Posts filed under 'youth'

Translation Tuesday: “With the Tongue” by Ivars Šteinbergs

April 23, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Jayde Will

Years later—truth or dare at someone’s place, no one chooses truth, we know everything we need to know anyway.

This Translation Tuesday, the Latvian poet Ivars Šteinbergs graces us with an ode to the tongue—the small, oh-so-easily forgotten organ without which language, and the institutions of literature and translation that depend on it, would be impossible. Drawing on the half-remembered frisson of youthful trysts, this humorous prose-poem ties the “games” of nascent sexuality to the generative “play” of language, brilliantly undermining the boundary between language and the body even as it strikes a balance between restraint and ribaldry.

I spin the bottle, it stops on Estere. I wanted it to stop on Sandra.

A small kiss, no tongue, mechanical, like you’re going through the motions during a dance lesson, afterwards I taste cherry lip balm. As far as the class trip, I only remember the ride in the bus, where in the back we had a circle around an empty Sprite bottle.

Years later—truth or dare at someone’s place, no one chooses truth, we know everything we need to know anyway: “Kiss Renāte—with your tongue!”, “Lick Anete’s neck!” “Touch each other with your tongues!”. The next morning—an oral exam, I hadn’t slept, but I got a good grade, as if I had been warming up for it the entire night before.

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Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Yassin Adnan’s Hot Maroc

June 8, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Alexander E. Elinson

“When the poor population gets a mobile phone and surfs the kingdoms of electrons, they forget all about their misery.”

With an infectious blend of humor, satire, and biting social commentary, Yassin Adnan’s novel Hot Maroc gives readers a portrait of contemporary Morocco—and the city of Marrakech—told through the eyes of the hapless Rahhal Laâouina, a.k.a. the Squirrel. Painfully shy, not that bright, and not all that popular, Rahhal somehow imagines himself a hero. With a useless degree in ancient Arabic poetry, he finds his calling in the online world, where he discovers email, YouTube, Facebook, and the news site Hot Maroc. Enamored of the internet and the thrill of anonymity it allows, Rahhal opens the Atlas Cubs Cybercafe, where patrons mingle virtually with politicians, journalists, hackers, and trolls. However, Rahhal soon finds himself mired in the dark side of the online world—one of corruption, scandal, and deception. Longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2017, Hot Maroc is a vital portrait of the challenges Moroccans, young and old, face today. Where press freedoms are tightly controlled by government authorities, where the police spy on, intimidate, and detain citizens with impunity, and where adherence to traditional cultural icons both anchors and stifles creative production, the online world provides an alternative for the young and voiceless. We are thrilled to partner with Syracuse University Press to present an excerpt of its debut in English.

The Atlas Cubs Cybercafe

The autumn winds blow over Marrakech’s gardens, parks, and trees as September draws to an end. The entrance exam period has passed and those of Rahhal’s and Hassaniya’s friends who passed the exams have enrolled in training schools for primary and secondary school teachers, while those who flunked have gone back to throw themselves into the embrace of a deadly emptiness. Students went on with their university lives, embarking upon another semester of lectures, discussion circles, and endless cafeteria fights, whereas those who failed were deprived even of the routine of attending classes. Hung out to dry like clothes on the line, blowing in the wind, a sense of worthlessness gnawing away at them. As for Rahhal, he found himself face-to-face with what Hassaniya had suggested. He had no other option. And he couldn’t have hoped for a better solution himself.

He stood ill at ease and submissive at the door of the principal’s office, and after Hassaniya asked if he could enter, Emad Qatifa himself rushed forward to welcome him.

“Please . . . please . . . Mr. . . . Mr. . . . Rahhal, right?”

“. . .”

“Please, come in.”

In a show of gratitude, Rahhal just nodded. He was nervous and flustered, unable to raise his eyes up to those of Emad, who seemed nice, while Hiyam, the actual principal of the school, remained sitting at her desk. She was totally indifferent. She didn’t stir in her chair at all. She was silently watching the scene with an expression that moved between severity and detachment.

The meeting ended quickly, quicker than Rahhal expected, and without him having said a single word. He found himself in the courtyard of the house that had been turned into a school, having gotten the job right then and there, but not yet understanding exactly what his job was, or what exactly the position entailed. The school had a teaching staff whose names, along with the details of the subjects they taught, were posted on an educational chart hanging to the right of the principal’s office, and Rahhal’s picture was not among them. The school had a doorman, who stood at the gate washing Hiyam’s car, watching over Hassaniya’s motorbike and the teachers’ bicycles, and selling single cigarettes to passers-by, so even this position was not available. What was left, then? It was clear that Rahhal would remain leaning up in the corner of the courtyard like a bench player on a soccer team. He would remain until things became clear. Watching the students come and go, making himself available to everyone: Emad Qatifa, the owner of the whole thing; his wife, Hiyam, the principal of the school; and her vice principal and private secretary, Hassaniya Bin Mymoune. READ MORE…

Dulces Sueños, Don Quixote

August 12, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Edwin Alanís-García

Reciprocal listening—everyone listening to everyone—had become more important than ever. There was an entire world that needed to be heard.

One of the most devastating outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic was the damage it inflicted on the education of children worldwide. As schools shut their doors and valued programs reluctantly halted, both kids and their educators were cut off from their communities and, for some, their places of refuge. In the following essay, assistant blog editor Edwin Alanís-García shares his experience working with one of these programs and spaces in New York City, a literary haven fittingly called Still Waters in a Storm.

The Traveling Serialized Adventures of Kid Quixote is a modern-day musical reimagining of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, of which the translators and performers are a community of young writers and thinkers ranging in age from seven to sixteen. To call this project “ambitious” would be an understatement—Traveling Adventures is a thorough reinterpretation of a four-hundred-year-old masterpiece of Hispanophone literature, being adapted into songs, theater performances, and even metafictional meditations on social justice, immigration, and the process of translation itself. It is a translation project years in the making, and the children were finally ready to present the first installments to the world.

Their visit to my alma mater was a confluence of the two literary worlds I’d known in New York City: the MFA program at New York University, and the sanctuary of Still Waters in a Storm, an after-school program in the working-class neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn. I volunteered at Still Waters during my last year of study, and was lucky to have witnessed the genesis of Traveling Adventures.

On a Friday morning in February, 2018, I took a train from Cambridge, MA to Boston’s South Station. The five-hour bus ride from Boston to New York stopped just a few blocks shy of the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers’ House in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, a literary landmark in a city of literature, and a space that has welcomed many of the world’s greatest poets and writers. It was a fitting venue for the Kid Quixotes. Though the performance space was smaller than some of the college classrooms and theater stages they’d been using on the tour, that intimacy provided a near theater-in-the-round experience. As one young performer described it, it felt more like doing a show in someone’s living room.

Friends and teachers spilled into the parlor. We sat close to the “stage,” a blocked-in area designated by the performers. At this distance, we weren’t just spectators, we were participants in a tale that began in seventeenth-century Spain and continued into twenty-first-century New York. The frame story begins with our protagonist (played by eight-year-old actor and author Sarah Sierra) being called to bed by her mother. Young Sarah wants to stay awake and read Don Quixote—she wants to become Don Quixote. In doing so, she adopts the persona of Kid Quixote, protector of the abused and oppressed. The dialogue is in Spanish, but quickly becomes bilingual when the scenes from the novel come to life. As she walks to school, Kid Quixote jumps into a scene from Chapter IV; a farmer is whipping a boy, and she cannot abide this injustice. What would be a horrifying scene of violence is reimagined by the children into an act of resistance, and the cruel farmer is made to look like a fool. Kid Quixote’s mission to help the downtrodden is set to “The Rescuing Song,” a plea and a promise to help those in need of protection. It is a song about belonging, and ultimately about “home.”

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Translation Tuesday: “Comfort Is Expensive” by Mlenge Mgendi

August 6, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Nathalie S. Koenings

Standing up alone in a nearly empty daladala, every passenger could see me. Those majambozi rascals had turned me into a public one-man show!

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the Swahili-language writer Mlenge Mgendi. “Comfort Is Expensive” comes from Mlenge Mgendi’s self-published collection Mama wa Jey: Hadithi za Uswahilini (Jey’s Mother: Stories of Swahili Life). Nathalie S. Koening’s nuanced translation captures the different registers of speech in this scatological tale, which weaves indispensable Swahili terms with well-timed slang that, in some ways, feels universal. The speaker captures the anxiety of youth squeezed under community expectations and bureaucratic pressure. Sober, infused with wry humor, and laced with charming off-beat metaphor, “Comfort is Expensive” shows a slice of life that points to the atmosphere of a place and the dispositions that form under specific pressures there.

That day, I was coming from school. My stomach, jeopardizing the love, unity and cooperation that had reigned in my bowels for centuries, was causing me real trouble. I had no choice but to hurl myself into a daladala bus and get home in a hurry. Don’t you know? Since our schools have no money for healing all that ails us, students get a “discount” when they ride the bus?

When I got to the stop, a daladala was waiting. It was totally empty, having been outsmarted by another bus that, zipping past like a toothbrush, had plucked up all the fares. As I was climbing in, the konda boy grabbed hold of me. “Hey, you! Stoo-denty! You taking up an actual seat coz you’re gonna pay full price?” The bus pulled away brush-empty, but even then, he wouldn’t let me sit. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2019

July 15, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Barbara Halla, Helena Fornells, and Lindsay Semel

Four reviews of translations you won't want to miss this month!

From translations by heavyweights like Ann Goldstein and Jennifer Croft to novels by writers appearing for the first time in English, July brings a host of exciting new books in translation. Read on for coming-of-age stories set in Italy and Poland, a drama in rural Argentina, and the tale of a young man and his pet lizard in Japan. 

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A Girl Returned by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions, 2019

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Editor

In A Girl Returned, Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s award-winning novel, a nameless young woman retrospectively narrates the defining event of her adolescence—the year when the only family she has ever known returns her to her birth family. From the title, the reader can already sense the protagonist’s conundrum. A passive object of the act of being returned, her passivity in her own uprooting threatens to define her identity. Ann Goldstein’s searing translation from the Italian inspires the reader both to accompany the narrator as she wades through the tender memories of that time and to reflect on her or his own family relationships through a new lens.

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Translation Tuesday: “I’m Scared of Those Dots” by Mirka Szychowiak

January 16, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Anna Hyde and Mirka Szychowiak

Somebody said that the healthiest ones die most easily.

Today’s Translation Tuesday comes from the Polish writer Mirka Szychowiak. “I’m Scared of Those Dots” is a haunting ellipsis of a story, concealing just as much as it reveals.

I came earlier today, let’s spend as much time together as we can, let’s enjoy each other’s company, stock up on it. As usual, we won’t be able to answer the same questions, but they will be asked nonetheless.

Zbyszek, who pushed you out of that dirty train? Your bloody blonde mop on the tracks, it still hurts. Who did it to us? How are you, Basia, do tell. What’s up? You were the fastest among us, made us so proud. Somebody said that the healthiest ones die most easily. You didn’t want to be an exception, did you? You passed away at a faster pace than when you broke the 100-metre record. Rysiu, your last letter made us angry. You better all come, you wrote. Your life with us was filled with laughter, but you were alone when you shot yourself for some strange girl. We were furious, but almost all of us did come. Almost, because Bolek had left by then, as was his custom, quietly. He fell over and that was it. Two hours after his death, he became a father. Both prematurely. Youth gave us no guarantees, we understood it early on and only Adam didn’t get it in time—it was the youth, which tore his heart apart, like a bullet. It was so literal it stripped him of all romanticism. It poured out of him, ripped him inside and that was it. Later it was Bożenka and Janusz. The two of them and the carbon monoxide from the stove. A potted fern—a nameday present—withered and then somebody called to say that there were less of us yet again.

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Translation Tuesday: Two poems by Lee Seong-Bok

April 25, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Yea Jung Park

That day the sun beat down on the blue china shards, all day long, and the blade of grass, slightly wilted, was a blade of grass.

Courtesy of Literature Translation Institute of Korea, we are pleased to showcase the work of Lee Seong-Bok, translated by Yea Jung Park. Wistful for lost opportunity, these urgent, insistent prose poems hark back to a time of youth, and are sure to evoke strong personal memories.


1) Sister, the boat we rode on that day

My love, my sister,
do dream of the sweet happiness
of going there and living, just the two of us!

— Charles Baudelaire, “Invitation to a Voyage”

That year in late spring, one night spent in the bungalow by the reservoir. Tens of thousands of stars whizzing above the campfire. The night-long cuckoo cry engraved a tattoo on my forearm in the shadow-shape of a heaving wooden ship, and sister, in the morning all those day-lily blossoms, I did not know where to find your eyes among them. Eyes with yellow petals hung like the wings of a fan, eyes rolling like iron hoops to the sound of buzzing. Even now, at the cuckoo’s cry my crazed arms will mimic the rowing of a boat, and sister, the boat we rode on that day advances carefully through the buzzing day-lily stars, searching for the eyes you have lost in the night.
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New in Translation: November 2014

November 12, 2014  |  in Reviews  |  by Eva Richter, Sohini Basak, and Tim Ellison

Wolfgang Koeppen’s Youth, Vietnamese poetry by Nguyen Phan Que Mai, and Melania G. Mazzucco’s Limbo

The strength of Wolfgang Koeppen’s Youth (Jugend), an autobiographical account of the German author’s formation, lies in the small stuff: its sentence constructions, its often-startling words. These sentences can go on endlessly, such as the evocation of its setting that starts the book. After a first, short sentence—“My mother was afraid of snakes”—Koeppen goes on to describe the area of Rosental in one elaborate sentence that continues for the next three pages. This sentence twists and grows, covering furniture, landmarks, food, even the history of the young narrator’s family, until the speaker plunges into a fantastic rant against the place:

[…] while all around the streets smelled complacently of the anatomy of clinics, the sweat of patients, the horror of the dying, the fear of the examinee and the guilty innocents at the mercy of the prison-warders […] of the vanity of professors, the dead hearts of officials, the frowst of the laws, and then the poverty of the Lange Reihe and the indurated humiliation of the gray school, how I hated the city and wished it consigned to the snakes (5).

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Hebrew Poetry from Ron Dahan’s Collection “Youth”

April 29, 2014  |  in Translations  |  by Yardenne Greenspan

Dahan's portrayals of war and daily life in Israel are stirring: precise yet deftly ambiguous, casual yet anguished

A soda machine burns outside a grocery store

and all the Pepsi and the Coke (diet, too) and the Sprite

Explode in all directions like grenades.

The village of Markabe is burnt and bombed like in a war movie.

And like in a war movie

there’s the guy who carries a heavy jerrycan on his back

and the guy with the cigarette between his teeth

and the guy called Nir

and the guy who’s going to die and doesn’t know it so he allows himself to reminisce about that time when

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Why good translated literature isn’t just for grown-ups

March 6, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by M. Lynx Qualey

"Для детей нужно писать так же, как для взрослых, только лучше." (Variously attributed to Maxim Gorky, Samuil Marshak, Leo Tolstoy, others.)

In the life of every bibliophile-parent, there comes a moment when each new children’s book begins to seem very much like the last. A blurry train of flat narratives skim past one’s eyes, filled with stock characters, stale language, and an all-too-familiar anodyne tone. Yes, there are brilliant books that stand out, and these are worth reading and re-reading. But there is also a sameness that suffuses English-language books for young people, a shared set of narrative tools and assumptions. READ MORE…