Posts filed under 'motherhood'

Translation Tuesday: H-A-N-N-A by Hanna Riisager

August 29, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Kristina Andersson Bicher

Blissfully mute, / infatuated babbling / from a marble mouth.

An entrancing poem on babyhood commands our devotion this Translation Tuesday–a fitting muse for poet and critic Hanna Riisager, whose first collection wields overtly feminine symbols to subvert gender norms. In H-A-N-N-A, precisely translated from the Swedish by Kristina Andersson Bicher, a small subject wields a gravitational pull, overwhelming us in equal parts bewilderment and wonderment.

You are a plank you
are a bridge you are a bronze
railing. You are a
landing you are a
nook. You are a ramp
for baby carriages.
Head down feet up
Child’s position.
Perpendicular dominance
trimmed in lead. An
H in the heart.
Think: the scope
of this walk!

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Matryoshka” by Marzia Grillo

August 15, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Julia Pelosi-Thorpe and Lourdes Contreras

Mothers’ lease contracts are printed in tiny, almost illegible fonts, punctuation arbitrary.

Rounding off our Translation Tuesday feature’s little Italian sojourn, we present the lilting prose of Marzia Grillo. “Mother” and “shelter” are her twinned themes—each contains the other perfectly, like synonyms, tautology, or an infinite matryoshka, and she demonstrates her point neatly with a text full of recursions, in which a mother’s housing houses housing mothers. Cosy!

My mother called to tell me my mother is dead?
—A.M. Homes

Houses were this: mothers. And matryoshkas were: continents, countries, cities, and wooden apartments—mothers’ furnished rooms.

All around she could see women carrying the future forward. Newborns hiding newborns yet to come, life germinating deep in springtime.

*

Seated at a coffee shop belonging to another generation, she leafed absent-mindedly through PortaPortese. The rentals section was filled with ads for mothers—one-bedroom apartments, studios, central heating, fireplaces. She’d have liked some above-fireplace shelving, for knick knacks and keepsakes. As she warmed herself she could watch a parade of her old mothers inside the Panasonic frame they’d given her years ago. Mothers small, big, bright, ancient. Mothers different to one another; some welcoming, others bare. She’d not need a television.

On her finger she wore a wedding ring that wasn’t hers: inheritance or hereditary? Her parents had been as mistaken about her as they had about themselves, cradling after their own bad choices as if she could right a wrong. And since apples don’t fall far from the trees that nourished them, she’d decided to live in a rose garden. She’d covered herself with thorns, starving but intoxicated by her self-sufficiency.

*

Since receiving the eviction notice, she’d started losing weight. At first strikingly, and then gradually, one pound at a time. Her first step was to stop drinking alcohol, as if she were pregnant. She’d say to waiters: “I can’t drink. It’s not official yet, but…” They’d congratulate her, serve more attentively, with fervour, voraciously beaming, dazzled by life. Since hearing she’d no longer have a home, she’d become hope in the eyes of the world. She carried this in her womb as she dwindled.

Do you remember sardines? she’d say to the mirror. She remembered this was what you called the residents of crowded houses but it was a misnomer. Cans aren’t mothers. They are just cans, no matter how crowded. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2023

June 12, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon, Samantha Siefert, and Xiao Yue Shan

New work from Shumona Sinha, Dorothy Tse, and Berta Dávila!

In this month’s selection of the best in translated literature, our editors present a selection of texts that range from the intimate, to the surreal, to the furious. From Galicia, a mother writes a poetic rumination of abortion and post-partum depression. From Hong Kong, a love story unfolds between two unlikely characters as the city clamours in protest. From France, an interpreter gives a searing account of the immigration system and its many failures, in the aftermath of her own violent act.

the dear ones

The Dear Ones by Berta Dávila, translated from the Galician by Jacob Rogers, 3Times Rebel Press, 2023

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

Five years after becoming a mother, a woman chooses to have an abortion. This uneasy duality forms the premise of Galician author Berta Dávila’s intimate, probing exploration of motherhood in her memoir, The Dear Ones, now available in an excellent English translation by Jacob Rogers. “It takes nine months for a child to form in the womb and be born, but no one knows how long it takes for a mother to do the same,” Dávila muses, never pretending to know or even seek a precise answer to the unstated question, instead dedicating this short but intense novel to articulating plainly the spaces between the themes of motherhood—the ones discussed openly, and the ones that are not.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “A Lonely Wrinkle on Her Forehead” by Roskva Koritzinsky

May 9, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Bradley Harmon

It felt good to give the girl the seat at the table that was usually hers, the apple tree whose buds were about to blossom...

This Translation Tuesday, we serve a rich allegory, a domestic scene patiently rendered by Norwegian writer Roskva Koritzinsky. A Lonely Wrinkle on Her Forehead is an exquisite study of human-animal, mother-child positionality both immersive and instructive. Hear from translator Bradley Harmon on the deliberate language and detached tonality that defines this work:

“The work of Norwegian writer Roskva Koritzinsky is characterized by a cool, contemplative atmosphere, inhabited by a voice that is enigmatic and ethereal but, importantly, also patient and precise. Every sentence, every word she writes is important. For many writers, this might a style that is too concrete, too fixed, but with Koritzinsky it’s the exact opposite. The keyword is atmosphere, an atmosphere that blooms into an existential scale from her careful composition. For example, the reader will notice the somewhat strange use of the definite form of the nouns for mother, daughter, dog, and so on. Further, Koritzinsky is insistent on the use of ‘the mother’ or ‘the daughter’ rather than the more intimately relationally ‘her mother’ or ‘her daughter.’ While it is the case that using the definite article in English might be seen as an overtly literal translation of Norwegian, as to opposed to a more ‘natural’ rendition with the possessive article, Koritzinsky is adamant in maintaining the distance that this word choice conjures. This is consistent across her other stories but is particularly pronounced in this one.”

When she came home in the afternoon, the seven puppies had vanished.

Their mother was lying in a corner of the living room, whimpering. She felt its belly and made sure the puppies weren’t in there. So they must’ve been somewhere else.

She stood by the window and looked out at the landscape. The murky murmur from the woods and fields, it had scared her for the first few years she lived out there, but eventually she’d gotten used to it.

Forgotten it?

In any case, let it become a part of herself. The song from the countryside had seeped almost imperceptibly into the house, like poison.  

She shuffled over to the couch and sat down. The dog bed was in the corner. The blanket on which the week-old animals had been lying was gone. Someone must’ve come into the house—the door was always unlocked, she’d always taken pride in it, to come from the city and do as they did in the country, put the key in a drawer and forget it was there, not so much out of trust in the neighbors as an entrenched notion that one was a stranger to the world. But then Someone had wrapped the blanket around the puppies and carried them outside. Their mother hadn’t defended them, she let it happen. Now she was lying in the corner of the living room, crying. 

READ MORE…

One Thing After Another: On A Postcard for Annie by Ida Jessen

September 28, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Rachael Pennington

A Postcard for Annie is a collection of stories in which hope is masked in grief, regret, and yearning.

A Postcard for Annie by Ida Jessen, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken, Archipelago Books, 2022

Where did it come from, this hope of hers? From him. Her hope came from him. Without him she was shapeless. She would never be able to explain it to anyone, not even to herself.

A Postcard for Annie, Ida Jessen’s collection of short stories, opens with a woman named Tove, writing a note to her husband after an argument about herring; “I am not your fucking housewife,” she scribbles. Through the following six tales, Jessen tracks the inner lives of women, whose day-to-day lives in Denmark are as mundane and normal as they are dramatic and devastating. These stories explore what binds these women to the people in their lives against a backdrop as often comforting as it is bitterly harsh, putting into words what the characters themselves cannot.

From the outset of Tove’s anger, we sense that this is about much more than the raw fish fillets she had bought for dinner, and as she embarks on an “excursion” to put distance between her and her husband’s constant derision and judgment—which has rippled through her since the day they met—we become aware of the essential role he plays in her sense of self. Later, when a stranger spontaneously decides to sit at the table where she is dining alone, we quickly realise the approval and presence of this man are more important to Tove than her own discomfort. Without a member of the opposite sex there to notice her, Tove is “shapeless.”

As such, despite a loveless, bitter marriage in which only hostile words are exchanged, Tove never loses sight of her husband, and similar strictures and relationships weave a common thread through these stories. Tine, who feels “doomed at fifty to be a fire that can’t be put out,” doesn’t give up on trying to get her husband to go to bed with her. Ruth finds herself at the hospital visiting her estranged son, who even as a baby would “would squirm from her embrace,” and Lisbet, caught in an enmeshed mother and son relationship that is tense and taut after twenty years of push and pull, cannot—or will not—break free from Malthe:

He turns and strides away, exuding as ever his own will; he cannot tame it, it surges towards her, away from her. He is surrounded by a light so fierce that even a bitterly cold day in a dismal parking lot feels like unrequited love.

READ MORE…

In Good Company: Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall on Translating The Left Parenthesis

September 22, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Rachel Farmer

[B]eing able to share genius in whatever way or form is the most beautiful thing there is.

Muriel Villaneuva’s The Left Parenthesis takes place by the sea, a fitting setting for a story that weaves in-between motherhood and mourning, loss and reinvention, the mind and the body. In the stunning autofictional tale of a recently widowed mother attempting to piece together her shifting roles in the world, Villaneuva merges the surreal and the intimately physical to chart the mystifying journey one takes back to get to oneself. In the following interview, Rachel Farmer talks to the co-translators of The Left Parenthesis, Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall, about the book’s feminism, Catalan specificity, and its “uncomplicated” representation of motherhood.

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.

Rachel Farmer (RF): First of all, before we dive into The Left Parenthesis, I’d be really interested to hear about your process as co-translators. In the brilliant conversation recently published in the Oxonian Review, the pair of you talked about working together on another co-translation of Montserrat Roig. Can you tell us just a little bit about this relationship?

Megan Berkobien (MB): Well, my dissertation is about co-translation, especially as a socialist and ecological phenomenon; it really came from the fact that basically all my translation experiences have been collaborative. I went to school at the University of Michigan for both my PhD and undergrad, and in the translation workshop there, everything was done together. So, it came naturally when I met María Cristina. The first thing we worked on as a team was a little anthology on women writers in Catalan—that’s when I realised we were really on the same page. We wrote the opening essay together, and it just really worked. We just feed off one another’s poetic creativities, I guess.

María Cristina Hall (MCH): For us, having the interaction of editing together was a way to build trust, to understand that our voices were similar enough to co-translate. Our process involved dividing the book up, each doing fifteen pages, then looking at each other’s version and editing it as if it were our own piece—so there’s never that feeling of holding back. It seems very natural to edit, sometimes heavily and sometimes not. If ever a word comes up where we think, “how should we translate that?”, we have a back-and-forth, and it goes smoothly from there. It’s very enriching, and I think something Megan touched on in her dissertation was the importance of working in a community and having company. Translation is usually very solitary work, so it’s very different to have this practice.

MB: In a lot of ways, the fact that translators are artists insinuates at the worst part about being an artist: that you have to work by yourself, and that you have this “grand genius” inside you. I just don’t think genius is never located in one person, and being able to share genius in whatever way or form is the most beautiful thing there is.

RF: Was there anything in particular about The Left Parenthesis that needed a different approach?

MCH: Well, it was our first project together, and then we did Goodbye Ramona by Montserrat Roig. In that book, the voices are so distinct that we divided it by character, so I worked on the one from the 1900s and Meg did the one from the 1960s—and the one from the 30s, we shared between the two of us. Because Meg is more active in the Socialist party, she could be the character who was politically involved, while I took on the conservative one since I live in Mexico and I have more of a background in Catholicism. But The Left Parenthesis is just one character talking about herself.

MB: We did have to attend to making sure it was all one unified voice, and as such it made a lovely first project because it’s almost as if our voices were weaving together. If we take a cue from the book to describe this, it’s kind of like waves were flowing over us, and each new wave made us come together a little bit more. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Yen Ai-lin

August 30, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Jenn Marie Nunes

I throw my shadow into the water / I live in a strange high-rise across the river

This Translation Tuesday, we invite you to savour three poems by the award-winning Taiwanese poet Yen Ai-lin, whose work meditates on femininity, motherhood and the body. The poems here, translated skilfully by Jenn Marie Nunes, reflect the changing trajectories of Yen’s poetics as they move chronologically from “Wintering Love Animals” (first published in 1982) to “Femaled Ocean” (2008) to “Reed’s Song” (2017). Throughout this suite of raw and imaginative poems, Yen’s frank and sensuous voice shines through. 

Wintering Love Animals

In winter
we burrow in the nest of blankets,
like animals seeking warmth.
Dear child,
you greedily suck my nipple,
wet mouthing, as if to say
“Your two breasts are so primitive,
your nipples so classical,
your temperature so Eastern……”
Yes, our position
is a primeval act seeking fire
through friction, endlessly mining
our own civility for fuel.

Dear child,
before sleepiness attacks
we’re both Pleistocene creatures,
still longing for a life erect. 

But, let’s stay curled in bed!
Use flesh to build the first cave,
conceal our reluctant evolution.

Femaled Ocean

Originally the shore had no shore
Waves just came and went
Enter Buddhist nature
Without a sense of time
Simply chewing over the taste of earth READ MORE…

Towards Empathy: Meg Matich on Translating Auður Jónsdóttir’s Quake

March 24, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Barbara Halla

It's important to try to read without an agenda.

Auður Jónsdóttir’s critically acclaimed Quake is a novel of a woman in fragments. Recovering from an amnesia-inducing seizure, Saga is made to walk through her life based on hints, illusions, and the capricious words of others. Translated into a haunting, lyrical English by Meg Matich, Quake traverses and trespasses across the demarcations of a single life to mark the entrancing dialogues between the self and other, fact and fiction, and a woman and her selves. In the following interview, Barbara Halla speaks to Matich about the trauma within the text, Icelandic women writers, and the interrogations of motherhood.

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.   

Barbara Halla (BH): Before we do a deep dive on the actual themes of the book and the story, I like to get a sense of how translators work and how they find their projects. How did you get interested in Iceland, in Icelandic, and how did you come across the book? And perhaps, why did you choose to translate it?

Meg Matich (MM): I had gotten a fellowship from Columbia to go to Slovakia for a tandem translation and along the way, I had to stop off in Berlin to visit a German poet I had been translating for class. The classmates suggested to me I do a layover in Iceland; flights were inexpensive, the hotels were relatively inexpensive. This was 2012, I believe.

I felt this very strong and immediate pull, especially because I was surrounded by ocean and a cold coast, both things that I like. I found out about Icelandic grammar just by asking about it in bookshops and it fascinated me—I like complex grammars as well. And I like strange things. Icelandic, I still think it sounds like cicadas, so I became very attached to it immediately. And soon I found my voice in someone else’s, which is something I hadn’t felt before— translation had always been a very sort of practical exercise to me, or a way to think about language. And it certainly caused me to write poetry differently than I had previously.

I came across Quake by invitation. Jennifer Baumgardner of Dottir Press had done some research on me, and we just started a relationship from there. I found Auður strange and chaotic and fascinating. And she is spellbinding when she talks. You don’t want to do anything else but listen to her. I guess that’s kind of what happened to the book. I was more engaged with her as a person than with the text at first, but that’s how I understood why it was meandering, and tangential.

BH: You also recently translated Magma by Þóra Hjörleifsdóttir and I find it a fascinating text to compare Quake to. In the English-speaking market, there’s been a push to hear more stories from women; do you find that something similar is happening in Iceland? What would you say the place that women’s writing takes in Icelandic literature?

MM: I can’t make general sweeping statements—that it has always been one way or another. In Icelandic sagas, and they’re always troublemakers, seekers, they cause misfortune. But in recent history, I would say yes, there has been a continued trend that more women’s stories are being told. And I want to pin this to one author: a woman called Ásta Sigurðardóttir. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2021

August 16, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan and Fairuza Hanun

New work this month from Lebanon and India!

The speed by which text travels is both a great fortune and a conundrum of our present days. As information and knowledge are transmitted in unthinkable immediacy, our capacity for receiving and comprehending worldly events is continuously challenged and reconstituted. It is, then, a great privilege to be able to sit down with a book that coherently and absorbingly sorts through the things that have happened. This month, we bring you two works that deal with the events of history with both clarity and intimacy. One a compelling, diaristic account of the devastating Beirut explosion of last year, and one a sensitive, sensual novel that delves into a woman’s life as she carries the trauma of Indian Partition. Read on to find out more.

beirut

Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse by Charif Majdalani, translated from French by Ruth Diver, Other Press, 2021

Review by Alex Tan, Assistant Editor

There’s a peculiar whiplash that comes from seeing the words “social distancing” in a newly published book, even if—as in the case of Charif Majdalani’s Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse—the reader is primed from the outset to anticipate an account of the pandemic’s devastations. For anyone to claim the discernment of hindsight feels all too premature—wrong, even, when there isn’t yet an aftermath to speak from.

But Majdalani’s testimony of disintegration, a compelling mélange of memoir and historical reckoning in Ruth Diver’s clear-eyed English translation, contains no such pretension. In the collective memory of 2020 as experienced by those in Beirut, Lebanon, the COVID-19 pandemic serves merely as stage lighting. It casts its eerie glow on the far deeper fractures within a country riven by “untrammelled liberalism” and “the endemic corruption of the ruling classes.”

Majdalani is great at conjuring an atmosphere of unease, the sense that something is about to give. And something, indeed, does; on August 4, 2020, a massive explosion of ammonium nitrate at the Port of Beirut shattered the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. A whole city collapsed, Majdalani repeatedly emphasises, in all of five seconds.

That cataclysmic event structures the diary’s chronology. Regardless of how much one knows of Lebanon’s troubled past, the succession of dates gathers an ominous velocity, hurtling toward its doomed end. Yet the text’s desultory form, delivering in poignant fragments day by elastic day, hour by ordinary hour, preserves an essential uncertainty—perhaps even a hope that the future might yet be otherwise.

Like the diary-writer, we intimate that the centre cannot hold, but cannot pinpoint exactly where or how. It is customary, in Lebanon, for things to be falling apart. Majdalani directs paranoia at opaque machinations first designated as mechanisms of “chance,” and later diagnosed as the “excessive factionalism” of a “caste of oligarchs in power.” Elsewhere, he christens them “warlords.” The two are practically synonymous in the book’s moral universe. Indeed, Beirut 2020’s lexicon frequently relies, for figures of powerlessness and governmental conspiracy, on a pantheon of supernatural beings. Soothsayers, Homeric gods, djinn, and ghosts make cameos in its metaphorical phantasmagoria. In the face of the indifferent quasi-divine, Lebanon’s lesser inhabitants can only speculate endlessly about the “shameless lies and pantomimes” produced with impunity. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Swings” by Oswaldo Estrada

April 13, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Sarah Pollack

Sometimes Sophie calls me mamá. Poor thing. She gets confused, even though my skin’s as dark as my luck.

Oswaldo Estrada’s story, “The Swings,” is one of twelve pieces of short fiction from his 2020 collection Las locas ilusiones y otros relatos de migración [Wild Dreams and Other Stories of Migration], winner of the International Latino and Latin American Book Fair Prize at Tufts. “The Swings” poignantly captures the dilemma of mothers who care for other women’s babies in order to support their own sons and daughters whom they have had to leave behind. The narration stitches together snippets of conversation over time of an anonymous nanny from Mexico who speaks with a new nanny at the park where they push “their kids” on the swings. The story offers haunting insight into the offloading of domestic labor and love to vulnerable immigrant women. I find particularly compelling Estrada’s representation of the paradoxical monetizing and stigmatization of Spanish, and the precarious position of caregivers who simultaneously need to forge a strong bond with children while never posing an emotional threat to the parents who employ them. In translating this story, I was challenged to find a balanced oral register with a decidedly Mexican lexicon. It was a rare pleasure to revise this translation with Estrada in a gentle back-and-forth process befitting the title of the story.

—Sarah Pollack, translator

Each generation paints them
a different color
(highlighting their childhood)
but leaving them as they are

—Fabio Morábito “The Swings”

 

I like these cold, early mornings, bathed in sunlight. The trees begin to fill with a pretty green, and even the park seems painted a different color. Maybe it’s all the kids who are drawn outside after the winter, like birds leaving their nests. Those who were crawling only a few months ago are already walking, and those who barely toddled around like ducks are now up to mischief.

You’re new, right? From miles away, it’s easy to see that you’ve just arrived. Here, we all know each other. My girl’s the little blonde running around over there. How old is yours? She’s still in diapers? You should take them off, take advantage that it’s hot. Trust me. Here they train them when they’re about to go to school. Some baloney that children will let you know when they’re ready. That it’s best not to rush them. That they’ll be traumatized. Nonsense. Look at them. Little whoppers with shit up their backs. It doesn’t bother you now, but imagine in a year.

I trained mine in a week. Because it was summer, I put her in undies. That’s how they learn. They feel when they’ve wet themselves and don’t like it, and they’re the ones that ask to be taken to the bathroom. She doesn’t even wear a diaper at night. She wakes herself up, runs to the toilet and goes back to sleep. I hear her because my room is next to hers, but I don’t get up. You have to teach them when they’re young.

READ MORE…

Adam Sorkin and Romanian Poetry in 2020

December 16, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Andreea Scridon

Sorkin’s corpus demonstrate[s] exceptional verve and dedication—two especially valuable traits in a sometimes thankless publishing industry. . .

“All Romanians are born poets,” goes a local saying, but far too few are published in English. Among their faithful champions, award-winning translator Adam Sorkin stands out: while some of us forwent productivity in favor of survival this year, he managed to put out a whopping three Romanian poetry translations. In times of collective confinement, they fittingly tackle the self’s relationship to space: the city, the countryside, the foreign land. They hone in on different forms of love and fear, too, from the romantic to the maternal to the religious—the love and fear of God. Beyond these and other commonalities, however, they differ in structure and style: the first is an emotional bildungsroman, the second an epic, the third a hymn of sorts. This formal range attests to Sorkin’s chops, which Assistant Editor Andreea Scridon is only too happy to extol.

It’s always contentious to name someone the best translator of a language, a claim that is perhaps more trouble than it’s worth. I, for one, tend to shy away from such absolutisms, but Adam Sorkin gives me second thoughts. Undeniably, he’s at the top of his game, having published over sixty books of Romanian poetry in English translation (even in the year of the plague, he’s managed to publish several).

Of the three most recent ones—Mircea Cărtărescu’s A Spider’s History of Love, Ioana Ieronim’s Lavinia and Her Daughters, and Aura Christi’s The God’s Orbit—I must admit I’ve only read the first in the original (among contemporary authors, Cărtărescu is a firm favorite of mine, so the stakes were especially high). All three, however, merit attention.

I have no interest in writing a sycophantic or fawning piece; in fact, I would be embarrassed to be so generous with praise if I didn’t feel that Sorkin’s corpus demonstrated exceptional verve and dedication—two especially valuable traits in a sometimes thankless publishing industry that doesn’t necessarily have an interest in promoting a minor language. To put it simply, having worked with Sorkin myself, I knew he wouldn’t disappoint.

A Spider’s History of Love was published by New Meridian Arts in July, making it the first of three Cărtărescu books to come out in English around this time (Solenoid, translated by Sean Cotter, will be published by Deep Vellum in 2022, and Nostalgia, translated by Julian Semilian, is forthcoming from Penguin in 2021). The book’s title is Sorkin’s doing, a phrase he took from a poem included in the volume, which encompasses selections from multiple collections; these are curated into three sections, entitled “Once I Had . . . ,” “Bebop Baby,” and “Prisoner of Myself.”

Considered cumulatively, these poems do not seem to represent an overarching epic odyssey in the same obvious way that Ioana Ieronim’s Lavinia and Cărtărescu’s own Levantul do; rather, they resemble an emotional bildungsroman with porous boundaries, entirely dictated by the inner life of the poetic narrator as he bends, with force and delicacy, the world to his perception, and not vice versa.

In “Once I Had . . .” and “Bebop Baby,” the microcosm of the poet’s Bucharest serves as the stage for various amorous pursuits. With obvious erudition, indicated by winks to his forerunners in Romanian literary history, Cărtărescu combines Romantic and Levantine elements with communist shabbiness. Thus, contemporary banality, even poverty, are seen through an euphoric eye and become savoury for those who understand how to look the right way, thanks to the poet’s almost rabid attention to detail:

. . . and deep down in the digestive tract I could spy
death herself.

I saw her leaning against the iron fence of the TB hospital next to the police headquarters
stopping a kid on the sidewalk to send him to fetch a newspaper or a fresh bun
and I saw her shopping for bread and newspapers in the pinkest, most incomparable
xxxxxxxxxsunset.

(“Love Poem”)

Everything becomes effervescent and iridescent for this narrator, a master of the art of sublimation, who seems to be eternally in love. His are confessional narrative poems—a form which suits the sentimental experience, with its varied shades and seasons. Long as they may be, they read quickly, engaging with reality and avoiding excessive abstraction. The rhyme is ingenious thanks to both the author and the translator (“. . . the evening / deposited thin sheets of lapis lazuli / the parked cars seemed folded from tinfoil and smelled of patchouli”; “. . . and your figure reminds me so little of aesop / that I wrote you a bebop”). READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Whalesong” by Aurélia Lassaque

October 6, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Madeleine Campbell

And her child would have asked her one day why isn’t the Earth called Sea when it’s covered by all that water?

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a mother’s heartbreak echoes the mournful music of the Earth in Aurélia Lassaque’s hybrid story “Whalesong.” Our protagonist is a prodigious scholar processing a loss so excruciating and traumatic that our narrator frames it via global atrocities and cataclysms. The Earth’s persistent gravity seems absurd, even obscene. Mass extinctions are viewed as unimportant. Through the speaker’s close-third reveries, we witness the massacre of the French Cathars—a gnostic community burned alive by the Church—and meditate upon the world’s cruelty as their ashes are washed away by a seemingly divine rain. Even the sea’s withdrawal evokes a desert’s emptiness. Excerpted from Lassaque’s forthcoming novel, “Whalesong” marries poetry with music, verse with prose—its aural artistry is preserved and accented by Madeleine Campbell’s exquisite translation, which strategically leaves passages in French, Occitan, and Latin to preserve bits of the source language’s sound. Just as our protagonist writes love poems in Occitan (the “language of secrets”), Lassaque’s prose itself reads like verse. A hauntingly beautiful selection by a contemporary troubadour.

She doesn’t know what to pack in her suitcase . . . Toothpaste. A translucent comb with a broken tooth.

When do milk teeth start to grow in? Why this amnesia of our early years? Why don’t our memories reach back to our birth? We are born, and then we step out on a tightrope without a net. We survive infancy. It takes so much effort there’s no room left to remember them. No room either for the future save for the thirst.

What is she to do with all the things they’ve given her? If only she could track the objects passing from nursery to nursery, outgrown in a matter of weeks. Why do people discard them so readily? What would a map of their journey look like?

She has fluoride toothpaste. She thinks it’s silly to deny herself a microwave yet use a toothpaste that causes cancer.

To lose your parents is to become an orphan. To lose your child, what is that? Why is there no word to express it?

*

Outside, it’s pelting down. In the South it rains less than in Paris. The rain is striking. In the tongue of Oc they say it’s raining millstones, raining anvils. A Christian god wouldn’t pelt them with anvils. Mind you . . . He did allow men, women, and children to gather in his temple, be massacred in his temple, even though the stones bleached out, all the blood had dried off centuries ago. That god had let it be known: Kill them all, God will know His own. The river of blood might be flowing still. There may be the odd mistake. A tiny martyr disappears down the river. Does God really welcome all innocents? The god who imposes baptism to save one’s soul, what does he do with the stillborn?

Dehors il pleut à coup de pelles. Plòu a palas.

It’s raining shovels. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 7, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andrew Adair, Clémence Lucchini, and Eva Wissting

This week's literary news from the United States, Sweden, and Mexico!

This week our editors bring you the latest news from Sweden, where a new edition of Nobel Prize-winner Nelly Sachs’s Swedish translations has been published; Mexico, where cultural centre Casa Tomada has continued its remarkable response to the coronavirus situation with a series of author events; and from Boston in the United States, which has lined up exciting programming this summer. Read on to find out more! 

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

This summer, Swedish publishing company Faethon released a new collection with the poetry of German-Swedish Nelly Sachs. For the first time, all of the most prominent Swedish translations of her poetry are presented together in one book. The collection includes classical translations by poets such as Gunnar Ekelöf and Erik Lindegren, as well as new interpretations by Margaretha Holmqvist, who also was a friend of Sachs. The book also presents thorough commentaries by Daniel Pedersen, professor in comparative literature, and an afterword by poet and translator Eva Ström.

The Jewish poet and playwright Nelly Sachs was born in 1891 in Berlin and fled together with her mother to Sweden in 1940 where she lived until her death in 1970. Sachs had a long friendship with Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf, who used her contacts with the Swedish royal family to enable Sachs and her mother to escape Nazi Germany. In Sweden, Sachs lived with her mother in Stockholm and it was at this time that she became a poet of note. She remained active as a writer and a translator for the most part of her life. In 1966, Nelly Sachs was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her outstanding lyrical and dramatic writing, which interprets Israel’s destiny with touching strength.”

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(Inter)Artistic Dialogues in Contemporary Macedonian Poetry

December 27, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Vladimir Martinovski

Contemporary Macedonian poetry is dialogical—a spiritual fruit on the literary crossroads between the East and the West

The interplay between different art forms has long been a subject of poetry. How can visual art, color, or sound be translated into the medium of language? In the following essay, Vladimir Martinovski reflects upon such meeting points in contemporary Macedonian poetry: the poetic dialogue between Mateja Matevski and the Japanese haiku-master Kobayashi Issa; ekphrasis in the poetry of Blaze Koneski; musical instruments in the poems of Jovan Strezovski, Slavko Janevski, Jovan Koteski, and Bogomil Gjuzel; medieval Byzantium sacred art in the poems of Mihail Rendzov. Through a selection of extracts from his essay collection Literary Cross/roads, Martinovski explores the rich and subtle interaction between words and the artistic forms that inspired them.

Contemporary Macedonian poetry is dialogical—a spiritual fruit on the literary crossroads between the East and the West, between tradition and modernity, between different artistic forms of expression and the art of the poetic images. A dialogue is established between poetry and different modes of artistic expression. In the attempt to transform paintings into a poetic text, poets must inevitably choose which pieces of visual information is to be transposed into poetic discourse. During the process, the semantics of ekphrastic poetic text is inseparable from—even incomplete without—the connection with the work of art that is the subject of literary description. The poem always depends on the role of the viewer that the reader receives, connecting the words from the poem with the work of art to which they refer.Therefore, a work of art could be treated as a “visual catalyst” of the poem, whereas the poem is an opportunity—thanks to the art of language—to see the work of art in a new way.   READ MORE…