Posts filed under 'War'

Translation Tuesday: “How I Went to War” by Miguel Gila Cuesta

April 20, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Will Carr

So he said, “Go on, get killing. In this company we kill hard 9:00 to 1:00 and 4:00 to 7:00.”

Gila’s star-making monologue “How I Went to War” (1951) broke a tacit taboo of postwar Spanish society. For twelve years, public discussion of the civil war had limited itself to the Franco regime’s mythos of a Glorious National Uprising, but Gila, with pitch-perfect working-class vernacular, replaced saintly heroes with indignant aunts, petulant commanders, and innocent spies dressed in drag. The diametrical contrast has led critics to hail Gila’s war routines as a comedic takedown of Franco’s official story. And yet the comedian never suffered reprisals—not even when he performed for the Generalissimo himself.

Gila’s comedic monologues present atypical challenges even for translators used to working with humor. Rather than relying on wordplay and culture-specific references, “How I Went to War” creates incongruities through clashes of tone and aspect. The comedian tells his war story in a casual, un-military style. The blue-collar narration and dialogues sometimes morph into exchanges that evoke children playing at soldiers. I’ve attempted to carry over the informal tone of Gila’s oral performances, with his hesitations and false starts, and to choose words and phrasing that would maintain the uncanny juxtapositions of a war narrated as work and play. Part of Gila’s genius is that he crafts a war story in which the words war and killing feel out of place both contextually and grammatically. When he uses matar (kill / killing), he breaks conventions of aspect in the same way that kill does when used instead of work or do (“How you killing?” “Killing good, how about you?”). I’ve tried to surround these words with a consistent baseline of idiomatic speech so that wherever Gila hammers matar into his workaday Spanish, kill fractures U.S. English along similar lines.

–Will Carr, translator

“How I Went to War”[1]

I’m going to tell you the story of how I went to war.[2]

I was working as an errand boy for . . . for some pharmacy warehouses.[3] And one day I accidently broke an aspirin tablet and they fired me.

So I went home and sat down in a chair we had for when we got fired, and my Uncle Cecilio came in with a newspaper with a want ad for the war: “Prominent War Seeks Hardkilling Soldier.” And . . . and my mom said, “You’re quick on the uptake, you should apply.”

And I said, “Me? Why do I have to go to war?”

She said, “Well you have to work somewhere.”

So I said, “But I . . . I don’t kill so good.”

She said, “They . . . they’ll teach you to kill good soon enough.”

Then my aunt said, “But now we’re going to have to buy him a horse.”

And my . . . my mom said, “Nonsense, the army gives you one when you join up.”

My aunt says, “No thank you, God knows who’s been sitting on that thing. He’s better off packing his own horse.”

So we went to buy a horse, but you couldn’t buy them separate. You had to get the cart and the flies with it.

And my mom said, “No, you’re not bringing flies to the war. At least as a foot soldier you’ll keep things clean.”

So I packed myself a hot lunch and went off to war. I showed up Monday at 7:00 AM, and the war was closed because it was too early. And there was this lady outside selling churros and bread and stuff. And I said, “Hey, is this the war of ’14?”

And she said, “This is ’16; ’14’s just down the street.”

So I went to the other war, and when they opened the war at 9:00 I went in. And there was this soldier killing there. I said, “How . . . how you killing?”

He says, “Killing good, how about you?”

I said, “Me, not too good right now, but once I get trained up . . .”[4] READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2020

November 16, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel, Marina Dora Martino, and Samuel Miller

Our favorite selections for the month, featuring David Diop, Yi Lei, and Pergentino José!

There’s plenty to get excited about in the latest offerings from around the world, bound to satisfy the desires of any reader—from the emotionally visceral, to the patiently curious, to the surreal and the hallucinatory. In scoping for the finest translations, we bring you reviews of anti-colonialist fiction by a Prix Goncourt des Lycéens winner, a new collection from a leading figure of contemporary Chinese poetics, and the first ever literary translation from the Sierra Zapotec into English by a thrilling new voice. 

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At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

David Diop’s brutal sophomore novel, At Night All Blood Is Black, translated elegantly by Anna Moschovakis, is a relentless indictment of the colonial power structure. Through the utter dissolution of the protagonist, Alfa Ndiaye, the novel demonstrates its ripples and rhizomes throughout society—from the individual to the geopolitical to the environmental—rotting away what does not serve it. Though heavy and dark from beginning to end, this is a highly specific, deftly illustrated, poetically rendered critique that justifies the emotional slog.

Alfa is a chocolat soldier, a Senegalese man who has voluntarily travelled to fight on the side of France in the first World War. During the ensuing battles, Mademba, his childhood friend and “more-than-brother” is disemboweled before his eyes by an enemy soldier. We meet Alfa shortly after he has watched Mademba die slowly, refusing his pleas for mercy. In these scenes of articulate gore and moral anguish, Moschovakis reveals her poetic side in the restraint and somber vivacity with which she renders Diop’s descriptions. Alfa then finds himself in the throes of both deep regret and liberation from the moral conventions which had prevented him from acting in Mademba’s best interest. “No voice rises in my head to forbid me: my ancestors’ voices and my parents’ voices all extinguished themselves the minute I conceived of doing what, finally, I did.” The horror of both bearing witness to and being complicit in the suffering of a loved one silences the voices of morality in his head and marks his entrance into a world of alternate, competing guiding forces: his own tortured impulses and the abstract interests of the narcissistic state. He begins performing solo operations late at night in no-man’s land, disemboweling enemy soldiers and keeping one hand and a weapon from each kill.

A progression that functions on multiple planes expands the novel upwards and outwards from where it remains firmly rooted—in viscera spilled. As time advances and settings shift, Alfa’s psychological state, the narrative mode, the realms of reality, the overarching value system, and the gender coding of these spaces evolve in conjunction. Generally speaking, the trajectory is from the concrete to the abstract, the sober to the unhinged, the current to the eternal, the “real” to the mythological, the individual to the collective, and the masculine to the feminine. Alfa remains our guide, however unreliable, through this uncertain terrain, until his psychological coherence evaporates entirely, leaving the reader stewed in his reflections and testimonies. READ MORE…

Announcing our May Book Club Selection: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

May 28, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Daniel Persia

This is one of Shibli’s greatest strengths as a storyteller: she trusts her readers to fill in the gaps.

One of the most powerful responsibilities of literature is to ascribe human voices to the momentous, overarching events of our world. This month, Asymptote has selected Adania Shibli’s unflinchingly powerful Minor Detail, a novelistic reflection on the violent and painful consequences of the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, from the War of 1948 to present day. With an astutely visual language and an unwaveringly intelligent morality, Shibli’s work is an impeccably crafted totem of resistance and justice. 

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette, New Directions (US), Fitzcarraldo (UK), Text Publishing (Australia), 2020

The smell of gasoline, the sound of a dog howling, the taste (or distraction) of a simple stick of chewing gum—these are only a few of the motifs surrounding trauma and pain in Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette. It is August, 1949, and a group of Israeli soldiers have set up camp in the Negev desert. As they patrol the nearby areas, they encounter and ambush a group of Bedouins, returning with a single survivor: a young Arab woman. Shortly after, she is hosed down and raped by the officer in charge. Over half a century later, a woman living in the West Bank crosses the border into Israel, looking to uncover the details of the case. Her journey reflects a changed Middle East.

As a literary project, a historical record, and a translation, Minor Detail is, simply put, brilliant. My knowledge of the Arabic language is limited, and so my goal here isn’t to compare the translation to the original text. Instead, I want to focus on narrative structure and style—two elements clearly on the minds of both Shibli and Jaquette, whose collaboration proves a success on all fronts.

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Land / Water: A Chronicle of Vietnamese as a Diasporic Condition

May 27, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Maya Nguyen

There can be no firm diasporic life. Only affirmation of the un-firm: the resolution of irresolution between one home and another.

The journey that a language takes to arrive at us is often unimaginably intricate, with all the marks of history, people, and land upon it. In the following essay, gorgeous with lyricism and intimate with the facts and ideas of past and present, Maya Nguen takes us through the emotional and physical cartography of Vietnam and its language, and how such structures reverberate against the ever-mutable definitions of identity, personhood, and home.

In the beginning is a creation myth.
Âu Cơ meets Lạc Long Quân where mountain meets sea.
They form a bond and Âu Cơ bears an egg sac with a hundred children.
At the core of their bond with one another is another bond of one with the mountain and the other with the sea. So it came to be that fifty children followed Âu Cơ for the mountain whence she came and fifty followed Lạc Long Quân for the sea whence he came. And as Âu Cơ calls for land and Lạc Long Quân calls for water their children come to call a country
land  water
đất   nước ¹
 where land begins at the edge of the water that starts at the end of the land: is a shore that holds the country in the crossing between one word and another: between 越南 & Indochine Française & Việt Nam & Vietnam
the Vietnamese language emerges at the border
thoroughly other & utterly ones own
& defined by a border endures
Diasporic
& Pure

<<  >>

In prehistory: Austroasiatic tribes living in the Red River Delta (today’s Northern Vietnam) speak a Proto-Viet language belonging to the Mon-Khmer language family.

<<  >>

Beginning in 111 BC: Colonization by the Chinese empire for eleven centuries to follow. Classical Chinese is imposed as the written language of the government elite, forming the basis of politics, science, and literature. Proto-Viet continues to be spoken, and its speech, to be influenced by Classical Chinese.

<<  >>

Beginning in the tenth century: Independence from the Chinese won by King Ngô Quyền at the shores of Bạch Đằng River. After a millennium of foreign occupation without a formal writing system of its own, independent Vietnam continues as before: with Classical Chinese at its helm.

<<  >>

Beginning in the thirteenth century: A vernacular written script called Chữ Nôm (lit. “southern characters”) is developed on the basis of Classical Chinese to record Vietnamese folk music and poetry. Considered as the pillar of Vietnamese literature, Truyện Kiều (Tale of Kieu) by Nguyễn Du is written in Chữ Nôm. For this script, Chinese characters are naturalized to fit the Vietnamese spoken language, which itself includes Chinese words naturalized into Vietnamese. “Southern characters” in Chữ Nôm: 𡨸喃. “Southern characters” in Classical Chinese: 字南. 𡨸喃 is taught in reference to 字南. 𡨸喃 exists alongside 字南: forming a pillar: a porous border. READ MORE…

Words Containing Multitudes: Theodor Kallifatides on Writing The Siege of Troy

October 16, 2019  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

A basic human need is also to remember and be remembered. That is why we put one stone on top of another, we paint, we sing, we write.

In September, we were honored to present Theodor Kallifatides’s The Siege of Troy as our monthly Book Club feature. This poignant, multilayered novel intertwines a modern coming-of-age wartime story with a psychologically profound retelling of the classic Iliad. In the following interview, Assistant Managing Editor Josefina Massot speaks with the author on overcoming writer’s block, writing about Greece in a foreign land and tongue, and humanizing ancient heroes.

Josefina Massot (JM): You had an unexpected bout of writer’s block at age seventy-seven, back in 2015, after almost fifty years of uninterrupted literary output. The Siege of Troy was, I believe, the first novel you wrote once you overcame it. Did your writing process change at all as a result? What was it like, rediscovering your narrative voice in novel form?

Theodor Kallifatides (TK): Yes, it affected me and my writing greatly. I felt free from all expectations, from all demands from the publisher, the public, and myself, and my writing got wings it never had before. I did not care about anything except doing justice to my deepest feelings and ideas. I got back both my eyes. Before it, I always had—as most writers do, I dare say—an eye on what people would think about my work. Suddenly, I simply did not care. I was free. READ MORE…

Collective Memory: Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Human Matter: A Fiction in Review

August 21, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Paul Worley

An exercise in the resilience of human memory, the novel integrates a broad swath of literary and global cultural touchstones . . .

Human Matter: A Fiction by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, translated from the Spanish by Eduardo Aparicio, University of Texas Press, 2019

As noted over the years by scholars such as Arturo Arias, Central American cultural production remains largely at the margins of academic study. As Arias points out in Taking Their Word, because popular knowledge of the region is so sparse, and because geographic ignorance (particularly in the United States) is so widespread, Central American immigrants will often identify Mexico as their country of origin, both for reasons of Latinx solidarity, and to protect themselves from discrimination and prejudice. This erasure is not even a recent phenomenon: the protagonists of the 1983 film El Norte, the Guatemalan-Maya brother and sister Enrique and Rosa Xuncax, are told to tell people that they are from the heavily Indigenous state of Oaxaca, Mexico, to avoid being taken advantage of in both Mexico and the US. However, from the United Fruit Company in the early twentieth century to the practices of Canadian mining companies, and even US president Donald Trump’s facilitating, in the words of the Guatemalan-American author Francisco Goldman, “organized crime” in Guatemala’s 2019 presidential elections, global forces have always played, and continue to play, an outsized role in the region.

Despite its apparently marginal status, the region has made a number of enduring contributions to world literature. Foremost among them is one of the fathers of Latin American modernism, the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, and the Guatemalan Nobel Laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias, not to mention one of the most important works of Indigenous literature in the Americas, the K’iche’ Maya Popol Wuj. Outside of these points of reference, however, much of the region’s vast, rich literature remains untranslated, which makes Eduardo Aparicio’s translation of Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s El material humano as Human Matter all the more important.

Rey Rosa, perhaps Guatemala’s most important living novelist, has had an eclectic literary trajectory. Having gone to New York in the early 1980s, he eventually became the protégé of the US-expatriate author Paul Bowles, spending a good deal of time with the author in his adopted home of Tangier, Morocco, and even becoming executor of Bowles’s literary estate upon the author’s death in 1999. Tellingly, one of Rey Rosa’s previously translated novels, the magnificent The African Shore, deals with the intersection of tourism, privilege, and migration in the border zone not between Guatemala and the US, or even between Guatemala and México, but between Morocco and Spain.

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What’s New in Translation: May 2019

May 13, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal, Jacob Silkstone, and Nestor Gomez

Your guide to this month’s newest literature in translation.

This month brings us a set of novels in translation from some of the giants of international literature: László Krasznahorkai, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Ananda Devi. These reviews by Asymptote team members will give you a taste of an exiled baron’s return to his home town, a meditation on fascism and gender relations, and the decline of an older woman living in a London divided by race and class. 

baron

Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet, New Directions, 2019

Review by Jacob Silkstone, Assistant Managing Editor

“With this novel,” László Krasznahorkai told Adam Thirwell in their conversation for the Paris Review, “I can prove that I really wrote just one book in my life . . . When you read it, you’ll understand. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming must be the last.”

Ottilie Mulzet’s English translation of Báró Wenckheim hazatér has, understandably, been one of this year’s most keenly-anticipated books. It opens with a “Warning,” a labyrinthine eight-page sentence ending with a sigh of weariness that merits quoting at some length:

I don’t like at all what we are about to bring together here now, I confess, because I’m the one who is supervising everything here, I am the one—not creating anything—but who is simply present before every sound, because I am the one who, by the truth of God, is simply waiting for all of this to be over.

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What’s New in Translation: March 2019

March 13, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel and Rachael Pennington

Reviews of the newest and most exciting fiction from Denmark and France!

March brings with it a host of noteworthy new books in translation. In today’s post, Asymptote team members cover two novels set in the early twentieth century: Ida Jessen’s A Change of Time and Marcus Malte’s The Boy.

AChangeInTimeCvrRH-600x709

A Change of Time by Ida Jessen, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken, Archipelago Books (2019)

Review by Rachael Pennington, Assistant Managing Editor

Weaving together diary entries, poems, letters (both opened and unopened) and song, Ida Jessen’s A Change of Time, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken, is a stirring reflection on death and mourning, loneliness, and female identity in a changing 20th century Denmark. Fru Bragge—almost always referred to by her married name—has just lost her husband. During a loveless marriage spanning more than two decades, she endured Vigand’s lack of affection and derisive comments in silence. Although she has finally gained her freedom in losing him, she has also lost all direction in life:

I feel like a person standing in a landscape so empty and open that it matters not a bit in which direction I choose to go. There would be no difference: north, south, east, or west, it would be the same wherever I went.

It is in this vast landscape, the heathlands of Denmark, that she begins to sift through her memories, uncovering the girl she was before she became Fru Bragge. During the day, she welcomes courteous visitors who come to pay their respects and packs away her late husband’s belongings for donation; during the evening, after darkness has fallen and the oil lamp in the window of her empty home is lit, she feels most comfortable. Here, surrounded by a “silence greater than silence” she writes in her diary, giving voice to a part of herself she had almost forgotten: “Thinking back, I almost feel envious of that young school-mistress. In fact, there is no almost about it.”

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Translation Tuesdays: “Fragments from a story of my life I’ll never write” by Ruska Jorjoliani

January 8, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Frederika Randall

"I go on. Until my nights end, as they did with Grandfather, with nothing left to tell, and he sings me a wordless song."

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, join Georgian writer Ruska Jorjoliani as she tells the stories of her grandfather and their people. Becoming a refugee as a result of war, Jorjoliani’s first-person narrator gradually finds new words, before finding the need to use those words—telling the story of family, dear yet far away.

Horses

Among us, epic tales were like wedges to keep the workbench of daily life from wobbling, benches with cheap tools on top, all of us dragging ours behind us the way we did our long, grueling winters. When I was a girl, the first creatures that roused my imagination were horses—starving, weary beasts, but still horses. Every morning I used to watch our neighbor Ciko saddle his bay, settle a rough woolly hat on his head, let out a shout, and gallop off, disappearing into the mountains. Ciko’s horse and Ciko, bent low over the halter, were the only beings who could travel beyond, exceed those limits set down by the laws of nature first and then by men, the only ones who could taste another air, other worlds hidden to the common gaze. After about twenty km, the rider had to dismount and walk up so that the horse didn’t fall into a gorge, then you’d arrive at a lake, green in spring and blue in summer—what it looked like in fall or winter you didn’t know, since no one had ever dared try the climb in those seasons—and then finally the mountain would begin to shrink like the tail of a hibernating dragon and you could make out the first houses of the others in the distance, those strangers, children of another god, the Kabards.

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What’s New in Translation: September 2018

September 11, 2018  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andreea Scridon, Khai Q. Nguyen, P. T. Smith, and Rachael Pennington

Readers of English are introduced to four fresh titles, and to their takes on conflict, whimsy, and the human condition.

Even as we celebrate 30 issues, join us at Asymptote as we bring you new reviews of exciting fresh releases. Dive into four titles here with us, featuring work set in Russia, the former Yugoslavia, Syria, and Argentina. Keep on following our blog in September to witness the journey our team has been through in the last seven years.

Checkpoint+by+David+Albahari+-+9781632061928

Checkpoint by David Albahari, translated from the Serbian by Ellen Elias-Bursać, Restless Books, 2018

Reviewed by P.T. Smith, Assistant Editor

On the jacket copy for Ellen Elias-Bursać’s translation of David Albahari’s Checkpoint, Restless Books cites Waiting for Godot and Catch-22 as comparisons. I’ll take them, especially the latter, but if I’m pitching this book to people, I’d offer up authors instead of books, and César Aira and Kurt Vonnegut. They better suggest the whimsy and quick-play changes that fill the brief pages of this novel, the sense that anything might happen, that the rules of the narrative can change in a sentence. Aira brings the freedom and the pace that Checkpoint has and Vonnegut the gentler, more passive characters than the strange and bold people who make up Catch-22.

Checkpoint is a quick book, coming in at under 200 pages in small format, and written entirely in one paragraph. It’s the latter that sets the pace. There are no pauses, sentences come and come and come, and so, though it seems as though at times nothing happens, events can rise and fall in an instant. This pace fits a war novel that’s about the absurdity of war, which Checkpoint determinedly and obviously sets out to be. A group of around 30 soldiers marches with their commander to guard a checkpoint, but they have no idea who they are guarding it against, who they are at war with, or even which side of the checkpoint they marched from. They have no known orders, and no way to communicate with their superiors. It’s a paralyzing life, one which soon includes mysterious deaths, refugees, attacks by soldiers of unknown allegiance, severe weather, and misfortunate forays into the surrounding forest.

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What’s New in Translation: July 2018

July 9, 2018  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Sam Carter, Sarah Booker, and Tiffany Tsao

Looking for your next read? You're in the right place.

For many, summertime offers that rare window of endless, hot days that seem to rule out any sort of physical activity but encourage hours of reading. While these might not be easy beach reads in the traditional sense of online listicles, we are here with a few recommendations of our favorite translations coming out this month! These particular books, from China, France, and Argentina, each explore questions of masculinity, death, and creativity in unexpected ways while also challenging conventional narrative structures. As always, check out the Asymptote Book Club for a specially curated new title each month. 

Ma_Boles_Second_Life-front_large

Ma Bo’le’s Second Life by Xiao Hong, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt, Open Letter (2018)

Reviewed by Sam Carter, Assistant Managing Editor

The “second life” in the title of this scintillatingly satirical novel alludes to how we live on in fictions as well as to how fictions sometimes take on a life of their own. Partially published in 1941 simply as Ma Bo’le, Xiao Hong’s late work was in the process of being expanded, but the throat infection and botched operation that cut her life short at age thirty left further planned additions unfinished. Fortunately for English-language readers, though, it’s now been capably, inventively, and gracefully completed by Howard Goldblatt in an exemplary instance of a translation demanding—as do all renderings into another language—that we attend to its twinned dimensions of creativity and craft. Previously the translator of two Xiao Hong novels as well as a quasi-autobiographical work, Goldblatt was undoubtedly the perfect person to carry out what he fittingly calls “our collaboration,” which is the result of “four decades in the wonderful company—figuratively, intellectually, literarily, and emotionally—of Xiao Hong.”

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

May 25, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar, Olufunke Ogundimu, and Rachael Pennington

International literary news for an international audience.

Another week has flown by and we’re back again with the most exciting news in world literature! This time our editors focus on Central America, Germany, and Spain. 

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America: 

Sadly, Centroamérica has been officially put on hold this year. After five years of unflagging work, the festival Centroamérica Cuenta, hosted each year across Nicaragua, has become the most significant and important literary gathering of the region, annually welcoming writers, journalists, filmmakers, editors, and translators from over thirty countries around the world. This year’s CC was scheduled to unfold May 21-25. However, since Nicaragua’s tense political situation that has taken the lives of so many civilians shows no signs of slowing down, the Centroamérica Cuenta committee has decided to suspend the festival until further notice.

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Translation Tuesday: “Inventory for After the War” by Raquel Rivas Rojas

May 1, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Catherine Boyle and Raquel Rivas Rojas

"One day the treasures will be exchanged for food."

Our showcase this week is a short story by Raquel Rivas Rojas, a writer who masterfully stretches the limits of language to catalogue what is left of life in the aftermath of an atrocity. 

“Inventory for After the War” by Raquel Rivas Rojas

For Gina Saraceni

To fight against death in the open air, in the midst of the ruins of a war that has just ended or that continues somewhere else.

The noises of the far-off war that advances or that retreats.

The animals that surround us. Birds of prey, wild dogs, rats, winged insects. Caymans in the rivers. Venomous snakes under the stones and the sticks.

Rags. Old cloths are used on top of one another. The oldest cloths disintegrate and fall apart by themselves, into pieces. The loose strips are lifted at times in the breeze.

The smell of burning. Always and everything smells of burning. Until it rains. Then it smells of soaked ashes and running blood.

The earth roads. Dusty or muddy. Walking on them is always torture. They don’t seem to lead anywhere. And yet, sometimes, a ruin is crossed by on the way.

Bare feet. Nobody has shoes any more. There are some thick rags left that are tied with other rags. And then, always and without fail, bare feet.

The absence of desire beside the surprising and sudden shock of desire.

Hunger. Guts filled with air. The air that circulates round the empty guts producing an uprooted pain. A pain that starts in the gums and ends in the anus. A pain that is prolonged outside as you urinate three drops and expel droppings as hard as stone.

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Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Darkness and Company by Sigitas Parulskis

April 17, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Karla Gruodis

Photography can do that—it can show us what an object really is. Photography is not just the object itself; it is always above it, beyond it.

This week we bring you a final installation of our series featuring Lithuanian writers inspired not only by these excellent writers, but because the Baltic countries are is this year’s Market Focus at the London Book Fair.

This excerpt of Darkness and Company is by the prolific Sigitas Parulskis. With a healthy sampling of Plato, this piece explores questions of photography, truth, and beauty as a young photographer goes in search of the perfect light to capture a horrific scene of violence and death during the Holocaust. The jarring and unsettling nature of this piece gives us a taste for the rest of Darkness and Company and reveals an incredibly talented writer. 

This showcase is made possible by Lithuanian Culture Institute.

The word ‘angel’ was scrawled on the blackboard in chalk. The rest of the sentence had been erased. Angel of vengeance, angel of redemption—it could have been either one.

He got up quietly so as not to awaken the other men and went out into the yard. He couldn’t see the guard, who was probably off dozing somewhere. The Germans were staying at the local police station; the brigade was sleeping in the town’s school. After a night of festivities at a local restaurant, most of the men were indistinguishable from the mattresses spread on the floor.

Vincentas stuffed his camera into his coat and headed off in the direction of the forest. He looked at his watch and saw that it was five in the morning. The sun was just coming up—the best time of the day if you wanted to catch the light. To capture the idea of light, as Gasparas would say. Where could he be now? Underground, probably; still wearing his thick-lensed glasses. Lying in the dark, trying to see the essence of things with his myopic eyes. His grey beard sticking up, his thin hair pressed to his forehead in a black band. Although short-sighted and ailing, he had been a strange and interesting person. His photography students called him by his first name, Gasparas. The photographer Gasparas. It was from Juozapas that Vincentas had first heard about photography, that miracle of light. While still a teenager he had read a few articles and a small book called The Amateur Photographer, and then, when he turned eighteen, he had bought his first camera, a used Kodak retina. But it didn’t go well, so he had found Gasparas. Without his thick-lensed glasses Gasparas couldn’t see a thing. He would take them off, look straight ahead with his strange, empty eyes and say, ‘Now I can see the real world.’

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