Translation

Remembrances

October 21, 2024 Catalan Portfolio, Fiction, Issue 28, Issue 28 Fiction, Translation

By ANTÒNIA VICENS
Translated by MARY ANN NEWMAN

Palma, 1978

One day he came, handed me a little box, and said look, look inside. Oh God, what a husband, I was afraid maybe he was losing it, another day it had been look, open this package, and there were more than half a dozen bras with ruffles. I opened the little box and was practically blinded by a stone brighter than the sun. No explanation, nothing, business is coming along, he said. And at night, here we go, trying for an heir, but that wasn’t coming along at all.

Translation: Two Poems by Edith Bruck

October 10, 2024 Poetry, Translation

By EDITH BRUCK

Translated by JEANNE BONNER

Poems appear below in English and the original Italian.

Translator’s Note

What I find indelible about Edith Bruck’s work is the subtle ways she introduces the topic of the Holocaust. A poem like “Pretty Soon” provides a glimpse of the author’s mindset – she managed to survive Auschwitz, and she hasn’t wasted a moment since her liberation as a teenager. She’s been incredibly prolific as a writer, and has traveled the world. But winning her freedom is an event forever married to the worst event ever: losing both of her parents in concentration camps. The challenge is to render that subtlety, which in the original is effortless. This is her life – it’s what she’s always known.

This thematic back and forth is also present in “There Were Eight of Us.” There were eight of us – but not anymore. One brother was swallowed up by the Holocaust, to use a phrase Bruck often employs in other work.

Missile Sequence

September 5, 2024 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Translation

By MOHAMMAD IBRAHIM NAWAYA

Translated by KATHARINE HALLS

Piece appears below in English and the original Arabic.

Missile One

A straw basket hangs from the side of a vehicle parked at the corner of your street. You assume it’s displaying fresh parsley, or strawberries, and you approach the man you assume is the vendor. His eyes repel you like blazing heat as he trains his Kalashnikov on you; you falter, want to explain why you have come toward him, you look at the basket and are stunned to see that it contains RPG missiles, arrayed with delightful geometry, and now you need to apologise to him for your inquisitive staring otherwise he’s going to empty that rifle into your head. But it’s pointless attempting to do anything because you’re rooted to the spot, which is what always happens when you’re scared, so you take hold of your eyes with your hands and scrape out the pupils with your thumbs, then hand them to him with an I’m sorry, because it’s the pupils specifically that have got you tangled up with him. He looks at you and swiftly loads his launcher ready to fire it at you. You dodge right and left, crashing into the walls around you, you duck into buildings one after another, and then you find yourself in your own quiet home, your wife beside you laying the lunch, and there in the centre of the magnificent dish of rice is a home-cooked RPG grenade.

The Visual Poetry of Anzhelina Polonskaya

August 1, 2024 Poetry, Translation

By ANZHELINA POLONSKAYA
Translated from the Russian by ANDREW WACHTEL

Poems appear below in English and the original Russian.

Translator’s note

Anzhelina Polonskaya frequently writes poems inspired by visual artists. These are not, however, ekphrastic renderings of an image in words, but rather a snapshot of the emotions that a given painter’s work evokes. In the poem “After Breughel,” published here, we need to ask, what precisely makes the text Breughelesque? To me, it is the anthropomorphized image of snow, with its dead white eyes in the first stanza, contrasted with the scarlet color (of blood, hell, the burning bush). This unsettling juxtaposition creates the Breughelesque landscape which has destroyed the artist, as in the painting Dulle Griet from 1563. But Polonskaya provides her picture without the scaffolding of a narrative, and, as far as the translator’s job goes, I needed to avoid explaining the poem, rather allowing the translation to be as allusive and mysterious as the original.

—Andrew Wachtel

After Breughel

Snow, listen up. Your eyes are dead.
We know full well we’re being led
like hostages of universal blindness.
Who are we, then? Unknown and homeless.

Translation: to and back

July 3, 2024 Poetry, Translation

By HALYNA KRUK
Translated by LADA KOLOMIYETS

Poem appears below in English and the original Ukranian.

Translator’s note

Since February 2022, the metaphorics of Halyna Kruk’s poetry have undergone transformation on the way to nearing the genre of testimony. Kruk explains in her speech at the poetry festival in Berlin in June 2022 that metaphors have lost their power in front of what is actually experienced (Kruk, Halyna. “Krieg ist keine Metapher.” Zeit Online, June 18, 2022). The voice of the diarist of wartime has become the most important feature of literary expression. In her Berlin speech—just as in the poem to and back, written in spring 2022—Kruk warns the prosperous western world against erecting an emotional wall between Ukraine and itself. While addressing the Western audience, she tries to explain a painful feeling of irreparable loss—in our souls, in our culture, science, economy, industry, society —of men and women, someone’s parents, someone’s children, who were killed by Russia: “War creates a gap between those who have experienced it and those who are far from it; with each passing day of the war, I see that it is more and more difficult to explain to people from the outside what we feel here, on the inside. … Poetry acquires very peculiar forms—a spontaneous prayer, a stingy testimony, a lament or even a curse to the enemy. These are not the forms of poetry to which modern European culture is accustomed, they are functional and ritualistic, too primeval in their emotional coloring, too subjective, too pathetic, and intolerant” (Kruk, “Krieg ist keine Metapher”; my translation).

In her poem to and back Kruk writes about the unfitting of war in the eyes of Western world, even if the words for war may be found by survivors and those who have experienced it. Incompatibility of war and peace, of poetry and war calls for the memory to work in place of creativity. The healing power of poetry—as a witness of war crimes in Ukraine—is encoded in Kruk’s poems, written in the spring and summer of 2022.

—Lada Kolomiyets

Nadryw | Feeling Language

June 11, 2024 Essays, Translation

By JONË ZHITIA
Translated from the German by LEANNE LOCKWOOD CVETAN

Piece appears below in English and the original German.

Translator’s note:

This essay, presented here in its entirety, won the 2022 Wortmeldung prize awarded by the Crespo Foundation, and, to me, is the thousand words expressed by the picture of the immigrant soul. The submission theme was: “Ships at anchor, cars in parking lots, but I am the one who has no home. How can flight, exile, and homelessness be put into words?”

The Fish Market

May 2, 2024 Fiction, Translation

By ESTHER KARIN MNGODO
Translated from the Swahili by JAY BOSS RUBIN

Piece appears below in English and the original Swahili.

Translator’s Note

I was drawn to “Soko la Samaki” by its rich variety of registers, and by its use of the second-person point of view, which in my experience is not so common in Swahili literature. I was also taken by the story’s close attention to class and gender dynamics, and the role of language, indeed languages, in interactions between men and women of different backgrounds and social standings. In my initial draft, I retained quite a bit of Swahili. As I began to revise, in consultation with both colleagues and the author, I was encouraged to seek out English that corresponds to not just Swahili meanings but Swahili cadences, especially when they play a role in one character trying to convince or gain entry into the world of another. The version here contains less Swahili than my earlier drafts, but the Swahili that is retained is more intentional. Of the handful of authors whose work I have been so fortunate to translate, my author-translator relationship with Esther Karin Mngodo has been, by far, the most interactive. In addition to drawing my attention to rhythm, Esther helped me comprehend some of the story’s slang and proverbial language, and she offered invaluable feedback and suggestions on how to render specific moments in English. Going back and forth in our comments in the margins of a shared doc, often when it was morning for me and evening for her, I felt like I was getting to collaborate with an author, editor, and fellow translator all at once. For that, and for the story itself, I am enormously grateful.

—Jay Boss Rubin

Symphony of the South

April 22, 2024 Arabic Fiction, Audio, Fiction, Issue 27, Issue 27 Fiction, Translation

By TAHIR ANNOUR
Translated by MAYADA IBRAHIM

The Common Magazine · "Symphony Of The South" by Tahir Annour, Translated by Mayada Ibrahim

Dew
Uncle Musa died. A year after his passing, my father headed north. He said he would be back in a month.

It all happened so fast I barely caught it, like a migratory bird resting in a dark corner of the forest, like all the things that crowd my memory. No sooner do they appear than they vanish. When I try to recall the details, to understand what happened, none of it makes sense. Time lures the mind into letting go, submitting to the abyss, but I know the mind is capable of reaching into the well of the past. All these memories, from time to time they pierce through the pitch-black darkness. They gleam and fade into the shadows of this exile, of this rotten world.

On one of the shadowy days before his departure, I accompanied my father to the farm. It was the afternoon. Our farm was just outside the village. People were drying their earthenware in the sun: cups, bowls, pots, censers, jars. Children ran around them and erected little churches. They waded deep into the mud, sinking their hands in as if into spilled blood—the blood of an offering, perhaps—smearing their faces and tossing it at one another. They yelled and called each other names. Their clothes were the color of rust, their faces crocodile-like.

The Day Azrael Committed Suicide

April 22, 2024 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 27, Issue 27 Fiction, Translation

By ARTHUR GABRIEL YAK

Translated by SAWAD HUSSAIN

Note: The following story contains graphic language related to war and sexual violence.

News of the clashes poured into the Gudele district police station from everywhere, not least from the general headquarters of the People’s Army, conveyed by the intermittent, staccato rattling of Kalashnikovs and DShK heavy machine guns, and the roar of tanks that left gutter-deep tread marks on the main roads in their wake. Thick, dark columns of smoke soared skyward from the city of Juba, visible from a distance to Colonel Franco just as he was ending his call with his sister Christina, who told him of how their youngest sister, Rebecca Majok Majak, the doctor working in Bentiu hospital, wife to a Nuer tribesman, was at risk.

Morning Light

April 22, 2024 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 27, Issue 27 Fiction, Translation

By JEMAL HUMED
Translated by ADDIE LEAK

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

For the fighter Taha Mohammed Nur [1]

The hallway is cold and disquieting, lined with austere doors marked with consecutive numbers, giving no indication of their occupants.

The corridor is never-ending, leading to a room at its end whose grand entryway, formidable and rigid, seems to surveil the movement of the other doors.

He stood in front of it and straightened his service uniform. He took deep breaths, as if to expel the fear that had accumulated between his ribs on this particular morning inside the prison.