Fiction | The Common

All posts tagged: Fiction

Knives, Tongues

October 2, 2025 Fiction, Translation

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

Raspberries

September 17, 2025 Fiction

By PHOEBE HYDE

The family are in the kitchen waiting to eat as the enemy soldiers approach the house. It’s already dark, and the man and child are restless at the table, waiting for the woman to pronounce the eggs set. She’s an excellent and exacting cook who will not be rushed. As the soldiers step onto the porch outside, the grandmother distracts the child with a joke: what did the rooster say to the wolf? and in the pause before the punchline, the first knock on the door falls—boom—and explodes—boomboomboomboom!

River Landscape

September 4, 2025 Fiction, Translation

By DANIELA ALCÍVAR BELLOLIO

Translated from the Spanish by JACK ROCKWELL

Piece appears below in English and the original Spanish.

Translator’s Note

Translating several of Bellolio’s stories, but especially this one, I’ve found that the hardest part has been the beginning. By the time the text hits its stride, somewhere in the second or third pages, it has swept me along with it, and it feels almost effortless—nearly as much so as Bellolio’s painstaking craft makes her own writing seem—to bob and weave with her sentences, to bunch up and then uncoil with the tense spools of her thought. But once I wrap back around to the beginning, I read the first few sentences I’ve translated and am shocked to find what feels like a jerky, uneven mess.

Bellolio rigorously calibrates the motions of her prose, and the elegance of her language applies some serious heft to the felt necessity of her narrator’s thought. This thought, and the careful patterning that structures it, are absolutely essential to this digressive, contemplative story. In the first long paragraph of “River Landscape,” a compassionate investigation of the interior life of a murderer fleeing his crime, a series of repetitions in the text mimics the destructive return of his victim’s face to his mind’s eye. While these repetitions spread out as the story progresses, in the beginning they are stacked thickly on top of one another. Finding the right rock and sway to carry the reader through this dense opening passage took some obsessive tinkering. I’m still not completely satisfied with it, but it’ll have to do for now. There was much going back and forth between alternatives, and much friendly (and incredibly patient) advice given by friends and colleagues, such as Jan Steyn, Emily Graham, Miharu Yano, and Dabin Jeong. I’m very grateful to all of them, and especially to Dabin, who introduced me to Bellolio’s work.

—Jack Rockwell

For A Secret Grievance…

August 7, 2025 Fiction, Translation

By EMILIA PARDO BAZÁN
Translated from the Spanish by ALANI HICKS-BARTLETT

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

Translator’s Note

Emilia Pardo Bazán’s short story “A secreto agravio…,” which I have translated here as “For A Secret Grievance…,” emerges, in part, from Pardo Bazán’s vibrant and perspicacious reimagining of another important work: “A secreto agravio, secreta venganza” [“For a Secret Grievance, a Secret Vengeance”], an Early Modern play written by the Spanish playwright and priest, Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681), and printed in 1637. Calderón’s tragedy, one of an unfortunate “trilogy” of wife-murder plays he authored featuring a fatal confluence of jealousy, suspicion, and problems of fidelity that led to the wife’s unjustifiable death, was hugely popular on the premodern stage while also being in dialogue with a wider genre of plays featuring uxoricide and conflicts of honor and faith (we might think of “Othello,” for example).

Patricia

July 8, 2025 Fiction

By ISSA QUINCY

This piece is excerpted from Absence, out now from Granta (UK), and forthcoming from Two Dollar Radio (US) on July 15, 2025.

In the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, there is a painting by Hendrick Avercamp, the mute of Kampen, hung on a deadening grey felt and squeezed in amid other Dutch masters. One’s initial glance at the painting will see it reveal little more than a benign winter scene. However, when you look at Avercamp’s painting closely you begin to notice the close detailing of the variance of life. There in the painting exists death, pleasure, ecstasy, frivolity, poverty and secrecy, closely exacted alongside other states of being and non-being all perceived by Avercamp from a heightened position, a vantage point for an incorporeal observer; a drifting onlooker that watches and takes in the immediate while the rest of the yellow-grey land and sky disperse outwards into misty incomprehensibility. What is presented is the sight of the intangible spectator that sees what is in front of him, recognizes everything and curtails his judgement of anything.

The Swan

July 3, 2025 Fiction, Translation

By MARZIA GRILLO

Translated by LOURDES CONTRERAS AND JULIA PELOSI-THORPE

Piece appears below in English and the original Italian.

Co-translating Marzia Grillo’s captivating short fiction “The Swan” (“Il cigno”) into English from Italian was an experimental process in which drafts ricocheted between the two of us over many months. This is in some ways typical for our collaboration… but, as we transform each piece, our approach morphs in fun directions, contingent on the fabric of our lives in a given moment. With “The Swan,” Julia fell in love with Grillo’s debut short story collection, The Sun’s Point of View (Il punto di vista del sole) in a Venetian bookstore and mocked up first and second versions on several high-velocity Italian trains in early 2022. Then, the project lapsed. Later that year, she and Lourdes met, were enchanted by one another, decided to co-translate, and Lourdes revived Julia’s draft. “The Swan” takes the reader into the middle of a lake in Lazio one afternoon, where, on a pedalo, a man proposes marriage for the nineteenth time to his unwilling girlfriend. The story is the first of the thirteen works of creative autofiction that make up the loving, disturbing world of The Sun’s Point of View. In a nexus of scenes across Grillo’s Rome, her immersive prose vivifies tormented characters who are moved deeply to desire (and destroy) themselves and others. As real and imagined figures fight for secure understandings of a reality that is suffused by a constant fog of instability, we the translators relish the challenge to locate in English what we can of the dark sparkle of Grillo’s dialogue, twisted narrative arcs, the emotional impetus of their intrigues, and their web of thematic resonances.

— Lourdes Contreras and Julia Pelosi-Thorpe

Crafts Like the Old Country

May 14, 2025 Fiction

By NINA SEMCZUK

That morning Irina Pychenko found herself in the ditch, again. It was the fourth time in a month.

“Third time this week I’ve found someone right here,” said the gentleman outside of her window, who was hooking a chain to the tow hitch under the back bumper. She had barely finished mashing her grill into the snow when he’d pulled over. “You wouldn’t believe how many people haven’t got their snow tires on yet.” His words made white puffs in the air, holding his speech like cartoon captions. “You neither,” he said, kicking her half bald Buick tires.

The Elephant’s Child

May 5, 2025 Audio, Fiction, Issue 29, Issue 29 Fiction

By PRIA ANAND

The Common Magazine · “The Elephant’s Child” by Pria Anand

The elephant-headed boy was born with the head of a boy.

“I had been expecting you for years,” his mother told him. “By the time you were born, you could practically walk.”

Target Island

May 5, 2025 Fiction, Issue 29, Issue 29 Fiction

By MARIAH RIGG

Fifty-eight years before Harrison’s granddaughter is born, the U.S. government drops a two-thousand-pound bomb on the island of Kaho‘olawe. It is 1948. On Maui, the shock from the bomb is so strong that it shatters the glass of the living room window, and Harrison, a baby still in his crib, starts wailing in time with the family mutt.

Midweek

May 5, 2025 Fiction, Issue 29, Issue 29 Fiction

By BILL COTTER

“I knew this guy once, called Andre,” Gary said, striking a strike-anywhere match on the zipper of his fly. He lit a Salem and buried the match in a clay flowerpot at his end of his porch step. He looked at me, not for permission to continue, but as though he were inviting me to dare him not to.

“Andre,” I said, kind of liking the feel of the name on my teeth.