Translations

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from All the Birds in the Sky by Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild

October 26, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith

Before the big fire, they had roosted in the houses on land, but now most houses are at sea.

Published on the day Denmark entered lockdown, Danish writer Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild’s award-winning novel All the Birds in the Sky follows a young, nameless protagonist who—in the submerged wasteland of a post-apocalyptic world—has to find her bearings in this strange landscape alone. The excerpt we are featuring this Translation Tuesday poignantly depicts a moment of aphasia that our narrator experiences as she attempts to grasp the language of her new world in all its ineffability. In a prose style that captures both the stillness of its depopulated setting and the urgency of our human desire for home, Haslund-Gjerrild’s voice is a unique one in the pages of climate fiction today. Equally pertinent is how, as co-translators Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell show us, this novel demonstrates the role that words and translation can have at a time when the ground we stand on has never been more uncertain.

“All the Birds in the Sky begins with the wind reaching into a house and touching all the things inside—creating a sort of inventory, like a finger which points and names: knife, shovel, blankets, shoes, pails of grain, leaves. This taxonomizing wind awakens the main character, a young girl who is, we come to understand, the last human left on earth. It is a word that pulls her out of the murky depths of her slumber: why—a word that demands an answer, an explanation, a story. She uses word chains and associations to try to hold on, making up new terms for the ones she has forgotten. 

As translators, we too search for words. In a work about losing language, our task was to find a vocabulary for and recreate the voice of a girl who was losing hers. The words themselves were important, of course: Haslund-Gjerrild’s language is much like the wind in this novel—simple and unadorned, it functions to reach out and touch, to grasp and hold. But even more central to this endeavor was the musicality of the text—its rhythm and movement. The girl’s journey in these first pages is felt as the steady beat of walking, the fluidity of thought, the slippage of memory, the momentum of searching. Much of the translation therefore came together not on the page, but by being spoken aloud. We read out the text, letting its sound and rhythm guide our choices—this word or that, a comma here or there, one sentence or two.”

—Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell

Something darts past her, quick. Then again. Like a twitch in her eyelids. When she opens her eyes, the blue is full of black knives that draw lines between the houses. There’s a shrieking in her ears, a squealing, like knives being whetted, that’s how sharp the tongues and wings of the black cloud are, now drawing circles and figure-eights above her. Below her, the gentle thumping of the sea.

She lies there a little longer and tries to remember what Um called those birds. Their flat, metallic cries ring in her ears. A flock of flying birds that can say only one thing, which they repeat, again and again and again. She has always wondered what could be so important for them to say that a single word, almost just a scream, could suffice for an entire life. She can’t imagine what it might be. Maybe here-here-here-here.

Other birds prefer to fly alone, like the heron, which just is as it is. A quiet and precise bird. If she sees a heron staring at the water, she stops too and waits motionlessly with her net in hand. The heron is so still it stops time, not a single feather quivers. Only the rings of the raindrops in the water reveal that time is passing as usual, but then, a loud splash, and the next second the fish is in its beak. It swallows its catch whole and resumes its waiting. When it finally does say something, it speaks with the same precision with which it waits; a few hoarse calls that echo between the houses before it falls silent again.

Meanwhile, the little shriekbirds, maybe that’s what she should call them since she can’t think of the word, fly ceaselessly and cry ceaselessly. They always fly together, never alone, so there’s really no need for them to constantly call each other. Perhaps they’re not calling, perhaps they’re just shrieking us-us-us, for joy of flying together as one.

The shade is deep and the street is narrow, but apart from the quick, black slashes of birds, the strip of sky above her is blue. She stands and folds up the blanket. One of the birds shoots past her ear while she winds the tether around the door handle. Carefully she poles out onto the street, into the little birds’ morning frenzy. Um loved them, real city birds, Um said. Before the big fire, they had roosted in the houses on land, but now most houses are at sea. They lay their tiny eggs in nests of seaweed, grass and feathers in the houses’ cabinets and drawers, fly up and down the streets and over the rooftops, around and around until they crash into the windows. Sometimes the glass breaks and the bird hurtles into the house like a soft rock, but most often the glass holds and the bird tumbles into the water. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Four Poems by Jan Skácel

October 19, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Daniela Kukrechtová

when apricots sweeten / and rye hardens in the fields

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you four poems by one of the most widely acclaimed Czech poets of the twentieth century. These poems by Jan Skácel, recipient of the Petrarch Prize for Poetry, rendered in Daniela Kukrechtová’s translation, achieve a stunning potency in their brevity, evoking the beauty of the Moravian landscape that cycles through the seasons and its landscapes. In the short space of the poem, Skácel’s poems revel in the incongruity of his images and often unravel in their conclusions to a surprising revelation. 

South Moravia 

Let whoever wants to poke about in our blames;
marvelous are the nights on the plains,
when apricots sweeten
and rye hardens in the fields.

When night is tall, when from the night gallows
a man hangs,
by the road he stole 

love from someone and he is hanging for theft.

Autumn in the City 

Here is a city, squares and houses,
and also girls with chignons on their heads,
in which wind, a mouse, and desire dwell.

And also there is autumn.

And somewhere high above, there is the sun.
Dug in a cloud like a claw in a horse’s heart. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Aisha Al Saifi

October 12, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Ali Al Rawahi

A fleeting dream, moving like a train, is on my tail

Drawn from a collection as provocatively titled as I Don’t Love My Father, this Translation Tuesday features two poems by the Omani poet Aisha Al Saifi who, at a young age, has established herself as a major voice within contemporary Omani poetry. Be it her clarion call to her fellow countrywomen (“[who] speak like singing”) or when she embodies the persona of a prophet (one who “[grows] bigger / Like a poem composed by an intoxicated poet”)—Aisha’s verse is driven by a narrative propulsion that expands her words into a compelling world. In Ali Al Rawahi’s translation, this bold voice which at each turn of phrase manages to be lyrical and declarative at once is a powerful expression of poetry’s ability to both move and mobilise. 

My Countrywomen 

My countrywomen who
encompass my blood with poems
and rapture
and prayers
My countrywomen
whose anklets
are like doves over the water
And their eyes are mountain dews in the remains

My countrywomen
Who speak like singing
And offer their pains to passersby 

The women … they are my friends
tired from
Masculine absurdity
And from anguish
that does not distinguish between
The temporary self from the eternal soul 

who trade their disappointments
For a cup of chamomile tea in the morning
And with a single piece of walnut
And a confectioned trail of words  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Stranger’s Life” by Yu Müller

September 28, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Yu Müller

A four-part palindromic poem written and translated from the Chinese by Yu Müller

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you a four-part impressionistic poem translated and written by Yu Müller. Instead of yielding to the seeming untranslatability of the palindrome in Chinese, Müller’s act of self-translation invents a curious way out of the original poem’s stubbornness towards any attempted act of linguistic border-crossing. As the English’s double translation would have it: when one has “agreed to write poems,” they should have “no worries about poetry”—for it can be infinite malleable. Hear from Müller as she describes how the poem arose from a pedagogical encounter, which in turn teaches us what creative acts of translation can achieve. 

“Stranger’s Life” is a series of poems that hold a special place in my heart. While teaching, I wrote Chinese on the white board, and when my eyes were forced to look at them backwards, it felt like tracing back the words to another reality from a different perspective. That’s when I indulged myself in collecting those altered palindromic words in Chinese and composing poems. However, in the attempt to translate them into English, translation became inadequate because it is impossible to retain the original form of the altered palindrome style from Chinese. As a compromise, I provided two ways of reading the poems in English—left to right and top to bottom and then backwards, but one can try to read them in a “zigzag” or “S-shaped” manner as well.”

—Yu Müller

Stranger’s Life

 

i

adult and me
agreed to write poems—
after car moves, then make faraway departure

sentimental Shanxi
family members get tough on you
what if I

steep myself in liquor on the Broken Bridge
and write books abroad in heartaches

listen
to the singing of boys and girls
an ode to each other while young

the Tomb Sweeping Day
                                       bringing debut homage to the grave mound
wind sweeps
                    rain pours
                                    snow buries
are you afraid?

—

afraid of you?
                        Great Snow
       heavy rain
gale

turn around at the grave mound
moral integrity of Ming & Qing dynasty

teenagers who sing praises to each other
chanting girls and boys
listen

I don’t want
you to make things difficult for others
West Mountain’s sentimentality

walk far, then start driving
—no worries about poetry
me and the People’s Congress

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Extract from House of Fashion by Maimu Berg

September 21, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by D. E. Hurford

These trends tended to be the same as the trends available in the West a year before, just that the designs had been made more boring and less sexy

This Translation Tuesday, enter the circles that defined Soviet-era fashion with Estonian novelist and ex-journalist Maimu Berg, whose novel House of Fashion fictionalises the strange sartorial world that she herself had inhabited when she worked for the Tallinn-based fashion magazine Siluett. In these extracts, we follow the wide-eyed Betti as she cavorts with a cast of fashion designers, post-censors from the Ministry of Culture, models and photographers, all this time wryly defending her role as a writer in this grand, far-flung industry. With D. E. Hurford’s translation, the energy of a lesser-known aspect in Soviet history is unveiled to English readers who are sure to be baffled by some of these playful anecdotes and the inside scoop.

Soviet Fashion. 

To Moscow, to Moscow.

Drug-addict models.

Everyone who lived in the Soviet Union nurtured a pious dream of visiting Moscow. At least that was what most Muscovites thought. When an invitation was sent from Moscow to the houses of fashion in, say, Tashkent or Alma-Ata, to come and see the latest developments in Soviet fashion, scuffles would break out. Anyone with even the smallest bit of status felt that she should be the one to go to Moscow, the navel of the world, where smoked sausage, tinned crab, Polish scent, East German hair products, mother-of-pearl lipstick, and a preposterous selection of handbags, jumpers and winter boots could be bought. She should be the one who, after a dull and tedious meeting at the Soviet Union’s head house of fashion, should get to trudge through crowded tunnels full of pongy dour people and go “from GUM to TsUM” (the two big Moscow department stores of the time) and to fabled shops like Vanda, Vlasta and Leipzig, where the peoples’ republics sold their own products, mainly cosmetics. No shopper really thought about the actual meaning of “people’s republic”; any Soviet woman who was the least clued-up associated the phrase with those particular stores near the centre of Moscow. In the morning before these wondrous shops opened, there would be a queue of women patiently snaking its way in front of the doors. Technically the queuing had started back in their home cities—the provincial houses of fashion had waiting lists for those wanting a trip to Moscow and there could be a wait of up to three or four years before it was your turn.

A similar sort of passion also inflamed the Tallinn House of Fashion in a minor way, but inversely. Usually, at the coldest point of the year, no one had any desire to trundle off in the train to Moscow, go to considerable trouble to stay at a hotel (you might well have made a reservation, but that didn’t guarantee you anything), visit all the shops needed to work through the order list given to you by friends and colleagues, cover huge distances by metro and trolleybus, and doze off in lectures presenting the clothing models redesigned by Moscow fashion designers and stylised to fit Soviet fashion, accompanied by some silly nonsense about the latest trends in Soviet fashion. These trends tended to be the same as the trends available in the West a year before, just that the designs had been made more boring and less sexy. Visiting Moscow was nice when it was warm and when fashion shows were on the agenda, whether those of the Moscow house of fashion or, even better, smaller fashion shows by different embassies, or by some Western firm that had gone to the trouble and expense of coming to the bleak plains of Sarmatia in the hope of sooner or later striking it lucky and the vast, gaping emptiness of the Russian market opening up just for them.

The first time Betti ended up in Moscow as a staff member at the Tallinn House of Fashion she travelled with head designer Milla Säga, a striking lady, tall, alert and strong, with a completely un-Estonian nose and stylishly dressed, as befitted her profession, and on that occasion dressed particularly strikingly. They headed for Hotel Berlin, whose heyday was long past—the last time there had been carp swimming in the marble basin of its fountain, for guests to select one and get most of it at a formal dinner in the ostentatiously handsome hotel restaurant, had probably been during Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s. By now, however, the carp had long been eaten and the basin drained; now the hotel lobby stank of people and grain coffee over-sweetened with condensed milk—breakfast was being served. There was no hope of getting a room so early, but even more tragically, it seemed no reservation for the Tallinn House of Fashion could be found, even though the receptionist flicked back and forth through the worn bookings diary and even rang somewhere to ask. 

Milla Säga, this sparkling lady who spoke Russian with an Estonian accent that sounded sweet in Betti’s ears and who was generally quite loud anyway, sharpened the tone by pointing to the dried-up fountain and informing all who wished to hear that it was “definitely here that she’d booked”. By an unfortunate error of Russian verb conjugation, however, she managed to inform everyone that it was definitely here she’d peed. The receptionist heroically stifled the laugh that emerged as her mind formed an image of the tall, elegant and self-confident Milla Säga tinkling the marble of the hotel fountain. However, she did understand what Säga meant to say, which was that she had personally sent the hotel a letter asking to book rooms for us. On this occasion, a Baltic accent was useful; without it the phone call probably wouldn’t have been made, and after a lot of faffing around and handing out copies of Siluett magazine (and some 25-rouble notes “getting lost” between their pages) Milla and Betti finally got the longed-for keys and clattered up in the lift to their floor.  READ MORE…

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…