Translations

Translation Tuesday: “Gogol” by Musa Effendi

January 5, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Musa Effendi

Try to understand his situation by this single explanation—he couldn’t hug anyone.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a disabled youth’s love of football is hindered by his supposed friends in Musa Efendi’s short story “Gogol.” Though our narrator attempts to convince us (or perhaps himself) of his empathy for his friend Gogol, it’s not long before the petty worries of children mirror the cruel pragmatism of the adult world, all at the expense of their friend’s wishes. Through deceptively simple prose, we’re taken through a string of childhood vignettes chronicling the titular character’s ostracization. The narrator’s excuses, deflected upon the reader (“You would do the same thing, too”) segues into a haunting and almost surreal final image, a scene tinged by the narrator’s remorse and subdued sense of awe.

“Turtles can fly.”
–Bahman Ghobadi

I do not like Balzac-style narratives; I do want to know a lot, yet I never dreamed of seeing everything. So I choose to talk about the near side of the Moon.

 

*

We talked about this with the guys during the nights before the actual play. Despite the name of the game, hands play an important role in football; it is the hands that help you speed up when you are running. It is the hands that help you to keep your rival away when you have the ball. It is the hands that help the goalkeeper to not let the ball pass through the door. In football, you get penalized because of a hand, but you can’t play without it either. Elchin was the one who told us all this. This was the reason we didn’t let Gogol play and assigned him as commentator of the game instead. We called him Gogol because while commentating the game, he used to get excited when a goal was scored and would make a noise like this: Go-go-go-gooooal!

He wasn’t stammering. It is just that he didn’t have hands. Try to understand his situation by this single explanation—he couldn’t hug anyone.

*

Our yard was surrounded by the neighborhood of strong football teams. There was Boka’s team on the opposite street (I don’t remember the name of it); they used to play very well. Nemeczek, Csónakos played in his team as well. Timur and his team were another bunch of strong players. So we didn’t have a chance to actually let Gogol join us in the game. You would do the same thing, too; for us, our games were more like training. But it would be waste of time to try him out by giving him a chance to play. True, his loss was greater than ours, but it is not worth sacrificing or compromising in such matters. Grown-ups do this, too—they prefer to save time and money rather than noticing other people’s losses. Necessity of life—my father would say.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Juan Andrés García Román

December 15, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Nick Rattner

You’re the blonde girl who all morning long turns her desk like a sunflower.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, the awe and dread of winter are at once historical and timeless in these selections by Spanish poet, translator, and scholar Juan Andrés García Román. In “The Hour,” a looming sense of nostalgia-fuelled Weltschmerz—allegorized here as passing seasons—prompts our speaker to recognize the fleeting joy of life and youth, while also imploring the importance of “staying” in the face of melancholy. In “For the First Time, You Feel Sad (Belisarius Sends His Troops Up Into the Trees),” our speaker deploys allusions and anachronisms—everything from Byzantium military history to Roman mythology to contemporary French children’s literature—to illustrate the love and longing of a winter-born absence. The cerebral maximalism of García Román’s verse is done justice here by Nick Rattner’s adroit translation of the poet’s layered metaphors and embedded historical/literary references. A learned take on the season-change poem which warrants a careful, meditative read.

The Hour

for Antonio Mochón

Who, after tossing and turning a winter
night while snow
covered the peaks, honored the refrain,
the brave old songs,
and the postcards of mountains
displayed in mountain lodges,
who, I say, did not this way pass
through a cemetery and, feeling a quaver
in their legs, partly from
fatigue of another world,
and partly to shield against wind and lightning,
did not slip themselves into an empty niche
to wait out the storm, and from this feel
suddenly tired of the path, READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Kōtarō Takamura

December 8, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Leanne Ogasawara

Chieko, who has become an element, / Is even now within my flesh, smiling at me

Master poet and sculptor Takamura Kotaro (1883-1956) candidly explores his grief and longing in these selections from the Chieko Poems, our pick for this week’s Translation Tuesday. As translator Leanne Ogasawara writes: “The Chieko Poems tell the story of the poet’s love for his wife. Reading the anthology chronologically, we begin with poems that describe the passion of their early romance and elopement against the wishes of their parents, following along as the poems become concerned with the trauma of Chieko’s mental illness and early death in 1938. Even after she is gone, Chieko remained the central figure in Kotaro’s life, and he would continue to write poem after poem about her. [. . .] The Chieko Poems are unforgettable as much for their early romance and passion as for the sense of loss and recovery expressed in the later poems. Kotaro slowly came to take comfort in this idea that through her death, Chieko returned to nature becoming imbued in all the things around him—even within his own body.” The selections below are three poems written after Chieko’s death. Kotaro’s sorrow accompanies his longing and desire as the speaker fixates on the beauty of his beloved’s physical form. With imagery that is at once reverential and abject, the speaker views his beloved’s body as something inhabiting both the natural and spiritual worlds.

A Desolate Homecoming

Chieko, who wanted to return home so badly
Has come home dead.
Late one October night, I sweep a small corner
   of the empty atelier
Cleaning, purifying
There I place Chieko.
And in front of this lifeless body
I remain standing a long time.
Someone turns the screen upside down.
Someone lights the incense.
Someone puts makeup on Chieko.
Things somehow get done.
As the sun rises and then sets
The house grows busy, buried in flowers
There is something like a funeral
Then, Chieko is gone.
And I stand alone
      in this now empty and dark atelier.
Tonight people say the full moon is beautiful READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “General Treatise on Counter-attacks” by Aniela Rodríguez

December 1, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Elizabeth Bryer

I preferred to make my own way. To let the world know how much is lost with a poor pass, and how much is gained with a good shot.

An aspiring footballer’s obsession with his former hero becomes an all-consuming quest for revenge in Aniela Rodríguez’s cerebral short story “A General Treatise on Counter-attacks,” our pick for this week’s Translation Tuesday. Our narrator is a small-town youth who idolizes football star Güero Hidalgo, but what begins as adoration quickly turns to loathing after a tragic accident. Years pass, Hidalgo’s greatness falters, yet our protagonist never strays from his mission to murder the disgraced footballer, a task that becomes less a heroic act of justice and more an unmerciful act of a disappointed fanatic. Rodríguez’s mature and emotionally complex subversion of the revenge genre forces us to connect the meaning of “pathos” with the varied meanings of “pathetic,” demonstrating the dangers of meeting your heroes—and the dangers of meeting your fans.

In this story Güero Hidalgo dies. I told my mother when I started writing, but she didn’t believe me: she rolled her eyes and looked at the ceiling, wondering aloud when she should turn off the soup. What a shame, she said, indifferent, and kept moving the spoon in circles. Nobody wants to hear a story in which the biggest football star that this country had ever produced is stabbed to death with an old knife blade.

In the story, Güero crashes his Cadillac into a bus full of passengers, delaying a good number of people. The bus has come from la Merced; atop it ride vendors who head for Chiapas every week in search of Zoque handicrafts at the best prices. So, the best part: Güero gets out of his impeccable latest model, expecting to fix everything with an autograph. But that’s not how it goes down. He has words with the driver and in amidst the irate vendors the commotion gets serious. Tempers flare, women shout. A man in a leather jacket steps forward. Nobody pays attention. He walks towards Güero, looks him in the eye and plunges a dagger into his chest. Nobody does anything. Silence. Before sticking the knife into him, the man says: Thanks for the penalty, moron. Güero lies face up on the ground, trying not to hear the words that will curtail his existence forever. The story ends like this, with my mother reaching for the wooden spoon to stir the noodle soup. But this story isn’t about Güero Hildalgo now, is it?

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Sleight of Hand” by Arkady Averchenko

November 24, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Siân Valvis

I felt like a fraud in front of this honest person, who with the purest of hearts believed my phoney hand.

A palm-reading leads a man to rationalize his life into absurdity in Arkady Averchenko’s satirical short story “Sleight of Hand,” our pick for this week’s Translation Tuesday. First published in Russia in 1912, the story follows a credulous yet self-assured man as he entertains one ridiculous conclusion after another while visiting a palm-reader. Our protagonist’s tone fuels much of the comedy, lending an almost fabulist tone that would seem cartoonish if our protagonist’s gullibility weren’t so commonplace. In a world of conspiracy theories and “alternative facts,” Averchenko’s century-old story probes a genuinely timeless phenomenon with his trademark sardonicism, an attempt at what we might call “epistemological humor.”

“You absolutely must visit this palm-reader” said my uncle. “He can tell your past, present and future—and he’s surprisingly accurate too! He told me, for example, that I would die in fifteen years.”

“I wouldn’t call that ‘surprisingly accurate,’” I objected. “We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we?”

“Wait for what?”

“Well, wait fifteen years. And if he does turn out to be right, then I certainly will have to visit him.”

“Ah, but what if he dies before then?” asked my uncle.

I paused for thought. Indeed, the death of this extraordinary person would leave me in something of a bind . . . If he were to kick the bucket, I’d find myself “blind”: unable to see into the future, and unable to remember my distant or even recent past.

Besides which, I thought, it’s in my interest to learn the time of my own death. I mean, what if I only had three weeks left to live? Who knows, I might even have a good thousand rubles sitting in the bank. I could be putting this to proper use—spending my last days on Earth living it up in style!

“All right, I’ll go,” I agreed.

The palm-reader turned out to be a wonderful fellow—devoid of any pride or arrogance, just as you’d expect from a person marked by God.

He bowed modestly and said:

“Although the future is hidden from our prying gaze, the human body does contain a certain document, which the experienced and knowledgeable eye can read like a book . . .”

“Is that so?!”

“This document is the palm of your hand! Each palm is unique, and she uses her lines to tell us everything—every detail of the person’s habits and character.”

My heart skipped a beat. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Petroleum” by Héctor Tizón

November 17, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Alexandra Falek

"And we’ll be able to buy medicine so we don’t go around rotting like garbage. We’ll be rich. You get what it means to be rich?"

One man’s quest for “black gold” arouses a village’s hopes and dreams in Héctor Tizón’s short story “Petroleum,” this week’s Translation Tuesday selection. Set in a poor rural village, its flawed protagonist Nicolas leads his community’s search for oil, promising everyone a fast path to a better life. Our narrator is a subtle voice among a colorful cast of characters, and offers an interesting approach to satirizing Nicolas’s quixotic mission: he both adopts the point of view of a “fly on the wall” and actively participates in the town’s naïve aspirations. Nicolas’s unwavering hope and determination lead to a painful truth about his story: under the seemingly mocking veneer of comedy, “Petroleum” hides a heart of tragedy. A poignant (and funny) tale about class, wealth, and the nature of belief in the face of reality.

A long shriek, a holler. It could be heard loud and clear from the viaduct to the municipal garbage dump and even further, interrupting the peaceful siestas throughout the shacks. We had been trying to catch cichlids since noon, carefully lifting the stones on the shore after clouding the water, and we heard it too. We listened closely and then heard it again:

“Hey! Julian, Segundo, Gertrudis, Gabino, Doña Trinidad! Come! Everybody come!”

We tried to figure out where the shouting was coming from and caught on right away. Nicolas was waving his arms and started yelling again, from the immense crown of a willow tree.

“Petroleum!” he shouted, “It’s petroleum!”

I really think that even though I’d heard the word at some point, I didn’t actually know what it meant. That’s probably why, despite all the shouting, Mouse and I didn’t pay much attention to it. For the time being, we were busy with the cichlids. Someone had offered to buy them at two for fifteen cents, and anyways, we liked putting our feet in the water. It was super. I think Mouse, or maybe it was me, I don’t really remember, said:

“Nicolas has lost it again.”

We shrugged our shoulders. The water was great and if we could catch about twenty more cichlids we’d have enough to buy something: the Boca Juniors jersey Mouse wanted and that donkey mask I liked. The one I had seen was a nice big mask with long soft ears and I think it even came with a whistle for Carnival.

And so we kept trying to catch as many cichlids as possible, downstream by the shoreline.

Every now and then a train raced by and we could feel the vibration of its motor and hear its piercing sound. Sometimes we didn’t even lift our heads to look, but when we did, we raised our hands to wave at the distant passengers who were staring out the windows. They seemed sad or distracted.

“Raul,” Mouse said to me from close by. “You know what petroleum is?”

I can’t deny that I regretted not knowing anything about petroleum. But I said:

“Yep.”

“Is it what they put in the engines?” he asked again.

“Yep.”

“What’s it do?”

“Who knows,” I said.

The sun had gone down a while ago. The water was cloudy and we could barely make out our own hands. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Constantine Cavafy

November 10, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Alex de Voogt

O memory, I pleaded / for you to assist me / to recreate the image / of the one whom I loved / the young face as it was.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday we present two newly translated poems from one of the most influential figures in modern Greek poetry, Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933). Though known primarily through English translations of his work (championed by Anglophone writers such as E.M. Forster), Cavafy has enjoyed increased attention as a formal innovator of Greek poetics. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, to Greek parents, and later educated in Britain, Cavafy would spend the bulk of his life in Alexandria writing poems for private circulation among friends, family, and local periodicals, eschewing the trappings of potential literary fame. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the poetry community of mainland Greece eventually embraced Cavafy’s bold new poetics, launching a modernist revival of Greek verse. Scholar and translator Alex de Voogt shares some of his insights on Cavafy’s formal stylings:

Cavafy built on the traditional Dekapentasyllavo or Greek folk song but allowed a flexible number of syllables, six or seven for either hemistich, together with a clear caesura. In later years, Cavafy would break the integrity of the meaningful phrase in each hemistich but never violated his own rules of syllabics . . . Syllabics look, feel and sound different when they are applied in translation. They are a hidden structure with historical antecedents. Cavafy used his hemistiches for an increasingly complex enjambment across line breaks as well as across the caesura.

“In the month of Athyr”

I am struggling to read                         an Ancient stone inscription
that says “Lo[r]d Jesus Christ.”            A “So[u]l” may be distinguished.
“In the month of Athyr”                        “Lefkio[s] w[ent] to rest”
With reference to his age                     “He lived this many years”
the Kappa Zeta shows                           he was laid to rest still young.
I see in the corrupted text                    “Hi[m] . . . Alexandrian”
And then there are three lines            especially disfigured
but some words can be made out      such as “our t[ea]rs,” “suffering”
then once again the “tears”                  and “his [f]riends are mourning [h]im”
It seems that Lefkios                             must have been greatly loved.
In the month of Athyr                            Lefkios was laid to rest.

* READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “A Hunger to Soothe” by Maartje Wortel

November 3, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Jozef van der Voort

It was like being very near to someone. It felt good and bewildering all at once, and then she realised: This is all me.

A woman’s abiding desire for touch underlies a deeper sense of disaffection in Maartje Wortel’s short story “A Hunger to Soothe,” our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. When Gradda’s pious husband dies in an accident, the touch-starved widow seeks comfort in another way: she offers free lodging to a young man who can provide daily physical contact. Instead of finding fulfillment, however, Gradda uncovers an enduring disappointment in God—and an enduring insecurity over her own desirability. In subtle yet direct prose laden with emotional uncertainty (a subtext carried over artfully thanks to Jozef van der Voort’s superb translation), Wortel’s story captures the heartache and loneliness that can fester over a lifetime of self-doubt and thwarted intimacy. We’re honoured to showcase “A Hunger to Soothe” in dialogue with our Fall 2020 Dutch Literature Feature (graciously curated by International Booker Prize-winning translator Michele Hutchison).

Gradda knew very well that she didn’t exactly look like someone you’d want to touch, which was why she liked to touch other people. She tried not to be too blatant about it: she shook hands, just like everyone else; she gave the usual three kisses on the cheek; and on public transport she would brush her leg against other passengers’ legs—all for ever so slightly longer than was normal, but not long enough for anyone to get any odd ideas about her. Yet now, at the age of sixty-seven, she longed for more.

Gradda had no illusions that she would find someone, but she had enough money now Joop was dead. She could pay for it with her inheritance. She placed an advert. And then Sebastiaan came along. But before him, there’d been Joop.

She’d spent thirty-five years married to a sternly devout man named Joop, and strictly speaking, she was still married to him. When they’d first got to know each other, she’d been so incredulous that anyone would want to be with her that she’d said, I don’t mind what you do with other girls as long as I don’t find out about it. I don’t have to be the only one, as long as you make me feel like I am.

Joop had felt offended. He’d told her there was nobody else and there never would be. And even though it was probably the truth, in all those years Gradda never felt for a moment like she was the love of his life. Maybe that was God’s fault. She was often struck by a jealousy she couldn’t explain. It wasn’t her, but some invisible force that kept Joop in his place. She’d tried to understand her husband, she’d gone to church with him, she’d prayed with him before dinner and celebrated every Christian holiday, and yet God had never found her. She thought, If He’s so great—greater than mankind—then surely He can seek me out too? Surely it doesn’t have to be so hard? READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Carmen Boullosa

October 27, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Lawrence Schimel

Earth is a ball in disjointed flight. / The illuminated celestial sphere / is a sudden shot. / The cosmos trembles, the planetary spins jerk.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday we bring you a selection of poems from Carmen Boullosa, one of the most dynamic and prolific writers in contemporary Mexican literature. The haiku-esque “Dry Rain” discovers a scene of natural beauty in Brooklyn, leading to a final image that is both concrete and abstract. In “Puy de Dôme,” our speaker addresses the seemingly ageless French volcano which has outlived its ancient temple—and perhaps even the temple’s gods. And in the elegiac “The Match,” our speaker witnesses the tragic death of Italian footballer Piermario Morosini, whose final moments on the field are recounted with profound sorrow and admiration. As with her novels, Boullosa’s poetry (here translated by acclaimed writer and translator Lawrence Schimel) spans an eclectic range of aesthetic styles and sociocultural themes, traversing national borders in pursuit of a shared humanity.

 

Dry Rain

Rain of flowers in Brooklyn.
Minute white petals fall
heralding
the spring,
bathing us
without water
in fresh                                                                                           hypothetical laughter. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Border” by Olja Savičević Ivančević

October 20, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Andrea Jurjević

Here’re her documents. You better hide ’em in a safe spot once you get to Zagreb.

A brother’s mission to bring his estranged sister to Zagreb betrays less-than-altruistic motives in Olja Savičević Ivančević’s short story “The Border,” our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. Set in the cultural aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars, the enduring religious and ethnic tensions between Bosnia (majority Muslim) and Croatia (majority Catholic) foreground the social taboos that persist at the borders of ethnicity, religion, and sexuality. Our narrator is an exasperated sibling charged with taking care of his (seemingly) eccentric and persistently angry half-sister, Ribbit. Through a sequence of flashbacks and narrative breaks, Ribbit’s true goals are unveiled, bringing to light the source of her defiant anger and her siblings’ xenophobic and homophobic motives. Savičević’s strategically unfolding plot and her skillful use of a morally unreliable (i.e., a clueless and bigoted) narrator provides a fascinating character study of a young woman who must transgress national, societal, and even familial boundaries to freely live her own life.

The cold is unbearable, yet Ribbit, head freshly shaved, wears a miniskirt.

“Isn’t your head cold?”

We stand on a patch of ice in front of her building. It’s Christmas morning. The steam fogs up my glasses. She smokes and shivers in her short jacket.

“I’m asking if you’re cold. Don’t you have a hat?”

“Are ya fuckin’ cold, baldie?! What kind of a bullshit question is that?”

She’s like that. It’s how she talks. A normal person would slap her, but I don’t. She knows I won’t harm her. She flings the cigarette and lights another, ignoring me. Buraz pulls up in my car and steps out. He blows into his hands to warm up and tosses a purse into the trunk.

“Jesus, Ribbit! Don’t be such a dumbass!” He yanks the hood over her head and turns towards me.

“Have her sit in the back and don’t let her out before you get to Zagreb under no circumstances. She’ll cut and run. How do I know where she’d go . . . Yesterday I left her alone for ten minutes. She put on an act like she needed to pee and ended up shaving her head. She can piss in a bag for all I care.”

Buraz pulls forward the seat and she crawls in, onto the back seat.

Ribbit graduated last summer, and is now nineteen. She’s grown tall, five foot eleven. Black eyeliner frames her green eyes. Before her brother slams the door, she screams from the top of her lungs:

“Hey, Buraz! Drop dead, ya filthy scumbag!”

She’s crazier than she used to be, but then again, she was never terribly normal.

I press the gas pedal. The car rattles, then slides down the slope’s muddy ruts, across frozen puddles. I exhale when I see Buraz disappear toward the building. In the rearview mirror I catch Ribbit’s empty side profile. She’s stuffing her thumb, with its blue fingernail, into her mouth.

The streets are empty as the snow-water pisses down. Random windows sparkle with Christmas ornaments and crosses made of string lights. A plastic Santa with a busted nose climbs over one balcony.

“There’s some ice on the road, but fortunately it’s not a long trip,” I tell her in the rearview mirror.

I had received the call from Buraz two days earlier. He had begged me desperately to take our sister in at my place in Zagreb. A few months, a year, who knows? Maybe even for good I thought, and did not like it one bit.

“Buraz pleaded for me to take you,” I try to suck up to her a little. “He’s terribly worried about you, you know. Look, he couldn’t even wait until after Christmas. I know you’re upset right now, but you’ll like it in Zagreb. Don’t worry. You’ll work in my shop. I can use the help.”

“I heard you went bust!”

I’m not close to Buraz, or Ribbit. The last time I saw them was two years ago in Bosnia at the funeral of a man who had been our father, my sorta-father, just like they’re my half-sister and half-brother.

I remember when I first met Ribbit. She was five and wore a flannel nightgown around the flat. She had the flu, yet still she kept chirping, wouldn’t keep quiet. Now she’s mum the entire trip, impenetrable.

New bright snow starts sprinkling and as soon as we leave the city the world outside the car windows becomes dreamlike, like a piece of naïve art, but beautiful. The small houses in snow-blanketed valleys are all equally white, even the ones without doors and windows. Smoke from the chimneys disappears into the hills. The roads are lined with newly built minarets, or tall church towers under construction, depending which town we’re passing through.

“Check it out, Bosnia with whipped cream,” I say to break the silence.

“Right. Shit topped with cream still tastes like shit.”

I surf the radio stations.

“If you say so.”

Her problem, not mine. I’ve got nothing to do with Bosnia except for my father and except for the two of them. And we aren’t even alike. The folk singer cursing love on the radio sounds better than Ribbit piercing my ears with silence. She glues her forehead and nose to the window. A young lady, yet still a child. A big bald baby. While on a straight stretch of road, I look over my glasses at my hairline in the mirror. She’s right, goddammit, I’m rapidly losing my hair.

“Want to sit up front? It’s more comfortable.”

Curled up in that tiny skirt, she shakes her head and then drops it between her embraced raised knees. On her scalp is a fresh scar and redness, probably from shaving. What the hell did she do that for? I remember she used to have long, golden hair when she was a child, nearly platinum. Later she had red hair, then it was black with a piercing in her brow. Then it was green with another piercing in her belly button, and the last time I saw her, canary-yellow.

“Well,” I give it another go. “It won’t be so bad. You always liked Zagreb. It will be nice, it’s a big city. Theatre, live music, nightlife. You’ll see, dear. So much better for a young girl than in a small . . .”

She lifts her head and looks at me with hatred, then lays it onto her knees again, without a word. She remains that way the entire trip, motionless—all the while the news keeps forecasting a snowstorm and negative twenty degrees that night. Only after we pass through the villages near the border does she stir. At that point she gets antsy. I tawt I taw a puddy tat, I think to myself and keep slowly driving toward the border.

“Hey, can we stop? I gotta pee. Oh, come on! Don’t be a dick, brother. I’m not gonna run away. Where the hell would I go, anyway?”

We’re surrounded by a desert of snow. An erased space. A few empty houses gape hollow by the side of the road and in the distance are woods. A kilometer down the road we see a large house with a neon Tavern sign. Only the bottom part of the lemon-yellow facade is finished. I park near the front—looks like it’s open. Ribbit gets out of the car and spreads her arms over her head as if she’s surrendering or waving and for a moment it seems as if a slight smile cracks across her face, the first one I’ve seen since I arrived.

In front of the tavern stands a scrawny Christmas tree, and inside, right above the bar, hang photographs of war generals decorated with shiny holiday tinsel.

While I wait for Ribbit, I order us coffee and settle closer to the fireplace. I hope she doesn’t vanish through the bathroom window, like in the movies.

Buraz said this: “Yeah, she’s a shame to me and the family but dammit, I worry about her. Someone’s gonna beat her to death while she’s walking home at night.” I imagine Ribbit tramping down dark city streets late at night with that once colorful, and now bald, female head beneath thin Christmas paper lanterns swinging in the wind.

It’s always windy around there.

“So, what’d Buraz tell ya?” she asks, returning from the bathroom.

He had shoved an envelope into my hands. “Here’re her documents. You better hide ’em in a safe spot once you get to Zagreb. It’s her ID, passport, health card, driver’s license, etc. There’s enough money for bills and food for at least three or four months.”

The envelope contained a whole lot more than food money. Buraz knows the shop has not been doing well, and that I’m up to my neck in debt. And I know it, too. He winked and gave me a tap, rubbed my shoulder for a second, like brothers do, a buddy to buddy. “You gotta keep her papers under lock and key. Swear on your life.”

“He told me everything, and just to be clear,” I respond to Ribbit, “in this case I’m entirely on his side. You can’t chase a married man.”

I lean over the table toward her. “A married man, and on top of that, one of theirs? You’ve really crossed the line. You’re truly asking for someone to break your bones and toss you into a trash can.”

Ribbit looks at me without blinking those green eyes, now smeared with makeup.

“Whaddaya mean, one of theirs?!”

“You know what I mean. Personally I have nothing for or against them, but I’m concerned about your wellbeing. You’ve crossed the line. That’s no small thing, Ribbit, not in Zagreb or Frankfurt or London or anywhere else in the world, never mind in the small . . .”

“What ya talking about, dude. One of their guys?!”

Ribbit laughs, but in a slow, heavy manner, as if she’s shorting, skipping. She tosses the small plastic coffee spoon toward me onto the tablecloth. “You mean their girls. It’s a she.”

“A she,” I repeat as if in a dream.

“Yep, a she. Her name’s Senada. What ya starin’ at,” Ribbit says rocking in her chair.

Senada is the woman Ribbit babysat for at times, that much I know. I only saw her once, at a funeral. A pale girl with dark eyes, two or three years older than Ribbit.

“And I ain’t chasin’ her. Her idiot husband’s been killin’ her since they got married. He’s after her. I ain’t chasin’ no one. We’re an item. Now ya know the whole truth.”

I feel the room spin and the coffee mixed with acid from my stomach returns into my throat. I inhale sharply, so much that it hurts.

“Since when are you into women? You used to have boyfriends.”

“I’m not into women. I’m into Senada. She’s my woman, gettit? We were gonna go with her kid to her sister’s in Sarajevo. She found a job there. But her husband figured everything out and collared Buraz. He stole her documents just like Buraz stole mine so Senada and I couldn’t cross the border to see each other. Buraz lied. He lies the moment he opens his mouth. Obviously the truth is worse than what ya thought,” she says and fires off another burst of laughter.

“Give me a break!” I yell. “Did Buraz shave your head?”

She blushes.

“Ah, well, good for him,” I say dryly and release the air from my lungs. I take the car keys and leave enough cash on the table for coffee.

“Wait for me in the car, it’s open.”

I feel the envelope with her documents and the money in the inside pocket of my coat. At the bar I wrap the envelope several times with tape and put it back in its place.

As soon as I walk down the tavern’s steps, I feel a hefty stone, or perhaps a piece of ice, hit my neck. The blow is cold and sharp. I’m stunned by the ferocity with which she pounces on me, biting my cheek and ear. She wraps her legs around my waist, mounts my back and keeps pounding, biting till she pulls off my glasses and snatches my keys. I barely break free and throw her onto the ground, stuffing her eyes and mouth with snow. That subdues her momentarily. My ear bleeds, and so does my lip. I hopelessly try to find my glasses, buried somewhere in the snow. Under my weight Ribbit cries, howls and wails from the top of her lungs. The few restaurant patrons are now crowding the windows, staring. They see a maniac strangling a bald girl. I hurry up before some fool dares to get involved. I thrust her down with my whole body so she can’t move and with my free hand I pry the envelope out of my pocket: “I see you’ve planned this all out, but you’re missing something.” I say into her ear, lying on top of her. I rub my own blood off her smeared face. “Merry Christmas, little sister,” I say. “And Merry Christmas to Senada.” I shove the envelope into her tights, ass-bound, deeply, so it won’t fall out: “You won’t get far without this.”

She kicks me in the groin and I turn over, folded up. Lying in the snow I see the blurry outline of that scrawny Christmas tree in front of the tavern at the Bosnian-Croatian border. Lights blink red-white-blue-red or perhaps in some other order . . . My glasses rest in the snow, too, surprisingly intact. I wait for her to stagger to the car, and then I put them on, slowly, not to hurt my ear. The forecast called for a deep drop below freezing and a blizzard. Another hour and a half to Zagreb. Ribbit finally starts the car and takes off in the direction opposite the border, toward Senada. By now people have already run out the front of the tavern.

I grab that hefty stone and throw it at the car, aiming precisely, so the rear window cracks audibly, and folks will never say I let her go without a fight.

Translated from the Croatian by Andrea Jurjević

Novelist and poet Olja Savičević Ivančević is one of the most prominent contemporary Croatian writers. Recipient of numerous awards and honors, her books have been translated into eleven languages. English translations of her work include her novels Adios, Cowboy (McSweeney’s) and Singer in the Night (Istros Books), both translated by Celia Hawkesworth, and the poetry collection Mamasafari (Diálogos) translated by Andrea Jurjević.

Andrea Jurjević grew up in Rijeka, Croatia, in the former Yugoslavia, before immigrating to the United States. Her debut poetry collection, Small Crimes, won the 2015 Philip Levine Poetry Prize, and her book-length translations from Croatian include Mamasafari (Diálogos Press, 2018) and Dead Letter Office (The Word Works, 2020).

*****

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Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Traian T. Coșovei

October 13, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Adam J. Sorkin and Andreea Scridon

This autumn has dyed all the lovers in the park yellow

This week’s Translation Tuesday brings you three poems from Romanian poet Traian T. Coșovei (1954-2014), a member of the 1980s generation of poets and a major influence on postmodern Romanian poetry. Of note in these selections is Coșovei’s use of indentation to flout the margin’s gravity, thereby providing the reader a sense of movement; given the speaker’s fixation on static moments in time, this motion feels paradoxical and almost dizzying. In “The Accursed Wheel,” the poet uses repetition, visceral and kinetic imagery, and rhythmic indentation to replicate a sense of thwarted progress. In “State of Mind,” autumnal imagery locates our speaker’s love amidst an awareness of the violent history that surrounds him. And in “The Last Supper,” a moment of heartbreak is preserved like a holy image when a scene of contemporary, mundane occurrences unfolds within a lover’s recollection as something almost eternal–again, repetition is deftly deployed to convey the speaker’s sense of temporality.

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READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Whalesong” by Aurélia Lassaque

October 6, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Madeleine Campbell

And her child would have asked her one day why isn’t the Earth called Sea when it’s covered by all that water?

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a mother’s heartbreak echoes the mournful music of the Earth in Aurélia Lassaque’s hybrid story “Whalesong.” Our protagonist is a prodigious scholar processing a loss so excruciating and traumatic that our narrator frames it via global atrocities and cataclysms. The Earth’s persistent gravity seems absurd, even obscene. Mass extinctions are viewed as unimportant. Through the speaker’s close-third reveries, we witness the massacre of the French Cathars—a gnostic community burned alive by the Church—and meditate upon the world’s cruelty as their ashes are washed away by a seemingly divine rain. Even the sea’s withdrawal evokes a desert’s emptiness. Excerpted from Lassaque’s forthcoming novel, “Whalesong” marries poetry with music, verse with prose—its aural artistry is preserved and accented by Madeleine Campbell’s exquisite translation, which strategically leaves passages in French, Occitan, and Latin to preserve bits of the source language’s sound. Just as our protagonist writes love poems in Occitan (the “language of secrets”), Lassaque’s prose itself reads like verse. A hauntingly beautiful selection by a contemporary troubadour.

She doesn’t know what to pack in her suitcase . . . Toothpaste. A translucent comb with a broken tooth.

When do milk teeth start to grow in? Why this amnesia of our early years? Why don’t our memories reach back to our birth? We are born, and then we step out on a tightrope without a net. We survive infancy. It takes so much effort there’s no room left to remember them. No room either for the future save for the thirst.

What is she to do with all the things they’ve given her? If only she could track the objects passing from nursery to nursery, outgrown in a matter of weeks. Why do people discard them so readily? What would a map of their journey look like?

She has fluoride toothpaste. She thinks it’s silly to deny herself a microwave yet use a toothpaste that causes cancer.

To lose your parents is to become an orphan. To lose your child, what is that? Why is there no word to express it?

*

Outside, it’s pelting down. In the South it rains less than in Paris. The rain is striking. In the tongue of Oc they say it’s raining millstones, raining anvils. A Christian god wouldn’t pelt them with anvils. Mind you . . . He did allow men, women, and children to gather in his temple, be massacred in his temple, even though the stones bleached out, all the blood had dried off centuries ago. That god had let it be known: Kill them all, God will know His own. The river of blood might be flowing still. There may be the odd mistake. A tiny martyr disappears down the river. Does God really welcome all innocents? The god who imposes baptism to save one’s soul, what does he do with the stillborn?

Dehors il pleut à coup de pelles. Plòu a palas.

It’s raining shovels. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Tide of Time . . . and the Phone Receiver” by Ping Lu

September 22, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Pinyu Hwang

The floor is slippery, take it slow, one step at a time, let’s go a little slower.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, writer and cultural critic Ping Lu illustrates the power of unspoken familial love in her memoiristic essay “The Tide of Time . . . and the Phone Receiver.” Through a sequence of personal anecdotes about the speaker’s stoic parents, we witness how a natural anxiety over the aging process can beget silence and emotionally oblique conversations. Affection is unuttered but demonstrably present through the speaker’s physical acts of care; in turn, her parents pass over the harsh truths of aging in silence, their aches and injuries covered as much as possible by a loving pride.

On the phone, Mother casually tells me that her back hurts. Then: an abrupt yelp, and I can clearly hear the phone being dropped, falling and landing, somewhere.

Mother has probably turned to talk with Father. One moment she is speaking to me, and the next, to him—it’s perfectly integrated, the flow of words seamlessly maintained. And where did the phone land? In the gaps between the cushions of the couch? On the corner of the coffee table? Or did it slip down to the floor? Mother won’t remember to pick it back up—she has all but forgotten the receiver, and the fact that I’m still on this side of the phone call. I can only keep my hold on the phone, waiting patiently, afraid that she will later remember and resume our previous conversation.

At my end of the receiver, as I wait, I hear it, with startling clarity: her conversation with Father.

In truth, it’s nothing much. Mother continues to talk about her sore back; their dialogue centers around domestic trivialities.

With my ear pasted to the phone, I become suddenly aware that I am eavesdropping, and that this doesn’t seem ethical. I want to put down the phone, but at the same time I feel a compulsion to continue. What if, after a while, Mother again picks up the receiver only find that I’m not here? READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Selections from A Woman Awaiting (The pandemic from a garret) by Agnieszka Taborska

September 15, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood

When the world goes back to 'normal,' how quickly will we regain middle age?

Writer, translator, and scholar Agnieszka Taborska reflects upon the literary and historical precedents of the global lockdown in these excerpts from A Woman Awaiting (The pandemic from a garret), our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. In coping with the trauma and uncertainty of the current pandemic, Taborska offers a bookish yet personal perspective, one informed by an expansive breadth of literary knowledge as well as familial accounts of another historical tragedy: the Nazi occupation of Poland. Paradoxically, the speaker’s isolation takes us on a necessarily cosmopolitan journey through books, recontextualizing the pandemic through the lenses of Gabriel García Márquez, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Bram Stoker, and Spalding Gray, among others. With candid, irreverent wit, Taborska chronicles her daily thoughts about the absurdities, losses, and shared anxieties of our current global crisis.

What was a day, measured for instance from the moment you sat down to your midday meal to the return of that same moment twenty-four hours later?

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain [1]

Friday, April 3

With every passing day our activities take on more of the characteristics of ritual. In the morning we top up the humidifiers on our radiators, rolling up the blinds to let the plants soak up the sun from the first minute, and wiping down with a wet cloth the leaves that haven’t had time to gather dust since we last cleaned them. For the umpteenth time we move the flowerpots around to make their residents feel as comfortable as possible. The tiles, the bathroom, the bathtub, and sink have been scrubbed raw.  We recall with relief that there are still windows to be cleaned. We have shifted the furniture around, surprising ourselves with the audacity of our experimental solutions. Our new routine makes us laugh at the previous one. We strive to create hothouse conditions in our limited space. When all this is over, will we deliberately let our flat go to seed? Will we stick to a daily agenda or—on the contrary—will we turn day into night, drop in on our friends unannounced, wake up our neighbours by playing loud music at dawn, will we ditch every schedule?

The habit of checking the weather forecast is now a thing of the past. The degree of air pollution has also become irrelevant. A million dollars to anyone who, asked out of the blue, can name today’s date and day of the week without having to stop and think. On the other hand, we are getting expert at telling the hour. We have our hand on the pulse. We are aware of the days getting longer. We are familiar with the path of the rays of the sun as they move across the floor. We could tell the shadows out in the street where and how far to fall.

Our window looks out onto a small grocery store. We have noticed a pattern: young people go in wearing gloves and face masks, the old behave as if nothing was happening. Our activist neighbour picks up litter from the pavement as usual. A sight that takes me back to the past.

The dogs waiting outside the shop are surprised that their two-legged friends have suddenly been spending so much time with them. Two Labradors who came with a gentleman on a bike kill time by simulating copulation, as always. They mount each other and make rubbing motions, too brief for ‘anything’ to really happen. The infection has not impaired their erotic fantasies. READ MORE…