Translations

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Hadiya Hussein’s Waiting for the Past

October 18, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Barbara Romaine

The decision to leave had come over her as soon as she discerned the merest ray of light to guide her: a faint beam, spun from a fragile hope.

Hadiya Hussein’s poignant 2017 novel plunges readers into a haunting and powerful story of resilience. Set at the end of Saddam Hussein’s brutal reign, the novel follows Narjis, a young Iraqi woman, on her quest to discover what has become of the man she loves. Yusef, suspected by the regime of being a dissident, has disappeared—presumably either imprisoned or executed.  On her journey, Narjis receives shelter from a Kurdish family who welcome her into their home and meets Umm Hani, an older woman who is searching for her long-lost son. Together they form a bond, and Narjis comes to understand the depth of loss and grief of those around her. At the same time, she is introduced to the warm hospitality of the Kurds, settling into their everyday lives, and embracing their customs. Barbara Romaine’s translation skillfully renders this complex, layered story, giving readers a stark yet beautiful portrait of contemporary Iraq. Asymptote is proud to partner with Syracuse University Press to present the following excerpt.

“To get there I’ll open a thousand doors.”

So Narjis said to herself, having sealed her lips, and from that time forward she began planning her escape, preparing for the long and exhausting journey: the journey that was to open for her other, unknown doors, confronting her with a life she had never yet known.

She was not entirely sure what would be the consequence of such an undertaking, nor could she have grasped it at the moment she decided to flee—it was all clouded. But she was driven by the forces of love and fear simultaneously, and she was determined to make the attempt, to try to achieve something better than just sitting and waiting for the final moment: death at the hands of forces outside one’s own control. When the time came, she packed a medium-sized suitcase, into which she put three shirts, a suit jacket, two skirts, two nightgowns, a towel, various toiletries including a toothbrush and toothpaste, and some underwear. She buttoned her blouse, then brushed her hair in front of the mirror and put it up in a ponytail, staring at her face, which was set with determination in those crucial moments, between one life on which she had closed the door and a different one she had not yet tasted. It might taste of honey or of bitter gourd, but she was prepared to swallow bitter gourd, or even poison, rather than stay as she was, prisoner of a barren life, stalked by fear from every direction. She had already sold her mother’s house—abandoned since she had inherited it—in order to finance her perilous journey. She had paid the sum upon which she and Mohsin al-Alwan had agreed, and would pay still more as circumstances required, in order that she might reach her destination. But why was Narjis fleeing, and where did she mean to end up? Where did she go, and what was it that she sought?

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Mom’s Photographs” by Nay Win Myint

October 11, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Kenneth Wong

Perhaps she was a bit like the acacia leaf from upcountry, prone to turn bristling red during the hot season.

This Translation Tuesday, let the three-time National Literary Award winner Nay Win Myint take you through the things that go unsaid and untold through the lens of a small Burmese family. First published in the January 1990 issue of Dream Blossom Magazine, translator Kenneth Wong brings us a moving story that courses through the past and its memories like a clear and wide river. Dive in! 

1

The view from the Irrawaddy River revealed the towering cliffs. The goldish brown seawalls peered down at the river from their high vantage point. The clear green waves, the river’s vanguard, charged at the cliffs, encircled them, then continued to flow further. Full of bumps and humps, the ragged ancient layers of the cliff looked like a soft piece of cake sliced off with a jagged knife. The water didn’t touch the base of the cliffs. It left enough space for a rough, sandy footpath, leading to the villages along the river. 

Coming up from Than Kaing by boat, once I spotted the high cliffs, I could tell I would soon reach Ye Nan Chaung—or, that I was approaching Nyaung Hla port. When the boat began to decelerate alongside the cliffs, all the emotions associated with this place, my mother’s hometown, became more intense. Walking up the slope from the water’s edge, I set foot in Nyaung Hla port, and soon all the scents of upcountry Burma came rushing towards me. Horse carts and cars awaited there, ready to take me to Ye Nan Chaung. 

The road from Nyaung Hla to Ye Nan Chaung was quite scenic, passing by the hills and valleys, pump jacks, golden grasses, reddish-brown pebbled grounds, oil rigs in the distance, silvery lakes, and little bamboo huts. I didn’t like taking the shared car rides, even if it was the cheaper option. Hemmed in by the passengers and cargos, I wouldn’t be able to experience a thing. Just to save a small sum in the fare, I’d be missing the beauty of the land I rarely got to visit. I’d rather hire a whole horse-cart for myself. Going downhill, we hobbled ahead with white knuckles; going uphill, we craned our necks as the horse strained and struggled. These were the land’s characters that I wanted to take in fully. Along the road, the Irrawaddy River sometimes revealed itself in sudden flashes. In downhill turns, the cart’s wheels creaked with a series of tok, tok, tok … This was the pastoral music I associated with this region.

Mom was born here; she lived here for many years. Whenever she talked about her childhood, this land, this air, this water, and these rows of houses invariably came up: the Irrawaddy, the Burma Oil Company’s (BOC) staff quarters, the gas pipelines, the wild acacia and margosa trees … she would speak of them endlessly. I could only come back once every couple of years, and whenever I passed through it on a horse cart, I remembered her. When I thought about her, I also remembered the photos she showed me especially … READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Colourful Fruit Trees” by Yao Yao

October 4, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Samuel Liangxing Luo

Those memories bathed in the bright sunlight reappear on quiet days from time to time.

Just in time for fall in the northern hemisphere, we have a special treat for nature lovers this Translation Tuesday: Yao Yao’s “Colourful Fruit Trees“ is in essence a paean to a wonder of nature and the conduit through which the warmth of the sun reaches into the sometime troubled lives of its myriad characters—some friends of the author in real life, others fictional. This is a living, breathing tapestry that is more than the sum of its parts. Thanks to translator Samuel Liangxing Luo, this marvel of a creative nonfiction that uses the list so well is now accessible to English readers. 

University teacher Frances Mayes, who had left San Francisco for a vacation in Tuscany, discovered a fascinating old house named “Yearning For The Sun.” There were hazel trees in front of the steps, fig trees by the well, and, on the surrounding hillside, 20 plum trees, 117 olive trees, along with countless other apricot, apple, and pear trees. These fruit trees were strikingly colourful and the scenery magnificent. Enchanted, she dug deep into her savings and put everything on the line to buy the house. Flooded with sunshine, her days there were brilliant and happy.

Cao Jie, who came to the city of Fuzhou to teach animation, connected frame-by-frame the images of the sky above the university city and the trees along the Minjiang River to create a Fuzhou version of Laputa: Castle in the Sky. The farm-style lychee and longan trees planted in the past were kept at the new campus. Every time she proctored for final examinations and looked out of the windows, she would see fresh lychee fruits shining in red on the branches, where two or three boys would be climbing and passing the fruits on to beautiful girls.

Cao Jie climbed all kinds of trees in her hometown of Chuandong. As a child, she fell from a red pomelo tree and pierced her eyelid on coal debris on the ground. There was a big yellow fig tree near the dormitory building at her middle school campus. Sometimes, she climbed up the tree and stayed alone quietly or had a nap there. Other times, she and three or four other classmates would sit and chat on branches more than ten metres high, just like the aliens living in the Hometree in Avatar. Cao Jie painted the best gouache for many trees. She was familiar with painting the details of the yellow fig tree, the winding branches, the tender yellow bud tips, and the little red fleshy fruits. There was also a big yellow fig tree at the university campus. Disguised by the fig tree, students turned over the wall, merged into the night, and played outside. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Acharya Chatursen’s Bride of the City

September 27, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Pratibha Vinod Kumar and A.K. Kulshreshth

Sir Mahanaman, today, your daughter attains eighteen years of age. The Republic of Vaishali has chosen her as its foremost beauty.

“I gladly declare that the eighty-four books and ten thousand pages of my literary output over the last forty years of my life are worthless and I humbly gift this book to my readers as my first work.”

—Acharya Chatursen (1891-1960), in his preface to Vaishali Ki Nagarvadhu

In the ancient republic of Vaishali, a childless couple discover an abandoned infant girl in a mango orchard. They name her Ambapali, one who sprouted from a mango. When she turns eighteen, Ambapali is forced to become a courtesan–the Bride of the City–under Vaishali’s laws, which dictate that a woman as beautiful as her cannot be only one man’s wife. Ambapali bows before the iron law of her society, but does not allow herself to be crushed. She sets terms that make her residence, the Palace of Seven Worlds, a centre of power. While the richest and the most powerful men grovel before her, Ambapali bides her time even as she burns with revenge . . .

First published in Hindi in 1948-49, Vaishali Ki Nagarvadhu (literally, “Bride of the City of Vaishali”) took Acharya Chatursen ten years of deep research. This unrivalled epic of the human condition boasts of a vast canvas of characters that includes the Buddha and Mahavir among “a Bollywood-like panoply of opulent castles, warrior princes, courtesans, dancers, wily courtiers, [and] sorcerers.” Hitherto untranslated, this icon of world literature is now available in a two–volume series out from Cernunnos Books. After reading the sponsored excerpt below, check out Historical Novel Society’s review here. 

The Cursed Law

The city seethed. At the crack of dawn, men had started thronging towards the assembly. Royal Avenue was choked with men on foot, in palanquins, on horseback, and in chariots. The big merchants, tradesmen, courtiers—they were all in the crowd. The outer corridors of the assembly were jammed with men jostling each other. The imposing marble steps were occupied by men sitting on them. A little further away, in the open field, some men stayed in their chariots as they surveyed the large building. Some of them raised their glinting spears and shouted out, creating a cacophony.

The members of the assembly were dismounting where they could and gravely making their way through the unruly mob. A platoon of guards cleared the way for them, and gatekeepers announced their entry into the hall.

The assembly was built mostly of gleaming white marble from the Matsya Kingdom. Inside, its main conference hall had a black stone floor and a hundred and eight black stone pillars that supported the ceiling. Nine hundred and ninety-nine ivory floor pods were neatly arrayed all around the hall. On these, the members of the assembly—representatives of the clans—sat quietly in their demarcated areas. In the centre of the chamber was a raised jade-coloured and intricately carved altar housing two silver pods and covered with a silver canopy. The canopy was ornate with paintings and festooned with flags. Its pillars and the two floor pods had gold inlay work. The pods belonged to the chief minister, Sunand and to the supreme commander, Suman. These two luminaries had not yet reached the assembly.

The altar had steps on three sides, and these steps seated the aged clerks who recorded the minutes of the assembly meetings. Their assistants stood ready with rolls of black and red notebooks in open baskets. Some middle-aged officials directed the preparations in their usual efficient and unobtrusive ways. The rest of the staff scurried to follow their commands.

The chief minister and the supreme commander took their seats without fanfare. The rising tumult of the assembly was drowned out by a blast of the trumpet signalling that the proceedings had started.

The crowd outside became more restive. As they chanted and paced, their faces turned red, and their eyes glowed with anger. The courtyard was packed with the sons of courtiers and merchants. The former brandished their swords and spears, shouting phrases that were lost to all but those next to them. The latter, trained to smile and create bonhomie, looked ready to pick fights. With these crowds thronging the assembly building, it was clear that all the markets and guilds in the city and up-country were closed. Inside, the two chiefs and the members of the parliamentary council were in a pensive mood. They fidgeted as if an unwanted event was about to be thrust on them. The guards were deployed in full strength, their faces taut and foreheads furrowed.

A sudden hush descended on the vast gathering, broken only by the deep, loud creaking of a chariot’s wheels, accompanied by the tinkling of what seemed to be a thousand of its bells. The men in the restless crowd stopped pacing, as if bound by an inviolable command. All eyes were trained on a chariot that advanced at a stately pace towards the courtyard. The chariot was covered with a white cloth, and a white flag fluttered on its golden top. It traversed the courtyard and stopped in front of the steps that led up to the assembly. The quiet throng looked on as an imposing man stepped out of the chariot. His clothes were a spotless white, and so was his flowing beard. A long sword nestled in a sheath at his waist. The sheath and the handle of the sword glittered with inlaid gems. The old man wore a white turban that was topped by a solitaire. A young man joined him, and the old man climbed the steps slowly, but without faltering, leaning on the young one’s shoulder. The men made way for him. The silence remained unbroken as he took the first few steps. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Marie-Célie Agnant

September 20, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Danielle Legros Georges

Love my skin / dark as your childhood nights / my mouth / rebellious nutmeg

This Translation Tuesday, we feature two extraordinary poems by the celebrated Haitian-Québécois poet Marie-Célie Agnant. Drawn from her first collection, Balafres, ardent readers of Asymptote might recall Agnant’s work from our Fall 2016 issue featuring Canadian poetry. But these two poems reveal a more personal dimension of the socially engaged poet, as translator Danielle Legros Georges shows us, with its heady mix of myth and memory. 

“Balafres, renamed Gashes in English, consists of 36 poems originally written in French, some spanning several pages, others epigrammatic. Agnant’s is a poetics grounded in the Haitian engagée tradition, a literature of social commitment; one in which political dimensions are not divorced from aesthetic ones. The poems here, however, are among her love poems—which are not so well-known. In translating them, I was, at moments, challenged (and subsequently charmed) by Agnant’s images, image-systems, and metaphors. In “Orphée,” for example, the question arose of how best to treat the breath (souffle) of the lover in mon corps/ balafon d’obsidienne / mes cuisses bilimbao et / mon souffle touffeur de savane.  Was the sultriness of the breath to be emphasized, the dry heat of it, its connection to biome, or a combination of these? Such have been the knots to untie toward equivalence.”

—Danielle Legros Georges

Orpheus

Honestly, break your pen
I’m neither
exquisite nymph nor
Madonna walled
in the great book of your dreams
far from the realm and frippery
of your words
move on

Break your pen I am not
this goddess
fairy
Aphrodite
with seawater eyes
who haunts your dreams

Break your pen and your mirror
look at me and
love me
with both hands
full-bodied

Love my skin
dark as your childhood nights
my mouth
rebellious nutmeg
my body
obsidian balafon
my bilimbao thighs
the heat of my breath like a savannah’s  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Competition” by Mário Araújo

September 13, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Elton Uliana

The landscape trembled, like when a person shakes while taking a picture.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you a charming story of a family race on an open field by the Jabuti Prize-winning writer Mário Araújo. In that brief stretch between the starting gun and an imaginary finish line, Araújo captures the kaleidoscopic psyche of a young girl at play. In Elton Uliana’s translation, we glimpse in “The Competition” a nimble adolescent mind figuring out the language to articulate her ambition, fear, affection, in short, her complexity. 

It was their father who, imitating the sound of a gun with his voice, gave the signal to start. The boy lagged behind right from the beginning, while she and her father thrust their legs forward, side by side; she was trying to perfect her incredibly fast steps to compensate for his much longer strides. The boy was behind mainly because, between the excitement and the distraction, he had delayed a couple of seconds before reacting to the starting gun.

Her head only came up to her father’s waist, but the fact is that, at that moment, she was barely looking at him, focused entirely as she was on her own performance. All she could manage was to feel his presence next to her, a dark, solid figure of great size, wearing the trousers he always wore. She was frustrated that his body needed to make much less effort than hers. Her father looked like he was floating in mid-air, but even so he still seemed invincible. It seemed as if he was moving forward, pulled by the power of the real propellers that were her feet, attracting everything around them like magnets. She could swear that he didn’t know where and how his daughter had learned to run as fast as that. The truth is that she learned a lot in the time she spent away from him and her mother. Hour after hour, day after day playing in the open field next to the house, dressed like a boy, wearing trainers—sometimes even barefoot—t-shirt and shorts, very different from the pretty little Beatrice her father saw at night, in pink or light-yellow pyjamas, or on Sundays, when she dressed up or went for lunch at their relatives’ house.

Now they were all in the open, her father, little Luke and her, and that would give her even more advantage, since she knew the field like the back of her hand. Her father shouted something and, by the way the words were framed by his lips, he seemed to be smiling, but she didn’t quite understand as she was concentrating on her task and the wind was howling heavily in her ears. She felt annoyed when she realized that her lazy dad, in addition to being carried on the wings of her jet propellers, still looked relaxed and happy. She quickened her pace even more to the point where her heart was almost touching that little thing in the back of her throat the doctor calls tonsils, and her mother calls bells.

As for little Luke, she didn’t have time for him now, he was such a baby. She only hoped that he wasn’t sitting on the grass crying and forcing their father to interrupt the competition and help him. But she couldn’t hear any crying, perhaps because the wind was blowing in her ears, the wind of that open field, a wind that lived there. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems from the Middle Korean

September 6, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Seenoo Kim

I might have lived by the seashore, / Eating seaweed, eating oysters

What might the music of the late Goryeo sing of? This Translation Tuesday, we are transported to more than half a millennia back, as Seenoo Kim translates two songs from the Middle Korean that reflect the vicissitudes of exterior and interior landscapes. Representing a tradition of folk poetry independent of the Chinese-influenced elite literature, these poems also reflect the literary possibilities of writing in the hangul script. In Kim’s translation, these meditative and often melancholic poems exude a lyricism that resonates with the contemporary ear. 

Dong dong¹

            The First Month²

The stream-waters
How lovingly they freeze and melt³
Yet I—born in the middle of the world
Walk all alone.

            The Second Month

Under the full moon
Like the lanterns lit on high⁴
Your face is one
That shines on everyone.

            The Third Month

All blossoming
Full spring’s rhododendrons⁵
You were born to be
The envy of others.

            The Fourth Month

They didn’t forget the spring
The nightingales are coming back
Not my mister; whose fault is it
He’s forgotten the old me?

            The Fifth Month

On the fifth day
The morning herbs of Dano day⁶
I’ll give them to you
So you can live for a thousand years. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Yen Ai-lin

August 30, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Jenn Marie Nunes

I throw my shadow into the water / I live in a strange high-rise across the river

This Translation Tuesday, we invite you to savour three poems by the award-winning Taiwanese poet Yen Ai-lin, whose work meditates on femininity, motherhood and the body. The poems here, translated skilfully by Jenn Marie Nunes, reflect the changing trajectories of Yen’s poetics as they move chronologically from “Wintering Love Animals” (first published in 1982) to “Femaled Ocean” (2008) to “Reed’s Song” (2017). Throughout this suite of raw and imaginative poems, Yen’s frank and sensuous voice shines through. 

Wintering Love Animals

In winter
we burrow in the nest of blankets,
like animals seeking warmth.
Dear child,
you greedily suck my nipple,
wet mouthing, as if to say
“Your two breasts are so primitive,
your nipples so classical,
your temperature so Eastern……”
Yes, our position
is a primeval act seeking fire
through friction, endlessly mining
our own civility for fuel.

Dear child,
before sleepiness attacks
we’re both Pleistocene creatures,
still longing for a life erect. 

But, let’s stay curled in bed!
Use flesh to build the first cave,
conceal our reluctant evolution.

Femaled Ocean

Originally the shore had no shore
Waves just came and went
Enter Buddhist nature
Without a sense of time
Simply chewing over the taste of earth READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from “Feel Free” by Dagmar Schifferli

August 23, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Rachel Farmer

Do you have a tape running? I can’t see one. How will you remember what I say?

Did you enjoy Rachel Farmer’s translation of francophone Swiss writer Catherine Safonoff in our most recent issue? If so, you’d be excited to learn that we are bringing you another of Farmer’s work in this week’s Translation Tuesdays showcase. Dagmar Schifferli, a writer who is also trained in psychology and social pedagogy, maps the shape-shifting and exacting interiority of an adolescent protagonist who speaks to her psychiatrist. In between fiction and dramatic monologue, here is a narrator’s voice that is unforgettable in her ability to speak plainly and potently. 

“Translating Dagmar Schifferli’s enigmatic novella Meinetwegen certainly came with its own set of challenges. For starters, how should I choose just a short extract of a work whose unique genius comes from the way it gradually, insidiously makes you question its narrator, then fall for her, then question her all over again? The novella, set in the early 1970s, consists entirely of a series of one-sided conversations between the 17-year-old protagonist and her psychiatrist. At several points, the young girl hints at her own untrustworthiness, insisting she would not tell a “deliberate lie”, challenging her psychiatrist to decide whether or not to believe her, and alluding to a lack of free will. The duplicity of her narration is reflected in the language, where dual meanings abound: for example, a clock “strikes” and another is “beating time”, a reference to the beatings she allegedly received. 

Even the German title, Meinetwegen, has a double meaning (and translating it was a bit of a head-scratcher). On the one hand, it can mean something like “I don’t care”—an attitude expressed about the narrator’s actions by an adult in her life. But later, another meaning is unveiled. The protagonist realises she can do things meinetwegen: “on my own account”, “for my own benefit”, “for my sake”. Finally, she allows herself to think about the future and takes back her own agency. This is why, after much deliberation, I chose Feel Free as the novella’s English title, as it captures this double meaning and also weaves in a reference to the protagonist’s enforced state of captivity. These layers of meaning mirror the narrator herself, and her singular ability to inspire both sympathy and distrust.” 

—Rachel Farmer

I like to talk.

But don’t expect too much. Once a week, they said. Or rather, ordered. Because nowhere is less free than here. Once a week—at least. I’ll make notes in between. I want you to hear everything. You will have to decide for yourself whether it’s true or not. If I were to tell you a story that wasn’t exactly how I really experienced it or that someone else told me, it would not be a deliberate lie. Having your ears boxed hard enough can damage the brain. And mine were boxed hard.

That’s why I’m not sure whether I’m remembering everything correctly. Even though I want to.

But there is one thing you should know: you must never interrupt me, never ever. And don’t ask any questions either—don’t make a sound, not a peep. Don’t go hm or clear your throat. That would get my thoughts all jumbled. It would immediately lead me astray; make me refer to you and phrase things for your benefit. To make you understand, above all else. It would take me away from myself and perhaps from the truth too, a truth I want to get to the bottom of at all costs. It’s not because I’m hoping to lessen my punishment. No, I’m ready for anything. Braced for anything.

I will accept any judgement.

A judgement would create clarity, would be a direct response to what I did.

Had to do.

I’m sure you know that humans don’t really possess free will. In school, I learnt that some people don’t even commit suicide of their own free will. Because, my teacher told me, their thoughts grow increasingly narrow, focusing more and more on what they intend to do. Until, in the end, all other alternatives dwindle to nothing, drift away, can no longer be imagined, the teacher explained. Despite the billions of brain cells ticking away inside the skull of every human being, connected to one another in I-don’t-know-how-many ways.

You just coughed. You shouldn’t do that.
Now I need to have a short break. Don’t say anything; just wait.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Extract from August is an Autumn Month by Bruno Pellegrino

August 16, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Elodie Olson-Coons

He is keeping an urgent record of the names of things coming to an end

Can’t get enough of our Swiss Literature Feature in Asymptote’s Summer 2022 issue? This Translation Tuesday, travel with French-speaking Swiss writer Bruno Pellegrino into the garden of Gustave Roud’s. Lose yourself in a giddying array of flowers and names in this extract from the opening of the Prix Alice Rivaz-winning novel, an evocative passage that demonstrates a poet and a botanist’s keen vision of the natural world. Translator and former contributor Elodie Olson-Coons walks us through the novel’s rhythms in a beautiful introduction to a fascinating book. 

“Shaped around the life of Swiss poet and photographer Gustave Roud and his sister Madeleine, Bruno Pellegrino’s August is an Autumn Month (Editions Zoé, 2018) is a tender, intimate opus: half lyrical biography, half archival fiction, intermittently illuminated by the author’s gentle, wry perspective (“If you want to get anywhere, Gus, you’ll have to pull yourself together,” he tells his character at one point). The book’s delicate framework—brother and sister, rural house and garden, 1962 to 1972 —is brought to life by the ebb and flow of the seasons, a Woolfian texture that gives its undivided attention to the botanical and the domestic. Moving like ghosts through their old family home, surrounded by traces of dreams long-abandoned and tender words unspoken, Gustave and Madeleine’s days are given life by the simplest details: a shift in morning light, a cup of linden flower tea going cold.”

—Elodie Olson-Coons

The time of foxgloves is over. As soon as Gustave touches the petals, even with his usual gentleness, the flowers crumple or come apart, soft as tissue paper, rolling paper. Foxgloves, that’s what they called them on their childhood farm; he doesn’t remember when he started thinking of them as digitalis. The courtyard is scattered with them, as if a storm has been and gone. It’ll need sweeping. But first, a more pressing concern: the inventory must be performed. 

He goes through the gate and, notebook in hand, moves into the gardens exuding metallic odours—unless they are his own, his breath, his combed-back hair, effluvia caught in his shirt collar or the impeccable folds of his trousers, who knows. Since passing sixty (and that was a while ago now), he isn’t sure of anything anymore. He straightens his long, bent figure. 

Ordered according to the demands of the varietals and the texture of the soil, the garden obeys a precise architecture: vegetables alternate with lilies, verbena, poppies; climbing plants shelter the more fragile elements; the perfume of the marigolds frightens away vermin. But the lushness of this jungle is sometimes difficult to contemplate. The glance hesitates in the face of such abundance—long gourds unrolling across the lawn of wild reseda and Japanese anemones—and this morning, something else means that, for the space of a few seconds, Gustave is overcome by the scale of the task. No storm after all, the night was a calm one; it’s only that, at dawn, dew settled delicately across the estate, crystallising into a white frost. It doesn’t seem particularly significant and yet, three days before the September equinox, everything is already condemned.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Mateo Morrison

August 9, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Ariel Francisco

my home becomes / a democratic cemetery / everyone free to choose their tomb

This Translation Tuesday, dive into three poems by the Dominican poet Mateo Morrison, recipient of the Premio Nacional de Literatura. Drawn from Morrison’s collection titled Hard Equilibrium, the poems here exhibit a form of night vision that navigates the reader through a world of emerging outlines. Rendered by poet and translator Ariel Francisco in a language that evokes through its understatement, we are thrilled to share these alluring poems with you. 

Scene of the Dead

Night arrives,
my home becomes
a democratic cemetery
everyone free to choose their tomb.

We lay bare our vocation
of living cadavers.
Not even a whisper is heard
and sometimes
—the neighbors know—
we play at death.

Our flowers no longer grow
their yellow’s become
one with death’s playful touch.

The gnawed doors are rigid
the moths have decided
to cease their gorgeous woodwork. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Prodigy” by Nei Lopes

August 2, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Robert Smith

Rumor had it the festival in the bay was being watched from the highest parts of the city too.

This Translation Tuesday, dive into a short story from Jabuti Prize-winning author Nei Lopes that takes the reader a century back to Guanabara Bay in Brazil where a circus troupe disembarks. Drawn from a short story collection (Nas águas desta baía há muito tempo: Contos da Guanabara) that zooms in on complex and forgotten chapters in Brazilian history. Hear from translator Robert Smith how Lopes, in Smith’s own words, “undertook meticulous historical research to offer a sweeping view of the place and era, celebrating Afro-Brazilian culture and exploring the history of systemic racism.”

“In portraying a dynamic period of upheaval, the narrator Prodigy occasionally overwhelms readers with the feeling that too much is happening too fast. At the same pace that his story becomes entangled with that of the geographical region, two revolts, and the historical figure João Cândido Felisberto, his ebullient mood overlaps episodes of horrific violence. This translation took some liberties in altering punctuation to maintain this disorienting effect. When translating idiomatic expressions indicative of a past era, I looked to rough English equivalents that would sound similarly dated to contemporary readers. A challenge specific to this short story is the multivocal narrative, which leaves the question open as to whether we are facing a carnival storyteller who is cordially inviting us to suspend disbelief, a folktale with elements of magical realism, or an unreliable narrator whose traumatic experiences as a victim of abuse and a soldier have led him to rewrite his life story.”

—Robert Smith

This island has a lot of stories. They all do, I should say; the whole bay: land and sea. The day the first circus arrived, for example, was like the world was starting all over again.

When the barge docked and started unloading all that stuff, we had no idea what it might be. But a strange joy took hold of everybody, made us want to sing and dance to do something to please that gift that had fallen from the sky without saying what they had come for. Little by little, the colorful poles, the boards, the wheels, the iron braces, the motley flags appeared… Then the cages with the animals.

It was the Seventh of September¹, and, while we were watching everything in awe, the fireworks were going off. The ships, Tamandaré, Trajano, Liberdade², were sailing by in the bay, shooting their fireworks toward the city, way over on the other side. Right then and there, we knew that something truly beautiful had begun in all of our lives.

Disembarking in the quay, the caravan of oxcarts and wagons continued down the bumpy old road. The company was directed by the famous artist Benedito de Lima. And it arrived on our island, straight from Niterói, to save us from our isolation and change our daily routine. It popped up out of nowhere, the only attraction in our village, stirring up the hopes and daydreams of rich and poor, young and old, black and white; everybody.

No one had known the circus was going to come. But when it arrived, even without announcements or pamphlets or newspapers, word got round. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Hip-hop Songs from the Swahili

July 26, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Richard Prins

Not everyone in jail committed a crime / Not everyone in jail committed a crime

In this very special edition of Translation Tuesdays, we are thrilled to bring to our readers three translations of hip-hop song lyrics translated from the Swahili by Richard Prins. From LWP Majitu to Juma Nature to Inspector Haroun, these three songs give us a peek into the music made by a generation of hip-hop artists working out of contemporary Tanzania. These lyrics, thoughtfully arranged in a visually refreshing use of space, find their own musicality and rhythm on the page in Prins’ translation as they tackle issues such as power and punishment through allegory and allusion. Be sure to check out the music videos in the links under each song as you feel your way into the counterpoints of page and performance. 

Story! Story!

“Hadithi Hadithi” by Sloter ft. Juma Nature

Back in the old days,
in the village of Kwale
in the land of the Pare,
there came a lion,
a lion,
stomping an elephant
dead.

Come, deceit
Make it sweet

So listen: When the wild dogs saw that the lion was a killer,
        They pulled a gun on the lion.
        They pulled a gun on the lion.
        The elephant rose from the dead.

Story! Story!
Come deceit
Make it sweet

Better hear it young
Or you’ll be lost

And now that the elephant was resurrected,
Giraffe
        Lion
                Gazelle
                        Hyena
                                Monkey
                                        Cheetah
                gathered around Lake Tanganyika
                        to witness the matinee
                                spectacle:
An elephant, trampled
        to death.

And once the elephant was resurrected:
        He pulled a gun on the lion.
        The lion pulled a gun back.
        Beat the elephant down.
        Lion stomped him afresh
        and knocked his lights out.

The elephant fell,
extinguished.

Story! Story!
Come deceit
Make it sweet

Better hear it young
Or you’ll be lost READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Triangle” by Lior Maayan

July 19, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Lior Maayan

Wrinkling time is not like standing time

This Translation Tuesday, we present to you Lior Maayan’s self-translation of his poem “Triangle”, in a moving poem that meditates on the experience of time as the speaker moves through the vicissitudes of living, both grand and personal. Read on!

Triangle

Today it occurred to me that there is no real time,
That there is no time in the real sense, just matter changing around us—changing us.
And I really felt in my body that there is no direction to this change,
In a fallow outside Shefar’am I saw an olive tree two thousand years old.
According to the harvesters. How will you prove it, as you are required to
amputate the trunk and count the rings of time, and yet I write you this
on my way to Stuttgart as evening is falling.

Once in the grocery shop, time wrinkled, I’m not sure this sight will ever come back,
I think it’s because of the sun but it’s probably because of Ayelet’s death.
Wrinkling time is not like standing time, it is the feeling that there is no
movement and you are for one moment a wind.
In the past, I would have told you about such things: “it’s to die for”
And meant “it’s to die”.

The days to come touch the days that have come
like the skin around
a bleeding cut,
and our lives are like a series of cuts. READ MORE…