Catching Up On the Latest From the Two Lines Journal
It’s not too late to catch up on the great writing you may have missed!
We’re nearing Thanksgiving here in the U.S., which means that we’re in that dizzying month where you look back and wonder where the time has gone. Wasn’t it just August? I found myself wondering recently.
The truth is that autumn has always had a disorienting quality for me. I love the crisp air, the apple cider donuts, the changing of the leaves—or here in California, hopefully, those spells of rainfall that we all experience with glee and awe—but I also always find myself wondering what happened to all those plans of mine?
It’s easy to reach November and feel that winter has already won out, that there’s no time to read those books that have been towering next to your bookshelf (which is already full), to send a late birthday present to a friend (their birthday was in the summer), to go to a pumpkin patch (the one you got at the grocery store was already carried off by a squirrel). And the proliferation of news, journals, and other online media only adds to the sense of missing out. Perhaps, like me, you’ve bookmarked interviews, articles, and translated stories and poems to read later, only to find yourself too burnt out by screen time when you clock out of work at 5.
That’s why I’m here to tell you that it’s not too late and to catch you up on what you may have missed…at least when it comes to the Two Lines journal. Take this week’s vacation as an opportunity to read some spectacular writing in translation. You can find all of our latest published work here, but here are some highlights from the past couple months (and a teaser of a couple pieces still yet to come).
“This is a place where nothing makes sense, I thought. And it frightened me to think that.”
—from “Alice in Thunderland” by Teolinda Gersão, translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa
Margaret Jull Costa is a legend, and beyond her artistry with words she manages to choose the most interesting projects that never disappoint. Like any tastemaker, she finds great writers, great stories, and then hands them right to you in startling English prose. This is the case with Teolinda Gersão’s “Alice in Thunderland,” which was the first piece we published this season in Two Lines. Taking on the well-trod subject of Reverend Dodgson, better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, is bold for any writer, and yet Gersão adds a frightening new layer to this reexamination of the controversial literary figure. Through formal experimentation (line breaks where reality itself seems to fracture) and beautiful, though deeply unsettling, descriptions, Gersão and Jull Costa bring this horrifying history to life.
“No one notices the darkness, that the curtains no longer let any light through.”
—from “A Woman’s World Behind the Lace Curtain” by Sara Tuss Efrik, translated from Swedish by Paul Cunningham
This diary-like story by experimental poet Sara Tuss Efrik takes us into the suffocating world of a young girl who is on a trip to Poland, the homeland of her father’s new wife. Details permeate this text and transform it into something both majestic and disconcerting, full of family dysfunction and self-loathing that is particular to adolescence. The true delights in this piece are Efrik’s surreal descriptions tinged with humor, brought into English by Cunningham. Just to list a few: a sofa that “resembles a lion’s head,” the sun that “dares to show its bright snout,” and a disco described simply as “full of foam and shame.”
“This hush is now a companion…”
—from “Only a Shape” by Mangesh Narayanrao Kale, translated from Marathi by Sarabjeet Garcha
Sarabjeet Garcha presents us with two poems by Mangesh Narayanrao Kale, an award-winning Indian poet writing in Marathi. His first poem, “Only a Shape,” strips objects down to their shape, so that a pocket becomes just the shape of a pocket and a banknote a shape of a banknote. Beyond mere language play, the poem seems to point toward a new understanding of our reality, one filled with presences and absences alike, erecting a world filled with the shapes of unrealized dreams.
Read “Only a Shape”
“let’s gather words for a house / we’ll lay gibberish carpets / follow blueprints of speech / with all its jagged verbs…”
—from “let’s gather words for a house…” by Dmitry Strotsev, translated from Russian by Anastasiia Gorlova and Paul Lee
Dmitry Strotsev is a Belarusian poet who writes in Russian. A celebrated poet and publisher of literature, Strotsev was briefly incarcerated in the fall of 2020 for participating in protests against President Lukashenko’s failure to concede his election loss, one of several prominent writers to be detained. Here we have two poems showcasing Strotsev’s immense talent for assembling words into bursting images (“the cacophonous cricket-chirps of sweet-voice things” and “the garden is built like a miracle-flute”) alongside his ability to withhold, doling out sparse, powerful declarations (“yes / a lot / everything / has changed / in thirty years…”). Here’s hoping we see more work of Strotsev’s translated in the coming years, as his is a voice that begs to be read and savored.
This season also featured work by Yam Gong (translated from Chinese James Shea and Dorothy Tse), Özlem Özgül Dündar (translated from German by Neil Blackadder), Blaže Koneski (translated from Macedonian by Christina E. Kramer), and Veronica Stigger (translated from Portuguese by Meg Weeks).
We’ll finish off the season with translations from two spectacular poets: Mohammad-Ali Sepanlou (translated from Persian by Siavash Saadlou) and Julien Gracq (translated from French by Alice Yang).
Read more in Two Lines.
