Posts filed under 'deportation'

What’s New in Translation: December 2024

Discover new work from Germany, Lebanon, Romania, France, Taiwan, Hungary, Finland, and Tunisia!

In our last round-up of the year, we’ve selected twelve titles from eight countries, with tales of grand adventure and prose of intimate beauty, novels tracing orature or the piecing together of history, rediscovered poetry and letters from literary titans, stories tinged with horror or fantasy. . . All to send the year off the best way we know how: in the company of our world’s brilliant writers.

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What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, translated from the German and edited by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill, Liveright, 2024

Review by Liliana Torpey

In What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, we are invited into the private, poetic life of the author behind the seminal political texts The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem. The door is not opened by Arendt herself—who never published her poems and seemingly never intended to—but by the volume’s translators, Samantha Rose Hill and Genese Grill, who dove deep into the archives to collect these poems. Reading them feels at once like a gift and a faux-pas, knowing that we are trespassing upon the intimate thoughts and gestures of one of the twentieth century’s great political thinkers.

The entirety of Arendt’s poetic corpus appears in this book. For a lifetime it doesn’t seem like many—seventy-eight in total—but the book’s thorough introduction, translator’s note, and footnotes reveal just how carefully Arendt stewarded these poems over the years. Hill and Grill detail the way that Arendt hand wrote each piece in a notebook or letter, then continued to edit by hand before finally typing up the poems and arranging them chronologically, by season. Packing many of them alongside her essential documents when leaving Germany, her poems “remained among her most prized possessions.”

This care is evident in the poems themselves, which often fall on the shorter and sparser side. It’s clear that Arendt had considered and reconsidered each individual word, trying to communicate what she felt and sensed. In many cases, that world appears to be a rather bleak one: “The sky is in flames, / Heaven is on fire / Above us all, / Who don’t know the way.” While her political writings directly address the mechanisms of violence and authoritarianism, her poems often reveal an unsettling and probing uncertainty.

Alongside—and perhaps stemming from—this uncertainty flows a desire and sensuality that animates Arendt’s curiosity and nostalgia: “Heart warmth / Heart grace / Inhaling deep emotional-being / Sighing softly / Like cloud mist / Audibly trembling touched-being.” Her precision and tenderness are disarming, though not totally distinct from the Arendt that readers may already know. Marked by ambivalence and vulnerability in the face of life’s great mysteries, these poems don’t simply reveal all that we hope to know about Arendt’s internal landscape; instead, they deepen a sense of wonder that hovers, always, just beyond our reach.

letters to gisele

Letters to Gisèle by Paul Celan, translated from the German by Jason Kavett, NYRB, 2024 READ MORE…

Uncovering Truth Through Fiction: Liliana Corobca and Monica Cure on Too Great a Sky

I think optimism is a solution to our very deep trauma­ . . . If you didn’t view life that way, you just wouldn’t survive.

After The Censor’s Notebook, winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for debut translation, and Kinderland, about a village of children abandoned by parents working abroad, Too Great a Sky is Moldovan author Liliana Corobca’s third novel to be translated into English by Romanian-American translator and writer Monica Cure. Beginning with a harrowing deportation by train from Bucovina, Romania to the steppes of Kazakhstan, the story chronicles a girl and a people who are forced to find their way amid unspeakable conditions and political change. I spoke with Liliana and Monica about working between academic research and fiction; navigating culture and language across borders both contemporary and historic; and the ways in which faith, optimism, and humor are instrumental to survival.

Regan Mies (RM): Too Great a Sky opens with its narrator Ana telling her story to her great-granddaughter, beginning when she’s eleven and facing Soviet deportation from Bucovina. What was it like to write in the voice of a much older woman recalling experiences from her youth and adolescence?

Liliana Corobca (LC): My novel is based on the real testimonies of people from Bucovina deported to Siberia, and these were from survivors who were very old. My main character is not a real person, but because someone like her would have been deported in 1941, it wouldn’t be realistic to imagine a survivor as a young woman or child today. But my novel is also about memory, about remembering the experiences of past and childhood. During the journey on the train, Ana was a child—that’s why I move between ages. We have an old woman who tells the story, but we also have a young girl who feels the experience of deportation.

RM: In her translator’s note, Monica writes that you had previously edited over eighty of these oral testimonies of Soviet deportation during World War Two. What did the journey look like between working with those texts in an academic capacity and deciding to write this novel?

LC: At the time when I was editing the documents, I thought that documentation would be enough, and then I moved on. I decided not to write a novel. Almost ten years passed after that, but when I was working with those testimonies, I discovered certain themes. They said, like the refrain of a song, “We survived because we believed in God.” I was educated in a communist society, which wasn’t religious at all. For me, it was complicated to write from inside the skin of a believer. These people who believed so profoundly and seriously in God had a very religious way of speaking. Even if they weren’t mentioning God by name, he was still present in their stories. I was impressed that, in the worst conditions, their hope and faith allowed them to survive. I began to read religious literature, and I learned to pray. I also began reading orthodox prayer books. Even though it wasn’t very usual to read the same prayers over and over again every day, it was through that practice that I learned to say my own prayers, which was what I needed to be able to write this story in their voices.

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On the Tempers of Time: Reading Christoph Ransmayr’s The Lockmaster

The Lockmaster is a chronicle of an imminent future where emotional disorientations encounter environmental turmoil.

The Lockmaster by Christoph Ransmayr, translated from the German by Simon Pare, Seagull Books, 2024

The Lockmaster, the latest novel from Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr, begins with an act of killing in a small European town. The narrator’s father—the titular lockmaster—presides over a series of sluice systems for guiding river traffic around the Great Falls, a cascade over a hundred and twenty feet high on the White River. On a festive day, ironically a day to celebrate the feast of Saint Nepomuk, the patron saint of those in danger of drowning, the lockmaster floods a navigation channel carrying riverboats. Accidental or otherwise, this episode claims five lives. A year later, almost as if in atonement, the lockmaster stages his disappearance into the same foaming roars of the Great Falls.

Tortured by the possibility that his father could be a murderer, the narrator goes on to experience a series of harrowing events as his hydraulic engineering projects carry him from the banks of the Xingu River in South America to the Mekong in Asia. By the time the narrator travels back to Europe and to the coasts of the North Sea, he himself has transformed into a murderer. Throughout, Ransmayr details the narrator’s childhood with gentle premonitions of his transformation, with prose that feels like a moving panorama of the idyllic outdoors, soaked in an aesthetic genre that seems almost “cottagecore”; yet, existing collaterally with the seemingly quaint charm of strawberry-picking and kayak rides, amidst riparian forests and river spirits, there are far more disturbing scenarios. READ MORE…