 Hello everyone and welcome to the very, very special edition of our virtual readings hosted by the American Literary Translators Association, otherwise known as ALTA because I will not be saying American Literary Translators Association for the entire broadcast. This is the virtual reading of ALTA's very first year of the Emerging Literary Translators mentorship program and we have three mentees with us who have completed the first pilot year of this program very successfully, I might add, and they are going to share their work with us today. So we have Scott Shanahan, Joyce Sinana, and Anna Zarenko with us to share their wonderful, wonderful translations. First up we have Scott Shanahan who translates from the Catalan. He was mentored by Ron Kupo and we have to thank the Institut Ramonlou for providing funding for his mentorship. Thank you very much to that organization. He's going to be reading from Journeys and Blooms which is a work by Mercier Rodoreda. So take it away, Scott. Alright, okay, so like Allison said, I'll be reading a selection from Journeys and Blooms which was by the Catalan author, Mercier Rodoreda, and a little bit about the text. It's a text from the author's, I guess, last few years. She's much more famous for a few other works that she published earlier in life and actually part of this book she originally wrote in the 60s and 70s and then the second half she wrote in like 1970, 1980. Yeah, the book is divided into two sections pretty evenly. The first half of the book is just us following a nameless narrator through a series of villages. They're all very fantastical. And then the second half of the book is more or less the same kind of premise except with flowers this time and every flower is sort of a metaphor for a kind of personality. Alright, so I'm going to be reading from the villages section first and just so people understand a little bit of what Catalan sounds like. I feel like I should read a few sentences. Not much, don't worry, I won't bore anybody. I just can't pass up an opportunity to promote Catalan as a language, right? Alright, so without further ado, Viajo al Poblo dels Gratos Ben Creados, which is Journey to the Village of the Wellbred Rats, right, Catalan first. I don't know if you can see it, but it was a village with so many, so many villages. Flowers, the windows and flowers all went to the fields of the land. And a great silence, as if no one had forgotten about the village. At the middle of a roadway, you'll see a boat because it's going to pass round the foot of a big rat like a bunny. A friend of mine is going to turn around and the young man is going to create a sign, a sign. Let me show you a little bit of the house. I don't know who it is. I'm going to be left alone with a rat looking at my face. I'm going to turn around. These hours, inside the houses, a small rat will appear. Another one and another. And it does that. And I just... That's it, right? Alright, so now onto the translation. The English, right? Okay, Journey to the Village of the Wellbred Rats. It was a village like so many others, I'm sure. Flowers in the windows, flowers in the railings of every terrace, and a perfect silence as though the whole place were empty. Halfway down a shady street, I give a start when a rat the size of a rabbit darted right by my foot. It stopped up ahead, turned to me, and hollered, Sir, oh, sir, would it be all right if I nibbled on a little bit of house? I didn't know what to say. It was all I could do to stare at the thing at those red eyes fixed right on me, at that head thrusting forward. Just then a smaller rat scurried through my legs, followed by another, and another, seven at all. They clustered around the biggest rat, and altogether began to sing, say yes, say yes, say yes, say yes. I tilted my head down, which they must have took for my consent, for they launched themselves at the ground floor of an old house, and began nibbling, chompy chomp, nibbling away. When they were all tired out, they wiped those tiny little chops of theirs with their four legs, give me one final glance, then when strolling up the street, a man emerged from the house the rats had been nibbling. His pants were half feet in the way, and his ears cropped. Come in, please, he said softly. Have yourself a seat. We sat down by the window. There were petunias on the sill. This village the man started off is not at all like any of the others. Our houses, as by now you've probably gathered, are built entirely out of wood from roof to foundation. But in 10 years' time, 12 at most, they'll all be gone. If there were any stone nearby, we'd be able to build them out of that, I suppose. But the quarry is more than 123 miles from here, and none of us has the heart to try our luck and go out looking for it. And, well, years back, one of our men, more determined, or maybe just more foolish than the rest of us, did take his cart and venture off in search of stone, and he built a house that lasted him his entire lifetime. He'd a wife and four children, all boys, tall, good-looking, the best a man could ask for. Then one day, Christmas, or maybe it was New Year's, I can't really recall, the house was empty. No parents, no children, even the bones were gone. The rats sure taught them a lesson. So the rest of us went on building wooden houses out of precaution, but laziness, too. But if we all, you might ask, but if absolutely every one of us were to build our houses out of stone, wouldn't we rally to each other's defense? Wouldn't we, we wouldn't even dare. We just have to build them out of wood. Wood so the rats can eat and remain happy. Wood so they'll allow our people to keep living most of all. But one year, the most sensible among us met up over in Geneva and Wood, and we put our heads together. We thought we might trick the rats. We would build our foundations, if only the foundations, out of stone. No matter the risk to life and limb, no matter what it cost. Well, they had to have a spot on us, because the next morning, each and every one of us would attend the meeting and no one else discovered our ears half nibbled away, fit to be tossed. As I've said, the village is destroyed every 10 years. And during that time, there's nothing else to do, but start on building the next one. A little here, a little there, come with me. We left the house and he led me up the street. At the very top, we came to an overlook, and quite sadly, sadder than anyone I've ever seen, the man extended his arm and pointed into the valley below. It was a vertebral ant colony of men down there, chopping and sanding, setting timbers and raising roofs. Trees in both hands that hauled timbers and plants without stopping. The soil here is good and we'd be able to grow anything. We'd be rich were it not for all the time we waste building houses instead of planting or harvesting. I jumped, there were rats all around us hanging on our every word. We're building you a village of the sweetest, softest wood you've ever tasted, said the man, the moment he caught on. Thank you, thank you, said the rats in unison. One adorable little rat cried out, we're just dying to eat and eat and eat and eat. Have at it, he said softly, half dead in the eyes. And they set straight to work on a few of the prettiest houses and the racket began at once, chompity chomp, chompity chomp. It seemed to me that the rats were rather occupied, so I whispered something into the man's ear in a ear like a saggy festoon. So why don't you kill them? His eyes filled with condescension. Any solution you managed to come up with we've already been trying for the past 1200 years. It's as though death was multiplying them to torture us. Just then I heard a tiny voice at my feet squealing out cries of wicked, wicked. I looked down to find a cute little rat already nibbling on the ends of my pants and I've been running ever since. Okay, I'm gonna read another one. They're all roughly that length. I'm going to read one more of the villages that was actually composed toward the end of the whole composition process. At one point, Rida Rida was living with friends of hers in Catalonia after many years of exile and the house she describes here, well, the village, but mostly the house she describes here is actually very much the house that she lived in. So with that in mind, journey to the village of fear. This village is sensational. Its houses are built rather far apart from one another on top of some kind of mountain with a commanding view of both Mediterranean and the white crested Pyrenees with a simple turn of the head. They're cheery houses standing strong in the wind of some 600 square feet of peace with massive apertures for the windows. Heavy on glass, light on brick. The walls inside the bathrooms are tiled from floor to ceiling in a floral motif, each flower rose, some pink, some blue, some yellow. The living room fireplaces are capped with a chimney hood topped with an oak mantelpiece on a wall of reddish stone, a rusty red with light colored streaks. The windows and balconies open onto the gardens, 300,000 square feet of gardens. When the owners of these chalets first purchased the land even before building their fantastic retreats, their properties were already rich with trees and shrubbery. There are most of the variety that the gardeners call ever-blooming and others like clusters of golden balls that always bloom in February or whenever their blooming season falls and still others that hardly bloom at all but gross swiftly to dizzying heights straight up into the sky. There's a path lined with mulberries of the broadest, brightest leaves. There are lindens, nothing to rival shumber in mind you, but still quite a sight. An olive tree with three branches, a symbol of peace, lords over the entrance, alongside three cypresses, a symbol of welcome. In the same area, a dozen poplars grow in a close cluster and flutter their silver-bellied leaves along with a half dozen pothorns, one chestnut, two furs, three pines that give it an errant shade of barbecue grilled beneath, and 12 Japanese cherries blooming thick in pink. Out back you'll find the fruit-bearing trees, four apricots, six green gauges, six peaches and three cherries, four almonds too for the welcome side of their pretty white blooms in the dead of winter. The only actual flowers for the roses are the finest caliber identical to those in the bathroom tiles, blue, yellow, pink. And there were bushes, too many to count, speedwells, forsythias, cottoneasters, summer lilacs, silver ragwort, rosemary. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the two willows along the edge of the pond, and the three Judas trees, or love trees, so named for their heart-shaped leaves, and one lemon. But one tree dominates the garden, even though quite a few have had to come down to leave room for the others, and that tree is the cork oak, extremely plain but extraordinarily hearty. Healthy, always in leaf, unyielding to the blasting winds, the cork oak sprouts over and over and over, never doubting that its trunk will be protected by the thick bark seldom sought after by wine bottleers these days, though which provides the tree all the safeguarding it needs, so that it might, with time and patience, make it to 100. And yet, among all these idyllic chalets, a curse is lurking, a kind of toxic gloom that only comes out at nightfall, and lasts well into the evening. Nothing ever happens per se, no one can really recall a single nasty incident, nor do burglars ever frequent the place, or muggers, or seedy people of any kind. It's something like that. When the darkness descends and the people who live here rush to lock up their windows and balconies, it's because they feel suddenly overcome as they look out at the moon, the clouds, the treetops outlined against the clear and the leaden sky, by the powerful feeling that every leaf of every tree is an eye endowed with intelligence and might, watching them, yes, but more precisely, observing them, spying on them, taking note of their every thought, but whatever for. So, I think it's a good place to stop in the villages because of all the mentions of flowers. It's a good transition to the flower section. I'll just read a few of the flowers. Ritteredo was obsessed with flowers, as you can probably tell. So it's no surprise that she wrote a good half of her book about flowers. All right, I'll read one. A lot of the flowers are kind of malicious. Fair warning. Jealous flower. The explorer who brought it back didn't really know what it was. He planted his only seed beneath his bedroom window. The very next day, he noticed a shoot sprouting up out of the soil like a blob of frozen gelatin. A day later, he spotted another beside it. Each new day brought another shoot, one on the left of the parent seed, one on the right, back and forth, in strict military fashion. The first of the shoots were already quite tall and the last were still just sprouts. Sheared to light and the explorer was pleased. The ground floor of the entire house was a greeny cloud of leaves beating gently with the slightest touch of a breeze, more graceful and translucent than the wings of a fly. The sun took a little longer to set on the day the flowers bloomed. It was mesmerized. The fragrance the flowers released had a sort of delicious freshness to it. A festival in cheer encircled the house. Yet all the while beneath so much cheer held lace and ring away. The roots of the flowers seemed as though they'd been growing for centuries and they started torturing the house from down below. It was in their way. They wanted the ground it stood on. They wanted everything, the entire universe. The house began to lean to the right. A piece of the railing that boarded the upstairs terrace snapped off. A panel on one of the shutters left off. It seemed one night as though the roots would shake the poor house to death. By daybreak, the house was long gone. They'd scared it off. All right. This flower's called Society Flower. It comes out in the evening. When the hidden tailors stitched the moon to the gown of the night, when frogs fill up with wind, when nightshars set out to hunt, Society Flower opens up. It sleeps the day away. It's petals of light gauze, a fiery pomegranate red. It prims. It flowers for the dismal, artless baths that come circling round, chatterboxes. Even when the flower has been up all night, when sleeping with the sun would be just the ever-living end, it can't resist opening up the moment you pass. It pays call. It won't say a word, of course, because it can't possibly talk. But it greets you with perfect grace, never letting you go, not for five minutes. It's such a ding that. Okay. And then I'll just read one more. I don't want to take up too much time. This flower's called The Strolling Flower. From two twin bulbs attached at the top, they're sprouts of silvery, trifoliate flower, straight with blue and noble to behold. The bulbs are its feet. These feet put out two short roots, never plunging the flowers too deeply into the ground, just enough to support it. The Strolling Flower is whimsical, wandersome. It's never alone. It can't live without company. They move in sets. They adore the sun. They shun the shade like the plague and waddle around like ducks. If they happen to like where they've chosen to take root all as well, but if the soil is parched for lack of rain, as their lives hang in the balance, they'll pick themselves up and little by little make their way towards the water. They take up at once with the pitched tree foil and stay the summer. No matter to them whether it's a hill or dill, along a fence or in the middle of a meadow. As soon as they sense the fall coming on, they gather in groups of six to speak in private. When they do disband and say their goodbyes for the winter, they're still as merry as ever, although their colors have somewhat faded. They hide when it's time to die. They scout out old trees and seek shelter in their trunks, tucking themselves away beneath the moss that never quite covers them completely or beneath some bit of bark, wherever they can. They're finished by the first chili gust. For wise and mindful jolt, the roots shake off the stem and flower. They toss the body as casually as we might discard an old suit or dress. All right, that's it for me. I hope you guys enjoyed this. Hand it over back over to Allison. Thank you very much, Scott. That was fantastic. I really enjoyed the flower section. I feel like the society flower made me think that the rose from the little prince would fit in perfectly with all of those flowers. Okay, totally. Thank you for the company. All right, thank you very much. Next up, we have Joyce Sonana, who is our mentee from the French. She was working with Allison Waters this past year, and the funding for her mentorship came from the French Embassy Books Office. We were very grateful to them as well. She will be reading from her translation of Manicouin, which is a novel, if I believe, by Henri Boscot. So I will turn it over to Joyce and enjoy it. Hi, so thank you, Allison. Thank you, Alta. Thank you. Are you hearing me? Am I showing up? Yep, okay, great. All right, so I'm reading from the fourth chapter of Malikwaf. And I need to tell you a little bit about the novel before we begin. It's a story about a man who has grown up in Provence in a very comfortable little village in Provence surrounded by his family. He has a great uncle who lived in the Camargue, a very wild region at that time. The novel is set in the early 19th century. So when he's 25, he learns that his uncle, his great uncle, has died and left him his property in the Camargue. Against the advice of the entire family, the narrator decides to travel to the Camargue to meet the notare, the notary, who will be giving him the information about the inheritance. And he learns very quickly that a condition of inheriting the property, which is a house on an island in the middle of the Rhône, the condition is that he has to stay alone in that house for three months. He gets there in mid-November and he has to stay there through the middle of February. This narrator is terrified of water, has never really spent much time by himself. And so the novel is the story of his experience on the island. There's one other person who is occasionally there. It's a shepherd who has served the old man and who is also helping out with Megremus, the narrator. So this is chapter four. It's Christmas Eve. The narrator is alone. It's the first Christmas he's ever spent alone. And it's snowing. And here is what he says. But my new solitude did not weigh on me. It made me lighter. I had made a break. I did not see clearly what this break signified. I was possessed by a poorly defined but powerful feeling that simultaneously thrilled and frightened me. The feeling of being cut off, perhaps even free, although that was less certain. Cut off from the family I loved and already following the current of this mysterious river whose existence I had never known before, yet which flowed within me. Suddenly revealed now by the sound of its current and the sight as yet confused of its banks. Huge dark waters were coursing through me and this thought so haunted me that towards five, despite the snow, I left the house to see the river. The river, by the way, is the Rhone. I took a direct path, barely 200 meters away, I came upon the bank. The river had just begun to enter night, a night flowing through snow. Between completely white banks where black holes opened up here and there, mysterious dead branches, backwaters, marshes, a long live beast slithered silently beneath the shower of snowflakes that deadened the water's murmur. At times the snow poured down so profusely that the river vanished beneath its endless, warming streams falling so quickly. Not one wind was dispersing them. For the air was calm and the silent waves of snow moved through the empty sky like thousands of birds in flight. Sky, water, riverbanks, island, all coalesced into one fathomless substance and I too merged with everything so that I lost sense both of the place in shrouded and dissolving whiteness and of the shapes effaced by the dizzying, ongoing avalanches. I was alive, yes, but in another space at once confined and infinite. All dimensions destroyed nothing but movement as the entire expanse became an elusive mirage dispelled by the slightest breeze. It felt as if the smallest gesture could effortlessly and completely rend the filmy body of this imponderable world where I was suspended, weightless in an immense void. The universal being floated there along with the void itself, imaginary nothingness created for the light world of snow that weighed no more than a thought, my most recent dream. Useless and free I wandered cut off from everything and almost from myself in the unreal air of a space formed and then annihilated by the snow as it scattered. Not one sensation bound me to life saved this precarious phantasmagoria. Even the night's cold did not affect me. I was no longer anything but a human wave vibrating with the snow, becoming snow, fluttering. I do not know how in this state of unearthly lightness I took a step but suddenly I saw beneath the snow bank the wild water just two feet from me, swift, black, ready to snatch me. I clung to a branch. The ground was fluid and it was hard to hold on with a desperate effort I succeeded. Then I leaned against a tree, a huge icy tree encrusted in snow. A shiver gripped me below my arms and along my sides enveloping my chest. I was cold. When a breeze lifted the aerial veil of scattering snow the whole river, a powerful rush of darkness suddenly appeared. It was a live creature. I no longer had any doubt a formidable creature. Beneath the vain flight of ephemeral snowflakes it flowed from its source to the sea in one stream heavy and dark. And although black it gleamed menacingly. Its ravenous mouth grew to the ooze of its banks digging slime from its damp bed dragging beneath its lie the belly, the sand, the stones, the plants, the dead. It was draining the earth. Not one sound rose from it. Beneath the dazzling shower of snow it was secretly sapping the soil's viscous roots. It had a will that made me bristle with fear for it was reaching me. Pure will indifferent thoughtless the will of an ancient element engaged for eons in a long labor of abrasion of secret soaking and patient erosion fluid yet decomposing force that attacked not only the banks of the river but aid as well into the shores of the soul. And these shores I felt them dissolving. In an unconscious collapse I sank despite my horror into a softened moving soil that liquefied layer upon soluble layer until it melted into the water of that mysterious internal river whose black stream ran through me parallel to the earth's nighttime flow. I had the strength to tear myself from this danger and I fled. It was still snowing nothing to orient myself barely formed paths melting into one another lured me led me astray then abandoned me. And so I took a few steps to the right to the left. I hesitated I searched for direction. What direction I no longer knew in this blurred universe spinning aimlessly could there be a direction? Through the falling snowflakes the memory of the house was vanishing and so much whiteness whirled around my head that my thought was little more than a faint warmth. A vague longing persisted there. I followed it and so I moved forward blindly more just to walk than to reach any goal. Not one reference point I circled. Still I saw the river again three times. As soon as I sought a direction and thought to take it I inevitably came upon the river always black, gleaming, icy. It slithered and still I fled. I went elsewhere but I never arrived. No longer any space only time. And yet I was moving forward within myself and the now invisible external world was being replaced by another perceptible world. It seemed to emanate from within to be constructed there and to be recomposing with the realities that had become inaccessible an interior double of the things from which the snow's vertigo had separated me. And from the phantasmagoric snow now falling within me just as around me the real snow was falling. A landscape began to form composed of great crystalline woods with fragile treetops, delicate bushes and blue-tinged thickets. Glass paths that shone on an island of pure snow. Obscure phantom, I crossed ice-covered clearings where paths appeared that led nowhere. I wandered through this mental island as much as on the real island but slowly as one must in a region of snow and silence. For these delicate edifices could not have been built and could not be preserved except through silence. They were so miraculous yet so fragile that at each instant I feared they might be shattered by a simple sound. I knew I was wandering through this imaginary world but was it imaginary in search of refuge? There was a house I no longer knew where whose inhabitants awaited me and they were worried I had not returned. If only I told myself in my reverie they don't think of the bell. This bell haunted me. Who had said above all don't use it? I'd forgotten a little man, a sprite perhaps but what did it matter now? At its first peel I thought this crystal structure would collapse and I would fall back into that real snow where I had been lost and from which the return path had forever fled. But here in this improbable inward region the return path will form itself. I can no longer find it. I know that one never finds anything. I want to create it as I walk and if I do not see clearly where I am going in this delirium I can sense what I love and where my desire leads. But the silence was so pure I could not say it nor even think it, not even to myself deep within. As I moved forward new shapes more and more transparent were born within me. The world was being purified. Sometimes a huge snow bird flew up from a snow tree. It vanished causing myriads of delicate crystal leaves to quiver beneath its flight. The fictive fragile forest trembled and in an opening the marvelous bird slowly shook the white feathers of its wings as it rose upwards towards any mobile constellation. For little by little the sky was clearing and the first streams of stars were beginning to fall to earth like a sparkling river bubbling brightly as it flowed towards me from the springs of a distant life. I hurried anxious to reach the house. Oh, I told myself I must find shelter before the river's current touches me and carries me across the abyss of the sky. The more I quickened to my steps the more the love of refuge warmed my heart. I was moving within myself straight ahead without hesitation in a world ever more pure and insubstantial. I was sure I had found the true path and that I was walking for my salvation towards the simplest house in the world, the dwelling of peace. The first currents of the river touched the tips of the island and coursed over the snow flooding the lost, the last paths where I might have been lost. And already I was walking freely among the stars. So that's it. Thank you so much, Joyce. That was absolutely gorgeous. The concept of that book, the fact that winter is the time that he has to spend alone in a big house in the middle of the sun. In a little house, in a little house in the middle of a big island. Yeah. The worst possible time to be in your own head is in the winter. Yes, yes. Thank you. Can I just say one more? Oh, go ahead, yes. This passage I just wanted to note was published actually separately before the novel was published in 1947 in Caillers du Sud. It was called Enchantement de la Neige, The Enchantment of the Snow. So it's a nice little passage. Enchantment, that's a fantastic name. So very French, I love it. Thank you so much for reading, Joyce. As a note for those of you who have joined us, this is the reading of the mentees for the first year of ALTA's Emerging Translator Mentorship Program. They're fantastic and wonderful and we're very, very happy to be sharing their work with you. For those of you who are watching, we're going to be doing a quick Q&A section after the last mentee has read. Anna will be coming up next. If you do have questions for any of our readers, you can email them to me at alicenturette.literatranslators.org. That email address is also in the description in the YouTube, on YouTube page. Again, that's alicenturette.literatranslators.org because if I say it too quickly, you won't have time to write it down. So finally, we have Anna Zarenko, who I'm going to turn back on so we can see her. Anna is our mentee from the Polish. She was working with Bill Johnston for the last year. She, her mentorship was funded by the Polish Cultural Institute of New York and you're very grateful to them for their funding. She will be reading from the White Stone, which is a work by Anna Boleska. So I will give it to you, Anna Zarenko, to read from your translation. Thank you. Well, I'll launch straight in in case people's attention span is flagging. The White Stone is Anna Boleska's second novel. It was published in 1994. It won the Raymond Prize in 1995. It's quite a short novel. It's set in the Polish Eastern Borderlands known as the Kresy at the beginning, the action starts at the beginning of the 20th century. And so we're talking about the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now, these borderlands, they occupy a very particular place in the Polish literary and historical imagination. A place of many nationalities, Ukrainians, Poles and Belarusians and of course, a significant Jewish community and many faiths, Orthodox, Catholic Lutheran as well. And the borders have moved, of course, communities have flourished and perished. So on the one hand, it's this magical, it's got this feeling of a magical lost domain, almost a garden of Eden, but also it's a location of loss and grief and in fact, bloodshed. As we know, now the protagonist, the main protagonist is a boy. It's a whole life story. So, and he spends all his life in this one little village of many nationalities in the borderlands. And he's referred throughout, he's referred to throughout as great-grandfather because he is in fact the author's great-grandfather. And so the book is a memoir in a way, but it's not full of, we don't have names, dates and places. It's, and the author in fact, never met him herself, never knew him. It's as though she has inherited perhaps a few sentences that he might have spoken, some words of his or stories that were told about him and then she takes them, almost like seeds if you like and throws them into this magical landscape and then grows this boy out of them. And throughout the book where of his past, his present and his future, all at the same time, it's as if the reader is circling him so that sometimes we're looking straight at him and we can see his past behind him or we're standing with him and we can see the future ahead of him. So time is very circular in the novel. Anyway, so I'll start reading from a section right at the beginning from his childhood. And it's a cold autumn night. A wind blew throughout the night and the sky is brightened, dawn approached. The sun quickly steeped itself in light and warmed the ground dried by the wind. Early that morning, a woman carrying baskets emerged from a nearby farmstead. She was taking a shortcut to town through the cemetery. Passing a freshly dug grave, she had a strange commotion. At first she thought it a night bird which had confused the time of day. But there it was again, a child was crying. The woman dropped her baskets and fled full pelt, stopping only at the edge of the cemetery. She clutched her head, pressing it between her hands as though to silence the voice of the devil. At last she dropped her hands and listened attentively. Birds were beating their wings. The last drops of night rain were tapping against the leaves. By the time she'd run to the doors of the presbytery, the fear was beginning to abate. Clasping her shawl tightly against her breast, she asked for the perished priest in a trembling voice. A moment later, he approached from the direction of the chapel. A poor damned soul is begging mercy of her father, who whispered the woman. The priest showed not the slightest surprise. He disappeared into the house and emerged a moment later with crucifix and holy water. The housekeeper hurried out, still throwing a scarf over her head, and the resident boy who served at Mass came running after. They hastened along the wide avenue. The women muttered under their breath, hoping to rout evil forces with their prayers. The boy, holding his trousers up against his stomach, gasped breathlessly. The window opened in a nearby house, and a woman leaning right out from the waist squinted curiously at the pastor's boy. Running down his steps, she called out to her husband and children. They rushed out in front of their house and saw that the priest was heading for the cemetery. They caught up with him as he was passing the wooden gate beside the pale blue plaster angel on plinth. The woman had been thirsty at the childish cries, led them to an old oak standing in the middle of the cemetery. They stood, overalled, by the silence raining in that place. It was somewhere here, whispered the woman, as though she feared to wake someone still sleeping. In Nominé Patrice d'Edphilly, Edspiritois d'Agati began the priest. And at that moment, from the grave, at the end of the narrow little avenue, a boy looked out, nimbly from the pit, and stood on the slab lit up by the sun. The light shone through his tangled hair, creating a halo around his head. Looking into the glare, at first they could make out neither his face nor the fear which appeared upon it. The childish figure stood motionless. The woman shifted and the priest stepped forward and then stopped, for at the boy's feet appeared the little head of another child. Impure spirit, damned soul, longed one of the women and covered her mouth with her hand. It would be quietly women as children. Just children for goodness sakes, said the priest and strode family towards the grave. The boy helped his sister climb out, and now she stood at his side, small and thin in the crumpled shirt. Her face screwed up, ready to cry. The man in the black gown was coming nearer and the children overcome with fear, aching with sleep, simply stood quite still. The priest was only a few steps away. Someone cried out, seeing him gather up his sultan and jump into the grave. Women he called out a moment later and looked out from the pit, come here. They ran up, the gravity of the order, overriding with fear. The priest stretched out his arms and handed them a bundle. The loud cries of a child rang out. Everyone came to as they roused from bad dreams. Someone grabbed the boy's hand, someone else took off their coat and wrapped up the little girl. The women passed the baby round, cooing at him. A little great-grandfather remembered that moment always being at once loud and joyful. They laughed. He didn't understand the noise or the laughter. Everyone wanted to touch him. He felt the hands on his face and his hair. Someone he stroked him gentle as moths. Others grasped him firmly as the wanting to confirm that he was really there. His little brother was crying out with uncomprehending yells. He was hungry, no doubt, and didn't want to wait any longer. They found themselves in a house big as a bar, but full of light. And great-grandfathers saw that they were pushing a bowl full of hot milk into his hands. Glanced about him and began to lap like an animal come to the end of its stroke. His brother and sister had disappeared somewhere, but he didn't think about them now. He slumped onto something soft, felt the pulsating warmth around him, and fell asleep. He slept for two days. Okay, so I'll work on the third dig. So I'm going to move on a little bit. He's settled down in the village. He lives with his aunt. We never find out her name. And for some time now, he'd felt drawn more and more by the open spaces beyond the village and towards town, tempted by its narrow streets and square, the taverns and the market, everything which spoke real life. He'd run along in the direction of town with the other village boys and hitch onto the peasant carts, heading for market. Glinging on with both hands, they'd rest their feet on the edge of the wagon with its dried-up remains of dung and stalks of hay, where the black hair of market-bound bullocks was beaten deep into the warm planks. Hang on, almost scraping the road, sick with yellow clay dust. Dangerously, nearly losing his balance, the peasants yelled at the mare, urging her on. The boys shouted with happiness. Dogs chased after the wagons, almost hoarse with barking. Great-grandfather would sail up and swing down a moment later, facing backwards, laughing and shouting. His words drowned by the rattling of the cart and the dog's ceaseless barking, warnters squeak. The drive across the fields soon ended and the first houses of the little town peered, their entrances facing away, their backs guarded by great balance with wide-leaved double doors. Here, the crazy ride came to an end. The driver turned round. That was the signal to let go and feet tucked up to drop like a soft sack into the dust of the road and roll quickly to the side into the roadside weeds. The next wagon was coming up close behind and another boy would jump and roll aside through the dust. The carts slowed down, the dog still barked without conviction, snatching at the heels of the boys lying there and then ran on. Great-grandfather lay motionless, his head turned in the direction of the departing wagons. Clouds of dust settled on the road and squeezed into his nose and mouth and screwed up eyes. Squinting, he could make out a dog shrinking into the distance chasing after the wagon. The boys around were getting to their feet, beating the trousers of the caps clutched in their hands. Great-grandfather got up lazily, was quiet, a sky-large rose high into the air but soon disappeared from the boys' sight. It was a short distance from the village to town but the houses, marketplace, church, synagogue, little Jewish stores, Fourier's workshops, clamor and smiles were so different it was like two separate worlds. The same carts that rocked along the soft country roads, raising flurries of choking dust, beat out a new rhythm along the cobbles of the town's main street. There was one kind of rhythm and melody for someone passing through and another kind for someone who worked each day to the hammering of horses hooves and rumbling of winding wheels. The boys soon lost sight of his mates as they disappeared here and there, lured into their own secret nooks, crannies and corners. People on market day come from near and far. The Jews ran across the square in all directions. Ukrainian peasants sat big and sleepy on their carts next to their dark-haired stocky women with beautiful faces. The carts rolled across the square towards a vast muddy site which was filling quickly with crowds of people and animals. Passing the carts full of goods, he heard the squabbling of traders from the cries of the tinker who repaired clay pots. The Belarusian babushka was largely lamenting her spilt cream, while half-starved dogs with sunken flanks quickly licked the white streaks clean away. A foal separated from his mother ran between the stalls and stamping out the rhythm of his fear on the cobbles he chased after the disappearing mare. All around it smelled of freshly-cured leather and horse sweat. He squeezed between the people and carts in the direction of the square. He always paused in the same place in front of the barber's window. The small narrow pane, flecked with spiders and flies, was smeared with streaks left by Ryska, the barber's wife, when she cleaned the shop window with a grubby cloth. Behind the pane, on a shelf lined with paper yellowing in the sand, stood two great Jews. Long black leeches lived in one of them, stuck to its sides. In the other, immersed in formaldehyde, floated a human embryo. The little boy with curled-up legs and huge head became great-grandfather's companion in musings and daylight dreams in which the tiny one, now revived, would lead his friend into a strange world full of other little boys and girls, their lives caught in a single moment. The embryo had closed almond-shaped eyes without lashes or eyebrows. A small, slightly flattened nose, its skin drawn taut by gently protruding cheekbones, a tiny receding chin and delicate lips scarcely atoned darker than the yellowish cheeks. The perfectly-formed skull with its little bulge to the rear and the delicate petals of the ears fixed against its cheeks looked as though they'd been carved from some fine or precious stuff. Beside this beautiful head, the rest of the body with its unnaturally huge genitals hung like a half-filled leather water-skin. He thought that one day the boy in the jar would open his eyes and they would look at each other through the double panes, the boy who could walk away at will and the boy imprisoned in a jar. The doors of the premises were continually opening and closing. Presents had already sold, their goods came in for a shave and a haircut. Someone spoke to him, someone else offered him a candy behind him like a bustling moisly. But he went unstanding there, motionless. Many years later, he stood in front of the same, equally dirty pane of the barbershop run by Rivka's son and looked into the same jar at the same embryo but could find no trace of the mysterious bond of previous years. Perhaps it was simply a question of perspective. The nurse evade a scrap of humanity and formality and knew that there was no mystery here. Maybe if he'd crouched down in front of the barberswender, perhaps the boy in the jar would have opened his eyes just once for a moment. But great-grandfather did not crouch down. The jar with the embryo stood there until the First World War, only to disappear with Rivka's son who left for the East, taking his whole family with him. The little great-grandfather returned to the village by a roundabout route through town. The market was over. Peasants stood about in front of the inn and hobbub and voices and shouts came from the side where it was full of people. Empty carts rumbled and whizzly over the cobbles. A uniform hum rose from the synagogue as though a swarm of bees had settled inside. The boy ran along the little streets, tapping the high wind gates with his stick, the furious yapping of dogs audible on the other side. Thank you. Thank you very much, Anna. That I was going to say something about the priest at the beginning, but then you got to the most bizarre imaginary friend I have ever met. That's amazing. I absolutely love it. Children can make connections with anything. All right. Thank you all so much for reading. I'm going to turn all your videos back on for those of you who are watching us live. If you have questions for our readers, we are now going to segue into our Q&A section and you can email me questions if you'd like me to ask them. And my email address is in the link below that on the YouTube page. If you can't see that, then it's Alison Charette at literarytranslators.org. While we're waiting to see if a couple of questions come in from the audience, I would like to open it up to any of you to ask you about what the experience, what your experience was like in the mentorship program. Anything good, bad, ugly, what it helped with, anything you'd like to tell us really. What was it like for you? Oh, I'll say something. So my experience of doing this translation before I got the mentorship was entirely solitary. I was not in any translating program. I didn't know anybody else who was a translator. I was really doing it by myself like the narrator of my novel. So it was wonderful to have a person to connect with in the process and a person who didn't think I was crazy. She did think the book was crazy, but it's a very out-there kind of book. But it was really, really a marvelous experience to have someone looking at my work, supporting me, giving me really wonderful advice and making me feel I had a context. So that was great. And that's exactly what we wanna do with this program is get people who otherwise have not had any sort of training or community to get that. Because as freelancers and as writers, we do lead that solitary life. So I'm very happy that that was your experience. Anna, Scott, anything from your perspectives? Yeah, I'll say something. So the work I chose for my author was not a work that was very well known to any English speakers because it was never translated in English, but a lot of her work has been, at least a lot of the bigger stuff. So I found that it was difficult for me to find a lot of historical context to work itself. I didn't really know where to begin in English or in Kotlin. And Ron was incredibly helpful with all this. He always knew what outside texts I should be reading. He knew if there was an article written about my book like 10 years ago, he knew everything. And so I found myself doing a lot of outside research in addition to the translation, but I don't know how I could have done the translation without the outside research. It's just, I feel like I have a much better sense of where it fits in and the Kotlin can. And for that reason, I know how to speak about it to an English audience in less context than I have. For all of you or many of you, what were the challenges that you had in doing these translations? And specifically if there was anything in the excerpts you read that you'd like to point out? I can speak of one major challenge, which is Moscow's sentences and rather long with clause, built upon clause, built upon clause. And I had a lot of questions about how to handle that and how to go with whether to try to speak that rhythm or if we could have an English that somehow suggested the French rhythm. One of the things that I know about the story is that he was deeply influenced by the English and he wrote working with that. I don't know what I thought. No, that's fantastic. Other challenges that people would face? Well, from my point of view, sorry, can you hear me? Yep, we're good. Okay, sorry. Yeah, from my point of view, that particular novel is set and because of the place where it's set, as I said in these Borderlands, it means that people are using, the characters that appear in the novel are using a number of different languages and you have to decide what to do with that. I mean, there were some Ukrainians because for a Polish reader, Ukrainian, you don't have to translate it. It's similar enough for them to be able to catch the meaning, but what do you do with that when you have to bring it into English? And that lot also some Yiddish, as I had to decide what to do with all these different other languages or phrases in other languages that were cropping up throughout the translation. So that was a bit of a challenge. Yeah. I just want to reiterate what the other said to you about how useful it is or just how great it is to have someone with whom you can discuss it when you're most aware on your own. Can you give us an example of one thing that you did in one of the instances where there was another language? I feel like I've heard a lot. Well, with the Yiddish is not so difficult now because there's a lot of novels. If you just think about, well, lots of new ones, people like Hannah Kral and Bash of the Singer. I think people are familiar with Yiddish phrases or they may have some German or it's close enough. You don't have to translate it. You can provide a glossary. You can't really do that with Ukrainian. So as I just translated it, on some cases I said, I think it depended on the context I just put, he said, in Ukrainian. I mean, it worked sometimes, other times it didn't. It was tricky. It was really tricky. Yeah. And I think maybe once I might even have left it because it didn't really matter at that point that you didn't understand. So I didn't have a uniform way of dealing with it. Very much. I feel like that's almost the best way because if it needs to be understood, then you should make it understood in English. But if it's just there as a, oh, this is someone speaking a different language and some readers are gonna understand it and some readers aren't, then, you know, I hesitate to say exoticism, but it is probably that. Scott, I was interested if we could hear from you. I know you've mentioned to me before that there are illustrations that go along with your book. Could you talk a little bit about that? I've seen a couple and they're just, they're wild. They remind me of the Codex Seraphimus, the most ridiculous book I've ever seen in my life. But how did, were they published with your original book? How did you come about finding those? I should, I had to specify right up front that they're not mine, they're another artist and still have to negotiate with the artist. So they're not by any means attached to the book, but there was something that Ron and I turned up in our research of just the book in general. So is it like fan art, then, that somebody wrote the book in? Yeah, yeah, but it's the best fan art I've ever seen anywhere of anything. It was astounding to be great fan art. No, I mean, these, yeah. That was just a lucky find, to be honest. So it's just something you're gonna be talking with the artist to see if they want it. Attached to the book when it's translated and it's published then? Yeah, and I think it would be great too, because so those, and no one else has seen these illustrations in a little bit, but what they are, they're mostly illustrations of the flowers sections and the flower is the main focus, but then usually in the bottom, there's the catalan text, these portions of the catalan text, which I think would be really fascinating to include in a translation, because when you're reading a translation, you always know in the back of your mind that this is not the original language that the work was composed in. And if you're like me, you're a little fascinating to see how they match up. And I think that this would be kind of a, if we were to able to have the illustrations sort of like fast on fast with the translations, then it would be sort of a low stress way of playing that game of what matches what, and maybe also educating people a little bit about how the work catalan looks like, anything. That sounds fantastic. I hope that works out. Yeah, me too, me too. I'm fingers crossed. Well, we are getting to the end of our hour and I have gotten one email from a viewer which was not a question, but just a congratulations to all involved. Great readings throughout. She says she's particularly moved by the passage read by Joyce, such a vivid paste description of solitude, which I think is a very, very good way of putting it. So kudos to all of you. Thank you so much for being a part of this. Thank you so much for going through the mentorship, being game to everything that that entailed. And we'll look forward to seeing all of these works out in the published world sometime in hopefully the near future. Thank you again to Ulta for programming all of these mentorships from the administrative side. Thank you to our funding organizations, the Institute of M&R, French books office, French Embassy Books Office and Folch Cultural Institute of New York. Thanks to our wonderful mentors, Ron Pucco, Allison Waters and Bill Johnston. And thank you to all of our mentees and congratulations all of you on a very successful first year of this program. And we'll be back here at Ulta next year with the next Crop of Mendes. Hope you all have a great day and see you later.