By VINOD KUMAR SHUKLA
Translated from Hindi by ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA
Table of Contents:
By MANISHA KULSHRESHTHA
Translated by CHINMAY RASTOGI
Piece appears below in both English and the original Hindi.
Translator’s Note
Hindi is comprised of words from a variety of regional languages of India and has various dialects. The way people speak it changes almost every hundred kilometers, with the language taking on a new garb and flavor, just like the clothes and food of the people who speak it. What delighted me about this story was the place it is set in and the dialect of the characters. It’s not common to come across literature set in the remote areas of Rajasthan, full of Marwari words (the primary language of the people of the state). As someone who spent most of his life in this state, I was even more invested to present the dialect, life, and customs of the communities.
Translated from the German by STEVEN CRAMER
Translator’s Note:
“Night Drive” is from Departures from Rilke (Arrowsmith Press, 2023), poems that repurpose, update, or upend lyrics from Rainer Maria Rilke’s New Poems (1907/08), often leaving Rilke’s premises almost altogether.
— Steven Cramer
By GEET CHATURVEDI
Translated by ANITA GOPALAN
Piece appears below in both English and the original Hindi.
Translator’s Note
There is an inherent quiet music and a brokenness in the story “Sindhu Library” excerpted from Geet Chaturvedi’s fiction Simsim. In its simple external reality, the story thinks with images and situations. There is a delicate textuality in the characterizations that take shape in a kind of leisureliness, be it the old man sitting among tattered books in his library or the balloon woman appearing at the start and end of the story, which is very poetic. I have translated the author’s pauses whenever I could, building a balance between language and sensation, between rhythm and vacuum.
By ALONDRA AGUILAR RANGEL
Translated by JENNIFER ACKER
Piece appears below in both English and Spanish.
There are people who express with songs what they can’t express with their own words. My grandfather is one of these people.
Papá José, as we grandchildren call him, is a reserved man, but he has a unique way of talking about his life and expressing his feelings. His hair is now covered in white and his face in lines. He usually wears a pair of gray pants, a flannel shirt, his old sandals and his light brown sombrero. He’s a working man of the countryside.
I visit him only once a year. Like many people from my country, I go to Mexico every December to spend Christmas and New Year’s with my family. It has been twelve years since I left home, the house where I grew up, the dirt streets and brick houses where I spent my childhood on the outskirts of Morelia, the capital of Michoacán. I went to elementary school there, then junior high school, until my family and I moved to the United States. So much time has passed since then. And now I have repeated the family history. Three years ago, I left my parents’ house in California to go study on the other side of the world. I can travel only once a year. The distance and time make me miss my family a lot. I question why we are constantly moving: Why do we keep looking for a better life somewhere else? This is why, for some time now, I have felt the need to talk more with Papá José, to know more about his life. I try to take advantage of every visit to talk to him and listen to his stories.
By AMAR MITRA
Translated by ANISH GUPTA
ONE
Ask Kartik. He will show you.
Ask Kartik how Hrithik Roshan, the film star, sings, how he walks, and Kartik, the neighbourhood tailor, will show you how he sings and how he walks.
Ask him to show you how superstar Shah Rukh Khan proposes to matinee queen Kajol, when and how he delivers those romantic dialogues, and Kartik’s imitation of Khan will make your jaw drop.
By JULIO PUENTE GARCÍA
Translated by JENNIFER ACKER, with thanks to Luis Herrera Bohórquez
Para Violante, en sus primeros meses
I met Jacinta in the migrant camp where we grew up. I remember that it was the beginning of June, a few days into the start of the harvest. At that time, Jacinta had lived for nine springs—she was two years younger than me—and for obvious reasons she still used her given last name, López del Campo. Those of us who saw her timidly climb the stairs and enter the last shack, which served as our classroom, with her butterfly notebook pressed to her chest and her gaze glued to her sun-toasted legs, never imagined that in less than ten years she’d be proclaimed the artistic heir to Joaquín Murrieta, a figure shrouded in dust but fondly remembered within the Mexican communities settled in the central lands of California.
Translated from the Spanish by MICHAEL BAZZETT
Humberto Ak’abal (1952-2019) is widely known in Guatemala. His book Guardián de la caída de agua received the Golden Quetzal award in 1993, and in 2004 he declined to receive the Guatemalan National Prize in Literature because it was named for Miguel Angel Asturias, whom Ak’abal accused of encouraging racism, noting that his views on eugenics and assimilation “offend the indigenous population of Guatemala, of which I am part.”
What does it mean then to meet Ak’abal in English? What does it mean to translate an indigenous writer who spurned institutional accolades from one dominant, oppressive language into another colonial tongue?
Poems by MILENA MARKOVIĆ, translated from the Serbian by STEVEN and MAJA TEREF.
Translators’ Note
As translators, we have multiple ways in which we interact as a translator couple. Oftentimes, we will sit side by side and take turns translating and transcribing as we work our way through a text. Sometimes though, one of us may translate a poem and later have the other check it. The poem “little lambs” is an example whereby Maja wrote out her translation in a notebook, which Steven later typed up and checked against the original. In the middle of the poem where “a band of clouds cross above my son,” Maja had followed the line with “while he squatted in the shallows,” yet Steven misread “shallows” as “shadows.”
Poems by JORDAN ESCOBAR, OSWALDO VARGAS, ARTURO CASTELLANOS JR., and MIGUEL M. MORALES.
This fall, half of The Common’s new issue will be dedicated to a portfolio of writing and art from the farmworker community: over a hundred pages filled with the stories, essays, poems, and artwork of immigrant agricultural workers. The portfolio, co-edited by Miguel M. Morales, highlights the work of twenty-seven contributors with roots in this community.
An online portfolio will also accompany the print issue, giving more space for these important perspectives. This feature is the first of several that will publish throughout the fall. Click the FARMWORKER tag at the bottom of the page to read more, as pieces are added.
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