Foreign Tongues: Bengali

HFR publishes contributors from all over the world, in languages and from places that some people (we're not pointing fingers) have never heard of. These recurring Foreign Tongues posts offer some culture and history—a way to better understand the background behind some not-so-familiar peoples and languages.

While I know we’re lucky enough to have a diverse readership, it wouldn’t surprise me if many of you were unfamiliar with quite a few of the languages featured in our International section. Or maybe I’m just projecting . . . which is quite possible, because as I leafed through Issue 42, I came across what was, to me, a beautiful jumble of script that would look great as a tattoo. The first (uneducated) guess I had was that this was Hindi script. Little did I know that what I was seeing was Bengali, or Bangla, the second-most spoken language in India, the official language of Bangladesh, and a language with an amazingly contentious and passionate history.

 Bengali is part of the Indo-European language family. This is the same (extremely) general branch that English falls into, so technically, Bengali and English have a common root. Below, though, you can see just how linguistically distant they are.

Bengali and English indicated with green arrows

This distance lends itself to untranslatable words and meanings like, for instance, the fact that there is no specific word for have in Bengali. Right. That means all of the following things we take for granted in English aren’t there for us in Bengali:

• To have your mother’s eyes
• To have and to hold
• To have or have not
• To have fun
• To have an ace up your sleeve
• To have no idea
• To have your cake and eat it, too
• To have a cold
• To have to go

And from there, you also can’t access any of the conjugations of have, i.e. has, had, etc. Well, how do you say things like that, then? There are definitely ways to express those general ideas, but as Westerners, we have (hah!) to be able to change the way we think about the world. Most languages spoken in the Western world are centered on the individual. As a society, we’re acutely individualistic. Everything we express—verbally or in writing—places us, as individuals, as the focus. From that point of view, we discuss the world in a sort of one-way dialogue. (When I first learned this as an undergrad, this was a sticking point for a while. How else could you view the world? I would wonder, as my linguistics prof skipped on to his next exciting point about berries being their own food group in Norway . . . ) Any time we say “I/you/we have,” we put ourselves as the center of action, and let whatever else we’re talking about play second fiddle as dependent on the fact that, first, there is—and must be—a you, I, we, etc. to affix the secondary object or person to.

 Contrast our me-me-me point of view with that of Bengali (and many other languages), which discusses the world through a complex, reciprocal pattern of interrelationships that has no concrete center, and that allows everything and everyone to interact on a level playing field, linguistically. A very dry, very basic way of explaining this is by understanding that generally, Bengali language structures itself something like this:



          X is to me

 

      or



          with me is X



The fact that no one goes around saying “I have” suggests (and I’m guessing here) that there might also not be a verb for “to be.” I say this only because if you can’t say “I have,” it seems likely that you also wouldn’t express the English claim to existence, “I am,” which is the epitome of individual-centeredness. Ask Stephen Crane. He knows what I’m talking about. These are (obviously) enormous linguistic differences, but they don’t only tell us how linguistically different English and Bengali are, they also tell us how disparate these cultures and their worldviews are.*



So now imagine being an English-speaking translator and finding these amazing poems in Bengali that you really want to translate. Taking the cultural and linguistic differences into account . . . how do you get the author’s message across? Any translator will tell you that taking a piece of writing from one language to another involves more than your multilingual dictionary and the help of Google Translate.

Opening stanzas: "Conjugal Prayer"

In Issue 42, Carolyne Wright discusses just that—translating Shamim Azad’s Bengali poetry and the difficulty of capturing and faithfully representing the cultural aspects of that poetry. After all of that linguistic difficulty we just talked about, there are still other aspects that are just as arduous to get right. Wright specifically calls out trying to translate the idea of what she calls a “dream city,” which is the mythical city of Ālaka. (Information on the city can also be found under Alaka, Alakapuri, and Alkapuri, which makes for some interesting Google searches. I have never been more annoyed at Alaska.) This dream city has a ton of cultural weight in Bengali, but in English, Wright struggled to find an equivalent. “Ālaka could be translated as “El Dorado” or even “Oz” to convey the sense of a fantastical city of unimaginable wealth and splendor, ” she says. But neither of these cities quite conveys the cultural significance of Ālaka.


From “Conjugal Prayer”



    How can I live with a saint in perpetual meditation

    who renounces everything at night

                                    and goes off to some dream city?



In Hindu mythology, Ālaka is described as a fabulous, hidden Himalayan city—the city of wealth, and the City of the Blessed. This is where Kuvera, the god of wealth, reigns, and the city is described as having a golden lotus-lake, golden houses, and crystal palaces. It’s enclosed by a golden wall and is a place where every desire is indulged.


Kuvera, god of wealth

As Wright has already pointed out, that description of Ālaka is a far cry from the Emerald City of Oz or El Dorado. The contemporary Emerald City, with its creepy behind-the-curtain, wish-granting wizard and its personified nonhumans falls into the fable-fabulous, just as Ālaka does, but has less of a mythological significance or religious aspect. (I know some of you are protesting this last point, but we can deconstruct The Wizard of Oz later. Right now, let's focus!) In similar failure, El Dorado, the city of unimaginable wealth (and unimaginable bloodshed), only matches the wealth aspect of Ālaka’s characteristics. So if we had a Dorado City of Oz, we might get closer to the cultural sense of this city, but we’re still a bit off.

Ālaka is no one-hit wonder—it has a rich literary history. It’s a city of the gods, the setting of mythological stories that answer the questions why and where did we come from. In the end, Wright’s selection of dream city is probably for the best. As she explains, “The expression “dream city” [allows] readers of the translation to understand the poet’s intention here . . . ” By not weighing her selection down with culturally predetermined ideas of what each alternate city might suggest, she leaves the poem to speak for itself.
... ... ... ...

To read poetry from Shamim Azad, as translated by Carolyne Wright, check out the International section of Issue 42.



Hear Azad’s poetry in the original Bengali, as she reads to the music of After Art Band:


Conjugal Prayer (mentions Ālaka)
Waiting for the Touch
I Want to Pierce with the Arrows of My Voice



*If you know more about this and can reign in my hypothesis, leave some info for us in comments!

Book Review: BOYSGIRLS

BOYSGIRLS, by Katie Farris. Marick Press, 2011 (forthcoming). Review by Debrah Lechner.

BOYSGIRLS is a dizzying series of colorful gem-like stories, demon-and-fairy tales that present fabulous monsters that we’ve known existed all along. In fact, any of us might be one.

In the story “Mise en Abyme” the first line of the story is, “People are forever falling for the girl with a mirror for a face.”

In “The Girl who Grew” the first line is, “I know what I look like, lying in this muddy water, my toes and fingers as thick as the trunks of elephants, my eyes rusted almost shut with pondweed and petrified eyelashes.”

In “Her Mother’s Mother was a Machete” the first line is, appropriately enough, “Her mother’s mother was a machete.”

In “The Devil’s Face” the first line is, “The girl has been learning to shit on the devil’s face.” I rather like and will also quote another line in this story: “It is difficult, he explained, after a millennia of existence, to get off.”

These stories are from the “Girls” section. “Boys” is more of an extended parable, concerning a boy with one wing who is seeking flight. It’s a little more obviously empathetic, although empathy is without doubt present in all of Farris’s fiction. It’s beautiful. It escapes being pretty, fortunately. Farris took a risk including it. It might have undermined the fear and loathing, shock and awe that she so carefully cultivated in the “Girls” section.

Farris addresses the reader a couple of times, using a style that is overly polite and slightly antique. In the introduction, in this mannered language, she insolently promises to provide fiction that you will be forced to react to, something unique, something you will want to keep reading−and then she insolently makes good on that promise.

It is another testament to the potency of Farris’s fiction that its imagery is more brilliant than the ink drawings by illustrator Lavinia Hanachiuk. Yup, you get pictures too.

Unless you object to the fecally encrusted face of Satan, there’s nothing not to like here. I suggest getting a copy of BOYSGIRLS as soon as it is published. It is forthcoming this spring.

Katie Farris’s poetry, fiction and translations have been published in numerous journals. She is a Romanian-born ceramicist and photographer. She teaches Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at San Diego University.

Buy #Quakebook, Change Lives.

Have you heard of #quakebook?

You have heard that the March 11 earthquake and tsunami devastated northeastern Japan. The earthquake hit 9.0 on the Richter scale and shifted the geographical position of Japan, and the tsunami almost completely razed the Tohoku coastline. The explosions, leaks, and power failures at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station have made Japan’s nuclear crisis the most serious nuclear emergency since Chernobyl. Even in Tokyo, traces of radiation have been found in the water, and for days, the densely populated capital was silent. The death toll has risen to 13,800 people, 14,000 people are still being reported as missing, and tens of thousands of people have been displaced from their homes, because they were evacuated or because their homes were destroyed. Japan in still experiences aftershocks, some as high as 7.2 on the Richter scale, and power outages and food and water shortages are still serious problems in Japan.

The actual number of people affected by the earthquake and tsunami is of course much greater. Many Japanese students studying abroad were unable to return home, and many could not contact their families and friends for days. I spent the first half of my spring break trying to get in contact with my host family and all of my friends in Japan, watching news updates from both the US and Japan, and sharing and following links to missing person finders, photos, and information sources on facebook.

So what is #quakebook?

#Quakebook started from a single Twitter post, and under the leadership of Our Man in Abiko, a blogger and foreign resident of Japan, in only a few weeks grew into a best-selling ebook on Amazon.

Published with the title 2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake, #quakebook is a collection of first-hand accounts, narratives, blog posts, tweets, photographs, and stories from people affected by the March 11 Japan earthquake and tsunami. Contributors to the ebook are professional and citizen journalists, authors, bloggers, witnesses, survivors, an 80-year-old Sendai grandfather, a family who told their son they might never return home, Jake Adelstein, William Gibson, Barry Eisler, and Yoko Ono.

#Quakebook is available for purchase and download on Amazon for the Kindle, but even if you don’t own the Kindle (like me) you can download the Kindle reader for your computer for free and read #quakebook on your personal computer. #Quakebook costs $9.99 on Amazon, and all proceeds go to benefit victims of the earthquake and tsunami through the Red Cross. Amazon waived all additional fees, and neither Amazon nor Our Man in Abiko and the #quakebook contributors receive any cut of the payments. Let me say that again. ALL PROCEEDS GO TO THE RED CROSS. Every single cent goes to benefit victims and survivors in Japan.

Buy #quakebook. Read something interesting. Donate some money. Change some lives.

Links (and sources for this blog post):

BUY #quakebook on Amazon

#Quakebook official website

Our Man in Abiko

New York Times Japan Information

News Around the Net

The 2011 Pulitzer Prize winners have been announced. Jennifer Egan take the prize home for fiction for her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad.

To help her celebrate the prize, Egan also gets HBO-optioning-your-book-and-turning-it-into-a-series money!

This is amazingly cool. It also makes me mourn the untimely death of my own Kindle (I was halfway through The Naked and the Dead! Ughhhh.).

The 2011 TIME 100. Authors Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan made the cut. As did Rain and Justin Bieber. You take what you can get.

The house that F. Scott Fitzgerald was said to have modeled Daisy Buchanan's house has been demolished. We have the pictures to prove it.

Last but not least, a recent study shows that book reading teens are less prone to depression than those who are not.

Sad News

Our hearts go out to the community at Louisiana State University; Jeanne Leiby was killed in a tragic auto accident yesterday. Jeanne was a fabulous editor for The Southern Review and The Florida Review before that, and really a wonderful person. She will be missed.

TSR's blog runs this tribute.

News Around the Net

Borders, going out of business with a sense of humor. Or a whole lot of bitterness.

Amazon is considering coming out with an advertising-supported Kindle. Evil, right? But not all that new of an idea.

The Atlantic has a new Stephen King story in their pages, and they also sat down to talk to him about the creative process and the state of fiction.

The American Library Association has released its official 2010 list of most challenged books. Twilight made the cut, congrats, Stephanie Meyer!

A joker posted the first page of Infinite Jest on Yahoo answers with the title "first page of my book, what do you think?" The results were not kind.

This Week in Literary History: This American Life

On April 10, 1925, the world was introduced to one of literature's most eligible bachelors: Jay Gatsby. Known for his extravagant parties, Mr. Jay Gatsby was the Diddy of 1922. This book portrays New York high society in the early 1920's perfectly, and for that reason it remains part of the American literary canon.

14 years later, on April 14, 1939, John Steinbeck would publish the antithesis of The Great Gatsby, a novel that focused on the poverty stricken and the working class, The Grapes of Wrath. As James Gray writes about Steinbeck and Fitzgerald, both writers had a "preoccupation with the continuing problems of American life...Fitzgerald took his share at the domain inhabited by the rich, the sheltered, the frequenters of cafes, bootleggers' parties, and psychiatrists' consulting rooms...Steinbeck, for his inheritance, took the orchards and growing fields of California, the wasteland of the Depression, the refugee camps of rebels and the slums of poverty."

April 14 is also the anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Bad times. There is a great poem about Lincoln in the latest issue of The Mississippi Review. You can scroll through all the issues available for backorder here.

Book Review: Without Such Absence

Without Such Absence, by Benjamin Vogt. Finishing Line Press, 2010. Review by Debrah Lechner. Poetry.

Without Such Absence is a lyrical tribute to the ecology and culture of Midwest America, to its architecture and people, an elegy to what has passed, an ode of praise for the beauty that persists into the present—whether present in photographs, in memory, or directly under your feet. It is obvious that Vogt knows where he is rooted, was meant to belong, and that alone is a rare and emotionally evocative quality.

His landscapes aren’t in need of human narration. They sing for themselves, and even when their identity has been formed or altered through a relationship with our species, they are distinct and whole in themselves. In “Lotus Lake, Minnesota”:

There on the north side where the lilies grow out

in waves one-hundred feet thick, where the shallow

bottom surfaces in spring snow, a wooden dock lurches

forward from the thicket. Its dozen slips twist, turn

away from soil and itself, so it leans like a weathered

farmhouse in a field. It doesn’t complain about

its disease, its creaks are rare, it speaks only to fish and not

to bare footsteps of little girls in lime-green swimsuits. . .

Also to be found in the book is significant meditation on the natural world and civilization (as we name these things) and how they can co-exist, can’t coexist, must coexist. Vogt’s thought about this varies, is refreshingly complex, but always filled with yearning.

In the poem “Compatible”:

Are trees and the interstates

among them? Jet planes in erratic

white cumulonimbus? Dandelions

in the cracks of city sidewalks?

And you ask day after day

what these things mean, if black is not

really white, if it can ever be,

if lack is really intense fulfillment

In “The Whale”, the subject is an Associated Press report of Vietnamese worshipping a dead whale that washed onto a sandbar and was stranded. There is much joy in Vogt’s poetry, another strength in his writing. “The Whale”, however, is melancholy, but the last lines are so memorable that I must close with them:

. . . the waves will punish

the whale until if fades into formlessness, then finally earth.

So in the end this is faith. The body giving up its reason.

Benjamin Vogt is the recipient of several fellowships and grants, Pushcart nominations in two genres, and the author of numerous poems published in multiple journals, some of which can be found in the large collection of his work Afterimage (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, forthcoming.) He is also the author of the chapbook Indelible Marks (Pudding House, 2004).

He currently lectures at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Nebraska, where he also cultivates a 2000 square foot garden filled with native grasses and plants−no small ambition to fulfill in itself.

Learn more about Benjamin Vogt at his website, which will also lead you to his gardening blog, Facebook and Twitter accounts if you have a comment or question. Without Such Absence is available for purchase at Amazon.com, among many other places.

Snubbed by Snooki

“Study hard, but party harder.”

These aren’t the words of the latest Bud Light or Bacardi campaign, but those of Rutgers University’s most recent guest speaker, Nicole Polizzi.

Better known as “Snooki,” a moniker made popular by MTV’s The Jersey Shore, Polizzi visited New Jersey’s largest university to speak to young Rutger’s students about the important things in life: You know, hair, fist pumping, and most importantly, keeping up with GTL—gym, tanning, laundry.

The reality TV star was paid $3200 to share her words of wisdom last Thursday, $2000 more than what Toni Morrison will be receiving to deliver Rutgers' commencement address in May.

This discrepancy in payment has earned the university’s Programming Association more than a few raised eyebrows, and begs the question, “are the words of a reality TV celebrity really worth more than those of a nobel-prize winning novelist?” For most of us, the obvious answer is “NO.” But in a time when younger generations are more likely to pick up a TV control than a book, this question is unfortunately one worth considering.

In 1992 when MTV released The Real World, I doubt any institution, especially not one of higher education, would have even considered inviting a reality TV star to speak to a group of students. But back then, a novelist had more respect than a D-list celebrity, and a nobel-prize was considered a bigger accomplishment than a fake tan and teased hair.

News Around the Net

Will DFW's new book be overshadowed by his suicide? Will you be able to separate the writing from the writer personally while reading?

Here's Michiko Kakutani's review of The Pale King.

What if I told you J.J. Abrams was collaborating on a novel with a graduate of Iowa's MFA program and a three time Jeopardy champion (the same guy). Would this be something you're interested in?

Let's hope this doesn't become a trend: Penn State has cut its funding for their MFA program.

And then there's this. And all of us who love words mourn.

Rumpus readers discuss how to defeat writer's block.

Stories Inspired by HFR

I am sad to announce the very last story we will publish on the blog from students at Basis in Scottsdale. This assignment was a 500-word story inspired by a picture from Issue #47 of HFR. This final story is a special "extra" story from 10th grader Sonya S. who wanted in on the action. This is a fabulous story, rich with description and brilliantly contained within 300 words, inspired by "Coppersmith's Cat" by Rena Effendi. I hope you all have enjoyed reading these wonderful stories. We at HFR have had so much fun reading through all of these stories and getting them all published on the blog. These students are very talented emerging writers, and we are proud to have had even a very small hand in assisting them in the early days of their writing ventures.

To all of the students at Basis who contributed their work to the HFR blog: Thank-you so much for letting us share your work. We think you are all very talented, and we hope you continue writing!

Here's Sonya S.' story:

*

The graying tomcat limped into the deserted village hesitantly, as if fighting against a current that was trying to push him back. His short, mismatched fur was matted with dirt, missing in patches around his numerous scars; his head swiveled around methodically as he began his search. Finally, the old cat paused his arduous journey--looming silently in front of him was a dilapidated, beaten little shack. One cloudy yellow eye blinked in recognition.

A low grumble escaped his throat and he trudged in, stepping cautiously around the rusty, broken tools. He vaguely remembered a time when they were new and shining and propped up against the once-sturdy wall, a time when the tinkering of metal and the laughter of children filled the house with liveliness.

He cocked his head to the side and pricked up a torn ear, as if hoping to hear a lingering echo of the living. But now, after nearly twenty long years of isolation, the only sound to be heard was the soft crying of the wind whistling through broken window panes. With a sigh, he settled down on his side in the middle of the previously undisturbed dirt floor. Quietly at first, he began to purr--low and broken, like the sound of a car engine that hasn’t been used in a long, long time.

His mind on memories of the past, memories of a warm fire and a pair of soft loving hands and kind eyes filled with happiness, the exhausted, abused cat closed his eyes.

Foreign Tongues: Danish

HFR publishes contributors from all over the world, in languages and from places that some people (we're not pointing fingers) have never heard of. This recurring post Foreign Tongues will give you a little culture and a little history, a way to better understand the background behind some not-so-familiar peoples and languages.
in the first place). So let's begin, shall we?

By now, you've probably figured out my format--introduce the language I'm talking about, give a little background info, shamelessly name a few famous people associated with the language, and finally, tie it back to HFR (which is where I find languages to write about in the first place). So let's begin, shall we?

Danish. Not necessarily an “unusual” language or a language that might make you say “wait, what?” when it pops up in conversation. It's one of the languages most people realize on some level must exist, because they learned about a place called Denmark in geography class, and there's always a language that goes with the country, right? Still, it’s not something most public schools offer as a second language (or maybe I'm just living in the wrong part of the country). But Danish is spoken by over six million people around the world, most of them living in the country of Denmark right above Germany.

Famous people. My favorite part of these posts is looking up the country the language hails from and figuring out people or events I know of, but didn't necessarily know were connected to the country and the language. It's a comforting form of the unexpected. This time, the people that made my list include (but are not limited to): Hans Christian Andersen, Niels Bohr, Søren Kierkegaard and three of the band members from Aqua (René Dif, Claus Norréen, and Søren Rasted). This is my most exciting list yet—I used to read Anderson’s fairy tales as a kid; I studied Bohr’s atomic model in high school (although I was never taught much of anything about the man himself); and as a kid because I liked to listen to Aqua’s music, even though I thought they were just singing about Barbie dolls and candy (I was sheltered).

Now it's time to let you all know how HFR brought this language, and consequently my favorite foreign tongues famous people list to-date, to my attention. I found, in #44, a travel essay written by Pia Tafdrup and translated by K. E. Semmel. The first line to catch my eye was "Even for the city's children, the festival is an important event. The children stream out of houses to join the huge procession, especially when Indifference and Forgetfulness are buried and those in costumes groove to the beat of drums and numerous other instruments. They scurry in and out of the carriages that carry the caskets." Then I looked back to the first line of the essay and the sense of poetry that image gave me, made sense. "How do you get a small child to associate poetry with something exciting and meaningful?" I really should start reading things in order.

After contacting and eliciting answers from K. E. Semmel, he brought quite a few points to my attention about the difficulties and hazards of translating. There were too many to sum up, so I decided to include the interview at the end of the post, for you to read as you please. Two of these points I want to highlight here. First, he summed up for me exactly what I thought the best part of translating was when he said, "What I like about translating is hitting the right notes, finding the perfect word in English." When that happens, I think it is always an epic "ah-ha!" moment. Point two: he told me the interesting fact that, at least in the example he gave to me, "in the subordinate clause, the subject...and the verb...are reversed in Danish. Obviously you can't translate them in reverse order in English. Any reader would instantly recognize it as a poor translation--literal translations tend to jar the flow." It was yet another example of how different languages have to be treated differently when being translated into English. Also, I might just sympathize a little bit with the fact that backwards sentences or clauses so often are found in Foreign Languages, and Danish happens to be one of them.

There is a lot of complications in translating any language. Semmel's example is one more on the long list, but when the result of finding a way around the complications is that more people get to read wonderful pieces of writing like Tafdrup's travel essay, how can it not be worth it?

1) Why did you choose to learn Danish? Why did you stay with it and become a translator?
I didn't choose Danish so much as it chose me, so to speak: I met and fell in love with a Danish woman (now my wife). I had learned German, studied it as part of my graduate program. As soon as grad school was over, we moved to Denmark and lived for several years. Picking up Danish, at that point, was a little easier—insofar that my understanding of German helped me read Danish. But the truly hard part came with pronunciation. Danish can be a very difficult sound to imitate, especially the letters å, y, and ø. The sounds seem to come from the bottom of the throat, not the top as American English does. The name Børge still kills me. I started translating because A) I love literature, and B) because I knew I could translate—knew I could use my language skills to bring a lot of great new authors to the attention of American readers.

2) What is the most difficult part of translating Danish?
Whether it’s Danish or some other language, translation is a difficult process. For a text to undergo a transformation from one language to the next requires careful attention to detail: How do you make the translated story/poem/essay true to the original at the same time you make it sound like a fluid translation? Make it sound like the language you're translating into. That’s really the heart of the matter, and I think the most difficult part. It would be the same whatever language you translate.

3) What is the most interesting part of translating Danish?
Same answer as number two, really. What I like about translating is hitting the right notes, finding the perfect word in English. When it goes well and you know you’ve got it right, that’s a great feeling for any translator. It's no different from writing a story or poem. Getting a sentence to flow the way you dreamed it is an intoxicating experience. Translation actually makes me more aware of my own language.

4) How does Danish differ from English grammatically or structurally?
Well, I’m not sure how to answer this question in a short blog post. One big difference lies in syntax. Take this example from one of my Simon Fruelund translations ("The World and Varvara"): Jeg tænder båndoptageren og stiller et enkelt lidt forsigtigt spørgsmål, og snart er hun i gang med at fortælle om sin tidligste barndom."

In main clauses such as "Jeg tænder båndoptageren og stiller et enkelt lidt forsigtigt spørgsmål....", the syntax is very much like English. So in my translation that part reads: "I ("jeg") click ("tænder") on the recorder ("båndoptageren") and ask a single, rather cautious question ("og stiller et enkelt lidt forsigtigt spørgsmål").

But in the subordinate clause, the subject ("hun") and verb ("er") are reversed in Danish. Obviously you can't translate them in reverse order in English. Any reader would instantly recognize it as a poor translation—literal translations tend to jar the flow.

5) A big part of the blog posts is the idea that every language is strongly based on and/or influenced by culture. What are some of the strongest cultural influences on Danish?
I’m not an expert on this, but I’d say the strongest influences on Danish are the English language and English-speaking television, particularly American. Language changes with each generation. With more and more outside influences on Danish culture coming from the English-speaking world, from pop stars to television programs, the more English words and phrases creep into the language. When my wife was a child, she pretty much had Danish, Scandinavian, German, Eastern European, and British programming on television. American shows (like Dallas) were a popular novelty. But today the influence of, say, Friends or The Daily Show—even the Super Bowl—can be seen in everyday speech, which then gets absorbed into the literature. Of course, this phenomenon is not new. Words are appropriated whenever any two languages meet in a significant way. We see this in English with words like schadenfreude or smorgasbord. I even hear friends say "scheisse" when "shit" would work just as well. This is not at all a bad thing. I like this dynamic. It means that language is continually evolving.

6) Are there any major trends in writing styles in Danish? How is it different from English?
There are so many ways to tell a story—regardless what language you write in—and so many different writers, each one having his or her take on what a story is and how best to tell it. I don’t think you can narrow down a list of trends, not in any way that does justice to a nation’s literature. About the only thing I will say is that many Danish stories tend, I have found, to not have neat, identifiable endings—sometimes to the point where you're left wondering what it is you just read. Because Danish writers are better supported by the government than in many other countries, less reliant on mega sales of books, I think there's a greater sense of freedom to experiment a little.

7) How is the writing style influenced by the culture?
This is a very interesting question. One thing that I’m fascinated by at the moment is the role of social media on literature, if it has one. In social media the focus is on these short bursts of information—tweets, status updates—and we’re getting used to reading this way, even thinking this way. (How many times do you find yourself thinking, “That’d be a great status update”?) You would think that this way of thinking would carry over into literature, right? Like it does in so-called “twitterature.” But it hasn’t really carried over in any meaningful way, not to my way of thinking. At least not yet. Most of the books you find in traditional brick and mortar stores resemble books that were published ten years ago, at least in the sense that they’re told in traditional narrative styles. (Which isn’t to say that more experimental books haven’t been published—just that they’ve not reached a mass audience yet. That may change. This NY Times article suggests more and more young readers are going the e-reader route.) I think that might be because people are still looking for stories to be full, rich, and big. And that is because the full, rich, and big stories are still what we read in schools—traditional narratives, in other words. When non-traditional narratives become standard fare in schools and colleges, then we may see a radical shift in our dominant manner of storytelling. Until then, or until some groundbreaking author paves the way for everyone else, I don’t expect much to change. So if by “culture” you mean “book culture”—where literature is produced and disseminated by readers and writers—then it’s probably going to be a slow process. I think writers are reluctant to jump on fads. I mean, according to this Guardian article, they haven't even begun to really incorporate the Internet yet.

K.E. Semmel is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in Ontario Review, the Washington Post, Redivider, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Best European Fiction 2011, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. He has translated Danish authors Pia Tafdrup, Jytte Borberg, and Simon Fruelund, among others. His translation of Norwegian crime novelist Karin Fossum’s next book will be published later this year. He has received translation grants from the Danish Arts Council.

Website of the Week: Broadcastr

Whenever a new social media platform begins to make its way around the internet, my initial reaction is always the same: this site is intrusive, a haven for exhibitionist narcissism, and borderline creepy (for examples, see Chatroulette and even to some extent Twitter, which I'm still not totally on board with yet).

Broadcastr holds promise to be quite different. This is a social media platform I can see being interesting and even useful as a writer, listening to stories and perhaps sharing my own. The concept is simple: record your story (using either your computer or an iPhone app) and then post that story to Broadcastr. All posts are geo-located, so that a person wanting to hear what's going on in Bangkok for example, can do so by simply finding the little pinpoint on the map. Some of it is nonsense, but I've come across quite a few stories that are interesting and seemingly real. They come across as the little gems that Ira Glass might pick up for This American Life.

Electric Literature (warning: link currently NSFW) is behind the project, which only lends itself to Broadcastr being a worthy medium of storytelling. So stop with the 140 character bit, and record something funny, or sad, or beautiful, and add it to Broadcastr.

Stories Inspired by HFR

We are finishing off the 7th grade stories with a haunting and tense piece by Michelina C. that is inspired by Debbie Fleming Caffery's "Horse in Hall." This is an excellent finish to round off these very wonderful HFR-inspired stories by very talented rising writers. Enjoy.
*

I woke up with a scream. My eyes teary and my back soaked with sweat, I crawled out of my bed, barely awake. It became a customary routine for me to wake up in this fashion. Ever since I was twelve, the same eerie nightmare had haunted my sleep. My dream did not involve monsters or murderers; but a small, abandoned and hopeless house. The house, a quaint cottage planted in the Colorado countryside, has only three rooms and one interminable hall. The end of the hall reveals a small rocking horse that stares into the distance, rocking side to side and never stopping. In my dream, I start outside, gazing at the patches of flowers, the warming sun piercing my back, I finally make my way through the front door of the Colorado cottage. A strong dark silence swallows the house, not allowing the birds chirping to peek in at all. I cautiously shuffle through each of the three empty and lonely rooms. I make my way to the hall with the rocking horse. The wicked horse stares at me and starts to rock back and forth. Its wooden legs click against the wood, sending goose bumps all up my arms. Staring at the rocking horse, a random scream suddenly stings my ears like an angry wasp and forces me to wake up.

I lazily dragged myself to the kitchen table, where my breakfast, a soggy bowl of cereal, was waiting patiently for me. I reluctantly slurped down the lumpy goo, despite my urges to gag. Recently, my mom has been very busy working the night shifts at the hospital; so she sleeps for most of the day, and leaves me to the chores. Usually, I finish my chores in the early morning before school so I can attend band practice in the afternoon, except today I just ambled back to my room. Still in my pink fuzzy pajamas, I pushed open the door to my room, a mess filled with packed boxes (since I was moving out soon), only to witness a small rocking horse posing in the middle of my cluttered floor. Screaming, I grabbed the nearest book and flung it across the room at the rocking horse. Right as the book was about to hit the horse, the rocking horse mysteriously vanished like a ghost. The book landed flat on the ground with a loud echoing bang. My fists clenched and my eyes wide open, I quickly sprinted out of my room.

Throughout the whole day my mind raced with explanations of what happened that morning. When I finished my chores, I decided to play my guitar to ease my stress. Music poured into the room, intoxicating and beautiful. As I strummed a melodic tune of chords on my guitar, a hideous scream sounded from my bedroom. I dropped my guitar on the floor in astonishment. The blood-curdling scream I just heard was the same scream that had been haunting me for five years straight in my nightmares. Shaking, I cautiously walked toward my room. The house was suddenly dark and hopeless, like the one in my dream. Every step I took closer to my room smashed me with a brick load of fear, toppling on pound after pound. I began to get claustrophobic as the darkness ate me alive. The walls felt like they were closing in on me, suffocating me. Finally, I reached the door to my room. My mind told me not to open the door, but my hand told me otherwise. I slowly slid open the door and peeked my head inside. Relieved, I saw nothing but the cluttered room, the same way I had left it earlier. I climbed into my bed, and made a house of pillows that blocked me from the edges of my bed, almost as if it could save me from my vivid nightmares and hallucinations.

I woke up the next morning confused. Usually my dream ended when I heard the scream; except, that night it didn’t. In my dream, after I heard the horrible scream, the rocking horse stopped rocking and just disappeared, leaving me alone in the hall.

That morning I was moving into my new apartment. After cleaning up the rest of my room, I was ready to finally leave and begin my new life, hopefully abandoning the dream. As I pulled up to the driveway of my new home, I gasped at the sight of my apartment. It looked identical to the cottage in my dream; even the flower buds were exactly the same. I dragged myself to the front door and reluctantly unlocked it. Taking my first step through the door, the same grim feeling I had in my dream took over my body. My body trembling, the familiar darkness welcomed me. I swerved my body left in the direction of the hall with the rocking horse. There, alone in the dark, stood the rocking horse, staring me down. Its eyes flashed a flaming neon red, pure evil. I forced my eyes shut, avoiding the horse’s gaze. Then for a moment, I opened my eyes only to see nothing there but the empty hall. I was alone.

Alaska's Fiddling Poet brings fiddle, poetry to AZ

If there are two things in this world that I love dearly, they are poetry and fiddles. So I can't wait for Ken Waldman, Alaska's premier fiddling poet, to visit the Valley. He'll be bringing his fiddle, his poetry, and even some stories, to the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) for performances April 28th through the 30th.

Waldman is a former college professor and the author of 6 books of poetry, a memoir, a children's book. He's also produced 9 CDs. He travels the country, sometimes performing solo, but often with accompanists, and details his life in Alaska and around the country through song, story, and poetry.

His shows at MIM will include a mandolin player, a guitarist, and a banjo player, and will appeal to "anyone who enjoys traditional folk music, smart poetry, acclaimed storytelling, or Alaska." The performances are free with museum admission, and are a great way to wrap up your Poetry Month celebrations!

Stories Inspired by HFR

Here is a 500 word story by another very talented young writer from Basis Middle School. This story is written by Kathleen W. and is inspired by "Patience" by Claudia Doury from HFR Issue #47. Kathleen gives up an emotional story that follows a girl's relationship with her father through memories.

*

The girl kneels on the crimson blanket, gazing at the deck of playing cards before her. The flimsy red rectangles lay facedown in six cautious rows, aligned to form a small pyramid. Reverently, the girl extends her hand and picks up the card in the center of the base of the pyramid.

The water-warped Queen of Diamonds stares back at her.

A gale of memories whips through the dark recesses of the girl’s mind. And suddenly, she is back in their cramped apartment, surrounded by crooked white walls, with Absalom, her father. Balanced on a three-legged folding chair, the girl inspects his pale skin, sparse brown hair, and calloused hands from her precarious perch. Absalom is cross-legged on the faded blue carpet, hunched over his beloved red playing cards, glaring intensely the Queen of Diamonds pressed in his fingers. Suddenly, he lifts his head up, his grey eyes fixed upon his four-year old daughter. “It’s the Queen,” he mutters softly, “Things are gonna be hard for the next few weeks.” Without averting his gaze, he pulls another card from the jumbled deck and shows it to the girl. “But don’t worry. As long as he’s here, I’ll be here. With you.” The girl looks down at the card in his hands. King of Hearts.

The sound of tolling church bells brings reality back into focus. The pyramid of cards urges the girl to continue. Hand trembling with anticipation, she uncovers the rest of the pyramid’s base. Jack of Clubs. Nine of Hearts. Five of Spades. The girl carelessly casts them into a pile, and continues, with a hungry look in her navy blue eyes. The second row also yields nothing, and the girl begins to fear. She is too late. She will not reach Absalom in time.

Reality blurs at this devastating thought and again the girl is thrust into her memories. It is a miserably humid night; the palpable heat overwhelms her senses. Absalom is nowhere to be found. For three fruitless hours, the girl, now twelve, scours all of his usual night haunts: the local coffee shop, the bustling casino, the dilapidated café where he works. Then finally, she sees him. Slumped against a flickering lamppost in a pool of red. Clasping a kitchen knife slick with blood in his left hand.

The girl’s own screams resound in her ears, jolting her from the nightmare. The pyramid materializes once more. Hand quaking uncontrollably, she slips a card from the third row into her hands, not bearing to look. After an eternity of agonizing uncertainty, she unfurls her quivering fingers.

The King of Hearts. Absalom. The girl clutches the face of her dead father close to her heart.

Stories Inspired by HFR

Happy Friday! Welcome to the second half of stories by 7th grade students at Basis Middle School in Scottsdale. Remember, these are 500 word stories inspired by images from Issue #47 of HFR. Today's story - sweet, with a very sad twist and great character relationships - is inspired by Debbie Fleming Caffery's "Sleeping Lizards" and is written by Abijith K.



*

I stepped out of the rain into the old uninhabited mansion, its furniture covered with a blanket of soot, its walls echoing with cries of help. Nearby, I saw a chair rocking back and forth, creaking like a poor child in distress. I averted my attention to the window; two lizards were pelted with raindrops and tried to come inside for shelter. I opened the window and the two lizards leapt on my arm. Water covered the lizards like a jacket and I could hear them gasping for breath. I wrapped them in my handkerchief and carried them home in a way that not even a single drop would even skim the scales on their body.

Once I reached the shelter of my house, I placed the shivering lizards in an open shoe box and emptied some crickets I caught into the box. I glanced away for a second, and by the time I looked back, the lizards had already devoured the crickets. I placed my handkerchief inside and the lizards snuggled under it. After making sure that the pair was comfortable, I slid the box into the cage so Ergo our cat would not eat them.

The next day, I checked on the two lizards. They were still snoozing, but once I placed their breakfast inside the cage, they woke up and gobbled it in one bite. I decided to leave them in the house when I went to school, but I kept them far from the cat.

When I came back from school, I quickly fed the lizards lunch and opened the cage, so they could crawl on my arm. However, they were still exhausted after trying to escape from the rain. I left them alone and completed my homework. When I fed them dinner, they started to walk in their cage; nonetheless, they could not crawl onto my arm.

A couple of days passed. Once, I decided to visit the creek with the lizards. They began to swim swiftly in the flowing water, and could even swim against the current; not many people could do that. After playing in the water for some time, the lizards swam to the bank where I tucked them in my pocket.

One day, after I fed the lizards their dinner, I left, forgetting to close the cage. The lizards crawled out, restless and excited. They wandered around for a while on the floor, but they came too close to Ergo the cat. Ergo, hungry as usual, pounced on the lizards. I entered the room to see the wicked cat dangling the lizards above his mouth. I quickly seized the lizards from the cat’s claws, but it was too late, the lizards had been killed because of my forgetfulness. For days I wept; I sat in solitude, not with my friends, mourning the loss of my companions. And to this date, I remember my two innocent pals, who I rescued from the cold, who died at the hands of my own cat.

News Around the Net

I know David Foster Wallace's book isn't due out for another couple weeks, but for some reason it is currently shipping from Amazon, meaning you can get a copy now. Also meaning booksellers are very angry.

Why do authors continue to read reviews? What can go right here? Just say no, people!

John Le Carre is trying to withdraw himself from consideration for the Man Booker International prize (a its $100,000 prize). After saying he does not like competing for prizes, he is not allowed to withdraw himself. Here's to hoping he's the first to win this against his will and pulls a Pynchon-at-the-NBA type stunt.

When's the last time you read a good "F-You" letter? Here's a good spat between Hunter S. Thompson and illustrator Ralph Steadman.

Here's a new poetry prize, the Montreal Poetry Prize. The winner gets $50,000 for a single poem. Yes, you read that correctly.

In a new book, neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran dedicates a couple chapters in an exploration of whether the human brain is hardwired to create and appreciate art.