a sort of present

I may have mentioned this before. That I'm translating a couple of stories by David Foster Wallace. That they ought to be coming out somewhere. That it's a puzzle he hasn't been rendered in Danish yet, apart from one story in a journal some years back. Anyway, one of the stories I'm translating, one that I've actually finished, as far as I can tell, is called 'Suicide as a Sort of Present', which is a poignant title given that Wallace only recently chose to leave this life and find another. The story is a raw, fleshy slab of psychology. That's how I want to describe it. It starts like this in the English original:

There was once a mother who had a very hard time indeed, emotionally, inside.

You can read the rest in the collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, first published in the USA in 1999.

have a cigar

Thomas E. Kennedy (here>>) is a busy chap. If he's not lecturing in America, writing novels about his adopted city of Copenhagen, or translating Danish literature, he may well be updating his blog 'A Shout from Copenhagen' for the literary journal Absinthe: New European Writing. Have a look at this piece, for example, a great little story about translating celebrated Copenhagen beatnik Dan Turèll (above).

welsh for bladder

More: Welshmen pissing themselves here>>.

welsh

It's not Welsh's fault (see here>>).

filled newspaper space

Here's a recent piece from The Times. An author slags off translators and then gets slagged back at by respondents in the comments box. I've already forgotten about it.

blind man's bluff

Niels Hav, from Lemvig in northern Jutland, has already established himself overseas as a contemporary Nordic voice with a number of foreign-language publications in e.g. Arabic, Italian, Spanish, Turkish and Dutch. But it is in Canada in particular that he has made his mark outside Denmark. An English collection of his poetry, God’s Blue Morris, translated by Patrick Friesen and P. K. Brask was published by Crane Editions in 1993, with a second collection, entitled We Are Here, put out by Book Thug of Toronto in 2006. My own translation of Hav's poem Blindebuk [Blind Man's Bluff] will be appearing in the Vancouver-based journal PRISM International in the spring. In the meantime, here's the original.

Blindebuk

De gav ham et tørklæde for øjnene

og snurrede ham rundt, den leg elskede han.

Svimmel af mørke tumlede han henrykt omkring

mellem sine kusiner, tre gratier

hvinende af latter. De lo ad ham, hans eufori,

som også var deres. Han fangede dem én for én,

men gættede systematisk forkert, og festen fortsatte

hele eftermiddagen. Han var lykkelig i sit mørke,

utrættelig og dristig, en grænse var passeret,

han rørte ved deres blussende ansigter;

hans hænder var lykkelige. Og han ønskede bare

at blive ved, da de ubarmhjertigt løsnede sløjfen

og trak tørklædet af ham. Han stod fortumlet

og grædefærdig, chokeret af lyset,

som for et øjeblik gjorde ham fuldstændig blind.

© Niels Hav

the buddhist

I mentioned how I was working on two new stories by Dorthe Nors. One of them is called The Buddhist. The first paragraph here provides a good idea of where we're at: it's an acerbic, stingingly caustic portrait of a man on his way over the brink, oblivious of everything but his own transcendence. As for the Citroën Berlingo, I think I can reveal that it plays a central role in the man's nemesis. It should be noted, however, that this work of fiction is of course in no way intended to characterise all Berlingo owners. Me, for example.

Before the Buddhist became president of the aid organisation People to People he was an ordinary Christian and a government official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was he who wrote the Foreign Minister’s speeches and thereby put words into the Foreign Minister’s mouth. It was a way of lying and at first it didn’t bother him any. Then it started bugging him because he found out he was a Buddhist. It didn’t just come to him all of a sudden that he was a Buddhist. The Buddhist as an idea more like crept up and settled in him shortly after his wife said she wanted a divorce. The Buddhist came in to him and sat down at the opposite side of his desk in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He contemplated the Buddhist and thought it was a good format to step into. Buddhists are good people. They’re deeper than most. Buddhists can see connections no-one else can. These were all qualities he recognised in himself, but which all could be improved upon, and so he became a Buddhist. If he hadn’t become a Buddhist, the divorce would have hurt that much more, but a Buddhist gains insight through pain. The more it hurts, the wiser the Buddhist becomes, the government official thought and stopped being a Lutheran.

© Dorthe Nors, 2008

Translation © Martin Aitken, 2008