Translations

Translation Tuesdays: “With the Tongue” by Ivars Šteinbergs

April 23, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Jayde Will

Years later—truth or dare at someone’s place, no one chooses truth, we know everything we need to know anyway.

This Translation Tuesday, the Latvian poet Ivars Šteinbergs graces us with an ode to the tongue—the small, oh-so-easily forgotten organ without which language, and the institutions of literature and translation that depend on it, would be impossible. Drawing on the half-remembered frisson of youthful trysts, this humorous prose-poem ties the “games” of nascent sexuality to the generative “play” of language, brilliantly undermining the boundary between language and the body even as it strikes a balance between restraint and ribaldry.

I spin the bottle, it stops on Estere. I wanted it to stop on Sandra.

A small kiss, no tongue, mechanical, like you’re going through the motions during a dance lesson, afterwards I taste cherry lip balm. As far as the class trip, I only remember the ride in the bus, where in the back we had a circle around an empty Sprite bottle.

Years later—truth or dare at someone’s place, no one chooses truth, we know everything we need to know anyway: “Kiss Renāte—with your tongue!”, “Lick Anete’s neck!” “Touch each other with your tongues!”. The next morning—an oral exam, I hadn’t slept, but I got a good grade, as if I had been warming up for it the entire night before.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Vitiligo Fawn” by Tijana Rakočević

April 16, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Will Firth

Two months after bwana’s return, a girl from Kashasha had a fit of laughter.

This Translation Tuesday, we are pleased to present new short fiction from the Montenegrin author Tijana Rakočević. A surprise awaits—for this story takes place not in contemporary Montenegro, as one might expect from the author’s identity, but in Tanzania’s colonial past, during the Kashasha laughter epidemic of 1962. This hypnotic tale describes the outbreak of the epidemic in remote Tanzania following the arrival of a British agent. As the narrator returns continually to the central image of a vitiligo-mottled fawn, whose coloration is mirrored by that of the disabled protagonist, Andwele, a haunting parable of illness, dehumanization, and assimilation emerges, rendered here in elliptical but powerful English by Will Firth.

Wache waseme nimpendae simwachi.[1]

If you never leave the house, no tragedy can befall you.

The edges of Tulinagwe’s purple khanga danced in the air as she kneaded a ball of risen dough. Whenever eight-year-old Andwele, as piebald as a scrofulous calf, stuck his finger into his mouth so far that he could touch the back of his throat, she would snarl, You sure know how to get on one’s nerves, boy, but this time she held her tongue. He tested her patience by rocking on a loose wooden board on the ground that moved to the rhythm of his round heels, and he only stopped when his mother glanced at him; in those moments, he felt I’m the center of the world, but she—if she had the strength to speak—would have called it asking for a hiding. It was a holiday in all Kashasha: the white man, Sir Jonathan, had returned—a dissolute English bon vivant, who their Baba wa Taifa, their savior Mwalimu, Julius Kambarage Nyrere, had befriended in Edinburgh during his studies. Tulinagwe saw him out of the corner of her eye as he ambled along the main road escorted by a gaggle of black girls, and, if she had not been busy rolling the dough for the family, which was so thin that it kept breaking in the middle, she would have said, not particularly handsome, not particularly tall; instead, she decided, I’ll save salt; if they still like it, they can ask for more.

Andwele slipped and fell. It was a tragedy.

He remembered that Mwanawa had given him five shillings and he limped off through the yard. The women wanted him to leave the village, which he sensed in the way they prepared him for the trip and because they had whispered ever since Kyalamboka lived in Sir Jonathan’s house. The man’s collection of romantic safari oddments in his private residence—photographs with animals, human animals, and human humans—seemed a grotesque combination to him, who imagined Muleba district as a mind-bogglingly vast Tanzanian shilling: go banana picking, they would have advised him if he were older, I’ll go cotton picking like Ipyana, my dad, he thought, but he lacked the courage. After that unusual visit, he believed Muleba was a heart broken. Hidden in the bushes near the house, he tried to get a glimpse of the vitiligo fawn that bwana had brought as a trophy from Europe, a fawn they called Sekelaga, Joy, but it was not there; he just heard the titillated giggles of his elder sister that vanished in the warm breeze. What did he promise her, he wondered, and will he take her with him? He would notice a villager and hire them to scrub the floors, and he would look on that troglodyte as human—that was the fortunate circumstance that made them dignified in their own eyes. The foreigner, always well-meaning and amicable, as if his earthly life depended on that handful of semi-savages, offered him Abba-Zaba chocolates so he would keep the secret; Andwele first spoke hapana, hapana, later nasikitika, but he was captivated by the sweet pain in his throat: asante sana, he repeated more and more often, thank you very much. He went away calm and beaming, his face radiant like a young idiot, dragging along his leg that they broke four more times after the accident, only to conclude it was better to leave it. Kyalamboka watched her disfigured brother and snorted spitefully in her rich lover’s ear, that little freak—sometimes I’d like to trip him up.

READ MORE…

From The Tale of a Wall

April 10, 2024  |  in All Eyes on Palestine, Translations  |  by Luke Leafgren and Nasser Abu Srour

We believed that freedom was possible, despite all its demands, and that our sacrifices might not be enough.

As you read this, the writer Nasser Abu Srour is serving a life sentence at a maximum-security prison in the Negev desert—a fate he was assigned to after being accused of killing a Shin Bet agent during the Intifada of the Stones. During this series of uprisings and demonstrations, Palestinians protested against increasing Israeli state repression, casual harm, and military occupation. For Abu Srour, who had been born in a refugee camp near Bethlehem, the Intifada represented a previously unfathomable opportunity for life that was not delineated by exile, by humiliation, and by a ruling elite that became ever more comfortable with violence, detention, land expropriation, and illegal Jewish settlement. He, and the people who shared this vision of the future, were named the Generation of Stones: an appellation by which the writer builds an ever-growing significance of land, of possession, and of action. What is a stone in the hand, a stone thrown in the air, a stone used to lay a wall?

The Tale of a Wall, forthcoming from Other Press and translated with extraordinary finesse by Luke Leafgren, is Abu Srour’s luminous memoir, written during his incarceration. Within its pages, he conducts a ceremony with the silent structure that binds him, to tell the story of a people that has long been imprisoned by something much more complex and multifarious than a partition. Through miragic poetry, profound conviction, and a never-wavering eye towards a more lucid future, he substantiates the kind of freedom that only the trapped know of—the kind that is forged out of shared belief, the kind that must be achieved through common labour and public declaration. As demonstrated in this surging, fourth-person excerpt, the poet continues, even under isolation, to channel the pulse of a nation under siege.

The cares, interests, and concerns we choose to focus on say much about us. We grow larger as the interests within us expand, just as we grow smaller when they contract. Every interest that makes its home within us shapes us by determining the contours of our activities, our sleeping hours, what we celebrate around the breakfast table, the songs we listen to, the number of minutes we spend interceding with god, and the titles and prices of the books we buy. The things we defend and the things we love: those are what define us. They are the first things that we declare in the first sentence of introduction, during the first meeting with the first person who asks.

Alongside their own concerns, the generation of Stones chose to concentrate on other causes: occupied Arab lands whose rulers shrank from the idea of fighting to reclaim them; Arabs who kept quiet while homegrown thieves enshrined their defeats; nationalistic speeches written in foreign languages; billions of poor people surrounded by the hoarded wealth of the world; millions dying of hunger and reduced to numbers, statistics, and averages tucked into the back pages of newspapers in the important and influential capitals; child laborers and their godless taskmasters; cheap labor and even cheaper working conditions; women whose bodies are harassed by violating hands; a women’s movement that never gives up the fight; speeches to awaken a paralyzed masculinity. . . Between one demonstration and the next, between a martyr’s funeral and the burial ceremony, Palestinians still found time and emotion to weep over the grief of others. Upon our narrow walls, we made space to write the details of others’ suffering until the images and slogans mixed together and became a strange shrine to the existential dignity of suffering. The stones provided by that dignity contained enough hope to compensate for the extra measure of frustration and despair we embraced.

We spoke all the languages of pain. After rejecting prejudice regarding religion, color, or beliefs, our speeches expanded to embrace the entire planet Earth. Our naked, bleeding breasts exposed the lie about a barbarous East that needed the West to refine its primitive savagery. In our lexicon of dignity and worth, the pains of others had no color or smell that distinguished them from our own, for we identified with every speech that rebelled against injustice or supported the not yet triumphant. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Perfect Crime” by Tasos Leivaditis

April 9, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by N. N. Trakakis

This manuscript was discovered in the room of a low-ranking bank official. The official himself was found dead, his head smashed.

This Translation Tuesday, a twisted, rambling screed offers a window into the dark mind of a low-level bank clerk. Obsessed with money, plagued by seedy, morbid memories, buffeted by obscure resentments, he comes across a letter that confirms his most paranoid delusions, and begins to plan his ‘perfect crime’. This is a powerful study of madness from the Greek writer Tasos Leivaditis, rendered into a genuinely disturbing English by N. N. Trakakis.

It continued raining, and so I too continued sitting under the porch of a cheap, commonplace hotel in a small cul-de-sac. How I got there is an entire saga, but I would often absent-mindedly find myself in the most unlikely parts of the city, and by ‘absent-mindedly’ I mean absorbed in thoughts that troubled me of late. I was always of course a procrastinator, but this delay had lasted for years and the resolution that had been ordained, from whatever angle you examined it, was not at all in my favour. When I left my boss’ house, in my haste I forgot my one and only coat, but I thought that, rather than trying to clear up such a messy situation, I’d be better off hanging myself. And I may well have done so if this letter hadn’t arrived. “The landlady must have left it on the table,” I thought. A letter that, the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that I had been waiting for it for a long while, it contained moreover so many details regarding my personal life that there couldn’t be any doubt that it was destined for me – despite the fact that people’s morals have slackened so much in our time that they might even call into question the authenticity of a letter, the contents of which would admittedly crush them.

The rain abated, I was ready to leave, then I remembered why I had come, it was the same hotel, many years ago, I might not have even been eighteen, I would often think “my God, if I could at least see one woman naked, then I can die!” but I was also afraid lest I did in fact die, one night it seemed I was hypnotised, a woman approached and brought me here to this hotel, I had no idea how.

“C’mon, get undressed and get in bed,” she told me.

It was winter, I was wearing a khaki scarf which belonged to my grandfather, I remember that it was this very scarf, hanging close at hand on a rack, that we used to bind his jaw as soon as he had died, as was the custom. I took off my jacket and lay down, the woman undressed completely, and I, of course, may as well have been dead, for whether from fear or bad timing nothing was happening. The woman got up.

“If you can’t do it, why hire a hooker?” she said, washing her hands in the basin.

“My apologies, some other time…,” I stammered.

She perhaps thought that I was trying to avoid paying, for she immediately replied:

“The body fell on the bed, it must be paid.”

That expression made an impression on me, in particular its tone: she spoke about her body as though she was referring to someone else, as though she was saying, for example, “the old lady is unwell, it doesn’t look like she’ll make it through the night,” an old lady, in fact, who’s lived her life and made your life miserable with her old-age grumbling – in exactly that way. Then, I don’t know how, I felt a kind of distress, as though they had stuffed my mouth with lots of cotton wool, I then observed the wall next to me: it seemed to tremble at first, then it began to tilt and tilt, until it was about to collapse on me, I rushed to the door and ran down the stairs.

At the exact moment when my boss was angrily showing me the door, I again noticed the wall shaking, “it’s weird how people live in houses like this,” I thought, when I got back home, past midnight, everything was shut, they were asleep, I began forcefully ringing the bell, eventually a window up high opened and that familiar, longish face appeared.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “A Triangle with Four Sides” by Nasim Vahabi

April 2, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Parisa Saranj

The line is the rebellious child of two insignificant points that came into existence because of one movement of a pen.

This Translation Tuesday, we present new hybrid, experimental fiction from Iranian author Nasim Vahabi whose debut novel in French  Je ne suis pas un roman (I am not a novel; Tropismes, 2022) was released to critical acclaim. Abstract in a generative way, A Triangle with Four Sides cleverly interrogates the notion of resistance. In each of the four angles that mirror and complement one another, we find a progression to expose and reconcile the many absurdities in everyday life and a wry attempt to rise above micro-oppressions. This is a well crafted puzzle of a piece that will definitely linger in the mind. Read on!

Geometry is more than a mathematical concept. It is the art of observation and comparison.

For example, the line—alone, single, and aimless—has geometry wrapped around its finger. It gets along with any shape. The line is the circle’s entire existence. Sometimes smooth or curvy, straight or zigzagged, sometimes boring and stretched out into eternity, other times stupidly coiled like a snake or long and high maintenance, and sometimes, like a hyphen, humble and content with its small lot in life.

The line is its own boss. When it wills, it folds over, straightens up, creates a sharp edge, or lies parallel with itself, but if it lies parallel with another line, it is liberation and generosity.However, once it decides to stretch even longer, its determination gets on your nerves. It seems something must interfere to save the line from itself. Perhaps self-replication? Or breaking into parts to create an independent entity such as a triangle—the perfect form, an archetype of stability. The square has always been envious of the triangle’s fortified flexibility. With three sides equal in length, whenever it wills, with a delicate, subtle movement, it could demonstrate equilaterality. But the square is heavy. Its movements are coarse. And yet, all it needs is to look at the rectangle or trapezoid to realize it could be worse: cumbersome and uneven. It could always be worse. The rectangle is the master of optimism. Rectangle considers itself the best of all shapes. Hates others and takes pride in having four sides staring at each other. Fanatic and self-absorbed, it only socializes with the rhombus, which is always uncomfortable and self-loathing. The rhombus is the shiest with the least confidence among all shapes: an unlucky rectangle.

The line would have never imagined having such offspring. The line is the rebellious child of two insignificant points that came into existence because of one movement of a pen. No one would ever know if that single movement was intentional or accidental. Right from the start, the point knew the line would not be satisfied with having a simple destiny as, let’s say, an em dash. The points knew the line’s ambition would make all the other points proud one day. Yes, the point—despite its insignificance—was aware of all these.

The geometry family, like all families, has its own untold stories. Geometry is life’s summary despite all its good or bad surprises.

I call my story triangle in honor of geometry, and I know that all it takes for my story to fall apart and turn into a coarse, inflexible square is one broken angle.

READ MORE…

Two Poems by Mahmoud Darwish

March 27, 2024  |  in All Eyes on Palestine, Translations  |  by Catherine Cobham and Mahmoud Darwish

If peace is a pause between two wars, then the dead have a right to vote: we will choose the general.

Of all that Mahmoud Darwish has left to us in his legacy of prismatic language, transcendent humanism, and elucidation of Palestinian consciousness, the greatest gift might be his belief that literature can confront any question—even those that seem most unanswerable—and consequently, his profound demonstration of living, gracefully and with dignity, inside ambiguity. Translated beautifully by Catherine Cobham, A River Dies of Thirst is the final book of poems published in Darwish’s lifetime, and it provides us with another opportunity to share reality with a writer who has always astonishingly made poetry the site of actuality—the poem as a place where thinking is forged. They precisely mark enormous emotional ranges with a single, pointed image; they make short lines of long wars; and they push us, as always, towards the seeking of meaning. In the final lines of his memoir, Memory for Forgetfulness, the poet repeats: “No one understands anyone. / And no one understands anyone. / No one understands.” Perhaps so. But as these poems congregate irresolution with desire, the ethereal with the material, and conviction with inquiry—we get the feeling that we might begin.

A common enemy

It is time for the war to have a siesta. The fighters go to their girlfriends, tired and afraid their words will be misinterpreted: ‘We won because we did not die, and our enemies won because they did not die.’ For defeat is a forlorn expression. But the individual fighter is not a soldier in the presence of the one he loves: ‘If your eyes hadn’t been aimed at my heart the bullet would have penetrated it!’ Or: ‘If I hadn’t been so eager to avoid being killed, I wouldn’t have killed anyone!’ Or: ‘I was afraid for you if I died, so I survived to put your mind at rest.’ Or: ‘Heroism is a word we only use at the graveside.’ Or: ‘In battle I did not think of victory but of being safe, and of the freckles on your back.’ Or: ‘How little difference there is between safety and peace and the room where you sleep.’ Or: ‘When I was thirsty I asked my enemy for water and he didn’t hear me, so I spoke your name and my thirst was quenched.’ Fighters on both sides say similar things in the presence of the ones they love. But the casualties on both sides don’t realise until it’s too late that they have a common enemy: death. So what does that mean? READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “today I only took one ativan” by Maniniwei

March 26, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Emily Lu

your hand was bigger. sturdier. the nights were sturdier too.

This Translation Tuesday, senses heightened by a sleeping pill, Taiwanese writer Maniniwei exhibits a wonderful sensitivity to touch. Everything in this dreamy poem feels as if ‘felt’. The softness of her cat, the points of its claws and teeth, the texture of the night, the contents of her dreams; they are as if sensations in the fingertips have been translated directly into a lilting prose-poetry, which have been rendered with equal care and skill into the English by Emily Lu.

I needed more distance from you. cicadas screamed as if giants were about to descend. my morning. was your tiny playground. today I took an ativan. weighed you on the scale. patted my own belly. and patted the cat one hundred times. your hand was bigger. sturdier. the nights were sturdier too. don’t ask the sand what it saw. which horses. which humans. I liked time on you. the flying humans from the picture stopped to rest in your mind’s boat. the fresh flowers and IV pole on your body. your nighttime bite and cough. your shoulder, eaten. I wrote this song for you. today I ran. today I only took one ativan. patted your fur. celebrated your fur. comforted your fur. your sweet fur. wet from the rain. very quickly I got hungry. didn’t do anything and hungry. Two scratch marks left by the cat. no blood. nothing. I saw it. you looked like a god of spring.

Translated from the Chinese by Emily Lu

Maniniwei is a Malay-Taiwanese writer and illustrator. She was writer-in-residence at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2021. Her works have been recognized by OPENBOOK, the Bologna Ragazzi Award, the Taoyuan Chung Chao-Cheng Award for Literature, and the National Culture and Arts Foundation. Restarting her creative practice after age 30, she is the author of more than ten books. She lives in Taipei with one child and two cats. This is the first time her work has appeared in English.

Emily Lu was born in Nanjing. She completed her MD at Queen’s University in 2017. She is the author of the chapbooks there is no wifi in the afterlife (San Press 2022) and Night Leaves Nothing New (Baseline Press 2019), as well as works appearing in Waxwing, Augur, Honey Literary, Arc Poetry Magazine, and filling Station. She lives in Toronto. This is her debut translation.

Translation Tuesday: “The Toothpick” by Mari Klein

March 19, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Mari Klein

it had been accidentally baked into a slice of Gerbeaud cake, and the confectioner, without knowing it or wanting to, had begotten a tragedy

This Translation Tuesday, we are proud to present a brilliant vignette from the innovative mind of Hungarian author Mari Klein, who also translates her own work into English. Dropping us in media res in this tableau of a woman crouching on a bathroom floor as she gasps for her dying breath—the ignominious cause revealed only near the very end—Klein not only gives us a masterclass in the depiction of consciousness but also a glimpse into her huge gifts as a mordantly funny writer.

(Then she groped on all fours on the worn bathroom floor, along the bathtub, under the washing machine, behind the laundry basket, but couldn’t find it: half a pair of the pretty green stone earrings were gone; there goes the family heirloom, she thought, wiping the blood that had clotted on her neck. But the snake bracelet―the clasp was broken and it was only cheap trinket gold anyway―she couldn’t get rid of, even though she threw it in the toilet and flushed it three times: the blue-purple marks of the scales would have to be worn and concealed on her wrist for a long time to come.)

She opened St. Peter’s Umbrella, to be read by Wednesday, and turned to the last page: “. . . a whisper, it sounded like the buzzing of a fly. Poor child!” she read, but suddenly slammed the book shut, crumpling the dust jacket in her hands, clenching it so tightly that her knuckles turned white. Then she gently stroked the letters on the cover, as if to apologise, and put the book back on the bedside table, next to the polka dot mug. With her finger she stirred the cold cocoa: the pale swirl swallowed the skin and then, as it weakened, spat it back to the surface. She licked her finger: the milk had gone sour. Titi said her daddy made her cocoa every night too.

 (From the white vinyl apron on the drying rack above the bathtub, she counted: water dripped on every fourth. The heavy body was sweating, panting, reeking of booze and garlic; but then all she could see was the fly on the mirror, rubbing its feet, buzzing, moving back and forth a few centimetres every now and then.) READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Ghayath Almadhoun

March 12, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Catherine Cobham

All the metaphors in this poem are based on a true story that has not happened before

This Translation Tuesday, prose poems come in from Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun, translated with care by Catherine Cobham. A warning label alerts us to the peculiar nature of the metaphors in “Poet in Berlin”. Almadhoun’s poet starts, stops, and starts over, as if trying to get the metaphors in his head to express the correct thing. His slow progress perplexes the detective trapped in the poem’s dense and mazey interior—he needs that warning as much as we do. In “Everything’s the Same” the sorrow of a sudden disappearance is ‘green’, ‘still fresh’, and we find grief and shock doing their customary thing. The poet stalks the house he once shared with the absent presence. Time is either stopped dead or winding backwards, his senses are heightened, and household objects take on a sudden, dangerous redolence.

Poet in Berlin

All the metaphors in this poem are based on a true story that has not happened before

A lonely man with green eyes and a blue gaze, searching for a woman carrying a forest, who went into the sea and did not return.

Lonely as a bench in a public park, most of those who have touched his wound think he is a poet from Berlin, but he is in fact a poet in Berlin.

He resembles a park bench, and therefore, he used to swear to passers-by that a woman he loved took him to the sea and brought him back thirsty, and in another account, in a poem they found in a pocket of his blue shirt, he said she brought him back from the sea thirsty, but she did not return. On the other hand, the Poetry Foundation in Chicago has not been able to verify the truth of the information contained in this poem.

A lonely man, in a city crowded with lonely people, he assured the German police that he took full responsibility for the disappearance of a woman as ripe as a peach tree.

The detective asked him to stop using metaphor, because the investigation report was not a postmodern poem, and in any case the sea could not possibly be a crime scene in this city, for even in David Bowie’s most defiant songs there was no sea in Berlin, then he added as calmly as an abandoned house, I cannot bring any charges against you at the present time, for as of the date of the writing of this poem, no official reports have been submitted about the disappearance of a woman who looks like the sunset, walks like a herd of gazelles, and loves summer and children. Furthermore, according to German law, there is no crime if there is no body.

A lonely man with green eyes and a blue gaze went into the sea to look for a woman who went into the sea and did not return, and he did not return.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Parwana” by Lida Amiri

March 5, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Lida Amiri

One glance at the sky finally connects her with infinity, where she belongs.

This Translation Tuesday—three days before International Women’s Day—we bring you a tragic story self-translated by former Afghan refugee Lida Amiri—centering on the plight of a woman who is not free to pursue love. In her language, parwana refers to a creature that has wings but cannot fly. It is a fitting name for our despairing protagonist, who, up against forces larger than her, stages her escape. 

The night is her sole protector, her only companion. It represents shelter from the stares and noiseless chatter of passersby on the streets. People who recognize her whisper, “That’s the general’s daughter that I saw with another young man! How dare she stain the impeccable reputation of a national hero?”

To Parwana[1], her father’s military background has become a curse. With a swift and vigorous hand motion, she desperately tries to delete each of these stinging judgments from her mind.

Suddenly, Parwana stops her agonizing train of thought and notices her immediate surroundings. She sighs and has a last look around her lovingly furnished room. She is just one step away from a pile of mattresses without a bedframe, which she sometimes fell off of when the nightmares reminded her of her wrongdoings. The only piece of furniture in her room is the wooden chest of drawers next to her bed, which is decorated with her perfume bottle and her Surmi—a Kohl used daily to protect her from evil looks because, according to her neighbors, she has all a young woman could wish for: a loving family, a room in her parents’ house, a job as a midwife. Is she actually willing to risk it all? While her heart races as she reminisces, she looks in the small mirror on the chest of drawers before taking a deep breath addressing herself. “The situation can’t continue like this, and you know it. He will be the right one,” she says softly while sighing heavily.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Dymov” by Yuri Serebriansky

February 27, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Sarah McEleney

The parachutes activated, and Dymov swung from the cords, examining the lines of the converging rivers below. . .

This Translation Tuesday, a hostile confrontation ensues when an astronaut inadvertently kills a cow—or two—during his Earth-landing. Here is translator Sarah McEleney on Serebriansky’s startling work of imagination: “This short story by Kazakhstani author Yuri Serebriansky reflects upon the indirect costs of space travel. While the story is meant to take place somewhere in Russia, Serebriansky considers it very much connected to Kazakhstan, as it was inspired by his trip to an area near the Baikonur cosmodrome. The author was traveling in the middle of spring when people were tending to their gardens in the countryside, and suddenly, he noticed shiny silvery containers everywhere, which reminded him of the tripods belonging to the aliens in H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. People had gathered parts of rockets that had fallen to the Earth and were using them instead of typical garden containers. At the time, Serebriansky already knew that these pieces of rockets emitted geptil, a rocket propellent hazardous to human health and the environment. With this in mind, a contemplation of the unforeseen consequences of space travel is embedded in “Dymov,” in which the protagonist’s thirst for personal heroism is dashed by his calamitous reentry to Earth.”

I’m a bird in a cuckoo clock. Soon I’ll jump out and say my “cuckoo!” to everyone. No. Not aloud. Because, after all, everything is recorded. The whole country considers you a hero, and you’re the next laboratory mouse in line, and everything is recorded. More important than a dog, of course. Dymov. The “cuckoo!” will be long, since I’ve got something to say. They’ll write: “he conducted experiments.” And really, I conducted them. I beat my heart when I had to, I ran blood through my veins. I was in a spaceship for three days without a spacesuit. Every one of us is the first in something. And what I am is a cuckoo bird, and also, codename “Fog”. Do I want anything else? Yes, I want to go to the moon. I want to climb out of here in a spacesuit, I want to go home. To my daughter. And to church. To Father Anisim, to Anisim.

 “Fog’, we’re going to prepare for descent, put on your spacesuit, we’re checking the telemetry before braking. Everything’s in order here.”

“Got it. I’m getting back into my spacesuit.”

That impossible silence is broken. Come on, speak, guys. I’d listen to your sputtering for a century. In an airplane you at least feel the engine, but here there’s just inertia. Space. It’s a heavy word. But howl. Everything is recorded.

The cabin of the spaceship becomes more claustrophobic in zero-gravity. But what can you do? There’s a lever attached to a cord, flying like they had warned. The planet below looks astonishingly lifeless, no traces of life from here—who says that on the radio? Maybe I didn’t hear it there? The globe above the control panel seems like it was made by Neanderthals. But you have to believe in it. Falling to it out of curiosity, into the clouds, from this, not even height, but rather, void—it’s scary, comrades. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: The Garden of Tomatoes by Esther Karin Mngodo

February 20, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Jay Boss Rubin

Tuntufye had already made clear that he didn’t believe in such nonsense. Blood drinkers didn’t exist.

This Translation Tuesday, we deliver gripping fiction from Tanzania, a short story of domestic deception that spawns an unspeakable being, a sinister spirit. Who is to say who is at fault? Hear from translator Jay Boss Rubin on bringing Esther Karin Mngodo’s The Garden of Tomatoes into the English:

“In this story, I was fascinated with how it contains genre elements but is not really genre fiction. There’s a genre element, for sure, but we stayed away from terms such as “vampire” and “zombie” because of all the associations those carry. There’s also an element of free indirect discourse, one that I was aware of in the Swahili, but that came out more in the translation, toward the end of the revision process. Esther was also especially helpful in drawing my attention to moments in the story where the main character’s own words, or her words and actions, might contradict each other. These moments of ambivalence, or rich ambiguity, really, are central to my understanding of the characters in “Atuganile,” the forces that push and pull on them.“

Tuntufye Mwasakyeni raised his cup of milky tea to his mouth and sipped. The house was quiet, different than most Saturdays. Two days had passed since his wife, Atuganile, had left to go see her mother’s ailing brother over in Chunya District—around two hours away by automobile.

Tuntufye placed the index finger of his left hand on the table in front of him so it mimicked the second hand of the clock on the wall. Departing for her trip, Atuganile had promised that she’d be back by Saturday at nine. It was now eight minutes to 9am. He wasn’t worried that something bad had happened to her—not in the least. He was well aware that if there were some shrewd, intelligent women there in Isyesye, Atuganile was one of them. She was a known quantity, especially in Uyole, where she vended fruits and vegetables. But it wasn’t like her to be late.

When it reached nine on the dot, Tuntufye stood up and went outside through the door in the living room. He leaned against one of the white, exterior pillars, keeping his eyes peeled for Atuganile. When he saw her, he grinned. She was striding forward like a champion athlete, her kanga coming undone and starting to fall down as she ran. Colonnades of trees to Atuganile’s left and to her right framed the scene of her arrival. Their branches swayed in the wind like giant claws—as if to swipe at her and sneer, today, Atu, you’re going to get it.

Once she’d drawn close, Atuganile set down the load she’d been carrying on her head and began explaining the reasons for her delay. “Forgive me, my husband. Forgive me, Baba,” she gasped. “The bus broke down. I had to hop aboard a different one. You know how difficult transportation can be here in Mbeya. Forgive me, Baba, for being late.”

Her husband said nothing. He jutted his lip forward, returned to the kitchen, sat down at the table and poured himself another cup of tea. Then he took his Bible and began reading. Atuganile sat with him and started sorting kisamvu, separating the good greens from the bad. In the middle of sorting, she picked up a sheet of Isyesye Oye!, the newspaper that had been used to wrap the cassava leaves. Alert: Blood Drinker on the Loose in Isyeye, the headline warned. Atuganile read on:

An individual in Isyesye is being sought by police for abducting children younger than twelve. According to the information available, five children have now disappeared as a result of coming into contact with the suspect, who is said to be a drinker of blood. Parents are advised to keep close watch over their children, and see that they don’t roam about after dark.

The newspaper described the child of one woman, known as Mama Samweli, who’d been missing for five days. When Mama Samweli went for a consultation with a local healer, the mganga advised her not to bother searching—her child had already had the life sucked out of them. When news of the blood drinker reached the Regional Police Chief, he stated that the government does not officially recognize witchcraft, so he was unable to comment on the rumor any further. But he assured the citizenry that efforts were ongoing to locate Samweli, along with the other four children who had gone missing over the past five months.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Is That You, Seryozha?” by Mikhail Zemskov

February 13, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Yuliya Gubanova

He exhaled into the receiver one more time and smiled happily. The tip of his nose trembled slightly.

This Translation Tuesday, a short story from Kazakhstani author Mikhail Zemskov, brought into English by Yuliya Gubanova. Alone in his dirty apartment, an oddball takes a creepy enjoyment from cold-calling strangers on his Soviet-era landline. Never speaking, only breathing suggestively into the receiver, he becomes the missing, longed-for person in another family’s domestic drama – a ghost, even – before hanging up and dialing his next victim. A grim prank, inflicting his loneliness on others.

He set his plate aside. The Korean-style carrots from a nearby cooking shop turned out to be just carrots, finely chopped, dusted with red pepper, and drizzled with vinegar. And stale, too. He suspected they would be… but for some reason he craved something spicy today.

He turned on the TV (an old Soviet one, still functioning, so why should he throw it away?). He switched channels, and turned the TV off.

He rubbed his stubble, which was coming up in gray patches. “I’d better shave, or it’ll be harder to do in a few days. Or should I grow the beard again?” But with those specks of gray, the beard – even when washed and carefully brushed – looked shaggy and unkempt.

It would have been nice to clean the flat today. But he was tired and did not want to get up from the deep armchair which had already been sagged by his parents. In fact, it had been a week since he first thought of tidying up. But in previous days, he had been just as reluctant to get out of the deep armchair.

He pulled up an old disc telephone set, also left over from his parents. He took a stack of small bills out of his jeans pocket, pulled one out at random. A ten-ruble bill. He put it on the table next to the telephone. He picked up the receiver. He dialed the numbers from the serial number of the dark green paper carefully and slowly. He cleared his throat.

Three rings, and somebody answered on the other end.

“Hello. Hello?” there was the uncertain voice of a young guy. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Rice” by Alejandra Kamiya

February 6, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Madison Felman-Panagotaco

Everything I hadn’t asked over the years comes back to me. Every question comes and brings others.

This Translation Thursday, we deliver gentle prose from Argentina, a subtle study of inter-generational difference, migration, and hyphenate identity in the form of a weekly lunch date between father and daughter. Hear translator Madison Felman-Panagotacos’ impression of Japanese-Argentine author Alejandra Kamiya’s affecting Rice:

“… a precise, austere story that explores what is named, what is spoken, and, most importantly, what is left unsaid…, ‘Rice‘ quietly explores quotidian experiences as a means of capturing life’s tensions and discomfort. Her brevity in narration, so uncommon for the long-winded prose of the Argentine canon, is disquieting and moving.”

XXXToday is Thursday and on Thursdays we have lunch together.
XXXWe talk a lot—or a lot for us. Neither of us is a person others consider talkative.
XXXSometimes we even have lunch in silence. A comfortable silence, light, like the air it’s
made of, and which best expresses the flavor of what we’re eating.
XXXOther times, when we do talk, the words form little mounds that slowly become
mountains. Between one and the next we leave long silences: valleys in which we think as if we were walking through them.
XXXWe choose a restaurant in an old house in San Telmo. It has a patio in the center, a square with its own sky, always different clouds.
XXXThe conversation with my father moves at a relaxed pace.
XXXSuddenly, in the middle of a phrase, he says, “…to wash rice…” and joins his hands, making a ring with his fingers, and moves them as if he were hitting something against the edge of the table.
XXXWhat happens suddenly isn’t him saying these words but me realizing I don’t know how rice is cleaned. What happens suddenly is me realizing I know many things like this from him, without knowing them, only intuiting them.
XXXI know that my father must be holding a bunch of something in his hands that I don’t see. I search my memory for the fields of rice that I saw in Japan, and I imagine that the bunch must be that type of green reeds.
XXXI clumsily deduce that the rice must be adhering to the plants and by shaking it, it should fall. Like tiny fruits or seeds.
XXXSeeing my father’s gestures I can get to the past, to Japan, or to my father’s history, which is mine. Like the impressionists, without looking for the details but rather the light, like I am familiar with the trees on the path to my house, not knowing their names, but without being able to imagine my house without them.
XXXThis is how I talk with my father: safely but blindly.
XXXHe says, for example, that this country is “just 200 years old,” “an infant country,” he says, and next to the infant I see an old Japan, with hands whose skin covers and reveals the shape of its bones.
XXXIf he holds his head when he says that they used to run through fields of tea, I know that planes pass through the sky that I don’t see and that drop bombs.
XXXWe look at the menu and choose plates that we will share. My father never got used to eating just one dish. It was my mother who adjusted to preparing various dishes for meals.
XXXLater we talk about books. He is reading Mozart, by Kolb, and carries it with him wherever he goes. My father always carries a book and a dictionary with him.
XXXFor me, who was born and raised in Argentina, I can’t be bothered to look up words in a dictionary. But not him. My Japanese father’s Spanish is vaster and more correct than mine.
XXXHe tells me that he went to get some tests that the doctor ordered and while he waited, he read a few pages.
XXX“What tests?” I ask him. “A biopsy,” he responds.
XXXI’m worried. I feel what is lurking, and a certainty like knowing night will fall each day, a type of vertigo. Everything I hadn’t asked over the years comes back to me. Every question comes and brings others. I want to know why my father chose this country, this infant country. I want to know what it was like the day he learned the war had started, what every one of the days that followed was like until the day he got to this land. I want to know what his toys and his clothes were like, what it was like to go to school during the war, what the port of Buenos Aires was like in the 70s, if he wrote letters to my grandmother, what did they say. I want to know the colors, the words, the smell of foods, the houses he lived in. Once he told me that shortly after he had arrived, he didn’t get into the bathtub but instead washed himself beside it and only submerged himself in the water when he was clean because that is how they do it in Japan. Like that, I want him to tell me more. Much more. Everything. I want him to tell me about every day, so no time is wasted. Maybe to write it: leave it to take root with ink on paper forever. Where to start? Where do the questions start? Which is the first?
XXXI look inside, as if I were lost running in this valley of silence that had suddenly opened between words. To lose yourself in a place so vast seems like a prison.
XXXWhen I stop looking, I see the question before me as if it had been waiting for me. I look at my father and ask my question.
XXXHe smiles, takes a paper from between the pages of his book and a black pen out of the pocket of the cardigan he is wearing. He draws lines very close together, some parallel and others that cross. Then another, perpendicular and wavy, that cuts through them close to one end. They are the rice plants in water. Then he makes some very small circles at the ends: the grains. He tells me that they fill up and retraces the lines but instead of straight, they’re curvy at the ends: the plants when the rice matures. “The fuller one is, the more cultivated it is, the humbler,” he says. “One bows like the rice plant under the weight of the grains.” Then he reaches out his hands and his arms and moves them in parallel to the floor. “They would lay big cloths over the field,” he says. I imagine them white, barely rippling, like water moves when it’s calm.
XXXHe goes back to holding his hands as if he were holding a bundle and shakes it like before, against the edge of the table. Now I see it clearly, I can almost touch, the grains of rice that fall away.

READ MORE…