Posts filed under 'translation tuesday'

Translation Tuesday: “Invasion” by Diego Lama

July 25, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Rose Facchini

The throng grew. There were people with greatcoats, mantles, furs, swords, sandals, wigs…

This Translation Tuesday, we present an oblique scrap of fiction from Diego Lama, translated into compact, equivocal English by Rose Facchini. An apparition disturbs Alfio from his espresso: his grandfather, dapper, smiling, and back from the dead. In the space of four hundred words, things only get stranger.

Alfio was sitting in the café when all of a sudden, he saw an old man appear. It was his grandfather.

“Hi, grandpa.” Alfio stood up, holding his demitasse.

His grandfather was a tall, thin gentleman of respectable appearance. He had big, blue eyes and a kind expression, reassuring, always elegant, always in a suit, always with polished shoes.

“Hi, grandpa,” Alfio repeated.

His grandfather had been dead for more than fifteen years. Alfio perfectly remembered the shoes and jacket they put on him the day of the funeral.

“Hi, grandpa,” he repeated a third time. “Weren’t you…?”

“Yes, I was,” the grandfather said, smiling in his own way, as if everything—even death—could be resolved with a witty remark. “I was. But now I’m alive!”

“I don’t get it.” Alfio sat down. “I just don’t get it.”

“Me neither, but I’m happy.” His grandfather remained standing. “Your grandmother’s also come back!”

“Grandma?” Alfio placed the demitasse on its saucer. “But… Grandma died more than sixty years ago, when dad was only a little boy.”

“A tragedy.” The grandfather smiled. “The important thing is that everything ended in the best possible way. We’ll just have to make do for a little while. Grandma and I need a place to stay, Alfio.”

“Go to dad’s house!”

“He’s too old. If he sees us, he’ll have a heart attack,” the grandfather smiled. “You’re not going to leave us high and dry, are you?”

“Of course not, grandpa. Where’s grandma?”

“There.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “To Invite All Creatures to Praise God” by Anne de Marquets

June 13, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Annick MacAskill

Would I not be incredibly ungrateful, / If I didn’t treasure him above all others— / Such a lover, a master, and father?

This Translation Tuesday, we present a devotional sonnet of striking intimacy and palpable gratitude in praise of “this great God who fashioned me so well.” The brilliantly “fashioned” author in question is the 16th century French sonnetist, translator and nun, Anne de Marquets, whose own craftsmanship has been brought into a vivid and forceful English by Annick MacAskill. Her translation sees the very fibers of creation exhorted to sing the praises of their creator, and gives the ardor of de Marquet’s “amour divin” a strange intensity.

O sky and earth, and you, furious seas,
O fields and meadows adorned with blooms and trees,
In short, all things in this great universe,
Praise him, the one whom I love—

He who defeated inglorious Death,
Destroyed sin, and toppled Satan,
Who died through so many martyrs,
To grant me most fortunate redemption.

O such a singular and perfect reward
From this great God who fashioned me so well,
And who will make me as I wish it!

Would I not be incredibly ungrateful,
If I didn’t treasure him above all others—
Such a lover, a master, and father?

Translated from the French by Annick MacAskill

Anne de Marquets (1533?-1588) was a French poet, translator, and Dominican nun. Originally from Normandy, she spent most of her life in the priory of Poissy, where she produced translations of Latin poetry, as well as her own poems on spiritual themes. During her lifetime, several notable French authors, including Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), wrote poems praising her literary talents. Today, she is most famous for her posthumously published Sonets spirituels (Paris, Claude Morel, 1605), a suite of 480 sonnets organized around the liturgical year.

In 1568, Anne de Marquets published her Divines Poesies de Marc Antoine Flaminius (Paris, Nicolas Chesneau; reissued in a slightly expanded edition in 1569), a collection that presents not only her translations of verse by the Neo-Latin writer Flaminio (1498-1550), but original compositions by Marquets. These include her Sonets de l’amour divin, forty devotional sonnets that adapt the language and forms of Renaissance love poetry.

Annick MacAskill is a poet and translator living in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada), on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq. She is the author of three full-length poetry collections, the most recent of which, Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022), won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for English-Language Poetry. Her poems have appeared in journals across Canada and in the USA, the Netherlands, and Ireland, as well as in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology series.

MacAskill holds a PhD in French Literature from Western University, where she completed a thesis on the poet and translator Anne de Marquets, and has published several peer-reviewed articles on Marquets and other sixteenth-century French poets. She is currently translating Anne de Marquets’ Sonets de l’amour divin into English and teaching in the Department of Languages and Cultures at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.

***

Read more from Translation Tuesdays on the Asymptote blog:

Translation Tuesday: “Muscovy Ducks” by Tô Hoài

May 30, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Thuy Dinh

Mostly it’s the ducks’ recalcitrant nature that does not endear them to people.

The mores of domesticated Muscovy ducks are the focus of today’s Translation Tuesday. Tô Hoài documents the lives of these gnarled, delinquent, “sybaritic” birds (translated into English with verve and gusto by Thúy Đinh), seeking in vain a sort of understanding. His focus settles on their eyes and faces, but for all his careful watching, he can find nothing to reveal the inner lives of these particularly unaffectionate, unmaternal animals. It seems they live simply to eat.

The calamity that wiped out the chicken has not affected the Muscovy ducks—strong, stolid beasts, immune to ill winds.

Two large ducks now waddle in the poultry yard. There used to be a brood of ducklings, all gone now. If human lives seem to merge into the sea of time, epic and borderless, rolling on endlessly, for the animals, especially those whose lives are enmeshed with ours, there exist only small injuries and barely noticed deaths. Theirs are insignificant, inchoate lives. Harmless beings, they don’t take much of our space, even though they breathe the same air as us. To us they seem no more visible than earthworms or ants.

Six ducklings there were—six tiny, charming heads, six pairs of round eyes, sparkling and innocent. They clustered and made yip-yip sounds around their mother’s coarse, webbed feet. Their mother is as coarse as her extremities. Obtuse and inscrutable, with a surprised expression etched permanently upon a swaying countenance, the mother duck looks like someone being robbed of her purse money on market day.

A witless bird, she accidentally killed one of her offspring.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Lucky to be a horse” by Luigi Pirandello

May 16, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Matilda Colarossi

He really can’t grasp the fact that he’s free.

The mystery of an abandoned horse, and what thoughts its mind might contain, are the subject of this week’s Translation Tuesday feature. With the acuity that earned him his Nobel Prize, Luigi Pirandello pores over its gaunt, overworked body and peers into its blankly staring eyes, searching for traces of animal thought.

The stable is there, behind the closed door, just past the entrance to the rustic, downward-sloping courtyard with its worn cobblestones and water tank in the center.

The door has become porous. It was green once, but now it has lost almost all its color, like the house, with that pale-yellow plaster, which makes it look like the oldest and most miserable one in the suburb.

This morning at dawn, the door was locked from the outside with a huge rusty chain, and the horse that was in the stable was taken out and just left there. Who knows why? With no reins, or saddle, or saddlebag, without even a halter.

He’s been standing there patiently, almost immobile, for a long time. Through that door, he can smell his stable, right there, close by, and the courtyard. And when he breathes in through his dilated nostrils, it’s as if he’s sighing.

With every sigh there comes, curiously enough, a nervous twitch of the hide on his back, where the mark of an old saddle can be seen.

Free as he is from any kind of horse tack, his head and his whole body, it’s easy to see what time has done to him: His head, when he lifts it, is noble still, but sad. His body is pitiful: the back is knotted; his ribcage sticks out; his flanks are pointy. His mane, however, is still thick and his tail, although somewhat thin, is long.

A horse that can be of no use anymore, to be honest.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Michael Benítez Ortiz

April 25, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Jackson Reed

The rainbow: / a broken parachute of dreams.

This Translation Tuesday, we present “Shipwreck” and “Landscape” by Colombian editor, music journalist, and one-time candy vendor Michael Benítez Ortiz. Writing the oh-so-ordinary at a tilt, Ortiz imbues the commonest of surroundings with a new, often despairing perspective. Translated with fidelity by Jackson Reed, the following works serve as an introduction to the idiosyncratic work of this emergent poet. Read on!

Shipwreck

The sky is the sea standing on its head
where my paper planes
drown.

 

Landscape

The night:
a mass grave of stars.

The rivers:
tears of pregnant women.

Tree branches:
dismembered children’s arms.

The rain:
condensed blood in the sky’s refrigerator.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: [Not the truth] by Riccardo Benzina

April 18, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Marco Malena

I never told you. / Now I let the trap speak / for me.

For Translation Tuesday, Italian poet Riccardo Benzina shows us the psychic toll of lies upon the liar in this haggard confessional. His lines, slowed nearly to a slurring by ragged breaks and repetitions, and translated with care by Marco Malena, evoke the sort of exhaustion that only prolonged deception can cause. “Worn out is the idea,” indeed.

Not the truth. That’s why I’m telling you
I’d like to rest.
Worn out is the idea.

Yes I’d like to, I’d like to
if I can because
later on the doldrums will turn into a giant strut, almost
an entire world and I will be
entirely taken, you will be
entirely taken, we will be taken.

I’d like to rest my self as well, my self
you leave in the closet every time
burning a merciless cross
on the wall of your chest. The distance
unsewn, a desperate kiss on the windows.

I never told you.

Now I let the trap speak
for me. You’ll see
that I’ve read and not replied, that you don’t receive, you haven’t
received anything. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Painting of a Dream” by Sakthi Jothi

February 21, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Thila Varghese

I am drawing an image of me that remains embedded in an undissolved dream of mine.

This Translation Tuesday, we feature the poetic reflections of Sakthi Jothi, translated from the Tamil by Thila Varghese. With painterly verse, Sakthi Jothi extracts a perfect image from the intensities of an “undissolved dream.” Feelings are captured in the lines, and colour and tools are sought to map their depths—but success may come at a price.

The Painting of a Dream

I am drawing
an image of me
that remains embedded
in an undissolved dream of mine.
I tried to put together a figure
by extending the lines in the summer
and contracting them in the winter,
stretching the lines farther
and erasing some of them as unwanted.
I painted it with colours
specific to each season.

It was only
during the times
passed in searching
for brushes and colours
to paint with precision
all the details,
such as the loneliness
that is undissolved by anything at all, READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Jhio Jan Navarro

January 31, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Eric Abalajon

we chew off fresh sugarcane and tell overblown stories

This Translation Tuesday, we feature three poems translated from the Hiligaynon – a language that Asymptote is proud to feature for the first time. The poems that addres are from Jhio Jan Navarro’s first chapbook Pinili nga Binaylaybay, Piling Tula (Selected Poems) released by the independent publisher Kasingkasing Press in 2022 that is made up of poems in both Filipino and Hiligaynon. Hear about the process of translating these poems from translator Eric Abalajon.

“Jhio Jan Navarro’s first chapbook tackles themes of intimacy in its many forms and documenting injustices especially in his home province of Negros Occidental. Navarro’s language manages to be both idiomatic and straightforward. What comes out is somewhat familiar to English readers, but now made ironic or imbibed with deeper meaning. In ‘The Bird in The City’, the popular expression ‘the early bird catches the worm’ is revised to illustrate urban cruelty and precarity. While in ‘Figure of Death’, the event of winged termites flocking to a light source during the rainy season might bring to mind the story of the Fall of Icarus. However, probably more recognizable to Filipino readers is its affinity to a story attributed to Jose Rizal, with moths attracted to a lamp instead. The allegory of naive ambition has been transposed to a rural setting, the insects signaling ruin to the household. Lastly, ‘Ortaliz’ tenderly recounts episodes from childhood, but pays careful attention to the landscape of sugar cane plantations and its persistent contradictions. Navarro’s poems are crafted with intricate imagery, and written with urgency and sensitivity to place and its history. I tried to convey this in my translations, where beauty and perseverance are inseparable from death and violence.”

—Eric Abalajon 

The Bird in The City

Perches
on branches
bearing red, flickering
light bulbs.

Hums
behind evening’s shade
since streets
are deafening
during the day.

Nests
in many building columns,
rafters, roofs yet
lays no eggs.

The bird in the city
flies straight into traps
and the one that remains
after others have gone
catches the most worms. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “A True Story” by Natalia Timerman

January 24, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Meg Weeks

A man who writes. A man who writes in a notebook, seated next to me on a plane.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you a work of metafiction from Brazilian writer Natalia Timerman’s collection, which was a finalist for the Jabuti Prize. In “A True Story,” a chance encounter with a man on the plane—her seat partner—leads to an intense connection mediated by the act of writing. Translated from the Portuguese by Meg Weeks, this story conveys the electric atmosphere of first meetings.

From the aisle of the plane I spotted row twenty-seven. I sat down in the middle seat. The seat by the window was already occupied by a young guy in a baseball cap, his attention focused on his phone. I was praying that no one would occupy the seat on my other side so I wouldn’t feel the need to make myself smaller, when a man, tall and blondish, his skin scarred by acne, approached.

He greeted me almost imperceptibly with his eyes and sat down on my left-hand side. Ok, patience. I took my book out of my bag, which I then placed below the seat in front of me, and opened it to the marked page, 174.

The man had large hands.

I tried to read but I couldn’t stop observing those hands moving to take a notebook and a pen out of a black backpack, also placed on the floor. 

I looked surreptitiously at the man’s face. From my brief glance, he struck me as interesting. His lips were red and thick, his eyelashes long and pale. Handsome, almost.

I returned to my book, but the movements of the pen executed by those large hands gripped my attention. A man who writes. A man who writes in a notebook, seated next to me on a plane.

I adjusted myself in my seat to achieve an angle that would allow me to both read my book and peer at his notebook as well. I was about to begin deciphering the handwritten words when the plane began to move.

I closed my book and my eyes and adjusted myself again in my seat, this time to face forward. I get sick to my stomach when planes take off. I took care, however, to leave the cover of the Bolaño I was reading face-up.

Once the plane had achieved its cruising altitude, I opened my book again. The man was still writing . . . delicate hands, I was able to make out while I pretended to stretch. He fidgeted a bit in his seat and in the same movement, rested his notebook on the armrest between our seats. Ah, now it was easy to read what he was writing—which he didn’t stop doing, even momentarily—all I had to do was tilt my body diagonally towards him. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Grigori Dashevsky

January 17, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Ainsley Morse and Timmy Straw

break, or blunt at least / this needle of mine

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you two poems by Russian literary critic and poet Grigori Dashevsky. In translating Dashevsky’s singular style, translator Timmy Straw writes: “Dashevsky’s poems are difficult to translate, for several reasons: their extreme compression and economy; their knotted, almost secretive syntax; their aslant musicality; the often-outright weirdness of their “aboutness”; and the span of their references, from the familiar (Homer, the Bible) to the less-so (Russian folklore, Orthodoxy, the bodily knowledge of Russian/Soviet apartment blocks). And some of the passages that land in Russian—lines that salt their revelation with sobriety, or ground it in the pleasures of sound, or both—just vibrate at too high a pitch in English.”

Not Self Nor People 

Not self nor people
are here, and never are.
The commandment illuminates
thistle, burdock, mosquito.

A feeble singing whines,
a no-see-um saw:
as if some evil sawed away
and an innocent suffered,
gone paler than white.

But the law without people
in unpeopled spaces shines:
no evil, no forbearance,
no face here—only the flickering
winglet of a mosquito.

Neskuchnyi Garden (3)

1
Let’s go out for some air,
talk a little there.
Air, like another’s heart
you can’t be seen
and til the grave are true.
It pleases you, in any case,
to warm yourself
with my voice. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Five Poems by George Sarantaris

January 10, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Pria Louka

about us hums / a mythical insect / a God

Part of the Generation of the 30s⁠—a group of Greek modernist writers and artists⁠—George Sarantaris has not received as much attention as the writers of that era, such as the Nobel laureate and poet Giorgos Seferis. This Translation Tuesday, translator Pria Louka brings five of Sarantaris’ poems into English. Read on and appreciate these imagistic, mist-like poems⁠—philosophical and sensual in their very reticence and brevity.

Philosophy

       For Kostas Despotopoulos

Conversation with the object
a lonesome thing,
deliberate silence
from an unknown listener
approaches us
and binds,
about us hums
a mythical insect
a God

The Mist

The mist teems
With anemones

Look at the branches
What a lake
What impatient heart
Peer into
The right drop
What drive
Takes the child
What languor
The woman

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Cindy A. Velasquez

January 3, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas and Cindy A. Velasquez

But to birth new homelands, / the world has devised tremors

In the first Translation Tuesdays column of 2023, Cebuano poet Cindy A. Velasquez take us to sea as we find our bearings in the new year. With a sensuousness at once personal and geological, Velasquez’s poems look for a sense of connection in  water bodies, drifting continents and connecting islands. Start your year of reading voraciously—and widely—with us here every week!

“I first read Cindy A. Velasquez in Kabisdak: Cebuano Literary Lighthouse, edited by poet Michael U. Obenieta, and later on, in her first collection Lawas [Body]. Lawas was in so many ways antithetical from the poetry collections of Velasquez’s contemporaries within Binisayâ’s school of feminist poetics in particular, and the literary ‘Bisaya-sphere’ in general. The Oliverian lucidity is rich, far from being rife and banal, a contrast to the Instagram-Pinterest school of ‘poetry’ or the ‘hugot’ impulse that perpetually plagues the local spoken word and performance poetry scene. The islands and coastlines left and missed are seascapes we have never been to but have always known. And then, there is Dong, a recurring or haunting character almost always addressed like an apostrophe, whom the poetic I-persona, Day or Inday, perpetually yearns for.

Velasquez’s body of works is a lingering on bodies of women and water as well as a story of love, romantic, familial, platonic. Oceanic in topicality, her poems could be read through the lens of ‘sea-poetry’—a literary tradition from Homer, Shakespeare, Whitman, to the British Romanticists writing about the English channel and even Derek Walcott—very male, mostly white, very Western. Be that as it may, I find the act of reading Velasquez an evocation of the tender eroticism of Syria’s national poet Nizar Qabbani, the meditative ease of Brazilian neosymbolist Cecília Meireles, and the hydropoetic enigma of T’ang dynasty Taoist elegist Ts’ao T’ang. 

But she doesn’t try to be any of the above. Her writing is her own accord; she is a poet of her own island.”

—Alton Melvar M Dapanas

The Reason

Theory of continental drift: the continents were once one,
bound to each other, and we have been told that the origin
of one is also another’s. But to birth new homelands,
the world has devised tremors deep in its own core.

So fret not when now and again, as you hold onto
my hand, it would swiftly quiver until you let me go.

Why is it better to love only one

I.

You gazed at the dimmed skies, enraged once more
for the moonlight was found wanting

then I told you: “Would you be more pleased if this world
had two moons?  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Seal” by Sissel Bergfjord

December 13, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Adrienne Alair

“He had long since resigned himself to a life devoid of eroticism.”

In our final Translation Tuesday showcase for the year, a lugubrious husband finds himself disenchanted with his marriage as his wife relates the tale of her former carefree life to their friends. Sissel Bergfjord’s beautiful story reveals a psychological truth about what remains unspoken in a loveless marriage. In Adrienne Alair’s sensitive and musical translation, a night of drinking turns up more revelations about the protagonist’s interior conflict than he asked for.

He didn’t like her when she had been drinking. She wasn’t someone you could say those things about: My wife drinks, or, My wife drinks too much. Tove was above all healthy and sensible, not because she was uptight or tried to proselytize or anything. She was a woman who hardly ever drank, let alone too much. But when she drank, the few times she did, it quickly became too much for him. Like now, as she sat in the yellowish glow of the Poul Henningsen lamp (and how did it look, really, to have a Poul Henningsen lamp hanging in something that resembled a woodshed) at Karen and Bodil’s place, her cheeks flushed, almost glistening, after several glasses of red wine. And now port! Her eyes shone in a way he very rarely witnessed, and that should make him happy; he should have a couple more glasses himself and get in the mood, follow her to the place she was in. Maybe he could even get her so livened up that it could lead to something. He had to admit, though, that this energy, this revitalization and rarely-felt mood of excitement were contagious at first, but then he remembered that he had been disappointed so many times, that he had long since resigned himself to a life devoid of eroticism. 

He could not remember when they had last either made love or talked about the fact that they hadn’t. He had previously tried different tactics to ignite the spark in her: a trip to the opera, a hotel stay with spa treatments and foot massages, a surprise now and then. He had bought thousands of kroner worth of flowers to absolutely no avail. He didn’t even know if she had liked them, the bouquets—carnations, roses, tulips, lilies—she thanked him, smiled, and put them in a vase on the dining table, but he had not had any luck with getting closer to her because of it, and in bed everything remained as it had been for many years. She read from some book before she said goodnight, closed the book and set it on the nightstand, put in her earplugs and turned off the light.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Pangkon” by Dalih Sembiring

December 6, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Nana

But how different the taste and aroma of milk mixed in coffee ground with green beans, she thought.

This Translation Tuesday, our story takes place in a makeshift warung pangkon—a lap café—where the young Mita waitresses for her male customers in Kalibata, Jakarta. Dalih Sembiring, while better known for his translation of Indonesian novelist Eka Kurniawan’s Man Tiger, proves himself a beguiling storyteller in Nana’s mesmerising translation. First published in the 2010 queer anthology Orang Macam Kita (People Like Us), “Pangkon” is a moving story of work and the affinities between women. 

She was nine years old, then. She brought home a packet of sweet condensed milk freely supplied by the school, which she mixed with a glass of warm water and later added a small spoon of coffee. No one else was at home, but she was cautious. Bapak could suddenly appear and scold her. Bapak said, coffee is for older people—for adults.

But how different the taste and aroma of milk mixed in coffee ground with green beans, she thought. She was nine years old, then. Yet to understand why some things are okay to do, and others not. It was not in her nature to question for reason. It was enough that she knew what was pleasurable was pleasurable, and what was not remained to be rejected. That is why she gets confused, now, at how blurry the lines that divide the right, the wrong, and the plain disgusting are.

“Where’s my bloody coffee, Cak!” shouts Bang Uwi to Cak Par, who is busy juggling his jars of coffee and sugar.

“Wait, one second!” Cak Pardi’s voice booms. “Who will it be tonight?”

“Mita will do, Cak. She’s like a drug.”

Bang Uwi’s words automatically invite laughter from all the men here.

The sound of rain on the roofs seems to compete with the increasingly loud chattering and cackling, and the loudspeakers drone a D’lloyd song from the VCD player. The rhythm of steel tires upon train tracks can sometimes be heard from outside. The chilly air coaxes the women on laps to press closer upon the bodies of their customers. Kretek smoke congregates thickly in the room as a sign: the night is still young. READ MORE…