Translations

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

April 25, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Daniel Hahn

Suspending sight and clarity, abdicating control: closing eyes.

For the fourth instalment of our Saturday column, In This Together, we present three diary entries from renowned Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares, translated by Daniel Hahn. Below, Hahn introduces us to Tavares’ work and the background behind his stream-of-consciousness diary that, written like a prose poem, records the daily changes of the pandemic experience:

The novelist Gonçalo M. Tavares is, like most of us, stuck at home. He is in Portugal, from where since March 23 he’s been writing a daily “Plague Diary.” As each piece is finished, it gets translated—sometimes overnight—into several languages for publication around the world. I have the good fortune of being one of the translators. To date he has written (and I’ve translated) thirty-two pieces, including the three that you can read below.

Gonçalo is one of the Portuguese world’s most critically acclaimed writers. José Saramago tipped him as the next Lusophone winner of the Nobel, saying, “Tavares burst onto the Portuguese literary scene armed with an utterly original imagination that broke through all the traditional imaginative boundaries. This, combined with a language entirely his own, mingling bold invention and a mastery of the colloquial, means that it would be no exaggeration to say . . . that there is very much a before Gonçalo M. Tavares and an after.” But while he has a stellar reputation in many languages, he is as yet frustratingly underappreciated in English. So if he’s new to you, I should say, perhaps, that this writing project is not typical of Gonçalo’s work—but then, I don’t know whether any one piece of his work is typical of his work, come to that. All are extraordinary, as I think this one is.

Each entry seems to take you through a single day’s experience—stepping-stone by stepping-stone—an observation, a piece of news, a thought that gets followed down a rabbit-hole, a bit of culture consumed, a recurring, niggling worry—in a way that partly recreates the peculiarly time-adrift days so many of us are experiencing; unstructured days filled with tiny moments (another news alert, an e-mail from a friend, stop to pat the dog, time perhaps for another coffee), but threaded together with some really subtle, almost invisible artfulness. Each day reads alone, but the best effect is cumulative, each piece slightly developing and illuminating what’s gone before. The writer is looking far outward as much as inward, so the diary ends up being global as well as intimate; its ingredients include utter banality, yet even that banality is woven into something weirdly engrossing, sometimes distressing, sometimes strangely comforting.

One day we will be living in a place where this whole project can be published all together as a book, to be read for its artistry and its thoughtfulness and as a reminder of who we were in the spring of 2020; but in the meantime, while we are still living in the present that it describes, I have felt its entries gradually becoming one of the richest ways I daily connect with the rest of the world (absent any of the old possibilities). I hope readers can find those connections for themselves here, too.

Extracts from “Plague Diary”

by Gonçalo M. Tavares

6 April

Human number 486 died in a Madrid hospital.

Lists of the dead.

Lists of chosen books.

A list of places to visit after the plague, when it is the anxiety that is driven away and not the bodies.

Ten pages in the newspaper with pictures of people with two dates.

Jacob Steinberg, Israeli poet: “we look tonight like a city in flames.”

I need gauze for the wounds of humans and animals and I consult a link.

“https://www.mifarma.pt/gasas-suaves-hansaplast-10-uds-85m-x-5cm.”

In the details, the link says the following:

“For looking, mole suggestion to clean and collect wounds.”

Later: “Individuals sterile wrapping.”

Then, the clincher. How to use it:

“Clean the area surrounding carefully before applying the look.”

“Use or cure the Hansaplast look to fix a look on nowhere.”

“Apply a new one, I think that less hair daily.”

All instructions should be like this.

Instructions from a lunatic for other lunatics.

I like automatic translators that move into high aesthetics without knowing it.

“Clean the area surrounding carefully before applying the look.”

Clean the surface of an animal’s leg or a human arm well.

Carefully clean and then apply the look.

With a certain strength.

I try this on Roma’s leg.

Medicine that carefully cleans the surrounding area and then applies the look.

The ancients were men who applied the look.

It didn’t work.

My Greek friend tells me that a few days ago, at the refugee camp in Ritsona, a woman tested positive for coronavirus when she went to give birth in a public hospital.

Only then did they realise that many in the camp were infected.

Quarantine. The baby reveals things.

The good soldier Svejk and the description of the lunatic asylum:

“one very educated inventor . . . who spent his life picking his nose and only said once a day: I’ve just invented electricity.”

The raving and badly translated ad for the gauze reminded me of that madman who invented electricity once a day.

When this is over, the outside world is going to be full of crazy people, daily inventors of electricity.

In Italy the government has given approval for all students to pass their year.

In Sweden there are fears of thousands of deaths from Covid-19.

Somebody asks: If you lose your desire, would you go looking for it?

Where?

Alexander Kluge talks about a doll “where the eyes” tell you the time.

Seeing the right time in the eyes of the doll.

Seeing the right time in the eyes of some old men on television.

At certain moments, clocks seem to stop working.

All that work are human eyes.

In Italy, everybody who goes out onto the street has the right time in their eyes.

In Spain too.

And in other places. In the United States.

I receive a link: click on a year and the most listened-to songs of that time will come up.

It’s called “nostalgia machine.”

A collective nostalgia machine.

Jung, explicit in do re mi.

I click on 1986.

The choices are terrible.

From Phil Collins to Samantha Fox.

Sometimes it’s better to lose our memory: memory 0.0

Two days ago in India: “Thousands of people flee to escape hunger.”

The factories are closed, almost everything quarantined.

Thousands quit the capital and return to their village.

There aren’t enough buses.

Reports in the Guardian. Many had to return on foot.

200 kilometres from New Delhi.

“The road seemed endless . . . and my children just took short breaks sleeping on the ground,” Mamta explained.

The only thing that kept us moving was that we had nowhere else to go, said Mamta.

The only thing.

“Each day a deeper rebirth,” the painter used to say, quoting a master.

The following day, in the same place, but sunk deeper.

With just your head out.

That’s how you learn: with just your head out.

Boris Johnson has been put into intensive care.

The Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab will take his place.

They’re talking about 15 million new unemployed people in the United States.

I return to my book.

“Take five steps forward and five steps back,” says a doctor at the asylum of the good soldier Svejk.

It is a test to see whether the man is crazy or not.

I try to do this.

We should all do this.

Five steps forward and five steps back to see if we stay in the same place.

We don’t stay in the same place.

It’s no longer possible to stay in the same place.

*

8 April

All Mexican women are in love with the undersecretary of health, Hugo López-Gatell.

From a friend of mine in Mexico City, she was the one who verified this.

He speaks every evening at 7:00 p.m.

All the women, of all ages, are in love.

Married, single, widows.

He’s charming and intelligent, they say.

He’s a combo, they add. He has everything all in one.

There are photos of him all over Mexico and circulating on the internet, in different poses and suits.

And with the caption:

“I’ll protect you”

“I’m telling you to stay home”

“I’d be happy to explain it to you”

And another one, with a mean (“but very lovely”) expression, with the caption: “I saw you went out!”, as if Hugo López-Gatell were reproaching a citizen for not staying home.

Many men are also in love with him, says my friend from Mexico.

“He’s so supergorgeous our doctor.”

“I fell in love with him from the start of Covid-19 and since then I’ve done what Hugo López-Gatell says.”

Meanwhile, the Chinese city of Wuhan reopened this Wednesday. READ MORE…

Living in the Ideal City: Fragments in the Form of Vision

April 22, 2020  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Franca Mancinelli

Before this city is scattered or rises like a curtain over the void. Keep living in it, believing in this space, stay.

Franca Mancinelli (b. 1981) is one of the leading poets of her generation and has received several important prizes in Italy. I have had the pleasure of translating all of her published poetry to date: her prose poems in The Little Book of Passage (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2018) and her verse poetry in At an Hour’s Sleep from Here (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2019). Her writing is cherished by readers because of the way she grapples with wounds, losses, and what she has called “fault lines”—sometimes personal in origin, sometimes not. By writing, she often seeks to transform these negative events or situations into something potentially affirmative. The title of her new book of poems, Tutti gli occhi che ho aperto, which is forthcoming in September at Marcos y Marcos, comes from a line in one of her poems that expresses this new possibility of vision: “All the eyes that I have opened are branches I have lost.” 

Over the years, Mancinelli has also written compelling personal essays. Published in anthologies and journals, these texts often evoke her hometown of Fano or meditate on works of art. Such is the case with “Living in the Ideal City: Fragments in the Form of Vision.” Mancinelli bases her text on a fifteenth-century Italian painting that is found in Urbino at the National Gallery. The painting represents an “ideal city” from which all, or nearly all, the inhabitants seem to have fled, arguably because of some invasion or plague-like disaster. Her text is a kind of reverie on this painting: its architecture, its empty city square and buildings. It raises the question of stepping into the painting, of having “the courage to cross the threshold, [to] enter the darkness, hollow and round like a belly that has taken you back into itself.”

—John Taylor

It emerges when I close my eyes. As clearly as an island suddenly appearing beyond the haze and the mist on the horizon. You see it and can only believe your eyes even if you know you are daydreaming. It happens every time in a different light, as if that square and those streets were the setting of a story. Perhaps only the ghost of a voice that has taken a breath, a gust skimming over the cobblestones, whirlwinding dust across the space, beating lightly on the windows like a bird that has lost its flock.

With sure footsteps, I was heading towards the half-open door. That of the large pagoda a magic spell had brought to a stop at the center of this gently drawn desert. I was moving forward over the large, ash- and sand-colored marble slabs. I could not take my eyes off the geometry seemingly guiding me to the center, like a rolling marble that gathers speed, approaching the hole where it must fall. The darkness beyond the door and a growing fear could have gripped my body and kept me from moving, but it was impossible: my steps continued towards the center while my terror was blooming like a black flower. The door might have opened slowly, then widely, to the breath of the void barely covered by the constructions that now seemed made of cards. They have been aligned in a lukewarm light, but, as you see, they cannot halt the fathomless blackness pressing outwards from the windows and the half-open doors. If you enter the pagoda you sink into the center of the universe, in an endless fall. The beast looks at you, awaits you, pretending to sleep with its hollow eyes: six large square pupils in a clear mellow sky that tells you not to believe in the darkness, not to be afraid. Come to the center; enter. You can imitate a childhood game and jump only on the light or the dark slabs. Precisely, calibrating each movement as if your life depended on it. With such concentration, obediently, you can advance to the foot of the staircase. Now you’re there, standing in front of the dark crack. You have gathered all the soft light of this scene; you have the balmy sun concealed by buildings but warm and sure, as in a late morning without school. You can see the pagoda slowly turning on its axis like a carousel without horses and without music, so slowly that it seems almost motionless; yet it rotates—of this you are sure—rotates like the earth. At the top, the almost invisible thread supporting it could lift it up again, restoring its airy foundations. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Invisibles” by Eszter T. Molnár

April 21, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Kristen Herbert

One girl started giggling nervously—another buried her face in her hands.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, psychological horror meets scathing social commentary in Eszter T. Molnár’s “Invisibles.” From the first paragraph we’re primed by imagery that’s both mundane and otherworldly—cupcake perfume and short skirts appear alongside a “vibrating blue” sky and decorative figures of preternatural monsters. Our protagonist, an exchange student seeking solace in drinking and hookups, reluctantly attends a Halloween party. But when a horrific discovery is made, the party is split between deniers and . . . deniers? Our protagonist’s indifference (itself demonstrating the benumbing effects of violence), plus the partygoers’ inebriated hostility and homophobia, and the ever-present face of youthful vacuity and diffusion of responsibility, set the stage for a tragedy that reads more like a nightmare. An important voice in contemporary Hungarian literature, Molnár addresses gender violence and domestic abuse in vivid, psychologically nuanced detail. “Invisibles” is one such study on how we interpret and (mis)handle horrific acts of violence.

The sky was still vibrating blue, but the shadows were preparing themselves along the base of the houses. As he wound his way through leaping skeletons, witches, and vampires, Tamás caught scent of the girls’ cupcake perfume. He stopped in front of a shabby tenement house. Bikes were parked along the sidewalk, in the street, even in the flowerbeds. He pushed open the door, stepped into the inner courtyard, and beside the trash cans, he leaned his bike against the wall, next to Varja’s. Her bike was decorated with plastic flowers. Please don’t leave trash next to the containers, put it in the bins! was written across the crimson sign in white letters.

He rang the bell three times, but the tune of “Für Elise” was lost in the music swelling up from inside. He started shivering. His damp sweater was sticking to his back, underneath his coat. It was a stupid idea to come, he thought, and he turned to leave, when the door burst open, and a sheet swept down over his head. They pulled him into the vestibule, circled around him, pushed him back and forth to each other. They were the spiders, he was the prey. Even though he’d expected something like this, his pulse went into a frenzy. He struggled helplessly, the blood throbbing in his ears stifled out the shrieking and choked laughter. He crashed into the wall, and fell to the ground. READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

April 18, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

A week ago, I couldn’t have imagined this feeling, passing the Spring Festival in Wuhan locked-down like this.

For this week’s edition of In This Together, we present a non-fiction text from the prolific Wuhan-based writer, Fei Wo Si Cun 匪我思存 (psudonym of Ai Jingjing 艾晶晶), who has been publishing a series of texts, collected under the title The Wuhan Battle Diaries, since the first day of the city’s lockdown. Xiao Yue Shan, the translator of this text, explains the significance of these diaries:

The news in China came at the end of the lunar year; a particularly ill-fated time, as the holiday season piques the highest rate of travel both within and outside of the country. We did not know then what we know now—how quickly the virus would spread, how drastic its impact would be on our daily lives, and how, in a brief few weeks, the whole world would come to experience the same fear, trepidation, uncertainty, and weariness that the people of Wuhan awoke to in the thick of its winter.

Fei Wo Si Cun is an incredibly popular writer; her works, largely tales of love and desire, have made her a household name and launched her into screenwriting as well as media production. When the lockdown was first announced, her’s was one of the first voices sounding in response, and it has since persisted in its accounts. Her intimate, informal language charted the city’s tragedies—sometimes pragmatically, sometimes despairingly, yet always indelible with the sense of survival, and interwoven with a sense of intimate locality.

There are cities that become synonymous with their devastation—Wuhan, which had previously occupied a low tier in the global consciousness, will likely be bound to the COVID-19 pandemic for the enduring future. Yet, in Fei’s tender depictions of the city, we become privy to its actualities; there is a redemptive grace that even the most devastated places may persist as a home, as somewhere precious. Many of us around the world are finding ourselves suddenly estranged from our localities, which have been cleared of their familiarities and comforts, but it is my wish, in translating this, that a Wuhan woman’s love for her city may remind us of what we cherished of these places, of what we wish now to save.

Awaiting Spring Under Quarantine

by Fei Wo Si Cun 匪我思存

These days, I’ve been staying up late. Yesterday, at around two in the morning, when suddenly news came online that Wuhan would halt all forms of public transportation—subways, airports, train stations, and any other method of leaving the city—my chest thudded. First arrived the knowledge that these measures indicated the severity of this epidemic, then came the disbelief, that I would actually witness a lockdown like this in my lifetime. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Battle” by Ana Luísa Amaral

April 14, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Margaret Jull Costa

Now, what mattered / was to survive, / to be a book.

This week’s Translation Tuesday pays homage to the books that grant us sanctuary amid chaos and absurdity. In “The Battle,” acclaimed poet and translator Ana Luísa Amaral deploys her Dickinsonian wit and wordplay to construct a humorous tale about literature and survival. A young girl’s personal library becomes a literary battlefield, book contra book, each title a moment in time seeking its own sentient survival. Renowned translator Margaret Jull Costa captures Amaral’s waggish metaphors and allusions as the poet anthropomorphizes the Great Books of history. A respite for fearful times and a tribute to the books that have become our friends when we need them most.

The Battle

Once upon a time,
in a young girl’s bedroom,
a drawer full of books
lay under permanent threat
of possible occupation
by a trousseau. 

What to do?
Should they just sit quietly
waiting for a lot of silly sheets
and useless towels
to come and invade their territory?
Or fight to hold on to
their hard-won
rights?  READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

April 11, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Anna Aresi and Sarah Moore

To that grasp / of a palm in another's palm / to that simple act, forbidden to us now—

For the second week of our new Saturday column, In This Together, we present a recent poem from Italian writer Mariangela Gualtieri, newly translated by Anna Aresi and Sarah Moore. Below, Aresi explains the context of Gualtieri’s work and how the poem came to be such an instant success in Italy:

The first case of COVID-19 in Italy was diagnosed on February 21, just days before the Carnival parades and celebrations were scheduled to take place. Everything was immediately canceled and schools were closed, at first only in the most affected regions, until on March 9, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte issued the decree that would bring the entire country into total lockdown. The same day, Mariangela Gualtieri published her poem “Nove marzo duemilaventi” (“March ninth, twenty-twenty”). Within hours, the poem had been shared thousands of times on social media and in messaging apps, effectively becoming the text of the Italian quarantine.

Mariangela Gualtieri is a beloved Italian poet and cofounder of the Teatro Valdoca theater company in Cesena. The company has performed poems and works by major Italian authors, and Gualtieri herself is known for the masterful interpretations of her own works. She read this poem for a local TV channel exactly a month after its publication, on April 9; the recording can be found here (Italian only).

With more time on their hands and prompted by a sense of social responsibility, authors have been prolific during the lockdown, sharing reflections, diaries, and other kinds of writing, often to raise funds for hospitals and other organizations. Only in the months and years to come will we find out what pieces will stand the test of time, but even now we can be sure that this poem is here to stay. Though prompted by an unprecedented state of emergency, Gualtieri’s poem does not read rushed; on the contrary, it is a thought-out, compelling reflection on our (unsustainable) way of life in relation to the environment. Much like Dante’s Commedia, mutatis mutandis of course, the poem establishes a relation between the human microcosm and the universal macrocosm, inviting readers to reconsider our position as both individuals and as a species in relation to the universe.

As a final note on the translation, I should add that a first English translation, by Lucy Rand and Clarissa Botsford, appeared soon after the poem’s release. Rand and Botsford stated that they “deliberately chose to stick very closely to the Italian structure so that readers who do not know Italian can read the original in parallel and appreciate the language to the full.” With the poet’s permission, Sarah Moore and I took a different approach, seeking to provide Asymptote’s readers with an English rendering that also conveys the rhythm, bold syntactical choices, and flow of images of the original.

March ninth, twenty-twenty

by Mariangela Gualtieri

I want to tell you this
we needed to stop.
We knew. We all felt
how our actions
were too frantic. Staying inside of things.
Each outside of ourselves.
Squeezing each hour—making it count.

We needed to stop
and we couldn’t.
It had to be done together.
Slow down the pace.
But we couldn’t.
There was no human strain
that could hold us back. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpts from I Am Not That Body by Verónica González Arredondo

April 7, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Allison A. deFreese

here no one/ is watching, not even God

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, poet Verónica González Arredondo bears witness to the plague of gender violence in Mexico in this excerpt from her forthcoming chapbook, I Am Not That Body. Our narrator speaks from a place beyond the remains of her body, recounting with chilling forensic detail the horrors she has witnessed and endured. From this ghostly viewpoint, the speaker refuses the anonymity, objectification, and cultural silence mandated by Mexican officials and the popular media, leading us to the horrifying and heart-breaking final stanzas where our speaker informs her family—and the reader—the she is not a statistic, or a faded memory, or a voiceless body. This excerpt, sublime in its masterful use of religious imagery, metaphor, and concise, almost staccatoed lines, is a necessary and timely read for understanding the recent wave of protests against femicide in Mexico. 

I Am Not That Body

When the night yawns
there are rows of teeth in its mouth
that pierce every bone in the earth

 

 

violence of a white handkerchief covers my mouth
I don’t scream
I don’t breathe
all my memories
will lose their tongue
I will become another,
identical to the voice I never recognized
I scream in order to wake up in another dream
but the dream has gone missing READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

April 4, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Sarah Moore

Defeating lockdown with what makes us human. The shared word—Ariadne's thread that allowed Theseus to find his way.

As COVID-19 continues to leave devastation in its wake, one is reminded of the importance of bearing witness. As Paul Celan said: “It, the language, remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything.” In our new Saturday column, In This Together, we at Asymptote are gathering a series of texts from writers around the world—poetry, journals, essays, and all the other tools language gives us to see beyond the surface of things. Today, in our inaugural post, we present diary entries from French theatre director Wajdi Mouawad, translated by assistant blog editor Sarah Moore. Below, Moore gives us an introduction and context to Mouawad’s life and work:

Wajdi Mouawad has been the director of La Colline theatre in Paris since 2016. One of five national theatres in France, La Colline is renowned for its mission to stage contemporary works. Since taking up this role, Mouawad has programmed work by writers such as Édouard Louis, Vincent Macaigne, Elfriede Jelinek, and Angélica Liddell. Last month, I went to see Anne-Marie la Beauté (Anne-Marie the Beauty), a nostalgic, bittersweet monologue written by Yasmina Reza, one of France’s most successful contemporary playwrights. The following week, Friday March 13, I had tickets to see the new play by Peter Handke, Les Innocents, Moi, et l’Inconnue au bord de la route départementale (The Innocents, I, and the Stranger on the side of the departmental road). Handke, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a contentious figure, and I was curious to see what I’d make of this new text. However, hours before the performance was due to start, the French government limited gatherings to fewer than one hundred people in an attempt to curb the spread of coronavirus. And since March 17, the country has been on a strict lockdown. Now, beside each listing for Reza and Handke’s plays reads “—annulé.” Mouawad, like everyone else, is on lockdown, with life on pause. How does a playwright and director respond when his theatre must close its doors to the public? Since the first day of this lockdown, Mouawad has been keeping an audio diary, published on the website of La Colline. Through his diary, Mouawad reflects on this unprecedented situation, on how he can continue to write and engage with communities, and as he says, “how to turn the time of lockdown into a time that’s alive.”

Excerpts from “Lockdown Diary — Day One”

by Wajdi Mouawad

Washing them twice an hour and for thirty seconds each time. I’ve never had such clean hands as during these days of solitude. And yet, despite the cleanliness of my hands, I must be responsible for something. Lady Macbeth, unwittingly. But then, what is this stain which won’t go and which I can’t stop scrubbing? What crime have I committed? What king have I slain? Unless, reflecting my own era, I’m nothing more than one of the thousands of Pontius Pilates (another character obsessed by the cleanliness of their ten fingers,) who is wondering what all this has to do with them. In this case, what is it about washing my hands that today carries the risk of being put to death? Which Christ am I sending to his crucifixion? What is sublime and who dies? What departs? What spirit of the forest is deserting the world? What must I, from now on, mourn? Carefreeness. It’s been two weeks since I can say I’ve been feeling carefree: climate, fire, violence against women, liberalism. If the world I’m giving up through lockdown was that one, why wish this lockdown to end as quickly as possible? To return to what kind of world? Between a world that crushes me, and one that turns me today into a statue, how to prevent a state of shock, without a reply to this question: what to do with this lockdown? I open my eyes this morning after wandering all night long in the bois de Vincennes. What is happening to us? On this first day of lockdown, taking stock of the situation is impossible. It’s like writing yourself in reverse. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m feeling. I don’t know where the measure of everything is. I don’t know if my lucidity is panic. In the evening, I go to bed and tell myself that without even knowing, I perhaps won’t see summer. So many of us won’t see it. Overwhelming and collective sorrow. I can’t reassure myself with the idea, increasingly fragile, that this only affects the elderly. And even if that were true, how can the death of others be reassuring? And anyway, how could we live in a world without the elderly if all the elderly were to disappear? For an hour, I’m overcome by unease and everything comes back to me. A civil war won’t stop the epidemic and misfortune doesn’t wait its turn. The gods don’t exist. No logic, other than nature and her disruption. Confused thoughts. Feelings in disarray. Multiple sensations. Like so many pieces of a puzzle, of no precise image except a fog, none of which fit perfectly together. Fear, sadness, anxiety, and memories. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by C.D. Zeletin

March 31, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Andreea Scridon

We find Elysium in each other, / It is your moment that, in my time, I discover.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, Asymptote remembers the life and work of acclaimed Romanian poet C.D. Zeletin. The three selections below exemplify Zeletin’s prosodic brilliance and his masterful juxtaposition of nature with emotional memory.

Translator and our own Assistant Editor Andreea Scridon honours the late poet:

“C.D. Zeletin, born Constantin Dimoftache (1935 – 2020), was a Romanian poet, essayist, translator, and medic. He was a professor of biophysics at Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bucharest. He published forty books during his lifetime, including translations of Michelangelo, Baudelaire, and Verlaine into Romanian (among many others), as well as his own poetry. He was awarded a series of international prizes for his work, and was decorated with the Order of Cultural Merit by the Romanian state. Zeletin died on February 18, 2020, exactly one year after we published a story on his work. We mourn his loss with immense regret.”

It’s no longer enough for the soul

It’s no longer enough for the soul, it’s true
to say just: you, you, you, and you,
so it seems to me, in these strange timely spheres,
that in you I enumerate my hours and my years,
and you, from my ever weaker hesitation
grow of yourself an independent incarnation.
We find Elysium in each other,
It is your moment that, in my time, I discover.
To left and right, look up or down
you move, I move, we live without duration,
the sunbaked sweetness of stagnation . . .
Our lives braid into one another—a rope for a maroon
strewn out between the frigate and pontoon,
through which there is no chance in storms
to hide our grain of sand’s small form.
By memory we rise and fall at helm,
encountering the venom of the same realm,
of pleasure locked in a kiss,
as butterflies over a flower’s deep abyss.

It’s no longer enough for the soul, it’s true
to say: you, you, you, and you . . . READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Buddha” by Jules Boissière

March 24, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by A. Z. Foreman

The Buddha gave our wolfish men a smile.

This week’s Translation Tuesday presents a chilling and challenging poem by Jules Boissière, translated from the Occitan. At turns uncomfortable to read yet undeniably skilful in its imagery and structure, the poem’s deft enjambment and linguistic precision belies the speaker’s cultural ignorance (e.g., the suggestion that the Buddha is revered as a god) and his complicity in colonial terror. It’s admittedly difficult to make sense of the colonizer’s mindset, which at once mourns a seemingly indifferent universe while confirming the wolfish volition of his compatriot soldiers.

Also noteworthy is the poet’s insistence on writing in Occitan rather than French. Writes translator A.Z. Foreman: “It is only in Occitan that Boissière allows himself to be honest about life as a colonial soldier. This poem gives a soldiers’-eye view of terrorized civilians running for their lives from a home in flames, followed by a macabre meditation. We are more accustomed to poetry that describes the effect of brutality on those who suffer from it. This poem, though, conveys the effect on a man who inflicts it. The coarsening of the mind, brought on by acceptance of the horrific.”  

The Buddha

Our soldiers won, then torched a domicile.
The owner with his sons ran half a mile
Under gunfire. On the ancestors’ altar
Not guarding the old creeds or their old shelter,
The Buddha gave our wolfish men a smile. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Balancing Act” by Hisham Bustani

March 17, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Thoraya El-Rayyes

He sees that she believes his crossing is The Immutable Truth—nothing else—nothing else but that decision to cross.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, acclaimed Jordanian writer Hisham Bustani conveys longing and estrangement with a death-defying metaphor in “Balancing Act.” Two individuals are divided by impossible circumstances. Will one risk walking a tightrope to reach the other? The mature and unexpected conclusion defies the simplicity of most parables, and one can even read this poetic story as a meditation on choice itself. Part of the power of Hisham Bustani’s allegory is its applicability to various real-life scenarios: the risks of choosing to cross a divide, be it personal, political, or geographical, always carries the weight of lost (but also new) possibilities.

A rope stretched taut between two tall buildings.

He stands on one rooftop and she on the second, watching each other.

The distance between them isn’t far. Had they been on the ground, they might cross it in twenty paces. But there, on those rooftops with the rope between them, the distance has grown.

The two buildings have no stairs. The two buildings have no elevators. The two buildings have no fire escapes. No one enters the buildings and no one leaves, and they are on those rooftops. There is no other path, and they watch each other from the ends of the tightrope. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Heimat Who Lives in a Box” by A.E. Sadeghipour

March 10, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by A.E. Sadeghipour

The service was horrible or maybe we were never supposed to be there.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, inexplicable shapeshifting, bad table service, tangible numerals, and a loving friendship that defies spatial logic are on the menu in “Heimat who Lives in a Box,” written and translated from the German by A.E. Sadeghipour. In this surreal microfiction, a dinner date is marred by embarrassment and a rude (and seemingly inhuman) waitstaff. Sadeghipour’s ability to flout realism while preserving the conventions of the short narrative leads us to a conclusion that is both ironic and “happily ever after”-esque.

My friend Heimat lives in a box which she wears everywhere we go. It constantly causes conflicts when making dinner reservations. The last time we made a dinner reservation and crossed the threshold of the restaurant, she grew larger than the door and continuously banged into the door frame. She grew embarrassed and shriveled down into a matchbox. I picked her up, kissed her, walked in, and was escorted to our table.

The service was horrible or maybe we were never supposed to be there. The other guests closed their eyes as they ate, and the waitstaff’s heads were always transfixed on our position regardless of where their bodies were moving. When the food arrived, it was cold and had a hair in it.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Lesbian Fairytales about Men” by Mette Østgaard Henriksen

March 3, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Sharon Rhodes

Once upon a time there was a man with a good explanation for everything. No one could stand him.

This week’s Translation Tuesday spins fairytales into absurdist comedies in these selections from Mette Østgaard Henriksen’s hilarious collection, “Lesbian Fairytales about Men.” Translator Sharon Rhodes explains her technique in preserving the Danish phrase, “Der var engang en mand”: “Literally, this could be translated as ‘there was once a man,’ but to preserve the fairytale element I have used the English fairytale idiom, ‘once upon a time.’” The fabulist literary convention established by this opening line is turned upside down when we actually meet these fairytale characters—mundane, awkward, hapless, yet still painfully human. Our narrator’s deadpan wit and subtle comic timing offers a glimpse into the hidden lives of these sad and clueless men, parodically portraying them as tragic (or tragicomic) heroes.

Once upon a time there was a man with a good explanation for everything. No one could stand him. He never considered that it might be because he trampled on ladybugs. In a rage he set fire to a cat’s tail because it was very soft. That’s part of the story of how he became a little lonelier with each passing day.

Once upon a time there was a man who liked to walk around bare balled. He also liked being whipped, but most found his nakedness overwhelming. They threw blankets at him and pointed at the clothes lying on a chair. When it got to be too much he’d crawl under the covers and press his face against the wall and tell himself he could live with it. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Air Plants” by Inbar Livnat

February 25, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Shoshana Akabas

I know that time passes, and time is what gives life to my epiphytes.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a lonely pensioner opines about life and horticulture in this moving slice-of-life narrative by Inbar Livnat. To carry our narrator’s nuanced voice into English, translator Shoshana Akabas adroitly deploys several techniques to capture the source language’s uniqueness. Writes Akabas: “Livnat’s writing is very cerebral and contains long sentences, which are much easier to understand in the original Hebrew; articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and pronouns are often attached to other words in Hebrew, which allows for concision that is not possible in English. I often had to split sentences or drastically alter punctuation to attempt to give an English reader the same experience or level of comprehension that a Hebrew reader might enjoy. […] On a more macro level, Livnat’s clipped, digressive prose is very characteristic of the modern Israeli style (be it literature, film, or visual art). In the United States, however, that disjointedness is considered much more experimental.”

The old woman in the greenhouse is me. I’m the one planting the Zamioculcas in the yard, growing air plants. I know that time passes, and time is what gives life to my epiphytes. I’m talking about plants that grow only in air that is steeped in humidity. I’m that way too: I grow old in humid air. I don’t feel it moment to moment, but if you put a camera there and photograph me every week, you’d see a difference, just like with the air plants. Like me, they scare some people, all bent, looking a bit like thorns. To me, they resemble fungus, something that isn’t supposed to grow, something that, if no one mentioned it, you’d just forget in some corner. My yard is full of air plants. There are already nurseries contacting me, asking if they can please buy some of the rare ones. Of course I could water and spray them, and, generally, dedication is a vehicle for good, but on principle, I do not nurture them. Just watch them. Just watch them survive. And they do survive. I’m by myself most hours of the day, anyway—I don’t need pity from anyone, thank you very much, that’s what I do best. I’m a retired archeologist and my pension is horrible, so my kids help a little. The state definitely doesn’t. The state’s not good for much, so perhaps I made a mistake giving it all my best years, if that’s what they were. Since Chaim’s gone, I’m alone every day. Oh, I already said that? Alright, so maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to come interview me. Can’t you send the photographer out for a walk now, and you and I can drink some tea in peace and quiet? All this fuss, and for what? I’ll make some tea for us and you can tell me a little about your studies and what a journalist does these days. I hope I’m not talking too much. Ah, no? Good. Well, if the photographer won’t go for a walk, tell him to take pictures of my plants. There are plenty of them. Me? Why on earth would you want to photograph an old lady like me? What do you mean, I’m just being modest? I think you’d be good to sit here on the sofa. It’s not that bad, right? It’s not that bad. READ MORE…