This week, we take a look at Alexandra Niemi’s searing translation of Dmitry Golynko’s poem “Government Funding,” which deeply resonates with our uncertain moment.  Read the poem in full at The Offing.

From “Government Funding”
(Translated from the Russian)

1
a rusted-out sedan stuck in traffic, they arrived
in droves from the rebel region to enroll, life
embittered in solid chocolate, an osteopath
found signs of pelvic dislocation in a laborer
from the mining sector, in government funding,
the inevitable bankroll of negative emotions,
siphoned for military use with third-party
government assistance, cooked up Turkish style

2
white supremacists, approaching
a migrant, don’t break a sweat slapping
your noble visage, called that old-hag baby
momma the proprietress of the paunch, get to the top
thanks to brain excision, fast-tracked
by government funding, an armored security vehicle
cut off by a station wagon, going out with bats
for a good thrashing, practically clinging to his leg

3
a shabby drone takes off from a war base
acting the false target, instantly shot down
by the powers of the Protective Ground Forces,
rebels fall around the fucked supervisory mission,
pouring rain fills the government-funded
UAV, the rocket bombardment of enemy
supply stations was memorable, the likelihood
of missing utterly low, the time has come

4
an overgrown manchild importantly spitting
his wild image, going shopping along the main
drag of city life, greedily bringing his lips
closer to the bottle to get to the bottom
of non-things, government-funded
direct shipments of liquid soap are held up
en route, caught him red-sleeved, rubbed
his nose in what he’d done, toasted to the deal

5
sucked down a liter of brown liquor
in one swig before boarding, the microflora
turned out badly by all accounts, delayed
release didn’t earn any fans, thrown under
the bus on bad advice, with government funding
the formula of modernity isn’t manifesting
at all from the desired preconditions, a jacked
motionless body, risked a step aside

6
two thugs carrying a stereo system, the climax
of the shopping riot at the looted corner
store, the night before the savage collapse in prices
the cash machine was ramped to full speed, looks
dead on its feet, the government funding
includes educational developments, raises
tuition, the dodo bird’s getting fat, started
hiccupping from the booze, yawns sweetly

Alex Niemi currently teaches Russian at the University of Iowa where she received her MFA in Literary Translation in 2014. Her writing and translations from the French, Russian, and Spanish have appeared in Drunken Boat, Asymptote, Action Yes, Horse Less Press Review, Prelude, Dusie, and others. Her translation from the French of The John Cage Experiences by Vincent Tholomé is forthcoming in 2018 from Autumn Hill Books.

Dmitry Golynko’s books of poetry include Homo Scribens [1994], Директория [The Directory, 2001], Бетонные голубки [Concrete Doves, 2003], As It Turned Out [2008], Что это было и другие обоснования [What It Was and the Other Arguments, 2012], Приметы времени [The Signs of Time, 2017]. Golynko is a recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including CEC ArtsLink Residency at UPenn, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, KulturKontakt Austria, International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Ventspils Writers’ and Translators’ House residency. Currently he teaches film theory at St. Petersburg University of Film and Television Studies and works as an independent scholar in the field of contemporary visual culture, biopolitics, accelerationism and object-oriented poetics.

This week, we’ve been diving into Emily Goedde’s translation of selections from Wei-Yun Lin’s My Mother’s Parasites. Read the full excerpt in The Brooklyn Rail. 

Tapeworm
(Translated from the Chinese)

When I was a kid, I would often go down to the river to fish with my friends. The fish all had tapeworms, which we would pull out of their stomachs and bury in the ground (we were afraid dogs would dig them up). Then we would roast the fish and eat them. One time, a kid started to play near where we had buried a worm. He was digging and digging at something, but he didn’t know what it was. Later his parents came to get him, and holding our tapeworm in his hand, he proudly turned to them and shouted, “Ha ha ha! Look what I found! A shoelace!”

– A story my Polish friend E. told me

One of my clearest childhood memories is a tapeworm I saw in Tokyo’s Meguro Parasitological Museum.

It was a human tapeworm. I don’t remember how long it was—I just remember it was enormous, like the white paper used for receipt tape. Even wrapped in coils, it was many times longer that I was at the time. Now that I think about it, it must have been ten meters. Or maybe it wasn’t that long—it just seemed that way to me as a small child. It was simply beyond my comprehension.

The reason I saw this tapeworm at all was because of my mother. At the time she was assistant professor in the Parasitology Department at the celebrated NTU, National Taiwan University. When people asked her profession, she would give a sly smile and say, “I teach parasites,” implying that the students were the parasites. On the other hand, so as not to be “parasitical” students, her students would say they were in the microbiology department.

Parasites have been in my life for as long as I can remember. We were around each other a lot, like best friends or favorite toys (although they couldn’t play with me; nor I with them). They were like invisible friends.

Before I learned to say my ABCs or “How are you?” in English, I had memorized the complicated and hard-to-pronounce English word “parasitology.” It was listed on the elevator next to the floor of my mother’s department. Still very small, I had great aspirations to memorize all the other English words on the elevator as well: anatomy, pharmacology, biochemistry, public health.

Did I think about earning a PhD in biology like my parents? The answer is both yes and no. The first thing I remember wanting to be is a zoo director (because both my parents studied animals). Later I wanted to be an inventor (that was because of Doraemon) and an elementary school teacher (my parents and maternal grandmother and great-grandfather were all teachers). Then, when I was twelve, I set my heart on becoming a writer (after I read Zhang Xiguo’s book Chess King). Although when I was in middle school, I suddenly decided that I wanted to research jellyfish (because we went to Palao, where the jellyfish were amazing, and I wanted to feel what it was like to be stung).

My parents didn’t comment on my jellyfish announcement. My father just said, “If you want to study jellyfish, you should go to France, because that’s where the best research is being done.” To this day I still don’t know what they thought about all this. Were they glad, “Our daughter has finally chosen the right path.” Or were they worried, “What? She changed her mind again!” Or were they afraid, “Good Lord, not another PhD? Can no one in our family escape this fate?” Speaking of fate, perhaps becoming a “high-level academic” really is a fated, family curse. In the Qing Dynasty, my grandmother’s father was a xiucai, a scholar who passed the imperial exams at the county level; her older sister directed a girls’ school, and my mother and two of my uncles all got their PhDs in the States. On my father’s side, however, he is the only one to have a PhD, and that’s just because the first time he went to my mom’s house for dinner—and an interview—my grandmother pulled him aside and threatened him: “My daughter is going abroad for her PhD, if you want to marry her, you’ll go too.”

Emily Goedde has been translating and thinking about translation since she was a high school student, when she spent her senior year as an exchange student in France. After college she lived in China for several years, where she was a writer for ex-pat publications. She then returned to the states to earn an MFA in literary translation from The University of Iowa and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, where her “creative” dissertation was a study of how translating wartime poetry taught her how to listen. She has been teaching writing, translation, and listening for over ten years to students of many different backgrounds, and she has developed sound studies projects, a literary translation journal, and translate-a-thons, which bring students together with professionals to translate documents for nonprofit organizations. For the past two years, she has been working as a freelance literary translator, and has published her work in The Iowa Review, harlequin creature, and Jade Mirror: Women Poets of China, among other publications.

Wei-Yun Lin (林蔚昀) was born in 1982 in Taipei, Taiwan. She is the author of three prose collections: 我媽媽的寄生蟲 (“My Mother’s Parasites”),  易鄉人 (“Translanders”), and 回家好難: 寫給故鄉的33個字詞 (“So hard to return home”). My Mother’s Parasites won a Golden Tripod Award from the Taiwan Ministry of Culture in 2017 and was published in Korea in 2018. Lin has also authored a poetry collection entitled 自己和不是自己的房間 (“A Room of One’s Own and Not of One’s Own”) and is now preparing a picture book called 憤世媽媽日記 (“The Diary of a Cynical Mom”). She currently lives in Taiwan with her husband and two sons.

This week, we recover Meg Berkobien’s stirring translation of the first poem from Alba Cid’s poem cycle “Natural History. Cid’s work, originally written in Galician, considers the implications of the human/nature divide. Read the poem in full at The Offing.

“An Apocryphal History of Tulips, or Hallucination in the Low Countries”
(Translated from the Galician)

1.
perennials require quite some time to grow. as
for tulips, so
for poisoned arrows plied of yew,
for histories.

2.
contrary to popular belief
—florists included—
tulips are not native to Holland, but to Anatolia instead.

I’ll present this clarification with my hands deep in soil,
silken artillery, useless caution
of an alliance moved from finger to finger
and lost all the same.

perhaps I’ll even whisper to you:
Anatolia comes from the Greek
from Ionian colonnades it signified East
and as the fifteen hundred rooms of the Knossos Palace rose,
the word was welded to ana + tellein, which has come to be
dawn, which has come to be
rising over any horizon

tender western girl,
trust the history of words
for you’ll never be able to trust those of men.

Meg Berkobien is pursuing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. See more of her work at megberkobien.com.

Alba Cid (Ourense, 1989) is one of contemporary Galician poetry’s most fervent voices. Her stories and poems, for which she has won several awards, have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary publications. She is currently finishing her Ph.D. from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Literary Theory.

Over the next few months, we’ll be revisiting translations we’ve loved from graduates and faculty. This week, we’re proud to feature Monika Cassel’s gorgeous renderings of Daniela Danz’s triptych of poems featured in the July/August 2016 issue of Poetry and available here.

“We Are Alive. We Are for Everything”
(Translated from the German)

Professor Benjamin Paloff’s recent translation of Dorota Masłowska’s Honey I killed the Cats (2012) is out and receiving some much deserved attention. The publisher, indie darling Deep Vellum, describes the novel as “an incomparably hilarious satire of modern consumer culture, with everything from personality to religion commodified, like Virginie Despentes meets Blade Runner.” This is Paloff’s second translation of Masłowska’s work, the first being his “pitch-perfect” translation of Snow White & Russian Red (2009).

We suggest checking out Ambrose Mary Gallagher’s insightful review of the translation in Michigan Quarterly Review, or, for a quicker read, Matt Janney’s write-up in Calvert Journal or Bridey Heing’s overview in World Literature Today. Can’t wait to dive in? We love this excerpt in Lithub.

Congratulations, Professor Paloff!

We recently caught up with CL major Davis Boos, whose translation and critical introduction of Mario Benedetti’s “Geographies” and “Out of Pure Distraction” recently won him a Sweetland Upper-Level Writing Prize in the Humanities.

Boos is interested in the problems language helps to overcome and to create. The essay that won Sweetland’s award explores this duality and the exile. As you read this, he will be studying in Buenos Aires and, with luck, translating more of said author’s work.

1. Where are you from? What is your Major/ Minor? What year are you graduating?
   I’m from Orchard Lake, an easy forty-five minute drive from Ann Arbor. I’ll be graduating in the Spring of 2021.
2. How does your major/minor fit together and why did you choose them?
   Coming to U-M, my two majors—Comparative Literature and Environment—were only united by my interest in each subject. I started reading very young and have never stopped. This cultivated, nearly by accident, an appreciation for and respect of language. I found the English department too restrictive and landed in the Complit office. The Environment major came about through my appreciation for the outdoors and desire to preserve it. Now, after a few years, the connections have become, sometimes through force and sometimes organically, clearer. I plan to write a thesis comparing the environmental legal structures of Latin America and the United States, especially focusing on the somewhat recent codification of environmental rights.
3. What was your favorite thing about CompLit 322? Would you recommend this class and why
   The most enjoyable aspects of 322 are the freedom you are given as a student and the practicality of the course. Students can pick nearly any source text in any language and have the entire semester to produce a translation and their reflections on it. There is little distraction from the work. Through this largely independent task, you begin to hone a tangible and pervasive skill—the ability to translate well. It turns out to be harder than it sounds.
4. Can you briefly describe what your essay was about and what inspired you to write about this topic?
   The essay is a critical introduction to the translations I produced for the class. Broadly, it relates the linguistic exile we each experience as citizens of a multilingual world and the physical exile of Mario Benedetti, the author who wrote the source texts for my translation project and was forced to remain outside of his home country of Uruguay for over a decade.
5. What was the creative process like for you as a translator during this paper?
   It is largely a process of revision. The initial translation, which seemed fine while it was underway, was comically bad when I sat down to read it over. With each round of edits the translation became a fairer compromise between the original meaning imbued in Spanish and comprehension for readers of English.
6. What do you hope to do after you graduate and how will your major/minor help your goals?
   I plan on attending law school after graduation. Comparative Literature not only sharpens rhetoric, comprehension and critical thinking, as many humanities departments can claim, but fosters second (or third or fourth) language acquisition. This is a skill that is becoming fundamental in an increasingly smaller world.

Here are two of Davis’ favorite excerpts:

From “Geographies”:

Ah, she said. But I don’t think either of you would recognize the city. Both of you would lose that game of geographies. For example? Dieciocho de Julio no longer has trees. Did you know that there is no longer shade to walk beneath on that long avenue in the heart of our city?

Suddenly I realized the trees on Dieciocho were important, almost crucial for me. It was me that they had mutilated. I am without branches, without limbs, without leaves. Imperceptibly, the game of geographies transformed into an anxious investigation. We went through the city, our city, mine and Bernardo’s, with questions blurred by our desire.

From “Out of Pure Distraction”:

He never considered himself a political exile. He had abandoned his land because of a strange impulse that took form in three stages. The first when four beggars came up to him on the street one after the other. The second when a government official used the word peace on television and his right eyelid immediately began to twitch. The third when he entered his neighborhood church and saw Christ (not the one most prayed to or surrounded by candles but a tired Christ in a back hallway) crying like a saint.

Congratulations, Davis!

Our congratulations to Professor Michèle Hannoosh, a Comparative Literature affiliated faculty member, who has recently published a translation of Eugène Delacroix’s Journey to the Maghreb and Andalusia, 1832: The Travel Notebooks and Other Writings with Penn State University Press. 

From the publisher:

On April 5, 2019 the Department of Comparative Literature was pleased to host a book launch with Frieda Ekotto and Corine Tachtiris for Don’t Whistper Too Much (Rutgers 2019),  the English translation of Ekotto’s novel Chuchote pas trop.

In her translator’s introduction, Tachtiris notes it is “widely considered to be the first Francophone African Novel to represent same-sex relationships in a positive light.”  

Frieda Ekotto is Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Comparative Literature at UM, and Corine Tachtiris (UM Comp Lit Phd, 2012) is Assistant Professor at U-Mass Amherst.

Corine Tachtiris(translator) and Frieda Ekotto (author) at book launch of Don’t Whisper Too Much (Rutgers 2019)