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April, 2012
Day Two at the London Book Fair
The London Book Fair runs from April 16-April 18, and WWB brings it to you from the Literary Translation Centre, a seminar dedicated to all aspects of literary translation. Follow us each day on Twitter--@WWBorders---and on our Dispatches blog, where we'll be posting daily round-ups with news on the ground. Day Two at the Literary Translation Centre gives us pause. On everyone’s lips is a quirky idea, especially for a group of translators and translation advocates: the…...
Day One at the London Book Fair
The London Book Fair runs from April 16-April 18, and WWB brings it to you from the Literary Translation Centre, a seminar dedicated to all aspects of literary translation. Follow us each day on Twitter--@WWBorders---and on our Dispatches blog, where we'll be posting daily round-ups with news on the ground. Turnout at Day One of the Literary Translation Centre—here at the London Book Fair—looks to be even higher than last year. And with crowds of enthused literati swarming…...
The Marco Polo of Morocco
Born in Morocco in 1304, Ibn Battuta was the greatest world traveler of his time. He began his journeys in 1325, a year after Marco Polo died in Venice, but traveled five times as far before he was done. In his journeys through lands including Egypt, Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, India, and China he covered an estimated 75,000 miles. Ibn Battuta’s name often comes up in books about African travelers, but he is rarely quoted. I get the impression that not many people have actually read him, but…...
But Your Eyes
But your eyes heard The brilliance of the laughter Residing in the pale bone Of our faces Your pupils will read The thread woven by time’s Imprint Upon the brow of the present With the red note of the river For a manuscript To adjust Our song still to come The odor of travel lingers about you Your only sin is in wanting To live life Some day Your steps Will lead you to The stopping place Of mornings. In her belly For centuries now Every fiber Will carry…...
Abdellah Taia’s “An Arab Melancholia”
Abdellah Taïa is Morocco’s highest profile gay writer, a point underscored in the accompanying blurb to his recently translated An Arab Melancholia. Since the book is billed as an autobiographical novel, one might expect—wrongly, it turns out—a gut-wrenching exposition of the existential dilemma of growing up gay in Morocco. Taïa came into his own awareness in Islamic Morocco, where being openly gay is taboo, which of course complicates an already complex and formative…...
The Advanced Language Class as Translation Workshop
A wonderful, and perhaps underappreciated, way to bring international literature into the classroom is through transforming advanced language classes into translation workshops. While language classes might seem an obvious home for news from afar, some people associate translation in language classes with a very old-fashioned approach—images conjured of Latin and Greek learned by musty old rote. But the workshop approach has many advantages, including facilitating a deep study of a foreign…...
“To read a text with the eyes of the world”
The book I most look forward to from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is the next volume of his excellent memoirs. But in the meantime we have Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing, based on a series of lectures delivered in May 2010. A fine novelist is not necessarily a fine literary critic. Ngũgĩ’s novel Devil on the Cross, reportedly the first modern novel in the Gikuyu language, was written on toilet paper while the author was in prison. It was a book I wanted to like.…...
Poetry from the Horn of Africa
Launched in November 2011, Warscapes magazine has taken on an unusual niche: the art and literature of war zones around the world. On March 6, Warscapes hosted An Evening of Poetry from the Horn of Africa in the headquarters of Alwan for the Arts near the tip of Manhattan on Beaver Street. The event was a rare opportunity to hear poetry written in Amharic, Arabic, Tigre, and Tigrinya, in the original and in translation. Maaza Mengiste, the Ethiopian writer whose debut novel Beneath the Lion’s…...
Etgar Keret’s “Suddenly, a Knock on the Door”
If a man comes knocking at your door to steal your magic goldfish, what do you do? Do you a.) politely ask him to leave; b.) assault him with the nearest metal object at hand; or c.) ask the goldfish to grant you your third and final wish and make the problem go away? In Etgar Keret’s world, the choice is all of the above. The protagonists of his new short story collection—Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger, Sondra Silverton and Nathan Englander—often…...
From the Translator: Titling “Tana”
I’m very grateful to the editors of Words Without Borders for letting me discuss my translation of Giulio Mozzi’s “Tana.” This gives me the chance to discuss my failure. Several years back, when I first met with Mozzi in Padua about his collection Questo è il giardino (This is the Garden), he told me that with “Tana,” a story named for its female protagonist, I should find an English name that also means “burrow,” as this is what “tana”…...
A Memoir Disguised as a Novel
Harper Perennial, which reissued A Life Full of Holes in 2008, describes it on the cover as “the first novel ever written in the Arabic dialect Moghrebi.” Yet there is more than a little doubt as to whether it is a novel at all. A Life Full of Holes was told to Paul Bowles in Moghrebi by a young man named Larbi Layachi, over the course of several months. Bowles recorded and translated each episode, refraining as far as possible from editorial interference. “Apart from the exceptions…...
From the Archives: Poetry, Sex, and Rap
April is National Poetry Month, and our theme this month is sex, so we're going back to our November 2005 South Korean issue for a tale that fits both: Lee Gi-ho's "Earnie." The story of a young prostitute with a booming voice who escapes via a fortuitous encounter with a music impresario, it appears in two renditions: the text, translated by Yu Young-nan, and a rap version penned by rapper Kyle Myhre, better known as El Guante. Poetry and sex, and a salute to translation as well, with El…...
Throwing Out the Baby
The frog was leaping away but we were closing in on both sides, running along bent over, our eyes fixed on its yellow-green back, the mud squishing under our feet. There had just been a cloudburst and the leaden sky indicated it was going to rain again. But this frog was a whopper, much bigger than any we had in our bag, and Xiaomao wasn’t going to let it get away. Before it got to the dike, the frog leaped into the air and landed on a tuft of grass. It was just about to take off again…...
Beyond this Darkness and this Silence
The world has become aware of its invisible citizen. But no one knows you are here. —H. G. Wells I warned her in one of our first conversations, though she didn’t take me seriously: “I’m invisible.” Not that I reproached her for her skepticism. To be honest, I don’t usually talk about it; people aren’t prepared to face the extraordinary. Which, if you are a part of what is considered “extraordinary,” can be wearisome. I knew almost…...
Tana
The rain began that morning. Tana was coming home from school. Thursday afternoons they had sewing class, and now on the bus, she realized this was the first day she'd left school in the dark. It would go on like this for months. It was cold out, raining, and the bus, jammed with boys and girls, with students, was steaming hot. The windows were fogged up; someone had managed to pry one open, and Tana, already sweaty, was freezing. She thought: I might get sick, stay home a week. She didn’t…...
To Troy, Helen
The two lay down together on the bed. Atreus's son paced through the crowd, like a wild beast, searching for some glimpse of godlike Alexander. Iliad, book 3: 284ff. I parked the car four blocks beyond the house. Felt like I was following a plan that I had rehearsed a hundred times. What sense did it make? Helen would not know I had come, did not even know I was on my way. I felt like…...
The Hunchback and Botticelli’s Venus
Fluttering locks of reddish hair whipped by the wind and rain, smooth and radiant skin, she is Botticelli’s Venus walking down the street. (The one in the Uffizi, born from a seashell, not the one in the Staatliche Museen, with a black background, which is similar but has dry hair arranged around the head, descending evenly down the body.) Don’t think that I boast any extraordinary perspicacity, but the fact is that even if the woman I observe is as motionless as a statue, I can still…...
The Schoolyard
That Monday, her classmates were playing dodgeball again. She watched them from the step, hoping that they would formally invite her, so that she could say no until they insisted, like her mother did on visits: “Would you like a little more cake? Oh no, no, no, thank you so much. Come on, a little more. Well, if you insist, maybe a small slice.” The girl enjoyed this kind of rhetoric, but the other schoolgirls didn’t appreciate its finer points. In the schoolyard everything was…...
The Ringing Body
She always recognized them by the trembling behind their bravado. From his first “Hello” she was certain he wasn’t one of them . . . that he had meant to call her, in particular. He was not one of those triflers, the junior bureaucrats, young clerks, and drunkards who amuse themselves by dialing just any number, for a thrill or perhaps the chance of something more. She recognized their attempts to disguise their impulsiveness: “Is Ahlam home?”…...
Horst
I’m thirty-nine. I’m a chemist, graduate of the university of ****. For the last twelve years I’ve been working as a lab technician for a pharmaceutical company. Practically speaking, I’m a hired hand, because the creative part of our work all belongs to our bosses, the illustrious professors and scientists who design our research programs according to the needs of the company. Among the eggheads who work with us there’s even a Nobel Prize winner who personally I’ve…...
Good Women and Bad Women
We never discovered how they found us out. My brother insisted that Márgara had stumbled across them accidentally while she was putting clean sheets on the bed, and that she had squealed on us. I suspected something different. On a number of occasions I had surprised my mother going through my drawers, or secretly reading my diary—it was more like an exercise book of notes and drawings and doodles—or stealthily lifting the other receiver while I was talking to a friend on the phone.…...
The Bicycle Factory
In 1966, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu issued Decree 770, criminalizing abortion. After that, women found their own ways to end unwanted pregnancies, no matter the risk. With money and contacts, one could arrange curettage—then the procedure would be performed without anesthesia in a garage or on a kitchen table. On rare occasions, a gynecologist would assist. Most women learned to terminate a pregnancy on their own. A catheter was introduced into the uterus. Through it, the women…...
Meow
To Juan Bonilla, who endured the first part of this story I can’t see it from the terrace, so I don’t know how big it is, or what color. The only thing I know is that every night, perched up on the roof, it wails my name at the moon. I’m no cat expert, but I think it has to be in heat; it sounds like a heartbroken child. I might even say it’s terrifying. It reminds me of the screams of those pale creatures locked in basements in horror films. And I’m…...
The Hole in the Garden, Part II
The woman showed up exactly one month to the day after the pigʼs arrival. I had just finished cleaning the house and was thinking about feeding the pig before I started waxing the floors when the doorbell rang. The woman on the intercom video screen looked like she was some kind of salesperson. I decided to pretend I wasnʼt home. Then, however, she leaned forward and brought her lips—caked thick with lipstick—up to the microphone. “Iʼm Hanamura, I work with your husband.”…...
Review
After the intermission, when they prepped the audience and warmed them up with an acrobatic display, clowns, and other supporting acts, the second part began, the main one, the part with the adored women. Wind instruments, festive but refined, herald the entrance of the star Dolly Scheinwald. She strides erect. She is very beautiful. Her form draped in a black dress with a deep reveal, her hair black and her alto a sensual rasp. Two bachelor spectators, high in the gods, know she’ll never be…...
