Translations

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Yehuda Halevi

January 2, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Dan Alter

all the Nile’s fields a mosaic . . . as if jewels shining on the high priest

The Hebrew poetry produced in Andalusia during its height is a startling instance of cultural synthesis. Jews participating in the prosperity of Islamic Spain enjoyed unusual mobility and integration under a protected if second-class status. Poetry was central to Islamic culture, prized and woven throughout social life, and the Hebrew poetry was in both conversation and competition with its Arabic counterparts. Following Arabic models, Jewish poets created a body of work which stands as the high point of Hebrew poetry between the Bible and the revival of Hebrew in the 20th Century.

The Arabic and Hebrew poetries of the period are written within a dense set of formal constraints. They employ an exacting quantitative meter, and primarily the qasida form of mono-rhymed lines divided into hemistiches. And as Islamic poetry used only classical Arabic of the Quran, so the Andalusian Hebrew poets wrote in strictly Biblical Hebrew, bypassing a millennia of linguistic development. This makes the work profoundly hypertextual, in conversation with the body of canonical Hebrew literature at the same time as with their Arabic contemporaries. It is also highly ornamental: sonically lush with alliteration, assonance and interwoven consonants and vowels; and syntactically dense with double and triple puns, homonyms and other wordplay.

As a poet reading these I experience above all an utter reveling in the materiality of language. My goal is to create versions that approach some of this sonic richness. In this light I privilege the music over form and precision of content. I aim to render this music as immediate as possible, which means I sometimes adapt archaic images and terms to ones with more resonance in contemporary language.

—Dan Alter

[Has time taken off its troubled]

Has time taken off its troubled clothes。。。 & put on finery
& the earth in silks & brocade。。。 has made quilt-work pillowed in gold
& all the Nile’s fields a mosaic。。。 as if jewels shining on the high priest
Oases laid out with dyed linens。。。 cities carpeted pure gold & silver
& by the banks young women。。。 would be light-footed as gazelles
But slowed down by bangles。。。 anklets hemming their steps
& the heart is drawn to forget its years。。。。 & remember other children
While Eden’s river runs through。。。 Egypt’s fields & riverbank gardens
& gold-red fields of grain。。。 wearing their embroidery
Sway in the sea-wind。。。 as if bowing down in praise READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Peter Nielsen

December 12, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Matt Travers

One lives, / or goes feral in other ways.

Moments from the lives of small animals are captured and made into poetry by Peter Nielsen (tr. Matt Travers). In “A Little Understanding” a story emerges from tracks in thick snow. A mouse’s footprints meet those of something larger, and then the footprints disappear. Cooperation is surmised—an unexpected and heart-warming interpretation of the spoor. The titular bench of Nielsen’s second poem peeks out from a thicket of scenes and memories, where we see people together and birds in concert, each spreading messages with their bodies.

A Little Understanding

Animals help each other. It’s not always seen,
but if one goes out when there’s newly fallen snow,
you’ll often be able to follow a trail. You’ll see, for example,
the faint trace of a mouse that has come running.
Further on you may see another larger set of tracks
cross the mouse’s path. Often, you’ll now experience that the big
animal has helped the little animal on its way in the
cumbersome snow, since it’s only the big tracks
that continue. This is how the animals help each other.

A Parsley-green Bench

I anxiously greeted a friend who passed with the car window rolled down.
He registered me fleetingly and proceeded to stop in the middle of the traffic,
but I waved him on. Can you spread a message in any other way? A comforting
letter perhaps? Besides, my masseuse is waiting. And she doesn’t wait. She’s kind of there,
dawdling across the body, finding what the rest of us are looking for shortly before we begin
to search.

The episodes in one’s day like to go along, not across. One lives,
or goes feral in other ways. A bench peeks out from the edge of the forest.
The waders are flying up in formation, passing close together
in a rush over the sandbank. White undersides. After a lightning fast
twist of the body: black-grey. The moment after: white again.

Translated from the Danish by Matt Travers

Peter Nielsen is a Danish poet’s poet. Educated as an administrator in
the local counci’s wages department, Nielsen began to write full-time after earning the three-year Danish Arts Foundation Grant in 1980 for his first major poetry collection ‘Kan sparsommelighed redde proletariatet?’ (‘Can Economising Save the Proletariat?’). Since then, he has been extremely productive writer who has published over twenty poetry collections, half a dozen novels, a set of children’s books and is the Danish translator for several major poets of international repute, including Paul Celan and the Swedish Nobel prize winner, Tomas Tranströmer. He was awarded the Danish Arts Foundation Lifelong Honorary Grant in 1999, and was the recipient of the Adam Oehlenschlaeger, Emil Aarestrup, Herman Bang and Johannes Ewald Fund in 2016. 

Yet despite critical renown, he has also proved extremely reluctant to play along with the literary promotions machine and is consequently largely unknown to the wider Danish reading public. Instead of engaging in public readings of his work, which he believes spoils a reader’s internal understanding of a poem, he lives with his wife in a distant country suburb of Aarhus and divides his time between writing poetry, translating literature and pursing a keen amateur interest in ornithology, with all three activities arguably being a part of a singular overlapping creative practice, as if his poetry is always only out there in the rushes, waiting for their time to take flight.

The poems here come from his later works. A LITTLE UNDERSTANDING comes from his 2003 collection ‘Livet foreslår’ (’Life Advises’, nominated for Nordic Council Literature Prize) and A PARSELY-GREEN BENCH can be found in his most recent 2020 collection ‘Inden årstiderne; Regnlys’ (Before the Seasons; Rainlight).

Matt Travers is a poet and translator whose works have featured in 3:AM magazine, Tripwire Journal, Firmament Magazine, Minor Literature(s), and Mercury Firs, among others. Originally from Huddersfield, England, he now lives and dwells in Aarhus, Denmark.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Fly” by Linda Lê

December 5, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Alex Nelson

Cervantes, Panizza, Soseki, and Hoffmann had all talked of dogs and cats; why shouldn’t I make a fly my muse?

A writer is stuck, buzzing with contempt for his departed wife. Suddenly, he is liberated by an uncommon muse. Words fly! stories swarm! This Translation Tuesday, we present an at once deeply sympathetic and totally absurd short story by Linda Lê. Hear from translator Alex Nelson on the influence of diaspora on the author’s repertoire, including The Fly:

“Within the ranks of other diasporic writers, Lê recontextualizes her postcolonial exile in her work by considering the blurred lines between language, representation, and form. Lê addresses themes such as the figure of the double, of the relationship between hosts and guests, of the danger of strangers through unexpectedly light-hearted prose, resulting at once in an entertaining story for the reader and a glimmer of the profound. This quality of Lê’s writing was both my priority to translate with fidelity and my greatest challenge when translating.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Tomas Venclova

November 28, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Diana Senechal

So death recedes. Morning approaches with a rooster’s cry / And a swallow takes heed

This Translation Tuesday, we find Lithuanian master Tomas Venclova sea-watching in a pair of entrancing poems, translated with beauty and guile by Diana Senechal. Lashes of brine, mist and cloud rise up from these chilly autumn seas, as do—so often the case—a soft sadness, and the observer’s most tender preoccupations.

August Elegy
For Z. B.

How are you, how is it to live
in the zone unknown to us still?
Forgetful and wet to the full,
the seasons float over the gulf.

Heat presses the narrow pavement,
the helicopter hones its direction,
takes notice: someone is absent.
This barely was able to happen.

Caught in the battered ships’ crush,
the whirlpools thrash the pavement,
and midyear soon comes to the seventh
year of your growing absence.

From that silent place what will I glean
on the balcony, pouring my wine
without you—who conquered alien
beds and bodies, you, skeptic, twin,

soul-likeness of mine? Almost always
you guessed what I had up my sleeve.
Now nature is all you have left—
the one God in whom you believed,

who always offered a safe
retreat from the State and its madness,
and whom—thrush’s skill, lynx’s craftiness—
you held higher than yourself.

Perhaps you are really in the fog,
in the film of glittering oil,
in scattered letters and logs,
by the promenade, where yachts jostle,

where road-loops are etched on the slope,
where the bell is contained in a breath
(a friend does not stay there long,
while an enemy stays to the death).

Perhaps you are really in the rays
where mollusks polish the deep,
in Vingis’s rusty pines,
and in Kotor’s salt molecules,

over here, where the sea vapor clears,
and in sands a thousand versts away.
“It is good,” you yourself would say,
“that nature gets by without tears.”

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Mingwei Song

November 21, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Eleanor Goodman

but the heart cannot pretend, it still hurts, it’s still wide awake

This Translation Tuesday, we flit between sleepless dreams in Mingwei Song’s immersive poetry. Hypnotized by incantations, we are firmly inside while the outside is ever-evolving; night falls and seasons pass. Translated from the Chinese by Eleanor Goodman, Angel and Bearing in Mind are an entrancing study of repetition and change. 

Angel

Waking from a dream, I dimly recall you, like a broken-winged angel
carefully hiding yourself in the crowd, like a spot of cardamom red in a black and white movie and in the blink of an eye the entire sky dances with snow, the dream smashes into symbols
like melting ice, flowing into the morning’s sorrow
waking each day again and again
as star after star goes extinct
I can only get up, walk into the origami of ordinary life
turn carefully so as not to bump into the walls covered in incantations
in one vast white day
my body is shadowless
with nowhere to hide the worries of dreams
the daylight holds no warmth
yet is everywhere
the endless day is as hard to traverse as an enormous empire
there is blank white paper everywhere before my eyes
yet I cannot write down your name

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “I Abandoned All Desire” by Mirza Abdul Qadir Baidel

November 14, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Homa Mojadidi

O ascetic, why take such pride in your purified heart?

This Translation Tuesday, a poem from one of the Indo-Persian masters. From the throes of a love denied, Mirza Abdul Qadir Baidel conjures cataclysms of desire and—intriguing subversion—the life-giving powers of heartbreak. The poem ranges across subjects and across geography like a river, and turns to face its creator in a thrilling final stanza, Baidel reflected in its surface, unhappy with what he sees.

I abandoned all desire—the pain of existence eased
I ceased the arrogant fluttering of my wings
my cage became an orchard full of flowers

The heat of my passion rendered this world
a flat plain. The flood of my tears made
the mountains and deserts into verdant valleys

Silence poured into my lap with the blare
of a hundred eschatons. The breath I suppressed
within my chest, gave root to a thousand reed beds

Wherever I looked, thoughts of the self waylaid me
until—this branch clad in flowers pointed me
towards the beloved’s door

O ascetic, why take such pride in your purified heart?
Whatever turns into a clear mirror simply becomes
a means for arrogance and ostentation

Love is the beginning of all sorrows. It pained
my heart so today—the flood receded in despair
finding my house already in ruins

If I rent my shirt out of my obsessive love, I will
try to hold on to the hem of my beloved’s dress. O love –
head towards the desert—see how the spring reveals itself there

Compelled by destiny—we act and speak
in helplessness and humility. Our imagination longs for
and soars towards what it cannot reach

I feel alive, electrified. Is it because I am about to lose my senses
or is it the thought of seeing the beloved? Like the mustard seeds,
the smoke rising from me betrays being burnt by a hidden fire

Baidel, once you retreated from worldly cares
saved yourself from all its snares—the world became
shrouded in shame—ashamed to show its guilty face

Translated from the Persian by Homa Mojadidi

Mirza Abdul Qadir Baidel, also known as Bedil Dehlavi, is considered one of the greatest Indo-Persian poets. He was born in Azimabad, India, in 1642 to a Muslim family who migrated from Central Asia. He was well-versed in Islamic scholarship and lived a humble life, avoiding court politics and wealthy patrons. He wrote ghazals, rubayees (quatrains), and prose. His famous works include Char Ansur, Talismi Hairat, Toor Marifat, Ruqa’at. While well-regarded in Tajikistan, Pakistan, and India, he is especially revered in Afghanistan, where a genre is dedicated to studying his unique poetics, called Baidelshenasi (Baidel studies). He is acclaimed for his simple language, unique compound expressions, literary riddles, and mystical insights.

Homa Mojadidi is an Afghan American poet and translator. Her translation work focuses on the works of Sufi poets such as Rumi, Baidel, and Hafiz. She grew up listening to the ghazals of these great poets being sung by famous singers and has been studying Persian classics like Saadi’s Bustaan and Gulistaan since age six. In her own poetry, Homa is interested in exploring the themes of loss, exile, memory, and mysticism. She is fluent in English, Farsi, and Urdu. Homa has an M.A. in English Literature from the University of North Florida and is pursuing an M.F.A. in Creative Writing with a concentration in poetry from George Mason University. She has taught English Composition and Literature classes at the University of Florida where she was pursuing her Ph.D. in Postcolonial Literature and currently teaches English Composition at George Mason University.

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Translation Tuesday: from “My Father’s Cité: An Adolescence in Social Housing” by Mehdi Charef

November 7, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Clayton McKee

My mom, my sister, my brother, and I have waited in France for ten years to get this privilege.

This Translation Tuesday, Mehdi Charef recounts his father’s teenage experiences in a newly-built Parisian banlieue. Social housing holds undreamed of comforts for his migrant family, and apprehension quickly turns to delight. Comfort! Safety! Privacy! Hot water! A new, fuller life beckons in the projects, and it involves quantities of rock ‘n’ roll, girlfriends and Carson McCullers.

It’s the Chinese building manager who told us that we had to move.  The immigrant families who had lived in shacks—think shipping containers turned ruins with wear and tear over the past eight years—in the cité de transit, or transitional social housing, on Rue de Valenciennes in Nanterre would now need to pack their bags. Two feelings arise with the announcement of the news: anxiety and melancholy. This move represents a separation. We know where we came from but not where they are taking us. They didn’t ask us about anything, and they aren’t telling us about anything. We are leaving our most recent safe place.

In the bidonville, I had learned that there were Algerians outside of the ones in the village where I was born. In the cité de transit, I had learned Berber and African expressions as well as all the Portuguese curse words.

It isn’t the shacks that I liked but the people who lived in them. In front of them, I kept my head held high because I was like them. It’s only in front of my French classmates that I was ashamed…

Our housing project is going to be demolished. The construction of a large industrial park is set to take its place:  la Défense.

Our new apartment is in Cité Rouge. The neighborhood is named that because of the brick façades of the buildings. It’s in the city Gennevilliers surrounded by small, old houses. We are no longer the isolated immigrant population. People walk down our alleys, underneath our windows. We are no longer the shame of those who were kind to us. We became visible before we were heard… READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Olivia Elias

October 31, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Jérémy Victor Robert

tongue like ground/ riddled with holes/ words unwilling to take/ shape

Today is Halloween, so here is a Halloween-related story: eleven years ago, after launching our Halloween-themed Fall 2012 issue, we heard that the cover (by guest artist June Glasson) hadn’t gone over well in some corners of the Internet. Despite their clearly (or so I thought!) childlike proportions, its ghoulish trick-or-treaters reminded some readers of the Ku Klux Klan. We learnt a valuable lesson about spelling out editorial intentions, especially when a lot is at stake. This Translation Tuesday, as we present two heartbreaking poems by past contributor Olivia Elias in Jérémy Victor Robert’s lucid translation—poems that were written before the October 7th attack, but which nevertheless speak to the ongoing humanitarian crisis—I want to make clear that we stand against Hamas’s brutality as well as with innocent civilian Gazans who are now being drawn into the war. We call for a ceasefire—which the U.N. overwhelmingly voted for three days ago—to be enacted immediately. We also chose to publish these poems against the backdrop of Palestinian voices being silenced—such as when the Frankfurt Book Fair recently canceled its prize presentation ceremony honoring Adania Shibli for Minor Detail—incidentally, our May 2020 Book Club pick. It is especially during such fraught times that we should listen to and read one another. 

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief, Asymptote

floating everywhere, the white shadows

often pain wakes them
in their severed limbxxxa brain area
lights upxxxneurologists say

phantom limb pain (named)

/
likewise on the world map
& in the cortexxxxthe indelible print

as if it could be enough to replace
with a pen stroke plus a few
statements/vetoesxxxa country’s name
to erase it

isn’t there always in our homes
at our tablesxxxa place for ghosts

floating everywhere, the white shadows

Tongue like Ground

tongue like ground
riddled with holes
words unwilling to take
shape
keep escaping through
holes

all I do is repeatxxxrepeat
xxxmy Name
xxxxis not
xxxNo One
xxxxfrom
xxxthe Land
xxxxof
xxxNo One

against burying under screedxxxrepeat
mantra
xxxxam fully alive made of silt & clay from this Mount

overlooking the same seaxxxupon which shines the same sun
as in the early stages

Translated from the French by Jérémy Victor Robert

A poet of the Palestinian diaspora, born in Haifa in 1944, Olivia Elias writes in French. She lived until the age of 16 in Lebanon, where her family took refuge in 1948, then in Montréal, Canada, before moving to France. Characterized by terse language and strong rhythms, her poetry shows a deep sensitivity to the Palestinian cause, the plight of refugees, and human suffering. Her work, translated into English, Arabic, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, appeared in anthologies and numerous journals, including Arablit, Asymptote Journal, Plume Poetry, Poetry Daily, Poetry London, The Barcelona Review, Circulo de Poesía, Nayagua, Arablit, Al Araby-Al- Jedeed and, in France, Apulée, Poezibao, Poésie première, and Phoenix. With Chaos, Crossing, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, she made her English-language debut, probing deeply into the upheavals of the 20th and 21st centuries. Published in November 2022 by World Poetry, the collection was reviewed by Poetry Foundation and figures among World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2022 and onWords Without Borders’ November Watchlist. In September 2023 appeared, in a limited illustrated edition, Your Name, Palestine, a chapbook translated by Sarah Riggs and Jérémy Victor Robert (World Poetry Books).

Jérémy Robert is a translator between English and French who works and lives in his native Réunion Island. He published French translations of Sarah Riggs’ Murmurations (APIC, 2021, with Marie Borel), Donna Stonecipher’s Model City (joca seria, 2020), and Etel Adnan’s Sea & Fog (L’Attente, 2015). He recently translated Chibuihe Obi Achimba’s poem, “a sonnet: a slaughter field,” which was published on Poezibao’s website, and Michael Palmer’s Little Elegies for Sister Satan, excerpts of which were posted online by Revue Catastrophes. Together with Sarah Riggs, he translated Olivia Elias’ Your Name, Palestine (World Poetry Books, 2023).

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Translation Tuesday: From “MetaXa” by László Garaczi

October 24, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Csilla Toldy

you cannot discriminate between the noises, you are waiting for Marina and salt blisters grow on your skin

An excerpt from MetaXa translated by Csilla Toldy channels the celebrated voice of contemporary Hungarian writer László Garaczi. Witty and provocative, this Translation Tuesday, we view the mundane with intense feeling through Asztrik’s eyes, jumping from erratic observation to probing thought on the love of a woman. Read on for an uncommon foray into another’s sensory world – feverish in its vibrance.   

a spacious lonely month awaits me, pinned to it the remainder of my life at home, light trembling under the skin—I have to meet the middleman from Hamburg, we have to clarify the details of the mission; I don’t talk to anyone for days, I stagger around in the July heat, I slowly begin to understand that I cannot do anything with this city, sharp menacing hot unevenness, it does not let me come closer to itself no matter how sly or flattering I am, I cannot smuggle myself into its good graces and my patience is running out—it is hard to imagine that I will have to sun dry in the heat for another two weeks—a blind fire flares up from under the earth—even your shadow scorches—you jerk back from the flame that flashes at you from the dying waves on the shore or the white stones, the cars are colourful leeches on the steaming asphalt—you hover weightlessly without an outline and choke, and then, when you are ready to give up there is the miracle, a new era—you throw the red plastic camera into an armchair, fall asleep—wake—sleep, forget even the forgetting—you carry on with the mantra even when awake—the air conditioning monster crunches its iron teeth, a picture on the wall, the air vibrates with the colours as if humming—you wriggle around on the bed, the picture on the wall doesn’t let you sleep, it’s a salmon with a glory,

you go down to reception—name tag Saulius—he rants on an exhale: how-are-you-thanks- fine, he holds a lit cigarette between his ring and little finger—you ask for the key to the net room, the air conditioning is not working, the window opens to a filthy alleyway and a neon sign in the gap between the fire walls: Moon Palace—you visit a few hacker sites, they are selling stone samples brought from the moon in apollo 13, stolen from NASA with photos and prices; with your usual name: Asztrik, you enter a Hungarian language US-room, there are about ten of them around not excited to see you, a closed group and they have no time for you—they are busy bankrupting Cat Canada at the moment; Maximillia is the demon of the chat room—she dominates the territory, knows no mercy, brutal, real—are you rebelling slaves—she leaves and knows that they will talk about her—a few of them follow her straight away—and then there is only Little Strawberry left—silence—you’re waiting for her to say something; Detko enters and starts chatting: she is holidaying in New York, she gives you her number privately, call her and have a drink together—Little Strawberry remains silent all along; before you leave, you take a look at the Gellert Mountain on the web camera and the light chain of the Elizabeth Bridge, you twitch under the feelings flooding you—go up to your room, it is cooler now, but the air conditioner is screeching—you imagine Maximillia, the demon in Budapest and Detko, the giggling teenager in New York—you are lying alone in a ran-down room in Brooklyn, the dread pumps adrenaline into your brain, even though tomorrow will be summer, too, and a bank holiday—the skyscrapers are sparkling, two spinning numbers show how many people are living on the planet and how much they owe to the banks—the sun is beating down in the park, rock musicians wearing white on a podium, spinning dancers on skates, a guitar-shaped boxplant, toilet basin, skull, another bush shaped like a finger-biscuit, forget, forget, oblivion—the Chinese girl who taught you the word oblivion after a concert—you cannot remember her name—forgetting the problem is the solution; you wake up at noon, sweltering heat—you are sitting on a bench on the promenade near the bridge in the shade, on the other side of the water the houses are trembling in the rising steam, the smell of chips iodine dead fish rubber acetone—cities smell more in summer—little balls of different smells bang your nose, the last miserable smoker stubs out his last miserable cigarette in Manhattan; at night I’m again in the net room—the mouse lies exactly in the same angle on the mousepad showing the airplanes approaching the WTC towers; in one of the common areas at least forty of them are fighting, Maximillia amongst them—you don’t even check the name list when your private window appears—you are alone with the demon—what’s up, hi, Maximillia—you did not call Detko, upsy-daisy—she disappears, you search around: nothing, she left—you call Detko on an impulse—it is ringing, you have to concentrate to breathe—in and out;

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Midnight Falls Like a Bird” by Félix Francisco Casanova

October 17, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Adelaida Vida

wounded with sleeplessness...

This Translation Tuesday, a poem from the Canary Island poet Félix Francisco Casanova charts a journey from exhaustion to the brink of a balmy doziness. A page is turned, and the process begins. All the forces of wakefulness are surmounted by the dreamy, inexorable course of a perfect poem read on the cusp of dawn.

Midnight falls like a bird

wounded with sleeplessness,
tediously you turn the page
and the poem wends its course
like a river without end,
it dilates and narrows the eyes
enrages and pacifies you
while the wood’s burning wanes
drowsiness arrives with the dawn.

translated from the Spanish by Adelaida Vida

Félix Francisco Casanova was born in Santa Cruz de la Palma, in the Canary Islands, in 1956, and passed away in 1976 at the age of nineteen. In 1973, at the age of seventeen, he won the Canary Islands’ main poetry prize, Julio Tovar, with his book El conservatorio. In 1974 he won the Pérez Armas novel with Demipage’s reissued work, El don de Vorace. A month before his death, he won a contest sponsored by the newspaper La Tarde for his poetry collection, A suitcase full of leaves. The translated poem, “Midnight Falls Like a Bird,” is from Félix Francisco Casanova’s book, Cuarenta contra el agua, compiled by Francisco Javier Irazoki, and published by Demipage.

Adelaida Vida is a writer, translator, and student in San Francisco, California. She first read Casanova’s work when she was living in the Canary Islands.

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Translation Tuesday: From “A Bathtub in the Desert” by Jadd Hilal

October 10, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Bryan Flavin

His shell was gigantic and green, with glints of bronze, copper, and gold.

This Translation Tuesday, we present a fairy tale encounter amid dark signs of a war’s beginning, elegantly entwined and counterposed by Jadd Hilal. The lonely Adel discovers two improbable creatures in his wardrobe, and they become his first real friends. In the outside world, meanwhile, something horrible is unfolding: school is cancelled, the local protests are turning ugly, shots ring out at night, and militias have begun to roam the streets. 

We reproduce here a note from Hilal’s translator, Bryan Flavin, who tells us more about the author and his work. 

A note from the translator:

L’Orient du Jour described A Bathtub in the Desert, Jadd Hilal’s acclaimed second novel, as “The Other Little Prince…[its] endearing narrator reminiscent of Saint-Exupéry.” Yet while Saint-Exupéry and Hilal both confront the expectations assigned to childhood and adulthood, Hilal does so within a different context, one of war and exile:

When war breaks out, Adel’s life changes forever. Fortunately he still has his two giant imaginary insect friends, Darwin and Tardigrade, to help him escape. Strained to make decisions beyond his maturity, Adel finds himself at a desert outpost where the combatants act like children, and the sheikh, leader of the outpost, forces him to grow up. Throughout, Adel must learn what it means to be an adult, traversing war and exile, friendship and isolation, innocence and identity.

With emotion and stylistic minimalism, the novel challenges the typical Bildungsroman in two ways: 1) it asks readers to re-examine and contextualize the biases surrounding childhood and adulthood; and 2) it subverts the Bildungsroman’s gradual trajectory, instead marked by Adel’s navigation of traumatic experience. The following translation is an excerpt, starting when Adel first meets Darwin and ending right before the start of the war.

A Bathtub in the Desert

When I say I didn’t have any real friends, that’s not entirely true—I did have one friend: my giant beetle. He appeared the night my parents announced their divorce. I still remember that night—I opened the door to my massive wardrobe and found him there, next to the toy plane my father had given me for my third birthday, the dozens of stones I’d collected on the roads, and the cardboard box decorated with lentils I’d made for my mother at school, along with a number of other memories.

I should say, I only ever used my wardrobe for this—for keeping memories. I had convinced my parents to buy me a dresser for my clothes, but in exchange, I had to give up my large jar filled with the Chiclets I used to collect. Not a bad deal. Besides, I ended up needing the space. Without it, I would’ve missed out on my very first friend.

Even though he was definitely a beetle, the thing that made me slam the wardrobe shut and rush back to my bed—the thing I forgot to mention—he was as big and as tall as a grown-up.

“Who are you?”

I remember fumbling back to the wardrobe door and opening it. He was still there.

“What do you want?”

He didn’t speak, but his eyes told me he was scared. Now that I think of it—he didn’t really look like a beetle at all. Instead of tiny little legs, he had two long ones, like us. He wore midnight blue dress pants with white pinstripes and white polished shoes. Above that: nothing. All black with only a pair of eyes at the very top. Blue eyes with wrinkles around the corners. As if he were smiling.

READ MORE…

Principle of Decision: Translation from Swahili

October 5, 2023  |  in Principle of Decision, Translations  |  by Albert Mwamburi, Hassan Kassim, Idza Luhumyo, Jay Boss Rubin, and Wambua Muindi

. . . the auditory and visual imagery that gather as you read the Swahili version . . . How [to] transfer the same to the English version?

This edition of Principle of Decision—our column that highlights the decision-making processes of translators by asking several contributors to offer their own versions of the same passage—provides a look at how translators render the subtleties of a poem with multiple layers of meaning in a new language. This round, Asymptote contributor Wambua Muindi leads our Swahili edition of the column.

Ken Walibora’s Kufa Kuzikana was originally published in 2003 and just clocked two decades since publication. For this edition of Principle of Decision, I chose the first two paragraphs of Walibora’s novel partly to celebrate it but also to appreciate the story it follows in the context of what occupied the first half of 2023 in Kenya—the cycle of anti-government and cost-of-living protests, the ensuing police brutality, and the ethnic targeting and profiling.

I also found these paragraphs appropriate here given that introductions are always novel and always set the tone for a story. In this case not only do the two paragraphs borrow the geography of Kiwachema, the fictional country the novel is set in, they also illustrate the constant movement and consequent contact that is the backdrop against which Walibora animates post-colonial Kenya. The friendship between Akida and Tim—the novel’s main characters—becomes a fable for the nation and demonstrates the exclusionary logic of national politics despite the promise of nation-building. 

I wanted to see what different translators’ English renditions of the novel’s opening lines would sound and feel like. Of particular interest was the auditory and visual imagery that gather as you read the Swahili version, and the way these sentences introduce the tone of the narration. How does a translator transfer the same to the English version?  This is also a question many of the translators asked themselves. Phrases like ‘dhahiri shahiri’ and ‘miinamo ya vilima’ which embody the particularity of Swahili sounds, posed an interesting challenge. The particularity with which the translators supply the tonality of Swahili is fascinating. Take for instance the last word: It is translated differently by each of the translators below, showing the different interpretations given and techniques employed in English translation.

—Wambua Muindi

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Two Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke

October 3, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Wally Swist

and I shall stand at its edge: / where there is nothing else, pain once more

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you a meditation on aloneness in the form of introspective poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, elegantly translated from the German by Wally Swist. Grappling with the immense and unspeakable, The Solitary and The Lonely One are indicative of the Austrian poet’s diverse repertoire on disbelief and mysticism. Read on and ruminate.

The Solitary

Like one who sailed on strange seas,
so I’m with the eternal natives;
the full days stand on their tables,
but to me the disgrace is full of figure.

A world reaches into my face,
which may be uninhabited as the moon,
but they leave no desire alone,
and all their words are occupied.

The things that I took far with me,
look rare, compared to yours—:
in their great home they are animals,
here they hold their breath in shame.

The Lonely One

No: there shall be a tumble out of my heart,
and I shall stand at its edge:
where there is nothing else, pain once more
and the unspeakable once more in the world.

Another thing in the immensity,
which becomes dark and light again,
one last longing face
in the never-to-be-satisfied,

another utter face on stone,
willing to its inner weights,
that the expanses that silently destroy it,
force it to be ever happier

Translated from the German by Wally Swist

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Translation Tuesday : “Little Sow” by Yi Hyosŏk

September 26, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Young-Ji Kang

Where could she be, my little Puni?

A quotidian tale of a young man and his sow in the idyllic Korean countryside is not all that it seems. Translator Young-Ji Kang captures the disquieting undertones that pervade Yi Hyosŏk’s writing, as we learn of our main character’s growing discontent with his little Puni and Little Sow. This Translation Tuesday, become a spectator to the breeding grounds, meander through the market, and follow the railroad tracks. 

The ruins of a fortress wall, a willow crowned by a magpie nest, a squat beryl blue sky. Below, a hutch containing a rabbit that in color is white but whose huddled form and spiky fur give it the appearance of a hedgehog. The onshore wind sweeps over the fields, tickling the crab-apples before swirling through the barley field where the breeding grounds still sit under a layer of snow, to buffet the pigsties.

Beside the pigsties, exposed to the wind and squealing at the top of its lungs, a sow is tethered, each splayed leg to a stake. Around those four stakes stalks the stud boar, its livid maw frothing, and then up go its front legs and it mounts. The sow, resembling a turtle pinned beneath a dark boulder, shrieks and wiggles frantically, dislodging the boar. Ever ready, the boar begins stalking again. From the sties all around comes the squealing and bellowing of mating pigs—it’s a raucous afternoon at the breeding grounds.

A crowd has gathered to cheer on the boar, but after witnessing half an hour of wasted effort, they begin to stir. And then one last time the boar comes crashing down on the sow—the stakes snap clean off, and the sow manages to slip free and scamper off.

“Poor little runt,” chuckles one of the breeding-grounds handlers. “Like trying to mate a hen with a bull—it’s unnatural, I tell ya.”

“Yeah,” says a farmer. “She must have had the scare of her life.” So saying, the farmer goes out behind the pigsty and corners the sow.

“I had her serviced here last month, I guess it was, but nothing happened,” says Shigi, the color rising on his face. “So here we are again.”

“Even animals have to be old enough to know better, but your sow’s still way too young.”

At the farmer’s words, Shigi gets even more red in the face. “Goddamn animal!” he mutters.

And if that were not enough, the annoying beast has broken free and is once againrunning loose. Humiliated, Shigi flares up and gives chase, the farmer close behind. One of Shigi’s rubber shoes comes off in the muck and his pants begin to slide down.

At last he manages to grab the tether circling the sow’s midsection and out of pique yanks it hard, bringing the sow up short. He whips the animal furiously with the tether, and the young sow wiggles and jumps every which way, squealing all the while. Yes, he will surely feel remorseful later on for lashing the pitiful beast, the family’s lifeline for the farm year in that the proceeds from its sale will cover their first tax payment of the year as well as keeping them stocked with provisions until the early-summer potato harvest. But losing face in front of the stand of onlookers is too much for him to bear, and he takes out his anger on the pathetic animal.

“C’mon, let’s give it another try.” After re-setting the stakes and ramming them in, the farmer beckons Shigi.

This time, Shigi and the farmer tether the terror-stricken creature to the stakes all the more securely, then position the wooden lever beneath the sow’s belly so that it’s suspended in air and can’t budge.

Shigi feels the boar’s hairy body as it squirms and paces, and then the moment he steps back, the boar charges the sow like a piston on a coal-fired locomotive, a lusty bellow issuing from its crimson maw. At the throat-rending squeals of the helpless sow, the onlookers’ laughter is stilled—for the moment their jokes are forgotten.

The image of Puni flits through Shigi’s mind and he looks away.

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