Translation

Playing Chicken

January 14, 2026 Fiction, Translation

Translated from the Spanish by SARAH THOMAS

Translator’s Note:

In the two decades that I have known Mar Gómez Glez, she has established herself as one of the most memorable and unique voices of her generation of Spanish writers. Mar’s output is impressive in its creativity, complexity, and the diversity of its genres and subjects: three novels, more than twice as many plays, a children’s book, and two non-fiction books (a study of Saint Teresa of Ávila and a cultural history of blood). These works treat a wide variety of topics ranging from pressing political themes to the deeply personal autobiographical content of her novel in vignettes La edad ganada, from which this text is drawn. What all her work shares in common is a deep ethical concern with human experience, the connections forged and broken between us, and our responsibility to others.

Among these diverse works, La edad ganada is one of the most experimental and personal. It brings fresh form to the bildungsroman: standalone chapters offer snapshots of an unnamed protagonist’s coming of age from two to thirty, their sequential numeric titles indicating her age (in the original, this text is titled “veinticuatro” or “twenty-four”). Across the stories, the narrative point of view constantly shifts, at times in daring or surprising ways, but the protagonist’s experience and voice remain at the center of the text. While deeply personal, the work also speaks to deeper ethical and relational imperatives. This chapter, which I have called “Playing Chicken” in the translation, is rooted in cultural specificity—the bureaucracy of Spanish universities, the classic winter stew cocido madrileño—but also explores a story that is all too familiar and universal: of power imbalance, the unspoken expectations articulated just below the surface of what is explicitly said, and the potentially devastating consequences of playing along.

—Sarah Thomas

Playing Chicken

They had arranged to meet in the park at 2 pm sharp. The student arrived at quarter to, and sat on a bench, watching the children play to entertain herself. The air was strangely cold, a springtime chill that came and went.

Raid on the Roma Camp

December 11, 2025 Fiction, Translation

By THEODORA BAUER
Translated by AARON CARPENTER

Piece appears below in English and the original German

Translator Note

Theodora Bauer’s novel Chikago (2017) follows two sisters from the Croatian minority in Burgenland, Austria. In this stand-alone chapter we learn that the family was ostracized from the small community in one of the poorest, but also most ethnically diverse regions in Austria. Burgenland was part of Hungary while under Hapsburg rule and is still home to Hungarian and Croatian minorities. This chapter begins with an idyllic trip that the father and his youngest daughter take to the village to do some business. When they hear a group of drunken townspeople plan on raiding the Roma camp just outside of town, where the father’s smithy is, they race back home to warn them.

Two Poems by Ahmed Bouanani, translated by Lisa Mullenneaux

November 6, 2025 Poetry, Translation

By AHMED BOUANANI

Translated by LISA MULLENNEAUX

Portrait of person smiling and holding up their hand. Turned to the right.

Photo courtesy of Archives Bouanani

This country

My country is this horizon with blank pages
where I see skeletons of broken children
wandering, begging for the light of thin wisps
of stories that might finally appease them

In hands the color of amaranth magic
they hold hippogriffs like dogs
a talisman to protect themselves from the lover
with hair braided into black shapes

Vermeer

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry, Translation

By ALBERTO DE LACERDA
Translated by MARIA DE CALDAS ANTÃO

The Common Magazine · “Vermeer” by Alberto de Lacerda

To John McEwan

The architecture of the sleeves—
White—
As she composes her response
To a letter
(On the marble floor
The seal
Jumps
From the crumpled letter)

Moisei Fishbein: Poems from Ukraine

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry, Translation, Ukraine Portfolio

By MOISEI FISHBEIN
Translated by JOHN HENNESSY and OSTAP KIN

Kol Nidre

And damp dust between stars will vanish,
and nothing will ever move or shine,
and as you look up at the sky at midday
the slanted rays will cross your sight.

Death of a Hero (The Mosquito)

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry, Translation, Ukraine Portfolio

By VIKTOR NEBORAK
Translated by JOHN HENNESSY and OSTAP KIN

The rusty hollows inside the old mosquito
reduce his soprano to dust. Down the pipe
of his fragile beak, the pumps are already weak.
And his blood flows through fossilized riverbeds.

His gas tanks empty, song silenced, not a drop
of compassion in him… Running on coal fumes,
the rusted engines deliver him to drill
one last buzz through the ears of the crowd.

A kamikaze who would have dropped heavenly tons
on these civilians as on military echelons
and then been posthumously awarded

the highest orders! his name on honor lists!
banners! trumpets! salutes! obelisks!
… if my slap hadn’t smashed him dead.

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

Viktor Neborak is a poet, writer, literary scholar, and critic. He is also a founding member (along with Yuri Andrukhovych and Oleksandr Irvanets) of the Bu-Ba-Bu literary performance group. His collection The Flying Head and Other Poems appeared in English translation in 2005.

John Hennessy’s most recent books are Exit Garden State, a collection of poems, and Set Change, selected poems by Yuri Andrukhovych co-translated with Ostap Kin.

Ostap Kin is the editor of Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond and New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City. With John Hennessy, he translated Set Change by Yuri Andrukhovych, and A New Orthography by Serhiy Zhadan.

Anna Malihon: Poems from Ukraine

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry, Translation, Ukraine Portfolio

By ANNA MALIHON
Translated by OLENA JENNINGS

YLANG-YLANG

in the thick halo of insects, the lamp resembles
a mature dandelion
the girl as pale as bandages incessantly conjures spells
I can’t make out the words
I am still there where there is roaring and how…
…ling
unbridled nature has undone me thoroughly
I lay like a stunned fish in the lord’s hand
and a thought about water fills a warm sea
bordering the land’s illuminated wounds
that the worms, animals and feathered messengers
visited while searching for sustenance
and instead of my arm a bamboo shoot hangs out
gathering strength
and in my hand someone has placed
the globe of this complicated world
exhaling: live
I don’t have enough strength to close my eyes in shame
or scream get away from me, I’m alone
alone I’m alone, give me back my hand
how now to overcome the grand piano’s mouth of silence
and toss a baby up to the sun
the bamboo will only be good for a flute
but I lack enough breath even for that
a tall girl with a gaze like the Mother of God
murmurs seeds of words upon the tiles
the mocking moon peeks through a hole burnt
in the tulle: time to go
and now in the cottony silence, a yellow
melody of resurrection pushes its way through
like a ylang-ylang flower
and a damaged airplane like a lost petal
returns to the sky
and the little boy with my hands embroiders the collected sounds
I exhale so loudly that the dandelion’s
circle of insects dissipates
dawn…

[IT FELT LIKE BLOOD]

It felt like blood
on the floor of the subway car,
like sticky patterns of footprints—my new identity…

It felt like someone had turned me into
a bucket of strawberries,
and forgotten about it…
And the platform like a safe haven
and the—red beginnings of love—
between heart and throat.

I woke up as if no one was shooting,
only boys wander in
one stands nearby with a pistol,
and—bang-bang!—into the void…

But suddenly not just a crater—
But a black pit in the chest.
And tiny red droplets.

I am eating one strawberry—for the sick brother,
another, smaller one—for the son,
I am eating the slightly crushed one for him
who crushed my heart over the years.
And the last one—the biggest, the shiniest—
for my father who was never a father to me.

Put down your toy death.
Go, return the sun’s face
to the longest night for me.
Here are peonies and June,
and soldiers tightly standing.
And never,
never will anyone leave you again…

[THE POEMS BETWEEN US GREW SHORTER]

The poems between us grew shorter
until everything unwound into a single letter
with a period
which you turned on its head
because you liked exclamatory endings…
Finally, everything went quiet.
I became still as a white shell in the Paleozoic era.
I wish I hadn’t written words, biting my lip.
I wish I hadn’t written on the water with my fingertips.
I wish I hadn’t turned circles into a delicate zero…
You destroyed my Universe, flipped, abandoned
Forgot the address
Forgot the lanterns with flames in the window
Only letters
gnaw at memory
like mice gnaw at last year’s feed sack.
Short poems come with freedom for the blind.
Long poems come with a cage for those with sight.

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

Anna Malihon is an award-winning Ukrainian poet and the author of six books of poetry and a novel. Her work has been published in numerous Ukrainian literary journals and translated into Bulgarian, Polish, Czech, Georgian, Armenian, and French. In 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion forced her to leave Ukraine. She lives in Paris, France.

Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collection The Age of Secrets, the chapbook Memory Project, and the novel Temporary Shelter. She is a translator of collections by Ukrainian poets Kateryna Kalytko (co-translated with Oksana Lutsyshyna), Iryna Shuvalova, Vasyl Makhno, Yuliya Musakovska, and Anna Malihon. She lives in Queens, New York.

The Universal Set

October 27, 2025 Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry, Translation

By PEDRO POITEVIN
Translated by PHILIP NIKOLAYEV

I am myself a member of myself
and every time I search within I find
another me, mysteriously aligned,
and in that replica wherein I delve

there dwells another, and another yet,
ellipsis dots: a mammoth nesting doll
that both contains itself, containing all,
and self-inhabits, the set of all sets.

I am the madness of the grand design,
I am the limit of where reason goes,
I am the science behind metascience.

The endless universe of sets is mine,
and this includes the cheeky set of those
denying my existence in defiance.

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

Pedro Poitevin, a bilingual poet, translator, and mathematician originally from Guatemala, is the author of six books of poetry. His work has appeared in Rattle, River Styx, The Mathematical Intelligencer, and Nimrod, among other publications. In 2022, he received the Juana Goergen Poetry Prize, and in 2025, the Premio Internacional de Literatura Palindrómica Rever.

Philip Nikolayev is a poet living in Boston, raised in Moldova. He translates poetry from French, Romanian, Ukrainian, Hindi, Urdu, and Sanskrit. His collections include Monkey Time and Letters from Aldenderry. His collection of poems in Spanish translation by Willy Ramírez and Pedro Poitevin, Un poeta desde el balcón, has been published in Latin America.

Some Kind of Corporate Retreat

October 14, 2025 Fiction, Translation

By TERAO TETSUYA
Translated by KEVIN WANG

The piece appears below in both English and the original Chinese.

Translator’s Note

“Some Kind of Corporate Retreat” is collected in Terao Tetsuya’s Spent Bullets (HarperVia, 2025), a book of nine linked short stories about Taiwanese prodigies turned disillusioned Big Tech engineers. In official American narratives, immigrant experiences often become flattened into palatable arcs of resilience. But this story insists on being wounded, unresolved, and playfully deviant in its exploration of hollow relationships and a simmering desire for destruction.

Knives, Tongues

October 2, 2025 Fiction, Translation

By SIMONÉ GOLDSCHMIDT-LECHNER

Translated from the German by MELODY MAKEDA LEDWON

Translator’s Note

“I need you to translate my book. You’re the person I would ask,” Simoné said to me as we sat on a panel about intersectionality and translation at the Translationale Berlin in the winter of 2023. We laughed briefly at how she had managed to weave this translation proposal into her response to a question about challenges in the German translation industry. Honored, intrigued, a bit nervous, I accepted.

Messer, Zungen, written primarily in German, explores how the erasure of Black people and people of color from the culture of remembrance within the Cape Coloured community in South Africa, also known as Camissa, is intimately tied to their displacement from ancestral lands and historic communal sites. Resisting racial violence, reclaiming memory, history and language therefore involves both returning to lost places and being resilient in hostile spaces. I found the role of language in this context particularly fascinating. The characters speak, remember, and experience their worlds in multiple languages, including Sesotho, English and Afrikaans, creating a mosaic of languages. In my initial draft of “Choir” and “Motherness,” I focused on how to recreate this rich tapestry of language in translation. As I began to revise, and consult with SGL and several colleagues, I concluded that it was most important to respect the characters’ language choices. Above all, I sought to capture the commonplace reality of multilingual worlds and communities. SGL adeptly portrays these realities in her novel without explaining them or making them more palatable to an imagined external audience. In contrast to the original, where passages written in English stand out, in the translation they seamlessly blend into the main language of the text, resulting in a new language mosaic.

—Melody Makeda Ledwon