潛入
佩德羅 ·諾沃亞
接著是你的訓練:水上運動,漸進式浸沒,還有,當然,健康檢查,看看你身體有沒有反應。你要知道:媽媽瑞木就是因為低估了科學而死的,因為她相信神話多於現實。但對外婆來說,她的女兒沒有死,她只是被召回大海去了。沒有人有異議。依照習俗,守夜沒有人哭。只有爸爸偉雄躲進了浴室,管它什麼傳統不傳統的,哭了出來。
爸爸總是用他自己的調子向前邁進。假如地心引力堅持要扯住我們,他會懸浮起來。假如世界要往左旋轉,他會衝到相反的方向。爸爸清楚曉得我們將要面對的是甚麼,他讓小代的醫生說服他將全家搬去喬西卡,希望當地較為乾燥的氣候,對你弟弟的健康會有幫助。
外婆知道之後,和父親斷絕了親子關係,打包好她的行李。「我要回家,」她說,帶著她八十年的歲月到機場,回到了日本。這個自傲的老太太一個人住,沒有電,沒有信用卡,也沒有超級市場,只吃魚、貝類,還有她自己從海裡帶回來的海藻。「整個太平洋都是我的,」一年之後她會這樣解釋說。
直到發現喬西卡的氣候與其說對小代有益,倒不如說是有害之後,我們搬回去卡亞俄。是你說服祖母搬回家的。這也是背信的時刻:你自己的背信。你搬去了庫斯科,因為你在那裡找到了好工作,可是你告訴外婆,你住在利馬,離她住的地方只有一小時遠。所以每次有家族聚會,你都要想出很多荒誕的藉口不去。也因為你是她最寵愛的──儘管她從不承認──每次你說什麼白癡的理由,她都接受了。不過當你接到電話,說小代的病已經很嚴重而且醫生已經說沒救的時候,你搭第一班飛機回到利馬。你現在人就在這裡,正潛入海裡尋找海藻,要給外婆用來做藥,現代醫學已經宣佈你弟弟快要不行了。
小代八歲的時候,外婆潛入海裡;十六歲的時候,是媽媽瑞木:現在,二十四歲,責任輪到了你,到下一代了。你弟弟的老婆本來建議由她來代替你,但她的血液裡沒有歷史。我們家族幾千年來都是由女人潛入海裡挖蚌採珠的。有點慌張地,就像她打電話給你的時候一樣,她正用著同等的絕望將繩索纏住你的腰。在船上,你的弟媳正冒著汗,承受著痛苦:你沉下去的身體某種程度而言也就是她的身體。
而你,臉朝下,潛進了一個黑色牛奶的宇宙,呼吸管從你的嘴巴發芽伸出如同獨角。燈籠惱人的光束, 裱框了你的下降,證明海裡黑夜比夜更黑。你沒有魚鳍,沒有潛水衣,赤裸著胸膛,僅僅穿著內褲,出發了,無邊無際地,朝著一叢又一叢的海藻游過去,要搜尋黃褐色的,那著名的石衣藻。那是你的祖先,亞瑪斯人,遠古的採珠人會生吃以抵禦病魔的。不妙的是,海藻選擇在水面之下岩壁的險惡深淵落腳。現在,三十公尺底下,你摸到岩石的鋸齒邊沿。
你小心翼翼地穿過浮游生物與貝殼的聚落。最後,你能感到石衣藻膨脹的囊泡掃過你的手掌與手臂,摸過你的胸線。你儘可能的拔,塞到你小小的網眼袋裡,你完成了:這一仗贏了一半。
你已經一分半鐘沒有換氣:這在水裡就等於一生一世。你覺得,有時候,你的舌頭在脹大,扭曲著,往後捲:你的媽媽就是因為誤算了回程的力度而死的。你很可能同樣地喪命。你儘可能緩慢地移動,以防身體內的二氧化碳飽和。你雙臂抱緊雙腿;踢腳的幅度只求足以讓你回到海面。這時,你的腳跟纏住了一個繩結,改變了整個計畫。你就在自己的路線上被打了個死結。
「不要懼怕海。不要害怕為你內心深處所愛的而搏鬥,」外婆總是這麽說的,魚群吞沒了你的潛水面鏡之前的餘光。那上面,你的弟媳用盡一切手段要拉起繩索,但沒有用,她驚惶地發現繩子已經軟掉,最後斷裂了。
經歷過橫膈膜受到無形的攻擊、經歷過催人入眠的暈眩要將你拉離這世界之後,你解開了那個結,掙脫了鉛帶,幾乎是本能地往上升。你的回程緩慢但持續,在距離水面五公尺處,你看到船的龍骨變大,越來越清晰。你看到你零碎的生命片段漂過眼前,像不規則的油污。當中,你從小代蒼白的臉頰上認出爸爸的輪廓,媽媽第一次挖到珍珠的笑容,外婆糾正一切的嚴厲聲音。就在那個瞬間,你的雙臂僵硬;你的舌頭是一條巨蛇,堵住你的上顎。光線變成了不一樣的光線:更白更兇猛。你開始做夢。在你的夢裡,你的腳發芽長出了魚鳍,氧氣只是無稽之談。
李焯雄翻譯自喬治·亨森(George Henson)譯自西班牙原文的英譯本。
Chinese translation by Francis Li Zhuoxiong
Read the Portuguese translation
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.