Imersão

Pedro Novoa

Illustration by Andrea Popyordanova

Submerges-te. Vais ouvindo na tua descida a avó Hiromi: «Arranjarás as algas da velha maneira». As palavras flutuam ao redor da tua máscara artesanal, são peixes esmiuçando restos de luz. De nada valeu a tua proposta, a ideia de continuar a apostar na medicina moderna. Os comprimidos de iodo, essas pílulas que o teu irmão Yochan tomava para combater a anemia não serviram de muito; no máximo, apenas lhe coraram de rosa pálido as bochechas durante uma semana.

Então veio o teu treino: a aquatização, as imersões progressivas e, claro, os exames médicos para ver como respondia o teu corpo. Devias certificar-te, a mamã Misuki tinha morrido precisamente por ter subestimado a ciência, por ter confiado mais no mito que na realidade. Para a avó, a sua filha não tinha falecido, tinha sido convocada pelo mar. Ninguém a rebateu. Como era costume, não se chorou durante o velório. Apenas o papá Hideo se refugiou na casa de banho para contradizer a tradição e romper num pranto.

O papá era o desencaminhado da família. Se a força da gravidade exigia que rastejássemos, ele levitava. Se o mundo girava para a esquerda, ele acelerava pela via contrária. Consciente do que o esperava, deixou-se convencer pelo doutor de Yochan e mudámo-nos a Chosica na esperança de que o clima seco melhoraria a saúde do teu irmão.

Ao dar-se conta, a avó deserdou-o e fez as suas malas. «Voltarei à minha terra», diz ao carregar os seus oitenta anos até ao aeroporto, e partiu rumo ao Japão. A orgulhosa ânsia viveu sozinha, sem electricidade, cartões nem supermercados alimentando-se somente de peixes, mariscos e algas que ela própria extraia do mar. «Tive todo o Oceano Pacifico para mim», explicaria um ano depois.

Ao comprovar que o clima chosicano, em vez de melhorar ao Yochan, estava a perjudicá-lo, voltámos ao Callao. Foste tu quem convenceu a avó a voltar. Foi também a época da traição, da tua traição: viajaste para Cusco porque arranjaste um bom emprego, mas disseste à tua avó que moravas em Lima, a apenas uma hora de casa. Por isso, cada vez que havia reuniões familiares argumentavas as mais notáveis desculpas. E como eras a sua preferida—mesmo sem nunca o ter confessado—, acabava por aceitar-te qualquer disparate. Mas quando uma chamada telefónica anunciou que a doença de Yochan tinha entrado em crise e que os doutores já davam tudo por perdido, apanhaste o primeiro voo para Lima. E ali estavas, submergindo-te para arranjar aquelas algas que a avó usava cada vez que a ciência médica abandonava o teu irmão.

Quando Yochan tinha oito anos, a avó tinha submergido; aos dezasseis, mamã Misuki, e agora, aos vinte e quatro, correspondia-te a ti por estrita substituição geracional. A mulher do teu irmão ofereceu-se para ir no teu lugar mas faltava-lhe história nas veias. As mulheres da nossa família submergiam no mar há milhares de anos à procura de ostras e pérolas. Desencorajada, marcaria o teu número de telefone com o mesmo desespero com que agora segurava a corda amarrada à tua cintura. No barco, a tua cunhada suava, sofria: o teu corpo submergido era de alguma forma o corpo dela.

E tu, cabeça para baixo, afundando-te num universo de leite preto com um snorkel que era um chifre a nascer da tua boca. E o agonizante fluxo da luz da lanterna delimitava a tua descida, verificando que a noite por baixo da superfície era mais noite. E sem barbatanas, sem fato de neoprene, com os seios expostos e vestindo tão só umas pequenas cuecas, dirigias-te, infinita, a um viveiro de algas onde devias achar as pardo-amarelas, as famosas algas fucus. Essas plantas que os teus ancestrais, as Donas caçadoras de pérolas, comiam frescas para afastar os demónios da debilidade. O problema era que preferiam nidificar sempre na profundidade hostil dos penhascos. Agora, trinta metros abaixo, sentias as rochosidades especialmente afiadas.

Com especial cuidado, introduziste-te por entre as matas de plâncton e colónias de conchas. E por fim, sentiste as vesículas inchadas das algas fucus percorrer-te as mãos, os braços e redesenhar-te os seios. Arrancaste tudo o que conseguiste para encher o teu saquinho de malha e pronto: a metade da batalha estava ganha.

Estavas há minuto e meio sem respirar: toda uma eternidade dentro das águas. Sentias, por momentos, que a tua língua crescia, serpenteava-se e encolhia-se: Assim tinha morrido a mamã quando não calculou o esforço do caminho de volta. Assim poderias morrer tu também. Mexeste-te o mínimo possível para não saturar o teu corpo de dióxido de carbono. Juntaste os braços à coxa e deste pontapés precisos para subir à superfície. Lamentavelmente um nó preso nos teus calcanhares alterou os teus planos. Ao que parece, ficaste presa na tua própria corda.

«Não tenhas medo do mar. Tem medo de não lutar pelo que amas nas profundezas», eram as palavras da avó, aqueles peixes devorando os seus fragmentos de luz em frente à tua máscara. Desde cima, a tua cunhada esgotava desesperadas tentativas de puxar uma corda que com horror, descobria flácida e logo rasgada.

Depois de sentir murros invisíveis no diafragma, uma tontura adormecedora que te roubava do mundo, consegues desfazer o nó, libertar-te do cinto de chumbo e ascender quase que por instinto. O teu retorno progredia lento mas constante, a menos de cinco metros de chegar à superfície observas em contra-picado a quilha do barco crescer e definir-se. Vês porções da tua vida flutuar como irregulares nódoas de óleo. No meio delas, reconheces as bochechas pálidas que o papá reproduziu no Yochan, o sorriso da mamã quando apanhou a sua primeira pérola e a voz severa da avó corrigindo tudo. Neste ponto, os teus braços estão rígidos, a tua língua é uma serpente agigantada obstruindo o teu palato. A luz tornou-se numa outra luz: mais branca e feroz. Começas a sonhar. E nos teus sonhos, nascem-te barbatanas nos pés, e o oxigénio é uma simples superstição.

Read the original in Spanish

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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.