Hello and welcome to Miss Translation, a semi-regular column about translation featuring reviews, previews, puzzles, and so on, written by me, Miss Translation, although you may also know me as Bela, a woman whose last name you’re scared of pronouncing. I changed it—you’re welcome. You know what we call that? Domestication. 

I translate from Russian and teach in the Translation Program at the University of Iowa. I have this dream job for either one more semester or one more year and then maybe never again, since Iowa is one of two undergraduate translation programs in the US and one of very few MFA translation programs. Thus, I have been forced to start a magazine column in pursuit of the real job that I want, a.k.a. the only way anyone I know actually supports themselves in this literary craft: Mrs. Translation. Or Mx.! I’m down for whatever. Please get in touch if you want to marry me or arrange any other kind of financial agreement in which I am the beneficiary.

Questions, comments, ideas for features, proposals, tips, tricks, puzzles, conundrums, problems, dilemmas, issues, etc. can be addressed to [email protected], SUBJ: Questions, comments, ideas for features, proposals, tips, tricks, puzzles, conundrums, problems, dilemmas, issues, etc. 

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Translation of the Month

I finally read Ia Genberg’s The Details, in Kira Josefsson’s translation. This book was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize a few years ago, but I don’t tend to pay attention to prizes. I once dated a man who only read National Book Award winners and that struck me as demented, but now that I’ve read The Details and am looking at Flesh by David Azalay I am wondering whether it’s actually a good idea. I ended up picking up Genberg because I recently made friends with Kira and her wife Jacqui Cornetta, who is also a translator. They are extremely attractive as individuals and as a couple, and indeed, they wrote an essay called “The Erotics of Translation” for Saskia Vogel’s beautiful magazine, TheErotic Review, which is only implicitly about how attractive they are, but whatever—it’s sexy, two translators, meddling with one another’s languages and practices (yes, they use “tongues” in it). 

But I didn’t read The Details because I was h*rny—I read it because I was teaching. Every semester, I have my students read excerpts from different books translated by the same person in order to try to understand the practice of literary translation as “cultural ambassadorship,” and see how much they can ascertain about a translator’s political and aesthetic values from comparing their works. Then I have the translator come in and, in Kira’s case, emotionally bludgeon the students by exposing them to the concept of social democracy, which was not something most of them had ever heard of and which, in a double-bludgeon, Kira was actually critical of—not of the welfare state, but of the image of Sweden as a utopia, which Kira believes not only erases its problems but, worse, limits our own political imaginary. Part of her mission is to complicate this image of Sweden by translating works that highlight tensions around race and immigration. My students didn’t know that you could have a political imaginary, and this is what’s funny about teaching a subject as abstract and all-encompassing as translation: the conversation, like language itself, ends up going everywhere. This also puts me in the position of using my podcast-poisoned, sundowning brain to answer amazing questions like, “Was the War on Terror justified?” 

The Details is very short: four linked stories recounted by a middle-aged narrator as she lays in a fever, recalling four people she no longer speaks to. The central relationships are from the 1990s, when you could “still lose people” if you stopped talking to them and they weren’t in the phone book. This is one of the themes that Genberg comes back to, and it strikes me as an interesting twist in the metafictional dimension, i.e. what it means when you write about people who are, effectively, neither dead nor alive, whose presence can only be reanimated through fictional depiction, however we are defining fiction and autofiction at the moment. There is nothing inherently compelling in the description of this book. What makes it great is the voice, which Catherine Lacey called “mesmerizing and hot to the touch.” I was also really intrigued by Genberg’s writing process, which involved, as Kira writes in her introduction, starting “over from the beginning of whichever chapter she was working on each time she sat down to write, rethreading the entire cloth of the text countless times.” This might sound like over-working the text, but considering the natural, associative flow of the stories, I think it must have played into why the writing feels so alive. I’m thinking about the way that certain stories you tell over and over become ossified precisely in their structure. I imagine that Genberg was jostling her narratives, like a horse jostles a horse girl, or one of those vibrating plates. I was excited not only by the language itself, but by the fact that the language was somehow so accessible and successful that this book became a bestseller in Sweden. There is no shocking backstory or maximalist presentation to this book, no trick, people just like it because they love the writing. To me, this is life-affirming. And, obviously, a testament to Kira’s talent. 

Have you translated something life-affirming and/or a testament to your talent? Tell me about it: [email protected] SUBJ: Review my translation 

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Books I’m Excited For

Queen by Birgitta Trotzig, trans. Saskia Vogel. Archipelago Press, February 2026.

One of Ia Genberg’s narrator’s failed relationships is with a woman named Niki, whose favorite writer is Birgitta Trotzig:

Wherever you found yourself in Niki’s apartment—at the kitchen table or in the bathroom or the hall or sitting on the windowsill—there would be a book by Birgitta Trotzig within eyesight. . . . These were the only books Niki would never dream of giving away or even letting anyone borrow. If somebody happened to open one of these books after finding it by the bed or the sink or on the table, Niki would snatch it from the hands of the person in question like she was taking a box of matches from a child. . . . In my world Birgitta Trotzig is the literary counterpart to the blurred picture you can find on a TV screen. It seems like there’s something interesting going on there, but I can’t tell what. I turn the knobs, try to change the settings, but the picture remains blurry. For a long time I thought I’d come to understand Niki better, her psychiatric approach to life’s spiritual dimensions, her worship of dirt and shame and the pull she felt from the underworld. It seemed to me that the two of them shared a room in a bloodred, severe, and chaotic world I couldn’t access. 

I love this ambivalent description, it makes me so curious about whether I will connect to this frequency or whether, as for Genberg’s narrator, it will feel like static. I do love dirt and shame and the pull of the underworld. I also remembered that I have heard Trotzig’s work before, at a reading, from a translation in progress by Ida Hattemer-Higgins; the density and the darkness of the language was mesmerizing. Ida is a great writer in her own right, but listening to her also reminded me of my big stupid theory that mediocre translation can’t ruin great prose—prove me wrong! preferably, by your own hand!—and that digesting a truly beautiful material, dissolving it in your own prose, will only make your prose better. 

Despite being a preeminent 20th-century Swedish writer who has published dozens of books in multiple genres, Trotzig has barely appeared in English; Queen, out from Archipelago Press in February, in Saskia Vogel’s translation, will be her first full-length work in our beloved language. It’s a novella from 1964, and has some pretty, uh, “bloodred” blurbs, like this one from Claire Foster: “Lethal and legendary, Trotzig’s world, in Vogel’s translation, is as definitive as the sun.” I’ve never thought of the sun as definitive before . . . damn. 

You may have noticed that this column feels a little incestuous (there is that Saskia Vogel again . . .) but that’s our world in translation. It’s small, and its actors, often by necessity, are prolific. It might also be because there are only so many people in the Swedish literary mafia. The theme for this month is the cold, by the way. And that must be why this month’s puzzle is from Iceland. 

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The Puzzle

Translation requires a lot of specialized knowledge, from jargon and slang to literary history. But that shouldn’t stop anyone from trying their hand at it for the pure pleasure of solving a puzzle and playing with form. This first translation/puzzle comes via writer and translator Larissa Kyzer, presenting Kári Tulinius, a contemporary poet and novelist from Iceland. Tulinius, Kyzer writes, is “stylistically restless, his poems ranging from simple, declarative statements to experimental texts that require readers to slow down in order to decode and reconstruct their meaning themselves.” 

Below you will find his poem, MARG URÞÚ SEMS YRGR, in the original Icelandic, next to a basic English translation (“trot”). To do the puzzle, use the Icelandic and trot English to write a poem that follows Tulinius’ constraints: your translation should have four words per line with four letters per word. 

MARG URÞÚ SEMS YRGR is part of Kári’s “breakable atoms” series, in which all the poems  have the same form of four verses of four lines each, with each line made up of four clusters of four letters. Sixteen of them were once performed simultaneously by a choir. In numerology, the number four represents diligence and stability. Try your hand at this poem as a spell to cast on yourself for the next year, to transform yourself into an antlike servant of strict and obscure designs. 

Hint 1: Tulinius happily breaks the rules of Icelandic. 

Hint 2: The vantage point from which this poem is written is a common site of shipwrecks—hence the catalogue of names (I think . . .)

Hint 3: What the hell is a skerry, Larissa??? 

Send me what you come up with! And do not cheat by, looking up Larissa’s solution, which I will link to next time, until you are done. Winner gets glory and online publication. This one is really fun. Bonne chance! I did my version in fifteen minutes and it turned out perfect.

Icelandic:

MARG URÞÚ SEMS YRGR

þoka þoka þoka máni
þoka þoka mána skin
skip þoka þoka þoka
sjór sjór sker sjórrauð gult sóla rlag
sjór sjór sjór sjór
höfn höfn fólk höfn
sorg sorg fólk sorg

ævar kuba agla logi
þóra rúrí paul kaja
isko dóri anna oleg
lára nína ómar pála

loft loft fugl loft
sjór sjór sjór svif
botn þang botn botn
eðja eðja flak eðja

Trot:

MANY YOU* WHO MOURN**

fog fog fog moon
fog fog moon-light***
ship fog fog fog
sea sea skerry sea^

red yellow sun-set***
sea sea sea sea
harbor harbor people harbor
sadness sadness people sadness

ævar^^ kuba agla logi
þóra rúrí paul kaja
isko dóri anna oleg
lára nína ómar pála

air air bird air
sea sea sea plankton
bottom/bed seaweed bed bed
sludge sludge wreck sludge

Notes:

* “you” is in the singular form in the Icelandic title, as opposed to the plural form of you, as would be grammatically appropriate

** The poet has dropped the phonetically unnecessary ‘i’ from the spelling of the word ‘syrgir’ in the title in order to fit the four-character-per-word constraint

*** these words (“sunset” and “moonlight”) are split across two columns in the Icelandic

^ each stanza can be visualized as a contained image, almost a painting, where each line of text would correspond to what you’d see in each line of the picture

^^ the third stanza is composed of names. æ is a single letter in the Icelandic alphabet

Send your solutions to: [email protected] SUBJ: Translation Puzzle. 

Vi ses nästa månad!

—Miss Translation 

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