Translations

Translation Tuesday: “The White Umbrella” by Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil

September 14, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Daniel Koehler

Some faces are simply too familiar to leave any doubt that they have been encountered before.

This week’s Translation Tuesday features one of the foremost exponents of the Turkish novel in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil. As his works have been scarcely translated into English, we are delighted to feature this short story translated by Daniel Koehler. Powerfully manipulating the reader’s perspective of an unfolding scene as the narrator follows an umbrella, then a hand, then a person—hear from Koehler about the author’s advocacy of realism’s necessity and his assimilation of other figurative devices within this enchanting story. 

“Having dabbled with romanticism earlier in his career, Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil sat firmly within a realist tradition by the time the collection containing this story was published. His cultural partisanship was conscious and deliberate. In the late 1880s, his famous treatise, Hikaye (The Story), advanced his theories on the superiority of realism over romanticism in nineteenth-century French literature. “The most unsavoury reality,” he argued, “is preferable to the most ornamented fantasy.” If Uşaklıgil dons the mantle of the literary realist, to portray the world simply as it is, he does not shy away from the use of figurative devices. In what might be construed as a nod to Stendhal, he entitled one iconic novel The Blue and the Black. Symbolism, particularly the symbolism of colour, permeates that work, in which blue represents idealism and hope, black disappointment and tragedy. Similarly, the unmarried young lady in this story shields herself with a white umbrella, while five years later, the umbrella in the hands of the mourning widow is black. The clothes of the cheerful girl on the embankment are multicoloured and bright; as a newly married woman, she makes an excursion with her husband to Göksu, the village of the sky-blue waters; but the clothes of the grieving lady on the ferry are monochrome and dark. The only constant is in Zerrin’s blonde hair, which passes from mother to daughter, and in her name itself: the Persian word for golden.

The story presents unique challenges for the translator. First and foremost is the extensive use of the ornate and intricate sentence structure that Ottoman Turkish inherited from literary Persian. Contemporary English, with its affinity for the concise, can feel unwieldy as a tool for the representation of Uşaklıgil’s prose. Generally, sentences have been preserved, although punctuation has been used where appropriate to separate clauses. A further challenge arises from the use of symbolism to which the previous paragraph alludes. A Turkish speaker may well notice the chromatic association of the words Göksu or Zerrin; someone unversed in the language will not. The use of footnotes, and the presentation of the instant note, constitute an attempt by the translator to remedy this lacuna.”

—Daniel Koehler

An elegant, white umbrella . . . while looking from my window down onto the embankment, I saw this umbrella, first from a distance—like a small, frothy, playful, flippant wave that had escaped from the sea for a while to go for a stroll on the embankment—walking along with a prancing undulation . . . After I sighted it, I forgot everything, I looked at nothing else, something I could sense in its bearing, in its walk conveyed even from a distance that this white umbrella, in that entire sequence of umbrellas, was a most joyful, a most merry little imp . . .

It slowly bobbed along the embankment towards my window. I could discern the fine gauze, ruffled in places by broad silk ribbons as it extended over the tulle towards the peak of the umbrella, the lacework that bunched up into little frills as it draped from the edges, and slightly below that, part of the slender yellow shaft. Looking further down—I could only see two fingers’ length; within a black glove that rested on a handle coated in red glass, its ample silk tassels swinging from the edge of the cords, I saw a hand, small enough to complete the ornamentation of this elegant umbrella . . . A hand that conveyed an unbounded impression of elegance in holding that slender shaft. A hand that seemed to wink at you and say: “Well, since you’ve seen me, you’ve realised what sort of person I belong to, haven’t you?” Yes, I’d realised; the figure that was shrouded within the flowing silk of a light purple yeldirme¹ under this umbrella formed of froth, like a lilac that had blossomed under the shadow of a white rose, could only be as I had discovered it . . .

This was not a yeldirme, it was something rather different; it partly resembled a ferace², but partly a yeldirme, so that, in sum, it looked like no item of clothing at all. Perhaps it was because of this, because it had come into being as the product of a young girl’s keen aesthetic sense, that it was pleasing to the eye. It was so simple that it had not a single piece of lacework, nor a single small ribbon. Yet its simplicity was so delightful that one’s eyes could not tire of taking in its delicate folds, rippling like an ornament from head to toe.

As they passed . . . did I mention they were two people? It was likely her mother, who waved at an empty paving stone on the embankment and spoke.

“Zerrin, let’s go this way!” . . .

They went, she receded; yet I had only seen that white umbrella! And that purple yeldirme, that black hand, and I had also heard a name: Zerrin! . . . I murmured the name to myself like a pleasant song: Zerrin? . . . This name matched every other element, an arrangement of elements composed of colours: white, purple, and black. Zerrin! . . . A bouquet of flowers formed of a great white rose, of purple lilacs and yellow hibiscuses, and, at the very base of the stem, bound by a black ribbon; yet the black formed a blemish on this collection of playful colours.

They were walking away, disappearing; after they had eventually faded completely out of view, and I was on the verge of withdrawing from my window, I saw the white umbrella appear once more.

“Oh! They are returning, they will pass by again,” I said. Now I would see the face of this bouquet, a face to which I had already given form in my mind’s eye. Zerrin! . . . As this name ignited my fantasies, I envisioned a delicate white face tinged with a vague pink. This face had faintly coloured lips, and eyebrows that seemed to have been painted with liquid gold, collected from a moonlit night only to evaporate, leaving but a shadow; eyes that smiled with blue, with green, with yellow, or with a colour formed of a clay kneaded from all of these . . . They were approaching, I was watching intently, suddenly the white umbrella was cast back slightly, the face I’d been waiting for was completely exposed, framed by a fine gauze headscarf . . . READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Four Poems by Gena Gruz

September 7, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Aaron Poochigian

A troika of horses with bells on trots

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you four poems by the poet and artist Gena Gruz in Aaron Poochigian’s translation. Reflecting on the Bulldozer Exhibition of 1974—where Soviet authorities sent literal bulldozers to destroy the art pieces of an unofficial art exhibition held by a group of avant-garde artists—Gruz’s poems respond to a crucial juncture in the history of modern Russian art. Be it the “budding façade” of marching girls or a “goldfish in fishnet negligee,” her poems, terse as they are, bristle with the power to invoke a surreal atmosphere in which a new social world is on the verge of being born, and a new language articulated. 

Girls in 1981 

girls are marching
moving en masse in formation
government provisions
are rearing outspoken heroines
their legs are covered with the down of pre-pubescence
their toenails are covered in polish the color of poppies
they in sailor suits
budding façade 

Tree

A tree is bowing to a locomotive
Shovel me into the furnace instead of coal
Wrapped like herring in newspaper
It will be burnt for power
It won’t become a coffin
It won’t become a fence
won’t see a girl coming home from school READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Speed of Gardens” by Eloy Tizón

August 31, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Manuel Antonio Castro Córdoba and Natalia Baizán de Aldecoa

There are loves that crush those who receive them.

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the titular short story from Eloy Tizón’s Velocidad de los jardines (The Speed of Gardens), which was chosen by El País as one of the hundred best books published in Spanish in the past twenty-five years. A tale of adolescence, the dramatic expansion of life’s possibilities, and its accompanying disappointments—Tizón’s narrator recalls an entire class and their fascination with the luminous Olivia Reyes. All this is told through Tizón’s finely wrought sentences which itself is a kind of spellbinding music. Hear from the translators about the peculiarities and pleasures of Tizón’s baroque style. 

“Eloy Tizón is one of the most important baroque writers working in the Spanish language today. In his language, where the baroque tradition reigns supreme, mastering the baroque style is tantamount to mastering the style of the Spanish language tout court. There have been no shortage of competitors for this title on both sides of the Spanish-speaking Atlantic, and in the Iberian Peninsula, we find such luminaries of the baroque register: Gómez de la Serna and Francisco Umbra, followed by Cristina Fallarás and Juan Manuel de Prada. In these writers, who are equally as prominent fiction writers as they are columnists, we find in them an affected antiquarian prose, a contrarian bravado at the level of ideas, a curated brand of O.K.-Boomerism, with sudden tinges of chauvinism, misogyny, or anti-Trumpism—depending on the day.

Tizón is a stranger to this school. He is worthy of winning the baroque pennant—not that he would care—but he might not be playing the Spanish league. Though a stylist of excess, and a habitual contributor to newspapers, he has shaken off all remnants of regional scruff. His sentences abolish the habitual linguistic ostentation of his contemporaries; there is no old fogey gesturing in his work; he is not known to indulge in that strange form of Iberian competition that consists in piling up subordinate clauses and stringing consonantic polysyllables. This has to do with Tizón’s readings of Clarice Lispector and (I venture) Virginia Woolf. Like them, his style is elastic, image-heavy, allusive rather than exact in a pseudo-philologist kind of way. Like them, he knows when to surrender style to character. Like them, he knows the purpose of curlicues and filigrees: to entertain the reader and not the author’s vanity.

Praised by many of his contemporaries, perhaps the aptest compliment comes from Alberto Olmos, who once described his style as “pouring MDMA on the dictionary.” What dictionary, he didn’t say. Certainly not The Royal Spanish Academy’s.”

— Natalia Baizán de Aldecoa and Manuel Antonio Castro Córdoba

Many said the fun ended when we passed into eleventh grade. We turned sixteen, seventeen; everything gained an unsettling speed. Sciences or humanities was the first customs house, the first border crossed, separating friends like travelers commuting from one train to another, their luggage left somewhere between the snow and the porters. Classrooms disbanded. Javier Luendo Martínez broke up with Ana María Cuesta and Richi Hurtado stopped talking to the Estévez twins and María Paz Morago dumped her boyfriend and scholarship—in that order—and Christian Cruz was expelled from school after hurling a flask containing a fetus at the biology teacher. 

Oh, yes; from class to class we towed Plato and something called hylomorphism that belonged to some forgettable school of thought. The Russian Revolution spread itself wide across our notebooks, and on page seventy-something the Tsar was executed between crossed-out scrawls. The economic causes of the war turned out to be complex, not what they look like by a long stretch, even if impressionism brought a fresh palette and a new idea of nature to painting. Mercedes Cifuentes was very fat and didn’t get along with anyone,  but that year she came back crushingly thin and still didn’t get along with anyone.

It was a kind of hecatomb. Half the class fell in love with Olivia Reyes, at the same time or in turns. Every morning she came into the classroom, showered, barely powdered, it was a creaking and vulnerable vision that could hurt you if you dared think about it around midnight. Olivia always arrived forty-five minutes late, and until she made her appearance the syllabus was something dead, a waste, the teacher rambled on about Bismarck, as if painstakingly brushing his tailcoated corpse, the chalk repulsed. Her arrival resuscitated our desks. You couldn’t believe it, Olivia Reyes, something so sponge-like and scented, stepping into the classroom, laughing, providing us with her fabled profile, her light at the prow, you wouldn’t believe it, it hurt so much.

The first days of spring have an amazing air about them, unimaginable, you can’t tell where it comes from. This effect is heightened by the first sightings of summer clothes (the coats strangled in the closet until next year), of bare-armed students carrying decapitations and whole kingdoms inside their folders. We would walk into school through a great red-brick patio with the basketball courts outlined in white, a scrawny tree blessed us; we would jog up the double staircase, hurried on by the dean—who comprised a blonde moustache with a wholehearted dedication to cursing—and then the bell would ring, firing the starting signal to our daily race for wisdom and science. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The Letters of Hiragy al-Qot by Abdel Rahman El-Abnudi

August 24, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Mariam Moustafa

If this letter were a boat, / I would sail down the Nile to reach you.

When Nasser commissioned the construction of the Aswan High Dam—a project pivotal to his legacy of modernising Egypt—most of the migrant builders who came from Upper Egypt were farmers who were unfamiliar with industrial machinery and faced hazardous work conditions. This week’s Translation Tuesday features a set of epistolary poems that relate the story of this historic project through the correspondences of a migrant worker Hiragy and his wife Fatma. These poems, drawn from the start of Abdel Rahman El-Abnudi’s The Letters of Hiragy al-Qot, were written when the poet lived amongst the labourers in Aswan who came from his village of Abnoud. One of the Arab world’s most respected vernacular writers—a true poet of the people—El-Abnudi’s works are social documents that chronicle the history of Egypt. In Mariam Moustafa’s translation, the emerging language of technological modernity is conjured with sensitivity, and the various registers of labour and longing are given emotional resonance. We are thrilled also to feature an audio clip of El-Abnudi himself reading the first two letters in Arabic—for our readers to appreciate why he too is known as “the sound of Egypt.”

“Abdel Rahman El-Abnudi always emphasized that his poems were meant to be listened to, not just read, and recorded most of his poems. I grew up listening to El-Abnudi reciting The Letters of Hiragy al-Qot, and was unsure how to convey the profound emotions that I hear in his voice to an English-speaking audience. A translator can communicate the meaning of sentences, expressions, and even untranslatable words to their target audience, but how can the emotions heard through the heart and soul be translated? In translating and revising this piece, I wanted English readers to feel and hear his voice, and asked constantly: “If El-Abnudi wrote these poems in English, what would they sound like?” This translation is my way of expressing gratitude to the poet, whose voice attracted me as a kid, enlightened me as a teenager, and kept me connected to my roots as a young woman.” 

— Mariam Moustafa

Letter 1

The addressee, the most precious diamond,
The marvelous pearl,
My wife, Fatma Ahmed Abdel Ghafar.
The address, our village of Gabalyat El Far.

This is my first letter to you, my love,
Sent from Aswan where I now work.
If I’d surrendered to the shame of being late,
I wouldn’t have written this letter.
Forgive me, Fatma, for the long wait.
I am sorry, I am ashamed, I am abashed.

It has been two months since you shed your tears.
I still remember how they burned my calming hand.
I promised you then, “Before my train reaches Aswan,
My letter will be in your hands.”
You didn’t believe me, you said:
“You’re such a liar. I know you’ll forget.”

I wish that moment could have lasted longer,
But my friends pulled me inside the train.
Their pull troubled my heart.
A fire raged in my soul as I left you, and our kids, Aziza and Eid.
The train began to move,
My heart plummeted.
I ran to the window and screamed,
“Fatma, take care of Aziza and Eid.”
The train screamed too,
Screeching off as if escaping a fire.
I heard your voice next to me, far away.
“My heart and soul follow you to Aswan, habiby.”
I threw myself inside the train, into the crowd,
And I cried aloud.
Our large village, where we could walk around for a whole day,
Was gone in the blink of an eye.

Forgive me, my love, for being late.
If this letter were a boat,
I would sail down the Nile to reach you.

Finally,
I send to you, to my village, and to my children,
A thousand greetings and salams.

Your husband,
Hiragy.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Salted Fish Shop (A Sonnet)” by Yam Gong

August 17, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Dorothy Tse and James Shea

Hear from Hong Kong poet Yam Gong, winner of the Workers’ Literature Award.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you a sonnet from the award-winning Hong Kong poet Yam Gong, translated by Dorothy Tse and James Shea. Rows of dried salted fish dangle in Hong Kong’s streets but, here, Yam Gong’s woefully romantic working-class speaker singles out one as an object of his adoration. First appearing in his 1997 collection, And So You Look at Festival Lights along the Street, this poem shows Yam Gong—himself a former mechanical technician—as a shrewd voice of labour and the everyday.

The Salted Fish Shop (A Sonnet)

It hung there for a long time, that salted fish
On the first day of work I used a pole
to hang it up and I started thinking
this salted fish is so handsome
surely someone is going to pick it
but day after day it hung there upright
and not a single grain of salt fell
Today someone should pick it
Looking at it every morning I think every day
this same thing every day I look at it
and slowly it became my hope each day
until my boss came to me today and said
You look as dumb as a salted fish
Don’t bother coming back tomorrow READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The Diagonal of Desire by Sinziana Ravini

August 10, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Kaylen Baker

If I must begin with a muse, why not a woman who’s already embodied many women?

This week’s Translation Tuesday follows a woman who—in pursuit of materials to build the protagonist of her novel, Madame X—visits, amongst others: a psychoanalyst, an actress, and a Pierre Huyghe exhibit. This extract from Romanian-born and Paris-based Sinziana Ravini’s debut novel La diagonale du désir, is the Swedish writer’s metafictional romp through a world of artistic and literary references in order to ask the question: how much of our own desires are constituted by our fictional encounters? Conversely, how much of fiction’s desires can be found in the actions of the world? With her translation, Kaylen Baker shows us a voice which, with characteristic humor and intelligence, uncovers the role that art and aesthetics play in forming the ground on which the mystery of our own desire is made visible.

The Pact

The building presides over the street like an impenetrable stone palace but, here and there, kissing cherubs cling to the molding façade, as if to draw out a repressed sensuality from such sobriety. Several floors up, I’m standing in the middle of a room full of books, and paintings of divinities, opposite a man who’s always filled me with dread.  

“And what might I do for you, mademoiselle?”

“I came to see you because I’m writing a novel.”

“You must’ve mistaken me for someone else. I’m a psychoanalyst, not a publisher.” 

“I know . . . I called on you because I want to take my main character to a shrink.”

The man begins to finger a cigar. “Imagine if every writer brought in their creative work for analysis. I’d never see the last of them! Who is this character?”

“Her name is Madame X. That’s all I can tell you for now.”

He cuts the cigar, lights it and inhales. “And what do you hope to explore through this novel?”

“I want to create a character who sets out to discover her real desire. Since I don’t have a lot of courage or imagination, I decided to ask a few women I admire to pick the plot themselves, by giving me missions, which Madame X will carry out.”

“And why not solicit any men, mademoiselle? Or do you have something against them?”

“On the contrary, but it’s the female unconscious I’d like to explore. Imagine finally being able to respond to Freud: What does a woman want?”

“Won’t she be . . . somewhat divided, this woman?”

“I see her rather as a subject in perpetual transformation.” 

“So why have you come to see me—me, and not a woman?”

“Exactly because you are a man.”

“Hm. I see.”

Silence settles around us. What am I doing here? When Faust signed the pact with Mephisto, did he find his soul, or lose it? 

“I think we’ll stop here.”

“So, you’ll accept to become my fictional analyst?”

“Fictional? I’m quite real myself.” 

“I’d rather conceal what’s real. Didn’t Oscar Wilde say that masks make us tell the truth?”

“Yes, well, the truth, you know . . . it’s debatable. I’m not sure I’m ready to play your game.”

“And psychoanalysis, that’s not a game?”

“Indeed, but a serious one! The game you’re about to create is quite dangerous. I’m under the impression you don’t really respect psychoanalysis as it is.”

“Then treat my lack of respect like a symptom.” 

“Humph.” 

Taking my purse, I make as if to leave.

“Let’s say your project intrigues me. When can you come back?” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Small Crescendos” by Pirkko Saisio

August 3, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Mia Spangenberg

But all love strives towards that big crescendo.

From the Finlandia Prize-winning author who published the first Finnish-language lesbian novel, this week’s Translation Tuesday features a genre-defying work of autofiction from Pirkko Saisio. The eroticism of encountering a stranger—be it in a tram or a seminar room; in real life or one’s imagination—is what ties together this attempt to follow the ruminating mind. In relating the path of her own desire, our narrator asks: “Is this story actually going anywhere? And is this even a story?”—cognisant of the limits of narrative in pinning down unruly desire. In Mia Spangenberg’s translation, Siasio’s virtuosity and playfulness is on full display. “Small Crescendos” is a perfect addition to your reading list this Women in Translation Month. 

“As a reader and translator, I’m enchanted by the lightness of Saisio’s prose and its rhythm and pacing, but it also poses a challenge, since Finnish is an agglutinative language and more concise than English. During revision, I focused on reading the translation out loud, as if it were a spoken word piece. Finnish can exhibit a gender fluidity that does not exist in English (there are no gendered pronouns as “hän” refers to both he and she), which may seem radical but is simply a tolerance for knowing less about people’s gender in writing. However, when Saisio writes about her love affair with an actor, I ultimately chose the word “actress” because it is otherwise easy to assume that Saisio is describing a heterosexual relationship when she is in fact not. This would be clear to most Finnish readers as Saisio came out publicly as a lesbian in the 1990s and has long advocated for LGBTQ+ rights in Finland.”

— Mia Spangenberg

When a wave crashes against a rocky shore, it sprays
glistening pearls of water into the air. Like small crescendos.

A gaze. One is at the bottom of the stairs, and another is descending
the stairs.
There’s a gaze, and the beginning and ending of a relationship are in that
   gaze, with a slight
acceleration in the middle, an accelerando.

A hand grips a pole on the tram. It’s a man’s
hand, slender and beautiful, meant for some instrument, maybe
a cello or viola.
I place my hand beneath his and squeeze the pole.
And yes!
The cellist’s hand slides down the pole and covers my own. Oh those long,
thrilling seconds between stops!

And that gaze again. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Ra Heeduk

July 27, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Emily Bettencourt

What exactly was seditious about these days of love?

With nine books of poetry to her name, Ra Heeduk—winner of the Midang Literary Award in 2014—has worked with the genre to interrogate the personal and the political since the 1980s. Yet, in one of her more recent poems, her persona confesses: “Here, poetry grows to resemble hieroglyphics // Dirt, not language, rustles in my mouth.” It is as if, after decades of prolific output, poetry becomes a stranger, turns suddenly into an enigma. As translator Emily Bettencourt explains below, these poems—drawn from Ra’s 2018 collection, Codename Poetry—are urgent reflections on the role of the writer in shaping culture and politics at a time when this very figure is met with suspicion. For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we are proud to present three poems that resonate with what Brecht famously said about art in dark times, that “Yes, there will be singing. / About the dark times.” 

“Codename Poetry was published at the end of 2018, but to fully understand the context of the collection, it’s better to go back to April 16, 2014, when the Sewol Ferry sank off the western coast of Korea. What followed was a dark period during which many poets and writers felt they were incapable of creating meaningful work in the wake of such a disaster—what could they possibly write that would even begin to touch their cultural grief? In the following years, former president Park enacted a cultural blacklist where creatives who criticized her government were stripped of funding and publishers who touched their work were shut down. Even the poets who felt like they could create meaningful and critical work following the disaster feared being blacklisted. In March 2017, Park was impeached and the blacklist ended. In this context, Codename Poetry contains an incisive commentary on the Sewol Ferry disaster itself, even as it reflects on other tragedies and the universality of grief. In the author’s note to the collection, Ra writes that because her life has been ravaged by teeth and claws, the words inside her have grown claws as well; this collection is her attempt to set them free. To me, this collection is an urgent reflection on the role of poetry and art in politics and society, as well as on the bonds formed by shared suffering—a reflection that is just as necessary today as it was three years ago.” 

— Emily Bettencourt

Codename Poetry1

They trapped him inside a file called “Poetry”
because they believed even lyric poems to be seditious

The file likely contained the following:

A handful of hair
A few pieces of fingernail
A hand towel with a frayed corner
A plaid jacket
An old leather bag and a few books
A spoon and a fork
A bundle of edited manuscripts
A pair of silver-rimmed glasses in a green case
A bottle of silence
A few leaves from the forest floor

His body odor left on bandages was bottled in glass
and everything that comprised him
likely went into the file called “Poetry”

Along with his poems, of course
They would have recorded even these things:

What bulbs he planted in his flowerbed
How many letters he received from abroad
What he talked about with a thrush in the forest
How he looked at the moth asleep on the hem of his shirt
How many buckets of water he drew per day
With whom he drank jasmine tea
Which books he borrowed from the library
What he talked about with his students in class
Why he stopped on the path as he walked home at sunset
What expression he wore as he crossed the border

What exactly was seditious about these days of love?

What they feared
was that he carried words that could open minds,
that he lived attending to the roots of the heart,
and that even as he labored as a locksmith
he never stopped writing poetry

Poems released from Codename “Poetry”
now glitter quietly in the sunlight

Out from between the sentences that endured his life,
someone is walking, barefoot, wearing no shadow READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “It Was Then That I Lost That Child” by Carla Bessa

July 20, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Elton Uliana

And so then, I had: my children, I had: seven children, I mean: six

The fate of a working class mother who loses her child is the focus of this week’s Translation Tuesday, which features an unforgettable experiment with the short story form. Devised through a verbatim technique, Carla Bessa—actress, director, and winner of Brazil’s most prestigious literary award, the Jabuti Prize—mines the genre for its dramatic possibilities. Bessa’s moving story switches deftly between a confessional monologue with eclectic punctuation that lends the mother’s voice a searing, staccato quality and, on the other hand, a set of intricate stage movements revolving around a domestic scene. The effect is a casual meeting of tragedy and mundanity. Indeed, for translator Elton Uliana, this story conveys “a reality of marginality and crime which is becoming increasingly prevalent in Brazil, particularly with the rise of far-right politics, its contempt for and disenfranchising of the lower classes.” This social commentary is achieved with great formal and emotional intensity in “It Was Then That I Lost That Child.” 

(She takes the chicken out of the freezer and puts it in the microwave. She rinses the thermos with boiling water, she puts the filter holder over the mouth of the flask, she places the paper filter in the holder and fills it with coffee powder, five level soup spoons.)

And so then, I had: my children, I had: seven children, I mean: six. Because: the one who got killed, I never really got to raise him. I couldn’t. I only: I only had him for the first month, then his father: stole my child from me, yes, it was his father: he kidnapped my boy.

(She pours the hot water carefully over the coffee until the filter is full. She stops, and waits for the water to seep through. The microwave beeps. With the kettle in one hand she goes to the microwave, presses the button that opens the door to remove the chicken. She realises that she has only one hand free and pauses.)

He beat me up. I’ve got the scars here on my face, see, ruined: it was him. That’s why I’ve got a face like this, all: destroyed, have a look. 

(She pours more water on the coffee, she stops and waits.)

He stole my son, and: I reported him. And so: it was his mother that had to look after my son. He and his mother raised my son, but: they never let me visit him. Then: I took them to court again: and I won: I won the right to see my own son. A right that was already mine. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Five Poems from The Book of Absence by Alireza Roshan

July 13, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Erfan Mojib and Gary Gach

You did to me / what black mulberries / do to fingertips

This week’s Translation Tuesday features a haunting sequence of short poems by the Tehran-born Alireza Roshan. Known widely as “a poet without a book,” Roshan began writing these brief poems on the Internet around 2008, and subsequently gained a popular readership for his evocative verses. For that reason, we may think of these poems as subsisting on a specific cultural moment when the tweet started to be conceived as a unit of thought. On the other hand, these poems can also be said to draw on the tradition of the haiku form that has made its way through world poetics. In Gary Gach and Erfan Mojib’s translation, these poems from The Book of Absence (where Roshan’s poems were eventually collected) flicker dramatically into existence and—in their quick apprehension of a strange image—dissipate, only to have their absence linger in the mind of the reader.

You did to me
what black mulberries
do to fingertips

*

No matter how many windows
I open—darkness
won’t leave my home

*

Solitude
is an invisible thread
which begins from the tip of your toe
encircles the earth
then reaches your heel READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Four Poems by Pedro Mir

July 6, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Jonathan Cohen

Will you admit you gave me a home / in the very inside of a fruit?

Pedro Mir (1913–2000), former poet laureate of the Dominican Republic, is often compared to Pablo Neruda and Derek Walcott for his lyricism and social engagement. Yet, as Jonathan Cohen demonstrates in his award-winning essay (selected by J.M. Coetzee for Asymptote’s Writers on Writers contest), Mir remains relatively obscure in the Anglophone world. In his essay, Cohen introduces us to this “Whitman of the Caribbean” who, at home and in exile, sang resplendently of the multitudes of islands and peoples in his fiercely political register. Ahead of Mir’s death anniversary on July 11, we are proud to showcase four poems translated by Cohen that reveal another face of Mir’s diamantine poetic personae, this time: the passionate lover, the rhapsodic suitor, the ecstatic agonizer. With surrealistic turns of phrases that surrender to an impassioned dream logic, these verses from his 1969 collection, Poemas de buen amor . . . y a veces de fantasía (Poems of Good Love . . . and Sometimes Fantasy), are charged with an eroticism not only for his beloved subject, but for language too and its capacity for image-making. They attest to why Mir should be counted amongst the best poets of the twentieth century. 

“Translating Pedro Mir’s love poems into English is both a critical and creative challenge. Like all his work, these poems are finely wrought constructions. The task for me was painful at times because discerning the exact meaning of certain words racked my brain, especially in surrealistic passages. The translator must often choose one over several possibilities. Not only that, the rhymes and metrics of the traditional poetic forms that Mir uses so beautifully, as in his ‘Sonnet of the Grateful Girl,’ are impossible to recreate without padding. Translation of these poems, at best, is an approximation. Yet it still is possible to make real poems in English, using Mir’s work as a blueprint, that are faithful to his verse—poems that give Anglophone readers the experience of the potent lyricism and originality of his voice, poems that sound like him and convey his intent. This has been my goal.”

— Jonathan Cohen

Invitation

To begin I offer you
                a bouquet of words
as an illustration and firelight and bubbling of a spring.
Then I give you the warmth of my hands
for the shiver of your belly.
Then I give you the chemistry of my blood
coursed through all the viaducts of oxygen
and the lime and nerves of my teeth.
And in addition my nutrients
                my iodine and my magnesium
my phosphorus and my salt
                my albumin and my sand.
And plus I give you
                my face dissolved
at the temperature of my genes
or my family.

And you won’t need anything more to receive
and keep forever
and maybe sob over for a brief moment
so as to acknowledge that now
that now you are saved from oblivion
and you are invulnerable to death. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Leaf” by Azza Maghur

June 29, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Dr. Safa Elnaili

I feared if I touched the leaf, it would either sting me, or its light would run through my body and melt me instantly

Can the story of a life be told through a single moment? What would it mean to, in William Blake’s words, “see a World in a Grain of Sand”? In Azza Maghur’s story, a single luminous leaf from a man’s childhood comes to define his entire life. Maghur’s prose is spare and understated; it is given a lovely cadence in Dr. Safa Elnaili’s translation, which lures the reader into a moment of beauty that is given a telescopic significance in the narrator’s reminiscence. Published in Arabic at the start of this year, this quiet piece received much praise for its resonances with reader’s experiences of the pandemic—its sensitivity to the tactile world, for instance, when a world was reckoning with the potency of touch.

All the rays of sunlight that day filtered through the trees onto a single leaf.

I swore to Mother that the sun rested on one leaf. I witnessed it shine as brightly as day against the dimness of its mother tree.

Mother was standing in front of the kitchen sink. She pulled her wet hands from under the running faucet, wiped them on the sides of her dress, and then smiled. She told me I was a little boy with a wild imagination. I had no idea whether I should give rein to my imagination or let it take me away on its wings.

I tell you this story because that leaf and my soul have become inseparable since that day. I searched for it my entire life. It was the size of my hand or slightly bigger, dark green, and so thick that even light couldn’t pass through it. Water droplets could rest on it undisturbed.

My only recollection of the tree was that its aura was dim, almost black. I learned as I grew up It must’ve been an emerald green tree, but I only remember the one particular leaf that soaked in the sun and captured all its strings of light as if it were planning to make something out of them. I reckon it’s the reason the tree was so dim.

I’ve roamed this earth; I’ve visited cities, villages, farmlands, and forests in search of the leaf but never found or seen anything that resembled it.

The sun’s light is boundless. It shines on earth with a fair and steady rotation, inflames the edges of leaves and homes, and draws shapes on sidewalks and rooftops. Its light and warmth sneak into concrete buildings and even shine through the tiniest holes in shirts or carvings on the soles of shoes. It stretches into the entrance of a dark cave but never dares to travel beyond it. Its light wrestles shadows. When it’s time to set, it departs leisurely, and its rays shine over the horizon. It yawns with heavy eyes and then sleeps until dawn to rise again.

I drove my car, parked it in the shade under a tree, and hopelessly looked for the leaf. I walked into forests and farms and searched for it among trees and bushes and even between the leaves of fruits but could never find it. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Airports” by Daniel Saldaña París

June 22, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Louis Sanger

on horseback / caught between one era and another

Selected in 2017 as one out of thirty-nine most promising Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine, acclaimed Mexican writer Daniel Saldaña París is no stranger to our pages—read our review of his “exquisite” novel, Ramifications, for a start. This Translation Tuesday, we introduce to our readers another facet of Saldaña París, with a curious aviation-themed poem from the collection La máquina autobiográfica rendered in Louis Sanger’s translation. Curious because nothing takes flight: the poem’s airports are empty, its turbines are violent. What soars instead is the poem’s dynamic syntax which zigzags through a word’s widening valences, where Saldaña París defamiliarises for us the everyday uses of the word and the world. There is no timelier moment than today to reconsider what we know of the poem’s titular space.  

Airports

(1)

Empty airports.
Themselves, I mean.
But also: with hundreds.
Hundreds who could.
Or could have been, but weren’t.

Airports themselves, no?
containing all times.

What is there to say about “grain of the voice”—seed:
say the truth
about the unsaid. (Listen.)

For example, a voice that sows fields of sorghum
in front of
unorganized fields:
cities seen from above.
The plane does what it has to, like I said,
better late, even late in the day
with a sun that sets this late:
all I love
is visible, and growing old. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from I Will Not Go Back by Caspar Eric

June 15, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Matt Travers

I can say nothing / that he himself / couldn’t say better, / say angrier

When the coronavirus struck Denmark in the early months of 2020, award-winning poet Caspar Eric adopted the practice of writing a poem a day for eighty days. Published eventually in Danish as I Will Not Go Back (Gyldendal, 2020), Eric’s practice finds in poetry the potential for serving as a mode of immediate witness to the unfolding of pandemic time and its political contexts. This Translation Tuesday, Matt Travers translates the poem Eric had written on Day 56, which eulogises the suicide of the Danish-Palestinian poet and political activist, Yahya Hassan, whose writing is praised for attesting to the link between “local violence with global violence” in his nominee citation for the 2020 Nordic Council Literature Prize. Written in one long, unbroken stanza, Eric’s voice pulses with a sharp political grief, and is a moving document to Hassan’s enduring legacy in literature as in politics.

DAY 56                                      228 hospitalised

I have to remind myself
that the crisis is here,
I cannot just
jump on the train to Aarhus.
They streamed Yahya’s funeral
on ekstrabladet.dk,
my thoughts are with his family,
my thoughts are with his loved ones.
And fuck those idiots
who whined on Facebook
about people not appearing
to keep proper distance.
Even on the day of mourning
Muslims are being shamed.
The racist narratives
lurking under the LCD,
fuck those people,
fuck their logics.
A hand in the air
for the poems of the impossible,
it is impossible to aim
towards the sentimental
without limiting
a boy to a poet
or to limit
the poet to a boy.
Nothing will ever be
the same again.
The moon’s corona
shone spiteful and beautiful.
I hammered down on the table,
dull tears,
in his own “Moonpoem,”
as salve and salvation,
he would not be killed
for nothing.
No, no one should die
for the majority’s peace.
I can say nothing
that he himself
couldn’t say better,
say angrier,
underneath his fury
a furious love.
I have already
quarreled with Ada
about what we can say
how it should be said.
It is a poor consolation
that everything has now changed.
What I miss
is also a young
human’s future,
the violence in the poems.
But the violence in the poems
is not only of the poems,
they are also the boy’s
and also his hands.
Everyone wants
A more real reality;
windows in the forehead,
concrete in the mouth.
Then they complain of the pain,
then they want it raw.
In with the shit
in the broken literature,
as long as the break
remains in the lines,
so we can stand on the sides
and clap very softly.
In these lonely minutes
it is a Brøndby fan,
let’s just call him Pervez,
who is my biggest ally.
Now we must lay
the identities in a coma,
try to find
a community
while the fire still
burns wildly.
Never let it go out,
never let it heat up.
Never let it heat up
a political project
if the project isn’t
also of doubt,
also of poetry,
like smoke forcing itself
down in the lungs,
forcing them to hack up
new melodies
in the petrified voices.

Translated from the Danish by Matt Travers

Caspar Eric was born in 1987 and studied Comparative Literature at the University of Copenhagen. He has written five collections of poetry (7/11, Nike, Avatar, All What You Own, and I Will Not Go Back — Poems from the days with COVID-19), and written a well-received experimental pop adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (#amlet). Nike, his long autobiographical poem whose starting point began with his own handicap and which reflects on the value of living with a disability in a hyper-mediated society, won the Danish Michael Strunge Prize, and Sherilyn Hellberg’s English translation won the Leif & Inger Sjöberg Award from the American-Scandinavian Foundation. Eric’s fifth collection, I Will Not Go Back — Poems from the days with COVID-19, published in November 2020, aimed to outlast the COVID disaster with one poem a day for the first eighty days. He has also translated Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel into Danish. 

Matt Travers is a writer based in Aarhus, Denmark. He has published poetry, reviews and translations with 3:AM Magazine, Zarf Poetry, Overground Underground, Firmament, and is currently working on the English translation of Søren R. Fauth’s Moloch: The Story Of My Rage.

*****

Read more from Translation Tuesday on the Asymptote blog: