Lassitude

It is from these long days of indescribable sickness

Where we would like to sleep the heavy sleep of the dead;

From these hours of anguish where existence weighs

On the soul and on the body.

So we search in vain for a gentle thought,

A joyful image, a rich memory;

The soul fights for an instant, and finally falls again, drooping

Under its deep troubles.

So all that enchants and all that we enjoy

Has for our open eyes only deceptive brightness;

And the dreamed happiness, if it comes, cannot exactly

Overpower our fatigue.

Question of Lust

Every thought that persists is contradiction.

Marcel Schwob

“Her performances have been enigmas to everyone so far,” says a character in Can Xue’s latest novel, Love in the New Millennium. She is talking about an opera singer, but her words sound just as apt as a descriptor for Can Xue’s experimental fiction: “Her songs aren’t about our past life, or about the emotional life of people today, but instead about the life we have never even imagined.” One of China’s most prominent novelists, Can Xue has called her work “literature of the soul.” Hers is a solo dance in the dark, a metaphysical picture of secular life that operates on its own elusive emotional logic. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen’s translation retains much of the zany humor from the Chinese while deftly easing readers into the meanings of names and idioms.

Poor drunk and deeply wounded humans
who believe that love cures everything.
And now they usually see that

Translator’s Note: The last protest Luis Montenegro attended in Nicaragua was on Mother’s Day in 2018. Pro-government groups fired on demonstrators that Wednesday, killing 15 and injuring more than 200. Luis stood next to a few. Not as part of any student group—a symbolic backbone of the protests—but rather as a citizen of the country and as a practicing doctor. He decided then that he couldn’t continue risking his life; he would contribute to the still-beating movement in other ways.

This poem, Joke 3, has been taken from “And here’s the song” by Hélène Sanguinetti, and has been translated from the French by Ann Cefola.

The following short story “La coda” (“The Tail”) comes from Luigi Malerba’s posthumous collection Sull’orlo del cratere (2018, On The Edge of the Crater). It has been translated from the Italian by Anna Chiafele and Lisa Pike.

This short story by Jung Young Su won the New Writers Award in Fiction from Changbi Quarterly in 2014, and has been translated from Korean by Anton Hur.

These poems first appeared in Anna Glazova’s collection For the Shrew, which won the oldest independent literature award in Russia, the Andrey Bely Prize, in 2013. They have been translated from Russian by Alex Niemi.

“It’s better for a star to never be around,” says Rikio Mizuno, the narrator of Yukio Mishima’s 1961 short novel Star (recently translated by Sam Bett for New Directions Press). “Absence is his forte,” he concludes. At twenty-four years old, Rikio has reached the height of his movie acting career. Young fans surround him on set. They idolize him, dress like him, mirror him. He finds them all disgusting, though he cannot find himself, despite appearing everywhere from press releases to the life-sized posters he plasters to the outside of his bedroom door. Celebrity has taken over his life. The entertainment bosses who hire and direct him have, in collaboration with the endless fans, agreed on who and what is: a bad-boy yakuza on screen, who in reality is an innocent heartthrob. His public life is controlled by this latter narrative, such that even when musing out loud about suicide, his assistant instructs him to make sure it looks like an accident if ever he decides to go through with it. An innocent heartthrob, after all, loves life, and never thinks of leaving this world.

“Is it normal to be ashamed of loving?” asks Édouard Louis in his third intensely autobiographical novel, Who Killed My Father. This searing short work, with its conspicuously declarative title, turns around questions that aren’t quite questions, and answers that are bold politically driven accusations. It opens with the speaker—who, as we know from interviews, is Louis himself—paying a visit to his father in the northern French village of his childhood after several years of separation. Yes, his father is still alive, but Louis argues that a lifetime of poverty, manual labor, malnourishment, and lack of education condemned him to an early death at barely 50 years old. Using fragments and scenes, Louis sketches an urgent, yet intimate, portrait of his father, who we learn is the “you” throughout the book. The detail is excruciating: His belly has been “torn apart by its own weight” and his heart “can’t beat without assistance, without the help of a machine. It doesn’t want to.”

In this interview, nonfiction MFA candidate Vera Carothers spoke to translator Emma Ramadan about her career path and about translating Delphine Minoui’s newly released memoir, I’m Writing You From Tehran, a story about Iran’s complex history of political unrest and one journalist’s search to be closer to her paternal grandfather.

In late 2013, nineteen-year-old Ayan and sixteen-year-old Leila abruptly departed their adopted home of Norway to join the Syrian jihad. They are the daughters of Somali immigrants Sadiq and Sara, and in Two Sisters, Åsne Seierstad tracks the devastation the family suffers in the wake of their departure and looks back in time to examine how two young women could become radicalized.

Whether you are a lover of Korean literature or someone entirely unfamiliar it, Heinz Insu Fenkl’s new translation of Kim Man-Jung’s 17th-century masterpiece The Nine Cloud Dream, recently published by Penguin, will be a revelation. Unlike earlier translators, such as James Scarth Gale and Richard Rutt, Fenkl attempts to recreate the experience of the novel’s first readers. This approach is fraught with difficulties because The Nine Cloud Dream, Korea’s most famous and best-loved work, was set in the China of almost a millennium before its composition and written in Chinese. According to the translator, that makes his task analogous to translating a 19th-century Russian work set in medieval France and written in Old French.

Jean Fremon’s latest work, Now, Now, Louison, translated beautifully from the French by Cole Swensen, could be described as a new possible answer to an ethical problem long-debated and long-agonized over by conscientious writers of fiction and nonfiction alike: what gives someone the authority to write about a real person? And, following that: what happens when you write about someone you love and admire, and give them a sort of second life in the written word? How much of this authority is real? How much is imagined?

The original Yiddish version of this story was published on November 3, 1917, in the newspaper Di Varheyt. It has been translated into English, for the first time, by Jessica Kirzane.

A notable achievement in contemporary Spanish artistic output, Nocilla Trilogy, by Augustin Fernández Mallo, is a beguiling, humorous, and challenging collection which explores the role of writing in the 21st century. With splintered narratives threaded through hundreds of chapters of varying length—from a few sentences to over eighty pages—Fernandez Mallo illustrates his thoughtful aesthetic strategy, fueled by an epistemological urgency, to shape contemporary approaches to literature in the information age.

Territory of Light chronicles the year-long journey of a mother and her daughter navigating a newly disorienting world in the wake of her husband’s swift and painful exit from their lives. Throughout these closely linked twelve stories, the reader intimately observes the family’s crushing experiences of anger, resentment, detachment, and desolation, transforming their relationships and, inevitably, their lives.

It Is Too Late Now

Look at the map, the clock and the calendar.

It is too late!

Here is the crux of the matter!

This is the hour to go our separate ways.

These translations of avant-garde Iranian modernist Bijan Elahi (1945-2010) have been co-translated from Farsi by Rebecca Ruth Gould and the Iranian poet Kayvan Tahmasebian and have been drawn from their forthcoming project, available here.