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Forever Red

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

By TINA VALLÈS
Translated by SAMANTHA MATEO

Whenever there’s any discussion of the hunger that marked the years following the Spanish Civil War, I’m reminded of the story about my paternal great-grandmother and the apple. My father says her name, halting at that g that separated her from all the other Annas. Maria Agna. No family dinner passed without mention of that apple. But, after so many years, I can’t quite remember if it’s an apple or a peach. My father always said the basket his grandmother carried back from the field emitted a potent scent, but I don’t think apples smell strongly enough that you could pick them out while driving in a truck a couple of meters away.

The Window

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

By IMMA MONSÓ
Translated by MARLENA GITTLEMAN

Lisa

Morning after morning, Lisa would wake up with an easily achievable aspiration: to eat breakfast while contemplating the house at the bottom of the valley, which stood in the distance amidst the fog. When the fog started to fade, she could make out frost-covered shingles and smoke rising from the chimney. She could glimpse the narrow ribbon of water that divided the field behind the house, until it disappeared into the darkness of the impenetrable forest. And she could, above all, train her gaze on a hypnotizing point: the only lit window, the window of an attic room, a room Lisa guessed was a study.

Zoraida Burgos: Poems

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

By ZORAIDA BURGOS
Translated by PETER BUSH

OUR VERY OWN EQUILIBRIUM
Wearily, but firmly, we twisted
our feeble trunks
around a stump
alone but not sad amid other trees,
entangled roots
clinging till the last
to our rough stony ground.
We grow two shoots
bringing hope to our landscape
when a ruddy wing on the bare
mountain horizon
heralds a threatening wind downstream.
Thoughtfully, carefully,
we’ve been turning our mud,
our clay, bare-fingered,
with the strength of truth,
of harsh truth dead reborn,
our hands tightly clasped.
And nothing, no wind, no clouds, no rain, no threats
will shake
the stump, clay or mud, and these shoots,
for wearily,
but firmly,
we’ve made them our own.

Maria Josep Escrivà: Poems

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

By MARIA JOSEP ESCRIVÀ
Translated by PETER BUSH

Who

Who has ever felt the shock of a brook
being sucked dry by the warm earth?

Who has ever felt the shock of the last
house falling apart in the mountains, mineral
corpse, stone by stone, bone by bone
of each man banished?

Tramsa, Tromsa, Tramso

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

By MÒNICA BATET
Translated by MARIALENA CARR and JULIA SANCHES

Sometimes this is my story, others it’s not. They used to bring it up at home whenever the room fell silent. They’d talk about her, about a city with a strange name, Sokołowsko. They’d talk about that evening.

There are still pages and pages with tracings of her hands sitting in a drawer. Some are just of hands, while others have words written on the palms or along the fingers. Run away, Get out, Air air, Disappear…. Now and then I place my hand in one of the outlines to see if we have this one thing in common. If, maybe, I too will see all those people someday.

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