In a 250-word takedown sent to me over text, the brain trust of my father and Anthropic LLM Claude (which was, incidentally, trained not only on my father’s critical tendencies but also on my stolen work) described my first column as “name-droppy and insecure,” “passive-aggressive about academia,” and “somewhat pretentious despite the anti-pretension pose.” “For someone claiming to be unpretentious,” Claude/my father declared (and where did I claim to be unpretentious?), “she casually drops terms like ‘metafictional dimension,’ ‘political imaginary,’ and ‘autofiction’ without explanation. The folksy tone masks what’s still pretty insider-y literary discourse.” Got my ass, Claude-father. Mask off. Thank you for doing your part in advancing humanity. 

The rest of you were really nice. The nicest of you sent solutions to the first puzzle. The competition was stiff; it was especially fun to see the many different kinds of people who read n+1. As soon as I got the first entry, from my friend Jonathan Woollen (translator of one of the juiciest books of this spring, Ann Scott’s Superstar—it’s called nepotistic promotion, not name-dropping, Claude), I realized I’d been crazy to think myself capable of objectively judging the puzzle. Read on for the winners, next month’s puzzle, and my folksy/pretentious thoughts about aliens and chuds. 

Does the LLM that you use to torture your children have any opinions about translation, or comments or questions or books I should read? Maybe you should spend more time emailing a human woman. Think of it as your own column. Write: [email protected] 

---

What I’ve Been Reading 

I’m teaching another gen-ed translation class, and the syllabus features a text that now seems as canonical in the translation classroom as Borges’s “Pierre Menard”: Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life.” Not being a sci-fi person or someone who was interested in translation theory until I started teaching, it was my first time reading this (from what I can tell) extremely famous short story, which was adapted into the movie Arrival. No duh: It’s a gem. 

Based on the theories and research connected to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which is used to conceptualize how language affects perception and cognition, “Story of Your Life” is about a linguist who becomes hypnotized while talking to aliens. Learning their language warps how she experiences time. The text is filled with linguistics terminology and has Strong Themes of Theoretical Physics involving Fermat’s principle of least time and teleology. 

As I was frantically making my slides, I got so anxious trying to memorize the difference between a semagram and an ideogram that I started writing a(n unpublishable) Substack about how I’ve gotten into “chinamaxxing” instead. This became very productive when I realized that, like the linguist, I was also being hypnotized by aliens and that the way that I acted and perceived the world was actively changing around the language being fed into my mind. 

All winter, Instagram had been insistent: my feet must never be cold, I must always be swinging my arms, consuming jujubes, punching myself—anything for my qi. I imagined my students would laugh when I told them, and feel embarrassed for me, and then I would meet their embarrassment by explaining that the point wasn’t my sudden hunger for snow fungus, it was that using the term “chinamaxxing” actually described not only the change in my lifestyle but also my embarrassment at being influenced like this. It changed my entire sense of myself, my behavior and my affect. 

I imagined that my quasi-example of Sapir-Whorfism would take up so much time that I would have a few extra days to decipher the slides left to me by my brilliant colleague, the one who had designed the course. No such luck: They begin with a lengthy discussion of fabula vs. syuzhet and end with scientific diagrams of the paths light can take to travel through water, which lead to a final slide asking the question (?): “A sci-fi/literary figure (“Borgesian fabulation”) of physics (but also of translation?)” I never did find an answer to that. However, I did blow my students’ minds with the cheapest trick available to a pedagogue: I explained to them that what was miraculous about Ted Chiang’s story is how artfully it throws the reader into “mimetic bewilderment”: “We were all just as confused reading this as the characters were experiencing it.” 

Can you explain theoretical physics to me? Are there other bewildering, Borgesian figures of translation that I should be aware of? I am, in general, interested in books about fictional translators, a genre hilariously known in some circles (I’m looking at you, translation scholar Klaus Kaindl) as “transfiction.” Know any good examples that I may not have heard of? Write: [email protected] 

---

Chuds 

I’ve always had trouble translating the terms Russians use for their law enforcement. First of all, there are a lot of different law enforcement officials in Russia, many of them of the kind that  showed up at protests back when there used to be protests. It was hard to keep them straight. There were “the officers from Center E,” who combat extremism, the riot control OMON, then the regular cops, who are, wonderfully, colloquially known as menty and musora, meaning “garbages.” Sad to translate “garbages” into “cops” (which comes from the Latin root capere,“to capture”). While Center E and OMON are merely annoying to disambiguate, the worst is when all these types of LEO are lumped into the general term siloviki, which means something like “muscle men” or “power men”—in other words, “enforcers.” This isn’t exactly a slang term; it’s regularly used as a general collective noun in straightforward reporting. You can’t always tell all the siloviki apart; they love to travel in packs. The word beautifully connotes the brutality of state repression, pointing to the arms of the law with a word that has sila, power, at its root. Siloviki can also apply to people who work for a criminal outfit, the kind who show up to shoot you in the back of the head in your building lobby—and to the white-collar bureaucrats who facilitate all of this criminality on paper. Sometimes I just say “thugs” for the whole lot of them. 

Since the turn of the 21st century, Russians have been calling all of these siloviki, the cops and the robbers alike, Orcs. The slavicist Eliot Borenstein has written about this phenomenon extensively, tracing its emergence to a 1999 Lord of the Rings fanfic that recast the (Western) Elves as evil and (Eastern) Orcs as the good guys, inspiring Russian LOTR fans to reappropriate the pejorative Orc as a term of positive identification. For better or worse, the reappropriation never quite caught on. In the ensuing quarter century, Orcs have come to stand for everything from the riot police in all of their gear to the zombified hordes—and their legions of trolls—who support Putin. In besieged Ukraine, the term expanded from referring to Russian soldiers to describing all Russians. Amid the recent wave of ICE/Border Patrol brutality, I have noticed the breach of the term chud into the mainstream American lexicon to describe a very similar genus of working-class right-wing man who would sign up to work for these agencies. As in Russia, the term carries dehumanizing class hatred and begs for reappropriation by “the enemy.” 

Where does chud come from? Well, broadly, the internet via The Simpsons. The reference is to an ’80s movie about Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers,who Homer claims to have taken him prisoner on a fateful trip to New York City (“Aw Homer, of course you’ll have a bad impression of New York if you only focus on the pimps and the CHUD”). According to Google’s AI summary re: this question, the deeper origins of chud are actually Slavic. It comes from chudak. This word is also impossible to translate—it means something like “idiot (complimentary/neutral)” (actually, like Homer), almost “holy fool,” as it shares a root with the word chudo, meaning “miracle.” When I told my collaborator and friend Ainsley Morse about this exciting switcheroo of Anglo and Slavic terms, the chuds and the Orcs, she said, “that sounds like bullshit.” Then I thought about it for three seconds and had to agree. At the same time, even if AI hallucinated this folk etymology, it may spread the same way that all folk etymologies do and create a new truth, one which further connects these two parallel forms and manifestations of fascism. As Igor Gulin writes in a book I am currently co-translating, “We live in two empires of evil and have been sketching out a strange pattern in the middle.” 

Do you want to write about difficult-to-translate words? I love this genre. Pitch me one: [email protected] 

---

Old Puzzle

For our very first puzzle, I chose a poem by  Kári Tulinius called “MARG URÞÚ SEMS YRGR,” which I had first encountered in a workshop with his translator Larissa Kyzer. The challenge of the puzzle was this: to render the English text using exclusively four letter words, following the Icelandic. The poem has four stanzas with four words each, and is about shipwrecks, with a catalogue of the sixteen names of the drowned in the middle. 

The poem was part of a cycle conceived during a year-long project of Tulinius writing poems on a typewriter in the window of a youth culture center in downtown Reykjavík: 

When I started I realized I needed some kind of form, so that I wouldn’t have to think of a new form every time I sat down. So I landed on this idea that I would write a line, and the number of words in the line would give me the form. . . . I mostly stuck with that schema, and eventually I had the idea that I could write a poem that was four verses of four lines of four words of four letters, but I didn’t try it until one day, hungover, I had the idea that I could break words apart, and arrange them like that visually. 

The importance of the visual was what inspired Kári  to get in touch with me after my column came out, imploring me to correct the way that the poem was presented. He asked that we put it into a monospace font, like Courier New or Lucida Console, so it would look more like it had on his typewriter.  Apologizing profusely, I took the opportunity to convince Kári  to judge the puzzle instead of me, which he agreed to. This had the added benefit of becoming a rejoinder to any contestants attempting to ingratiate themselves by inserting my name in catalogue of the shipwrecked. “Nice try,” I wrote to one sporting fellow. “Too bad that Kári also has four letters.” 

Of the four stanzas in the poem, to me, the one that is just names poses a special challenge. Beginning, in both Icelandic and English, “ævar kuba agla logi,” for someone who is unfamiliar with Icelandic, it is not immediately clear that these are names at all. I really liked what contestant/historian/organizer Esther Kamm did, rendering the stanza:

Jean Rene Yves Abel
Musa Doaa Rana Asad
Luis Raúl José Alba
Kofi Sani Femi Akua

Esther explained,

The theme of sadness and shipwrecks made me think of the Caribbean and Mediterranean—seas of historic connection and circulation, where in the last twenty-plus years thousands of migrants and refugees have died trying to cross. For each line I chose names common to a country or region that’s seen many refugees attempt those journeys:

Haiti

Middle East, especially Syria and Palestine

Hispanophone Caribbean & Central America

West Africa (those specific names come from Akan, Hausa, Yoruba, Akan) 

A similar game was played by my dear friend Alena Jones, who was probably trolling me when she sent me her version: 

YULE MORN THRU MORN

wave wave wave moon
wave wave tide-pull
hull wave wave wave
oshn oshn fear oshn

dead star felt fall
look look look look
safe safe home safe
loss loss some loss

rose jack kate leod
moly bron kath bate
bill zane rich dick
seen dion gugg heim

open open gull open
oshn oshn oshn reed
last leaf rest rest
muck muck what muck

The joke turned out to be on Alena, who Kári  chose as one of two runners-up. “I will say,” Kári  wrote, “at first I groaned when I noticed the references to the Titanic movie in the list of names, but then I laughed, and I’m always happy when a poem makes me laugh.” Like me, Kári also loved “oshn.” 

The second runner up was Bulgarian translator Nikola Nenkov Kendros, whose version Kári called “the most faithful.” Due to the potentially explosive nature of the term “faithful” when it comes to translation, for our own safety, I will not reproduce any part of Nicky’s beautiful version. 

And now for the winner. Congratulations to Caroline Katzive, a French and Spanish teacher from Washington, DC, currently living in London: 

ALLO FYOU MOUR NERS

haze haze haze moon
haze haze moon glow
ship haze haze haze
seas seas reef seas

ruby gold sund owns
seas ease asea seas
port port them port
ache ache them ache

ivar coby agla logi
tora rory paul kaya
isko dory anna oleg
lara nina omar pala

wind wind bird wind
seas seas seas alga
murk kelp murk murk
ooze ooze ruin ooze

Kári wrote: 

I’ll admit, “ALLO FYOU MOUR NERS” didn’t jump out to me at first read, and that was because it was done so smoothly that it felt entirely natural to me. On a second read-through of the entries, what first made me stop and pause was the second line of the second verse, “seas ease asea seas.” As the words rearranged themselves in my head into “sea sea sea sea seas” an image of sea upon sea upon sea stretching into infinity flashed in my mind, then the words snapped back into “seas ease a sea seas,” bringing forth an entirely different set of images and notions. It was startling. Now, a single line rarely makes a poem, as anyone who’s looked up poems which gave the world famous aphorisms can tell you. Luckily, “ALLO FYOU MOUR NERS” does a number of other things really well too. I was really struck by them for people, and the renamings were both smart and respectful. And the last line of “ooze ooze ruin ooze” had a real sad finality to it. In the end, what pushed this translation into first place for me was how different each verse felt, the stark image of the first image, the wilder form of the second, the focus given to each name in the third, and the quiet despair of the last verse.

When I told Caroline she had won, the first thing she did was call her mother. I also told Caroline that Kári had offered to buy her a cookie, to which she replied that there was actually a very nice bakery and cafe down the street from her place in London. What I didn’t tell Caroline was that Kári had also made this same offer to me and to all of the other contestants, as well as any n+1 web developer willing to fulfill his request re: the font. I have a feeling that Kári may also have a cookie for you, reader, should you ever find yourself in Reykjavik. 

I wish I could show you all of the versions—-they really were wonderful and surprisingly numerous. But, most importantly, you should see the OG Larissa Kyzer’s. And look out for Larissa’s translation of Steinunn G. Helgadóttir’s The Strongest Woman in the World, which will be coming out as part of Open Letter’s Icelandic triptych this September. You can start reading it here. Finally, if you are interested in reading more Icelandic literature but unsure of where to start, in 2021, Larissa curated a really great collection of new writing from Iceland on Words Without Borders, which she contextualized in this essay. Great for when it is suddenly 90 degrees in early Spring. 

---

On to the Next Puzzle 

The hardest part of writing this column is getting translators to submit puzzles. I have to figure out how to solve this. Maybe I can ask the web developer to make sure that the first letter of each new line of this column forms an acrostic that spells out PLEASE HELP ME I’M DYING? Are you susceptible to subliminal messages? Or are you, perhaps, capable of sending the kind of psychic signals to Lydia Davis that would make her answer my email? Do you have the proper tools to hypnotize Sawako Nakayasu into doing my bidding? I am just kidding. I am in no need of necromancy. Yet. 

This time, it is my pleasure to bring you this insane concoction from writer John R. Sesgo, whose first book of translation, Karmelo C. Iribarren’s You’ve Heard This One Before, is being published by World Poetry in April. Iribarren is a self-taught contemporary poet from Spain with fifteen renowned collections of poetry. Until fairly recently, his occupation was bartender. Here is a typically plainspoken Iribarren poem in John R. Sesgo’s translation: 

Sunday, Afternoon

If it isn’t raining
what am I doing
watching the rain

As a habitual translator of deceptively simple poems myself, I was not deceived—I know all too well the complexity that can go into rendering this kind of thing with John R. Sesgo-like grace. In his introduction, Sesgo writes that the “most crucial” effect of Iribarren’s poems is what the poet calls their “carpentry”—namely, their use of mostly internal assonant rhyme. Sesgo painstakingly works to reproduce it. 

The translator deviously provided four levels of difficulty on this puzzle, four patterns of assonance you can include in your translation. He has made color-coded diagrams. If I am smart enough to understand them, I promise that you are, also. He said to consult RhymeZone and WordReference’s Spanish idioms forums. I did not ask him for an interlinear translation/trot this time, assuming that readers might want to practice their Spanish/use dictionaries/the-thing-that-shall-not-be-named. 

HINT: If I were you, I would make your trot of the poem and then start messing around with John’s green and blue highlights.

Here are John R. and Karmelo C. I dare you!

Karmelo C. Iribarren: Sonic Puzzle

By John R. Sesgo

Although apparently simple, Iribarren’s poems are like tiny, sonic engines that run on—and generate—very complex patterns of rhyme.

The puzzle below is built around two of his favorite sonic effects: 1) chains of assonance; and 2) what he calls “a turn” or vocalic surprise at the end of a stanza or line.

The puzzle begins with the second effect, and then proceeds to build in further sonic patterns. One thing to note is that English assonance is a weaker effect than in Spanish, and that, especially when a pair of vowels is involved, some consonance is usually required to make the rhyme audible (compare the assonance of “hatter” and “fathom” with that of “hatter” and “hacker”). For the poem below, however, single-vowel assonance (e.g., “time” and “line”) will be enough to carry across the effect and solve the puzzle.

I have split the sonic challenges into four levels of increasing difficulty. 

Level 1

El amor

Como el viento que encuentra
una rendija
y se cuela en la habitación
y lo desordena todo
libros
facturas
poemas
             así llega
en la vida
el amor.

Nada es igual a partir de entonces,
ese caos
es la felicidad. 

Pero un día habrá que recoger.

Suerte si no te toca a ti.

Challenge: End each stanza with a different stressed vowel sound. In Spanish, that is –o, –a, –e, and –i.

Level 2

El amor

Como el viento que encuentra
una rendija
y se cuela en la habitación
y lo desordena todo
libros
facturas
poemas
             así llega
en la vida
el amor.

Nada es igual a partir de entonces,
ese caos
es la felicidad. 

Pero un día habrá que recoger.

Suerte si no te toca a ti.

Challenge: Build an assonant chain where a vowel sound is repeated twice in the first stanza, and once in the third. In Spanish, that is the vowel sequence i-a.

Level 3

El amor

Como el viento que encuentra
una rendija
y se cuela en la habitación
y lo desordena todo
libros
facturas
poemas
             así llega
en la vida
el amor.

Nada es igual a partir de entonces,
ese caos
es la felicidad. 

Pero un día habrá que recoger.

Suerte si no te toca a ti.

Challenge: Introduce sonic variety and an aural surprise by:

1. Having two instances of the same vowel sound in the first stanza that occur nowhere else in the poem (in Spanish, that is the vowel sequence o-o); and
2. Using a vowel sound in the last word of the first line of the second stanza (in Spanish,o-ein entonces) that appears nowhere else in a stressed position in the poem. 

Level 4

El amor

Como el viento que encuentra
una rendija
y se cuela en la habitación
y lo desordenatodo
libros
facturas
poemas
             así llega
en la vida
el amor.

Nada es igual a partir de entonces,
ese caos
es la felicidad. 

Pero un día habrá que recoger.

Suerte si no te toca a ti.

Challenge: Build a five-link chain of assonance in the first stanza; in Spanish, that is the vowel sequence e-a.

Send your solutions by April 27 to: [email protected], SUBJ: Translation Puzzle.

---

If you like this article, please subscribe or leave a tax-deductible tip below to support n+1.