Translation | The Common

All posts tagged: Translation

River Landscape

September 4, 2025 Fiction, Translation

Translated from the Spanish by JACK ROCKWELL

Piece appears below in English and the original Spanish.

Translator’s Note

Translating several of Bellolio’s stories, but especially this one, I’ve found that the hardest part has been the beginning. By the time the text hits its stride, somewhere in the second or third pages, it has swept me along with it, and it feels almost effortless—nearly as much so as Bellolio’s painstaking craft makes her own writing seem—to bob and weave with her sentences, to bunch up and then uncoil with the tense spools of her thought. But once I wrap back around to the beginning, I read the first few sentences I’ve translated and am shocked to find what feels like a jerky, uneven mess.

Bellolio rigorously calibrates the motions of her prose, and the elegance of her language applies some serious heft to the felt necessity of her narrator’s thought. This thought, and the careful patterning that structures it, are absolutely essential to this digressive, contemplative story. In the first long paragraph of “River Landscape,” a compassionate investigation of the interior life of a murderer fleeing his crime, a series of repetitions in the text mimics the destructive return of his victim’s face to his mind’s eye. While these repetitions spread out as the story progresses, in the beginning they are stacked thickly on top of one another. Finding the right rock and sway to carry the reader through this dense opening passage took some obsessive tinkering. I’m still not completely satisfied with it, but it’ll have to do for now. There was much going back and forth between alternatives, and much friendly (and incredibly patient) advice given by friends and colleagues, such as Jan Steyn, Emily Graham, Miharu Yano, and Dabin Jeong. I’m very grateful to all of them, and especially to Dabin, who introduced me to Bellolio’s work.

—Jack Rockwell

August 2025 Poetry Feature: Anna Malihon, translated by Olena Jennings

August 28, 2025 Poetry, Translation

By ANNA MALIHON

Translated from the Ukrainian by OLENA JENNINGS

From Girl with a Bullet, forthcoming October 2025

Presented in Olena Jennings’ seamless translation, Anna Malihon’s new collection, Girl with a Bullet, is one of the most important books of the year for those with an interest in the fate of Ukraine, a gift to Anglophone readers.

—John Hennessy, poetry editor

Table of Contents:

[The girl with a bullet in her stomach]

[Don’t go into that home]

[Now the only thing that you can do for her, Christ,]

[Unfold and dive into me, to my very bone,]

Talks with the Besieged: Documentary Poetry from Occupied Ukraine

August 21, 2025 Poetry, Translation

By ALEX AVERBUCH

Translated by OKSANA MAKSYMCHUK, MAX ROSOCHINSKY, and the author

Piece appears below in English and the original Russian and Ukrainian.

Translators’ Note

Alex Averbuch authored Talks with the Besieged on the basis of his engagement with group chats on Telegram and other public IM platforms by Ukrainian civilians in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. The present selection is excerpted from this larger work that explores the relentless and evolving nature of the occupation, capturing the initial bewilderment and disorientation experienced by those who stayed behind. These brief, fragmented exchanges reflect civilians navigating the chaos of war in real time. Oscillating between found poetry, a digital archive, and virtual testimony, the text presents the fears, anxieties, aspirations, and dreams of the community enduring liminality and existential uncertainty. In translating these dispatches, we’ve attempted to approximate the casual, matter-of-fact tone of participants, their poignant attempts to lighten the mood, encourage each other, and offer reassurance and consolation.While Telegram and many other IM platforms offer automatic capitalization for each new comment, we decided to use lowercase letters instead, capitalizing only toponyms and proper names. We have also removed the names of the original contributors, blurring the distinctions between them and obscuring where one utterance ends and another begins. We hope that these decisions help render the text as a continuous uninterrupted expression of hope and terror and create an impression of a living chorus, a droning and wailing unbroken human voice.

For A Secret Grievance…

August 7, 2025 Fiction, Translation

By EMILIA PARDO BAZÁN
Translated from the Spanish by ALANI HICKS-BARTLETT

The piece appears below in both English and the original Spanish.

Translator’s Note

Emilia Pardo Bazán’s short story “A secreto agravio…,” which I have translated here as “For A Secret Grievance…,” emerges, in part, from Pardo Bazán’s vibrant and perspicacious reimagining of another important work: “A secreto agravio, secreta venganza” [“For a Secret Grievance, a Secret Vengeance”], an Early Modern play written by the Spanish playwright and priest, Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681), and printed in 1637. Calderón’s tragedy, one of an unfortunate “trilogy” of wife-murder plays he authored featuring a fatal confluence of jealousy, suspicion, and problems of fidelity that led to the wife’s unjustifiable death, was hugely popular on the premodern stage while also being in dialogue with a wider genre of plays featuring uxoricide and conflicts of honor and faith (we might think of “Othello,” for example).

The Swan

July 3, 2025 Fiction, Translation

By MARZIA GRILLO

Translated by LOURDES CONTRERAS AND JULIA PELOSI-THORPE

Piece appears below in English and the original Italian.

Co-translating Marzia Grillo’s captivating short fiction “The Swan” (“Il cigno”) into English from Italian was an experimental process in which drafts ricocheted between the two of us over many months. This is in some ways typical for our collaboration… but, as we transform each piece, our approach morphs in fun directions, contingent on the fabric of our lives in a given moment. With “The Swan,” Julia fell in love with Grillo’s debut short story collection, The Sun’s Point of View (Il punto di vista del sole) in a Venetian bookstore and mocked up first and second versions on several high-velocity Italian trains in early 2022. Then, the project lapsed. Later that year, she and Lourdes met, were enchanted by one another, decided to co-translate, and Lourdes revived Julia’s draft. “The Swan” takes the reader into the middle of a lake in Lazio one afternoon, where, on a pedalo, a man proposes marriage for the nineteenth time to his unwilling girlfriend. The story is the first of the thirteen works of creative autofiction that make up the loving, disturbing world of The Sun’s Point of View. In a nexus of scenes across Grillo’s Rome, her immersive prose vivifies tormented characters who are moved deeply to desire (and destroy) themselves and others. As real and imagined figures fight for secure understandings of a reality that is suffused by a constant fog of instability, we the translators relish the challenge to locate in English what we can of the dark sparkle of Grillo’s dialogue, twisted narrative arcs, the emotional impetus of their intrigues, and their web of thematic resonances.

— Lourdes Contreras and Julia Pelosi-Thorpe

June 2025 Poetry Feature: New Poems from Pedro Poitevin, Aiden Heung, and Ellie Black

June 26, 2025 Poetry

This month we’re pleased to bring you poems by PEDRO POITEVIN translated from Spanish by PHILIP NIKOLAYEV and new work by 2025 Disquiet Prize finalists AIDEN HEUNG and ELLIE BLACK.

Table of Contents:

Pedro Poitevin (trans. Philip Nikolayev), “Sonnet from the water before dawn” and “Self-Portrait as a Dog”
Ellie Black, “The Confessional” and “Revelator”
Aiden Heung, “The Theory of Evolution”

Two Poems by Hendri Yulius Wijaya

June 5, 2025 Poetry, Translation

By HENDRI YULIUS WIJAYA
Translated By EDWARD GUNAWAN

Content warning: Some offensive slurs that appear in the source text have been carried over into the translation.

Translator’s Note

Fueled by far-right nationalist politics and religious extremism, persecution and violence from both state institutions and the general public against queer and trans Indonesians have reached unprecedented levels—mirroring similar disturbing patterns worldwide.

May 2025 Poetry Feature: Dante Alighieri, translated by Mary Jo Bang

May 29, 2025 Poetry

This month we’re honored to bring our readers an excerpt from MARY JO BANG’s new translation of Dante’s Paradiso, out soon from Graywolf Press.

From Paradiso: Canto XI

The first eighteen lines of this canto are Dante’s elaboration of human difference, his lament over the failure of some humans to realize their gifts, and an exultation for the opportunity he’s been given—which is to enter Heaven before he has died.

Thomas Aquinas’s clarification of “where they fatten up” begins at line 22 and continues without interruption until the end of the canto. In lines 124 to 126, Thomas complains that Saint Dominic’s flock, the Dominican friars, are showing signs of ambition and greed, seeking honors and offices. They are wandering away from the tenets of the order, which are to live a life of humility and self-sacrifice. In lines 137 to 139, he says, “You’ll see what has splintered the tree, / And how the remedy for that can be deduced from // ‘Where they fatten up, if they don’t lose their way.’” The tree is the Dominican order, and it has been scheggia (“splintered” or “chipped away at”) because so many of the sheep have strayed. If the monks and clergy remain true to the principles set out by Saint Dominic, they will be enriched with the “milk” of spiritual nourishment and “fatten up” the way sheep are meant to.

Throughout the Divine Comedy, Dante is concerned with the ways in which selfishness destroys the social fabric. He details how people pay for that selfishness in Hell or by having to trudge up the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory. But Dante isn’t only interested in what happens after death, he is also talking about how we live while on earth. His life was destroyed by the petty grudges of partisan politics. As an exile, he was under constant threat of death. He takes great risks in writing his poem because he hopes that by addressing the greed and megalomania that is destroying Italy, he can help put a stop to it. He also knows that this is not a time-limited problem but a timeless one, which is why he wrote the poem in the vernacular—so that, unlike poems written in literary Latin, it would change over time. He said he was also writing his poem in the vernacular so that it could be read by everyone. That is why I translated the poem into the American vernacular.

—Mary Jo Bang

Amman: The Heaviness and Lightness of Place

May 5, 2025 Amman Portfolio, Essays, Issue 29, Issue 29 Essays, Translation

By HISHAM BUSTANI
Translated by NARIMAN YOUSSEF

Amman is not incidental. The sayl, the stream that patiently carved a path between seven hills for thousands of years, drew—as waterways often do—the din of life. It was somewhere close to here that the Ain Ghazal statues were found. Nine thousand years old, captivating in their simplicity, they seem to be about to speak as you contemplate their black-tar eyes, the details of their fine features, their square torsos and solid limbs.

Wandering

May 5, 2025 Amman Portfolio, Essays, Issue 29, Issue 29 Essays, Translation

By ALA JANBEK
Translated by ADDIE LEAK

Amman was culture, colorful walls, and distant souqs in the old city where Mama tried to buy everything we needed in one trip. Na’ur was where my grandfather built the mill near a spring, where our home by the hill watches the sun set behind Palestine, far from the chaos of the valley.