Zhytja

Pedro Novoa

Illustration by Andrea Popyordanova

Ti zhytesh. Thellohesh duke dëgjuar gjyshen Hiromi: “Do të marrësh algat që përdornim dikur.” Fjalët notojnë përreth maskës së bërë nga ty, janë peshq që derdhin fije drite. Kot shkoi edhe propozimi yt, basti yt për mjekësinë moderne. Tabletat e jodit, pilula që yt vëlla Yochan merrte për të luftuar aneminë nuk shërbyen për shumëgjë; më e shumta që bënë, ia skuqën faqet për disa javë.

Pastaj erdhi trajnimi yt: sportet ujore, zhytjet e vazhdueshme dhe, sigurisht, vizitat mjekësore për të parë si po reagonte trupi yt. Duhej të siguroheshe sepse mama Misuki kishte gjetur vdekjen pikërisht për shkak se kishte nënvlerësuar shkencën, sepse i besoi më shumë mitit sesa realitetit. Për gjyshen, vajza e saj nuk kishte ndërruar jetë; ishte marrë mbrapsht nga deti. Asnjë nuk e kundërshtonte dot. Siç zakoni e deshte, askush nuk qau gjatë ‘zgjimit’. Vetëm gjysh Hideo gjeti strehë në banjë për të thyer traditën duke shpërthyer në lot.

Gjyshi ishte delja e zezë e familjes. Nëse forca e gravitetit na tërhiqte poshtë, ai ngrihej sipër. Nëse e gjithë bota do të rrotullohej nga e majta, ai nxitonte për nga kahu i kundërt. Duke e ditur qartë se çfarë do të pasonte, u bind nga doktori i Yochan dhe ne të gjithë u shpërngulëm në Chosica, me shpresë se klima e thatë e atjeshme do të përmirësonte shëndetin e vëllait tënd.

Sapo e mori vesh, gjyshja e mohoi dhe bëri gati valixhet. “Do të kthehem në tokën time,” tha ajo ndërsa tërhiqte tetëdhjetë vitet e saj deri në aeroport, dhe u nis për në Japoni. Plaka krenare jetoi vetëm, pa energji elektrike, pa karta apo supermarkete, duke u ushqyer vetëm me peshk, butakë dhe alga që vetë i nxirrte nga deti. “E kisha të gjithë oqeanin Paqësor vetëm për mua,” thoshte një vit më vonë.

Me të parë që klima Chosiciane po e përkeqësonte shëndetin e Yochan në vend që ta përmirësonte, u kthyem në Callao. Ishe ti ajo që e bindi gjyshen të kthehej. Ishte gjithashtu periudhë tradhëtie, e tradhëtisë nga ty: shkove në Cusco sepse gjete një punë më të mirë, por i the gjyshes që jetoje në Limë, veç një orë larg shtëpistë. Prandaj gjeje justifikimet më të çuditshme sa herë që kishte bashkime familjare. Dhe meqë ishe e preferuara e saj—pavarësisht se kurrë nuk e pranoi—, pranonte çdo lloj marrëzie nga ty. Por kur nga një thirrje telefonike more vesh se sëmundja e Yochan ishte përkeqësuar dhe doktorët nuk jepnin shpresë, more avionin e parë për në Lima. Dhe ja ku ishe, duke u zhytur për të gjetur ato alga që gjyshja përdorte sa herë që shkenca e mjekësisë dorëzohej përpara vëllait tënd.

Kur Yochan ishte tetë vjeç, ishte zhytur gjyshja; kur ishte tetëmbëdhjetë vjeç ishte zhytur mama Misuki, e tani, njëzet e katër vjeç, përgjegjësia të takonte ty, gjeneratës tjetër. Kunata jote deshi të zhytej në vendin tënd, por asaj nuk i rrjedh histori në vena. Gratë e familjes sonë ishin zhytur në det për mijëra vite në kërkim midhjesh dhe perlash. E hutuar, ajo të thërriste në telefon me të njëjtin dëshpërim me të cilin po mbante litarin e lidhur rreth belit tënd. Në varkë, kunata jote po djersiste, vuante: trupi yt i zhytur ishte në një farë mënyre trupi i saj.

Dhe ti, me fytyrë poshtë, duke u mbytur në një univers qumështi të zi, me një tub ajri që ishte si një bri i mbirë nga goja jote. Dhe rrezja pikëlluese e dritës së fanarit kornizonte prejardhjen tënde, duke provuar që nata poshtë sipërfaqes ishte më shumë natë se vetë nata. Dhe pa krahë, pa kostum zhytjeje, gjinjtë të ekspozuar dhe e veshur vetëm me të brendshmet e tua, ti nisesh, pafundësi, drejt një tufe algash ku duhet të gjesh ato ngjyrë të verdhë në të kaftë, të famshmet algat fucus. Ato bimë që paraardhësit e tu, Gjahtaret Ama të perlave, i hanin të freskëta për të zbuar djajtë e dobësisë. Problemi ishte se këto alga preferonin të ndërtonin foletë e tyre në thellësitë e egra të shkëmbinjve nënujorë. Tashmë tridhjetë metra në det, ti e ndjeje mprehtësinë e shkëmbinjve të thepisur.

Me shumë kujdes, ti penetrove mes për mes tufa planktonësh dhe koloni guackash. Dhe më në fund, ti ndjeve fshikëzat e fryra të algave fucus të të prekin duart, krahët dhe të lënë gjurmë mbi gjinjtë e tu. More aq shumë sa mundje të merrje që të mbushje trastën tënde të vogël rrjetë dhe gati: gjysma e betejës ishte fituar.

Kishe një minutë e gjysmë pa marrë frymë: një përjetësi e tërë nën ujë. Njdeje, për disa momente, sikur gjuha të zmadhohej, përdridhej dhe kthehej mbrapsht: Kështu kishte vdekur mamaja kur nuk llogariti sforcon që duhej për t’u kthyer. Ashtu mund të kishe vdekur edhe ti. Lëvize sa më pak që munde për të mos e mbushur trupin me dioksid karboni. I ngjite krahët për vithe dhe shtyve aq sa duhej për t’u kthyer në sipërfaqe. Si për fat të keq, një nyjë ngatërruar në takat e tua ndryshoi planet. Siç dukej, po mbyteshe me litarin tënd.

“Mos ki frikë nga deti. Mos ki frikë të luftosh për atë që do më së shumti,” ishin fjalët e gjyshes, ata peshq që gllabëronin pjesë drite përballë maskës tënde. Nga sipër, kunata jote bënte përpjekje të dëshpëruara për të tërhequr litarin, që më pas e tmerruar do të zbulonte se ishte i dobët dhe më pas i këputur.

Pas të ndjerit shpërthime të padukshme të diafragmës tënde, një marramendje përkundëse që po të tërhiqte nga kjo botë, ja arrin të zgjidhësh nyjën, të lirohesh nga rripi i belit dhe të ngjitesh për në sipërfaqe gati instinktivisht. Kthimi yt vazhdonte ngadalë por në mënyrë konstante; të paktën pesë metra pa arritur në sipërfaqe sheh nga poshtë strukturën e varkës të rritet dhe marrë formë. Sheh pjesë të jetës tënde të notojnë si pika vaji të pabarabarta. Mes tyre, ti njeh faqet e zbehta që gjyshi trashëgoi tek Yochan, buzëqeshjen e mamit kur gjeti perlën e parë, dhe zërin e ashpër të gjyshes që korrigjon gjithçka. Në këtë pikë, krahët e tu ngrijnë; gjuha jote është një gjarpër gjigand që po pengon qiellzën tënde. Drita është shndërruar në tjetër dritë: më e bardhë dhe e ashpër. Ti fillon të ëndërrosh. Dhe në ëndrrat e tua, këmbët e tua shndërrohen në pendë dhe oksigjeni është thjesht një supersticion.

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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.