Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed

Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed
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Introduction

When I translate, which is most days, I am always trying to capture, reproduce, become the author’s voice, and when I read translations, what I look for is a voice, one that I want to listen to, a voice that convinces in English.

My selection of prose pieces for this edition of Two Lines was guided by that desire to be convinced, and what I thought would be an impossible task was, it turned out, very easy. I just listened and chose those voices I most wanted to carry on hearing.

And what was so exhilarating about hearing and reading these stories and extracts was not only the sheer variety of experience they encapsulate—from Emily Dickinson dying in Amherst to a rabbi trying to rediscover his identity in Brooklyn to Hamza leaving Sudan in search of work wherever he can find it—but also the sense of estrangement that fills so many of them.

In The Naked Eye, a Vietnamese girl ends up in Paris not knowing a word of French; Azorno is full of shifting identities and locations; in “The Man Who Tried to Go to Heaven” a young boy is transplanted to a strange land and a still stranger situation. We have a French author writing about an American poet, a Japanese author writing in German about a Vietnamese girl adrift in Paris, a Cuban author (and translator of Russian literature) writing about Russians and diamonds and the mafia on the Costa del Sol. These stories throw open windows onto exhilarating and troubling worlds. And that is surely what translation aspires to do.

—Margaret Jull Costa

A map crumpled like politics—
torn and sullied like the ethics of nation states.—

. . . writes Kurdish poet Sherko Bekes in Choman Hardi’s translation. The map, for the poets in this issue, is sometimes the record of a diasporic and ongoing journey, even for those who are not, like Bekes’s speaker, in some kind of exile. The youthful Berliners of Andrej Glusgold’s and Chris Michalski’s poems seem on the point of a Rimbaldian departure.

There seems to be no abode but the beloved himself for the persona of the Hungarian Anna Szabo’s "This Day," and the shifting cityscapes make it clear that this is also a condition of the uncertainties around them. The supremely “vexed” question of a place that can accept them both at once, and which they can accept in turn, is central to the erotically charged struggle of the lovers in Mahmoud Darwish’s "Rita’s Winter." And it is the Basque language being crumpled into erasure in Kirmen Uribe’s witty poem which manages its own re-inscriptions.

While I did not consciously seek poets inscribing (or refusing) new and invisible borders, a cohort similar to Breyten Breytenbach’s apatride citizens of “Mor”—an invented word halfway between “love” and “death”—many of the most initially gripping and subsequently memorable translations I encountered in making this difficult (because so limited) selection seemed to share that liminality. (Not the Haitian René Depestre, locating a household around the deity of a sewing machine—and not younger Palestinian poets Najwan Darwish and Ayman Ghbarieh, humorously and defiantly rooted.)

All these poems, of origins and blurrings, now have new roots as poems in English, thanks to their translators’ inspired and judicious gardening

—Marilyn Hacker