Tag: Danish

Reading Women in Translation: Looking back over the past twelve months

For myself at least, as Women in Translation Month rolls around each August, there is, along with the intention to focus all or part of my reading to this project, a curiosity to look back and see just how many female authors in translation I’ve read since the previous year’s edition. I’ve just gone through my archives and am pleasantly surprised to find twenty titles, the majority read in 2022. Within this number are several authors I’ve read and loved before and a number of new favourites that have inspired me to seek out more of their work.

First among these is Lebanese-French writer Vénus Khoury-Ghata, whose The Last Days of Mandelstam (translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan) so thrilled me with its precision and economy that I bought another of her novellas and a collection of poetry, Alphabet of Sand (translated by Marilyn Hacker). I’ve just learned that another of her Russian poet inspired novels, Marina Tsvetaeva: To Die in Yelabuga, will be released by Seagull Books this fall. I can’t wait!

 

The advent of the war in Ukraine instantly drew my attention to a tiny book I had received from isolarii books. The name Yevgenia Belorusets became suddenly and tragically familiar as her daily diary entries from Kiev were published online. I read that small volume, Modern Animals (translated by Bela Shayevich), drawn from interviews with people she met in the Donbas region and as soon as it became available I bought and read her story collection Lucky Breaks (translated by Eugene Ostashevsky). Although both of these books reflect the impact of war in the east of the country, they could not be read without the context of the full scale invasion underway and still ongoing in her homeland.

Another author I encountered for the first time that inspired me to read more of her work was Czech writer Daniela Hodrová whose monumental City of Torment (translated by Elena Sokol and others) is likely the most profoundly challenging work I’ve read in along time. Upon finishing this trilogy I turned to her Prague, I See A City… (translated by David Short and reviewed with the above) which I happened to have buried on my kindle. A perfect, possibly even necessary, companion.

My personal Norwegian project introduced me to Hanne Örstavik, whom I had always meant to read. I loved her slow moving introspective novel, The Pastor (translated by Martin Aitken) and have since bought, but not read, her acclaimed novella, Love. However, lined up to read this month, I have her forthcoming release in translation, Ti Amo, a much more recent work based on her experience caring for her husband as he was dying of cancer. The only other female author I brought into this project was Ingvild H. Rishøi whose collection Winter Stories (translated by Diane Oatley) was a pure delight. I have been making note of other female Norwegian writers to fill in this imbalance in the future.

The past year also brought new work by two of my favourite poets: a book of prose pieces by Italian poet Franca Mancinelli, The Butterfly Cemetery (translated by John Taylor), and the conclusion to Danish poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s epic experimental trilogy, My Jewel Box (translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen). In May I had the honour of speaking with Olsen and Jensen over Zoom for a special event—it was a fantastic opportunity I won’t soon forget. I also became acquainted with a new-to-me Austrian poet, Maja Haderlap, through her excellent collection distant transit (translated by Tess Lewis) and have since added her novel Angel of Oblivion to my shelves.

Among the many other wonderful women in translation I read over the past year, Geetanjali Shree’s International Booker winning Tomb of Sand (translated by Daisy Rockwell) needs no introduction—it is an exuberant, intelligent and wildly entertaining read. On an entirely different note, Rachel Careau’s brilliant new translation of Colette’s classic Cheri and the End of Cheri completely surprised me. I had no idea what a sharp and observant writer she was, in fact I didn’t know much about her at all and I discovered that she was quite the exceptional woman. Changing direction again, In the Eye of the Wild, French anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s account of her terrifying encounter with a bear in a remote region of Siberia (translated by Sophie R. Lewis) approaches the experience in an unexpected manner that I really appreciated.

Keeping with nonfiction for a moment, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza (translated by Sarah Booker), a collection of essays about contemporary Mexico, was a difficult, necessary read. Annmarie Schwarzenbach’s account of her overland journey to Afghanistan with Ella Maillart in 1939, All the Roads Are Open (translated by Isabel Fargo Cole) was another book I had long wanted to read that did not disappoint but which carries much more weight given the more recent history of that region. Finally, My Life in Trans Activism by A. Revathi (translated from Tamil dictation by Nandini Murali) offers vital insight into the lives of hijra and trans women and trans men in India from a widely respected activist. Tilted Axis in the UK will be releasing this book to an international audience later this year.

Rounding out the year, were three fine novels. First, I after owning it for years, I finally read Seeing Red by Chilean writer Lina Meruane (translated by Megan McDowell) and was very impressed. Last, but by no means least, I read two new releases from Istros Books who have an excellent selection of women writers in their catalogue. Special Needs by Lada Vukić (translated from the Croatian by Christina Pribichevich-Zorić) captures the slightly magical voice of child narrator with an undisclosed disability in a remarkably effective way, while Canzone di Guerra by the inimitable Daša Drndić (translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth) offers a fictionalized account of her years in Canada as a young single mother that was most enlightening for this Canadian reader.

I have, at this point, seven books selected for this year’s Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth) and we’ll see how I manage—and now I also have a goal to exceed for the eleven months before August 2023! I would, by the way, recommend any of the titles listed above if you are looking for something to read this month.

I am the hard one: Outgoing Vessel by Ursula Andkjær Olsen

destructive is my normal state (37)

Danish poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen is a singular force of poetic vision. Intense, strident, futuristic. Outgoing Vessel, newly released from Action Books, is the follow up to her award-winning Third-Millennium Heart, a powerful reading experience I loved so much that I responded in verse with an experimental review published here (open the PDF to read). Translator Katrine Ogaard Jensen is on board again for this new journey and, as with her previous work, Outgoing Vessel unfolds over a sequence of poetic movements to form a 193-page, book-length poem that is both epic and operatic in scope. I was not surprised to learn that Olsen is also a librettist. As with her earlier project, the “singer” here is an enigmatic narrative force—perhaps the same one, I don’t know, though I hear a companion rather than a continuation myself.

no one except me can hate feelings
anyone else who claims to hate feelings:
let it be known how they still succumb to them
anyone else who claims to hate feelings:
let it be known how they, in weak moments
open up to them and

and become soft with longing

among all time’s winners
i am the hardest (8)

The early suites of Outgoing Vessel seem charged with negative energy, often erupting in harsh declarations of hatred that begin with the self and extend outward.  The voice is hard, constrained. Darkness and destruction are evoked frequently. Yet the motion is self-driven, Olsen owns her language, and the direction she is moving toward (and expecting others to align with) is not symbolic, but it is futuristic. She seems to be intent on encasing her darker, grieving being, containing it inside a container—described as an orb:

which I will send off as the outgoing
vessel that it is
after which the new human can arrive in its

incoming (48)

Third-Millennium Heart built on a tension between the clinical and the organic, pregnant with promise, anger and grief, rupturing ultimately into a powerful post-human feminist vision—one which gives birth to the possibility of a cyborg-like hive-heart existence. Heart’s speaker devoured and contained. Vessel’s is more isolated, inward focused and philosophical. Pain, grief, and an existential disconnection drive her rhythmic reasoning as she moves toward the foundation of a technological ontology, a science fiction solution, and a re-imagining of a new human beingness.

we must assume there is an original alienation:
first the estrangement, a person, a stranger to themselves
stranger to others, the person exists deep inside their
distant interior, without knowing, they must escape to the
surface, from inside, to become human (108)

The futuristic tone becomes more prevalent as the sequence progresses, propelled in no small part by the “technoscientic” poems that close each section of the work. As translator Katrine Øgaard Jensen explains in her note, Olsen “created these poems by piecing together lines from each suite, running the text through multiple languages in Google Translate, translating it back into Danish via Google Translate” then, from the resulting document, the final piece was created employing a cut-up method. This mechanical process allows for a new tone, energy and uncertainty to enter the cycle (not mention an added challenge for the translator to meet in a satisfactory measure):

human nature
in the coffin, a
relic, collection of Bones and Hair
encapsulated and stored in
a humane vacuum

this is
the refuge (94)

The strange brutality of Olsen’s poetry, the slogan-like chants, and the tightly-honed anger can be off-putting, but as with Third Millennium Heart, I find it oddly therapeutic. Anger in its shades and intensities can be a positive force—it is the healing movement of the cycle of grief, it pushes you forward, up and out of the sandpit of sadness that follows loss, trauma, heartache. It sounds counter-intuitive but I saw it many times working with survivors of acquired brain injury. Yet it is hard to allow it in oneself, for fear it will erupt in uncontrollable ways. Through the course of Outgoing Vessel we witness the speaker’s emergence as a voice of concern, intent on invalidating loneliness—through her outgoing/incoming vessel she comes to a radicalizing understanding of empathy and experience.

Olsen is a poet who, as her translator Jensen freely admits, cannot be neatly and directly rendered into English—her work is highly inventive, rife with cultural references, puns, neologisms, and experiments with language. Rather than attempting to produce an exact copy, Jensen aims to stay true to the “spirit of the work,” allowing it to find its own form in translation. This is, it turns out, an ideal approach for a poet who sees her own  work as a “translation of an idea”. As such, she is simply the first translator and Jensen is the second. The result is a sequence of poems that carries its own fresh energy. Tight. Terse. Tender. And ultimately affirming in its futuristic vision.

Outgoing Vessel by Ursula Andkjær Olsen is translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen. It features stark, spare photographic works by Sophia Kalkau and is published by Action Books.

The Endless Summer by Madame Nielsen

Over the past six months or so I have pursued few opportunities to write longer critical reviews for publication. In fact, I have been more interested in encouraging others to write reviews for me to publish at 3:AM Magazine. I’ve gotten out of the habit of looking to upcoming releases with an eye to what I might want to write about, especially sight unseen. Rather, I am more likely to find myself reading a book I already own and realize that I want to write about it at a greater depth than my typical blog post. But every now and then a book grabs my attention and I set out to secure an advance reader’s copy and review placement on instinct alone.

Such was the case with The Endless Summer by Danish writer and transgender performance artist, Madame Neilsen, recently released by Open Letter Books in a translation by Gaye Kynoch. I knew nothing about this book when I first saw it in an email newsletter but I confess that I was immediately intrigued by the unusual sounding author.  And although I tend to tread very carefully around transgender themed writing or writers of any sort, I knew I wanted to read this book. And write about it. Endless complications in my efforts to obtain a review copy notwithstanding (it did arrive about two weeks after I submitted my finished review), I was thoroughly captivated by this lovely novel.

The story of a boy “who is perhaps a girl, but does not know it yet,” The Endless Summer is, in simple terms, an evocative requiem to that moment in life when all is possible and the harsh face of reality has not yet been confronted. I attempted to capture some of its strange and wonderful magic in my review originally published in the Spring 2018 edition of The Quarterly Conversation and reproduced below.

The Endless Summer by Madame Nielsen, translated by Gaye Kynoch. Open Letter Books.

I remember the year I became an adult. I was twenty-four. I had completed one degree, married, and moved across the country to continue my education. After rent, bus fare, and the student loans we’d secured, we were left with $10 a week for food and barely enough to keep the huge empty front room of our apartment heated through the frigid Ottawa winter. So we turned the registers off and retreated to the bedroom. Homesick, we missed our friends and families. By the end of the term we both recognized that something had been irrevocably altered; an intangible light had been extinguished. This was real life. We had grown up. Our own “endless summer,” that fragile Garden of Eden, was over.

“It is not the bite in the apple that makes the Fall. It is the idea of a life after this one-and-only now.”

Perhaps it is something you only notice once it’s gone; the last traces of a moment when you still believed in the possible, caught up in a lingering nostalgia for a time before the burden of responsibility took its toll. If only one could go back and recreate the mythical intensity of the past, eulogize the lost magic, just like the old woman whose most unusual story lies at the heart enchanting novel, The Endless Summer, by the equally enchanting Madame Nielsen.

The Danish transgender performance artist, has, over the course of her career, presented, masqueraded, invented, and re-invented herself many times, even having her birth-identified self, Claus Beck-Nielsen, declared dead along the way. (He was ultimately revived when the lack of any identity altogether proved too difficult to sustain.) The multi-facetted Madame Nielsen is a novelist, poet, artist, performer, stage director, composer, and singer. With The Endless Summer, newly released from Open Letter Books in a translation by Gaye Kynoch, Nielsen weaves a tale that sidesteps the common expectations of narrative progress and character development. Rather, an odd cast of characters is choreographed through a shifting, dreamlike landscape openly reminiscent of David Lynch, complete with digressions into side stories, tales from the past, and glances into the future. The stories are continually being started, interrupted, and resumed again. The influence of Proust and other French novelists is evident, but Nielsen’s wistful narrator, who will ultimately become an actor, demonstrates a strong theatrical sensibility throughout.

The novel opens with a simple statement, the oddly incomplete sentence: “The young boy, who is perhaps a girl, but does not know it yet.” This phrase will be echoed, with slightly different shades, gradation, and detail, throughout the text. Likewise, the other main characters’ defining characteristics or curious features will be continually evoked, elaborated, and elegized as the tale unwinds. This is, as the subtitle advises, a requiem. A deep melancholy is never far from the surface. But first there is the summer, the “endless summer” a nebulous state of being which exists outside of time, a world unto itself “where time and light stand still and the dust rotates and no one does anything, nothing other than living as if they were in a different era and a completely different location.”

The young boy, who is in fact in his late teens, but so slender, delicate, and shy, falls into this other world after meeting a girl, an ebullient, full-figured, dark-haired girl. He becomes her lover and slips into her household, joining her two little brothers, her jealous, gun-loving stepfather, and her enigmatic mother in a little white farmhouse. The last, a dazzling, long-limbed Nordic beauty spends her days riding her beloved stallion through the surrounding fields. The boy and girl spend their days in bed, losing themselves in one another’s bodies. All the while other characters are introduced, ready to take their places in the drama that will eventually unfold, we are warned, to its necessarily tragic end.

The narrative advances through a series of scenes played out on this other plane of existence, a fairytale space without distinct boundaries. It is not clear when it begins, or when it is truly over. This extended moment of impossibility, or rather, all possibilities, draws others into its sphere of influence—young men on the cusp of adulthood, wayward artistic wanderers, and those going nowhere, like the perfectly handsome, utterly unambitious Lars, the daughter’s best friend. Other characters circle, like satellites, around the periphery of this space of suspended reality, and thus on the edges of the story, providing substantive props against the ephemeral timelessness of the “endless summer.” Aware that the cautious reader may be inclined to advance with incredulity, the narrator is quick to advise:

… if the story so far sounds like a dream, a glossy tale of the kind one occasionally—on holiday or a long-haul flight—allows oneself to lean back into and, as if it were sinful, a praline, vanish within for a brief moment, then it’s because life is a dream, a dream from which you never wake up, but which one day is nonetheless suddenly long since over, but you’re still here and can either use “the rest of your days” to forget and “get on with it” or on the other hand, like me, abandon what is and try to retrieve what was, even the tiniest little thing that has been lost, even what perhaps didn’t really exist but nonetheless belongs in the story, call it forth and tell it so it doesn’t vanish but on the contrary now at last becomes real and in a way more real than anything else.

At the nexus of this act of remembering is the almost otherworldly presence of the mother, a romantically idealized woman, cool, impenetrable, and independent, who casts a spell on all who fall within her orbit, including the Portuguese artist half her age who will become her lover. The slender young boy is clearly enthralled by her, by “the inscrutability and the light that makes it impossible” for him to ever be finished looking at her, “because as soon as he glances away for a moment he has a feeling that he has not yet seen her.” She can be thought of as the embodiment of womanhood to which he, the boy who might be a girl but doesn’t know it yet, is unconsciously drawn. His first sexual and gender explorations are deeply enmeshed with the softly rounded body and pleasure-loving spirit of the daughter, but it is the mother who holds him in awe.

The only character about whom we have no solid background, who falls into the “endless summer” with little more than a passing reference to a family that pretended they had money but in truth had none, is the narrator’s own past self, the slender young boy. The rest of the cast, even those who pass through peripherally, have a story, with dramatic beginnings and occasionally exceptional, but most often disappointing or tragic ends. Early on, when he is spending his days lost in bed with the girl, she entertains him with accounts of her childhood with her grandparents in Spain, her discovery of the truth of her real father’s identity, and the details of her stepfather’s inherited wealth and decline into possessive aggression. It is noted that she has lots of stories. He, on the other hand, has only those he creates.

So this story, this winding, dreamy, melancholic tale of the “endless summer” and everyone and everything it contained, where does it lie? In memory? In longing? Or in the romantic imagination of the “weird cobweb-flighty female being” that the young boy, who might be a girl but doesn’t know it yet, ultimately becomes?

The success of this unlikely, sprawling reverie with its expansive cast and uncertain timeline lies in the emotionally absorbing, reflective tone of the narrative. To read is to submit, to trust the voice. The repeated descriptive motifs are reassuring rather than affected. When new characters appear, instantly vivid portraits are created with the capture of curious details and ineffable traits and qualities:

And shortly after midnight, the two Portuguese arrive with their rucksacks, the one, the pen pal, actually not so dark at all, far from it, tall and strong and with golden curls, Peixe, he is called, “The Fish,” but where he comes from they call him “o Vikingo,” the other one is smaller but equally masculine, dark and mysterious, a little shy like a wild cat, the same soundless movements, an abrupt laughter cracking his face in a flash of light that has disappeared before you have seen who he is.

However, the illusory nature of the entire enterprise, this attempt to recreate the transcendent quality of the “endless summer,” is never denied. Little by little, disillusionment and disappointment dilutes and denudes the magic; characters begin to fall out of that other world, and back into this one. But the end of the “endless summer” is as mutable as its onset.

The transformation of the slender young boy into an old woman lost to her memories is never openly explored. It is an inevitability written into the texture of the account. Rarely does the narrator admit a first person pronoun. This is her (or his) story retold from the sidelines of his (or her) life—a life in which “none of the things he promises himself or dreams about will ever come to anything, while all the things he has never wished for or promised himself will happen and amount to all there has been.” As a reader who was, at one time, a girl who was a boy, but didn’t understand it, I registered a particular resonance with The Endless Summer. The experience of living and writing across a gendered expression creates a haunting sense of disconnect, an otherworldliness. But this poignant novel is much more. It is a requiem for the death of dreams, and a hymn to keeping the spirit alive in the exercise of living beyond the moment when you still believed.

“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”