The Dive

Pedro Novoa

Illustration by Andrea Popyordanova

You dive. As you descend you hear your Grandmother Hiromi: “Bring back the algae of the old ways.” The words float around your handmade mask like fish shedding scales of light. Your bet on modern medicine came up empty. The iodine tablets that your brother Yochan took to combat anemia had little effect; at most, they turned his cheeks pink for a few weeks.

Next came your training: aquatics, the progressive submersions, and, of course, the medical checkups to see if your body was responding. You needed to be sure: Mama Misuki had died precisely because she had underestimated science, because she put more trust in myth than in reality. To Grandmother, her daughter hadn’t died, she’d been called back to the sea. No one contradicted her. As was custom, no one cried during the wake. Only Papa Hideo sought refuge in the bathroom, where he broke tradition and burst into tears.

Papa marched to his own tune. If the force of gravity insisted on dragging us, he levitated. If the world rotated left, he raced in the opposite direction. Knowing full well what lay ahead, he allowed Yochan’s doctor to talk him into moving us to Chosica, hoping that the dry climate would improve your brother’s health.

When Grandmother found out, she disinherited him and readied her suitcases. “I’ll go back home,” she said as she carried her eighty years to the airport; and she left for Japan. The proud old woman lived alone, without electricity, cards, or supermarkets, eating only fish, abalone, and algae that she took from the sea herself. “I had the entire Pacific Ocean to myself,” she’d explain a year later.

After discovering that the climate in Chosica, instead of helping Yochan, was hurting him, we returned to Callao. It was you who talked Grandmother into coming back. It was also the time of betrayal, your betrayal: you traveled to Cusco because you got a good job, but you told Grandmother that you lived in Lima, just an hour from home. That’s why, every time there were family reunions, you’d invent the most outrageous excuses. And since you were her favorite—even though she never admitted it—she’d end up accepting whatever nonsense you told her. But when a phone call told you that Yochan’s illness had become critical and that the doctors had lost hope, you took the first plane to Lima. And there you were, diving in search of the algae that Grandmother used when medical science declared that your brother was going to die.

When Yochan was eight, Grandmother dived; at sixteen, Mama Misuki; and now, at twenty-four, the responsibility passed to you, the next generation. Your brother’s wife offered to go in your place, but she lacked history in her veins. The women of our family had dived in the sea for thousands of years in search of oysters and pearls. Distraught, she would dial your number with the same desperation with which she now held the rope tied around your waist. From the boat, your sister-in-law was sweating, suffering: your submerged body was in some way her body.

And you, face down, sinking into a universe of black milk with a snorkel that was a horn that sprouted from your mouth. And the agonizing stream of light from the lantern framed your descent, proving that night below the surface was more night. And without fins, without a diving suit, breasts exposed and dressed only in your underwear, you set out, infinite, toward a swarm of algae where you were supposed to find the yellow-brown ones, the famous fucus algae. Those plants that your ancestors, the amas, the ancient pearl divers, ate raw to ward off the demons of weakness. The bad thing was that they preferred to build their nests in the hostile depths of underwater cliffs. Now, thirty meters below, you felt the jaggedness of the rocks.

You took care to penetrate thickets of plankton and shell colonies. And finally, you felt the swollen vesicles of the fucus algae brush your hands and arms and trace the outlines of your breasts. You pulled out as many as you could to fill your small mesh bag and you were done: half the battle was won.

You’d gone a minute and a half without breathing: an eternity beneath the water. You felt, at times, that your tongue was growing, twisting, curling backwards: That’s how your mother had died when she failed to calculate the strain of the return journey. You could die in the same way. You moved as little as possible so not to saturate your body with carbon dioxide. Your arms clung to your thighs; you kicked just enough to return to the surface. Then, a knot snagged on your heels altered the plan. You’d become entangled in your own line.

“Don’t be afraid of the sea. Do not fear fighting for what you love deep down,” Grandmother used to say, the fish devouring remnants of light in front of your mask. From above, your sister-in-law exhausted desperate attempts to pull the rope, horrified to find it limp, then broken.

After feeling invisible punches to your diaphragm, a lulling dizziness that was pulling you from this world, you’re able to undo the knot, free yourself from the lead belt, and ascend almost by instinct. Your return was slow but constant, less than five meters from the surface from below you watch as the keel of the boat grows and becomes defined. You see bits of your life floating like irregular oil spots. Among them, you recognize the pale cheeks that Papa traced on Yochan, Mama’s smile when she found her first pearl, and Grandmother’s stern voice correcting everything. At that moment, your arms stiffen; your tongue is a giant snake obstructing your palate. The light has become a different light: whiter and more ferocious. You begin to dream. And in your dreams, your feet sprout fins, and oxygen is a mere superstition.

translated from the Spanish by George Henson

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Listen to the author read the text in the Spanish:

Winner of the “Story of 1000 Words” contest sponsored by Peru’s Caretas magazine, Pedro Novoa’s “The Dive” does not fit neatly into any genre. At 997 words, it lives on the margin of the cuento (short story), the cuento breve (short short story), and the microcuento (micro-story).

I posed the question of genre to the author in an email: “There is a very thin line between cuento and cuento breve that makes a sharp delineation difficult. I use devices common to the cuento, but also poetic devices like metaphor, similes, or symbols, which allow me to save space.” “Ultimately,” he concluded, “I think it’s a cuento breve because, unlike the microcuento, it forces the reader to take a breath, a brief but necessary pause before resuming the story.”

Written in the second-person tú, “The Dive,” whose first line is “Te sumerges” (You dive), is reminiscent of Carlos Fuentes’ Aura, whose opening line, “Lees ese anuncio” (You read the advertisement), has become of the most memorable, if not haunting lines in Spanish literature. This comparison is appropriate, however, for another reason: the novella, like the cuento breve, is a genre that demands linguistic economy.

As a translator, my immediate task was to honor the 1000-word limit. This meant, for example, avoiding periphrasis wherever possible and applying a scalpel to remove any excess.

Another consideration was the translation of the title, “Inmersión,” a polysemic noun, meaning at once “immersion,” “diving,” and even “under-water fishing.” This polysemy, of course, is intentional. No single English word, however, contains the same semantic values. In the end, I chose “The Dive” to echo my translation of the story’s first line.

In a final email, Novoa confessed that the story is based on his own experience of losing consciousness while taking diving lessons. “But,” he wrote, “following Vargas Llosa’s recommendation to not ‘parasitize’ our lives, I decided to use the experience in a way that demanded that I do research. That’s how I arrived at the pearl divers.” My translation, then, required that I also carry out research on Japan’s ama, which, like Novoa, I opted to leave in Japanese.

Novoa ended his email confession, saying, “Writing this story was part of an exorcism,” adding, “I wanted those demons that I had immersed to be known by as many people as possible.”

Consider, then, this translation an effort to help Novoa exorcize those demons.

Pedro Novoa (b. 1974, Lima) has won numerous literary prizes in his native Peru, including the Premio Nacional de Dramaturgia, in 2004, and the Premio Internacional de Cuento Corto Dante Alighieri for short stories. He has published the novel Seis metros de soga (Ediciones Altazor), which was awarded the Premio Nacional Horacio 2010 in the short novel category, and the novel Maestra vida (Alfaguara), winner of the Premio Internacional Mario Vargas Llosa. He has contributed to anthologies published in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Spain, and Peru. His story “Inmersión,” which appears here as “The Dive,” recently won first prize in the XXVII Edición del Concurso de las 1000 Palabras, organized by the magazine Caretas. He is a professor at the Universidad César Vallejo.

George Henson is a translator of contemporary Latin American and Spanish prose. He has translated works by many notable writers, including Elena Poniatowska, Andrés Neuman, Claudia Salazar, Raquel Castro, Leonardo Fuentes, and Luis Jorge Boone. His translations have appeared variously in Words Without Borders, Buenos Aires Review, BOMB, Literal, and The Literary Review. His translations of Alberto Chimal have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Flash Fiction International, and World Literature Today. His book-length translations include Sergio Pitol's The Art of Flight and The Journey, both with Deep Vellum Publishing. George is a member of the Spanish faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he is affiliated with the Center for Translation Studies. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Dallas.

Alketa Halilaj (1990) is a young journalist and translator from Albania. She started her career in 2013 by co-funding and working as the Editor-in-Chief of Pa Fokus online magazine (Albania). Currently, she manages some online platforms on investments and entrepreneurship. She is also translating two books on Semiotics. During her short but intensive career, Alketa has been part of many translation projects—mainly in the literature field. She is very passionate about literature, semiotics and languages as she can speak Albanian, English, Italian, Spanish and German. During her free time, she takes online courses and reads literature blogs.

Eunice Kim is a schoolteacher and novelist who received her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design and her BA from Amherst College. Previously, she has been published in Lumen and Canyon Voices. In her free time, she advocates a sustainable lifestyle that seeks beauty in all its material and spiritual manifestations. Her fiction and nonfiction works are inspired by fairytales, meditation practices, and improvised music, and revolve around place, object, symmetry, and abstraction. Originally from New York, she is currently living in Los Angeles with her pet turtle Soren.

Fabrizio Mas was born in Lima, Peru. He has had instruction in different forms of art, but he is mainly a writer and a translator. As a writer, he has been published a number of times in literary magazines like Os Fazedores de Letras (Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, Portugal). His most recent work is included in an anthology of young Latin American writers called Apuntes Sudacas (Ayni—Cooperativa Editorial, 2016), which will be published this year in Barcelona, Spain. He is currently working on a book of short stories and on a translation, from Portuguese into Spanish, of a Brazilian writer and composer. He is also part of an art collective in Peru called Sapos y Culebras. Besides his literary work, he has also worked as a scriptwriter for shortfilms in Peru, combining his work as a writer with his interest in cinema.

Sohini Basak has poems and short stories in the Missing Slate, Ambit, Lighthouse, Paris Lit Up, Helter Skelter, Emma Press and Poetrywala anthologies, and elsewhere. She won second prize at the inaugural RædLeaf India Poetry Prize in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Melita Hume and the Jane Martin poetry prizes in 2014. She studied literature and creative writing at the universities of Delhi, Warwick, and East Anglia, where she was awarded the Malcolm Bradbury continuation grant for poetry. She is one of the social media managers for Asymptote and works as an editor in Delhi.

Sylva Ficová is a freelance translator, editor, lecturer, and photographer. Professionally, she specializes in subtitling, academic translation and localization, but she has also translated more than 15 book titles, including The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake, a novel by Patrick McCabe, a comic by Alison Bechdel and books on literary theory by Northrop Frye. She lives in Brno, Czech Republic.

Avgi Daferera is a translator to/from English from/to Greek, and occasionally from Spanish. She was born in South Africa and raised in Greece. She studied English Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and holds an MA in Writing from the University of Warwick, UK, and an MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia, UK. Apart from Greece and the UK Avgi has also lived in Spain and Belgium. She has worked as a freelance translator for over five years. Her translations have been published in various print and online magazines. Avgi was the Greek mentee during the first year of the British Centre for Literary Translation Mentorship Programme in 2012. She is currently working as a Children`s Rights Assistant at the Ersilia Literary Agency in Athens.

Rosy D'Souza is a poet, translator, teacher and a development professional and cofounder of Sunoh, an online radio station. In the past she has taught English literature to graduate students and has worked with internationally renowned NGOs to improve the quality of teaching-learning in primary schools in rural India. Currently, she has taken a sabbatical to be with her baby girl, Misuni. Her poetry has won many prizes and her anthology Manna Bisupu (Warmth of the Soil) is critically acclaimed. Her translation of H. Y. Sharada Prasad's Quit India Prison Dairy, Arivina Adumbola (A Playground of Wisdom) is a vital historic document of India's freedom struggle. Her translation of Jeremy Seabrook's essays into Kannada, Swargakke Moore Maili (Only Three Miles to Paradise) is forthcoming.

N. Kalyan Raman is a translator of contemporary fiction and poetry in Tamil, a major language of south India, into English. He has so far published nine volumes of Tamil fiction in translation, including Mole! (2004), Manasarovar (2010), The Arena (2013), Farewell, Mahatma (2014), Still Bleeding from the Wound (2016) and The Ghosts of Meenambakkam (2016). His poetry translations have appeared in several anthologies of literature in Indian languages and in journals such as Poetry Internetional, Circumference, Indian Literature, Caravan and The Little Magazine, among others. He has just completed translation of two novels by Poomani, the distinguished chronicler of subaltern lives, and is currently translating a collection of short stories by Salma. He has translated relatively little from English to Tamil, his mother tongue, but would like to do a lot more in future. In 2014, he published a Tamil translation of Grace Paley’s story, “The Long Distance Runner.” “The Dive” is only his second attempt in this direction.

Aňa Ostrihoňová studied English, American and French language and literature at Charles University in Prague and has a PhD in translating studies from Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra. After living abroad for several years, including working as a translator for the European Commission and the European Parliament, she returned to Slovakia in 2011 and founded her own publishing house, INAQUE. She writes essays and book reviews and translates fiction and non-fiction from English, French and German.

Francis Li Zhuoxiong is a contributing editor at Asymptote. A critically acclaimed and platinum-record lyricist, he was the subject of an interview in the Jan 2011 issue of Asymptote. Songs he has written include the 2012 Olympics song for China (sponsored by Coca Cola), the Chinese version of the 2010 FIFA World Cup song "Wavin' Flag," the theme song to the movies "Red Cliff I & II" (directed by John Woo), and the Karen Mok songs "愛" and "不見不散,“ which won him Golden Melody Awards for Best Lyrics in 2003 and 2015 respectively. Click here for his website.


Lectures d'ailleurs is an alternative Spanish/French—French/Spanish literary translation initiative and publisher conceived and run by Professor Caroline Lepage of the University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre-La-Défense in France. With no commercial aim and comprised of both high school and university students and professors as well as professional translators—all of whom are passionate about literature and translation—this project has as its aim the diffusion of short literary forms. Only a few stories or micro-stories from a given author are published in order to give greater visibility to as many authors as possible. Stories do not need to be previously published or fit any thematic criteria; all that matters is that they are untranslated. The members of the team then read the stories and proceed to select some of them. The translation is then produced collaboratively in different workshops. Lectures d'ailleurs was created on November 4, 2012. It has produced 32 anthologies organized by country or theme and in the process translated more than 700 authors.

Poupeh Missaghi, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Iran, has a PhD in English, Creative Writing, from University of Denver and an MA in Translation Studies. She works and has published as a writer, translator, editor, and educator.

Nazanin Mehrad has a PhD in Hispanic literature from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. She has worked as a translator and interpreter for many years and has teaching experience at the university level as well.

Sim Yee Chiang is a contributing editor at Asymptote. He was born in Singapore, received an undergraduate education and a master's in English from Stanford University, and researched issues of English-Japanese and Japanese-English literary translation under the auspices of the University of Tokyo, where, seduced by the praxis itself, he now hopes to contribute to the exponentially growing mass that is world literature.

Sayuri Okamoto is a contributing editor at Asymptote. She holds degrees in art history and Japanese literature and works as a translator, writer, and curator. Born and raised in Shizuoka, Japan, she is currently living and working in London (UK) and Padua (Italy). In 2014, she received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for her translation of Gozo Yoshimasu's "post-3.11" poetry series Dear Monster.

Machiel van Veen developed a liking for languages while working as a conductor on Dutch Railways, where he learned English, French, and German. He has translated John Barth’s The Sotweed Factor into Dutch as well as several other books from English and Scottish English. Based in Amsterdam, he also specializes in decoding works written using the Fractur-Alphabet.