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)