Translations

Translation Tuesday: “The Mighty Gaucho” by Tamara Silva Bernaschina

February 18, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Tim Benjamin

For Vicente, the mighty Gaucho is all the terrors of this world in a single individual.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poignant story of youth, manhood, and mental illness by Uruguayan writer Tamara Silva Bernaschina, translated by Tim Benjamin. Young Vicente lives with his family in a small town, right across the street from the Gaucho—”all the terrors of this world in a single individual”—a gigantic man famed for his physical strength and rumored cruelty to children. Yet even as Vicente’s uncle and mother threaten him with stories about the Gaucho, the only violence Vicente has seen from him is self-directed: he has repeatedly attempted to hang himself from the tree outside his house. When the Carnival comes to Vicente’s town and Vicente finally experiences the violence and recklessness that have made the Gaucho a figure of local legend, he makes a choice that, small as it may seem, will change both their lives forever. Read on!

They’re going to ask me why.
—José Watanabe

I
He liked to wonder if the moments when his dad had to sprint across the street, wrestle down the enormous Gaucho from the tree from which he’d once again hung himself, were moments of life in the world, or of death. There must have been minutes that ticked by in which more people were born than died. And vice versa. Someone, somewhere, must be keeping count. This is what he thinks, he’s got an image in his head of a little bead with the Gaucho’s name on it attached to a wooden abacus, swinging back and forth between dead and alive. He watches the Gaucho through the kitchen window, big, gigantic, now crumpled in the dirt and gasping for breath, like Aunt Ermilda’s epileptic dog. His mother and Uncle Thomas are there too, standing behind him, breathing down his neck as they watch his dad and the Gaucho disappear into the little shack across the street, and then they all sit back down at the kitchen table and wait for him to come back with the details. His father comes through the door in a state, sweat soaking through the front of his shirt, glazing his brow. He wipes away the sweat and they all stare at him as he mumbles an I’m coming or something like that but none of them totally understand what he says, and nobody responds. Finally, he sits back down at the table, takes a knife to the food on his plate.

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Translation Tuesday: “I Wonder Whether” by Anita Harag

February 11, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Marietta Morry and Walter Burgess

I don’t know whether I’m in love. I do know where these words must appear in a sentence.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a captivating short piece by Anita Harag, translated from the Hungarian by Walter Burgess and Marietta Morry. Although our narrator is immersed in the bliss of romance, she finds herself relentlessly questioning the foundation of her happiness. Does her partner truly love her, though he appears to be drawn to other women? Does she genuinely love him in return? More fundamentally, how can she even be certain of her own feelings? Her efforts to impose a logical structure on the messy, unpredictable nature of love disrupt the lushly intimate moments she shares with her lover. With its playful linguistic twists and staccato rhythms, “I Wonder Whether” masterfully captures the sensation of being both within and without, suffused with pleasure and unease.

His hands are warm, my thighs cold; I’m chilly. It’s autumn, the AC is on. The cinema is full, I’m sitting on the aisle; the cool air is blowing on me. He asks me whether we should switch seats. I like to sit on the aisle; I don’t want to switch. I would like his palm to be bigger, to warm a bigger area of my cold thighs. I like it when he doesn’t only touch my thigh, but my shoulder and my behind, too. When he takes my hand on the street, in a store or on the bus. He takes my hand anywhere and at any time. Mine is cold; he warms it. His is always warm, mine always cold. At the bus stop he breathes on my neck, so that I won’t be cold. Women stare at him. When I look at them; they turn their eyes away.  

There are handsome men. This sentence is declarative. “Handsome” is the adjective attached to men. Not to all men, that would be “men are handsome”. Not all men are handsome; for me only the ones with prominent noses and muscular calves. In this I differ from my girlfriend, who likes men with strong arms and blue eyes. Those are also handsome; yet I don’t like them. I should say: I like some men, and some I don’t. The ones I don’t like, my girlfriend might. It’s also possible that we both like the same man, with blue eyes and muscular calves; that’s a problem.  Fortunately, my girlfriend doesn’t like men with prominent noses. They repel her; I think the reason for this is to make sure we won’t end up liking the same man, even by accident. Sometimes, I find a man with blue eyes and strong arms attractive. That makes me feel bad, and I try to find fault with him. Some of them can look at me with those blue eyes and make me forget to speak. Him, too, he hasn’t got a prominent nose nor muscular calves, yet I like him. He likes women with brown hair and brown eyes, like me. He also likes women with green or blue eyes, with large or small breasts. He finds something pretty in each of them. I can see myself falling in love with several women at the same time, he says. This is a declarative sentence. It doesn’t contain “perhaps” nor “maybe”, nor anything conditional. “Perhaps” and “maybe” are modifiers expressing uncertainty and possibility. Perhaps I could fall in love with several women, at the same time.  

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Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from “Alone” by Nesrine Slaoui

February 4, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Frances Egan

She was tormented by the gap between what she wanted to look like and her modest and underwhelming reality.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you an excerpt from “Alone,” Nesrine Slaoui‘s intricate portrait of immigrant life in modern France, translated by Frances Egan. In these three spare, plainspoken vignettes, the lives of two women intertwine: Anissa, the child of two Moroccan immigrants in the Argenteuil banlieue, and Nora, a Maghrebi businesswoman in Clichy. Despite their various attempts to assert control over their own lives—despite Anissa’s attempt to bond with a new classmate, despite Nora’s attempts to stand up for herself and advocate for change in her workplace—their actions are continually circumscribed by greater social forces, by the historical inertia manifest in the petty cruelty and unexamined prejudice of their classmates and colleagues. What follows is a forceful examination of racism and economic inequality in modern France—and a challenging reminder that none of us is as free as we would like to believe.

3 September 2021
Cité Champagne, Argenteuil

In Marseille’s Quartiers Nord, Bricarde and Castellane, the drug dealing hotspots where a kid dies every fortnight from a Kalashnikov bullet, the windows offer a dreamy and unobstructed view of the Mediterranean Sea. A tease, an enviable and deceptive skyline, since the only place you can actually access the beach is from one small spot at L’Estaque. Here, in the much quieter cité Champagne, about twenty kilometres northwest of Paris, the balconies of the social housing block offer a panoramic view of the capital and its monuments, the Eiffel tower, sparkling at night, in prime position. The day they moved in, Karim kept this view until last, as a surprise for his wife Yamina. They had both been amazed that such luxury could penetrate this isolated spot. It made you wonder if the town planners and architects of these housing estates were trying to maximise the contrast between here and there, or if they wanted to soften the dreary dereliction of this Argenteuil ghetto. Perhaps they imagined the residents gazing into the distance and forgetting the reality at their feet: the broken lifts, the lobbies smelling of urine.

On the ninth floor of her tower, Anissa wasn’t thinking much about the skyline. Locked away in her room, she was trying to take a photo of herself on her phone. But even standing on her tiptoes, so that her legs looked longer, and arching her back, to emphasise her bum, she didn’t have one shot she could post on Instagram. And that’s despite knowing every tip there was to enhance your figure: stand slightly side-on, tuck your tummy with a hand to your waist. Expression wise, she made sure not to smile and kept her mouth slightly open to hold her delicate features in place. All those hours spent scrolling social media, day after day, meant she followed the rules without even realising it. But it didn’t matter. The reflection in the rectangle mirror in her bedroom wouldn’t do what she told it to, and she couldn’t make her body match the profiles that flitted across the screen. Without filters, without tricks, her body and her face were ordinary; her imperfections, her asymmetries were there for everyone to see. None of it looked like the calibrated social media ideal, like the apparitions, the fantasies. She couldn’t compete, she couldn’t fight. And she was tormented by the gap between what she wanted to look like and her modest and underwhelming reality. The only thing she liked was her flat teenage stomach. Everything else was too small, too skinny, not woman enough.

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Translation Tuesday: “A Stranger in Town” by Zinaida Shakhovskaya

January 28, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Theo Barnett

Chickens and vultures are all that’s left of the official bodies; as for this thing you’ve come up with, that’s news to me.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a thrilling tale of international espionage and intrigue from Russian émigré writer Zinaida Shakhovskaya, deftly translated by Theo Barnett. Arriving in an unnamed country, veteran spy Loris feels completely secure—he speaks the language perfectly, can name every place of the town, knows exactly what he needs to do—that is, until he runs across an old friend. What follows lays bare the true conflict in Loris’s heart, a deep pessimism beneath the mask of a devoted professional. Yet even as Loris admits his despair, the world around him hums with activity: children at play, a girl meeting her partner in a restaurant, new foliage casts dappled shadows on the streets. Together, these moments paint a picture of the world in “its breathtaking benevolence and fixity,” which stands against Loris’s despair and finally empowers him to act. Read on!

Loris knew the town, where he was arriving for the first time, down to its last detail. He had undergone such extensive preparations before being sent there that he knew the place inside out: every bend in its labyrinthine streets, the name of every hotel and caffè, the address of every library, museum, tavern and concert hall in the town, of its every abattoir, square and monument. Any passer-by could ask him for any directions, and, with native fluency, Loris could supply them. He recognised all these things as he saw them for the first time.

On his way from the station, carrying a light holdall, he entered a hotel and requested a room (even his accent didn’t betray his identity). On a paper slip he wrote down his name (not his own), verifying this by making unsubtle glances at his passport (also not his own) … After a wash and a freshen-up, he left straight for the town.

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Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Wen Yiduo

January 21, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by A. Z. Foreman

Just hear the gunfire! Death is roaring, reaving. / Silent night, how could you keep my heart from heaving?

If you’re unfamiliar with the work of Wen Yiduo, the renowned Chinese poet of the 1920s, these three poems demonstrate why he became a household name in his native country. The first, “Deadwater”, describes a backwater ditch, where the filth seamlessly transforms into images of ethereal beauty (“let the grease weave a layer of silk brocade / where germs brew a mist like twilit clouds at dusk”). In the second, “Silent Night”, the speaker’s comfortable domestic life can’t obscure the knowledge of suffering outside, piquing a deep indignation at the unfairness of the world. Finally, “End of Days” imagines the dull wait for death, consumed by loneliness and dread. All three are suffused with Wen’s trademark kaleidoscope of devout aestheticism, deeply intellectualized formalism, and raw patriotism.

While this selection of poems have been translated into English before, translator A. Z. Foreman‘s innovative adherence to a strict rhyme scheme draws out the poet’s original intention. Wen, a key figure in the “formalist school” of Republican China’s poets, didn’t care for much free verse and long rejected the idea that Chinese poetry should be in free verse at all. The basis of his poetic vision is not freedom but beauty, a beauty inspired by the English romantics and the formalist concept of “dancing in chains.”

Deadwater

This is a dead ditch rank with despair’s backwater.
A brisk wind can’t raise a ripple from its skin.
Why not junk some more scrap tin and copper here,
or dump your rotten dinner leftovers in.

Maybe the copper will turn to an emerald green,
and peach blossoms bloom out of the tin pots’ rust.
Then let the grease weave a layer of silk brocade
where germs brew a mist like twilit clouds at dusk.

Let the dead ditchwater ferment to green liquor
bubbling up floating pearls out of its white foam,
little pearls growing to bigger pearls in chuckles
that burst when liquor-raiding mosquitos come.

And so a dead ditch rank with despair’s backwater
can claim something lively, bright and all its own.
If the frogs here can’t handle the solitude
this stagnant muck can gurgle them up a tune!

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Translation Tuesday: “Katherine” by Ling Shuhua

January 14, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Nicky Harman

She didn’t understand why her mother was so against her playing with Silver. She was fascinated by this little country girl.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a short story by Ling Shuhua, translated from the Chinese by Nicky Harman. The Wu family has escaped to the mountains for their holiday, but their tranquil lifestyle belies the turmoil brewing around them—they’re in 1920s-1930s China. For Katherine, the youngest daughter, every day is a battle with her status-conscious mother, who is intent on shaping her children according to trendy Western sensibilities. Katherine finds solace in the company of Silver, her nanny’s daughter, whose practical countryside wisdom provides a counterpoint to her mother’s imported values. Their innocent antics set off a chain of events that exposes the fragile facade of propriety so carefully maintained by the Wus, and, more generally, the affluent class to which they belong. 

The rain stopped at dawn, and a mist descended over the trees in the valley. Amid the white-out, all that could be heard was the waves breaking on the beach, their steady rhythm seeming to promise a beautiful morning. 

A long-drawn-out hoot broke the silence. The jade-green foothills lay in a dreamlike haze, the mountain peaks facing out to sea floated clear of the mist as if from behind clouds at sunset, and the coastline emerged in perfect chiaroscuro, like a Chinese ink wash painting.

The surface of the water began to glow with brilliant dawn colours and the sand on the beach caught flickers of light; in the eastern sky, the sun spewed bright golden rays of light through the layers of crimson clouds. 

Then the mist vanished and on the hills, buildings painted red and green, as neat as little doll’s houses, could be seen amongst the greenery. 

Set back at some distance from them was an impressive-looking villa painted a vivid red and flanked on one side by a broad veranda in pale green. This, the summer home of company director Wu, could be seen from miles away.

On the veranda, the aroma of coffee and buns filled the air; Mr. Wu was having breakfast with his wife and two of his children—a boy and a girl of twelve or thirteen, smartly dressed in Western-style clothes.

Below them, on the lawn, a big empty space dotted with bright flowering trees and shrubs, the youngest daughter, Katherine, was sitting on a rock playing at cockfighting with Nanny Wang’s daughter, Silver. They were jabbing at each other with big handfuls of pine needles. Suddenly, Katherine stopped and gazed out at the sea.

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Translation Tuesday: “Fındık” by Sait Faik Abasıyanık

January 7, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Will Washburn

Something else was going on with the dog; deep down, he was catching on to something.

Fındık, the titular character of Sait Faik Abasıyanık‘s short story, is the kind of dog you can find anywhere: one of those common strays who are nonetheless elevated by virtue of their sheer adorableness, endearing themselves to the local residents. He’s also a perfect litmus test for human character, exposing those who would scold a dog for merely approaching them. Despite such treatment, Fındık remains trusting and friendly. That is, until he encounters the Poison Man, a self-important garbage collector who is charged with culling the village’s canine population. Translated from the Turkish by Will Washburn, “Fındık” examines themes of moral responsibility, human-animal bonds, and the rationalizations people use to justify cruelty toward the downtrodden—but also, what spurs them to defy those rationalizations.

Fındık is pals with everyone in our village, young and old, who doesn’t have too high an opinion of themselves. Colored like a tabby cat, Fındık (his name means “hazelnut”) is the bastard offspring of a wolf-dog and a hunting dog. As a love-child, he ought to be beautiful, but in fact he isn’t. If you don’t give him a pat on the head when he approaches you, wagging his big thick tail and blinking his brown eyes, then you’re a strange one indeed. To reject an animal that approaches you with such a need for affection, you’d have to have never been in love in your life, never cared about anything, never known what it means to have a soft heart. You might hold that such people don’t exist. And yet how many times, with my own eyes, have I seen Fındık approach people—not just for a piece of bread, but in need of a simple pat—and be shooed off. So I’m unable to change my opinion of humanity.

It’s a well-known fact that, with the onset of summer, dogs catch a nasty microbial illness from each other. Around that time, the city busies itself with killing off every dog in sight. People hide all the dogs in their area. The municipality pays one-and-a-half lira per dog, and a bunch of dog-killers set off on their rounds.

In our village, we call this person the “Poison Man.” You should see this Poison Man: he’s an odd one. To be sure, not everyone who does that job is abnormal. But becoming a killer, an Angel of Death, inevitably alters a person’s condition, their character, their gaze, their walk. Or maybe it doesn’t alter them; maybe we only think it does. You know that play, So It Is (If You Think So)? Well, if we think the Poison Man is abnormal—then so he is. He might as well be the Düsseldorf Monster. That’s the fellow who used to carry a gleaming metal chain with a knife attached to one end, which he’d use to ensnare little children, take them behind the bushes, and kill them.

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Translation Tuesday: “My Christmas: Memories of a Transvestite” by H.W. Burg

December 17, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by M.M. Pinky

Over and over, I would anxiously ask myself: where did you get this queer desire to dress and act so femininely?

Just in time for the holiday season, we bring you a different kind of Christmas story for this week’s Translation Tuesday. “My Christmas: Memories of a Transvestite,” written by H.W. Burg and translated from the German by M.M. Pinky, was originally been published 100 years ago, but remains startling in its immediacy. Through a series of Yuletide reflections, the author, assigned male at birth, relates their lifelong journey of coming to terms with their innate femininity. The quest for authentic gender expression expands into a tender exploration of self-discovery, longing, and the profound human need for pure acceptance. In a political climate where transgender rights seem to be an increasingly easy target, this short memoir reminds us why fearmongering rhetoric obscures the simple truth of people who, like anyone else, are searching for connection and love.

It is Christmas Eve again. Alone, I stand at the window of my quiet bachelor’s room and look into the cold winter night. Hoarfrost covers the trees. Hedges and bushes glisten in the light of the streetlamps as if the sky descended to Earth with thousands of little falling stars on this holy night. How beautiful it is when nature unfolds its wonders and no human hand disturbs its mysterious play.

The sound of “Silent Night, Holy Night” floats by my ears from the neighboring house. Through the thin window curtains, I see the dark outline of a Christmas tree and the bright glow of its lights. I close my eyes and imagine how those gathered around the tree join hands in love, how the quiet happiness of peace transfigures their eyes. I know the people. Quiet, simple, content people, who help each other carry the heavy things in life. How beautiful it is when two hearts find each other and love lifts them up from the vices of everyday life.

On my table there too is a Christmas tree. It is small; I bought it today, ready-made with decorations and candles already on it. As I’m about to strike a match, a deep sadness creeps over me. I am suddenly gripped by a desolate loneliness with a force I haven’t felt for some time. Lighting the candles is impossible. My eyes fill with tears and I have to sit down with my head against the table. My deep misery grips me with terrible strength, and I begin crying, crying bitter tears, today—on Christmas Eve—while everyone rejoices and celebrates the season of joy. 

Once my tears dried, I sat dreaming, pondering before my Christmas tree, from which no light fell into my saddened soul. Memories from days long ago unfurled within me, memories of celebrations of Christmases past. In my mind they all lay before me, and of the long list, four stayed in my mind with particular clarity. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Yung Yung by Lo Yu

December 10, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Fion Tse

In truth you are her muse. She writes about you; she can only write about you.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you an excerpt from Hong Kong novelist Lo Yu, translated from the Chinese by Fion Tse. In this short, plainspoken tale, an unnamed member of the Hong Kong diaspora travels to Paris to spend Christmas with her girlfriend, all the while haunted by thoughts of another lover, her “Hong Kong girlfriend” who she has left behind in London. Lo Yu’s prose has an urgent, almost frantic quality, which perfectly captures both the desperation of the narrator’s girlfriend, terrified of being left for another woman, and the despair of the narrator herself, who has only just realized that her Hong Kong girlfriend regards their relationship as more than a fling. In a bittersweet allusion to the surrealist paintings of René Magritte, the narrator finally understands how mistaken she has been. Read on!

You, Your Girlfriend, Your Hong Kong Girlfriend

Perhaps you’re already on the EuroStar to Paris, hurtling towards the city you were born in. Next to you is your girlfriend, elegant yet lost. You have yet to break up. You’re headed to her family home because it’s Christmas, and Europeans celebrate Christmas with family. And of course she wouldn’t dare to leave you on your own for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day, all alone in London.

You probably won’t go back to your family home in Paris, possibly to avoid Cantonese—because when you talk to your family, you’re reminded of that Hong Kong girlfriend, like a character in the Hong Kong shows Grandma likes to watch.

How many girlfriends do you really have?

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Translation Tuesday: “Childhood” by Maria Karpińska

December 3, 2024  |  in Translations, Uncategorized  |  by Jonathan Baines

Right there, in a setting so much like a fairy tale that it felt unreal, we would imagine the end of the world.

A single season can completely upend everything you used to take for granted—at least, that’s how it often feels when you’re young. This week’s short story, “Childhood”, by Maria Karpińska and translated by Jonathan Baines, depicts one such formative period. Over the course of a summer vacation, a boy is increasingly caught up in the escapades of his magnetic new friend, who sweetly conceals her taste for cruelty. Together, the children dream of apocalypse. If chaos were to invade the pastoral setting of childhood, what form would it take? Karpińska’s piece quietly hints at the looming shadows of global crises, cast over those who are too young to make sense of them.

As a child I loved the steady rhythm of trains. It sent me to sleep. The whole family, laden with provisions and luggage in extraordinary quantities, would board the train and within a quarter of an hour I’d be asleep. I’d settle down on a pile of suitcases, or on my mother’s generous thighs, and drift off, lulled by the rattling of the wheels. 

It was high summer. The trees outside the window were such a luscious green, that you could sink your teeth into it, and it would dribble down your chin. The picture postcard quality of the season had not yet been spoiled by the heat. Cottages were scattered here and there. The scene was peaceful, idyllic. Everything was blurred around the edges, smudged with dirt, like a windowpane smeared with the grease of a hundred different hands, imperfectly cleaned up by Polish State Railways. 

And who should step into this picture, but a wee girl. That’s how everyone referred to her. I can still hear my mother saying, “There’ll be a wee girl there. You’ll get along.” We were on the train then, too, on our way to see my uncle’s family, or some in-laws, I don’t recall. I’d never met the people we stayed with and I haven’t seen them since. I don’t know what the thinking was behind that trip, but then one’s childhood is packed with events for which one receives no explanation, things happening for no reason and with no goal in view, coming to pass abruptly, with no introduction. A blissful world of ignorance with no decisions to be made. 

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Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Gyula Jenei

November 26, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Diana Senechal

there will be something irrational in the way i stop, thirty years later, on a corner, not knowing where to go from here.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you two poems by the Hungarian poet Gyula Jenei, in spare, elegant translations by frequent contributor Diana Senechal. In Senechal’s words, “Jenei’s poems convey at least three kinds of outsiderness: societal outsiderness, where he holds a distinctly different view from others; temporal outsiderness, where he returns, disoriented and unsure, to places of the past; and existential outsiderness, where he doubts even himself.” At once laconic and expansive, Jenei’s poems present a fascinating existential struggle, the speaker simultaneously overwhelmed by the ravages of time and the solitude they impose, yet trying all the same to distinguish past and present, to make plans, to “imagine the future” in a chaotic and indifferent universe. Read on!

After a While

ever since my father died, it’s all one whether he
was happy or unhappy. nothing matters to him
anymore. just to us, who remember him, clashed
with him, used him, didn’t love him enough.
only we feel pain if others hurt us: hit us,
ignore us, abandon us in our suffering. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Yongfen Zhang, Female, Central Plains” by Yiran Li

November 19, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by James Appleby and Yiran Li

Legs are easy to read. There’s only two: / those that have laboured, those that haven't.

I first heard the story of Yongfen Zhang from the cleaning lady at the community library, Yongfen’s roommate. She told me that Yongfen lost her father when she was a baby, that her mother remarried, that she never attended a day of school. To support her children, Yongfen left her hometown for Shanghai. Unable to read a single character, she could only clean streets. She was confined to her room and the streets she cleaned. 

Although I never met Yongfen I feel a kinship with her: we speak the same dialect and come from the same region in central China, with its overpopulation, agricultural tradition, history of famines, conservative thinking, lack of trade and emerging industries. Our region has become the primary source of migrant workers for Shanghai. I meet them in libraries, in barber shops, on streets, and I recognize them immediately once I hear how they speak Mandarin.  

—Yiran Li

Yongfen Zhang, Female, Central Plains

Yongfen Zhang, 1982, Xihua, Central Plains,
street cleaner, Central Plains Road, Shanghai.
Illiterate and tracing the graffiti
of her name from ID to labour contract
Not even in dreams: no mountain, no sea.
Central Plains to Central Plains Road,
map of half her life.

Reading is the refuge of the people
and she reads too, warnings from heaven,
from the landfill take the third right
and read your way back home,
reading her husband’s face (a good man
schooled three years, pinching her tits
so much more gently than her stepfather).
After meals she sits in the dirt
and reads the moving legs.
Legs are easy to read. There’s only two:
those that have laboured, those that haven’t.
Just as she sat, ten years old, on the ground,
concrete-mixer, digging wild vegetables,
hop-skipping to the field with brother
strapped to her back, arms muscled as hammers.
Never thought she’d grow into a sin called
ignorance.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Inheritors of Silence by Abeer Dagher Esber

November 12, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Chloe Bordewich

When had my daughter grown up? Her sarcasm had turned harsher than a frostbitten child, her laugh so rebellious.

Inheritors of Silence (ورثة الصمت) is about the mutually reinforcing relationship between private catastrophes and the collective trauma of political repression. Tragedy metastasizes across time and space—from one generation of women to the next, and from the family’s origins in Homs, Syria, to Nice, and then to Montreal, where the narrator, Sami, and his daughter, Jano, now live. In this excerpt from the opening chapter, Sami is groping through the first hours after his daughter’s attempted suicide. As a Syrian immigrant in Quebec, he is one kind of outsider, a foreigner (though, as Sami himself points out, his neighborhood is full of foreigners like him living lives that are symmetrical but rarely touching). Suddenly, Sami realizes that he is an outsider when it comes to his daughter’s life, too. After a lifetime of loss, he is desperate to find a way back in. Arabic has a great capacity for metaphor, especially metaphors of sentiment, and capturing the full metaphorical repertoire of this text in English while maintaining the fluidity of the prose is challenging. But this allusive vocabulary is a cornerstone of Sami’s narrative voice. He is a poet, and even his quotidian surroundings conjure a stream of images that allow him, and the reader, to wander out of exile—if only for a sentence or two.

—Chloe Bordewich

The morning came with dull normality. A bright light pierced the windowpane as huge plows rumbled past, emitting a ceaseless stream of high-pitched beeps. The day before, a storm had inundated Montreal with snow, stuffing the city’s streets. I woke now to concussive rumbling and tried to shake the previous night’s madness from my body. Exhausted from insomnia, I remembered that what had happened the day before was not a dream. Without so much as a suitcase or a word of farewell, my daughter had, of her own free will, tried to go to her death. My daughter, only in her twenties, had been infused with the poison of knowledge she couldn’t bear and decided not to go on.

I leaped from bed as if stung by the memory of a torture chamber full of scorpions and traitors. I had to face the morning and confront reality in all its baseness, the depravity of events wilder than a wedding of lunatics. Fearing the darkness of night, as well as the light of day, I put my head underwater and fumbled like a slumbering blind man until the world stopped breathing. A deadly silence descended, and I groped for noise. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “That Old Woman” by Raul Germano Brandão

November 5, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Jacqueline Frances Austin

She unhinged herself to eat, made herself small to eat, appeared stupid and contemptible to eat.

For November’s first Translation Tuesday, we bring you a short story by Raul Germano Brandão, translated from the Portuguese by Jacqueline Frances Austin. In this haunting tale, Brandão recounts the woes of the destitute woman Candidinha. Like Voltaire’s Candide, her life is an unremitting stream of unearned misfortune, but unlike her optimistic counterpart, she maintains an iron grip on her fury and indignation. In order to survive, Candidinha transmutes her tragedy into entertainment, adopting an exaggeratedly ludicrous persona; her affluent neighbors reward her performance with leftovers. The narrative traces this disjunction between public and private, unfolding between the voices of the onlookers—who alternate between mocking gossip and scathing reprimands, feasting on her misery—and Candidinha’s own voice, bitter and cursing. Brandão unsparingly renders the acute discomfort provoked by direct confrontation with inequality, a grotesque reminder of the irrationality of fate.

That old woman who sometimes faces me on nights of supreme affliction, dressed all in black, ragged and stiff, is made of hatred and stone. I speak to her. She doesn’t respond. Her mouth held tight she keeps her silence, a ragged shawl pulled up around her chest. She is huge, like despair, dry as the stones. . . What is her story?  

On ill-fated Tuesdays she always turned up in that big, lugubrious house, that witless, ridiculous old woman, holding her son, António, by the hand. Looking like a damp bird she would leap across the living room, her shawl aflutter, carrying her hat. Everybody found her comical and stupid, always dragging her boy, her look disorientated and her appearance somehow contemptible.  

“Here’s Candidinha again. . .”

“Oh no.”

“Oh my dears. It could only happen to me, just imagine. . .”

On seeing her they would all start to laugh at that dry and stumbling figure, crushed by her disgrace, her hat missing feathers and her smile quite put on. She was like some kind of starving jester to whom, for their poverty, one tosses a crust, but mostly because they are inoffensive and ridiculous. You could tell that old woman anything: troubles, disasters, irritations. . . If you did, for a few minutes she’d exchange a few words, her smile forced and sinister. Trailing her ragged shawl, she’d go hopping around the house. READ MORE…