By Lev Fridman There is this edge, where some of us recall childhood’s voices. –– There is an edge, Mama i Papa –– where we wake up in the car with a travel mug to recall a Country. ––No, not That Country of the Present slowly invading this one.–– […]
By Preea Leelah Every day, Charlesia walks to the ocean and fixedly gazes in the direction of her homeland, the island of Diego Garcia, the place she may never see again. Shenaz Patel’s novel Silence of the Chagos is the haunting, still unfolding story of the people of Diego Garcia, one of the 56 islands that form the Chagos Archipelago, situated in the Indian […]
By Alex Brostoff and Sherilyn Hellberg Alice sits in the shower. Alice examines the curtains of her cunt. Alice wonders. So starts Johanne Bille’s Elastic, a novel stretched taut over the contours of a body and gone slack with echoes of the unsaid. The Danish language may not use terms like “ethical non-monogamy,” but Alice […]
By Olivia Lott Room in Rome introduces English-language readers to the work of essential Peruvian poet Jorge Eduardo Eielson (Lima, 1924––Milan, 2006) through David Shook’s translation. A member of Peru’s “Generation of 1950,” Eielson is best known for his borderless aesthetic practice, which includes poetry, narrative, theater, visual arts, performances or “actions,” and syntheses that […]
By Elena Borelli Last Dream is a collection of translations from Giovanni Pascoli’s corpus of poetic works. The choice of poems reflects a personal preference on the part of the translator who handpicked a number of works mostly taken from what he interprets as the pastoral, almost Arcadian side of the Italian poet’s production: lyrics […]
By Alta Ifland The stories we enjoy as children and teenagers mark us in a much stronger way than those we read as adults, maybe because what we read when we are not yet fully formed informs us permanently. These stories are like braids that weave our emotional core, and because they are intertwined with […]
By Magdalena Kay Dorota Maslowska’s novel Honey, I Killed the Cats takes us on a fast-paced journey through psychological and physical space. Set in an off-putting contemporary city, we are never sure where we are, again neither physically nor psychologically. Although its neighborhoods and streets have British names, this metropolis is anywhere and nowhere—there is […]
By Frederika Randall The poet Pierluigi Cappello was born in Gemona del Friuli in 1967 and died in 2017 in Cassacco, a town 20 km away. In his fifty years in Italy’s far northeast he never lived beyond a 30 km radius of Gemona, a city whose name still evokes a devastating 1976 earthquake that […]
By Ben Ffrancon Davies Caryl Lewis’s stormy novel, The Jeweller, focuses on the humdrum yet turbulent life of Mari, a market-stall jeweller by day who moonlights in a most peculiar way. She, along with her friend Mo, clears the houses of the recently deceased, sorting through their things to find jewels which she can sell […]
By Jonathan Stone The Grannies took the most practice. There were three of them, and as I prepared to read out loud Alex Fleming’s translation of Osipov’s essay “The Cry of The Domestic Fowl,” I kept vacillating between voices. The one who’s in the worst health hears and sees things: “Yuri, is that you?” she’ll […]
By Lucina Schell Fidelity is often considered a virtue in translation, especially when the translator is female. So what happens when a young female poet writing in English decides to translate a feminist work of great rhetorical sophistication by a young female poet writing in Spanish that specifically plays with the idea of an aesthetic […]
By Eva Dunsky In Garden by the Sea, translated by the mother-daughter team Martha Tennant and Maruxa Relaño, Rodoreda writes a slow burn towards catastrophe. Rodoreda, who is considered one of the most important Catalan writers of the 20th century, wrote often about Catalan society in the years before and after the Spanish Civil War, […]
By Serena Todesco As a translator, I often find myself trying to find suitable images to describe what translation exactly entails. When it comes to authors from relatively unknown countries, such as Croatia, translation is indeed a form of irregular and unpredictable treasure hunting. Thanks to the strange combination of my academic interest in European […]
By Sean Lambert Reading Jindřich Štyrský’s dream journal highlights what an understudied genre of literature the dream journal is. Perhaps if there were a larger body of famous examples (Jack Kerouac’s Book of Dreams and William Burroughs’ My Education are desperate for company), it would be clearer how uniquely compelling, evocative and revealing is Štyrský’s […]
By Heather Lang-Cassera Liu Tsung-Yuan has long been acknowledged as one of the most accomplished prose writers of the T’ang Dynasty. However, his excellent poetry was set aside for a time in China—largely because, relative to his prose, he wrote little of it—and it has been wildly under-translated into English. Fortunately, renowned translator Red Pine, […]