Literature in Translation |
“I Didn’t Want to Be Born Here (or There),” “Decompression” & “untitled”
“I’m made up wholly of inertia / from which I suck the strength // of the stump / of a phantom / tree”
Literature in Translation |
“The Train”
“The train has stopped in a sleepy, quiet time, / this is the time of memory, / of waiting. / Mother says we will come back soon / to this land where my navel was buried, / where the / morning cicada sings and where flowers / never die.”
Literature in Translation |
“I laughed in my kingdom and as king I laughed,” “no doubt a rain sleeps in the hand,” “a child shows his hands,” “life looks like you,” “but we / do nothing but follow” & “the world transforms at a rapid pace”
“but we / do nothing but follow / traces / we ourselves are / nothing but traces / of life / that is why we need so profoundly / to hold on to ourselves …”
Literature in Translation |
“Translators and Traitors” & “A Writer’s Decalogue”
“Do your best to say things in such a way that the reader will always feel that, deep down, he is as intelligent as, or even more intelligent than, you. From time to time, he will be more intelligent than you are in earnest; but in order to convey this to him, you will need to be more intelligent than he is.”
Literature in Translation |
“name,” “darkness like a shadow,” “shadow’s resistance,” “rainy day” & “skylight”
“they say my name was encoded with a disaster / in fact all names are given / and intended to carry blessings or misfortunes”
Literature in Translation |
from The Cremulator, a novel by Sasha Filipenko
“When his assistants carry out a sentence, I often have to collect pieces of skull after moving the bodies, which takes extra time. When you have to cremate fifteen-twenty people in a night, you don’t want to be distracted by things like that.”
Literature in Translation |
from Mammoth
“About an hour later, a woman strolled in wearing a mink coat, her hair wavy from sleeping in rollers. An old man in a beret clung to the crook of her arm. For whatever reason, I glanced at the barman, and he gave a calm nod.”
Literature in Translation |
from Dendrites
“Nine years ago Leto was still a toddler—how old was she then, two? three?—yes, she’d just turned three when the fires broke out and the whole city burned for three days and nights, for three days and nights stores and houses were looted, the smoke seemed to trap and incite unspoken fears …”
Literature in Translation |
“Bulletin and Elegy of the Mitas”
“To Melchor Pumaluisa, son of Guápulo, / whose testicles they severed with a butcher knife / on the hacienda’s patio. / And kicking him, they made him walk / before our tear-filled eyes. / He erupted from the blows in jets of blood.”
Literature in Translation |
“Belgium,” “Patterns,” “Poland,” “Hooligan” & three untitled poems
“A young girl is embroidering in her chamber. / On the canvas, patterns of spears and crosses. / The girl stitches dead soldiers on a meadow / With red flowers on their chests.”
Literature in Translation |
“Attenborough”
“I imagine how nice it would feel to cool off in the aquarium installed for the penguins and have a dip in the ice-cold water of the pool whose glass wall lets you observe the tiniest movements up close. “
Literature in Translation |
“Chaïm Soutine’s Obsession”
“That his rage was in a painting did not suffice to appease his rage against the painting. He kept taking back his works from those who had bought them, to destroy them.”
Literature in Translation |
“The Bird’s Birth,” “The Bird (II)” & “The Old Woman’s Song of Herself as a Young Girl”
“this is the bird / in whose one eye / there is the last leaf of fall / and in whose other eye / there is the news / of the spring baby’s hasty birth”
Literature in Translation |
“This Is A Humane Country”
“Once I got to the hotel, a man visiting from the inland said to me, “Your Spanish is a little too good. We don’t trust anybody who doesn’t speak a bit of our local lingo because they might pull one over on us. Know what I mean?”
Literature in Translation |
from The Number on Your Arm is Blue Like Your Eyes
“I’ve never met anyone younger than I with a number on his or her arm, but what would be so special about that? Those who try to sensationalize the memory of the Shoah or heap superlatives onto it trivialize the suffering of victims or veer into kitsch.”