More on: translation

It almost takes a supernatural power to insist on existing, belonging, and mattering as an embodied presence when you are an outsider.

Night hadn’t brought forth its cache of new stars. / Nor mimosa trees folded their leaves. / She laughed, a bold and sudden laugh

That woman carrying a stone might be understood like this: the Virgin and the Stone:—-to her has been foretold  ————————————the weight of the world. She carries a stone like others their cross.—-A–cross: said to be from this landscape’s newest tree:—artificial tree whose fruit is a natural corpse.—-The stone has the weight ——————————————–of a dead child:…

It’s been a while already since the last pair of animals climbed into the ark. An admirable job. The solitary ones have remained on earth, the unpaired, the ones marked with a red felt pen by God. The chill of the first drops disperses them onto the avenues slippery from the port and docks already…

the white-haired child is there, upright in the mire a son of Adam seeking the orient within seeing himself in the eyes of the pack that combs the countryside, spurred on by brass horns his fortune has no bounds he pores over matter which unnerves his world especially the timid ones striding on ibis legs,…

Van Gessel has been Shūsaku Endō’s primary English translator since the 1970s. He has translated eight of his novels and worked as a consultant on Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Silence. We asked him about the previously untranslated Endō story in Image issue 92, and about what Endō’s work has to say to the West. Can…

Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai, translated from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (New Directions, 2013) Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue, translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Riverhead Books, 2016) A Story of America Goes Walking by Saara Myrene Raappana and Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton (Shechem Press, 2016) Peter Hujar: Lost Downtown by Vince Aletti and Stephen Koch…

UNTIL LAST YEAR, I worked in a small apartment on Nampeidai in Shibuya. In actuality, the apartment was not on Nampeidai proper, but was located away from the main street and all its spacious mansions, and thus the deposit and the rent were not so very expensive. Of the apartment’s two rooms, I used one…

ONCE that creature had thudded to the floor and finally gone quiet, she had waited for her rage to subside and her breathing to return to normal before washing everything off at the hand basin in the toilet—the place she always washed. It was, perhaps, inadvisable to destroy all evidence of contact with the rapist—she realized…

YOU MIGHT BE AT A DISTANCE from your life. As always: an ordinary state, banal. Your body headed straight for the abyss, with the forward momentum of age. And beneath the freshness of blood there is weakness, ashes. Nostalgia: the soul. Sick, yes. Without a doubt: sick. And the real name of that sickness would be…