Translations

Translation Tuesday: “Baby Shower” by Isaura Contreras

August 6, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Janet M. Izzo

They were surprised when just four months later, Mat and Sara told them the news that they would be living together, for a very special reason.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you an understated comedy of modern manners from the pen of Isaura Contreras, translated from the Spanish by Janet M. Izzo. As the on-again, off-again relationship between Mat and Sara blooms into anticipated parenthood, their coworkers Pablo and Lidia watch first with amusement, then anxiety. Their own relationship, so secure in comparison to Mat and Sara’s initial misfortunes, begins to seem stagnant and decayed in the face of the other couple’s renewed affections, and the prospect of new life. Will they reconcile themselves to their differences, or end up like the formerly-single Mat, whom they once so smugly counseled? If nothing else, the story is guaranteed to amuse anyone who has been forced to endure the antics of baby-crazed friends—read on!

Pablo and Lidia had started seeing each other the year before they saw Mat arm in arm with Sara, who had arrived at the office just three months earlier. They were both glad that Mat was dating someone after the tumultuous breakup with his fiancée. Nevertheless, they couldn’t help but wonder what Sara saw in him, even though they considered Mat a dear friend. Sara was clearly kind and attractive, candid and sweet, compared to a resentful and hostile guy, who took advantage of any opportunity to bring to light others’ misfortunes. Pablo and Lidia disregarded these embittered episodes, keeping in mind the four years they’d known him, especially the compassion that suddenly surfaced after the wedding was canceled. Mat, once recovered from the shock, described in a surge of sincerity, the painful weeks he searched for her without success. Pablo and Lidia rehearsed their best lines and witnessed how he recovered his arrogant walk. They discussed the huge favor they could do for him if they only dared, as good friends, to give him advice. Pablo would tell him how girls should be treated, with signs of affection and attention to small details, with compliments every morning, noticing their different hairstyles and the color of their eye makeup. All activities that, punctually and purposefully, he had managed to accomplish in his own relationship. Lidia would also tell him that it is important to put arrogance aside, to stop being explosive and antagonistic, authoritarian and worried about appearing sensitive. She would tell him that relationships are like plants that need to be watered, day by day, with care and devotion.

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Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Luciana Jazmín Coronado

July 30, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Allison A. deFreese

We like to walk in the cobwebs of the creator’s finger, to die of laughter and ponder things that swing in the light.

The heartbeat of the poems of Luciana Jazmín Coronado (tr. Allison A. deFreese) comes from the push-pull of beginning- and end-times. “The Beginnning” is a genesis myth refigured for our critical moment. The Christian version has it that the world sprang from God’s command; Coronado imagines a gentler awakening, in which drowsy, new-born man stumbles not only upon apples but coal—twin sins, the seeds of Anthropocene destruction. “Imperfect Children” is suffused with the same ambivalence, a gentle petition to a lowercase god to heal the open wound of existence; “Creation” imagines in the same breath god’s “perfect green lawn” whose plants gird themselves for its coming destruction.

The Beginnning

I.
I was born.

I’ll follow some path,
ask why I bear such sorrow

I ask the sun to step aside because he’s old
and watches everything without remembering.

I love myself with one hand
and explore northward with the other.
I might be inside a flower
or anywhere else. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: from “And Death Shall Have No Dominion / Killing ‘The Mother’”

July 23, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Honora Spicer

To More Deaths, more glasses raised in secret toasts.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you an excerpt from Victoria Guerrero Peirano’s experimental novel Y la muerte no tendrá dominio, translated into English for the first time by Honora Spicer. In surreal and brutal fragments, Guerrero recounts the death of her mother in a state hospital, the two women alienated from each other not only by the physical process of death itself, but by the mediating force of medical bureaucracy. Elsewhere, Guerrero is pursued by thoughts of her pet rabbit, whose “half-dead brood” have similarly consumed her, the process of grief expanding even to overwhelm nonhuman life. Yet even at its most grim, Guerrero remains clinically attentive to the social and political forces that determine embodied experience, her oscillation between passion and restraint serving to heighten the eeriness of her prose. Read on!

7

Ever since she was admitted to the Emergency Room, I kept a sort of diary. I kept note of everything the attendants baldly said. Under duress, they barely opened their mouths to say, “I’m not the one in charge.”

From that day on, death buckles and becomes something nasty, dramatic, dreadful, defining. I thought about that whole troop in white, green, or plum scrubs who disconnected patients by night, failing to give medications on time, falling asleep or going to drink. About those messengers of mortal death who instead of preparing a smooth way, impose the stoniest. They made it all the more difficult: an emotional test, a test of lucidity and endurance.

To More Deaths, more glasses raised in secret toasts.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The School” by Mireille Jean-Gilles

July 16, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Eric Fishman

I could imagine a thousand voices, a thousand children’s voices: “teacher, teacher,” “hi, teacher,” “sorry, teacher,” “I love you, teacher,”

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you an extraordinary new work of microfiction by the Guianese poet Mireille Jean-Gilles. Stranded in the central yard of a nameless school, Jean-Gilles’ narrator is confounded by the ugliness and hostility of the buildings’ facades. They assume that the institution they face must be a factory or a prison, so at odds are they with the purpose of a school, and the emotional lives of young people. Yet even as the school is an institute of dehumanization, it still carries prefigurative possibilities: “I sensed that each class must have been an oasis of happiness, full of colors, full of children’s drawings, of colors, from dreamy blue to impulsive purple, a thousand childish colors.” The narrator’s voice spills over with questions in the face of this contradiction, phrases and clauses accumulating one after the other, piled paratactically like the “wildly green leaves” of the mango tree in the schoolyard. They are adrift in this strange place, yet ultimately their dislocation is a source of peace, as they resign themself to the paradox of beauty emerging in a hostile world: “everything was one and its opposite at the same time . . . so I searched no more, just let myself be carried away by the swell of waves.” Read on!

It wasn’t a factory, or a prison, although you might have thought so, it was immense, full of cells, full of rooms, in fact, finally, it seemed to me that it was only a mundane school, it wasn’t the end of a shift, it was only the end of classes, classes for shrill little children or mocking older ones. The prison, sorry, the school, had in its center a navel, an immense navel that must undoubtedly have been what’s called a schoolyard, the schoolyard was finally mute since within ten minutes the entire school had emptied, the signal had been finally given to clear out, it was five o’clock.

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Principle of Decision: Translation from Italian

July 11, 2024  |  in Principle of Decision, Translations  |  by Antonella Lettieri, Candice Whitney, Catherine Xinxin Yu, Elena Pala, and Julia Conrad

How does one evaluate the works of a writer who paradoxically championed women’s rights and supported an ultra-patriarchal regime?

Principle of Decision takes a close look at the manifold, careful decisions made by translators in their interpretations. Each participating translator is given the same excerpt of a text to render into English, revealing the various incarnations that can stem from even a single word. In this edition, Catherine Xinxin Yu presents a piece from the Italian writer Ada Negri.

When I was casually browsing at a book fair in 2023, my eyes were caught by two descriptors on the back of a tiny claret booklet featuring Ada Negri’s works: ‘feminist literature ante litteram’ and ‘twice nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature’. I had to find out who this Ada Negri was.

Ada Negri (1870-1945), born in the northern Italian city of Lodi, grew up in a working-class milieu and began earning a living as a schoolteacher from the age of seventeen. She published her first poem La nenia materna (Mother’s Lullaby) in 1888, her first poetry collection Fatalità (Fatality) in 1892, and continued to garner literary acclaim through the 1910s. Her gaze was directed outwards, encompassing the struggles of the Italian working class of which she was a part, but also turned inwards, voicing her intense emotional turmoil as a woman, a lover, and a mother. At the same time, she actively participated in socialist projects like the Lega Femminile di Milano and co-founded the Asilo Mariuccia in 1902 for at-risk women and minors.

In 1917, Negri published her immensely successful short story collection, Le solitarie (Solitary Women), from which the excerpt below is drawn. Eighteen grayscale character studies provide ‘humble glimpses into the lives of women who fight alone: alone despite family, alone despite love, alone due to faults of their own, of men, or of destiny’, as the author wrote in the book’s preface (translated from the Italian). This collection was groundbreaking in its focus on the tribulations of lower-class women and unflinchingly tackles taboo subjects from female sexuality and abortion, to marital unhappiness and the lack of care for the elderly.

So far, so good, right? But Negri was also a controversial figure who achieved her status partly due to her staunch support of Mussolini’s fascist regime. In the 1890s, she befriended socialists active in Milan, such as Filippo Turati, the Russian-born feminist Anna Kuliscioff, Nobel peace prize winner Teodoro Moneta—and Benito Mussolini, who identified as a socialist at the time. But by the outbreak of WWI, as Mussolini’s break with socialism gave way to his avowed fascism, Negri definitively sided with Mussolini’s bellicose patriotism and distanced herself from the antimilitarist democratic socialism of Turati and Kuliscioff. She would go on to win the Premio Mussolini in 1930, become the first and only woman to be admitted into the Accademia d’Italia in 1940 (a short-lived hall of fame for intellectuals in fascist Italy, if you will), and follow government directives in her long-standing collaborations with major newspapers until her death in 1945. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Ode to Wood” by Pablo Neruda

July 9, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Wally Swist

I carry around the world / on my body, on my clothes, / scent of sawmill, / aroma of red boards.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poem by the inimitable Pablo Neruda, translated from the Spanish by Wally Swist. Oscillating between the grand and the mundane, but never stinting on lavish detail, the poet draws an entire world out of his relationship to wood—the elemental matter from which so much of our world, from houses and coffins to ships and railroad ties, is fashioned. Dwelling in particular on the physical scene of trees being felled, Neruda not only pays vivid homage to the labor of woodcutting, but also illustrates the intimate connection between the world of human industry and the natural environment from which it arises—a connection that is more salient than ever, in our current age of ecological collapse. Read on!

Oh, how much I know
and recognize
among all things
wood is
my best friend.
I carry around the world
on my body, on my clothes,
scent of sawmill,
aroma of red boards.
My chest, my senses
feel impregnated
in my childhood
of falling trees,
of great forests
of future construction. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Aruanda by Virgília Ferrão

July 2, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Beth Hickling-Moore

“Witchcraft?” Pedro Lucas’ almost guttural voice catches in his throat in confusion.

This Translation Tuesday, we are honored to share with you an excerpt from the latest novel by the first woman to win Mozambique’s Prémio Literário 10 de Novembro literary prize. Here to tell you about this riveting tale of parallel love stories that traverse centuries is translator Beth Hickling-Moore herself: “Aruanda fluctuates between two stories, the first set in the 19th Century and the other in the 21st. In each story, prejudice, conflict and environmental destruction are destined to repeat themselves. In 1890, black servant Carina de Sousa is accused of witchcraft by the plantation overlord, along with her mother, Lina. What nobody knows is that Carina is in a secret and forbidden relationship with Pedro Lucas, the son of Carina’s boss, the captain. A scuffle ensues and Pedro Lucas is killed, leaving Carina pregnant with his mestizo child. The story then jumps back and forth between Carina’s story and the present day, in which professor Daniel de Barros —along with student Maria Cristina—embarks on a restoration project in the Aruanda region. As both stories develop in tandem, we discover that Daniel and Maria Cristina are in fact reincarnations of Pedro Lucas and Carina. As the professor and his students fight to save the Aruanda region from property developers who are destroying the landscapes just as the plantations did centuries before, we realise that Daniel and Maria’s love is similarly ill-fated. While Aruanda reflects on the country’s issues of prejudice, conflict and environmental destruction past and present, the novel does not feature the word ‘Mozambique’ at all: much like Isabel Allende’s Casa de los Espiritus is an allegory of national history without ever naming names, Aruanda takes place in fictional Aruanda, named after the Afro-Brazilian spiritual citadel of the same name, and considers whether postcolonial, post civil-war Mozambique is indeed a version of this utopia, or whether it is controlled by the same forces as it always has been. Aruanda will be of interest to a contemporary readership because it falls within the spheres of climate fiction, science fiction and race writing. Recent big-budget film and TV adaptations of novels such as The End We Start From and Leave the World Behind demonstrate the popularity of such genres, but very little climate fiction is published from the African continent, one of the regions most affected by the climate crisis. The book is also reminiscent of Octavia Butler’s classic, Kindred, in its historical episodes and supernatural elements.”

Aruanda is silent. Its solitude has risen, its melancholy dripping into the sea. I’ve never been to the Indian Ocean, but this is how I picture it: deep and still like the tombs of my ancestors who traversed its waters. Its quietude stretches right up to the large house belonging to the Prazo overlords: Captain Major Bento Noronha and his wife, Dona Luísa.

The dinner table is laid just so, just how Dona Luísa likes it. Tonight we are hosting young Doctor Fernando, the family physician. After coming to see Sargeant Pedro Lucas, he has been invited to stay for dinner.

Captain Bento and Doctor Fernando’s conversation lingers on banalities as the sweet scent of lilies tickles my nostrils. I inhale deeply and see Dona Luísa descending the granite steps, carrying a glass vase holding the flowers.

“It’s a pleasure to have you here, Doctor Fernando.”

“An absolute honour, Madam,” he responds politely, nodding in reverence to his hostess.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from “To see a woman . . .” by Annemarie Schwarzenbach

June 25, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Natalie Mariko

we were meant to meet one another at the stranger’s threshold, along this obscure and melancholic borderline of awareness

This Translation Tuesday, in honor of Pride Month, we present a fiction excerpt from the desk of Swiss novelist Annemarie Schwarzenbach, written ninety-four years ago and now translated by Natalie Mariko. In these impressionistic scenes, the nameless, genderless narrator (a thinly-veiled insert for Schwarzenbach herself) is drawn continually to the thought of Ena Bernstein, their unseen fellow guest at an alpine ski-lodge. In Schwarzenbach’s hands, the gossipy high-society atmosphere of the ski-lodge gives way to a quasi-mystical perception of the natural world, which is reinforced by the ineluctable “oceanic unknown” of the narrator’s desire for women. “The ardent love which had always tethered me to this landscape grew in a violent way,” Schwarzenbach writes, as the narrator’s longing for Ena refracts the mundanity of everyday life into something beautiful and strange––a powerful reminder of how our desires can enrich the world. Read on!

To see a woman: just for a second, just in the short space of a look, and then to lose her again somewhere in the dark of a hall, behind a door I’m not allowed to open—but to see a woman and in the same moment to feel that she also saw me, that her eyes hung puzzled, as if we were meant to meet one another at the stranger’s threshold, along this obscure and melancholic borderline of awareness . . .

Yes, to feel in that moment how she also faltered, almost painfully halted in the hall of her thoughts, as if her nerves contracted, being touched by mine. And if I wasn’t tired then I wouldn’t have been bewildered by the day’s memories: still, I saw fields of snow, and thereupon the long evening shadows; saw the bar throngs, girls passing by to be sloughed like puppets from their partners, carelessly laughing back over their thin shoulders, the blustering jazz starting alongside their laughter. And before it blew again I took refuge in a small corner, Li waving there, her little face quivering white under high, shaved brows. She slid her glass back to me—stubbornly forcing me to drink the whole thing—and laid her slender hands on the Norwegian’s neck. She floated past dancing, and he hung with his eyes at her lips.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: from “A Minimal Unhappiness” by Carmen Verde

June 18, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Katie Shireen Assef

Unhappiness is not only a state of the spirit... No. Unhappiness is a place, a real, physical place, a dark room that we decide to stay in.

This Translation Tuesday, we are excited to present the English debut of Carmen Verde, a finalist for the Premio Strega in 2023 for her very first novel, A Minimal Unhappiness, which we excerpt here in Katie Shireen Assef’s impeccable translation. Verde’s narrator is a habitué of sadness and madness, an accustomed yet discerning sufferer. If unhappiness is a room, as she claims with some authority, then hers is lush-black, Gothically plangent, and filled with lugubrious relatives.

God is the Highest. God is the Most High.
Isn’t that terrifying?

 

***

In photographs we’re always sitting close together, my mother and I: she, pale, uneasy, with a look that seems to apologize for itself.

In those days, she still prayed to God that my bones would lengthen. God had nothing to do with it, though. If it took stubbornness for a girl not to grow, I had more than enough.

I never thought I was ugly. And I never doubted that I resembled my mother, even if I didn’t have her thin ankles, her elegant proportions. Ours was an elusive, an indecipherable resemblance: the sort of resemblance that pierces the heart of those who manage to recognize it.

 

***

In my five years of primary school, she came to pick me up every afternoon. The window of my classroom looked out onto the street, so that between my desk and the bench where she sat waiting, there couldn’t have been more than a hundred fifty feet as the crow flies. I was happy when I saw her on the other side of the glass, even if I was soon overcome by the fear—the terrible certainty, even—that she would decide to go and leave me there, alone. I never believed I had a right to my mother’s presence.

In winter, on windy days, the dust from the street would cling to her silk stockings, to her camel-colored coat, to her hair that was so straight and smooth it seemed like velvet. On the first warm days in June, she would stand beneath the shade of the linden tree at the center of the piazza. If she stayed, I told myself, it meant she loved me. I couldn’t see her from where I sat at my desk (the shutters were closed to block out the sun), and so the fear would slowly build up inside me until, five minutes before the lesson ended, I had lost all hope of finding her. And yet there she would be, still in the same spot. Yes, Sofia Vivier was a good mother.

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Translation Tuesday: From “After Celeste” by Maude Nepveu-Villeneuve

June 11, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Kate Lofthouse

“It’s no big deal, it happens to one in five pregnancies.”

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poignant excerpt from the latest novel by Québécois author Maude Nepveu-Villeneuve, translated into English by Kate Lofthouse. In plangent, methodically-detailed vignettes, Nepveu-Villeneuve’s narrator describes her return to Moreau, the village of her childhood. In the wake of a recent tragedy, her perception of the world around her comes unmoored; she feels as if she has never left Moreau, as if her years away were only a nightmare, yet Moreau also seems unreal, “a figment of my imagination.” Struggling to engage with the world as a thing separate from herself, the narrator spirals into her past, moving from distant memories of childhood vacations abroad towards the cause of her present alienation.

     I’ll just . . . go home to my sad life and be miserable forever.
—Maddy Thorson, Celeste

Summer is darker than winter on my parents’ street, once green leaves fill the branches of Moreau’s trees and their ancient foliage has cast its shadow over the houses. My parents escape in search of sunshine every year, to Spain, Morocco, Belize, anywhere the July heat is more oppressive than it is on their little shaded street in a small village lost up in the north, a little town I never name when people ask me where I come from, because it doesn’t mean anything to anyone, so I always go back to the closest big city saying around there, and people nod and shrug, because even that city is a minor one, insignificant, one never mentioned in weather reports and which people struggle to picture.

They took me with them when I was little. The three of us went, a close-knit and indestructible family unit with the same sturdy blonde heads and indistinguishable laughter, we fled the shade cast by the old trees over the bungalows and the lawns, and we walked along the shores of Caribbean islands or through the streets of Cairo or Terceira. I would have preferred the cool air of our little street, riding my bike around the block for hours, napping in the hammock in the backyard, drawing on the pavement with Laure, my neighbour from across the way, my best friend. But my parents had other ideas, we left at the end of the school year and came back at the beginning of August, in time to buy supplies and new clothes.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: from “The Atlantic Express” by Georgi Tenev

June 4, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Traci Speed

Different people are travelling on the express. A lot of Italians have sold their collections of African bones to be able to board this train.

This Translation Tuesday, a grim vision of the future comes to us from Bulgarian author Georgi Tenev and his translator, Traci Speed. Rado is on a train through a dystopian but dimly recognisable Europe, trying to get off the continent before apocalypse sweeps in from the east. As the carriages inch around a radioactive Mediterranean, he muses about how things came to be so wrong. The signs of moribund civilisation that spring from Tenev’s imagination are graphic and pointed. Passengers trade in the bones of migrants who died trying to enter Europe in the ‘better days’. Mutant rabbits, originally bred for KFC, serve as ‘edible companions’ for the journey ahead. There are whispers that Hitler has come back from the dead. When things go catastrophically wrong, Tenev shows, it’s hard to know whether to laugh or to cry.

This war’s been going a long time, and it’s being fought for what’s most important inside of you. The struggle’s between those of us who want to save you and that animal force that wants to swallow you up. We found the subgenetic formula for intelligence, for human reason. We determined the principle behind the absorption of ephermine, that subtle substance with a negative mass, that diaphanous matter. Ephermine cannot exist independently, and so it gravitates in an orbit around the photon and comprises part of its spectrum. This form is vulnerable and unstable, but without it—consciousness, thought, and reason wouldn’t exist. Something else that wouldn’t exist is that thing which, for a change, we call the soul—that which is not quite intrinsic to the body. For some time now, we’ve been trying to migrate from this body, from the biochemical base to another independent host of identity. We made attempts and we made mistakes; you, however, turned out to be a paradox, an exception to the rule. You’re too attached to the biological, to what you consider life. We have to put people like you under quarantine until we’ve researched the vector of your development better. Until we write the story of your—yours personally, in this case—your rise and fall. You call it birth and death. Fine, call it that. In order to reach the heart of the ephermine, however, the casing has to be destroyed. A person has to be crushed and broken down before receiving a new unrestricted identity. But you stubbornly persist, you want to maintain the status quo. Fine, listen to your story. Then you can evaluate whether or not you have anything to be sorry for.

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To Tear Down Since They Won’t Let Us Build: Katerina Gogou and Her Impressive Invasion of the Poetic Realm

May 29, 2024  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou and Dimitris Gkionis

Since they won't let us create life, we're going to ruin what's existing, and the new will follow.

As one of Greece’s most bold and unwavering poets, there is a ruthlessness running through the work of Katerina Gogou. In ferocious, free-styling verse, she vividly identified the brutalities and loneliness around her, and, with the incendiary vibration of a radical cry, came up always on the side of anarchism. As sensitive to hypocrisy as she was to corruption, Gogou dreaded a poetics that stood aside from politics, in one of her poems confessing: “What I fear most / is becoming “a poet” . . . / Locking myself in the room / gazing at the sea / and forgetting . . .” So it is that she remained dedicated to the necessity of rebellion and freedom until her death in 1993.

In this following article by Dimitris Gkionis, translated from the Greek by Christina Chatzitheodorou, we are offered an insight of this powerful poet in the midst of her time, navigating rages, passions, injustices, and her own poetic urgency. A woman who believes in words as action, as weapon—this is what comes into view.

On October 13, 1980, this piece, featuring an interview between Dimitris Gkionis and the poet Katerina Gogou, was published in the newspaper Eleftherotypia. It has since then been re-published—along with other interviews of Gogou—in Katerina Gogou, Mou Moiazei o Anthropos m’enan Ilio, Pou Kaigetai apo Monos tou (The man reminds me of a sun that burns by itself, published by Kastaniotis Editions in 2018). In both her poetry and interviews, Gogou’s work had always reflected her unconventional, rebellious, and combative spirit—always rebelling against authority, no matter what form. A supporter of the radical movement, she spent most of her days in Exarcheia—the historical centre of radical left-wing/libertarian politics—and was in constant conflict with the establishment, eventually giving up a promising career in acting to write poetry instead.

Through her verse, Gogou denounced social inequality, condemned police violence, criticised the death penalty, and stood in solidarity with political prisoners. Her mind was never at rest, and neither was her pen. While some of her poetry has previously been translated in English, it is the interviews that have been able to directly capture Gogou’s reasoning behind her aesthetic interventions, providing a more holistic picture of her and her work. In these conversations, she explains why she writes what she writes, and her anger at a stagnant world that she wants to change: “I am writing to get rid of this rock (kotrona) that is weighing me down. If I didn’t write, my ears would buzz. Ιf I don’t take this action, if I don’t put words on this white paper to bring myself to life, I could do things that are horrible and unimaginable.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Home Country” by Ksenia Rogozhnikova

May 28, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Nina Murray

the thieving babushka / carries her loot / down the freezing streets

This Translation Tuesday, we are honored to present a poem by the Kazakh poet Ksenia Rogozhnikova, deftly translated by the Ukrainian poet Nina Murray. With wry humor and plainspoken kindness, the poem’s unnamed speaker bears witness to the antics of a “little match girl” far more defiant and vivacious than her namesake, and to the theft of a roll of toilet paper by an old woman in a shopping center. Together, these images form a subtly generous portrait of urban life, a flicker of warmth against winter’s chill.

Home Country

the little match girl
sets things on fire
with the tiny bombs
she throws
under people’s feet

I dive into a mall
to get warm
let an elderly woman
ahead
into the bathroom

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Snow” by Guka Han

May 21, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Catherine Leung

"I felt like this meaningless daily routine could just carry on forever."

This Translation Tuesday, we feature an intricate story told deftly by Guka Han, translated from the French by Catherine Leung. On a morning too cold to leave her bed, Han’s narrator scrolls through her feed. Among the ads and videos, a photo of “her” surprises her: a friendly fellow student from film school, and in a later crossing of paths, a strange albeit familiar face in the country she’s emigrated to. Memories begin to return—of her first summer in this new country, her anomie, her listlessness, and her two strange encounters with this girl. Deep unhappiness lurks in the narrator’s ambivalent, almost benumbed recollection—elusive and obscure, yet instantly familiar to those who know it.

I open my eyes. The day is about to begin, but last night’s dreams and the events of yesterday still surround me and hold me back from a fresh start. My head’s in a fog. The alarm didn’t go off. Curled up under the duvet, I reach out to grab my phone. The cold air from the bedroom immediately nips my arm. I look at the time on the screen and stretch, but don’t manage to shake off the sense of fatigue. I wonder what woke me. The chill in the bedroom feels even sharper than usual and I don’t feel ready yet to face the new day. I curl up again and make the most of the little heat still remaining in the bed.

I turn my phone back on. The bright screen dazzles me, but after a few moments, my eyes adapt. I scroll through the day’s news. An acquaintance is interested in the language of cats; another hates a politician; somebody is stuck at the airport in Moscow; a celebrity has succumbed to cancer; such and such a person is looking for a flat “650 euros max”; a child has choked on a Kinder toy; a girlfriend has eaten noodles with mushrooms; somebody else has felt moved by an extract from a book; and in the middle of all this news, a photo catches my attention. It’s her. She’s wearing a thin dress and is smiling as she stares at the lens or the person who took the photo. Her forehead is glowing in a summer light. It’s a good photo in my opinion—she’s beautiful in this dress, in this light.

With a flick of the thumb, I scroll through the news again. Stories, ads and photos follow one after another, and then suddenly, there she is once more. In this new picture she’s posing with a girl who I used to hang out with at university. I tap on the photo without thinking.

“…”

Three ellipsis points, nothing else. Sixteen people liked this photo, and twelve added a comment. I read one, then another, and suddenly realise she’s dead.

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