three percent: per højholt

Chad W. Post, master of Open Letter Books out of the University of Rochester and the force behind accompanying translation blog Three Percent wrote this about some translations I did of Per Højholt's astonishing Praxis 8: Album, Tumult. I'm not finished with Højholt yet, not by a long chalk.

Click here: Three Percent: Per Hojholt in Calque

niels hav

Niels Hav from Lemvig in West Jutland, latterly of Copenhagen's Nørrebro district, is one of this country's finest poets, and, I think, my personal favourite. I've been fortunate enough to translate some of Niels Hav's poems into English and to have had them published in various journals in Canada and the US. Niels tells me some more are coming up in Absinthe #16 this autumn. Listen to the sound of Lemvig here>>. Read the words here:

KÆRLIGHED

Det er sådan et stort ord.
Eller fik jeg det galt i halsen?
Elske, hvad er det,
når det kommer til stykket?
Mange veksler med tiden den store
kærlighed til småpenge.
Jeg elsker dig. Og du hiver stikket ud.
Jeg elsker dig. Og du kyler min bog
i nakken på mig.
Jeg elsker dig. Og verden eksploderer!

Vi tørster efter hinanden i uvidenhed,
ligesom elefanter.

Uden børn ingen lykke,
sagde Schumann. Clara fødte ham
syv børn som modgift mod melankoli.
Det var ikke nok!
Han blev sindssyg, forsøgte selvmord
og døde på en nerveanstalt.
Hun spillede klaver. Det er dét,
de kalder kærlighed.

Niels Hav © 2004

red hair

Packed house last night at Copenhagen's LiteraturHaus where I shared the bill with Thomas E. Kennedy, Line-Maria Lång, Niels Hav and Boy in Blue for the launch of The Girl With Red Hair (buy it here>>), an anthology put out by Serving House Books in the US and including Dorthe Nors' Gwen, Betsy and Anne-Marie Jensen in my translation. Great soup, too.

the fish

Novelist and story writer Charlotte Weitze has a new collection out here late February entitled Det hvide kvarter. Publishers Rosinante asked me to translate one of the stories in it. Hear Tim Hinman read The Fish here>> on Charlotte's website.

anyway

There was a piece in one of the dailies here about how miserably we book translators are paid. This is true, I imagine, but we do it anyway.

conjunction

US writer Fiona Maazel, author of Last Last Chance (here>>), has done a great little piece for the website of A Public Space on Dorthe Nors' stories in English. Read Dorthe Nors: A Master of Conjunction here>>. While you're at it, buy the journal, too.

mirror lands honoured

Congratulations to Birgithe Kosovic, whose magnificent Det dobbelte land [Mirror Lands] just won the prestigious Weekendavisen Award for 2010.

There's an English sample out there somewhere, a short excerpt from which has already been put up here>>.

Publishers of the world arise from your slumbers!

wung-sung

Jesper Wung-Sung (born 1971) is an almost improbably productive writer whose hyperactive pen has produced at least a dozen books (all of them critically acclaimed) since winning the Danish Debutant's Award at the Copenhagen Book Fair in 1998. Throughout his work runs one glorious theme: male existence, dissected in all its phases in a remarkable blend of realism and absurdist humour. From the ecstatically received 2009 collection of stories Trælår [Dead Leg](Danish review here>>) comes a story which in every thinkable way is typical Wung-Sung right down to its cryptic title. It'll be published in Absinthe #16 this autumn, and I've called it Close only counts when you're doing your damnedest. It starts like this:

They had buried Mort the Wart in the yard.
Of course, they had not actually buried Mort the Wart in the yard. Not all of Mort the Wart, for his head was sticking up out of the lawn. It had been necessary, though, to gag him. To put a stop to his yelling. The cries. The screams.


Extract © Jesper Wung-Sung
Translation © Martin Aitken

red hair

Serving House Books in the US have just published an anthology of stories entitled The Girl With Red Hair, edited by Walter Cummins and Thomas E. Kennedy. The book includes fine contributions by Danes Niels Hav, Line-Maria Lång (who graces the cover) and Dorthe Nors, whose story Gwen, Betsy and Anne-Marie Jensen appears in my translation. According to the publishers' site (here>>), the book will be available on Amazon soon. I got mine free.

prizes

Janne Teller's remarkable novel Nothing, published in my translation last year in the US and Canada by Simon & Schuster imprint Atheneum, has garnered noteworthy acclaim, being awarded a Printz Honor as one of the top five novels for young adults in the US last year, and a Batchelder Honor as one of the year's three best translated novels in the same category. These are actually major honours. I'd like to think they might have just a little bit to do with me. Nothing will be published in the UK and Commonwealth by Scottish publishing house Strident in April.

a public space

New York journal A Public Space (hereby warmly recommended) has linked to this blog. Meaning I'd better do something about it. Note new design. Note new enthusiasm. A Public Space has just published my translation of Dorthe Nors' magnificent story The Winter Garden in their issue #12. Buy it, it's great.

dictionaries

Dictionaries. Never use 'em myself.

mirror lands

He sits himself down on a rock protruding from out of the dry ground. The light is sharp between the fig trees on the mountain slopes around him. He screws up his eyes as his gaze passes over the trees and beyond to the mountains on the other side of the Popovo valley. In his hand at his knee hangs a letter. A white sheet of paper, lines of hastily scribbled letters slanting sharply to the right. Each word utters itself without him reading. They say that his wife is dead and that she will be buried in Dubrovnik beyond the mountains the day after tomorrow at 4 pm. That she was found on the bathroom floor. That it happened while his son, who has written the letter, and his daughter-in-law were in with the neighbours for no more than half an hour, and that she could not have been lying there very long. At the bottom of the page, a busy little symbol is scrawled, and although it is almost quite illegible, he recognises the name of his son.

[...]

Now Frane’s coughing returns to him. It consumes him with guilt about the sour, sulphurous feeling in his stomach that its maddening sound on occasion brought up in him. Although he by no means wished to be like that, he was: He was unable to abide the sound of her asthmatic hacking that both of them were aware sooner or later would be the death of her. He found it simply too intimate an experience to hear the mucus rattle in her throat before being loosened, to hear the sputum being worked against the roof of her mouth before being swallowed or spat out into the lavatory. It offended his modesty in the same way as when people champed on their food or quite unashamedly enjoyed the sound of their own singing. He could not endure this demonstration of the force of her asthma, its insufferable momentum and predictability. The illness was a problem medicine was unable to solve, merely adjourn, and which could only annihilate itself by unfurling to the full and killing her.
He picks up the letter from his knee and reads it again: Frane is dead. They found her on the bathroom floor. She had been lying there for half an hour at the most, while Tomislav and Svetlana were in with the neighbours having coffee, and she will be buried from the Danče church the day after tomorrow at 4 pm. Not a word does it say about needing him home.

extract from sample translation

© Birgithe Kosović & Gyldendal, 2010
Translation © Martin Aitken, 2010

how they look

PRECIPICe is a literary magazine out of Ontario, Canada. The new issue just out contains a recommendable review of Scandinavian literature, including poems by Jørgen Leth and Niels Hav in my translations, one of which is this one from Leth's 1987 collection Hvordan de ser ud [How They Look]:

HOW THEY LOOK

How they look
not how they are

stop along the way
lay small things out

investigate what happens
vinyl flashes across the fields

a tree burning
a horse that looks up and listens

describe how they look
a person with an onion in their hand

a handful of earth with metal in it
not how they are


from Hvordan de ser ud [How They Look] (1987)

faeries are cool (new vampires)

Carlsen have got me translating the third in Melissa Marr's bestselling urban fantasy quartet of Wicked Lovely novels, this one entitled Fragile Eternity. Read about the book here>> and visit Melissa's website here>>.

Tons of readers for this, I reckon. And one of the characters smokes. Faeries are cool.

poems

Translations of mine just out. 'My father's wristwatch', a poem by Niels Hav in The Los Angeles Review (here>>) and 'Boredom: seven poems around a theme' by Jørgen Leth (selected by the translator) in The Literary Review (here>>).

More from both writers to come soon in Canada's PRECIPICe Magazine.

nothing

My translation of Janne Teller's Nothing, published this spring on Simon & Schuster's Atheneum imprint in the US and Canada, will be coming out on Strident in the UK & Commonwealth in April 2011.

silhouette of a sinner

Leonora Christina Skov's extraordinary queer Gothic salute Silhuet af en synder [Silhouette of a Sinner] came out here a couple of weeks ago on Rosinante to ecstatic reviews across the board. Lilian Munk Rösing at Information (here>>) summed it nicely:

[a] metaliterary, pulpy nest of plot-boxes packed with ghosts and ghouls, lesbian incest and voyeurism, cross-dressers and changelings ...

Here's a short extract - the book's opening paragraphs - from the English sample I did recently for Gyldendal. It's already stirring up interest in the UK. Watch this space.

August 1973

These many years gone by not a single day has passed without me thinking of the time I returned to Liljenholm. It was in November 1941, a little after four in the afternoon, and just where the avenue of lime trees comes to an end and the manor reveals itself in full view, my feet stopped all by themselves.
“My God!”
In front of me, my dearest Nella turned around. Her skin was like porcelain, even in the wind that had long since got the better of her carefully done hair; she brushed a long curl away from her eyes and put down her suitcase for a moment.
“What’s the matter?”
She took no notice my pointing finger, but simply picked up her suitcase again and pulled her collar further up around her ears.
“I’d suggest you get a move on,” she said over her shoulder.
“But can’t you see …?”
“Do hurry. It’s going to rain soon.”
It had been five years since we had been there last, and in our absence, the hall had fallen in on itself like a hunched old man. Or perhaps it was merely the wilderness that had grown up around it. Bare creepers lay in wait in the fading light of afternoon, having crawled up the redbrick walls and covered most of the entrance. The hole in the wilderness where the main door had to be resembled something more than a hole, however. It looked like … well, I hardly know how to put it. But imagine opening a thick, old book one wishes to read again. One turns the pages, oblivious, the paper crackles and naturally one is expecting a familiar story to begin. Perhaps it even says Chapter One, yet underneath one finds only a hole the size of a fist, a hole in every single page so all that remains are useless, amputated sentences. That is how it felt to see Liljenholm again. Even as I went closer, I saw only disquieting darkness where the entrance was supposed to be.
“One could hardly claim Liljenholm has aged with grace,” I commented, if only for the sake of saying something to make things settle again, and Nella was almost inside the hole now. Flanked by two moss-covered stone lions, rampant and with teeth bared. I vaguely remembered having seen them before.
“Hardly. Had you expected it to?” she asked and patted one of the beasts, the one on the right that had lost half its wig-like mane, a clean break from the top of the head to a point midway down its muscular back. Her matter-of-factness surprised me, although really it oughtn’t to have. After all, this was Nella’s childhood home, not mine. Eighteen long years spent here with her mother, Antonia von Liljenholm.
Are you familiar with the name? I hope so. Regardless of what one otherwise may think about Antonia, she was certainly one of Denmark’s leading Gothic authoresses up to World War II, though the passage of time has been unkind to her reputation. Even the most major of her thirty-two novels have been forgotten, and if we are to include her personal life history, mention must be made of the fact that all those around her died or disappeared (or, in Nella’s case, fled to Copenhagen), leaving Antonia to spend the last ten years of her life alone in the hall here. She died of cancer at the age of fifty-two. In 1936.
“To think she could bear to live here on her own,” I exclaimed, just as the outline of the main door loomed up in front of us, Nella putting the key in the lock and turning it three times. We were here only to bring order into Antonia’s personal documents and to sort through the heirlooms before the manor was to be sold and our futures could begin. Well, Nella’s future, to be exact. I was here just to keep Nella company and to lend a hand where I was able. An appendage, one might say, of no great weight, though the latter description, in consideration of my appearance, would require some small amendment. Nella turned her head and caught my gaze. Her face was devoid of expression, like a bedsheet that had been ironed.
“Are you ready?” she asked, then pushed at the door until it opened with a groan of capitulation. I assume I said yes. But I was not in the least bit ready at all. Even today, so many years later that it could all be something imagined, just to think of the moment I stepped over the threshold is so very disagreeable. Everything I knew disappeared behind me without my having any idea what was going on. Everything I was suddenly became open to question, and I do not even know what disturbs me the most: the fact that it happened, or that it just as easily might not have happened.

For the fact of the matter is that I never left Liljenholm again. That is the short version. And the long one? You shall have it, of course, as soon as this foreword is written to end. Yet I shall linger a moment before handing the pen to that considerably younger version of my self. She who committed to writing all that happened at Liljenholm that winter, and all that had happened in the years before, and who later, in 1943, published it all as the real story, Silhouette of a Sinner. Under the rather inadequate pseudonym A. von Liljenholm, no less. But before I lose myself entirely in the past, allow me to draw attention to the fact that I am writing this foreword under duress. I cannot see that a book such as Silhouette of a Sinner should have any need at all of a foreword, yet my publisher seemingly is of a different opinion. Bella, she is called. She is Nella’s daughter, and I have never before found difficulty saying no, but I cannot possibly say no to a person who resembles Nella so much. My Nella. That is what love does for one.

© Leonora Christina Skov and Rosinante/ROSINANTE&CO, Copenhagen 2010
Translation © Martin Aitken 2010

arken

My Danish translation of Boyd Morrison's The Ark came out yesterday on Lindhardt & Ringhof.

auricula

The Silence of 1915 occurred on September 7 and embraced Western Europe and the countries from the Baltic in the north to the Balkans in the south. Since it was unforeseen, no accounts of it exist. Many failed to even perceive it, fleeting and incidental as it was, and this despite their own participation in it. There was no question of recalcitrance, neither was there time. The silence occurred, catching Europe between two breaths and with one leg aloft, as it were, whereupon everything and everyone carried on as though nothing had happened. How indeed should one have known that the silence one so unwittingly upheld embraced all of Europe? Naturally, it might have been made the subject of discussion immediately following its occurrence, but since its few witnesses were unreasonably distributed – many lived far from civilised parts, in regions where silence already was their confidant – the subject was quickly changed. The news media, who besides participating in the event also received incredulous enquiries concerning it, realised immediately that it would be impossible to verify and might therefore lead to most anything at all, and hushed it up. He who seeks information about the event is even now, so many years after, at a loss. A Bulgarian agronomical journal mentions it in a subclause in the context of an article on watermills in the north-eastern provinces, and the pseudonym Ludwig Renn treats the phenomenon with ill-bestowed irony in his novel of 1936, Vor Grossen Wandlungen. It should also be noted that in France in 1921 initiative was taken to repeat the event on its 6th anniversary, though this remained but a local enterprise, betrayed by a dog in Containcourt and pigeons in Honfleur.

(extract of sample translation)

© Per Højholt & Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag A/S, 2001
Translation © Martin Aitken, 2010