Translation | The Common

All posts tagged: Translation

Instant Karma

October 26, 2026 Essays, Issue 32, Issue 32 Essays

By RIMA BRUSI
Translated from the Spanish by JESSICA POWELL

Excerpted from Phantoms

In January 1970, two months before my conception, John Lennon and Yoko Ono shaved their heads, and a few weeks later they released the single “Instant Karma!”

If this thing I’m writing were a script, my parents’ acid-filled days on New York’s Lower East Side would be accompanied by this song. This is what I’m thinking about today as I talk to my mother, Teté, on the phone. This is mainly how we communicate: in-person visits rarely go well for us. In fact, our life together has always been more or less a disaster. We maintain our relationship, what remains of it, with the help of the telephone and letters.

Two Poems by Dalia Taha, translated by Sara Elkamel

October 21, 2026 Dispatches

By DALIA TAHA
Translated from the Arabic by SARA ELKAMEL

a gnarled tree in front of a sunlit landscape

Ramallah Landscape, photograph by Dalia Taha

Ramallah, West Bank, Palestine

Enter Zakaria Mohammed’s Balcony

On Zakaria Mohammed’s balcony,”
we notice just how close
the settlement is.
Then we ignore it and drown
in conversation, its lights
swelling before us
the way a car’s headlights
flood your whole existence
before its body of steel crashes into you.

The Messengers

October 1, 2026 Fiction, Translation

By ZHU YUE
Translated by ALYSSA ASQUITH and JIANAN QIAN

Story appears below in English and the original Chinese.

Translator’s Note:
Zhu Yue’s characters often find themselves disembodied: their eyes fly away; their teeth fall out; their bodily secretions are preserved in museums; their fingers are replaced with wheat noodles; they find their own heads buried in their backyards.

Chupacabra

September 3, 2026 Fiction, Translation

By RODRIGO URQUIOLA FLORES
Translated by SHAINA BRASSARD

Story appears below in English and the original Spanish.

Translator’s Note
It is a pleasure to share my translation of this short story from contemporary Bolivian author Rodrigo Urquiola Flores. This semi-autobiographical work of fiction transports the reader to the windswept edges of the city of La Paz during the early and mid-1990s, when young children like the author and myself were cognizant of the mysterious and feared chupacabra as a topic of conversation and media coverage.

The story is part cataloging of the author’s first significant experiences and memories. Thrillingly, the narrator takes us on a journey from the neglect and loneliness of his spare, dusty home to the high drama of the soccer stadium. It is nothing short of a revelation. In this third space, he finds seemingly all the raw materials of life: effort, teamwork, luck, heartbreak, agony, triumph, relief.

Through the storytelling of his Aymara grandmother, Urquiola also takes us back in time to the Ocobaya hacienda, a site of subjugation and domination. I have resisted translating – and therefore decontextualizing – pongo, patrón, and amo, the unique terms of racialized power associated with this social and economic system. Curious readers are invited to learn more about haciendas, a significant feature of not-so-distant Latin American history with meaningful connections to the plantation system of the United States.

Baleia

August 18, 2026 Fiction, Translation

By GRACILIANO RAMOS
Translated by MILA MASSAKI GOMES

Translator’s Note
In Portuguese, “Baleia” means whale. Baleia… how funny it had seemed to me when I first encountered Graciliano Ramos’s work — a dog named “Whale.” It isn’t, of course, a simple or even silly name. In this short story, excerpted from the famous Brazilian novel Vidas Secas (1938), we follow a dog as she lives out her last miserable, heart-wrenching moments. Starved, thirsty, and rabid, Baleia is no more than a limping bag of bones to an outsider’s eyes. It is ironic: a skinny, limping dog, easily killed, named after an enormous, powerful, and beautiful animal. The deserted, scorched, barren land is home to a dog named after a sea creature. The end of her life, though brutal, is an act of mercy out in the arid backlands where she lives. While canid, Baleia is a reflection of her human family — migrants, alone in the backlands, fighting hunger, drought, sickness, and the threat of a gun held by an authority that sees people in the vast, desert lands as no more than sick animals to be killed. As she dies, Baleia dreams of an abundance she lacks, an abundance of care, joy, love, and food. Many people feel empathy for dying dogs — their deaths are hard and painful to read. With “Baleia,” I imagine Graciliano Ramos turning this empathy around to the Brazilian elite living near the coast. His story asks, “What would be of the world if we felt the same empathy we feel for dogs for the people who share this land with us?”

Excerpts from Khanandihi

August 6, 2026 Fiction, Translation

By SHATADAL MITRA
Translated by BISHNUPRIYA CHOWDHURI

Piece appears below in English. Click here to read the original in Bengali.

Translator’s Note

I believe what makes stories great is their ability to surprise and hearten their readers simultaneously. The tale of Khanandihi, which revolves around a quintessential Bengal village as it lives through generations of transformation— social, economic, and ethical—does so with an unparalleled efficacy that deserves a global readership. The narrative defies linearity, both in its language and in its structure. As a result, past and present run interwoven into each other, endowing even the smallest characters with a cosmic expanse and scope. The text resists rushed reading—its layers of long, winding sentences and subtle subtextual nuances unlock only when savored.

The Kestrel

July 15, 2026 Dispatches, Translation

By ERNESTO PÉREZ ZÚÑIGA
Translated from the Spanish by OLIVIA BAES

Photo courtesy of the author.

Salceda Valley, Colmenar de Oreja, Madrid

I hear it sing after the solstice. A bird of prey, the little falcon with the beautiful song. A crystal line rising from the tree where it perches to the sky then plunging down abruptly. This is how the kestrel precedes its own flight to the zenith, as if it first needed to trace a path of fierce bells.

I am not the only one to hear it: the small birds flee to faraway trees.

This is the sound of winter, when the year begins in slumber, damp with secret rains in the dawn and combed by the blizzards which wait for the sun to set through a crack in the clouds.

It is during the day that the kestrel attacks the few sparrows cowering from the cold on the roof. Huddled together and silent, as if awaiting an airbus, they disperse in a daze as talons strike from somewhere in the sky.

Self-Portrait in The Caribbean

July 9, 2026 Poetry, Translation

By PAOLA ASSAD BARBARINO
Translated by MAGDALENA ARIAS VÁSQUEZ

Poems appear below in English and the original Spanish.

Translator’s Note:
Paola’s poetry, which I have been translating for a while now, is fundamentally Venezuelan and has to be understood in that context. The challenge for me is to render this context as best as I can from my position as an outsider. “Autorretrato en el caribe” or “Self-Portrait in the Caribbean” was a particularly challenging poem to translate keeping this in mind. It’s also one of my favorites of hers. It relies heavily on Venezuelan history and an understanding of their political context. The most prevalent example of this is the quotation, “¡Entonces yo tampoco quiero mando!” which is a historical allusion to Capitán Emparán, who, in the face of the Spanish crown’s decaying power in Venezuela, famously used the words to renounce his position in government, granting Venezuela independence from Spain. It directly translates to “Then I too do not want to be led” or “Then I too do not want to lead.” The double sense of the phrase in Spanish is particularly interesting in the context of the poem. I chose to keep it in Spanish to keep this double meaning, and also to assert the phrase’s origin as Venezuelan, whose context may not be readily available to an Anglophone reader. The final stanza of the poem is one of my favorite lines that Paola has ever written. Speaking from the position of someone living through exile, Paola’s poetry is politically and personally charged and speaks to the complicated space she inhabits.

Feltspade

June 11, 2026 Poetry, Translation

Poem by ELIAS SADAQ, translated from the Danish by DENVER DAVID ROBINSON.
The piece appears in both English and Danish below.

Translator’s Note

I bought a copy of Elias Sadaq’s debut poetry collection DJINN on a windy December morning in Copenhagen in 2024. Although I’m not Danish, Moroccan, or Muslim, I’ve spent over half my life going between the United States and a small seaside village in Denmark not so far―in kilometers―from where Sadaq grew up. I was curious to know what it’s like to be of Danish and Moroccan descent, queer and Muslim, and come from one of (highly homogenous) Denmark’s most ethnically diverse districts, a place I had visited occasionally with my father. Sadaq’s work enchanted me immediately. There was much I recognized, and more I did not, including incantations to punish and protect. As I read, I scribbled a rudimentary translation in pencil next to his lines. Eventually, I reached out to Sadaq, who gave me permission to translate and seek American publishers for his work. Now, after several months of collaboration and getting to know one another, I have finished my translation of DJINN. I’ve learned so much in my work with Elias, who is one of Denmark’s most versatile and exciting new artists. For one, my understanding of modern street Danish has improved. More importantly, his generosity and playful curiosity have inspired me in this time of increasing discord. His work opens doors, welcoming all who care or clamor to enter―strangers, DILFs, saints, and demons―while narrowing the gap between the sacred and profane.

A felt spade is a military entrenching tool, a survival shovel, but also carries a derogatory connotation employed to infer one is an idiot. I considered translating the title with an English colloquial equivalent, such as blunt instrument, dull blade, or simply tool. In the end, I chose to keep the literal translation to allow readers to sit with the original title’s ambiguity.

― Denver David Robinson

Review of Cécé by Emmelie Prophète

May 26, 2026 Reviews

Review by SAM SPRATFORD

Book by EMMELIE PROPHÈTE
Translated from the French by AIDAN ROONEY

Uncle Frédo lies in the dark, water dripping through the sheet-metal roof. His American Dream crushed by the reality of existence as a non-white, non-citizen in the U.S., he returns to Haiti for the remainder of his life. He rarely speaks and is nearly always drunk. He spends his days in a dreamless twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness.

Cécé, his 20 year old niece and the inheritor of his psychic burden, is our real protagonist.

Cécé was born into a slum outside Port-au-Prince, a place fractured by violence. It is the recent past, in the heady early days of the digital age. Facebook was still the social platform of choice and capitalism had not yet made an industry of influencer marketing. Abandoned by a kleptocratic state, the Cité of Divine Power and its counterpart, Bethlehem, have seen gangs step in to provide structure for residents by claiming a monopoly on violence. Unlike the Hobbesian Leviathan, there is no law underwriting the circumstances under which violence can be applied. It is a lawless place—but not without an order of its own.

All posts tagged: Translation

Instant Karma

Two Poems by Dalia Taha, translated by Sara Elkamel

The Messengers

Chupacabra

Baleia

Excerpts from Khanandihi

The Kestrel

Self-Portrait in The Caribbean

Feltspade

Review of Cécé by Emmelie Prophète

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