conflict and turned what he thought was a three-month journey into a 40-year exile. He was eventually allowed to return to Vietnam and passed away on January 22, 2022, a month before Russia invaded Ukraine.

–Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Dying Water by Amna Mufti

April 12, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Haider Shahbaz

We are related to the land in many ways, but surely the strongest tie is that of the grave.

This Translation Tuesday, we are thrilled to bring to you an excerpt from the novel Paani Mar Raha Hai (Dying Water) written by the award-winning Pakistani writer Amna Mufti. With the 1947 Partition of India looming in the backdrop, Irfan and Shahida move to Pakistan and confront not just a divided world but also a divisive secret. Adapted and condensed into a self-contained short story by translator Haider Shahbaz, this at once mythic and historical tale of ecological crisis from the Urdu is a riveting take on the fault lines between geological and geopolitical boundaries.

“The novel, Dying Water, focuses on the environmental consequences of the Indus Water Treaty between India and Pakistan. In this way, it connects our current climate catastrophe to longer histories of colonialism and partition. It also changes the language and framework we use to talk about the climate crisis—instead of scientific facts, it forms a narrative out of religious beliefs and mythical tales to create a unique prose style that emphasizes our ethical connections to nature.” 

—Haider Shahbaz

 

Irfan remembered the first time someone brought up the idea of his marriage to Shahida. 

Irfan was well-educated—an alumnus of Aligarh—and extremely good looking, but even he was taken aback when he first heard about the proposal. Shahida was rich and beautiful beyond imagination. Irfan, on the other hand, didn’t have any family. It’s not like he was born from a stone. When times were good, he used to live in Amroha with all his relatives. He got his degree in engineering from Aligarh and went to Delhi to look for a government job. Around the same time, the British decided to leave and partition India. Irfan heard that government officers could choose if they wanted to stay in India or leave for Pakistan. 

What does a blind man want? Two eyes! Irfan sent a telegram to his family and told them they were moving to Pakistan. The family was scared. They didn’t want to leave. But what could they do? Eventually they mustered up the courage to get a train from India to Pakistan. Each and every family member was killed on that train. Nobody survived. 

Irfan got his Pakistan, and he loved it with all his heart. Pakistan gave him a high-ranking position in the government bureaucracy. And Pakistan gave him Shahida. He was completely blown away by her beauty, grace, and refinement. Even touching her was overwhelming for him.  READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: April 2022

April 11, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Arabella Bosworth and Georgina Fooks

Discover new titles from Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad and Korean novelist Kyung-sook Shin, out this month!

In this month’s roundup of translations, we review the works of two iconic feminist writers, Forough Farrokhzad and Kyung-sook Shin, who trace, narrativize, and engage with gender and politics in its most vivid and various forms. In dialogue with the greater schemes of sexuality, passions, and poetics, these women writers work within and trespass the boundaries of their language to paint bold new portraits of the world, as a place lived in the mind.

season

Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season by Forough Farrokhzad, translated from the Persian by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., New Directions, 2022

Review by Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach

A poet of (com)passion: such is just one of the myriad ways to encapsulate the unique encounter with Forough Farrokhzad and her poetry. One of 20th-century Iran’s most celebrated and outspoken poets, she was controversial for the ways in which she lived and loved—openly, in transgression of patriarchal societal norms—and as a result, her work was banned for more than a decade after the Islamic Revolution. Yet, her legacy has lived on in illicit fragments and poems shared between readers, and now she is one of Iran’s best-loved women poets, widely read and translated. Through the work of Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., this latest translation seeks to offer lovers of poetry a comprehensive critical edition of Farrokhzad’s work.

Born in 1934, the poet’s turbulent life was tragically cut short by a car accident in February 1967, leaving us with a nonetheless prolific oeuvre spanning a wide range of creative endeavours. A poet, filmmaker, actress, painter, and more, her work across various formats bears witness to the vibrancy of human life in the face of suffering, and to the wonders and pleasures of living despite overwhelming pressures and pushbacks.

Farrokhzad is undoubtedly a poet of romance. Drawing on a long tradition of Persian love poetry (Rumi was one of her great inspirations, according to Sholeh Wolpé), Farrokhzad’s work remains unique in its fervent declarations of physical and emotional intimacy, opening up possibilities for women poets in the Persian language. The opening poem of the collection, ‘Captive’, points to the vastness of desire:

I want you, and I know that never
will I hold you as my heart desires
You are that clear bright sky
I am a captive bird in the corner of this cage

READ MORE…

We Stand With Ukraine: “The Ghost of Kyiv” by B. R. Dionysius

April 9, 2022  |  in We Stand With Ukraine  |  by B. R. Dionysius

Through his phone’s / cracked canopy he plays you a black streak / over Kyiv

In this week’s edition of literary works written in support and solidarity with the citizens of Ukraine, we are proud to present a poem by B. R. Dionysius. “The Ghost of Kyiv” movingly comments on the distancing voyeurism of watching tragedy unfold from afar, and of wide-ranging human affairs condensed into byte-sized consumption. As we continue to navigate the ever-shifting boundaries between the virtual and the real, Dionysius’ poem works between man and machine, its precise lines edging out the bodies caught within them.

The Ghost of Kyiv

Your son shows you a Tik Tok clip;
You both play Russian computer games.
Simulators that glorify World War Two/
mid-century armour & the cold war era
where each new development increased
penetration; rounds that defeated steel’s
stubborn thickness. You watch your son
take to the skies over maps of Ukraine.
1941. Get shot down a lot. The next best
thing to flying solo. Through his phone’s
cracked canopy he plays you a black streak
over Kyiv; a medieval, barbed arrowhead
punching through the sky’s grey cuirass. For
fifty years the fulcrum has been idle; three up
-grades, engines, radar, missiles, but never seen
combat. Seventies bones good enough to mix
it over the capital with its modern successors,
flankers & frogfeet; a retro jet where the ghost
got good purchase from his re-engineered multi-
role fighter. The first ace in a day in fifty years.
Not since Alam’s F-86 sabre rattled in the Indo-
Pakistani war has the aerial world revelled in six
kills in one day. Your son doesn’t bother to fact
check the video, sold on social media’s bravado;
a pilot’s last stand. He tells you the ghost was shot
down, but ejected. His short clip trimmed to fit.
READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 8, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Josefina Massot, and Kristina Tatarian

News this week from Argentina, Armenia, and Hong Kong!

As the scope of literature continues to take in the shifting realms of experiences and global relations, our editors from around the world report the latest updates, from festivals, activisms, and the spotlighting of vital voices both new and familiar. Read on to find out more!

Josefina Massot, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina

Last week, we mourned the loss of the great Sergio Chejfec, whose work spanned grammars, genres, and geographies. Chejfec spent his time between his native Buenos Aires and New York City, where he lived and taught at NYU’s Creative Writing Program. During a 2018 interview with Télam, he spoke about the impact of migration on his work: “In my experience, moving from one country to another accentuates the passage of time: the gap isn’t merely geographic. Exiles are far away from their countries, but also from the network of simultaneities they were accustomed to while living there; notable among these is language.” Fortunately, gaps and absences can be bridged through translation. Chejfec’s works are available in French, German, Portuguese, and English, and US readers can delight in them via Open Letter.

Meanwhile, Other Press is on the verge of releasing Kit Maude’s rendition of Camila Sosa Villada’s Bad Girls (incidentally, Sosa Villada’s latest has just come out in Spanish). Equal parts gritty and tender, Bad Girls narrates a trans woman’s exploits at the margins of society; a recipient of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award in 2020, it’s bound to take America by storm. The award’s previous winner, Maria Gainza’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady, just out from Catapult, was also widely celebrated upon its reception. The novel, translated by Thomas Bunstead, follows an auction house employee on the trail of an elusive forger; like Gainza’s The Optic Nerve, it draws from art and literature to great effect. READ MORE…

Confronting Caste and Gender Hierarchy: On Gogu Shyamala’s Father May Be An Elephant and Mother A Small Basket, But…

April 7, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Suhasini Patni

Her work brings forth the daily, dignified lives of her people.

Father May Be An Elephant and Mother A Small Basket, But… by Gogu Shyamala, translated from the Telugu by Diia Rajan, Sashi Kumar, A. Suneetha, N. Manohar Reddy, R. Srivatsan, Gita Ramaswamy, Uma Bhrugubanda, P. Pavana, and Duggirala Vasanta, Tilted Axis Press, 2022.

To read Gogu Shyamala’s Father May Be an Elephant, a landmark collection of twelve Dalit feminist stories translated from Telugu, is to uncover the gaping absence of women in Dalit literature. Rarely are stories exploring the intersections between feminism and Dalit experience translated into English. First published by Navayana, an anti-caste indie press based in New Delhi, the seminal stories are now distributed through another radical small press, Tilted Axis.

In the title story, children play in balmy, wet weather, shrieking with happiness as the clouds part to reveal a rainbow. A young girl waits for Mother, who has been “weeding the paddy fields all day.” Born in a house where musty dampness is etched into the soot-covered walls, she is used to seeing her family slog for hours. While a thunderous rain pours outside, the family members soothe one another, consoling and rubbing each other’s overworked backs. Father has lived away in the city for almost a year to earn back the money he was wrongly accused of stealing by the patel, a person belonging to a non-subaltern caste. On the rainy day he comes back, a tender joy spreads among the “orphaned birds.”

In his absence, the family survived on thick gruel, but to celebrate his return, Mother buys a kilogram of meat with chili and salt to make curry. The children relish the meal, roasting the meat over woodfire, content with full bellies. But when Father asks his wife for money to buy toddy, he is informed it was all spent to prepare the feast. Angered by her response, Father “beat her like she was cattle,” not stopping despite the wailing of the kids. “We were scared that he might beat us too if we went near him,” worries the panic-stricken protagonist, helplessly watching this violence along with her siblings. Father is ultimately berated by his own mother, who reminds him that it was his wife who took care of everyone while he was away. The title is a popular idiom—despite the elephant-like prowess of the father, the woman is the reason a family survives.

READ MORE…

David J. Bailey on Translating Jorge de Sena’s “The Green Parrot”

April 6, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

Discover Portugal’s colonial legacy in de Sena’s humorous and heartbreaking account of life under the Estado Novo dictatorship

Featured in the current Winter 2022 issue, “A Tribute to the Green Parrot” by Jorge de Sena manages to be both a humorous and heartbreaking account of life under the Estado Novo dictatorship in Portugal. The story centers around an unlikely friendship between a young boy growing up in a stifling conservative household and the family’s pet parrot, an “impassioned” and “exuberant individual” from Brazil. In his English translation David J. Bailey captures the colorful hues of de Sena’s language and introduces Anglophone speakers to a beautiful piece from one of the greatest Lusophone writers of the twentieth century. I had the opportunity to speak with Bailey over email about his experience translating “A Tribute to the Green Parrot,” and in the following interview we discuss representations of colonialism in language, the power of children in conveying narratives, and the different measures that Lusophone writers have taken to overcome dictatorial censorship in their careers.

Rose Bialer: I wanted to start by asking: How did you first begin translating from Portuguese?

David J. Bailey: I became interested in Portuguese almost by chance, opting to study it at degree level alongside Spanish. I quickly grew fond of the language and culture and eventually took a PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian literature to pursue an academic career. I’ve done commercial translation in the past, but this was my first serious attempt at translating a literary piece.

RB: When did you first come to encounter the work of Jorge de Sena? How did your engagement with his writing develop into your translation of “A Tribute to the Green Parrot?”

DB: When I started lecturing at the University of Manchester, I inherited a course on Portuguese colonialism from my predecessor, Prof Hilary Owen. Some of Jorge de Sena’s stories were on the reading list and I was especially moved by this one, which ends the collection Os Grão-Capitães. De Sena was a key figure in the resistance to the Portuguese dictatorship, on a par with other writers from his generation such as Miguel Torga and José Régio. “A Tribute to the Green Parrot” was something of an anomaly in not having been translated before. I looked at it with some M.A. students last year and ended up translating the entire story during lockdown. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems from Time is a Cryptic Text by Lauri García Dueñas

April 5, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Olivia Lott

time is more and more social protests listened to less and less

This Translation Tuesday, time acts as the grand cipher that the Salvadoran poet Lauri García Dueñas seeks to decode from its twenty-first century entanglements. Originally published by Proyecto Literal in 2012 (one of the forerunners in promoting experimental works from Latin America today), these three poems from Time is a Cryptic Text begin with simple propositions about time’s essence and nature. But as they churn on, the poems’ words shudder like atoms trying to break loose from their bonds with each other, and time turns out to be completely polluted and punctured by the social and political world. Olivia Lott’s translation brims with this accelerated energy; each poem, like a movement in a grand symphony, contains its own music and cacophony. 

“As García Dueñas’s title indicates, the book’s fifty-two poems (or single poem in fifty-two parts) departs from an obsession with time as a conventionally unquestioned organizer of existence. Through avant-garde formal devices––like stream of consciousness, relentless enjambment, and the absolute defiance of capitalization and punctuation––the texts seek their own encryption, asking the reader to look between the cracks. There, they’ll find many things: from an x-ray deconstruction of Mexico City (where García Dueñas lived for several years) to a love poem that doesn’t want to be one. In translating these poems, I have privileged their rhythm, opting for a sped-up English to match their urgent political drive and to keep the poetic experiment front and center. This is especially important, I think, when translating a writer from El Salvador, given the expectations for neo-realism and testimony historically placed on Central American writers—not to mention the exclusion of the region’s avant-gardes from both Latin Americanist and comparative conversations. Time is a Cryptic Text is both politically committed and formally innovative.” 

—Olivia Lott

2

 

time is also nervation african bees searching their honeycomb for death this frenetic pleasure of parallelepiped writing uninterrupted this dark swollen-cheek sun the wind lacan flipping through books in the gandhi on miguel ángel de quevedo the telephone rrring sounds like a naked body two naked bodies thorns fish gliding on the sidewalk pedestrians walking over the fish the young musician yelling out to people to please stop stepping on the fish you’re hurting them but people never understand anything the fish are the foundation of this lacustrine city sky turned to water madness tip of the scar i spread infected words not one period instead of the other you’re not real i can’t find the syllables or the start of the nervation it means nothing i walk fast a type of solitude burrows a nest in me nothing touches the ground i don’t want anything from you i say it again i’m not convinced i’m always late peach flowers intersect the eyes of other eyes petals time grinds its teeth when it sleeps the young musician builds spaces to live in sounds of bold colors it all escapes our own volition but i want to play with death and yell burn burn i’m peeling you off of me you’re hurting me phrases in the darkness time isn’t real (i don’t think it is) READ MORE…