Translations

Translation Tuesday: Six Poems by Liesl Ujvary

September 16, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Ann Cotten and Anna-Isabella Dinwoodie

Yes, it’s true that we are free people. We are free people because we know that we are free people.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a trenchant sequence of six poems by Austrian poet Liesl Ujvary, translated from the German by Ann Cotton and Anna-Isabella Dinwoodie. In our current information-saturated age, the very nature of truth has become the central battleground, and Ujvary’s poems lucidly illustrate this. Each poem uses the deceptively plain language of logical exercises to dissect the mechanisms of modern discourse—where topics such as art, human relationships, and science are often filtered through the lenses of capitalism and politics. They expose how a passionately held conviction can be systematically inverted, and how the dialectical process is routinely weaponized into pure propaganda. The result is an ominous portrait of “doublethink,” where contradictory narratives coexist and simplicity masks manipulation. Entertaining yet chilling, this collection of poems distills the essence of the “fake news” era.

this is better

democracy is better than dictatorship
butter is better than margarine
schools are better than military training camps
sex is better than booze
humans are better than computers
houses are better than barracks
poems are better than advertisements
students are better than cops
truth is better than lies

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “WC” by Stefan Çapaliku

September 9, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Vlora Konushevci

The chamberlain spoke gently, almost tenderly that he who seeks to enter is Otto—a servant of God, mortal and sinful like all the rest...

In this wry story by acclaimed Albanian writer Stefan Çapaliku, translated by Vlora Konushevci, a journalist arrives in Vienna on an assignment to document the funeral of Otto von Habsburg, the last heir of the storied Habsburg dynasty. But his plans are soon derailed: besieged by a persistent stomach problem, he’s forced to prioritize his bowel movements over frontline reporting. From the confines of a café bathroom, for which he already holds a peculiar affinity, he is reduced to hearing, rather than seeing, the majestic procession pass by. This undignified place winds up being the perfect setting for the narrator to meditate on what makes a life meaningful, and how to measure the worth of our accomplishments when we’re all the same flesh in the end.

1.

Morning. I open my eyes, as I’ve done countless times through the night. From the curtainless window, the view hasn’t changed: a city slowly morphing into a monster, its limbs aggressive, forged from red bricks veined with concrete and rods of iron stretching skyward. Then, almost suddenly, the sun appears, and with it, a sliver of hope seeps into my waking. The view begins to clear, shedding that initial layer of violence.

I step out onto the back balcony of my apartment to gauge the temperature of the day, confirming for what must be the hundredth time that the city is turning into one giant dormitory. It now resembles a sleeping quarter—sprawling and expanding like the hopeless belly of a morbidly obese man. The buildings, once erected in communist times, are now, in our age of liberty, multiplying in the ugliest of ways. Lumps, foolish extensions, architectural carbuncles sprouting from them…

I leave the house, find somewhere to sit, and open my office door. My office is my laptop. The door is its lid. It doesn’t matter where I am, at home, in a café, in the park, or anywhere else. I carry my office with me. I loathe all things conventional. My conventional office is in the city center, very close to home, but I hardly ever go there, even though it’s just 550 steps away.

And sure, 550 steps are nothing, but I’m lucky no one requires me to keep fixed hours. No one demands explanations. My work happens wherever I am. Every place is a suitable workplace for my profession, except the office.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The Guard by Maisku Myllymäki

September 2, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Tabatha Leggett

He doesn’t see himself until he takes his selfie.

What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without sleeping? 50 hours? 70? What about 200? In this week’s Translation Tuesday, the unnamed protagonist of Maisku Myllymäki‘s novel The Guard has been awake so long they have to write the day of the week on their hand to remember that it’s Sunday. Yet in spite of their insomnia, they remain almost hypnotically attentive: to the pilasters of columns and poorly-named green paint in the atrium of the museum where they work, to the remembered touch of their boyfriend, to the asinine behavior of museum-goers and to the strange effect of social media on personal identity. Translated into deft and subtle prose by Tabatha Leggett, this excerpt is sure to leave you eagerly awaiting a full translation of the novel. Read on!

It’s December 9, the final day of the exhibition. Tomorrow, the people in dark blue and sand grey coloured overalls will pack it all away. They’ll destroy the setting in which Peter and I first met eight months ago. They’ll wrap the artworks in paper and protective plastic sheeting and pack them into bespoke wooden chests. This is meticulous work. The art will be handled with the kind of deep tenderness very few living beings ever truly experience. Sometimes Peter touches me that way.

I’m sitting on a tall, black stool in the corner—the very stool on which I’ve spent countless hours sitting these past eight months and long before, supervising different artworks, different kinds of exhibition. It’s hard to remember exactly how long I’ve worked here. It’s the kind of job where nothing really gets done, no progress is made during the hours I spend in this hall. For me, a regular work day is one in which nothing extraordinary happens. In that sense, you might compare my job to that of a lifeguard.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from the Stain, the Jacket, the Rooms, the Pain by Wilhelm Genazino

August 26, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Charlie N. Zaharoff

A look delivers the quickest verdict; its production requires no more than a second’s time.

“What do you do when you can’t manage to write a book? I’ll tell you: You make little notes, observations, anecdotes, sketch individual scenes. And then? You piece them together indiscriminately.” Thus wrote one irate critic of the Stain, the Jacket, the Rooms, the Pain—but they were wrong.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you an excerpt from Wilhelm Genazino‘s mid-career masterpiece, translated from the German by Charlie N. Zaharoff. Here, the superficially aimless wanderings of our unnamed protagonist give way to a complex pattern of references and emotional resonances, his catalogue of observations accumulating into a vivid psychological portrait. What results is not a traditional dramatic novel, but rather, a powerful meditation on memory and loss. On the process of choosing an excerpt, the translator writes: “I had to make peace with the fact that I was doing a sort of violence to the text by snipping threads—visible or invisible—where they were not meant to be snipped. It felt worth it to give readers a sample of Genazino’s work, which with the exception of one novel remains untranslated into English.” Read on!

I step into the Rialto, the second-largest Italian café in town, and take a spot at the long counter, which reaches from the depths of the room up to the glass doors in front. I ask for an espresso and the telephone and dial Gesa’s number, although I’ll hardly say a word to her. The call is just a pretense. Gesa picks up. I say: I’m in the Rialto, do you want to hear Italy? She says: Yes. Then I am silent and hold the receiver towards the counter. From time to time, when she is sitting alone in her room, Gesa wants to be interrupted by the sounds of an Italian bar. She loves the quick setting of espresso dishes on the glass counter, the clacking of cups on the saucers, the laying of spoons beside the full cups, the snapping of the ice-cream scoop, the light sputter of the fruit press, the skating back-and-forth of metal ice-cream bowls on the counter, the pressure of freshly uncapped bottles, the opening and closing of heavy fridge doors, the clicking of ice cubes in slender glasses, the impact of a bottle opener on a marble slab, the hissing of the espresso machine, the dumping of coffee grounds into wooden trash bins. This is what she wants to hear: the sound of a more distant life that infiltrates her own for one minute, like a promise. After a while I ask: Is it good? Yes, it is good. Gesa laughs, and from her laugh you can tell that her life has rotated once around itself. I say: See you later. We hang up, I give back the telephone, pay and go.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Short Stories from Sudan

August 19, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Essam M. Al-Jassim

“They’re not heart defects,” I desperately replied. “But my heart, always in exile, has taken the shape of my homeland.”

For this Translation Tuesday, we’re thrilled to present two very short stories by Sudanese writers Fatimah El Senussi and Wedd Alwakeel Maarouf. Both stories use a minimum of words to depict meaningful moments. In “Expatriate”, a routine doctor’s visit becomes a lens through which conventional ideas of pathology are questioned. The story deftly explores the struggles of immigrants navigating healthcare systems where their unique challenges are often misunderstood or ignored. In “A Machiavellian Mind”, a bartender’s long-nursed inner ambitions clash with the reality of his mundane job; with sharp wit, the story playfully subverts alarmist narratives about Islamic fundamentalism and its perceived threat to Western civilization. Translated from Arabic by Essam M. Al-Jassim, both pieces shine with a pithy, humorous, and deeply emotive voice.

Expatriate
by Fatimah El Senussi

In a distant land, the cardiologist closely scrutinized the X-ray of my heart. In a low, disturbed tone, he said, “You have congenital heart defects.”

“They’re not heart defects,” I desperately replied. “But my heart, always in exile, has taken the shape of my homeland.”

The doctor, initially stunned, sat down to diligently examine the map.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “My Shadow Will Comfort You” by ariel rosé

August 12, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Frank L. Vigoda

in the fog I heard your / steps retracing the past / we spoke our mother tongues

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a nostalgic and impressionistic poem from Polish-Norwegian poet ariel rosé, translated from the Polish by Frank L. Vigoda. In “My Shadow Will Comfort You,” the speaker reaches across time to address a loved one, now lost to the past. Wandering through the valley of memory, they search for a connection that once defined their world. The ever-present fog impedes their vision, solidifying the elusiveness of what has slipped away. This lost bond transcends the individual, rooted in shared family history, language, and identity—a private world of meaning that bridged two souls. But the speaker remains suspended between past and present, longing to inhabit both at once, looking for a space between remembrance and the irrevocable passage of time.

 

After Beckett

You see, I’m a dream
collector, you’re a water
carrier and the fog is dense
in the valley I hear someone
knocking
knock
knock
no
it is just a memory
I want to be in many nows at once
I heard the unspoken words
I looked for the dear face

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from West Farragut Avenue by Agnieszka Jelonek

August 5, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Nasim Luczaj

This may have meant: Don’t cry, there’s no need, it’s already happened.

From Chicago to Warsaw is 7,559 km—a long way to travel for the dead. But that is what the protagonist of this Polish novel by Agnieszka Jelonek must do: her boyfriend, Shrimp, has just fallen to his death. To the tragicomic circumstances of his demise—the indefatigable Shrimp accidentally fallen from an open window trying to smoke a cigarette—are now added the bizarre indignities of life as an unwilling and unwelcome traveller, from an odious Polish couple who have assimilated into American life to the hostile bureaucracies of the hospital and the crematorium, capped off by the unexpected appearance of Shrimp’s “other” girlfriend. Translator Nasim Luczaj writes: “Jelonek’s style is a tequila shot. There’s salt, there’s lime, there’s at once delicious and painful heat. The main challenge was to preserve the simplicity of the writing and not succumb to the temptation to ‘clean up’ the frequent repetition or enforce any of the cold elegance often associated with reminiscence—this grief is messy and hot.” Read on!

There’s no difference between a November afternoon and a November night. The car journey lasted six hours. No one said a word, no one cried. Shrimp’s Dad held on to the steering wheel, while his other son kept himself glued to the window. We looked out at the A7, and no one wanted to be in that car, everyone would have preferred somewhere else, anywhere but here. None of us accepted what we’d been told. The information rode with us as a separate passenger, and it, too, stared quietly into the dark.

We parked in front of the tenement and waited in silence for some time. A woman’s shadow passed across the building. Women in Shrimp’s family are slight, girlishly built, and always look younger than they actually are. A hunched, frail aunt wrapped up in her coat got in the car and turned towards us as if to speak but seemed unable to come up with anything.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Baba by Mohamed Maalel

July 29, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Clarissa Botsford

You don't have to do this anymore, Ahmed. Do you want people to laugh at you?

It is a cliche that no one struggles with an overabundance of paternal love—that children are more likely to lack it than to have it in excess. In Baba, the debut novel of Tunisian-Italian writer Mohamed Maalel, young Ahmed is confronted with both lack and excess at once—with a loving father whose repeated expressions of care can never amend the traumatic betrayal this excerpt describes. Clarissa Botsford’s translation is haunting, expertly capturing a child’s tilt-a-whirl emotional life and dawning awareness of adult complexities, his simultaneous craving for love and his harsh refusal to forgive. In Botsford’s words, “The narrative microcosm in Baba powerfully embodies the new dynamics of a multicultural, colorful, and contradictory world, giving life to a story about the search for a blended identity amid religion, tradition, and queerness.” Read on!

A Boy Becomes A Man

When I was six, my father made me a man. Back then, I was convinced I could be anything I wanted. First, I wanted to be a superhero, then a fairy, and later a policeman. I watched the kids’ shows on TV. At six, I fell in love for the first time with Céline Dion, with Lara Croft, and with a cow in the yogurt commercials called Fruttolo. At six, I admired my cousins’ Barbies from afar, imagining what it would feel like to hold something with a figure like my mother’s. When I was six I was a child, with all the typical imperfections of children. When I was six I experienced intense pain. I tried to give it some kind of ironic significance over the years, but pain can only be ironic when it’s not your own. The pain is set against a Tunisian backdrop.

We were traveling with the usual food parcels for my father’s family. Outside, the high temperatures made the car windows scorching hot. My father was listening to the Koran on the radio, which made the air even more sultry tense. My ears received the unintelligible sounds as an annoying hum. During the whole the car ride, he insisted my brother memorize them. He couldn’t do it; he lowered his eyes when my father reminded him how immoral his life as an unbeliever was. He didn’t bother me. Instead, he’d ask me to choose a song on the radio. “You listen nice music Ahmouda, not like your brother’s haram junk,” he’d say.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Unruly Grass” by Nermin Kamal

July 22, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Anne Thompson-Ahmadova

It was child’s play for him to do what many people had tried to do and failed—bring a smile to the face of the deeply grieving woman.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present to you a short story by decorated Azerbaijani author Nermin Kamal, translated from the Azerbaijani by Anne Thompson-Ahmadova. In it, a man and a woman—both married, but not to each other—commiserate about their respective marital woes.  His wife can’t seem to recover from grief; her husband is lost in the interminable throes of depression. Meanwhile, the machinery of the city churns on. As the couple take solace in their clandestine connection, the man’s wife finds her own comfort in an unexpected animal visitor. Kamal playfully jumps between various perspectives among the city’s residents to depict their entanglements with a broad vision.

Late one afternoon a man and woman were sitting talking in George Enescu Park in the Eighth Residential District. ‘Cover your ears. Don’t listen to them,’ an old street vendor on a nearby bench told her granddaughter. The man was complaining about his wife and the woman about her husband. Tedious though the conversation was, they were listening intently to each other.

‘How long can this go on? How much longer can we live like this?’ the man grumbled. ‘I come home exhausted from work and find her sitting there crying. She put her father’s pictures on the wall and I didn’t say a word. Now she’s wearing her father’s clothes. I tell her, you shouldn’t keep a dead man’s clothes in the house, take them to the charity. Your father was a big strapping bloke, you’re a petite woman, how can you wear the dead man’s jumper in front of your husband? But does she listen? She’s been crying for six months. I could understand it then—her father had just died, but what can I say to her now?’

‘Mine’s the same,’ the woman grumbled. ‘The house is falling apart. All the cupboard doors are hanging off their hinges. Whatever you touch, it’s broken. He doesn’t fix anything or get anyone else to fix things, he just sleeps all day. Not that his father has died. He says, I’m tired, really tired. You might be fed up of life—that’s up to you, but I’m not. Life is wonderful.’ 

Though he was just a statue, George Enescu couldn’t bear it. He swept his bow over the strings of his violin. When the man was speaking, the noble instrument growled like a bear, but when the woman was speaking it twittered incessantly like a nightingale. But no one except the violinist could hear it.

‘At least there’s a grave. We gave him a proper burial, laid flowers. I said to her, the world is heading for hell in a handcart. By the time we die we might envy those who are already dead!’

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Danae Sioziou

July 15, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Panagiota Stoltidou

the locking of the door, the alarm, / and my own passage from fire to ice.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you two poems from the Greek writer Danae Sioziou, translated by Panagiota Stoltidou. In the first, “Athenian Days”, we’re transported into the commotion of daily life in the Greek capital. Sioziou balances familiar images (insects, breakfast, untrustworthy-seeming people you encounter in the streets) with a more mystical register: “kaleidoscopic / entropies, shells of dreams”. In a melancholic voice, the city hints at an inner vitality, buried by long years of decay.  The second poem, “Tropicalities”, is a philosophical meditation on paradoxes, and impossibilities reminiscent of Heraclitus. Various objects are listed in turn, but they are defined by their inability to fulfill the functions for which they were designed. In contrast, time’s incessant march seems all-powerful.

Athenian Days

Athenian days: flirtations
of cockroaches and shady characters,
eggs sunny side up, totems, kaleidoscopic
entropies, shells of dreams.

I know nothing of rising
stars, the eye is fixed on the first
hour, I am the center of the city,
the bustle, you say, of the here and now.

And if I saw you yesterday, my little light-eating
nightmare, boomerang, brought back
from nothing, shining messenger,

you, moon, I remain dead
only in terrible depths does the drowned
tree of life shine within me.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from That Any Might Be Saved by Panni Puskás

July 8, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Austin Wagner

I told them no mercy, you must be destroyed, because violence is the only path to happiness

Ready to dig deep? The narrator of Panni Puskás’s novel That Any Might Be Saved is, as demonstrated by this dizzying excerpt, brilliantly translated from the Hungarian by Austin Wagner. Asked by their psychotherapist to recall their childhood, the narrator draws up their very first memory: a tantrum provoked by their inability to find a plastic ball to play with. From here the narrator’s monologue unfurls in a dazzling spiral, transitioning seamlessly from their childhood recollections to their frustrating relationship with their perpetually unemployed friend and finally to the liberatory violence of vandalism and of the destruction of their mother’s possessions—an apparent rejection of their own richly remembered past, which frees them from the strictures of polite society and psychotherapy alike. Read on!

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Dear Italian School” by Marilena Delli Umuhoza

July 1, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Monica Martinelli

That Whiteness is taken for Italianness itself represents the very beating heart of this privilege.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present to you a powerful essay by Italian-Rwandan author Marilena Delli Umuhoza, translated from the Italian by Monica Martinelli. A moment of casual racism in her daughter’s school play inspires the narrator to reflect on her own memories of bigotry as an African-origin woman growing up in 1990’s and 2000’s Italy. She traces how racial prejudice is passed down through children’s books, advertising, TV shows, and teachers; Black men and women depicted as criminals or sex objects, always, in some way, dirty. These tropes spill into modern immigration debates, where refugees are stripped of dignity, their suffering sensationalized: “And so there they were, those bodies, taking over my entire television screen without any respect for people in their most vulnerable moment: dead, naked, washed up on Italian shores.” Against this erasure, Delli Umuhoza insists on the significance of writing, of inscribing the truth of Black lives into history. Childhood racism leaves deep scars precisely because it is so pure; children, innocent yet perceptive, directly reflect the biases of society. Blending incisive cultural analysis with raw emotion, the essay makes clear why antiracist education must begin early.

A letter from an African-Italian mother

Last week I attended a musical at my daughter’s school. The show they put on was Around the World in Eighty Days, inspired by the movie recounting the adventures of Phileas Fogg.

After visiting European countries like France and Spain, welcomed by songs of joy and rather coquettish dancers, our hero comes to Africa. Welcoming him there is a person whose foolish way of speaking reminds me of the Italian dubbing actors in the film Gone with the Wind, with their mispronounced monosyllables in a typical “African” accent. I dug my nails into the fabric of my seat’s armrest, as I always do when I am nervous.

The journey continues toward the heart of Africa, where Fogg is chased by a group of Africans for unclear reasons (the acoustics were terrible and the representation pretty confusing). I thought to myself, I’m so glad they cut it. I was thinking of a scene that I had reported to the teacher six months earlier, after my daughter had come home in tears and asked me: “Mom, does grandma eat people?”

“Baby,” I replied, “what are you talking about? Of course not.”

“So why do they make us play African cannibals who eat Fogg at school?” 

“What do you mean?”

“In the scene where he gets to Africa, we have to say, ‘Mmmm … It smells so tasty! What do you say, shall we cook him?’”

I was speechless. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Riversong by Wendy Delorme

June 24, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Kathryn Raver

I seek only those flammable things from which a story might be made.

Ever kept a secret way longer than you thought you would? A year? Two? What about seven? In this novel excerpt from French author Wendy Delorme, brilliantly translated by Asymptote’s own Kathryn Raver, a story of a love unspoken becomes a story about the nature of literature itself, and the parallels between writing and self-creation. Isolated in a mountain cabin, an unnamed writer reflects back on the years leading up to their relationship with their now-lover. At first hesitant to confess her feelings, she instead watches her friend’s gender transition unfold over the course of several years, only to find that as their voice and appearance change, her feelings for them deepen. When, after a an encounter on a rainy night, her feelings finally come to light, it sparks an epistolary conversation that will change both their lives. Read on!

A restless night. Sleep escapes me, but the words don’t come either. What does come is the thought of writing to you. I’m thinking again of how we met. How we really met. That night where I knew I wanted you.

Sometimes, a person comes along and we see them. Truly see them, I mean. Our perspective changes. Our line of sight suddenly sharpens, like that of an animal scrutinizing the brush to see what moves within. Our retinae focus, taking in details that up until that point had blurred together into a hazy landscape. The eye becomes curious and searches for more, latches onto a mouth, the clean line of an eyebrow, the velvety texture of a cheek, a shoulder muscle, a manner of smiling. This sort of gaze, when it lands on another, radically changes the bond two people share.

What turned my gaze on its head, that night? READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The Elements

June 17, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Michelle Clayton

I said I wished I had voted, and the three of them burst out laughing.

Pedro Mairal’s 2005 El año del desierto [The Elements] is a novel for our times: a beautifully-written, grippingly-narrated, and lucidly-plotted story of how easy it is for a civilization to fall back into barbarism. It begins in an Argentina in the grip of the financial, political, and social crisis of December 2001, and it goes on to narrate the collapse of civil society: a collapse that takes place over the span of a calendar year, but that involves the implacable unraveling of some five hundred years of history. As history and geography rewind beneath the feet of the nation’s horrified inhabitants, one woman lives through its regressive stages, just barely surviving to tell a tale that resonates with dystopian imaginings everywhere. It is told from a resolutely female perspective, that of the clear-eyed and plain-spoken heroine, Maria Valdés Neylan, the descendant of Irish immigrants to Argentina. (Not just any immigrants: her great-grandmother is the title character of James Joyce’s short story “Eveline” – left on the docks by Joyce, but imagined here by Mairal as having traveled on to Argentina). Maria’s narration alternates between the laconic and the lyrical, testifying in vivid and moving but never salacious ways to the violence she sees unfolding around her, and that is visited on her own body – as we see in this excerpt, in which she thinks back over the line of fierce female figures from whom she is descended, in ironic parallel with the unraveling of women’s rights in a society barreling backward.

—Michelle Clayton, translator

“The Comet”

I wasn’t able to bathe until the third day. There was a tub with cold water in a tiny room at the back of the house with a bolt on the door. It wasn’t the cleanest, and of course it was hard to see anything, but just to have some privacy felt like luxury to me; I could finally cry without being seen, not to mention take my clothes off and let down my hair. It had been months since I had done either: I always felt like I was being spied upon, with unseen men milling around me. Now I bathed standing up in the big metal tub; I washed my hair with soap, luxuriating in it despite the freezing water. Other residents sometimes left a garden hose filled with water coiled in the sun on the patio through the day, so as to have lukewarm water when they bathed in the evening. But I didn’t wait to heat up the water; as soon as I learned that the bath was free, I went straight in.

READ MORE…