Translations

Translation Tuesday: “The Princess” by Alit Karp

February 2, 2016  |  in Translations  |  by Alit Karp and Ilana Kurshan

As she baked the cake, she thought about what she would say when she'd present it to the Princess.

By the time Nils Holgersson turned forty-eight, he already lived very far north, in Jokkmokk, the capital of Swedish Lapland, which could only with the utmost pretension be called a capital city, since it was no more than a small, remote village upon which, as Tacitus wrote, the sun never shone in the winter and never set in the summer. He worked as a custodian at the only local high school, which had three classes for each grade and a dormitory so that students who lived as far as 100, 200 or even 1000 kilometers away would have a place to stay. The school menu was standard for Sweden: mashed potatoes with butter and strips of bacon on Mondays, fried fish and potatoes on Tuesdays, pea soup and pancakes with jelly on Wednesdays, tuna salad on a roll on Thursdays, and noodles with ground beef on Fridays, which was the children’s favorite. He knew all this from his wife, Maria, who was the cook in the school where he worked as the custodian.

No children had been born to them. They accepted this as their lot in life and did not ask questions, neither of the doctors nor of their own parents, who were still alive when children remained a possibility. Sometimes Nils would amuse himself with the notion that if he had a son, he would teach him how to hold a hammer, how to drive in screws, and how to chop down trees. Most of the time, however, he did not torture himself with such pointless musings.

He rarely spent time with Maria during work. She would be in the kitchen and he’d be in the schoolyard, which was generally covered in ice, or else he’d be in the classrooms or the bathrooms. They didn’t think it was appropriate to consort as a couple just because they were lucky enough to share a workplace. If by chance they passed each other in the hallway, they would mumble feeble greetings and continue on their way. In the evenings, when they met at their home adjacent to the schoolyard, they did not engage in long conversations: Hi. Hi, do you want to eat? Yes, thanks. Beer? Yes, please. Can you turn up the volume on the television? Thanks. They would doze on and off until midnight, each in an armchair, and then go to sleep in their bed, which was neither particularly big nor particularly small, but in any case no act of love had been committed there in quite some time.

One particular morning Maria burst into the school storeroom which served as Nils’ office and said to him breathlessly, “Did you hear? Princess Victoria is getting married in two months and her wedding procession will pass through all of Stockholm. We have to be there. She’ll be so disappointed if we don’t go. And I want to bring her a present, something that will remind her of that day in the forest, you remember, right?” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from The Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language by Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco

January 26, 2016  |  in Translations  |  by Janet Hendrickson and Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco

What is that? Nothing but the dawn as it walks among the cabbages.

This week we are proud to present Spanish lexicographer Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco’s 17th century text filtered through Janet Hendrickson’s illuminating translation. Of her experimental technique, she explains: “My rule was to follow the order of the original text (in the edition of the dictionary I used), translating entries, fragments of entries, and fragments of sentences that I found interesting and that I felt resonated with each other. Using this method, the original 250 pages corresponding to the letter A were reduced to five.” 

A

A

It is so simple to pronounce. It is the first letter man utters on being born. It is pronounced, like the vowels that follow it, by puckering the lips and exhaling. The simplicity of the a is such that its utterance is not denied to the mute, who with the a and the help of their tone, the movement of their hands, feet, eyes, and body make us understand in a moment what the articulate could not; the mute, as they walk together, prattle more than magpies. The a is doctrine, way, eternal bliss. The a, repeated three times, declares the mute’s impotence in speech; for me, mute in what I seek, it means the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; I implore my God to give me His life to finish this work for His glory and for everyone’s use. I know of no one who has taken on this task, bringing it to the end I seek. A they called the letter of health.

 

A B C

Means the first beginnings.

 

ABEJA

(Bee)

Gathering dew from one flower and the next, the bee makes liquor sweet as honey, moiling in its cunning honeycombs of wax. It alone among insects was created for the benefit of man. The bee leads to disquisitions on its choice in flowers, on the craftsmanship with which it makes hexagonal cells, on the clemency of its king. The bee is the symbol of the curious, those who gather sentences as the bee gathers flowers, making a work smooth and sweet. The bee does not procreate through the coupling of male and female, and they are no less fertile for that.

 

ABISMO

(Abyss)

Infinite congregation of water; depths of the deepest valleys, where vision fades when gazed at from above.

 

ACÁ

(Here)

Where I am.

 

AGUA

(Water)

Water swallows land, quenches fire, rises through the air and alters it and lies above the heavens themselves. It raises such a multitude of fish; it allows man to travel a great distance in a short time. Water has the virtue of cooling, cleansing, smoothing. It means the Holy Spirit. It means the wisdom of God, which is Christ. It means the peoples. Artificial waters, water of the angels, distilled with aromatic drugs, roses and the rest, orange blossom, jasmine, lemon blossom, myrtle.

 

ÁGUILA

(Eagle)

The eagle kills the deer with marvelous guile: filling its wings with earth, leaping over the deer’s head, the eagle shakes dust in the deer’s eyes, by which it blinds the deer and makes it run, until the deer reaches a cliff, where the eagle lets it fall; it kills itself or breaks its legs. The eagle snatches the serpent in its talons and lifts it in the air and tears it to pieces, but the serpent coils around the eagle and catches its wings; it does not let the eagle fly; both fall to earth. The eagle lifts the turtle in the air and drops it on a crag. The eagle is not afraid of lightning; when it thunders, the swan hides between the reeds and rushes of the lakes. The eagle means Christ among men, who is like the eagle, queen among the birds, for the flight by which Christ descended to the innermost part of the Virgin Mary’s heartstrings. Christ is the eagle with sharp vision; He beholds the sun.

 

AIRE

(Air)

The wind, being moving air or being caused in air. It would take too long to declare here how and where and from what are created the mist, the dew, the rain, the snow and hail that fall, the thunder and lightning, comets, firebrands, the exhalations, vortices, and yawnings of the sky.

 

AJO

(Garlic)

Garlic is so well-known that one need not describe it. Garlic is not a food for courtly people. The leopard abhors the smell of it; if the leopard’s lair is scoured with garlic, the leopard forsakes it. Garlic rubbed against the trunk of a tree keeps caterpillars away.

 

ALBA

(Dawn)

What is that? Nothing but the dawn as it walks among the cabbages.

 

ALGO

(Something)

We ask, “Is it something?” We answer, “It is nothing.” A term that comprehends all that can be.

 

ANDRÓGENO

(Hermaphrodite)

Some say that women have three wombs on the right and three on the left and one in the middle; some wombs create males, the others females, and the one in the middle hermaphrodites. And others attribute even more wombs to women, and many allow for none of this.

 

ANILLO

(Ring)

Rings were worn on the finger closest to the pinkie on the left hand because anatomists found there a delicate nerve that runs from that finger to the heart; by it gold and stone alike communicate their virtue, by which they comfort.

 

APIO

(Celery)

The symbol of sadness and weeping.

 

ASNO

(Ass)

It makes no noise, except when it brays, at which point it is insufferable. A child can take the ass where he wants; the ass brings us bread and wine; it pulls the waterwheel; it carries the wheat to the mill; it cleans the house and dungs the fields; sometimes it plows; it threshes in season and harvests grain; it has no bile. The ass seems inept for war, but some nations have used it in war; the asses of Palestine were nimbler than horses. Its head, affixed to a sown field, not only shoos birds but fertilizes the land. They make sieves to sift wheat from its hide. A hard callous grows on asses’ knees; mixed with aged oil this callous is so potent that when one anoints oneself with it, even if one is a woman, a beard will grow there.

 

ATEO

(Atheist)

He is ungrateful.

 

ATOMO

(Atom)

Those little specks that float in the air and are perceivable only through the sunbeam that passes through a chink in the window.

 

***

Image credit: Portrait of the author by Jeronimo Jacinto de Espinosa

For more delightful experimental translations like this, check out our newly released Winter issue, featuring Browyn Haslam, Martin Rock, and Joe Pan.

Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco (Toledo, 1539–1613) was a Spanish humanist and priest, once chaplain to King Phillip II. In 1605 he began to write the Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española [Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language], published in 1611, a dictionary of the Spanish language, encyclopedic in scope, that was among the first monolingual dictionaries of a vernacular European language. Covarrubias is also the author of the Suplemento, a supplement to the Treasure, Emblemas morales [Moral Emblems], published in 1610, and Tratado de cifras [Treatise on Ciphers], now lost.

Janet Hendrickson translates from Spanish and Portuguese. She translated The Future Is Not Ours (Open Letter, 2012, ed. Diego Trelles Paz), an anthology of stories by Latin American writers born since 1970, and her translations of fiction and essays have appeared in publications including n+1, The White Review, and Granta. She earned an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and is currently a PhD student in Hispanic literature at Cornell University.

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from “Ruined City” by Jia Pingwa (tr. Howard Goldblatt)

January 19, 2016  |  in Translations  |  by Howard Goldblatt and Jia Pingwa

The chair creaked and inched slowly toward the pear tree; squinting at the moon through the branches, she fantasized that it was Zhuang’s face.

When originally published in 1993, Ruined City (Fei Du) was promptly banned by China’s State Publishing Administration, ostensibly for its explicit sexual content. Since then, award-winning author Jia Pingwa’s vivid portrayal of contemporary China’s social and economic transformation has become a classic, viewed by critics and scholars of Chinese literature as one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Howard Goldblatt’s deft translation now gives English-speaking readers their first chance to enjoy this masterpiece of social satire by one of China’s most provocative writers.

While eroticism, exoticism, and esoteric minutiae—the “pornography” that earned the opprobrium of Chinese officials—pervade Ruined City, this tale of a famous contemporary writer’s sexual and legal imbroglios is an incisive portrait of politics and culture in a rapidly changing China. In a narrative that ranges from political allegory to parody, Jia Pingwa tracks his antihero Zhuang Zhidie through progressively more involved and inevitably disappointing sexual liaisons. Set in a modern metropolis rife with power politics, corruption, and capitalist schemes, the novel evokes an unrequited romantic longing for China’s premodern, rural past, even as unfolding events caution against the trap of nostalgia. Amid comedy and chaos, the author subtly injects his concerns about the place of intellectual seriousness, censorship, and artistic integrity in the changing conditions of Chinese society.

Rich with detailed description and vivid imagery, Ruined City transports readers into a world abounding with the absurdities and harshness of modern life.

Here below is an excerpt used by permission of the University of Oklahoma Press. Click here for more information about Ruined City, released in bookstores this week.

Over the next few days, Zhou Min left early in the morning and returned home late at night, not straying from the magazine. At home he had little time for Tang Wan’er. Always itching to go somewhere, she complained that they hadn’t been to the Sheraton Dance Club for a long time, but he kept putting her off. She told him that Zhuang Laoshi had opened a bookstore to the left of the Forest of Steles Museum and said they should go check it out, see what sort of books they stocked, and show Zhuang Laoshi that they cared about what he was doing. Zhou replied impatiently, “I don’t have time for that. You can go if you want.” He did nothing but play the xun on the city wall and sleep. Upset, she ignored him. When he left for work in the morning, instead of going out on her own, she stayed home and tended to her appearance, putting on perfumed rouge and painting her brows thin and smooth. She kept her ears pricked, thinking it was Zhuang coming to see her every time the metal ring on the door made a noise. When they had made love that first time, she was elated that the barrier between them had been removed. As she thought about how she was now his, her face burned and she got hot all over from arousal; when she saw how the people passing by the door outside looked indifferently at the pear tree, she laughed coldly as her anger rose: Just you wait, one of these days you’ll know what I mean to Zhuang Zhidie. Then I’ll watch you come fawning over me and embarrass you until you look for a place to hide. But it had been so long, and Zhuang had not shown up again, so she vented her anger on herself by mussing her hair and by pressing her lips on the mirror and the door to leave red circles. That night, the moon was as bright as water. As usual, Zhou Min went to the city wall to play his xun. Wan’er shut the gate and went in to take a bath. Then, draping her nightgown over her naked body, she went out and sat on the lounge chair under the pear tree. Utterly lonely, she thought about Zhuang Zhidie: Why don’t you come? Were you, like all the other men, just satisfying a sudden urge that day and put me out of your mind once it was over? Did you simply want the memory of another woman added to your list of conquests? Or, as a writer, did you merely use me as material for something you were writing? She thought some more, and as she savored the memory of that day, she retracted her earlier thoughts. He would not be like that. The look in his eyes when he first saw her, his timid approach, and his madly urgent behavior when they were together gave her the confidence that he was truly fond of her. Her first sexual encounter had been with a manual laborer, who had forced her down on the bed, and that had led to their marriage. After the wedding, she was his land and he was her plow; she had to submit to him whenever he felt like cultivating his land. He would climb on with no preamble and finish before she felt a thing. With Zhou Min, she naturally enjoyed what she hadn’t had with her first man, but Zhou was, after all, a small-town character who could never compare with a Xijing celebrity. Zhuang had started out shyly, but once he entered port, he was immensely loving and tender; his many tricks and techniques had finally taught her the difference between the city and the countryside, and between one who was knowledgeable and one who was not. She came to know what makes a real man and a real woman. She touched herself as she followed this line of thought, until she began to moan and groan, calling out to Zhuang. She was writhing and squirming on the chair. The chair creaked and inched slowly toward the pear tree; squinting at the moon through the branches, she fantasized that it was Zhuang’s face. As she flicked her tongue, she wrapped her legs around Zhuang until she was up against the tree trunk, where she moved, rocking the tree and swaying the moon, until one final, forceful push of her body before she went limp. Three or four pear leaves circled above her and then settled onto her body. Exhausted, she remained in the chair, lost in thought, so weak it felt as if all her bones had been removed. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt of “Bret Easton Ellis And The Other Dogs” by Lina Wolff

January 12, 2016  |  in Translations  |  by Frank Perry and Lina Wolff

An orange canary perched on a stick inside, its head aslant, looking at us with its black pinhead eyes.

So no Dad, not that I’ve lacked for stand-ins. Only my fathers have all been mayfly dads, the kind that are here one day and gone after three days at most. Some left traces behind, a khakicoloured toothbrush in the bathroom, an inhaler, a book on a bedside table, and sometimes those traces would give rise to hopes that they might come back, come in the door to the flat and suddenly be struck by the idea that this really was a bit like returning home, that everything was already here—a home, a wife and a child—all they had to do was enter and start living. I wrote about all of them in my diary, and because their names eventually started to blur (Valerio, Enrique, Álvaro, José María) I began calling them ‘the Jogging Pants Man’, ‘the Chuckling Man’ and ‘the Tartare Man’ instead, and then their images would immediately reappear before me. ‘The Tartare Man’ once made himself a steak tartare on our terrace. I had no idea what steak tartare actually was until he explained with a lofty expression on his face that this was what sophisticated bohemians in Paris ate. The sophisticated inhabitants of Paris were people whose taste buds had not yet been destroyed by charred meat and fried onions. He took the ingredients out of the bag and put the tartare together in front of us. The tartare consisted of cutting up a packet of raw mince and mixing it right there and then with egg yolk, salt and pepper. Have a taste—it’s delicious, he said and offered the greasy plastic tray to Mum. She turned her head away and pretended not to look, but I did. His fingers closed hungrily around the mess and you could see the pleasure in his face as he pushed the morsel into his mouth. Uhhnn, he said. Then he swallowed and it was impossible not to think of a snake as his Adam’s apple pushed the mouthful down his throat. Please don’t let her let him move in, I thought, and she didn’t.

For his part the ‘Canary Man’ made his mark with a rather distinctive present. Before he arrived Mum explained that this man wasn’t ugly, or attractive, but attractively ugly. He turned up one Friday evening, appearing in the gloom of our hall with a bottle he presented to Mum. Mum accepted the gift and put it on the linen cupboard.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Kim Seung-Hee

January 5, 2016  |  in Translations  |  by Brother Anthony of Taizé and Kim Seung-Hee

Avantgardists are dreadfully fierce though they do not mean to be.

In Poetry’s Emergency Room

Poetry is emergency room, poetry is oxygen tent, poetry is red blood inside a cold apple,

sorrow is like fertilizer

that must be sprinkled here and there on poetry,

poetry is a pregnant woman’s day,

the day of delivery nobody knows when it will be;

poetry comes racing embracing a bomb,

racing over the clouds.

Yet in one tiny paddy-field,

yellow heads of rice are ripening.

A field the size of a bowl of rice, small enough for a conical hat to cover,

a tiny bowl of a hat-field,

a gruel-bowl sized, rice-bowl sized gruel-field, rice-field,

hat-field.

Ordinary patients recover energy thanks to a bowl of gruel,

so by the power of a small strip of autumnal paddy

I am saved, you are saved,

so once again we lie flat on the field gleaning ears of language

then sow seeds of language

so that golden paddy-fields rise in tiers,

one of your poems,

a steaming bowl of rice, your collection of lyric poems. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Hedgehogs” by Amanda Michalopoulou

December 22, 2015  |  in Translations  |  by Amanda Michalopoulou and Patricia Felisa Barbeito

How do hedgehogs do it? She imagined them upright, then lying down, going at it all aquiver, jabbing each other with their spines.

They could hear them in the night. From the communal garden came a rasping, booming sound like an electric coffee maker empty of water.

“What the hell?” Martha said.

“It’s the hedgehogs,” Klaus answered.

“How do you know?”

“I know.” He muttered as he turned on his side.

She got up and opened the door to the balcony to hear better.

“Have you any idea what I do for a living?” Klaus shouted from under the covers.

Martha sighed and returned to bed. She lay down on the very edge, trying not to touch him. When he spoke to her like that, angrily and loudly in German, she punished him by increasing the distance between them.   At times, in the middle of the night she’d ask herself: Are we really sharing the same bed? Are we really Martha and Klaus?   She’d reach out with her hand, touch his knee to double-check and then immediately pull her hand away. The closeness they’d shared at one time now seemed unfathomable. READ MORE…

Alberto Chimal on Star Wars: The Eternal Reign

December 17, 2015  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Alberto Chimal and George Henson

Star Wars is not a religion but its myths are powerful.

I must admit that I am one of those who watched the first Star Wars movie in the seventies. In Mexico it was titled La guerra de las galaxias (War of the Galaxies): it arrived in late 1977 or early 1978. The movie was unprecedented in my life because I was a child, and not because I sensed how successful and influential it would become.

The TV commercials had piqued my interest, I remember, and also the lightsabers: they were the most popular toy of the time and were made out of a simple flashlight, attached to a translucent plastic tube. The light was colored by putting a piece of cellophane inside the tube, near the lightbulb. Some kids already had their sabers when my mom took us to the old Cine Hollywood theater to watch the movie. We went with a friend of hers and her children, and all of us watched in envy as those other kids ran around the theater with their swords glowing red, blue, or at times white, if they already had lost their cellophane.

In the end, everyone, us and them, came out singing John Williams’s theme, firing imaginary guns, thrilled by film quotes we rarely recognized as such and by the truly original moments, brilliant in their innocence and speed and beauty, made by George Lucas and his many contributors at Lucasfilm. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Venus” by Chen Xue

December 15, 2015  |  in Translations  |  by Chen Xue and Josh Stenberg

Jointly published with Read Paper Republic

There are works that I feel like translating because of their perspective and politics, and others where it is the language or the narrative that attracts me. In Chen Xue’s best work, and I think “Venus” is an example, she combines these two qualities. Acid, tender, provocative, realistic, fanciful—she has a real arsenal of literary moods and weapons. “Venus” did not get published in a couple of literary translation journals, specifically (I was told informally) because of its transgender perspective. While thanking Paper Republic and Asymptote for including it here, I call shenanigans. Anybody who values the transmission of Chinese-language literature in the English-speaking world ought to celebrate rather than suppress the diversity of Sinophone literatures.

—Josh Stenberg

***

The silence of night falls on Phoenix’s room, it’s sometime in July, the dog days, it’s hot and stuffy outside, inside with the air-con on it gets down to 26 degrees, just the right temperature for an exchange of secrets.

Mum and dad are just behind the wall in the main bedroom, but it’ll be alright. At three o’clock in the morning, the despairing and the hopeful are both awake. The world is so quiet that even the sound of breathing seems to be amplified, Phoenix’s long curly hair half-conceals the naked chest, the discarded clothing are strewn about, the tender, naked skin is lustrous, almost reflective, Winter Pine has considered putting on some music to ease his own anxiety, but instead he forces himself to swallow, it’s as though there were some kind of rhythm, inaudible to the ear, emanating from Phoenix’s body, stirring the air, creating waves, with a dizzying gesture she clutches at the bed with both hands, rising from her kneeling position, and when her pale and delicate thighs spread at the crotch, an edifice predicated on her knees, ivory columns perpendicular to the bed, tapering to points, something hidden in the delta between the legs appears, which the neat, even trim of the curly pubic hair makes especially conspicuous.

That something is her penis, she hasn’t had it removed yet, suddenly exposed, it’s flaccid, about ten centimeters long, accompanied by the two ovoid testicles, as her body rises they slowly emerge before Winter Pine’s eyes, so this is it, Phoenix cups it lightly, Winter Pine is staring at the thing in the palm of Phoenix’s hand, he once had a dream in which he had a thing like that, it’s so big he says, Phoenix says, for something so unnecessary it really is very big.

Do you want to touch it? Phoenix takes him by the hand, but he shrinks back, Wait. Winter Pine forces his breathing to grow regular, he nears the bed, crouches next to Phoenix, stretches his hand out to Phoenix’s crotch, gathers up the scrotum and penis in his palm, they’re quite heavy, except in film and television or pictures this is the first time he has seen this thing, this “penis” in real life, Winter Pine is surprised to find it so warm, and that it feels somehow frail, maybe that has to do with the hormone shots, was it bigger before? Winter Pine asked, when he says “before,” he means before she started transitioning, before Phoenix turned eighteen. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: On the River Boży Stok by Wioletta Greg

December 8, 2015  |  in Translations  |  by Anna Hyde and Wioletta Greg

I listened to apocryphal tales, to stories about ghosts, about saints, ghouls and vagabonds coming from the other side of the hill.

“In the beginning there was vast darkness./ Gardens of house mites blossomed within./ A river of light flew through these gardens./ Monsters of hay shifted.// In the beginning there was dense silence/ like inside poppy heads.” [1]

That’s how I imagined my beginnings in the stone house by the pond in Hektary in the village of Rzeniszów upon Boży Stok in the Jurassic Highlands, where I was born in February of nineteen seventy four, when the ice covered nearby ponds and cloth nappies froze stiff in the hall and in the attic. My Grandfather, Władysław Lubas—participant of the September Campaign, marksman of the 74th Infantry Regiment, stalag prisoner—was given three hectares of land during the Land Reform after the war. That was where he built a house of stone with brick corners, the house which looked a bit like a Polish country house. The right side of it—the dining room and two other rooms divided by a spacious hall—was the residential part, while the left side, with a separate entrance and a small window, was a barn. You could say that we lived together with the animals. In early Spring the rooms were filled with the smell of chopped yarrow for turkeys maturing in a cage under the table. A brooding duck sat under the ladder to the attic. Chickens, rabbits, dogs and cats wandered around the house. Up until the 1980s we used domestic appliances made by Grandfather. These were, amongst others: churns, pastry boards, rolling pins, wooden mixing bowls, pails held together by metal bands, stools and troughs. And since my Father’s hobby was taxidermy, there were stuffed martens, magpies and buzzards on the walls, while a stuffed rabbit in formal wear (in a top hat and with a cane) sat on a birch stump. There were beehives in the meadow by the apple trees. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Okinawa, Mon Amour” by Betina González

December 1, 2015  |  in Translations  |  by Meghan Flaherty

In Japan everything always happened in reverse: wolves did not eat people, kamikazes were not afraid of death, grumpy people smiled.

It’s #Giving Tuesday! If you’ve enjoyed our Translation Tuesday posts, please consider a $25 donation to our newly launched fundraising drive today! Every little will help us bring you more of what you love.

***

In Japan everything always happened in reverse: wolves did not eat people, kamikazes were not afraid of death, grumpy people smiled, and Cinderella was a stoker’s son named Mamichigane.

Every day, Miriam thought about that typhoon-exhausted island she had never seen: Shuri Castle cloaked in flames, the drowned children of the Tsushima Maru, and the woman who came down from Heaven and had to stay on Earth because some man stole her magic kimono.

Every day, Miriam fed her fish, dusted off the glass cases of her tragic geishas, and cursed, with much gentility, her destiny as a South American. Her big brother’s explanations didn’t help much. As Kazuo so often reminded her, the Ryukyu Kingdom had little to do with Japanese traditions, and the people of Okinawa ever fled their island. Okinawa had to be the one place in the world with a commemorative statue of the Father of Immigration: Kyuzo Toyama, the hero who arranged the flight of the first Okinawan-Hawaiian citizens in 1899. For Kazuo, the argument reinforced a historical truth: their ancestors were in fact the first settlers of the Americas and, according to him, merely completing their millennia-long task. The Indian-American was practically Japanese; if Kazuo had any talent, he would draw a manga of the second wave of continental population, destined to perfect a race of supermen through dry-cleaning and karate. READ MORE…

Revisiting Our 2014 Contest Winners: Poetics of Wonder: Passage to Mogador by Alberto Ruy-Sánchez

November 29, 2015  |  in Translations  |  by Rhonda Dahl Buchanan

They became tinged with burning desire for each other, and finally one of them made a colorful confession: "Your voice makes me feel saffronized."

Happy Sunday! Today, we continue with our spotlight on our Close Approximations contest by showcasing the first edition’s winners. If you’re interested or know someone who might be interested, bear in mind that we’ll be awarding $4,500 total in prize money to six emerging translators, and our deadline closes in just sixteen days. Visit our contest page for full details.

The second of our two runners-up in the fiction category, Rhonda Dahl Buchanan, gives us this prize-winning translation of an excerpt from Mexican author Alberto Ruy-Sánchez’s Poetics of Wonder: Passage to Mogador.

What a thrill it was to see a sample of my translation from Poetics of Wonder: Passage to Mogador by the Mexican writer Alberto Ruy Sánchez, published in the January 2014 edition of Asymptote—complete with the beautiful Arabic calligraphy created by Caterina Camastra for the English translation of Nueve veces el asombro and an excerpt of the author reading a passage from the novel in the original Spanish.

I believe this recognition helped Dennis Maloney, editor of White Pine Press, secure a PROTRAD grant from the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA). With funds from FONCA’s Program of Support for Translation, Poetics of Wonder  was published in July 2014 in the “Companions for the Journey” series of White Pine Press. In September 2014, Alberto Ruy Sánchez and I were invited to Washington, D.C. by the Mexican Cultural Institute to present a bilingual reading of the novel, and we’ve been invited back to D.C. by the Mexican Embassy for an encore book presentation this March.

Shortly before Christmas 2014, Texas Tech University Press published my translation of the Argentine writer Perla Suez’s novel La pasajera in their Americas Series, titled Dreaming of the Delta. I hope that being selected as a winner of the Close Approximations Competition will help me secure grants and publishers for future translation projects. I am truly grateful to Howard Goldblatt, Lee Yew Leong, and the Asymptote editors for this honor that truly has been the gift that keeps on giving!

—Rhonda Dahl Buchanan, Runner-up in the fiction category, Close Approximations

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Revisiting Our 2014 Contest Winners: Ó by Nuno Ramos

November 28, 2015  |  in Translations  |  by Krista Brune

Like a whale letting its gas escape, the insane energy of our physical happiness seeks cover—in language.

With less than three weeks to submit to our Close Approximations competition, we thought it’d be a good idea to revisit the winning translations of our previous edition (judged by Eliot Weinberger and Howard Goldblatt), each accompanied by a brief note from the victorious translator.

This year’s esteemed judges—Michael Hofmann (Poetry), Ottilie Mulzet (Fiction) Margaret Jull Costa (Nonfiction)—are itching to start reading your submissions, so we hope these prize-winning translations inspire you to submit your work and stand to win up to 1,000 USD in prize money! Visit our contest page for full details.

This weekend, we will be presenting the two runners-up in the fiction category. First up, Krista Brune’s prize-winning translation of an excerpt from Nuno Ramos’s Ó, from the Portuguese: READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Saliva” by David Clerson

November 24, 2015  |  in Translations  |  by Peter McCambridge

I looked at the animal, at its lifeless eye that would never see another thing, and I thought back to the grilled cheese I had eaten at nightfall.

I’d spotted it lying in the ditch, one eye open, but perfectly still, its left side covered with black blood, its tongue hanging limply from its mouth. I’d stopped, as though the dead animal had been a boundary stone ordering me to a halt, and I’d taken the time to stare it down, thumbing my nose at death or bad luck.

It was a long-legged husky with lovely grey and black fur. Its half-open mouth showed off teeth more white than yellow. And even in this lifeless state, lying there in the ditch, it was impressively built. It was a dog from the north, well used to sniffing around bears and moose. It was also a pet, trained to warn humans of the dangers of the wild. But at the end of the day it was just another animal lying dead at the side of the road, hit by a pickup rattling by at 120 k.p.h. or a truck piled high with heavy logs.

And even though the sight of the dog was enough to spoil anyone’s appetite, I hadn’t eaten since the night before and hunger was gnawing away at my stomach. I looked at the animal, at its lifeless eye that would never see another thing, and I thought back to the grilled cheese I had eaten at nightfall at the rest stop in Hearst, the improbably French-speaking town in northern Ontario. I thought back to the coffee, too, paid for with my last few dollars, that I’d sipped slowly as I waited for morning to come. I recalled it sliding down into my stomach, whetting my appetite; I heard my stomach rumble and I thought of eating again, and told myself that I’d need to get to my destination before I could eat. And so I walked away from the dog, stuck my thumb in the air, and focused on the road. I walked. A cloud of smoke came out of my mouth and the frost creaked beneath my boots.

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Translation Tuesday: from The Atlantic Grows by Julie Sten-Knudsen

November 17, 2015  |  in Translations  |  by Martin Aitken

"Two moths have gone into the trap, their bodies are stuck to the paper, their wings are still flapping."

The Atlantic Grows investigates notions of family, colour and race, and specifically the relationship between two sisters who share the same mother and yet are divided – by their different fathers, by the colour of their skin, and by the Atlantic Ocean that separates their continents.

***

In the light of the desk lamp
that is yellower than the daylight
the skin of my hand looks almost green,
almost red, with a golden wash.
It is not white.
The wall is white.
The used tissues
and the unpaid bills are white.
My hand has a different colour. The colour has a name.
I learned it when I was small. I used it
in the kindergarten, in the recreation club after school
when I needed a felt tip
in that indeterminable shade of pink
to draw a fleshy arm or a face:
I need the skin-coloured one.
There was no other use for that felt tip.

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