Delos: A Journal of Translation and World Literature

"Dentro. Una storia vera, se volete / Dentro (Inside). A True Story, If You Think So" by Giuliana Musso

2024-03-19T18:19:27-04:00

Giuliana Musso’s fearless play about the structures and cultures that hide sexual abuse is a Pirandellian spiral of truths that elude proof, presented through a theatrical framing that confounds reality with art. The most recent play of nine that she has written and performs in her preferred “theater of inquiry” style, Dentro (Inside), dramatizes Musso’s real-life encounter with an acquaintance who shared an impossible story of incest. In the opening minutes, Roberta discloses the horrifying experience of slowly learning that her ex-husband molested their daughter Chiara for years when they still lived together. Over a series of “chapters,” or scenes, it becomes apparent how every system in place to help vulnerable members of society—from the hospitals to private psychologists, the police and law enforcement, eventually the lawyers, the whole legal system, and even language itself—was unable to support Roberta and her daughter. To the contrary, given that the case was dismissed, they have gag orders; they cannot even speak of what happened so as not to slander the reputation of the ex-husband/ father. In a last-ditch effort, Roberta turns to Giuliana, who she knows as a celebrated actor-author, to devise a play that speaks to these issues. The actual play is ultimately a dramatized account of their real-life conversations.

Literary Translation is Original, Creative Writing

2024-03-19T19:11:38-04:00

In February 2023, I traveled to Mexico City to attend an homage to my friend, the Mexican poet David Huerta, whose poetry I’ve translated extensively. There, in the company of Huerta’s colleagues and friends, I was received and embraced as a fellow poet, my translations understood as poetry that coexists with Huerta’s and their own. Upon my return to the US, I found this reply from a writing program to my inquiry as to whether literary translation projects were eligible for their writing fellowship: “We ask that Fellowship projects be original writing or research; translation projects are not accepted.” In response, I wrote the following description of literary translation as original, creative writing, based on my own work and personal experience. I dedicate it to the memory of David, writer, reader, literary thinker, and teacher extraordinaire, and to the enormous literary community he left incalculably enriched.

Four Contemporary Love Poems by Zhang Zhihao

2024-03-19T19:19:27-04:00

Zhang Zhihao (张执浩), poet and novelist, was born in 1965 in Jingmen, Hubei. He graduated from the history department of the Central China Normal University in 1988. Author of nine poetry collections, several novels, and some influential essays, Zhang has won numerous poetry awards, including Poet of the Year (2014), the annual Chen Zi’ang Poetry Award (2016), and the Luxun Literary Prize for poetry (2017, Chinese equivalent to the Pulitzer). He is currently editor-in-chief of Chinese Poetry, a quarterly poetry magazine in Wuhan, China. The four poems translated here center on the theme of genuine love and the yearning for such love; they provide an opportunity to access the writings of a major poet in the contemporary Chinese poetic landscape.

Six Poems by Óscar Hahn

2024-03-19T19:24:46-04:00

Óscar Hahn (b. 1938) was a member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 1971. He went into exile from his native Chile in 1974 after having been held in the Arica Prison following Pinochet’s military coup the previous year. Hahn earned a doctorate from the University of Maryland in 1977. His book of poems, Mal de amor (tr. Love Breaks), was banned by Chile’s junta in 1981. For some thirty years he was a professor of Latin American literature at the University of Iowa, where he now holds emeritus status. Hahn currently resides in Ohio.

Trancendence Towards a New World

2024-03-19T19:30:35-04:00

German Salas was born on June 15, 1943, in San José, Costa Rica. Having published and self-published eight collections of poetry between the 1950s and 1980s, including A La luz del silencio (In the Light of Silence 1967), Árbol del universo (Tree of the Universe 1987), and Libro de oro (The Golden Book 1989), Salas has an insatiable thirst for the written word. According to Costa Rican Professor, Dr. Gabriel Vargas, Salas was an assiduous member of El Círculo de poetas costarricenses (1960), one of the “most serious literary
groups of the century” (personal correspondence 2023). Though German Salas published three times with El Editorial Costa Rica—as did many other authors of this group—his name is not mentioned in any of the catalogues or anthologies of the era in which he wrote. These facts lead to the question of why he has suffered relative obscurity in Costa Rican letters.

“The Kafkaesque and the Stories of Our K and Samsa” by Mojaffor Hossain

2022-07-30T11:01:01-04:00

The literary creative nonfiction titled “The Kafkaesque and the Stories of Our K and Samsa” is about the world that Kafka creates in his stories and novels. This piece relates the Kafkaesque to the contemporary social systems. Some people in real life undergo the same bizarre experiences in their lives as Joseph K or Gregor Samsa, Kafka’s famous characters, go through in fiction.

Excerpts from Einar Schleef’s "Droge Faust Parsifal" (Drugs Faust Parsifal)

2024-03-19T19:45:20-04:00

Arguably the most important books by Einar Schleef (1944-2001) are his novel Gertrud, a monologue narrated by his fictionalized mother, his diaries, and the work excerpted here, Droge Faust Parsifal (Drugs Faust Parsifal, 1997). Schleef also wrote plays and short stories, and was a theater director, set and costume designer, actor, illustrator, painter, and photographer. His work deserves a wide readership, yet only a story and a play have been translated into English (Buchner 1982, 130-138; Vivis 1987). Drugs Faust Parsifal’s 500 pages are autobiography, theater history, dramaturgy and cultural essay in one. It won the City of Bremen Literature Prize in 1998 and was adapted for the stage in 2011 by Armin Petras. The selected passages from Drugs, which are somewhat anomalous in a book mainly about dramaturgy, concern Schleef’s personal struggles; they have historical relevance and show his linguistic dexterity, articulated in his “suffering language, a language for suffering” (Windrich 2009, 481). Both as child and adult, he is an observer of a postwar society divided against itself.

Preface

2024-03-19T17:44:32-04:00

Preface to Delos Volume 38, Number 2, Fall 2023

Notes on Contributors

2024-03-19T20:13:30-04:00

Biographies of the contributors to Delos Volume 38, Number 2.

Call for Chapters for an Edited Volume Published by a US-Based Academic Press (TBD)

2024-03-19T17:50:47-04:00

This call for chapters invites researchers to prepare submissions for our edited book about transatlantic and Atlantic-intersecting songs and music. These pivotal forms of transoceanic cultural expression, preservation, exchange, and innovation reveal creative, inventive, linguistic, historical, religious, social, ludic, and emotional aspects of experience. We welcome contributions about transatlantic and Atlantic-intersecting songs and music from authors working in musicology, linguistics, cultural studies, literary criticism, ethnology, historiography, religious studies, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, among other disciplines.

Marylin: A Novel of Passing by Arthur Rundt

2024-03-19T19:59:47-04:00

Arthur Rundt. Marylin: A Novel of Passing. Edited and translated by Peter Höyng and Chauncey J. Mellor. Afterword by Priscilla Layne. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2022. Hardcover/Paperback, 123 pages. $99. ISBN: 9781640141483.

De-mystifying Translation: Introducing Translation to Non-translators by Lynne Bowker

2024-03-19T20:04:56-04:00

Lynne Bowker. De-mystifying Translation: Introducing Translation to Non-translators. London and New York: Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group, 2023. Hardcover: $160; Paperback: $42.95. 216 pages.

Free access at: De-mystifying Translation: Introducing Translation to Non-translators -9781000866483.pdf (oapen.org).

All Poetry by Paulo Leminski

2024-03-19T20:10:12-04:00

Paulo Leminski. All Poetry. Translated by Charles A. Perrone and Ivan Justen Santana. Hanover, CT: New London Librarium, 2022.
Hardcover: $9.85; Paperback: $18.95. 348 pages. ISBN: 9781947074651.