At eight years of age, I almost stopped sleeping. When I did manage to fall asleep, I found myself in the worst of nightmares. My ability to remain aware in the dream and to control the surrounding dream world lit me up like a beacon in the darkness. Every moment I felt the unkind attention of Morpheus upon me.
Тогда, в восемь лет, я почти перестал спать, а если всё-таки засыпал, оказывался в худшем из кошмаров. Моя способность осознавать себя во сне и управлять миром сновидений подсвечивала меня в темноте. Каждое мгновение я чувствовал на себе недоброе внимание Морфея.
The boughs of the olive tree branch out on the large room’s window, which opens onto a folktale repeated by the villagers about a spider inhabiting the old house on the plateau. A distorted spider whose shape swelled as it captured profane spirits. Alien faces to the village were caught in its nets: men with unkempt hair and beards, unpleasant faces in veils, and jelly-like features that came to hide in the spider's web.
تتفرع أغصان شجرة الزيتون على شباك الغرفة الكبيرة المفتوح على خرافة يرددها القريون عن عنكبوت تسكن البيت القديم الذي يتراءى على الهضبة. عنكبوت مسخ تضخم شكلها وهي تواصل أسر الأرواح المدنسة. لقد علقت بين شباكها وجوه غريبة على القرية، رجال بشعور ولحي مشعثة، ووجوه متفسخة وراء النقاب، ملامح هلامية جاءت للتخفي في بيت العنكبوت...
L’exil m’érode, tige dans la tempête de duneLes vertiges, nausées du sevrage, me renversentchiffon que le vent agitesur les piquets des campements désertés
Short stories tend to have much shorter lifespans than novels do. As such, a translation is a form of reincarnation. The end result is the same story, but also a completely different one at the same time. The first level of changes is due to the different language operating under another structure, a different set of ties binding the abstract with the specific. But there's also the second level, a more intimate level where the story surreptitiously obtains new properties after it’s been processed through the mind of the translator.
I got into translation for the same reason many people get into blogging, writing reviews, and other fannish activities: I loved certain stories and felt the strong desire to share them with my friends. Except many of my genre-reading friends do not speak Russian. And while I'm not a reviewer and am a lazy blogger at best, in this case I had, ahem, a particular set of skills…
Ma io penso che gli scrittori di fantascienza non siano profeti, sono solo narratori, ecco perché ci sono sia cose buone che cattive che provengono dalla grande attenzione che riceviamo.
For the latest of our author/ translator interview series, we're delighted to welcome H. Pueyo, writer and translator of 'Saligia', in our March 2019 issue. We asked her to tell us more about the story, and her experiences of writing and translating.
Can you tell us more about yourself and your writing – what first got you into speculative fiction?
Writing is an old passion of mine; it never occurred to me to do anything else in my life since I was a very small child, so it’s hard to separate myself from it. That being said, I’m very new to speculative fiction!…
For the latest in our author/ translator interview series, we're delighted to welcome Mike Jansen, writer and translator of the story 'Fluxless'/ 'Fluxloos', which appears in our December 3rd, 2018 issue. Mike was kind enough to provide bilingual answers to our questions, so we hope you enjoy reading more about his work, and about the Dutch SF scene.
Kun je ons iets over jezelf en je schrijven vertellen – hoe ben je ooit begonnen met fantastische literatuur?
Can you tell us more about yourself and your writing – what first got you into speculative fiction?
Ik heb altijd alles gelezen dat los en vast zat, sciencefiction, fantasy en horror.…
Read in Italian here
People who know me know that for some years I have been involved in an almost impossible mission: to promote and spread not much the concept of SF “diversity” (a positive idea that hides, in my opinion, a fundamental error, that is diversity from a common standard; from a normality that has become a benchmark for evaluating any phenomenon, yet which doesn’t exist in reality) but instead a fairer distribution of “the future” and therefore of opportunities between dominant cultures and languages and those ones considered minor for the only reason of being “other”.
Fortunately, as a small publisher and SF writer, in five years of translations from at least six languages, and with a catalogue of over seventy stories published from around the world I can affirm:
Quality has no colour,
Quality has no nation,
Quality has no language,
Quality belongs to everyone.…
