Posts filed under 'betrayal'

Translation Tuesday: “The Ashes of Hell” by Brahim Darghouthi

January 19, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Essam M. Al-Jassim

I stared at the neatly made bed and whispered, “Forgive me, my dear, if I have to violate your secrets today.”

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a son mourning his mother’s death unearths secrets of his family history in Brahim Darghouthi’s short story, “The Ashes of Hell”. Our unnamed narrator finds miscellaneous keepsakes of his parents in a locked box, including letters from his father, a Muslim murdered by the Nazis in an apparent case of mistaken identity. Reflecting upon his mother’s subsequent anti-Semitic resentment, our protagonist recalls a deeper pain beneath this prejudiced demeanour. A short but powerful portrait of compounding grief and the often-destructive ways we deal with it, “The Ashes of Hell” delves into the ethics of family secrets and our obligations to the dead. 

When I returned from the cemetery that bleak and fateful morning, I tapped on my mother’s door softly as if she were still lying asleep on her sickbed. I entered on tiptoe and went straight to her antique, oak coffer, decorated with all the colors of the rainbow.

Her distinct fragrance still hung in the air. I stared at the neatly made bed and whispered, “Forgive me, my dear, if I have to violate your secrets today.”

Taking me by surprise, she answered, “The coffer’s key is under the pillow, my darling.”

The scent of heaven immediately struck me as soon as I turned the key in the lock and slowly raised the paneled top. Some small items were neatly arranged inside: sandalwood, amber, small bottles of rosewater, a yellow quince, a small book of dhikr the size of a hand, three new candles, and a fourth that was half melted.

My mother had always hated power switches; to her, they resembled the fangs of rabid dogs. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Glass Apples” by Lidmila Kábrtová

September 8, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Graeme Dibble

So I leaned against him, resting my head on his chest, and looked up. But the sky was like burnt porridge.

A game of magical thinking leads to a teen’s traumatic coming-of-age in Lidmila Kábrtová’s short story “Glass Apples,” this week’s Translation Tuesday selection. Decay and growth surround our speaker as she pursues a crush, though her excitement and anticipation betray her as she discovers a sinister and predatory side to young love. Of note is the speaker’s voice, initially full of hyperbole and youthful naiveté. A first-person narrative of meandering thoughts segues into a moment of subtle disembodiment (CW: sexual assault) as the speaker refers to “the body” instead of “my body,” and all the while rotting “forbidden” fruit provides a literal background to our protagonist’s fear and disillusionment.

It’s pitch black. Even though I’m being very careful, I can still feel myself standing on apples. There are so many that it’s impossible to avoid them, so I don’t. They crunch underfoot, turning into a sticky, sour-smelling mush. They are summer apples, but Gran, who I’m staying with over the summer holidays, calls them glass apples because they have such fine white skins that they almost look like they’re made of glass. They bruise easily—in fact, all you have to do is handle them a bit roughly and almost at once horrid marks appear on their soft apple skin and quickly turn brown. These apples don’t even taste very nice: at first they’re hard, bitter and tart, and then almost instantly they become floury and not nearly as sweet as, say Holovousy or reinettes, so they’re no good for anything except strudel. Gran bakes strudel with them regularly, twice a week. Even with the bashed and rotten ones. Which is just about all of them. The two of us always have a lot of coring to do. Gran even knows how to core the really, really bad ones. But not even Gran could make anything out of these ones.

My skin is really delicate too. Like glass. Gran says it’s like those apples. She says it all the time. I liked her saying it to me when I was ten, but now that I’m sixteen it’s really annoying. It’s also annoying how she’s always checking up on where I’m going, who with, and what time I’ll be back. I’m sixteen and I don’t want my Gran on my back all the time!

Last year I could still talk to her about a lot of things. But now I don’t want to talk to her about anything. Not about apples and certainly not about Štěpán. Definitely not him. Or anything to do with tonight. I just want to get home quietly so Gran doesn’t hear me. I’ll have to wash my shoes too, as they’ll be filthy from all of the apple mush.

I know I promised Gran I wouldn’t go to the dance. And then I climbed out my bedroom window. It’s on the ground floor, so you don’t have to jump from very high up. I’ve never tricked Gran before—well, at least never this much. But I just had to. Going out was a matter of life and death. Gran wouldn’t have understood. She would have said: Tereza, there’ll be other dances. In a year or two when you’re older and more responsible . . .

But how could Gran know what it was like not to see Štěpán, when it was obvious he’d be at the party? How could I lie under the duvet and try to close my eyes when all I could see going round my head were all the girls around him squealing, just so he’d notice them?

I didn’t have to squeal. He whistled over to me this afternoon when I was in the garden: “Are you coming, Tereza? It’s just a stupid dance, but better than nothing . . .” And he had his head tilted to one side in a really cute way and was kicking a stone on the ground.

Štěpán, the best-looking boy in the village. All of the girls were after him. Of course I was aware of him too, but the past two years he had acted as if I meant less than nothing to him. As if he didn’t register me. As if I didn’t exist.

“Yeah, I’ll come.”

“See you at nine then,” he said and disappeared. READ MORE…

My 2018: Jonathan Egid

December 20, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Jonathan Egid

I relished the opportunity to read texts with somewhat more invigorating prose than typically displayed in analytic philosophy journals.

Israeli writer Amos Oz and Cretan memoirist George Psychoundakis are two of the highlights of Assistant Blog Editor Jonathan Egid’s 2018 reading list. Addressing topics ranging from Israeli politics and the death of Jesus (Oz) to Renaissance poetry and home-brewed alcohol (Psychoundakis), the two writers nevertheless share a sense of humour and a talent for producing powerful and thought-provoking texts.

Having spent most of the first half of the year reading texts about, rather than in translation, as part of my research for a thesis on the philosophy of cultural and conceptual difference, I relished the opportunity to read texts with somewhat more invigorating prose than typically displayed in analytic philosophy journals, and my summer reading list was full of translated fiction.

High on this list was the Israeli writer Amos Oz’s first new novel in over a decade, Judas. An old-fashioned novel of ideas in the tradition of Tolstoy and Thomas Mann, Judas begins with an end; the protagonist Shmuel Ash is left suddenly by his girlfriend, and then learns of his father’s bankruptcy, which forces him to abandon his promising studies. He takes up work caring for an elderly cripple in an ancient house on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and the narrative follows Shmuel as he is drawn into the troubled history of this crumbling house and its mysterious and enticing inhabitants.

The narrative is interspersed with Shmuel’s reflections on his now-abandoned thesis, giving the story—which takes place almost entirely in the old house and the neighbouring streets, cafes, and alleyways—a dazzling historical and intellectual scope, as Oz spans continents and centuries from medieval Al-Andalus to Galician shtetls and kibbutzim on the Sharon plain, tracing the fraught history of Jesus and the Jews. The focus of these reflections is neither Jesus nor the Jews, but on the eponymous Judas, or rather on the figure of Judas, the figure of a most reviled and hated traitor.

READ MORE…