2020 ALTA Travel Fellows Reading Transcripts

Congratulations to the 2020 ALTA Travel Fellows! Their audio chapbook is available at https://soundcloud.com/littranslate. The following access copy is a complete transcript of their reading and does not constitute publication.

Introduction – Robin Myers

The ALTA43 theme is “In Between,” an idea that evokes, in many different ways, the nature of translation itself: its existence between languages, spaces, creators, and communities; and its power to question, complicate, and forge beyond the fixtures of borders and systems and communicative tropes. But there’s also, of course, a powerful and unsettling in-betweenness in our current moment: the exacerbated uncertainty with which we’ve all been experiencing the past few months, the struggle for connection in varying degrees of isolation.

My name is Robin Myers, and I’m truly thrilled and honored to introduce this year’s group of ALTA Travel Fellows—although of course the meaning of “travel” is more metaphorical than usual at present. The work of these nine extraordinary translators—spanning poetry, short fiction, novel excerpts, imitation folk tales, ballads, and hybrid texts in several forms—inhabits countless kinds of in-betweenness with vibrancy and insight, acuity and grace. I’ve been moved and delighted and somehow heartened as I’ve gotten to know their translations: their scope and focus, their rich and committed and compassionate attention to language and what it’s capable of.

A few words about the ALTA Travel Fellowship.

Each year, between four and six $1,000 fellowships are awarded to emerging translators, meaning unpublished or minimally published translators, to help them pay for lodging and travel expenses to the annual ALTA conference. This year, with the shift of the conference to an online platform, nine Virtual Travel Fellows, including two Peter K. Jansen Fellows, were awarded $500 each. 2020 marks the fifth year of the Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellowship, preferentially awarded to an emerging translator of color or a translator working from an under-represented diaspora or stateless language.

This year’s winners were selected by judges David Ball, Bonnie Chau, and Tenzin Dickie. The 2020 ALTA Travel Fellowships are made possible thanks to the generous support of ALTA’s Past Presidents Council, the Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fund, and numerous individual donors, including established translators and other devoted supporters of the craft and art of literary translation. Congratulations to these exceptional emerging translators, chosen from among eighty applicants.

Öykü Tekten (2020 ALTA Travel Fellow, Turkish and English) is a poet, translator, and editor living between Granada and New York. She is also a founding member of Pinsapo, an art and publishing experience with a particular focus on work in and about translation, and a contributing editor and archivist with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. She translates from Turkish and English.

DAĞ

Sabahın karşısında konuşmak ne zor!

İncecik kül gibi kalıyorsun,

Dağ susmaya giden yolu biliyor,

sen bilmiyorsun.

Taş yarılıyor bir çiçek için, yol veriyor.

Kısacık konuşuyor çiçek: “Dünya” diyor,

“gördüm, benimle tamamlanıyor.”

Yeryüzü karşısında konuşmak ne zor!

Yamaçtan aşağı bak, uçurumu gör!

—görsene kekeme!

İçindeki zayıf hayvan, dayanıksız dil,

olmamış hal

gümüş bir zirvede eriyor.

MOUNTAIN

How difficult it is to speak against the morning!

You are left like fine ash

The mountain knows the path to silence

you don’t.

The stone gapes open to a flower, gives way to it.

Quickly the flower says: “the world,”

“I saw it, completing itself with me.”

How difficult it is to speak against the earth!

Look down the hillside, see the cliff!

—see it, stutterer!

The fragile blood in you, the flimsy language,

the unripe mood,

are melting on a silver peak.

POPLIN YEARS

All day I flex a piece of tin out of shape.

Dry river, old pain

twitches sometimes

demoiselle crane, sometimes

jolly rain, but

the cotton in me untangles,

the dark route and the loose-bunch.

In this passage,

in these silent sentences, what am I doing?

The flesh of hardwood empties itself, I hear it.

All day I flex a piece of tin out of shape.

Wrap me in poplins, in cotton flannels!

Dry plain.. blind compass…

MY FACE: A WORKSITE IN THE DESERT, YELLOW

:( standing still, it lost itself in me. Petrified.

Quiet long

quiet thin patience: distant from

its water its road its sleep. Blind layer,

blind cluster. in this century in this city an offbeat

note. Si

My face:

:( a cloudy thing, weepy evening.

A cold climate. In it terrifying horses roam around

unaware of their rages. Silent,

starless. We went to the desert together,

we listened to the desert. re

My face:

:( Leyla from the mountain. Snow-eyelashes.

Salty pepper in the kitchen of smells and twangs. een

FISH

I took the bait some time ago

ah! my tongue’s wounded

I can’t speak.

PHOTOGRAPH

I stand still in an old photograph.

Even in this photo my face resembles an old photo.

A complicated mythology, a creeper-tempo

posed right in that moment for the camera,

still posing.

A frozen moment during a massive fire:

A leg of a bridge without its bridge,

standing mournfully still.

A hollow fountain, once public,

whose water shrank,

and an old city, once happy, now ruined.

Five women and a greenish sepia:

The first one gives her life to the one next to her,

The third is grief twisting her neck to the left,

standing still. The fourth is like a fading day dream.

An old rain is pouring down on the fifth.

It seems to be a black & white day,

a silver river in the depths of the photo

is the only thing stepping off the frozen moment.

Karen Hung Curtis (2020 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellow, Chinese - Hong Kong) is a Hong Kong writer and translator. She was the recipient of a Luce Foundation Chinese Poetry and Translation Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center in 2019, and is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she is translating Hong Kong author Wong Bik-wan. She translates from Chinese – Hong Kong.

溺愛

謝曉虹

從前聚集在愛河一帶的遊客，都是來看溺死者的。

據說，沈溺了數以萬計情侶的愛河，天氣晴朗時，表面泛著一朵朵櫻桃紅 — 那是屍體浮上水面的臉，因為特殊的水質，那些臉沒有腐壞，也沒有發脹，清晰地呈現出愛慾高潮時既痛苦又喜悅的表情。然而，這種景象畢竟只是傳說。到過愛河的人都說，它總是被濃霧所遮蔽，偶爾看到的，只是徘徊在半空，以啄食屍體為生的黑色鳥群。這種鳥嘴部鋒利如刀，個性凶殘而淫蕩，牠們迷戀人類甜美的肉身，同時又捨不得他們銷魂蝕骨的表情。即使愛河裡的屍體常常被鳥群啄食乾淨，連頭骨也不剩，那些薄薄的臉卻被保留下來，一張張浮在河面上。

An excerpt from Drowned in Love

by Dorothy Tse

Once, the tourists who flocked to the Love River only came to see the drowned bodies.

Legend has it that this river, where countless lovers drowned, glowed cherry pink on cloudless days — the floating faces of corpses. Because of the unusual water, the faces never swelled or rotted, and displayed instead the orgasmic look of simultaneous pain and pleasure. This is myth after all. People who had been to the river said it was always shrouded in fog, and only occasionally would they see, hovering in mid air, a flock of black birds subsisting on the dead bodies. These birds, beaks sharp as knives, were cruel and lustful — they were at once intoxicated by the sweet human flesh and reluctant to destroy the faces of ecstasy. Even when the corpses in the river were picked clean by the birds, the skulls scarcely remaining, the faces were always preserved, floating on the water like thin pieces of paper.

How the lovers sank into the river remains a mystery to this day. Some believe they fell

in by accident. When amorous couples stopped by the river bank, bodies entwined and lips locked, their eyes slowly turned the grayish blue of the water. Tingling with the moist, gentle touch of fog on their skin and with the lingering legend of the river, their bodies moved towards the water unaware as they slowly crossed the embankment. They did not notice their bodies trembling, like soft ripples on the river surface in the rain. When people heard the sharp splashes of someone falling into the water, followed by shouts and running, only then did they realize that yet another pair of lovers had drowned. Afterwards, the police asked tourists to leave the river area, and raised the embankment once again. Still, there were lovers who vanished overnight without stepping out of their hotels. Their faces sank inside their locked rooms and reappeared floating on the river surface, baffling the local authorities.

Before the Love River was filled in, conservation groups and environmentalists protested, and small businesses in the neighborhood organized sit-ins and demonstrations. But among the protesters, only the cultural critic Sandi Mandu truly empathized with the drowned lovers: they threw themselves into the river not to die, but to seek life. If the river was filled in, lovers would never again find their euphoria.

The hairdresser who lived on Love River Road often heard the sound of things falling into water.

The sound was crisp and clear, like a splash made by seasoned synchronized divers as they stretched their toned arms towards clear skies and entered the water with their taut bodies. The hairdresser did not know that these were hallucinations caused by hunger. Beneath an empty sky, vehicles moved along a flat, straight asphalt road. They were, almost all of them, trucks marked with a canned fish logo transporting processed food to the docks.

Green City had long ceased to produce fresh fish. The poor quality fish from the river were canned, in order to seal off the stench of the polluted water. From where the hairdresser lived, the new musical fountain on the other side of the road was visible when there were no cars driving past. At noon, carnival-like music from the fountain roused her from her nap. She often woke up from erotic dreams of naked bodies curved like dolphins spat out from the fountain, but they were only lifeless streams of water gushing from the round manmade pool, flowing towards nowhere.

The hairdresser was surprised that she wasn’t turning into a fish. If being in love had any symptoms, it was that her feet had stopped touching the ground. After two weeks, she realized she wasn’t going to sink into water like a fish, but that she wasn’t going to fly like a bird either — she would probably continue floating, less than two centimeters from the ground.

She worked at the hair salon from Monday to Friday, and like all the other hairdressers in that city, she trimmed hair, beards, and eyebrows, as well as body hair for the clients. The salon was piled with dummy heads and mannequins, some with outstretched arms showing curly underarm hair, others with legs apart revealing trimmed, triangular-shaped pubic hair.

Clients in smocks waited among these dummies in the salon until they were led to a private area closed off by curtains. The hairdresser, a long white hose in hand, cleaned the clients’ naked bodies thoroughly with mineral water from an outside source, or immersed their whole bodies in a tub. Then, starting with her fingertips on their chins, she cupped their cheeks in her hands until their heads tilted back, like watermelons, into her curved arms. Resting on her soft hands, clients quickly fell asleep and when they woke up, they found reflected in the full-length mirror an exceptionally clean body, and a child-like look of mild shock on their face.

For the inhabitants of the polluted Green City, this seemed to be the only way to see themselves in a new light. At times the hairdresser giggled at their wide-eyed faces; she felt, in this era devoid of myths, that she was like a sort of convenient John the Baptist.

And yet, the hairdresser never saw this look on her husband’s face. He refused to let his wife’s scissors near his body. As she held his erect penis, she reassured him of her skills and persuaded him to peep from behind the curtains when she trimmed her clients’ hair. Instead he closed his eyes, oblivious to her plea, until milky white sperm spurted into her hand like a dull fountain stream.

Kristen Renee Miller (2020 ALTA Travel Fellow, French). Kristen’s work appears in POETRY, The Kenyon Review, Guernica and Best New Poets 2018. She is the translator of Spawn, by Ilnu Nation poet Marie-Andrée Gill. A recipient of honors from The Kennedy Center, The Humana Festival, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, she lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where she is the managing editor for Sarabande. She translates from French.

I’ll be sharing a short selection of work from Spawn, by Ilnu Nation poet Marie-Andrée Gill, published in 2020 by Book*hug Press. Spawn is a collection of untitled micropoems braiding themes of twenty-first-century imperialism, 90s-kid culture, and coming of age in the Ilnu community in Quebec.

Nous autres les probables

les lendemains

les restes de cœur-muscle

et de terre noire

Nous autres en un mot :

territoire

We the unlikely

the aftermath

the remains of heart muscle

and black earth

We the territory

in a word

to lick the skin of the water

with a tongue I don't speak

the day lifts up me on his shoulders to watch

the varnish half stripped from our memories

the cement pelt poured over our feral skins

how to augur anything

but crooked miracles

anyway

A luck: the arena at night and making out

behind the police station

the northern lights dancing on nintendo

chicken buckets, the monthly allowance

happy meals from nobody’s birthday

and weekends in the woods

and partridges to twist.

And the lake, a luck, the lake.

In houses all alike women embroider your future

on moccasins sold to tourists.

The light comes and goes.

Timushum says: Only thunderstorms still tell it

like it is.

I got up early to watch the sun

fuck with the lake

I pinched an eyelash in my fingers, drank your face

straight from the bottle

the possibilities have become too much

for me

How do you swallow the lake's beauty with all these ghosts chewing through its plastic-filled lung. I’m in the underwater level of a video game just as the air runs out, just as that little tune begins to play.

I want the America that cries out in your voice

I want our plundered bloods

our earth-colored, powwow bloods

rising in her throat

when she sees us queueing

for the microwave.

Balsam fir dance in slow motion and the earth

shudders as I come

as my fingers find the burning ember.

I want this vertigo as a vow

to sap the cruel beauty

of oil-slick rainbows.

the little heart closes like a dandelion in darkness

seagulls tread water in the wind

of your badlands of your brush fires of your hands

around my neck

sometimes the sky pulls down his starry leggings

and comes hot

in the lake's wide mouth

it’s always there, that color

of mixed diesel pulsing

through the two-stroke organs

of our winter bunkers

And when the night draws its celebrations to a close, the hares undress all alone, sexes smeared from long storms. Perhaps we’ve forgotten that the body, yes the body, finds a desolate kind of beauty once exposed.

ouananiche revive the watercolors

of our blooming organs

time to swallow the evidence

of our mutant hides

the ten-centimeters-dilated code of etiquette:

it's to quit pretending

it's licking the plate and the bones

until nothing is left but the echo

of our laughter or raptors waiting to devour

the future

we have hundreds of years

of cataclysm at hand

there are signs installed side by side

in the chalky veins of the nomadic life

meeting the blue-gray gaze

of the nearly bursting lake

we see our dream: a woman risen up

from all these winter worlds

heaped with ice, ready to start again

splitting the surface of the lake

stripping the pelt from its shoulders

where sweetwater salmon drink

the milk of our fallow hearts

we cut our teeth on weapons

I know we are blue plumage

the symmetry of spruce

the language of hailstones

I want to close with a bilingual poem that’s not in Spawn, but which draws from a poem in Spawn. A finished poem in translation is often just a fragment of the exchange that’s taken place between languages.

So I made this poem in order to demonstrate and unpack the process of translating three lines in one of Gill’s poems. And what I hope it shows is the richness of possibility in her work, and the limitless unfolding that can take place in a translation.

nous nous baignons dans le mal de vivre

we bathe ourselves in the mal de vivre—

nous nous baignons

we wade in

we swim

we submerge—

dans le mal de vivre

in the misery, the unhappiness

we wade in profound discontentment

we bathe in the malaise—

de l'asphalte chaud

in the noxious bloom of a newly paved lot

in the malaise of hot asphalt, we bathe

nous nous baignons dans le mal de vivre de l'asphalte chaude

hot asphalt is the water we swim through

en attendant de trouver la parole

looking for a word—habitable

for a home-like, habitable word

a sustainable language

en attendant de trouver la parole habitable

ou de gagner quelque chose au gratteux

looking for landfall, a windfall, a lottery win

hot asphalt is the water we tread as we wait

for parole habitable

for a language to shelter in

Ena Selimović (2020 ALTA Travel Fellow, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian) is a literary translator working from Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian into English. She is currently translating the novel Underground Barbie by Maša Kolanović. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. Her research on multilingualism brings a relational approach to the study of contemporary American and Southeast European literatures.

Underground Barbie by Maša Kolanović

Excerpt from a chapter entitled “Wartime Necessities”

“Moja prva sirena za oglašavanje zračne opasnosti u životu. Do tada sam čula samo onu za Druga Tita kad smo se svi morali ukipiti u isti tren, bez obzira u kojem nas položaju ona zatekla. Stanje u stanu je tada doživjelo kulminaciju: tata je spuštao rolete, mama otišla isključiti plin, a brat sakriti krletku s papigom na neko mjesto udaljeno od prozora. Meni je srce opet lupalo kao u onom tobožnjem infarktu. Tata je onda rekao mami neka ponese stvari koje su već nekoliko dana bile spremljene u torbi smještenoj u predsoblju. Ja sam također brzo otišla po svoje stvari jer sam na sve ovo zapravo bila na neki način spremna.”

My first ever air raid siren. Until then I’d only heard the one for Comrade Tito’s death, which required everyone to freeze at once no matter what position it had caught you in. The state of affairs in our apartment had reached its culmination then: Dad was rolling down the shutters, Mom turning off the gas, my brother moving the birdcage away from the window. My heart had begun pounding again like it did in that alleged heart attack. Then Dad was telling Mom to fetch the things packed away in the suitcase that had been standing in the foyer for several days. I also rushed to get my things, because I had actually been, to some extent, prepared for all this.

I had heard Mom and Dad talking increasingly more anxiously on the phone with our extended family, squeezing out every bit of news, and that year we hadn’t gone to the beach but for a couple days. Grandma and Nono had sounded equally worried, and even all the beaches near Zadar were pretty deserted, with plenty of space to lay your swimming gear. Everything was leading to this moment which, though we had somehow expected it, lost nothing in the way of horror. Nonetheless, we had to remain collected, as our neighbor Stevo routinely said (he hadn’t moved away after all).

My things, which neither Mom nor Dad knew anything about, were also ready. In my little Smurfs suitcase, I had packed away my most prized portable property, the most important things I wanted to have with me when the world ended. Because, should our building be the one hit by a bomb and reduced to rubble, spewing flames and black smoke, life wouldn’t lose its meaning if my Barbie remained whole, wearing her flashy pink little outfit with its tiny fluorescent lemons, pineapples, and bananas, her pink-green watermelon-shaped bag, sunglasses, and the open-toe heels that went best with that combo. And, of course, as long as nothing bad happened to any member of my family, relatives, and friends from school and from our building. Leaving Barbie at the mercy of the shelling would have been far too risky. But Barbie was just a small part of my wartime necessities. Because what was Barbie without her own perfect things that she simply had to have in abundance?! She’d be the plainest peasant girl from the Handicrafts store, and I had seen more than enough of those before the day arrived when She finally knocked on my door (my mailbox, to be precise).

That was a long time ago now, long before all that business with the planes and the sirens. At first, Mom had absolutely refused to buy me that sliver of plastic perfection, but she was talked about, she was known, and some, like one Ana F. from building #17, had even acquired her before I did. Everyone from my building had watched her. And even though she was so small, oh, that platinum-blonde cowgirl was clearly visible in her hands. And not just visible. On the sewage grates where the girls from #17 played, you could just feel that there was something out of this world there, something that must have fallen from the sky. Ana had a real real Barbie that her aunt sent by airmail from America. The one who had blonde hair, who could bend her knees, and came with lots and lots of accessories. And rumor had it that the pop singer Neda Ukraden’s niece had as many as fifty Barbies like that!

Jealousy isn’t the right word to express what those of us who didn’t have a real Barbie felt at that time. Yeah, a real one. Because there were all kinds of “Barbies” made from various disgusting plastics. Non-Mattel fakes with puffy cheeks, unbendable knees, poorly sewn clothes, catastrophic shoes, and who weren’t even called Barbie, but Stefi, Barbara, Cyndy, and all sorts of stupid names. Not having a real Barbie meant being profoundly unhappy. My uncle Ivo from New York put an end to this dark B.B. era when he sent a real Barbie to our home address because he simply couldn’t let his niece in Yugoslavia be deprived of that small but important token of prestige and prosperity.

One day, she arrived in our mailbox, which Mom and I opened together. At least in that moment, despite her prior seeming disinterest, Mom had caught my Barbie fever. I saw it in her eyes. And I honestly didn’t think any less of her character because of it; you’d have to be blind, in the least, to remain indifferent in Barbie’s presence. That fever was accompanied by the realization that only a thin layer of brown wrapping paper stood between me and my most coveted piece of plastic, preventing me from even guessing which one would be my first—and first real—Barbie. And when I unwrapped the package, it simply couldn’t have turned out more perfectly, because my first Barbie was also my favorite actress, Crystal from Dynasty! (On second thought, it might not have actually been that Crystal, but it didn’t matter because I imagined it was Crystal in the flesh.)

When I opened the box and loosened Crystal Barbie from her protective covers, it felt like I had touched a small deity. Only this deity was much more perfect than all those fat, clunky prehistoric goddesses I had seen plenty of in various exhibitions at the Archeological Museum Mom and Dad routinely dragged me through so I could acquire a “cultural sense” from a very young age. That shimmery little pink ribbon tied around her waist-defined cocktail dress, which glittered with every possible shade of every color at once, the same pink color around her neck, a small ring, earrings, little silver sequined shoes, a hairbrush and comb, the scent of fresh plastic—it was all so real! She was no longer an unattainable object I had seen only in commercials on the satellite channels, imagining for the umpteenth time that I was playing with her as if she were really mine. Now, for the first time in my life, I had something that was truly valuable.

Alex Karsavin (2020 ALTA Travel Fellow, Russian) is a translator and writer based in Chicago. They are the translations and poetry editor at Homintern magazine, and occasionally the Zahir Review. Their writing and translations have appeared in The New Inquiry, Columbia Journal, PenAmerica, Sreda, Sick Muse, and are forthcoming in “F-Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry” (Isolari Press). They are currently co-translating Ilya Danishevsky's Mannelig in Chains with Anne Fisher, funded by the University of Exeters’ RusTrans project.

Галлюцинограмма by Elena Georgievskaya

жена, облеченная в солнце, подхватывает падающего

отрывает кусок одеянья, протягивает ему

и спасенный ей говорит: не подойдет твое солнце, жена

я надену черное солнце ментовской формы

Hallucinogram by Elena Georgievskaya

a woman clothed with the sun uplifts the fallen

tears off a piece of her robe, hands it to him

but the saved says to her: woman, your sun will not fit

i will don the black sun of the pig’s uniform

i was launched by the light’s developer, i came round

looking for desolation’s cobwebs, but it was clear

splendid things brimmed in each corner—there was nothing to cling to

now there’s someone to look up to

now there’s plenty to pick from—the new seriousness of buttons and peaked caps

the subtle irony of collaboration

so die for us, black sun of the pig’s uniform

i would like to gaze upon each, in whose head

the mongolian wind whirls the gypsy’s wheel

under the downpour of russian hatred

to gather them up and lead them out

they are obscured by the black sun of the baltids, grey uniform

grey being the new black

i enumerated him: element A, element B plus element C

to me he’s the elements, to him we are lemmings

Croaking under the water’s grey surface

we are reborn as worms under the bark of a needlessly felled tree;

reinventing the wheel, we close our eyes

so as not to see the black sun of the pig’s uniform

but it’s a hallucinogram, it flares up

and spawns into phosphenes, breaking our labyrinth

and now, ahead of us, we have a graying road, an immense straight road

to the sun

xenos

тени над мутабор by Ilya Danishevsky

“над проемами тени выделяющие летний жир где длинные дети стрекоз ловят своих головастиков и хелицерами сквозь мембраны и просто обернись и нет потому что дым может прятать в ночи капилляры и капилляры рабочих и бумажных студентов и прилежные доводы разума и прилежные сбои сердца и тех кто ходил смотреть вдоль волчьих ягод в суггестии ржавых заборов”

Shadows Over Mutabor by Ilya Danishevsky

over the voids there are shadows secreting summer fat

where the gangling dragonfly children catch tadpoles and their chelicerae pierce

membranes

all you have to do is turn around and there’ll be nothing because smoke can hide capillaries in the night

the capillaries of workers and parchment students

it can hide the mind’s diligent arguments

and the heart’s diligent stuttering and those who went to see

skirting alongside wolfberry bushes aswarm in the suggestions of rusty fences

those who went to see a sparrow under the fake drapes of nettle in his

loose-leaf shroud

who went under the stooped sky and the summer heat drawn in and exhaled

out of sync with the pace of the worker and the misaligned sights of the student

the buyer of coffee or the researcher of the extent of the discursive field of the Antarctic

or Arctic or wherever there’s penguins

the pauses in our gestures divvy into glistening gaps

glimpses of gangling dragonfly children and of handknit

beanies

firmly fastened under the chin and words secured on a string slipped through each sleeve

and so on and all you have to do is turn around and no that’s not the right hand

or—not anymore

0717 (1) by Galina Rymbu

растения, сделанные из животных; гнилая сила узла, распространяющегося вдоль поверхности тонкий звук; плачущий газ, выходящий из земли в продолговатые камеры,

0717 (1) by Galina Rymbu

plants composed of animals; the festering strength of a knot dispersing a thin sound along the surface; a crying gas rising out of the earth into oblong cells, and the earth itself, flying into a pit, into a face; the doubling of foreign lands—through withdrawal; life—a wooden pipe thrust into the mouth; a clergyman in a tracksuit he found on the road and his dog, encased in a thin layer of film—opposite this; the sound of harmonica, night, a shattered mirror; the Nile flows through Moldova, and the Seine—through Sudan; the insane sex of beetles, merged into an amorphous sphere; the swarm of mind corrodes the road.

чёрный лечебник by Galina Rymbu

кто занес в карту своих состояний

твоё детское отвращение,

скользкие ладошки речного дна?

дрожит среда, когда мы

появляемся в ней.

Black Pharmacopoeia

who entered into the map of their moods

your childhood disgust,

the slippery palms of a river bed?

the medium trembles when we

appear in it

hello, I’m a beast,

a soundless beast

upon catching sight of me

empty nets of nature

flow downstream

on this earth

it’s no one’s business,

what we’ve said to each other.

invent me a car—“black pharmacopeia”

in the depths of sleep, in the adult pharma gloom,

where there’s sleepwalker-sounds, bodies-rattlings.

the car burns in the desert.

but you don’t have a lens. you don’t see.

invent me a body, taut, like the string of a bow,

instead of un-walkable mountains of fat,

and loose lumps of feelings,

imagine me a body,

abashed, like the glance of an aperture

hello, beast-ne’er-do-well, beast-pain,

melancholy’s beast, beast-psychosis,

dearest, you carry the end of time

on tail’s tip, your eyes

burn red

in the darkness of the adult pharma,

your palms, slippery as the auditoriums of a river bed, carry

the seeds of transformation

Jamie Lauer (2020 ALTA Travel Fellow, Spanish) is a Spanish–English translator and freelance editor committed to bringing more female voices from Latin America into translation. She holds an MA in comparative literature and a certificate in literary translation from Indiana University Bloomington, and she was awarded World Literature Today’s 2020 Student Translation Prize for Prose.

Hey, everyone. This is Jamie Lauer. I will be reading translations from a collection of microfictions by Chilean author Pía Barros titled Llamadas perdidas (Missed calls in English).

Pía currently lives and works in Chile. She is part of a generation of writers who established their careers during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Like many of her contemporaries, her fiction reflects concerns for the social injustices of that time period and the struggles of the country to move past them. She is also well known for the feminist themes found in much of her writing. Interestingly, her feminism is closely intertwined with her political resistance, for the Pinochet dictatorship had frequently positioned itself as “masculine” and dominant over “subservient” (or feminine) citizens.

The importance of every word choice in these short pieces has resulted in both joys and trials while working to bring them into English, and I want to thank the ALTA community for being a helpful and supportive space for me. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

Cuento tal vez oído en un bar a las tres de la mañana

A Lauro Zavala

Me dijo que el Emperador, conmovido por su prosa, le regaló diez años más de vida, al cabo de los cuales le concedería una noche para la lectura de lo que hubiese escrito y luego lo decapitaría.

El escritor miró a las estrellas y comprendió que su tiempo era un pestañeo en el universo. Tomó entonces a su hija pequeña y comenzó la tarea.

Story heard, perhaps, in a bar at 3 AM

To Lauro Zavala

He told me that the Emperor, moved by his prose, had granted him ten more years to live, after which he would be given one night so that what he had written could be read, and then he would be beheaded.

The writer looked up at the stars and realized that his time was a blink in the universe. He then took his young daughter and began his work.

At the end of the allotted time, the Emperor showed up at his door.

The writer brought the girl forward and said, “When you finish reading, you can return her to her mother and behead me.”

Then, the writer removed the silk mantle that covered his daughter’s body.

The Emperor studied her shoulders, her neck, her armpits, her pubis, and saw that the girl’s entire body was written upon in a tight calligraphy.

The Emperor loved the girl that night, I believe the story goes. They say he read her over and over again, but the remarkable thing is that at each turn of love, the stories blended together and the same tale could never be read twice.

The writer died an old man. The Emperor too died old and happy.

They say the girl never died.

Sometimes she goes out to bars and, before undressing, tells stories like this one.

On Writers

At the height of absurdity he sees repeated on all stages the graying outbursts and acts of childishness from the fellow youth of his generation.

———

Poets large and small adjust the height of the microphones up and down.

———

The snitch poet remembers there was a time when he thought everything would remain hidden, hushed and silent, like the dead.

Reflections

For Jorge and Óscar

The man enters following the usher’s circle of light. Another man, two rows back, sees the shape of his profile, half-lit by the colors reflecting off the screen. As he watches, he remembers the first time he saw that profile, in another movie theater, many years ago…

You were my best friend when I was seven. You were tall, gangly, a brother in poverty; my mother forbid our friendship because you were arrogant and bad-mannered. But you knew the twisting-turning staircases, the map of hushed adventure, that led us to the space behind the movie screen in the theater where we couldn’t gain regular admission. With a gesture that commanded silence, you passed a piece of mirror to my brother Oscar and me, and turning our backs to the curtain, we saw pirates, kisses, prohibited embraces, reading the subtitles in the mirror.

You broke the magic in the heat of the moment the third time we saw Atlas Against the Czar. You couldn’t help it—your nerves betrayed you. You stood up and shouted at the top of your lungs, “Behind you, idiot, the one-eyed man’s gonna stab you in the back!” The usher ran toward us, passing through the aisles and cursing under his breath, as we raced puffing and panting back the way we’d come. We managed to reach the top of the stairs, and then we turned our heads to look back. The door slammed behind us, and a heavy padlock sealed us out, shutting down our childhood forever.

We didn’t see each other again for twelve years, yet I always treasured the adventure of that movie theater, of that mirror-imaged life.

When the country became all fear and smoke and everything seemed like a dreadful movie in which we had been wrongly cast, I was made to walk with my hands behind my head in the prison camp. I saw the outline of your nose, as I had years before. But now you were the one with the helmet and gun, and I closed my eyes while you guarded us, trained your rifle on us.

Here, in this theater, I see the nape of your neck, as you saw mine before.

There is a tear in the world’s screens now.

I stand up, bring my hand to my pocket and, before leaving, move closer to your row; and even though I know from the expression on your face that you don’t recognize me, I offer you a piece of broken mirror.

Skin Against Skin

For you, Z and S

In the morning, I prepare breakfast and set the table for two. I open the curtains, and the sea enters the window from afar. While the bread warms, I run to put on the scent she likes. When she gets back from feeding the animals, we sit down to plan out the day. At night, our bodies intertwine, thighs open, and I lose the notion of my own skin as I’m enveloped in her hands, open completely like an offering so that her fingers, her mouth, her entire being may melt into my dampness and we may be consumed by the night and exhaustion.

Only rarely am I freely assailed by sadness, when we sit and watch the afternoon darken.

I stretch out my hand and find hers, which receives me. We say nothing, and our eyes mist over with old longings, with pain yet to come.

“My love,” I murmur to myself.

“My love,” she whispers almost inaudibly.

The entire afternoon perches on our eyelids.

“My love” floats in the air, mingling with our perfume, and there it remains.

Dong Li (2020 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellow, Chinese - Mandarin) is an English-language poet and translates from Chinese, English and German. He’s the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Grant and fellowships from Humboldt Foundation, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Yaddo and elsewhere. His full-length translation of the Chinese poet Zhu Zhu The Wild Great Wall was published by Phoneme Media.

Hi, my name is Dong Li, I have been working on a group of independent Chinese poets. Here’s an audio taste of their poems in my English version.

The first poet is Song Lin. I’ll read from an excerpt of a hybrid poem “Fragments and Farewell Songs.”

The ninety-year-old grandmother sits, elbows on the tablecloth. Outside the window the sea dims, heavier than lead. Light flees. Massive waves almost press on the roof. Then you think, poetry won’t replace bread or build an amusement park over a garbage dump. Oil stains can only be wiped out, bit by bit. You go out, toward a fragment of the ancient city wall.

***

Always something brimming in the eyes of animals reminds one of nostalgia, a language independent of any voice. The river, facedown, a coolness fills my lungs. In order to drink, one has to kneel forward. I used to kneel down like this in the mountains of home.

In the reflection a trembling face watches you

and breaks as you dip your hand in the water

but you feel it, the feeling stronger than ever.

Memory is another kind of rage.

***

This is a letter from elsewhere,

like graffiti around the corner

left by an anonymous alien,

now telling an unknown story.

If the urn of memory

is buried in an unknown place,

how will you tell your own story?

‘Father, I have been waiting for your return,

I have been standing on the mountain of our early years,

waiting for you.’ Like always,

an emptiness hits the spine after a closure.

To take fire out of snow, to walk without a trace,

that is difficult, let alone a life laid down in sacrifice.

The next one is Zhu Zhu.

Florence

A day of rush. Itineraries delayed

by getting lost. We study the map and forget

we are already in those pensively charming

alleys and structures, roaming obliviously

through its newly recovered anonymity.

Perhaps this is what Florence longs for,

otherwise it would not close its churches so often,

leaving tourists on the steps and in the square;

with magnificent marble it walls off a somber quietude

in the interior of a closed church, secreting emptiness.

Every place corresponds to the image of a person.

Florence reminds me of an old lady, standing

behind thick violet curtains looking outward,

mouth tilted in irony, in whose living room

hangs a small privately-owned Botticelli.

I worry about her restraint. Whenever people

praise our ancient art yet insist that

the Chinese today should only write political poetry—

in their imagination, aside from the bloodshed,

we do not deserve to seek beauty like artists before us,

nor do we have the right to indulge in the mundane and song;

in sharp spasms of morality, in the endless folds

of history, a life’s touch becomes

estranged from itself and is reduced

to footnotes about hardships and inhumane colonies.

Thus I would prefer that Florence be brightly open,

flat and even, like a plate at an outdoor café.

That waitress who comes to serve our desserts,

slowing her steps as she notices us staring at her skirt,

looks like a fluffy-haired, overripe Beatrice—

afternoon sunlight unloads the weight of every tree,

the leaves’ capillaries expand in the wind, and their shadows

pass over our foreheads and become another pause.

Guards talk to themselves in the arched hallways; peering

from every museum window, it is beautiful out and out.

Here’s Ye Hui:

Happiness Always Comes at Twilight

Happiness always comes

At twilight, and shadows lean closer

I remember a small city

The smell of May suddenly fills the sidewalk

And the arch that drips with tendrils

Inside my body

Hypnotic honey is being made

Faces from the deep

Of strange streets surface one by one, as if asking: why

Are you standing here? I do not remember

I only know

The countless days lost, the suddenly closed windows

Names fade toward their own end

Like smoke

I walk on the street, a drop of rain

Falls on my forehead, what does this say

Wait perhaps until evening to awake

Perhaps, not too late

A temple

Finally attains its calm in silent prayers

Outside it

A few sheep graze grass, slowly

As if darkness eats away light

Last but not least, Liu Ligan:

The Haze

The sky darkens like the night before revolution.

People cover their faces with their collars.

On the street they rush by, like melancholic

assassins. I take the subway home.

Someone talks about Tocqueville’s

The Old Regime and the Revolution.

I swallow saliva nonstop

to ease the piercing pain in my throat

as if the pulmonary lobe soaked whole in winter

this poisonous life, now inflamed.

No, I do not believe

any revelry that leads to the guillotine

nor do I think the world will turn

any better. But how to explain

this piercing pain, this mute

order? The future sticks in the throat

like a phlegm. I queue up

and wait to pass the ticket-checking point.

Outside, the dead haze seems

to be watered down by the imminent night.

Thank you very much for listening. Hope you have a lovely day!

Shoshana Akabas (2020 ALTA Travel Fellow, Hebrew) is a New York City based writer, translator, and teacher. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she taught for several years. Her writing and translations can be found in The Washington Post, The Kenyon Review, Asymptote, DoubleSpeak, The Believer, Electric Literature, and Elle Magazine, among others. She translates from Hebrew.

Relocation

A man wanted to meet me before he relocated from Israel to Texas. He thought I could potentially be his spouse and leave everything and move away with him, all because he was going to work somewhere in Texas and fulfill his lifelong dreams. I don’t have a problem with fulfilling lifelong dreams, but this man didn’t know me, and I wasn’t about to move to Texas with him. I’m all for dreams – I dream a lot – but his were too one-sided.

In the ad, he wrote:

Smooth-naped man with a big smile, interested in meeting a woman for relocation.

And me, why did I answer? I don’t know. I called as if inquiring for a friend, but it was really for myself. I was interested in where he was going – if he was moving up north to Haifa or just to some kibbutz right outside the city – but he was talking about a real relocation. He was in the seamanship business. One of those people who has a lot, and cracks the idea of struggling to make a living, because suddenly one thing has led to another and they have a new penthouse apartment and a jeep and a fixed salary without moving a finger, because that’s how it is when the whole industry works for you.

His ad was infuriating, because it didn’t say a single thing about him, except the big move he was planning. I wonder: what kind of girl did he think he was going to meet that way?

Two days after I called, he took down the ad. I guess he was confronted or attacked and didn’t know how to deal with it. He somehow thought that it was a legitimate ad for meeting someone, but there were so many things he failed to understand, and I don’t know why I called him in the first place. Stupid. Stupid sometimes, and naïve, just like him.

Party

Thursday, a week from today, at 8pm: a Lost Items Return Party. Arak and mini-sandwiches will be served. Where: my house. Why: you’re invited to get rid of all the things I’ve forgotten or left with you over the years. You’ll also have a chance to get back what you left with me.

Peter, you’re responsible for bringing back my black stockings and burgundy lace bra (my first lace bra). Amir #1 – I have two 188 Lightning Brigade shirts from your army days to return, as well as the kitchen apron I made and promised to give you as a present years ago. In return, I’m asking once again for that green carpet fabric you bought for me in Haifa, not realizing that it was so thick it wouldn’t even fit into my sewing machine. S. – I still have your letters from the school trip. You have a few of my Beatles albums. One of them is rare. Return it, please.

Amir #2 – I’m pretty sure I left my Dafna clogs with you after we split. When I wore them, they inspired me to cook and clean and do the things that normal people do. They’re definitely in the lower right-hand drawer of your blue dresser, the one that’s difficult to open, so it just rests on the floor. I’ve had too many dreams about that apartment.

Ethan, please return the hyrax shirt (ideally washed), and the David Foster Wallace book, The Girl With Curious Hair. Oh, and Amir #2, please do a thorough search, because I’m pretty sure that Kites – my favorite book for years, when I was certain you and I were Ludo and Lila – is still in your possession, even though you’ll probably deny it. But I don’t have it. Tomer, I left a bunch of rubber bands and a Carolina Herrera perfume bottle with you. You can keep “Requiem for Tel Aviv”; that was a gift.

This party will be a chance for all of you to meet each other, exchange notes on how I am in bed – sorry, S., I’m sure that something wonderful would have happened between us if I hadn’t been in 7th grade and too embarrassed to even hold hands – oh, and of course: help me make space for someone new.

Chapters from Coffee and Cake:

Purity

Purity kisses me goodbye as I leave the in-patient psychiatry department building. She ended up here because her boyfriend hit her, you understand? The police came and brought her here. Her. That’s what happens when nospeakhebrew.

Purity thinks I’m a soshaworka. She said in English, “Me die.” Later, they told me, “There are boundaries. You are a volunteer. What were you thinking, a kiss on the cheek?” They can’t understand the connection that forms between two women in the craziest place on the planet. I’m telling you, I don’t know which hell is worse.

Rift

There are days of unfathomable sadness, like a gaping rift in my heart just right of center which reminds me of the infinite loneliness seeping in, and the futility in everything, and the unending war, and the prevailing suffering in the world. Days in which I want to erase my existence, and the only thing standing in my way is the twelve diaries I’d leave behind as evidence. Today, though, is not that kind of day; today is an ice-cream day.

I think about my daughters, the daughters I still do not have, and how I will raise them in such grief, how I will stroke their hair and say, “Today Mommy’s not feeling well again, go eat some rice pudding.” In my imagination, I’m more fulfilled, more motherly: I’ve even cooked the rice in milk, and it’s different from the bottles of milk that Sylvia Plath left for her children, and the damn cookies. I believe, all in all, that I can function just fine, and when I have daughters maybe I’ll summon more strength.

You might ask: Who’s the lucky guy who will be enlisted to father these girls – how do I picture him? Very quickly, I enter a world of fantasies, a single-family home with a dog and cat that don’t fight and children who appear a little unkempt but do not lack devotion; the girl wears a white cotton dress, something very soft and soothing. Maybe the father is at work, maybe he’s a farmer. Yet, at this moment, there is no one more present than I am, I can wake from all these delusions, Good morning.

Sometimes I imagine myself to be so optimistic – far more optimistic and relaxed than I really am.

In reality, I am affected by every little thing, and I take everything to heart, and I certainly don’t wear cotton clothes, but a viscose-lycra blend – flexible fabrics that don’t breathe. And I let myself down; I tell myself repeatedly: you’re not capable. Once, I met a man who told me how he pats himself on the back and says encouraging words, “You are a man, you are a man’s-man!” and how he mans up and groans like an animal. But I’m not like that; excellence isn’t a value that exists in me.

It existed once. But then became entangled and worn down. I have no drive in me, and this is what sometimes makes me feel a little different, like I don’t have the fuel that motivates people to do and act and live, and, in some cases, it comes down to the cellular level, when I don’t even have the motivation to get up and make myself a sandwich or heat a Stouffers for a minute and twenty seconds in the microwave.

I never met that man again – a little drool leaked from his lips when he spoke, and I, with all my criticism, didn’t see myself attracted to him. It’s a terrible thing to say, because I also leak sometimes – not from my lips, but from my soul – and if someone were to write me off because of this, he would immediately be labeled an insensitive jerk, right?

Laura Nagle (2020 ALTA Travel Fellow, French, Spanish, Irish) is a freelance translator and writer based in Indianapolis. She holds an MA in Romance languages from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently translating Prosper Mérimée’s genre-defying 1827 hoax La Guzla from the French and working on her first novel.

I’d like to share my translation of “Maxime et Zoé,” which was published in 1827 in the collection La Guzla. It was presented as the French translation of an Illyrian ballad written by a musician named Hyacinth Maglanović. Before long, however, it was revealed that Maglanović and his compositions were the invention of a young writer named Prosper Mérimée.

I will read for you a few verses from the—as it turns out, original—French text, followed by my English translation of the full lyrics.

MAXIME ET ZOÉ,

PAR HYACINTHE MAGLANOVICH

O Maxime Duban ! ô Zoé, fille de Jellavich ! que la sainte mère de Dieu récompense votre amour ! Puissiez-vous être heureux dans le ciel !

Quand le soleil s’est couché dans la mer, quand le voïvode s’est endormi, alors on entend une douce guzla sous la fenêtre de la belle Zoé, la fille aînée de Jellavich.

Et vite la belle Zoé se lève sur la pointe du pied, et elle ouvre sa fenêtre, et un grand jeune homme est assis par terre qui soupire et qui chante son amour sur la guzla.

Et les nuits les plus noires sont celles qu’il préfère ; et, quand la lune est dans son plein, il se cache dans l’ombre, et l’œil seul de Zoé peut le découvrir sous sa pelisse d’agneaux noirs.

Et quel est ce jeune homme à la voix si douce ? qui peut le dire ? Il est venu de loin ; mais il parle notre langue : personne ne le connaît, et Zoé seule sait son nom.

Mais ni Zoé ni personne n’a vu son visage ; car, quand vient l’aurore, il met son fusil sur son épaule, et s’enfonce dans les bois, à la poursuite des bêtes fauves.

Maksim and Zoë

By Hyacinth Maglanović

Oh, Maksim Duban! Oh, Zoë, daughter of Jelavić! May the holy mother of God reward your love! May you find bliss in Heaven!

When the sun had set in the sea, when the voivode had gone to sleep, then could the sweet sound of a gusle be heard beneath the window of the lovely Zoë, eldest daughter of Jelavić.

And the lovely Zoë hastened on tiptoe to open her window, and a tall young man sat on the ground sighing as he played a love song on his gusle.

And the darkest nights were those he preferred; but when the moon was full, he hid in the shadows, and none but Zoë could catch a glimpse of him beneath his black lambskin pelisse.

And who was that sweet-voiced young man? Who could say? He came from afar, yet spoke our tongue; he was familiar to no one, and Zoë alone knew his name.

But no one, not even Zoë, had seen his face; for when dawn approached, he slung his rifle over his shoulder and set out into the forest to hunt game.

And he returned each time with the horns of a mountain goat, and said to Zoë: “Carry these horns with you, and may Mary preserve you from the evil eye!”

He wrapped a shawl around his head in the manner of the Arnauts, and no wandering traveler who ever encountered him in the woods ever saw his face beneath the many folds of gilt muslin.

But one night, Zoë said, “Come near, that I might touch you.” And with her pale hand she touched his face; and her own features felt no more beautiful than his.

And so she said to him, “I am grown weary of the young men of this country, all of whom pursue me; I love only you. Come tomorrow at noontime, when they will be at Mass.

“I shall mount your horse behind you, and you shall take me away to your country, to be your wife. Long have I worn opanci; I wish to have embroidered slippers.”

The young gusle player sighed and said, “What do you ask of me? I mustn’t see you during the day; but come down this very night, and I shall take you away with me to the beautiful Knin valley, where we shall be wed.”

“No,” said she, “I want you to take me away tomorrow, for I wish to have my nice clothes, and my father has the key to the trunk. Tomorrow I shall steal it, and then I shall come with you.”

He sighed again and said, “As you wish, so it shall be.” Then he kissed her; but the roosters crowed, the sky grew pink, and the foreigner departed.

And when the noon hour arrived, he appeared at the voivode’s door, astride a steed as white as milk; and on its haunches was a velvet pillow, for the comfort of the lovely Zoë.

The foreigner’s clothes gleamed with gold, and his belt was embroidered with pearls. But his brow was hidden beneath a thick veil; barely were his mouth and moustache discernible.

And the lovely Zoë mounted nimbly behind him on his milky-white steed, who whinnied with pride at his burden and galloped away, leaving whirlwinds of dust in his wake.

“Tell me, Zoë, have you brought the fine horn that I gave to you?” — “No,” she replied, “whatever would I do with such a trinket? I am bringing my gilt dresses, my necklaces, and my pendants.”

“Tell me, Zoë, have you brought the fine relic that I gave to you?” — “No,” she replied, “I hung it around my little brother’s neck, that it might heal him, for he is ill.”

And the foreigner sighed sadly. “Now that we are far from my home,” said the lovely Zoë, “halt your fine horse, remove this veil, and let me kiss you, my darling Maksim.”

But he said, “Tonight we will be comfortably ensconced in my home, where there are satin cushions; tonight we will lie together beneath damask curtains.”

“Alas!” cried the lovely Zoë, “is this the love you have for me? Why will you not turn your face toward me? Why do you treat me with such disdain? Am I not the most beautiful girl in the country?”

“Oh, Zoë!” said he, “someone could pass by and see us. Your brothers would chase after us and return us to your father.” As he said this, he struck his steed with his whip.

“Stop! Stop, Maksim,” she cried. “I see now that you do not love me. If you will not turn round to look at me, I will leap from this horse, even though doing so should kill me.”

And so the foreigner pulled up his horse with one hand, as with the other he threw his veil to the ground, and he turned himself round to kiss the lovely Zoë. But alas—Holy Mother of God!—he had two pupils in each eye.

Lethal was his gaze! Before his lips could meet those of the lovely Zoë, the young girl’s head fell to her shoulder and she tumbled, pale and lifeless, from the horse.

“Cursed be my father,” cried Maksim Duban, “who gave me this evil eye! I do not wish to cause further harm!” And with that, he gouged out his own eyes with his dagger.

He had the lovely Zoë buried with great ceremony; and as for himself, he entered a cloister. He did not remain there long; soon the lovely Zoë’s tomb was opened once more and Maksim was laid by her side.