Posts filed under 'WWII'

Translation Tuesday: “Bambirambo” by Mario Schlembach

May 23, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Cristina Burack

Bambirambo is a fighter, and if you wait long enough, then it will certainly come back to life.

This Translation Tuesday, we deliver a story of coming to terms with death. Set on a farm which bears the scars of a prisoner-of-war camp, Mario Schlembach’s “Bambirambo” centers a child surrounded by decay, but only awakened to the harsh reality of decomposition when his friend, a rescued fawn, takes his last breath without warning. On translating this precise and delicate tale of reckoning, translator Cristina Burack writes: “The juxtaposition of the fawn—befriended and cared for, observed in death and decay, and never forgotten—and the buried prisoners-of-war, anonymous over decades, spur reflection on the human relationship to and remembrance of life and death, casting it in a unique light. The related tension between naivete and violence is even encapsulated in the title, ‘Bambirambo’, so wonderful in its alliteration and the associations it invokes. As a translator, I found it challenging to keep the prose as clean but specific as possible— something which German verbs do very well and very succinctly. I also had to decide how to translate verbs in a sentence where the subject wasn’t repeated. Ultimately, I decided to repeat the ‘you’ to emphasize the directness and the pull on the reader as a part of the story.“

Bambirambo

“Do you know what decomposition sounds like?” The rotating wings of the circling flies tumbling over each other. A humming and buzzing, vibrations, drawing the gaze, as if the dead creature were a place of life. You want to capture the moment, and you press the shutter button.

***

Once freed, this memory plunges you into the blood-colored afternoon. It’s early summer. You hear the noise of the old SAME tractor’s motor. The even strokes of the mower as it carves its path through the high grass around the dilapidated barracks. You, all of eight years old, go ahead to warn your father of barbed wire, rocks or ditches that are too deep. New relics grow each year out of the once scorched earth. You don’t yet know that you’re mowing over death and oblivion. It’s only much later that you’ll see photos from back then.

*

1940. Wood barracks, a seemingly unending number of them, and more than 50,000 people from all over the world, locked up like animals at a time when what was thought to be impossible had become possible. The brutalized bodies no more than display material and research objects for a perverted, deadly science.

*

The grass dries up into hay in three days. Your father rakes it into windrows and then brings the press. The machine advances tirelessly, picking up everything, as the unvarying waltz-like dance bathes your senses in its soporific rhythm, unleashing your fantasy.

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2022

April 25, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

Introducing our favorites from the latest issue!

Featuring work from thirty-four countries, the Spring 2022 issue is once again charting new territory across the landscape of world literature. From Hermann Hesse to Kim Hyesoon, as well as coverage of Ukrainian poetry and exceptional Swedish works in our Special Feature, these wonderful inductions into the English language are full of discoveries. Not sure where to begin? Read on for our blog editors’ curated selections!

Through the brutal scorchings and flighty erasures of passed time, Greek tragedies have endured—as though stone, and not words, were their material. Near as our own stories, ancient as storytelling itself, and inextricable from the passions they depict, the characters that had suffused the fifth-century Athenian air with their spectacle defy temporality, continuing to walk and rage within the immediate theatre of our world. In the betrayal of fathers and the names of flowers, in funerals and weddings, in any force that could be mistaken for fate. By the logic of the tragic’s pervasive mutability, their untimely timeliness, one is made to think of the ways cycles are kept and broken, if whether the knowledge of something coming has ever been enough to stop it.

On the mitigative potential of the tragedies, Brian Doerries (the founder of Theatre of War, a production company which stages performances for communities confronting urgent social issues) had posed a question: “What if tragedy is a form of storytelling that was designed . . . to wake us up to the slim possibility of human agency, of making a choice that averts imminent disaster before it’s too late? What if tragedy is as refined of an advancement as architecture or the sculpture, law, government of 5th century BCE . . . a form of storytelling that arose out of a necessity of nearly eighty years of war, to communalise trauma, give citizens permission to access and express their emotions, and help heal the city?” To conceive the life of these plays as not to instruct but to change, what emerges is how the devastation of tragedy offers us, by way of its lapidary endings, the opportunity for transcendence. In José Watanabe’s Antígona, translated with an impeccable ear by Cristina Pérez Díaz, Sophocles’ Antigone is given fluid, elemental form, a series of poetic rooms built for one actress to walk through, inhabiting their rhythm as she inhabits time. Written beneath the dense terror of civil conflict in Peru, Watanabe’s distilling of chorus into a single rivulet of speaking is to run a thin-wire sieve through the voracious appetite of mass violence and statistic, provoking the wide overarch of trauma into open intimacy, into something that is suffered individually, in bodies united by the likeness of experience but ruthlessly alone in bearing it. The voice is torn with the tension between thinking and knowing, between feeling and narration, spreading itself amidst the leaves of time:

The sacred eye of daylight does not penetrate that far
nor the cries of friends and relatives. In that silence,
death, laborious, enfolds the girl
in a dense cocoon of shadows.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: April 2021

April 12, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Charlie Ng, Marina Dora Martino, and Rachel Stanyon

New work from Japan, Denmark, and Germany!

Our chosen texts from around the world this month denote a certain defamiliarization with one’s environment, whether due to an intrinsic sense of alienation, or an enforced strangeness by a world unexpectedly altered. In literature, disparity is a powerful, effective motif for both the urgency of social commentary, and the exploration of the personal psyche, and the works presented here are exemplifications par excellence in both respects. From a collection of short science fiction tales from a Japanese counterculture icon, to a dual text of two poetry volumes by acclaimed Danish poet Pia Tafdrup, and a harrowing tale of exile and forced peripatetics in the immediate fallout of Kristallnacht. Read on to find out more!

terminal boredom

Terminal Boredom: Stories by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan, Verso, 2021

Review by Rachel Stanyon, Copyeditor

Terminal complicity. Terminal addiction. Terminal jealousy. Terminal resignation. Terminal self-deception. Terminal love. Any of these could have been the title of Terminal Boredom, this engrossing first collection of short stories by Izumi Suzuki to appear in English translation. Given how prescient and succinct these tales are, it is surprising that they have taken this long to become available in English. With their worlds full of disillusionment and disaffection, youth unemployment and apathy, they will certainly strike a chord for modern readers interested in the emotional and societal effects of late capitalism, along with fans of sci-fi and speculative fiction.

In Japan, Suzuki is better known; there is even a novel (Endless Waltz by Mayumi Inaba, 1992) and a film (Koji Wakamatsu’s 1995 adaptation Endless Waltz) about the relationship between her and her jazz-musician husband, Kaoru Abe (Suzuki’s daughter sued over invasion of privacy at the book’s release, so read and watch as your conscience dictates). Suzuki, born in 1949, had a varied career, working as a key-punch operator, bar hostess, model, and actress, finding success as a writer before committing suicide in 1986, eight years after her then newly ex-husband had died of a drug overdose. These biographical details suggest that she understood intimately the sometimes hapless jobs, dependencies, and loneliness of the characters she depicts.

The scenarios constructed in the collections’ seven stories are varied enough to maintain interest, while the themes of apathy and detachment bind them together. “Women and Women” (tr. Daniel Joseph) describes a world plagued by resource scarcity in which men have been carved out of society and sent to a cunningly translated “Gender Exclusion Terminal Occupancy Zone” (GETO for short). This society is controlled through a sort of Orwellian erasure of history, and maintained by the complicity of the vast majority of its female inhabitants. Although the same-sex relationships are cast sympathetically, and, indeed, androgyny seems to be idolized throughout the collection, the story seems ultimately to condemn this ghettoized, vapid world. There does, however, remain a degree of ambivalence. The narrator soon comes across an escaped boy and “learn[s] the unexpected, dreadful truth about human life” before discovering that her mother was disappeared because she had fallen in love with a man and conceived naturally; in the end, though, our protagonist opts back into ‘normal’ life:

When I returned to my room, I noticed that my anguish was almost entirely gone. Women and women. Just as it should be. (. . .)

And yet . . . I put the pen down again before I was done. Now that I know about that thing, how can I ever be happy? To doubt this world is a crime. Everyone but everyone believes implicitly in this world, in this reality. I and I alone (well, probably not) know the great secret of this existence, and I’ll have to live out the rest of my life keeping it at all costs.

Right now, I have no intention of sacrificing my life for some underground resistance movement. But who knows, it might come to that someday.

The reader cannot, however, help but feel that it never will. READ MORE…

The Tactility of Translation; The Translation of Tactility

June 18, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Marta Dziurosz

. . . just the original, the blank page, and the translator’s knowledge, experience, intuition, artistry.

Each translator’s relationship with their source text is utterly singular, and occupies all the emotional registers of human relationships: reverence, intrigue, and frustration. In the following essay, translator Marta Dziurosz, who works between the Polish and English, ruminates on the intricate development of this relationship: its precisions, intimacies, and sensitivities.

There’s joy in repetition

—Prince

In January 2020 I was due to speak at the British Library. It was a Holocaust Memorial Day event, and I was there to talk about my co-translation—with Anna Błasiak—of a book entitled Renia’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust, the wartime diary of a young Polish Jew, Renia Spiegel. The third speaker at the event was artist and writer Edmund de Waal, whose astonishing book The Hare with the Amber Eyes I read when it first came out. Half preparing for the event and half procrastinating, I watched Make Pots or Die, a documentary about de Waal’s work.

De Waal spoke about his work as evidence of spending time—how he places his pots in the vitrines in which they’re displayed very quickly and it’s almost always wrong or almost right, and then he needs to come back and look at them, look at them for a very long time, because there’s an enormous difference between almost right and right. The process struck me as familiar; as a translator, I think about the weight of a comma. I put it in, I take it out, I put it in, I take it out, I put it back in. I put a semicolon at the end of a sentence instead of a full stop, change it back to a full stop. I switch the second and the fifth words around. I change a noun to its diminutive, reconsider.

Once I had that thought, de Waal’s pots started to look like drafts. Perhaps he’s iterating. To me, every pot within an installation looks like a re-translation of a word, sentence, thought, text. The vitrine, taken together, is a mind subtly improvising on a theme. The difference is that in a de Waal vitrine, the audience can see many iterations, many expressions of a thought, if this is what they are; the reader of a translation only sees the last version, the one the translator (and, possibly, her editor) deemed the best, whatever that means.

the poems of our climate (detail), 2018 © Edmund de Waal. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian. Photo by Mike Bruce.

the poems of our climate (detail), 2018
© Edmund de Waal. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian. Photo by Mike Bruce.

What would a translation look like if every draft of every sentence, or even of just one sentence, was present at the same time? Unreadable, of course, but for a translator—how informative, how interesting. De Waal: “Repetition isn’t about repeating the same thing. It’s about minute differences between each moment, between each sound, between each object that you’re making.” Having to appreciate every shade of a sentence, calibrate every word choice so that meaning, register, mood, rhythm, emotional effect all work, and putting all those carefully chosen words in an order that suits the sentence, the paragraph, the whole book—all this makes translation seem impossible, but as some point you make the decision. You place pot A next to pot F and slightly behind pot R, and then lean tile N against pot V and somehow, you’ve arrived. READ MORE…

Reflections on the Daily: Jean Giono’s Occupation Journal

May 25, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Sarah Moore

This is the journal of an established writer, who, even within these pages, grapples between his own identity and the "legend" of Jean Giono.

Occupation Journal by Jean Giono, translated from the French by Jody Gladding, Archipelago Books, 2020

This is not a journal. It’s simply a tool of the trade. My life is not completely depicted. Nor would I want it to be. As I’ve said, here I practise scales, I break up my sentences, I try to stick as closely as possible to the truth. But sometimes events are so rich with drama or pathos . . . that practising scales—my scales— isn’t sufficient and I have to invent. For me, anyway, expressing truths of this order is impossible without inventing. Moreover, it’s to be able to express them simply that I force myself to do this daily work.

—Jean Giono, “December 25, Christmas”

In his own words, this book is an exercise: a series of attempts to train himself in writing, for when his “trade” is truly called upon. His goal? Simplicity and truth. Yet, reading this work in 2020, now available for the first time in English and translated by Jody Gladding, it is so much more than a mere exercise. Jean Giono’s Occupation Journal is a fascinating record of life under Nazi occupation in France, and an insight into the daily reading and writing practices of a dedicated author. Written between September 1943 and September 1944 whilst living in the town of Manosque in the south of France, it was only published in French in 1995 (by Gallimard, as Journal de l’Occupation). The diary entries are a fascinating historical record as well as immensely clever insights into the presence and importance of literature in a writer’s life.

By the time he began Occupation Journal, Giono was already a well-known writer, with over ten works published, including his famous “Pan trilogy.” He was also equally famous for his pacifism. Having been called up to fight on the frontline in WW1, Giono would never forget the horrors of his experience, and the resulting principles influence all of his early work. This journal, therefore, comes at a crucial time in his development; the majority of his work published after the war left behind pacifism, whose failure he witnessed in the coming of a second war, and adopted a greater pessimism with regards to human nature. Certain writers, including Stendhal and Balzac, also heavily impacted his later writing. This journal is a key into discovering this period of transition—a period so evidently crucial in the development of his thinking that its importance cannot be underestimated.

The infusion of literature into his daily living is remarkable. Giono notes profusely what he is reading, what he intends to read, and his reflections on what he has read. His reading is structured and often consists of long classics: Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, Balzac, Homer, Virgil. It’s almost enviable in its attention to detail and its scope—”I’ve read all of Proust carefully ten times”! Fascinatingly, he often views literature as a model, a possibility of this world, and he judges the world by the standards of those encountered in fiction. He views “nobility” and “grandeur,” for example, in terms of Lancelot and Don Quixote and applies this to war taking place in the “modern, mechanical world,” where, of course, society falls short:

But the quest for the Grail made the knights-errant gallop in a straight line. Even Don Quixote walks straight. Today it seems as though the Grail has shattered and they are chasing all the scattered bits of it in every direction.

READ MORE…

In Conversation: Stephanie Smee

April 19, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Brigette Manion

As her translator, I have had the opportunity to sit quietly with her as she pondered the inhumanity of the Nazi regime when she was forced to flee

The Spring 2018 issue launch is just around the corner (stay tuned…) and it is full of amazing writing from around the world. This season we approach the question of family. Texts explore exiles, adulterers, and a levitating aspirin in our Korean Fiction Feature, headlined by acclaimed filmmaker Lee Chang-dong. Amid exciting new writing and art from twenty-nine countries, gathering together such literary stars as Mario Vargas Llosa and Robert Walser, discover “tiny shards” of childhood on the verge of experience as remembered by Jon Fosse—a giant of Norwegian letters in his own right—or not remembered by Brazilian author Jacques Fux à la Joe Brainard.

Although “unhappiness is other people,” according to Dubravka Ugrešić, we’re just as likely to be imprisoned in our own family, a predicament brought to light in Dylan Suher’s review of Eileen Chang’s Little Reunions. In a generously personal essay, Ottilie Mulzet reveals how she turned to Gábor Schein’s “father-novel” to unlock the secret of her intransigent birth mother, whose refusal to speak to her had “stood in [Mulzet’s] life like a monumental cliff.” Schein’s poetry also graces this issue, and in a timely echo of Spring and past horrors, he takes up the refrain of Dayeinu of the Passover Haggadah—it would have been enough for us: “Enough, if you or I still / hoped for something. Enough, if we forgot to remember…”

For some, family remains a hall of mirrors, leaving the outlook bleak for human brother- and sisterhood: “My path doesn’t lead to you. Your path doesn’t lead to me,” writes the Libyan poet Ashur Etwebi. At times, language cuts as deep as our common mortality, that kinship beyond all social roles, as in the poignant drama, The Last Scene. Echoing the resignation of Alain Foix’s death-row prisoner, poet Esther Tellermann laments, “breathe me / sister in death.” Others, like Cairo-based artist Amira Hanafi, strive to knit together connections between strangers. Her recently concluded installation, A Dictionary of the Revolution, deployed a vocabulary box of 160 words to generate conversations with more than two hundred people across Egypt.

As a special treat for our blog readers, we bring you a special interview conducted with this new issue in mind. As she prepared her enlightening criticism, Brigette Manion sat down with translator Stephanie Smee to talk about her translation of No Place to Lay One’s Head by Françoise Frenkel. As Brigette explains in her review, “No Place to Lay One’s Head looks back over Frenkel’s life, from her youth as a bibliophile and her establishment of a bookstore in Berlin, to her journey across France and final passage into Switzerland. Frenkel presents a story of survival and resilience dedicated in her foreword to the memory of the ‘MEN AND WOMEN OF GOOD WILL’ who, with great courage and often at considerable risk to their own lives, helped and inspired her along the journey.” Happy reading!

Brigette Manion (BM): How did you first come across Françoise Frenkel’s memoir, and do you remember your initial response to it? 

Stephanie Smee (SS): I first came across Frenkel’s memoir after reading a review in Lire magazine. I had the good fortune to be in Paris when I read it for the first time, and many of the images she described, particularly of her early years in Paris, felt incredibly poignant. Perhaps my response to her very moving story was tempered by that. I also found her descriptions of different places so detailed and lyrical that they evoked a visceral response in me. I remember, too, being terribly affected by the immediacy of her writing, a characteristic of her memoir which truly sets it apart, in my view, from many other memoirs that are often written several years after the events that are the subject of the work.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

March 2, 2018  |  in News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar, Kelsey Woodburn, Manel Mula Ferrer, Olivia Snaije, and Paul Worley

Bringing you the latest in world literature news.

Never is there a dull period in the world of literature in translation, which is why we make it our personal mission to bring you the most exciting news and developments. This week our Editors-at-Large from Mexico, Central America, and Spain, plus a guest contributor from Lithuania, are keeping their fingers on the pulse! 

Paul M. Worley and Kelsey Woodburn, Editors-at-Large, reporting from Mexico: 

On February 21, numerous events throughout Mexico took place in celebration of the International Day of Mother Languages. In San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, CELALI (the State Center for Indigenous Language and Art) held a poetry reading featuring Tseltal poet Antonio Guzmán Gómez, among others, and officially recognized Jacinto Arias, María Rosalía Jiménez Pérez, and Martín Gómez Rámirez for their work in developing and fortifying indigenous languages in the state.

Later in San Cristóbal, at the Museum of Popular Cultures, there was a poetry reading that brought together four of the Indigenous Mexican poetry’s most important voices: Mikeas Sánchez, Adriana López, Enriqueta Lúnez, and Juana Karen, representing Zoque, Tseltal, Tsotsil and Ch’ol languages, respectively. Sánchez, Lúnez, and Karen have all published in Pluralia Ediciones’s prestigious “Voces nuevas de raíz antigua” series.

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In Review: “Unknown Soldiers” by Vaino Linna

May 25, 2015  |  in Reviews  |  by Daniel Goulden

Daniel Goulden reviews a book "so good it hurts to read."

In November 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland in hopes of annexing Karelia, a strip of forested lands on the border of Finland. It wanted Karelia as a buffer to safeguard nearby Leningrad. Finland fought back fiercely, but ultimately had to surrender portions of its Eastern Lands. Two years later, in June 1941 (when the Nazis broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact), Finland was trapped between two authoritarian regimes. Allying itself with Nazi Germany, Finland entered the war against the Soviet Union and attempted to regain the territory lost during the Winter War.

The novel Unknown Soldiers by Vaino Linna presents the morally ambitious events of the Continuation War. The story follows a company of soldiers, some excessively patriotic—and others considerably less so—as they march through the forests of Karelia. The perspective seamlessly switches from character to character, so the reader witnesses the war from multiple perspectives. Despite their differences, each character quickly realizes that the war is horrifying and pointless. The only characters who do not realize this ostensible truth of war are the deluded officers, more concerned about medals and careers than the lives of their men. READ MORE…

New in Translation: 33 Days by Léon Werth

April 22, 2015  |  in Reviews  |  by Yardenne Greenspan

“I recount the lowly; I tell, in the immensity of this war, the stories of insects.“

Every year, as Holocaust Memorial Day approaches, my husband and I begin looking for a film, a book, or an article with which to commemorate the day. Each year this tradition becomes more challenging and more exciting, as we move away from Hollywood epics and into the realm of small-scale, private stories. As I grow older and my mind expands, I become more interested in the minutia of this enormous tragedy: what people talked about, what mundane things preoccupied their minds, what made them laugh.

In his memoir 33 Days, Léon Werth chronicles the time he and his wife spent on the road fleeing Paris during the Fall of France in 1940. They move between farmhouses and through blockaded roads. They worry for their teenage son, who has left earlier with friends. They pilfer whatever remains in empty homes and abandoned vehicles, and sleep on hay bales. They are at war, but not in the Holocaust. They are Jews who do not yet know what their identity will come to mean.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Mouse” by Regina Ullmann

February 17, 2015  |  in Translations  |  by Kurt Beals

An excerpt from The Country Road, translated by Kurt Beals

Death was prepared in the form of a trap. But before its time finally came, the mouse would have to gnaw through the wall that led into my bed-chamber. It would have to gnaw through a long and narrow passage, and gnaw through my sleep.

Sometimes I pounded on the bed with my fist, frightening myself with the way that its thunder rolled over everything imaginable in the night. And I thought I could sense that the mouse felt this fear, too. But before this wave of fright could roll gently into peace, that same quiet gnawing could be heard again from afar. It was so quiet that it was audible only to someone alone and left to himself in a house by a moonlit field on the edge of a forest. He guards himself like his own hunting dog, and even when he is asleep he will hear any approaching danger. He is like fog, when it is dark, the fog that seems to live in its own light. He is like the rain, far and wide, high and distant, in the heavens and on earth. How could he fail to notice the gnawing of a mouse, when that activity returns again to itself. He feels it in his blood. So once again I lit my candle, the bane of all four-footed intruders. But the candle didn’t spread its angel wings as it had in other nights, arching them over the dark abyss of fear, becoming a spirit of the shadows, the better to offer its light . . . Instead it suddenly betrayed me to my enemy, becoming a sort of gnawing creature itself, there in its candlestick. It ate away at my sleep, and the mouse did not fear it.

READ MORE…

NYC Mayor de Blasio to Stop at Carlo Levi’s Grassano

July 21, 2014  |  in Essays, News  |  by Antony Shugaar

"I never saw other pictures or images than these: not the King nor the Duce, nor even Garibaldi; no famous Italian of any kind."

When New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio visits Grassano, the birthplace of his grandmother Anna Briganti, he’ll be walking in the footsteps of not only his forebears but also an Italian author whose first book was a cornerstone of one of New York’s best-known publishing houses. The coincidence is more than a geographic one: the reforming mayor will be returning to a family hometown, but also to a place that led to a masterpiece of social reporting and reformist philosophy.

Carlo Levi’s book, Christ Stopped at Eboli (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli), published in 1945, was one of Roger Straus’s first acquisitions: it was “a harbinger of things to come,” according to Hothouse, a history of the publishing house FSG, “a critical triumph and best-seller in 1947.”

The book was written by Levi, a Turin-born Jewish doctor and painter, who recounts a year of his internal exile in Grassano and a neighboring village, Aliano (called Gagliano in the book), for anti-Fascist activism.  

READ MORE…