Posts filed under 'translation tuesday'

Translation Tuesday: “The Killer in Compartment Number 8” by Ivanka Mogilska

November 29, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Lora Petrova

[It] turned out that the body was surrounded by poems of an unknown author.

This Translation Tuesday, a literary murder mystery aboard a train carriage reveals the intricacies of expressing a woman’s inner life. Briefly sketched yet drawn with a rich interiority, the Bulgarian writer Ivanka Mogilska’s short fiction is translated by Lora Petrova. Step right onto the crime scene now and find out who’s guilty!

If the cricket that lived in Emilia’s left ear had been less insistent, she would surely have learned the killer’s identity earlier. But he almost never stopped. Most times it was singing with a quiet monotone, making her feel as if she was drifting through a cloud, with a head stuffed full of cotton. The train was wriggling through the valley. The fog was hiding the warning signs on trees about the coming fall. Today, the cricket’s song was especially anxious and Emilia would often have to read the same page twice. 

Soon after departure, the frivolous young man in the group of guests staying at Waterby Manor found the hostess dead in front of an old cabinet in the corridor leading to the kitchen. Police arrived quickly and asked the guests to retire to their rooms. The officers inspected the crime scene.

The cricket in Emilia’s ear hit a high note when it turned out that the body was surrounded by poems of an unknown author and the cabinet had hundreds more pages written in the same hand. Poems, poems, poems. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “a day (like any other)” by Carla Bessa

November 22, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Elton Uliana

walk the dog, here comes the neighbour, hello!, help!, sorry?, how are you?

This Translation Tuesday, the inimitable Carla Bessa plunges us into the frantic interior of a woman (like any other) and her everyday frenzy. If you’ve read Bessa’s work in our pages, you’ll recognise her work as mining the dramatic possibilities of text to revelatory effect; today’s story is another stellar instance. Drawn from her recent book Todas Umas, which explores the effacement of women after marriage and motherhood, Elton Uliana offers us the gushing rhythms of an inundated mind in his tightly woven translation. Read while listening to a recording of the Jabuti Prize winner’s new microfiction!  

a day (like any other)

get up early, have a shower, make some coffee, wake up the kids, kiss them, wake up the husband, kiss him, welcome the housekeeper, good morning!, help!, hi?, good morning!, have breakfast with the husband and kids, help!, did you say anything, honey?, me?, strange I heard something too mum, come on, time to go to school, take the husband and kids to the car, say goodbye, help! walk the dog, here comes the neighbour, hello!, help!, sorry?, how are you?, very well thank you, see you later, help!, turn around, keep walking, go to the bank, go to the hairdresser, help!, help!, go to the beautician, go to the shops, come back home, cook, iron, clean the house, no need for the cleaner it’s done already, visit the mother, help!, help!, help!, make an appointment at the gynaecologist, smile to the doorman, help!, all right, ma’am?, all great and you?, give the car park man some change, help!, help!, take the blender for repair, help!, come home, help!, hang the new painting in the dining room, or perhaps in the bedroom, help!, help!, help!, pick up the kids from school, help with their homework, help!, help!, help!, help!, help!, dinner, put the children to bed, read them a story, sing them a lullaby, stroke them, smother them with the pillow, welcome the husband, poison the husband, go to sleep.

wake up in the middle of the night thinking, shit, forgot the dog.

Translated from the Portuguese by Elton Uliana READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Irina Mashinski

November 15, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Maria Bloshteyn

Poetry fills up drums canisters garbage cans / lakes bogs artificial reservoirs

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you two energetic poems from the Russian by Irina Mashinski, author of The Naked World and a prolific writer herself in both English and her native Russian. Harnessing the potential of Irina’s bilingualism and exophony, translator Maria Bloshteyn speaks of her dialogic translation process: “The process of translation with a bilingual poet becomes much less about the translator finding the perfect phrase or equivalent rhythm in the target language, and much more about assisting the poet by providing variations of translations of a single line or stanza for her to choose.” Dive right into this strange, mesmerising wasteland of this poetic collaboration.

In Absentia

1. Twilight 

The tree is dead,
I drag it down the slope,
half-sinking in the snowbanks.

So will my Faustian questers
someday
haul me through the snow,
in just such tin-stiff mittens,
all my odd loops and whorls,
this tangle, knots upon the bark—
a pattern seen but once.

And just as quiet and pale
as these stunned trees,
my brother-poets will
escort me:
the icy beech, the hemlock, the black walnut,
the birch, the hornbeam, the bird cherry,
the sugar maple, the plantain, the other maple—
that for a long time will burn
scarlet.

When I’ll be dragged
blinded over the stumps—
through the gully,
over remnants of fencing,
the forked road, the post,
the plaster fountain—
the birdbath overturned,
the empty birdhouse, rot and moss,
the gulley, and the rot and moss,

when I’ll be dragged
down for the extraction
of the golden root—

a ragged trench will stretch across the deep snow,
stippled like a greyhound,
as if the angels wrestled on it,

they’ll stand there scattered in farewell,
the slope as deep as a fresh rough-draft,
not noticing how their legs are whipped
awkwardly by my dead branches,
by the trailing
still unyielding roots.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpts from Galápagos by Malva Flores

November 8, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by J Buentello Benavides

The sea is also a cemetery: that lukewarm hammock we dream of

This Translation Tuesday, sail to the Galápagos with the poetry of the Mexican poet, Malva Flores, winner of the Aguascalientes National Poetry Prize in 1999. In five elusive and potent fragments, Flores fires up the islands of imagination that make up the tropical locale’s “intoxication”. On this Archipelago, a fascinating intertextuality is weaved throughout as we encounter literary figures from Victor Hugo to Salvador Elizondo. These poems, rendered in J Buentello Benavides’s marvellous translation, shine through with an allusive power that can only be described as “an excess of sun”. 

Terraces 

You must always climb. That is banishment,
a slope, even if it’s in the desert.
María Zambrano 

Lose a foot, the floor, the rhythm of a jump; stay standing on the terrace. Yes. Like that. Alone on the terrace, among hanging clothes like bloodless bodies and all the old things from which you detach because you don’t want to see what happened, but you save them, you stick them in chests, in boxes, even in plastic bags. You save them. 

What happened became simple. You were wrong. You lost a foot, the floor, the rhythm of a jump and you came to a stop on this island suspended in the whitest blue of a brilliant afternoon: this eternal terrace. 

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Halo and Mic” by Sian Northey

November 1, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Susan Walton

“Where’s yer bloody ’alo? Or are you a plastic angel?”

Today’s Translation Tuesday features a cracking piece of Welsh fiction from Sian Northey where a bored angel descends to earth and finds himself having to play to a human crowd. In Susan Walton’s translation, nuances in speech and register are captured to delightful effect, allowing the voices of angels and men to truly soar. Let yourself be enthralled by this wholly original tale of shape-shifting and light-hearted rebellion. 

They didn’t twig what I was. A bit of a disappointment, really, because I’d gone for a classic look—full-length white nightie, two wings, and a light dusting of radiance, but not too blingy. You don’t want to be trashy, do you? That’s why I told that Jelia and his bloody trumpet to stay at home.

“You can’t go by yourself,” he’d said, after snatching up a dusty volume from the piles at his side, opening it and starting to read. “A host—that means a multitude.”

“Nope. Never. No way, José. Not a chance in hell, gwd boi.” Jelia had looked at me suspiciously, raising one eyebrow, waiting for an explanation. “Practice. They must be communicated with. It’ll need to be done again at some point, for sure,” I’d said. “And anyway, I’m bored,” I’d added. “But you’re staying at home. Bad enough that one of us is breaking the rules.”

“Go then,” Jelia had said, turning back to his trumpet. “Anyroad, the place has changed a lot, they say. They won’t be very impressed with you.”

And they weren’t. I chose a spot where there were quite a few people and appeared as it was getting dark. I stood there for a few minutes before anyone said anything. I rather regretted not letting Jelia come with me—him and his twenty trumpets. I’d expected the people to be surprised, even fearful, but the only thing that happened was that a couple of them passed me to reach a long counter where drinks were being served. I noticed that one of the girls went through me, rather than pushing against me; she turned to look at me. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpts from So to Speak by Ricardo Cázares

October 25, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Joe Imwalle

I look to the bone the tender thigh almost foam

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you excerpts from the award-winning Mexican poet Ricardo Cázares’s 75-page serial poem So to Speak. With a cinematic eye that hones in on the materiality of everyday experience, Cázares’s speaker leaps from image to image with dazzling grace and wonder. And, in replicating this sensation of poetic propulsion, hear from translator Joe Imwalle the process of working with a poet whose work is always already imbricated in the net of translation.

“In addition to his poetry, Cázares has translated Charles Olson and Robert Creeley into Spanish. These poets are clearly an influence on Cázares’ attention to breath and syllable. Olson’s statement in “Projective Verse” that “the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge” was ringing in my head when I first began this project. Surely, Cázares has carried this statement around too. Reading his poems aloud has a palpable energy with a forward momentum. The poems are open ended and each flows into the next. They enact the poetic moment that boils up from a quotidian event leaving the speaker on the verge of understanding something transcendent.

Translating these poems presented plenty of enjoyable challenges. So often the associative leaps being made are sound-based, pesa slips into pozo. Cázares also plays with ambiguity. I often had to choose one meaning over another when both were intended to resonate.”

—Joe Imwalle

I look at my hands

at the fingers of my hands
        at the yolks cooling down on my skin
and falling to the plate

____________I see the trace
                                        see the sun in a burner
                                        where someone’s boiling a stock

I look at the bread with compassion

                                               once
____________________on that same table
____________we studied the nervous system
____________of a frog

I look at the flames

                            boiling flowers
                                    dry leaves

                in the golden liquid steeps a tea
                for insomnia 

I look at the ceiling
                        a DC-10 lands
                        on the table’s edge

                   I look to the bone the tender thigh almost foam
                  there’s fine weather a breeze
                  scent of diesel and apples 

I see my hands
____________I scan the radar verify the instruments
________and fine tune their touch READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Mom’s Photographs” by Nay Win Myint

October 11, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Kenneth Wong

Perhaps she was a bit like the acacia leaf from upcountry, prone to turn bristling red during the hot season.

This Translation Tuesday, let the three-time National Literary Award winner Nay Win Myint take you through the things that go unsaid and untold through the lens of a small Burmese family. First published in the January 1990 issue of Dream Blossom Magazine, translator Kenneth Wong brings us a moving story that courses through the past and its memories like a clear and wide river. Dive in! 

1

The view from the Irrawaddy River revealed the towering cliffs. The goldish brown seawalls peered down at the river from their high vantage point. The clear green waves, the river’s vanguard, charged at the cliffs, encircled them, then continued to flow further. Full of bumps and humps, the ragged ancient layers of the cliff looked like a soft piece of cake sliced off with a jagged knife. The water didn’t touch the base of the cliffs. It left enough space for a rough, sandy footpath, leading to the villages along the river. 

Coming up from Than Kaing by boat, once I spotted the high cliffs, I could tell I would soon reach Ye Nan Chaung—or, that I was approaching Nyaung Hla port. When the boat began to decelerate alongside the cliffs, all the emotions associated with this place, my mother’s hometown, became more intense. Walking up the slope from the water’s edge, I set foot in Nyaung Hla port, and soon all the scents of upcountry Burma came rushing towards me. Horse carts and cars awaited there, ready to take me to Ye Nan Chaung. 

The road from Nyaung Hla to Ye Nan Chaung was quite scenic, passing by the hills and valleys, pump jacks, golden grasses, reddish-brown pebbled grounds, oil rigs in the distance, silvery lakes, and little bamboo huts. I didn’t like taking the shared car rides, even if it was the cheaper option. Hemmed in by the passengers and cargos, I wouldn’t be able to experience a thing. Just to save a small sum in the fare, I’d be missing the beauty of the land I rarely got to visit. I’d rather hire a whole horse-cart for myself. Going downhill, we hobbled ahead with white knuckles; going uphill, we craned our necks as the horse strained and struggled. These were the land’s characters that I wanted to take in fully. Along the road, the Irrawaddy River sometimes revealed itself in sudden flashes. In downhill turns, the cart’s wheels creaked with a series of tok, tok, tok … This was the pastoral music I associated with this region.

Mom was born here; she lived here for many years. Whenever she talked about her childhood, this land, this air, this water, and these rows of houses invariably came up: the Irrawaddy, the Burma Oil Company’s (BOC) staff quarters, the gas pipelines, the wild acacia and margosa trees … she would speak of them endlessly. I could only come back once every couple of years, and whenever I passed through it on a horse cart, I remembered her. When I thought about her, I also remembered the photos she showed me especially … READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Acharya Chatursen’s Bride of the City

September 27, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Pratibha Vinod Kumar and A.K. Kulshreshth

Sir Mahanaman, today, your daughter attains eighteen years of age. The Republic of Vaishali has chosen her as its foremost beauty.

“I gladly declare that the eighty-four books and ten thousand pages of my literary output over the last forty years of my life are worthless and I humbly gift this book to my readers as my first work.”

—Acharya Chatursen (1891-1960), in his preface to Vaishali Ki Nagarvadhu

In the ancient republic of Vaishali, a childless couple discover an abandoned infant girl in a mango orchard. They name her Ambapali, one who sprouted from a mango. When she turns eighteen, Ambapali is forced to become a courtesan–the Bride of the City–under Vaishali’s laws, which dictate that a woman as beautiful as her cannot be only one man’s wife. Ambapali bows before the iron law of her society, but does not allow herself to be crushed. She sets terms that make her residence, the Palace of Seven Worlds, a centre of power. While the richest and the most powerful men grovel before her, Ambapali bides her time even as she burns with revenge . . .

First published in Hindi in 1948-49, Vaishali Ki Nagarvadhu (literally, “Bride of the City of Vaishali”) took Acharya Chatursen ten years of deep research. This unrivalled epic of the human condition boasts of a vast canvas of characters that includes the Buddha and Mahavir among “a Bollywood-like panoply of opulent castles, warrior princes, courtesans, dancers, wily courtiers, [and] sorcerers.” Hitherto untranslated, this icon of world literature is now available in a two–volume series out from Cernunnos Books. After reading the sponsored excerpt below, check out Historical Novel Society’s review here. 

The Cursed Law

The city seethed. At the crack of dawn, men had started thronging towards the assembly. Royal Avenue was choked with men on foot, in palanquins, on horseback, and in chariots. The big merchants, tradesmen, courtiers—they were all in the crowd. The outer corridors of the assembly were jammed with men jostling each other. The imposing marble steps were occupied by men sitting on them. A little further away, in the open field, some men stayed in their chariots as they surveyed the large building. Some of them raised their glinting spears and shouted out, creating a cacophony.

The members of the assembly were dismounting where they could and gravely making their way through the unruly mob. A platoon of guards cleared the way for them, and gatekeepers announced their entry into the hall.

The assembly was built mostly of gleaming white marble from the Matsya Kingdom. Inside, its main conference hall had a black stone floor and a hundred and eight black stone pillars that supported the ceiling. Nine hundred and ninety-nine ivory floor pods were neatly arrayed all around the hall. On these, the members of the assembly—representatives of the clans—sat quietly in their demarcated areas. In the centre of the chamber was a raised jade-coloured and intricately carved altar housing two silver pods and covered with a silver canopy. The canopy was ornate with paintings and festooned with flags. Its pillars and the two floor pods had gold inlay work. The pods belonged to the chief minister, Sunand and to the supreme commander, Suman. These two luminaries had not yet reached the assembly.

The altar had steps on three sides, and these steps seated the aged clerks who recorded the minutes of the assembly meetings. Their assistants stood ready with rolls of black and red notebooks in open baskets. Some middle-aged officials directed the preparations in their usual efficient and unobtrusive ways. The rest of the staff scurried to follow their commands.

The chief minister and the supreme commander took their seats without fanfare. The rising tumult of the assembly was drowned out by a blast of the trumpet signalling that the proceedings had started.

The crowd outside became more restive. As they chanted and paced, their faces turned red, and their eyes glowed with anger. The courtyard was packed with the sons of courtiers and merchants. The former brandished their swords and spears, shouting phrases that were lost to all but those next to them. The latter, trained to smile and create bonhomie, looked ready to pick fights. With these crowds thronging the assembly building, it was clear that all the markets and guilds in the city and up-country were closed. Inside, the two chiefs and the members of the parliamentary council were in a pensive mood. They fidgeted as if an unwanted event was about to be thrust on them. The guards were deployed in full strength, their faces taut and foreheads furrowed.

A sudden hush descended on the vast gathering, broken only by the deep, loud creaking of a chariot’s wheels, accompanied by the tinkling of what seemed to be a thousand of its bells. The men in the restless crowd stopped pacing, as if bound by an inviolable command. All eyes were trained on a chariot that advanced at a stately pace towards the courtyard. The chariot was covered with a white cloth, and a white flag fluttered on its golden top. It traversed the courtyard and stopped in front of the steps that led up to the assembly. The quiet throng looked on as an imposing man stepped out of the chariot. His clothes were a spotless white, and so was his flowing beard. A long sword nestled in a sheath at his waist. The sheath and the handle of the sword glittered with inlaid gems. The old man wore a white turban that was topped by a solitaire. A young man joined him, and the old man climbed the steps slowly, but without faltering, leaning on the young one’s shoulder. The men made way for him. The silence remained unbroken as he took the first few steps. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Marie-Célie Agnant

September 20, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Danielle Legros Georges

Love my skin / dark as your childhood nights / my mouth / rebellious nutmeg

This Translation Tuesday, we feature two extraordinary poems by the celebrated Haitian-Québécois poet Marie-Célie Agnant. Drawn from her first collection, Balafres, ardent readers of Asymptote might recall Agnant’s work from our Fall 2016 issue featuring Canadian poetry. But these two poems reveal a more personal dimension of the socially engaged poet, as translator Danielle Legros Georges shows us, with its heady mix of myth and memory. 

“Balafres, renamed Gashes in English, consists of 36 poems originally written in French, some spanning several pages, others epigrammatic. Agnant’s is a poetics grounded in the Haitian engagée tradition, a literature of social commitment; one in which political dimensions are not divorced from aesthetic ones. The poems here, however, are among her love poems—which are not so well-known. In translating them, I was, at moments, challenged (and subsequently charmed) by Agnant’s images, image-systems, and metaphors. In “Orphée,” for example, the question arose of how best to treat the breath (souffle) of the lover in mon corps/ balafon d’obsidienne / mes cuisses bilimbao et / mon souffle touffeur de savane.  Was the sultriness of the breath to be emphasized, the dry heat of it, its connection to biome, or a combination of these? Such have been the knots to untie toward equivalence.”

—Danielle Legros Georges

Orpheus

Honestly, break your pen
I’m neither
exquisite nymph nor
Madonna walled
in the great book of your dreams
far from the realm and frippery
of your words
move on

Break your pen I am not
this goddess
fairy
Aphrodite
with seawater eyes
who haunts your dreams

Break your pen and your mirror
look at me and
love me
with both hands
full-bodied

Love my skin
dark as your childhood nights
my mouth
rebellious nutmeg
my body
obsidian balafon
my bilimbao thighs
the heat of my breath like a savannah’s  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Competition” by Mário Araújo

September 13, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Elton Uliana

The landscape trembled, like when a person shakes while taking a picture.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you a charming story of a family race on an open field by the Jabuti Prize-winning writer Mário Araújo. In that brief stretch between the starting gun and an imaginary finish line, Araújo captures the kaleidoscopic psyche of a young girl at play. In Elton Uliana’s translation, we glimpse in “The Competition” a nimble adolescent mind figuring out the language to articulate her ambition, fear, affection, in short, her complexity. 

It was their father who, imitating the sound of a gun with his voice, gave the signal to start. The boy lagged behind right from the beginning, while she and her father thrust their legs forward, side by side; she was trying to perfect her incredibly fast steps to compensate for his much longer strides. The boy was behind mainly because, between the excitement and the distraction, he had delayed a couple of seconds before reacting to the starting gun.

Her head only came up to her father’s waist, but the fact is that, at that moment, she was barely looking at him, focused entirely as she was on her own performance. All she could manage was to feel his presence next to her, a dark, solid figure of great size, wearing the trousers he always wore. She was frustrated that his body needed to make much less effort than hers. Her father looked like he was floating in mid-air, but even so he still seemed invincible. It seemed as if he was moving forward, pulled by the power of the real propellers that were her feet, attracting everything around them like magnets. She could swear that he didn’t know where and how his daughter had learned to run as fast as that. The truth is that she learned a lot in the time she spent away from him and her mother. Hour after hour, day after day playing in the open field next to the house, dressed like a boy, wearing trainers—sometimes even barefoot—t-shirt and shorts, very different from the pretty little Beatrice her father saw at night, in pink or light-yellow pyjamas, or on Sundays, when she dressed up or went for lunch at their relatives’ house.

Now they were all in the open, her father, little Luke and her, and that would give her even more advantage, since she knew the field like the back of her hand. Her father shouted something and, by the way the words were framed by his lips, he seemed to be smiling, but she didn’t quite understand as she was concentrating on her task and the wind was howling heavily in her ears. She felt annoyed when she realized that her lazy dad, in addition to being carried on the wings of her jet propellers, still looked relaxed and happy. She quickened her pace even more to the point where her heart was almost touching that little thing in the back of her throat the doctor calls tonsils, and her mother calls bells.

As for little Luke, she didn’t have time for him now, he was such a baby. She only hoped that he wasn’t sitting on the grass crying and forcing their father to interrupt the competition and help him. But she couldn’t hear any crying, perhaps because the wind was blowing in her ears, the wind of that open field, a wind that lived there. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems from the Middle Korean

September 6, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Seenoo Kim

I might have lived by the seashore, / Eating seaweed, eating oysters

What might the music of the late Goryeo sing of? This Translation Tuesday, we are transported to more than half a millennia back, as Seenoo Kim translates two songs from the Middle Korean that reflect the vicissitudes of exterior and interior landscapes. Representing a tradition of folk poetry independent of the Chinese-influenced elite literature, these poems also reflect the literary possibilities of writing in the hangul script. In Kim’s translation, these meditative and often melancholic poems exude a lyricism that resonates with the contemporary ear. 

Dong dong¹

            The First Month²

The stream-waters
How lovingly they freeze and melt³
Yet I—born in the middle of the world
Walk all alone.

            The Second Month

Under the full moon
Like the lanterns lit on high⁴
Your face is one
That shines on everyone.

            The Third Month

All blossoming
Full spring’s rhododendrons⁵
You were born to be
The envy of others.

            The Fourth Month

They didn’t forget the spring
The nightingales are coming back
Not my mister; whose fault is it
He’s forgotten the old me?

            The Fifth Month

On the fifth day
The morning herbs of Dano day⁶
I’ll give them to you
So you can live for a thousand years. 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…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from “Feel Free” by Dagmar Schifferli

August 23, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Rachel Farmer

Do you have a tape running? I can’t see one. How will you remember what I say?

Did you enjoy Rachel Farmer’s translation of francophone Swiss writer Catherine Safonoff in our most recent issue? If so, you’d be excited to learn that we are bringing you another of Farmer’s work in this week’s Translation Tuesdays showcase. Dagmar Schifferli, a writer who is also trained in psychology and social pedagogy, maps the shape-shifting and exacting interiority of an adolescent protagonist who speaks to her psychiatrist. In between fiction and dramatic monologue, here is a narrator’s voice that is unforgettable in her ability to speak plainly and potently. 

“Translating Dagmar Schifferli’s enigmatic novella Meinetwegen certainly came with its own set of challenges. For starters, how should I choose just a short extract of a work whose unique genius comes from the way it gradually, insidiously makes you question its narrator, then fall for her, then question her all over again? The novella, set in the early 1970s, consists entirely of a series of one-sided conversations between the 17-year-old protagonist and her psychiatrist. At several points, the young girl hints at her own untrustworthiness, insisting she would not tell a “deliberate lie”, challenging her psychiatrist to decide whether or not to believe her, and alluding to a lack of free will. The duplicity of her narration is reflected in the language, where dual meanings abound: for example, a clock “strikes” and another is “beating time”, a reference to the beatings she allegedly received. 

Even the German title, Meinetwegen, has a double meaning (and translating it was a bit of a head-scratcher). On the one hand, it can mean something like “I don’t care”—an attitude expressed about the narrator’s actions by an adult in her life. But later, another meaning is unveiled. The protagonist realises she can do things meinetwegen: “on my own account”, “for my own benefit”, “for my sake”. Finally, she allows herself to think about the future and takes back her own agency. This is why, after much deliberation, I chose Feel Free as the novella’s English title, as it captures this double meaning and also weaves in a reference to the protagonist’s enforced state of captivity. These layers of meaning mirror the narrator herself, and her singular ability to inspire both sympathy and distrust.” 

—Rachel Farmer

I like to talk.

But don’t expect too much. Once a week, they said. Or rather, ordered. Because nowhere is less free than here. Once a week—at least. I’ll make notes in between. I want you to hear everything. You will have to decide for yourself whether it’s true or not. If I were to tell you a story that wasn’t exactly how I really experienced it or that someone else told me, it would not be a deliberate lie. Having your ears boxed hard enough can damage the brain. And mine were boxed hard.

That’s why I’m not sure whether I’m remembering everything correctly. Even though I want to.

But there is one thing you should know: you must never interrupt me, never ever. And don’t ask any questions either—don’t make a sound, not a peep. Don’t go hm or clear your throat. That would get my thoughts all jumbled. It would immediately lead me astray; make me refer to you and phrase things for your benefit. To make you understand, above all else. It would take me away from myself and perhaps from the truth too, a truth I want to get to the bottom of at all costs. It’s not because I’m hoping to lessen my punishment. No, I’m ready for anything. Braced for anything.

I will accept any judgement.

A judgement would create clarity, would be a direct response to what I did.

Had to do.

I’m sure you know that humans don’t really possess free will. In school, I learnt that some people don’t even commit suicide of their own free will. Because, my teacher told me, their thoughts grow increasingly narrow, focusing more and more on what they intend to do. Until, in the end, all other alternatives dwindle to nothing, drift away, can no longer be imagined, the teacher explained. Despite the billions of brain cells ticking away inside the skull of every human being, connected to one another in I-don’t-know-how-many ways.

You just coughed. You shouldn’t do that.
Now I need to have a short break. Don’t say anything; just wait.

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Translation Tuesday: An Extract from August is an Autumn Month by Bruno Pellegrino

August 16, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Elodie Olson-Coons

He is keeping an urgent record of the names of things coming to an end

Can’t get enough of our Swiss Literature Feature in Asymptote’s Summer 2022 issue? This Translation Tuesday, travel with French-speaking Swiss writer Bruno Pellegrino into the garden of Gustave Roud’s. Lose yourself in a giddying array of flowers and names in this extract from the opening of the Prix Alice Rivaz-winning novel, an evocative passage that demonstrates a poet and a botanist’s keen vision of the natural world. Translator and former contributor Elodie Olson-Coons walks us through the novel’s rhythms in a beautiful introduction to a fascinating book. 

“Shaped around the life of Swiss poet and photographer Gustave Roud and his sister Madeleine, Bruno Pellegrino’s August is an Autumn Month (Editions Zoé, 2018) is a tender, intimate opus: half lyrical biography, half archival fiction, intermittently illuminated by the author’s gentle, wry perspective (“If you want to get anywhere, Gus, you’ll have to pull yourself together,” he tells his character at one point). The book’s delicate framework—brother and sister, rural house and garden, 1962 to 1972 —is brought to life by the ebb and flow of the seasons, a Woolfian texture that gives its undivided attention to the botanical and the domestic. Moving like ghosts through their old family home, surrounded by traces of dreams long-abandoned and tender words unspoken, Gustave and Madeleine’s days are given life by the simplest details: a shift in morning light, a cup of linden flower tea going cold.”

—Elodie Olson-Coons

The time of foxgloves is over. As soon as Gustave touches the petals, even with his usual gentleness, the flowers crumple or come apart, soft as tissue paper, rolling paper. Foxgloves, that’s what they called them on their childhood farm; he doesn’t remember when he started thinking of them as digitalis. The courtyard is scattered with them, as if a storm has been and gone. It’ll need sweeping. But first, a more pressing concern: the inventory must be performed. 

He goes through the gate and, notebook in hand, moves into the gardens exuding metallic odours—unless they are his own, his breath, his combed-back hair, effluvia caught in his shirt collar or the impeccable folds of his trousers, who knows. Since passing sixty (and that was a while ago now), he isn’t sure of anything anymore. He straightens his long, bent figure. 

Ordered according to the demands of the varietals and the texture of the soil, the garden obeys a precise architecture: vegetables alternate with lilies, verbena, poppies; climbing plants shelter the more fragile elements; the perfume of the marigolds frightens away vermin. But the lushness of this jungle is sometimes difficult to contemplate. The glance hesitates in the face of such abundance—long gourds unrolling across the lawn of wild reseda and Japanese anemones—and this morning, something else means that, for the space of a few seconds, Gustave is overcome by the scale of the task. No storm after all, the night was a calm one; it’s only that, at dawn, dew settled delicately across the estate, crystallising into a white frost. It doesn’t seem particularly significant and yet, three days before the September equinox, everything is already condemned.  READ MORE…