She reached to flush the toilet again. The head sputtered, “N-no, just a minute—"
She stayed her hand and looked down at the head in the toilet.
It was probably more accurate to refer to it as “a thing that vaguely looks like a head” than an actual head. It was about two-thirds the size of an adult’s head and resembled a lump of carelessly slapped-together yellow and gray clay, with a few scattered clumps of wet hair.
Life is filled with strange happenings that are hard to fit into our understanding of the world. Many we let pass in order to get on with our days. But this was not something I could let pass. I talked to Tiechan’s neighbors and his friends, his family members and his enemies. Slowly, I pieced together what had pushed my friend to his tragic end. This is what I discovered.
We're delighted to welcome John Yu Branscum and Yi Izzy Yu to the blog, to tell us more about their translation of Ji Yun, and their work on Chinese anomaly tales, or zhiguai. You can read their translation of Ji Yun's Guests from the Sky in the September 2019 issue of Samovar, alongside the original Chinese. They are both writers and translators, and teach at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. They are one of two finalists for the The International Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts from Antioch University/Lunch Ticket Magazine.
Umberto Eco once pessimistically said that “translation is the art of failure”. In contrast, I say that this precious craft is the art of success because without literary translation, we are all separate dots in an ocean of failures.
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.…
