I will tell you a story I heard from no one. No one has heard it. I will give it words because it wants to be told, here at the far end of the sea, so close to the beginning.
Kerron sinulle tarinan, jota kukaan ei kertonut minulle. Kukaan ei ole kuullut sitä. Annan tarinalle sanat, koska se haluaa tulla kerrotuksi täällä meren ääressä, niin lähellä kaiken alkua.
These days it’s naïve to assume that a person would accept something from a stranger. This might never work on the street in daylight. But there’s something about the empty subway platform at night that makes Marcus believe she’ll take the note. Then it will be up to the words. They have to work. They must.
«Так. Во первых меня зовут Марик и ни каких вариантов. Бабушка инагда зовёт меня Марочкой. Звучит наркомански и я угораю когда Ба так говорит. Одно временно меня выбешивает, что Марочка звучит как Ларочка. Девчачье имя. Я могбы запретить ей. Сказать не делай так Ба никогда незови меня этим наркоманским девчачьим именем. Но немогу. Она стирала мои засратые пелёнки и ночей неспала. Она лично забрала меня у аиста. Отчистила меня от капустных листьев. Это я только начал перичеслять. Ещё, много чего, думаю понятно. С каким лицом я пришёлбы ей чтото запрещать. Только просить. Попросил не звать меня Марочкой «в обществе» (так
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.…
Read in English here
Le persone che mi conoscono sanno che da alcuni anni sono impegnato in una missione quasi impossibile: promuovere e diffondere non tanto il concetto di “diversità” – un’idea positiva ma che nasconde, a mio giudizio, un errore di fondo, la diversità cioè da uno standard comune, da una normalità diventata metro di valutazione di qualsiasi fenomeno, il quale tuttavia nelle realtà delle cose non esiste – bensì una più equa ripartizione di futuro e quindi di opportunità tra la cultura e la lingua dominanti e quelle ritenute minori per il solo fatto di essere “altro”.
Per fortuna, da piccolo editore e divulgatore di fantascienza, in 5 anni di traduzioni da almeno 6 lingue e con un catalogo di oltre 70 storie pubblicate da ogni angolo del mondo posso affermare quella che, pur sembrando una banalità, è tuttavia il presupposto di quanto sta avvenendo nel genere dalla SF nonostante non se ne tenga conto:
La qualità non ha colore,
La qualità non ha nazione,
La qualità non ha lingua,
La qualità appartiene a tutti.…
I knew that the way in which the language itself evoked a particular time and place was what made the novel special, and that these subtle flavors could easily be lost in translation.
Thank you to Small Beer Press for giving us permission to publish this excerpt from Su Wei's novel The Invisible Valley, translated by Austin Woerner and released on April 3rd 2018.
Cagliari, my city, reaches out to the sea, but it's built on several hills. I imagined how it would be transformed following a rise in sea level, with people taking refuge on hills and on the roofs of the highest buildings, but, all in all, life would continue.
For our latest author interview we're excited to welcome Maria Haskins, author of 'Balawats portar' 'The Gates of Balawat', reprinted in our September issue, to talk to us about short fiction, museums and her favourite reads of 2017.
