Translation Selections
My journey with these remarkable translators feels like a chain reaction—each encounter led almost seamlessly to the next, woven together by a narrative of shared passions and creative discovery. Years ago, I met Oonagh Stransky when I was a student in her translation course at the Italian Middlebury Language School, where her nuanced approach to translation and ability to illuminate the subtleties of language left a lasting impression, shaping my early perspectives on the craft. Drawn once again to Middlebury later in my career, but through its Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, I was fortunate to be placed in a workshop led by Edward Gauvin, whose insightful and expert guidance expanded my understanding of translation. Alongside some of my workshop peers, I was later invited to join a translators group, where I had the pleasure of working with—among many other truly wonderful colleagues—Slava Faybysh, who stands out for his friendly, open demeanor and creative solutions to the various translation challenges we encounter.
What I value most about these relationships is not only the expertise these individuals bring to their work but also their down-to-earth nature and infectious sense of humor. They each radiate warmth and affability, something I believe fosters genuine connections and, as a result, enriches our collaborations. I hold immense respect for their dedication to the craft; their passion and meticulous care shine through in every word they choose, resulting time and again in exquisite recreations in the English language.
The compilation of the texts featured here celebrates a wide artistry in translation. Oonagh expertly captures the—to borrow her words for a moment—“bold strangeness” of Giacomo Cardaci’s voice in Zucchero e catrame, a raw and vivid depiction of memory, trauma, and resilience amidst cultural tensions and societal changes. Edward brings Elsa Gribinski’s hypnagogic short story “Ode to Jouy” to life with elegant English. He highlights the author’s preference for “pithiness in prose and lyric in story” and notes that “nested in the dense weave of its swift prose was a network of allusions, associatively darting among images glimpsed and remembered. […] Small wonder then, that the collection later to include ‘Jouy’ would be called Toiles.” Slava has a keen eye for Ainur Karim’s colloquial, dialogue-rich storytelling in the excerpt from Who Will Marry You?, a novel exploring societal upheaval and family during—as Slava puts it—the “boom-and-bust cycles of capitalism.”
Together, these translations—spanning Italian, French, and Russian—bring distinct voices and sensibilities to the collection. With their range of styles, themes, and characters, these pieces offer a vibrant assortment of literary experience. As guest editor for West Branch Wired, I am proud to highlight translation’s vital role in connecting readers to these global voices, a practice deserving far greater recognition in the English-speaking world. After all, only through translation do these voices become “global.”
—R.F.
Rose Facchini is a Lecturer in Italian at Tufts University, the Editor and Italian Translator Editor for the International Poetry Review, and a Contributing Editor for the Journal of the History of Ideas. Her translations have either appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals and with various publishing houses such as Asymptote’s Translation Tuesdays, ergot., Exacting Clam, International Poetry Review, Snuggly Books, and West Branch. https://linktr.ee/rose_facchini
Sugar and Tar
by Giacomo Cardaci, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky
Prologue
I wrote this in the Cesare Beccaria juvenile detention facility in Milan, where I was imprisoned almost three years ago, just after turning seventeen, for a crime I committed and which I’ll tell you about in due course.
I read the pages out loud to my cellmate, Moustafa, a Moroccan kid who stared at me with pitch-black eyes, looking like a wildcat alarmed by a dangerous sound in a dark forest. In fact, I read mostly at night, when neither of us could sleep, tormented by our painful memories, by the drone of flesh-eating mosquitoes hungry for our warm blood, by our dreams for the future, and by the ghosts of prisoners past who, according to Moustafa’s dumb but contagious delusions, roamed the prison at night, breathing icy air down the necks of the youngest inmates, immersing them in fear.
Around two o’clock in the morning, a guard used to come to our cell and, finding us still awake, would softly scold us.
“Quiet down, it’s late,” he’d say, but we didn’t care and kept on talking, swept up by our memories, driven by the need to remember.
Here, inside, we only have words.
I owe the existence of this book to Moustafa. “Write about it!” he’d whisper at three o’clock in the morning after he finished chanting and moaning his prayers. Like me, he tossed and turned on the prison cot with its revolting sheets. “And you’ll see, everything will become clearer.”
He used to tell me, and still does as if it were the absolute truth, although he could be lying, what his Italian language teacher apparently always told him at the end of class, heaping praise on his work: yes, there were some grammar mistakes; yes, it still needed work, but it has a lot of potential. A sheet of white paper, his teacher used to say, isn’t just a simple sheet of white paper; it’s a sponge, capable of soaking up dark ink, dark fears, and dark thoughts and in turn illuminating them. Each time Moustafa comes back to the cell after class, he’s euphoric. “You should write too!” he says over and over.
Poor Moustafa. And yet, seeing how insistent he is, seeing him try to act like a writer, even though he once told me that he’s never read a book in his life, not even a short one, but that he would definitely buy mine, I decided to follow his advice.
My hope is that anyone who reads these pages finds as much joy as we did, and cries as hard as we did – because once in a while, even that greedy Moroccan kid, that hot-headed thief starving for money, a boy whose soul was riddled with dreams of revenge, was moved to tears. I hope my readers will live out all the emotions we experienced in that overheated or icy-cold rat hole of a cell, while navigating my past and culling whatever lessons they want from it.
Beginning with the first and most important one.
How to identify a witch.
The real kind.
PART 1
Chapter 1
Among the worst mistakes that my parents made during their lifetime were the ones they proudly took ostensibly for my own good.
For my own good, back when I was a kid, my mother decided to send me to the San Giusto Martire parochial school instead of the local elementary school, Ugo Foscolo. My father, who’d been listening to her praise the place since before I was born – how lucky I’d be to have some of her same teachers, even though they had to be decrepit with age – agreed with her absent-mindedly, as if he were being asked his opinion on a new bath mat. My father was always busy with his clients at his bar, where he spent all his time, both day and night, and where the most important and intimate family discussions took place. As a result, our family affairs were public matters: clients listened in and even felt entitled to offer advice and warnings, especially when they were drunk.
My dad distractedly agreed with my mother’s suggestion, and so I was sent to the parochial school, just like my older brother Fabrizio who detested the place and begged them to send him to Ugo Foscolo, coming home each day upset and disgusted, threatening to crawl out the boys’ bathroom window the first chance he got. Since there were two of us, we got a fifteen percent discount on the tuition, which I’m sure was the only aspect that made my father grunt with satisfaction. He thought a lot about money, how to multiply or save what he had: in secret, after closing time and while Polina mopped the floor, he filled the Aperol bottles with some second-rate orange liquid that he bought in Slovenia. It didn’t really matter; his bar was the only one in town, and his clientele was made up of ruddy-faced men with foggy vision, rancid breath, and dirty nails. They were the wise men of our family.
***
The school was on the main street of a town near Udine I’d rather not name. It’s an irrelevant detail: anyone who’s ever been there will recognize it from my description of the awful place, and for those who haven’t, well, better off that way. It was founded and was still efficiently run by a handful of about thirty nuns of all different ages and origins, including a few recent arrivals from the Philippines who irritated the locals because, instead of being or acting poor as they were expected to, they shared cell phones for long-distance calls, giggled in public, and spoke a cheerful language that no one had ever heard before or understood, saying who knew what to each other. “They’re probably making fun of us,” my mother said during one of her frequent racist rants.
Over the years, the more senior nuns had managed to transform the school building, an ex-hospital, and therefore as grim as an armory, into a monstrous house of horrors. Every inch of the place was covered with images of torture: tortured saints shot through with arrows, or being licked by drooling and depraved dogs, or roasted over coals like juicy steaks; woeful, crying Madonnas; pretty martyrs whose eyes had been dug out with spoons by some deranged Roman emperor, or whose tits had been sliced up like prosciutto, or whose hands had been hammered to shreds, or whose bodies had been burnt to piles of ashes to be swept up with a broom.
There was only one holdover from the hospital era: the stench of alcohol. The sisters took turns sterilizing every single corner of the place, having infected each other with such a maniacal obsession for cleanliness that every three or four sentences included the word “hygiene” or one of its derivatives. “It’s not hygienic,” they’d whisper as soon as we got ink on our hands or dribbled fruit juice down the front of our smocks. “Go wash up with the antibacterial soap immediately!” For them, external cleanliness and pure morals went hand in hand; similarly, external dirt was a synonym for inner luridness.
There was a level of silence in that building that was almost otherworldly; it seemed to exist just so it could be brutally disrupted, sooner or later, with a tragic scream. Merely crossing the threshold made a person tense their hands up into fists, as if they’d just seen a big hairy spider or rotten skull or demonic snake. But there were no hairy spiders, rotten skulls, or snakes. There were only the sisters.
Ah, the sisters. A coven of witches who walked around the school glowering, their heels click-clacking across the floor, dressed from head to toe in black: from black shoes to black stockings to black habit to their black-as-tomb veils. From afar, they all looked the same. Up close, they were distinguishable by their facial features: some of them had faces that looked like dripping candle wax, their bodies as stiff as if already buried; others scowled; still others looked downright evil.
What was most frightening was not what you could see but what you could not. For example, there was talk that under their veils, their hair was as short and spiky as toothbrushes and as gray as sewer rats. Or worse: apparently, some of them were bald, and to compensate for their lack of hair, they had tufts of beards growing from their chins that they had to secretly shave off each morning. Naturally, these were only speculations: no one had ever seen them with a razor in hand or without their veil, as it was a mortal sin to show a single, scandalous lock of hair. And if, by chance, someone did catch sight of a single, scandalous lock of their hair, the poor woman would consequently be labeled with the worst possible insult, that of being an “easy woman.”
Whenever my father saw a nun walk by, he grabbed his balls, something he also did when he saw a hearse or a black cat, making him snicker with the drunks who hung around his bar, the men who squandered the money he loved so much and that my mother kept tucked away in a packet of cigarettes behind the coffee, together with a few precious and untouchable greenish nuggets of hash, which they crumbled up and mixed with their tobacco in the evenings before relaxing in front of a TV talk show. My father thought that nuns were costly good-for-nothing hags, dogs that no one wanted, not men or friends or even distant relatives. All except one: Suor Virginia, the headmistress of the convent. When a woman didn’t feel like working, he used to say, all she had to do was throw on a veil, press her hands together, and pray all day. “Now that’s the life!” he’d say. “A life worth living forever.”
Giovanna, an elderly neighbor, used to say that the women in black locked up whiny children in underground caves, fed them bats, and forced them to drink a potion made of rotten worms. The potion was meant to transform them into zombies with cobwebs for brains and toilet paper bandages for clothes. I was sure this was just another stupid story invented to scare or mess with kids. And, at the time, at age six, I already thought I was too old for idiocies like that. Actually, I’ve always felt older than my age, ever since I was born. Even now, here in prison.
***
But actually, I was afraid. I had never been so fucking scared, and the fear has stayed with me ever since. I’m afraid of finding myself on my own, surrounded by people I don’t know, without knowing what to do or say. It’s the fear of looking stupid, of being teased for making a fool of myself. The fear of finding out that I’m all wrong or inadequate. I was scared of those women who everyone badmouthed. My fear parched my throat, confused my thinking, and made it hard to see, and on the first day of school, my mother didn’t even notice. She was too busy wandering up and down the halls of the school she’d attended at my age, pointing out the things that were the same and those that were different with the melancholy air of a chatelaine showing off the rooms of a castle where she hasn’t set foot for decades. Maybe my biggest fear of all was precisely that: failing at the things she had done so well at school. Hating a place she had loved so much. In short, letting her down.
At the end of the tour, before abandoning me in a vast room with high ceilings, she turned around one last time and whispered the words you usually whisper on such occasions: “Don’t embarrass me.” Then she disappeared, and I grew as mute as a fish, surrounded by other children who looked at each other just as mutely, waiting to be swallowed up by a shark.
But the most confused fish of them all, the most frightened one, was the little girl I sat next to. Carrie, or rather, Carefree, as I rebaptized her as soon as she introduced herself to me, her name reminding me of the silky, breathable sanitary pads that were constantly being advertised on TV. “Extra-silky, extra-strong pads… for women who want to be free and independent!” I nervously repeated the slogan to myself, adjusting the dried-up wad of toilet paper that I wedged between my butt-cheeks in the place of a real pad while continuing to stare furtively at my deskmate. The lenses of her eyeglasses were smudged as if she’d pushed them up her face with dirty fingers a thousand times; she had giant coils of curls, which had been sprayed to stay in place; she had dark peach-fuzz on her arms and face, all the way down to her chin, looking almost like a beard; and she wore a bottle-shaped pendant around her neck that did not hold, as I would’ve expected, a sprig of lavender or some fairy dust, but rather a monstrous model of a wrinkled brain. Carefree held the pendant as tight as a life buoy and shook it like a rattle to ward off a demon, as if death might appear in person at any moment to scoop her up and take her away. And then, at a certain point, death did appear.
***
Actually, I can’t recall the very first moment I set eyes on her. It’s been almost fifteen years, and I’m still so angry with her that rancor clouds my memory, and an altered reality takes shape in my mind. But I have absolutely no problem recalling the great despondency I felt when I saw that dark, oblong shape, that lamppost, poke her head into the classroom.
The long shadow, the lamppost, coughed to get our attention. A few seconds later, irritated by something we had not thought of doing, she shrieked, “Stand up!” Hearing how disappointed the nun was with us already, we jumped to our feet as if we’d been kicked.
The sister then sat down with great ceremoniousness under a ratty map of Italy directly in front of Carefree and me, as we had wound up in the unluckiest spot – the front row. This allowed me to examine her carefully, though. She was a pointy old thing, and everything about her was angular: she had a triangular nose, rectangular ears, a squarish forehead over two tiny, pebble-shaped eyes. Her skin was as ashen as an embalmed saint, but unlike a dead person, her movements were decisive and sudden, and her pupils bore into us like infrared cameras. Not a single lock of hair was visible under her veil, from which I deduced that she was a “difficult woman.”
She took a pen out of her pocket and opened a large notebook. “When I call your name, introduce yourselves by saying one or two things about you and and your families,” she said quietly. And then, my god, I swear on everything I own, I heard my name uttered in what had to be the cruelest and most heartless manner ever. I was so frightened that for a few seconds, I froze, I couldn’t breathe, I wished I wasn’t Cesare Barozzi, that I was someone else. But seeing that I was who I was and that no one else was me or raised their hand in my place, I whispered, “Here,” with all the dignity that I could muster. As the nun’s tiny cameras zoomed in on me, I heard my mother’s repeated warnings: “Don’t gesticulate, don’t squirm, don’t be overly dramatic, you’re not a ballerina, don’t touch your weenie, stand up straight, don’t embarrass me, please don’t embarrass me, you better not embarrass me!”
If I wanted to start off on the right foot, as Fabrizio had suggested – and he should know, he’s racked up a lot of experience with the witches – I needed to say something special, to stand out from the other kids; it was important not to miss the chance of getting on the teacher’s good side, as the sister’s first impressions were usually her last, he said, and if you started off by getting on her nerves, you’d always be on her nerves.
So I decided to show off my one talent: my skill for speaking and surprising people. Alba, Marianna, and all my mother’s other friends always said, “My, what a tongue you have!” To which my father, a taciturn man, always commented darkly: “That he does… But, to make money, you need to know how to use your hands, not your tongue.”
So I told the nun, to charm her, that, unlike my classmates, I wasn’t born in Udine, but in Trieste, a city on the sea, the streets of which were lined with million-euro buildings, where my family and I would live once my father decided to sell the bar, when we’d be rich. There was a wind that blew in Trieste in the winter that came all the way from the United States. And a deep ocean current flowed into Trieste that carried military submarines filled with Chinese, Arab, and Philippine soldiers, all ready to invade our shores, part of an ongoing covert ethnic replacement operation. And there were often tornadoes in Trieste that were so strong they brought the weakest birds crashing to the ground, and picked up old ladies, and whisked them away, and… The teacher interrupted me with a weary and impatient expression that somehow grew even more weary and impatient when it was Carefree’s turn to speak.
My desk partner said she lived with her mother and grandfather ever since her father had gone “to space.” The teacher, hearing Carefree say such a foolish thing, peered at her as if the girl had spit in her eye.
“Space?”
“Yes,” Carefree said, clenching her pendant with the horrible little brain in it. “To Pluto.” Her tone of voice gave her away. So this was the little girl I had heard about in town, the one without a father. Worse, actually: her father had been killed, shot, drawn, and quartered – the only way I imagined men could die.
“You mean he’s in heaven, don’t you?”
“No, on Pluto.”
“On what?” The nun screeched and leaned in dangerously towards us while I slid as far away as I could from Carefree, looking at her sideways and imitating the teacher’s indignant expression to show that I wanted nothing to do with her, that I was sitting there purely by chance. Then, as the child didn’t reply, the nun pontificated: “Don’t you know that when people die, they go to the kingdom of heaven?”
“The kingdom of heaven?” Carefree asked with incredulity. “No way, sister. You’re wrong. They go to Pluto.”
***
Finally, the moment I’d been waiting for arrived: the teacher was going to tell us about herself. I’ve always been unnaturally, even morbidly, curious about my teacher’s private lives. The nun thought it best to inform us, first and foremost, that she was under particular stress at that time due to something had happened in her bathroom: a pipe behind the sink had broken, but that was nothing, no, what had upset her was that “the plumber who came to fix it dropped a hammer on the floor and managed to smash one of the tiles! And do you know what he said?”
She looked at us as if she were reliving a trauma from which it would be impossible to fully recover. “He blasphemed the way they do around here!”
I gasped, pretending to be shocked while trying to imagine which of the numerous curses I heard at the bar had been uttered. The sister told us again that the plumber had blasphemed, this time explaining what the word meant, and then she proudly informed us that she promptly sent the plumber packing, without even paying him. Once he was gone, she hurried back to the bathroom and sprayed holy water on the cracked tile from a Virgin Mary-shaped bottle that she kept tucked into her habit, which she then pulled out and showed us as if it had been a scepter or some other powerful weapon, when actually it was just an old statuette of baby Jesus’ mom, so worn down that you couldn’t even make out her face. When she pressed Mary’s crown, a jet of holy water sprayed out the statue’s neck and onto our noses, mine and Carefree’s. Then she glared at us as if issuing a warning. “Try and swear the way they do around here, and you’ll find out what happens!”
Setting the bottle down, she went on to explain that until the age of eighteen, her name was Lorenza, but when she took her vows – in some strange twist of fate or due to the bishop’s visionary and prophetic intuition, because he’s the one who chooses the nuns’ names – the sorceress that Carefree and I and all the other mute fish had been staring at was baptized as nothing less than Sister Dolores.
“But you have to call me ìn-sé-gnàn-tè,” she said, slapping her hand down on the desk with each syllable, “and not maestra, like you did with your preschool teacher. And don’t forget: there really is only one teacher! And it’s him!” she yelled, pointing at the crucifix that hung over the doorway. “I’m merely one of his humble servants!”
***
And that was how our first Italian class began. Sister Dolores then wrote a large capital A on the blackboard, dirtying her black cassock with a little chalk dust. We copied the capital letter A down on a piece of paper: once, twice, three times, waiting for further instructions. But Sister Dolores just opened a long book – later on, I learned that it was always the same one, Les Misérables, year after year – and started to read without paying any further attention to us, only getting up and walking around to check on us now and then.
Carefree gave me a quizzical look. But since I didn’t know what to say or how to encourage her, she went back to focusing on her letter A. Soon we discovered that that was our only task for the whole day: copying out the letter A for hours and hours, until evening, without stopping. Hundreds and hundreds of As. When Sister Dolores hinted at the fact that the alphabet was made of twenty-one letters, each of which could be written in three ways – capital block letters, lower case block letters, and cursive – I almost fell to the floor with despair.
I wondered why on earth my mother had been so enthusiastic about throwing me in a place like that, and with the collaborationist consent of my father, no less. She must’ve been crazy. She must’ve been very different from me. She must’ve wanted me to become just like her. Or maybe it was for my own good.
Oonagh Stransky’s translations from the Italian include works by Eugenio Montale, Domenico Starnone, Carlo Lucarelli, Luigi Pirandello, Marco Vichi, Mario Rigoni Stern, Marialuisa Spaziani, Giuseppe Pontiggia, Roberto Saviano, and Erminia Dell’Oro. Her translation of Starnone’s The House on Via Gemito was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize and the ALTA Italian Prose in Translation Award. Oonagh studied Italian at Middlebury College, UC Berkeley, the Università di Firenze, and Columbia University. She currently resides in Italy. Giacomo Cardaci, born in Udine in 1986, is one of Italy’s most exciting new voices and has already earned several important literary prizes, including the Pier Vittorio Tondelli award and the Piero Chiara Giovani prize. His debut novel, Alligatori al Parini, was published by Mondadori in 2008. This was followed by La formula chimica del dolore (Mondadori 2010) and Zucchero e Catrame (Fandango, 2019), now available as an audiobook in Italian on Audible. His short story “Crioconservazione” appeared in Nuovi Argomenti and an essay on queer life in Milan, “La cacciata dell’ultima strega,” was recently included in The Passenger: Milan (Iperborea, 2023).
Ode to Jouy
by Elsa Gribinski, translated from the French by Edward Gauvin
The landscape is one from another era: a mill, a stream, two villagers conversing, and in the foreground, a young woman in three-quarter view, bent over the water. From the former Hôtel de l’Industrie on the Rue du Bac, at that uncertain hour when ready-to- wear boutiques are rolling down their shopfront grilles, he reached the Right Bank via the Pont Royal, and made his way at random along the streets toward the Grands Boulevards. While on the Left Bank, he would have liked to duck in at Deyrolle for the taxidermied birds arrested in their iridescence, the scarab beetles pinned in their sheen, but something held him back; he tried in vain, as he walked, to put his finger on just what. Farther down the Rue du Mail, a display in a window caught his eye. A bluish Toile de Jouy; for a long moment, he grows lost in contemplating it. The young woman has straightened and is now looking at him with a bemused air. He thinks: a Fragonard, rather.
He resolves to step inside, figures he’s after a reason to write, whether motivation or motif. He would like the Toile de Jouy because it’s got a story—not too colorful, but a story nonetheless, even a bit naïve. She assures him that Toile de Jouy is out of fashion, a bit “monochrome” not to say gray; she doesn’t insist that what’s outdated is lackluster, but she invokes modernity. Thinks he: a black quadrangle on a field of white has no more color than a Toile de Jouy and even less story.
She unrolls several patterns for him, pulls a thousand swatches from their drawers, shows him a modernity that is tightly woven, smooth, garish along the edges, and makes abstraction of it all. She adds that modernity is easy to live with. He thinks that nothing is easy to live with, thinks of Perec’s Things, thinks that the soft grey would go well with her blondeness, her painted lips, retouched by a magazine glossiness. She suggests a floral motif: the dark red of poppies, the purplish red of irises; not so far off, declares she, from a Toile de Jouy. He thinks: not naturalistic enough. He wants characters, he explains, he’s not Rousseau, writing about flowers; a fiction, no matter
how short, is worth nothing without the human element. Also, he just isn’t into flowery things. Floral, she corrects him gently. She brings up a semi-plain with a geometric motif, like a landscape—the cubists, after all, Picasso, she notes, abstract shapes are conducive to the imagination. He’s stopped listening; he’s watching her lips, trying to describe their exact shade of red, dreaming of shuttered shops, boutiques obscures from Perec to Modiano, black quadrangles on a fields of black, attempting to picture what a modern, easy-to-live-with Toile de Jouy would look like: the salesgirl in the window, the boutique, the avenue lined with scenic trees where once pall-mall was played, and himself from behind, lost in the abyme of his fading request, the details of the bluish scene repeating to infinity, yards of wallpaper dyed a light red on which he might write.
Now she unfurls a theatre of feathers, claiming that birds are a very naturalistic motif, modern and classic all at once, the colors might be bright but not contrived. He thinks once more of that soft gray, declares his choice is made: the mill, the stream, the two villagers conversing, and the young woman in three-quarter view, bent over the water in the foreground. Who cares if his eye was fooled at first glance? That’s how he sees her still. She replies that the Toile in the window is very old, a homage to tradition, its cotton fragile; it is not for sale. He watches her lips stretch around the vowels, the I rouge of Rimbaud, blushing as she says Jou-y. He’d have been better off stopping at Deyrolle in his hour of uncertainty. He sighs, bows to the eloquence of those blonde curls, exits the shop, and for a moment remains, undecided, in front of its window before leaving the Rue du Mail behind and heading down the Rue de Richelieu toward the Louvre. He recalls that when the windmills of yore still abounded in town, there was once, a bit farther up and also intersecting the Rue Montmartre, a Rue du bout du monde—the end of the world. Thinks he: the end of the world is never far off.
He has stopped in front of the Musée de l’Orangerie; orange he muses, Monet’s water lilies he muses, his Toile de Jouy slips his mind a bit in this urban setting whose minerality the greenery of the Tuileries scarcely disturbs. Here he comes, down onto the quays. He wonders what shade the Seine is, pictures the muted gray of Toiles de Jouy amidst modern transparency. He didn’t notice what color her eyes were, he thinks—“amused” probably isn’t a color of the spectrum. He walks upstream, cutting a swath beside the colorless waters where, mind adrift, he sees lilies, a crimson spot like an iris of yore (isn’t “Toile de Jouy” a kind of bearded iris now?) undulating, stretching, a scarlet plait between braided banks, a gullet gules with blushing lips centered on a field of toile, a lapwing of cardinal cloth, but rather madder in the river’s gray, glaukopis like the strygine goddess, and the flashing blue-green of parakeets that stare at him, unblinking. When he opens his eyes once more, there stands a Fragonard, looking bemused, on a joyous field of Toile.
Edward Gauvin translates from French with a personal focus on post-Surrealist literatures of the fantastic and graphic novels, of which he has translated more than 450 to date. His writing and translations have appeared in McSweeney’s, the Paris Review, the New York Times, Harper’s, and Subtropics. He has received fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim and Lannan foundations, the NEA, PEN America, the Fulbright program, and the French and Belgian governments. His fiction debut, The Ear in All the Night, is due out in December from 7.13 Books. Elsa Gribinski (1971- ) is a Bordeaux-based essayist, poet, and playwright whose debut fiction collection Toiles (Mercure de France, 2024) was nominated for the Goncourt de la nouvelle. These sixteen ekphrastically inspired stories draw on various genres of visual art—a conceit in keeping with her frequent interdisciplinary collaborations involving actors, artists, dancers, and musicians. For Mercure, she has also assembled and annotated three literary, eclectic, and incorrigibly “subjective” anthologies: of fabulist fiction, depictions of women, and discussions of words. A Slavicist by training, she once—long ago!—translated a volume of previously unpublished stories by Mikhail Osorgin. These days, she can often found leading creative workshops for all ages.
“The Bully” from Who Will Marry You?
by Ainur Karim, translated from the Russian by Slava Faybysh
After this latest incident, Marjan and Bakhor once again tore through the whole house and got rid of every stash of liquor they could find.
For this purge, a sobered-up Zaytuna sat on the couch watching with a defeated look on her face. “Check the bathroom, too. Under the sink,” she prompted.
“Thanks. Got that one already.”
“You always were a smart one, Marjan.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m done with it. Promise. I’m going to quit drinking first, then smoking.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You think I’m not serious?”
Marjan sat down beside Zaytuna. “What do you mean? I never doubted you for a second.”
“But not right away,” Zaytuna blurted, “The smoking part will come later. First this,” and she made the gesture for drunkenness, tapping two fingers on her neck.
Marjan nodded. “Of course.” When Zaytuna started digging around in her purse, Marjan said, “Out of cigs, huh? You fiending?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Still digging in her purse, she pulled out her wallet, opened it, and rifled through frantically. “And now the money’s gone, too! Shit. I can’t believe these devil children. Do you see what I’m dealing with, Marjan?”
Marjan took a peek inside the wallet. There was nothing there except a couple of coins. But she didn’t believe the money had simply vanished. Auntie must have either lost the money or spent it, or maybe there was no money there to begin with. But Zaytuna wasn’t messing around. “What a bitch! Right under my nose, just look what that Bakhor is doing. I should kick her out, shouldn’t I? To hell with her! I mean it, to hell with her! I don’t even want to see her anymore! And I’d like to see that husband of hers try and show his face around here!”
And then came a scandal for the ages. Zaytuna called over Bakhor and her husband and proceeded to give them a full-on shellacking. The two of them decided they’d been completely disrespected and announced they’d be moving out. Marjan knew the whole thing would eventually blow over, and she managed, just by the skin of her teeth, to calm them down. Everyone decamped to their respective rooms, and Zaytuna broke into tears. But money clearly wasn’t the issue—it was the loss of trust.
“Auntie, look what you’ve done,” pleaded Marjan. “You’ve hurt everyone’s feelings.”
“There’s a thief in this house,” whined Zaytuna. “How am I supposed to live with them after this?”
When Dana returned from school, Zaytuna replayed the scene for her benefit, too. How could Auntie let this go, how could she trust, how could she live with this? Dana hugged her, but Marjan noticed, without saying a word, that something was off with her little sister. “Everything okay?” Marjan asked her later.
“Yeah.”
“You’re looking a little pale lately. You sure things are good?”
“I said yes.” Dana averted her gaze. Just then, Marjan noticed something. She abruptly brushed her baby sister’s bangs to the side.
Dana recoiled with a sharp “What are you doing?” but—too late.
Marjan saw her sister’s hairline, brandishing a nice bruise. “How did you get that?”
Dana shot her such a poisonous, hate-filled look that it made Marjan flinch. “It’s nothing. Just—some girls have been picking on me at school. They’re a year older than me.”
The revelation took Marjan a little while to digest. She had of course heard about such things. In their village, and at the district school, bullying was unheard of—if anything like that were to happen, it would quickly become public knowledge. Everyone knew each other. But the things that went on in the bigger schools in Almaty, where they shook students down for money, where they pilfered their new clothes, and forced them down on their knees and humiliated them—she’d heard about these things, of course. But really? Even in a prestigious school downtown?
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Suddenly everything clicked into place.
Dana turned red, but finally blubbered it all out. From her jumble of a story, Marjan gathered that the girls were from the popular crowd, and that they’d only started going after Dana after Papa was arrested. “And Mama’s a hot mess. . . . I didn’t want to bother you right now. . . . It’s been a few weeks now. Tomorrow I have to bring them more money.”
“What if you don’t?”
“They made this one girl get down on her knees and eat dirt.”
“Have you considered calling the police?”
At the word police, Dana twitched as if from an electric shock. “Are you kidding? Husky’s father is in the police. She said he’s a prison guard. Same prison where they put Papa. And they can make everything worse.”
Marjan took another incredulous look at her sister. “Dana, the police don’t guard the prison. Can’t you see they’re lying to you?”
“But what if he’s friends with the prison guards? Husky knows all these private details about Papa—”
“Husky? That’s her name?”
“It’s a nickname. She kind of looks like a husky, her eyes and hair are just like one.” Dana drew a slanted line across her forehead to illustrate.
“Well, whatever. If not the police, why don’t you tell one of your teachers?”
“Really? Are you serious?” Dana flapped her hand, terror-stricken. “Oh, no, that would only make things worse. They would just yell at them, that’s it. And then the girls would take it out on me. Just forget it, I’m going to transfer to another school when the quarter’s over anyway. And then by the time I graduate, they’ll let Papa out, and then it’ll all be over and we can go back to normal.”
Marjan grew pensive. She was at a loss to understand the emotions raging inside her. That was why, while Dana was washing up and changing her clothes, Marjan went to her room and slammed her body against the rug-covered wall a few times.
The evening was relatively uneventful. Dana stayed close to Zaytuna, who was so hungover that she just sat motionless with a compress on her head the whole time. The next morning, Marjan offered to walk Dana to school, but her sister wouldn’t hear of it. She did ask, though, “Marju, could I hit you up for some cash? Like five thousand or so. Just in case.”
And Marjan handed it over.
“Thanks.” Dana hugged her. “Just don’t even worry about it, okay? The quarter’s going to be over soon, and I’ll switch schools.”
“I’ll come pick you up after school.”
“No don’t! Seriously, please don’t, just don’t. Okay?” Dana looked her in the eye to plead her case.
Marjan nodded and headed to the university. It was a good day. Her lectures flew by, and they were interesting. During the break, she and the girls had one cheese samsa apiece and washed it down with some cola.
Back in class, Zarema noted, “You’re so broody today.”
“I want to pick my sister up from school.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’ve been picking on her. Demanding money.”
“Oh, no! They’ve got her on a payment plan?”
“Something like that. It’s some kind of girl gang, and the leader is called Husky.”
“Pfft. Yikes. Husky. Sounds shitty. You should call the police.”
“Police is the last thing Dana wants. She’s terrified of them after our father was arrested. I’ll deal with those girls myself.”
Zarema turned to look at her with a combination of sympathy and amazement. “Marjan, are you serious? You’re going to need help with this. These kids will just tear you apart. You’re like ninety pounds, with your boots and purse. Seriously, are you really going to start something with them? A bunch of teenage gangbanger wannabes? They’ll clobber you!”
“I just want to talk.”
“And that’s the problem. These are the kind of people you can’t get through to just by talking. You’ve got to hit them right in the teeth. Otherwise it won’t work.”
Marjan thought about it some more. What was she feeling? Was it fear? Surprise? Rage? She pressed her palm to her desk, then clenched a fist.
“That’s it, I’m coming with,” declared Zarema. “I want to make sure there are no shenanigans.”
No matter how much Marjan tried to ward her off, Zarema wouldn’t take no for an answer. They found a bench not far from the school—Dana would no doubt pass by this spot on her way home. They took a seat, feet dangling, and pulled out their German textbooks. Somewhere around half an hour later, the bell sounded, and schoolkids shot out of the building, in groups or alone.
A small group of older girls came out, laughing and squealing in Marjan’s direction. She noticed Dana among them, rather scrunched-up inside herself and smiling awkwardly. One of the girls had a big smile and was holding her by the elbow as if they were longtime pals, whispering something in her ear. Gray angled bangs concealed half her face.
Marjan eyed the whole company, but not with hostility. Zarema saw them too. What happened next, Marjan could only recall later in short snippets. She felt “that feeling” that she could never explain. Her memory carried her away somewhere far—like before the start of a race. The smell of horse sweat. Nervous trembling. Shallow breathing. Mind somewhere else. But this time she needed to keep her horse reined in at any cost. Don’t jump the gun, hold back.
Marjan lost her ability to hear. She leaped off the bench and flew towards the huddled cluster of girls. Zarema must have yelled something out, but whatever it was, it didn’t register.
A few girls saw her and scattered. When Dana spotted her, her mouth fell open in soundless amazement. Husky was last to see, and she only had enough time to let go of Dana’s arm. After that everything was a blur.
As her awareness gradually returned, Marjan found herself plonked on top of a preteen girl’s back, tightly clutching her dyed gray hair and pressing her face into the ground. “Eat it!” hissed a guttural voice. “I said, eat—” and then it hit Marjan that she was the one saying these things. The girl opened her mouth with a sharp gurgling sound, sucked some flecks of dirt into her mouth, and started coughing.
Nearby, in utter shock, Zarema and Dana were holding hands like a pair of first graders. The other kids were also standing at a distance, watching from the sidelines.
“Marj . . . Mar . . . Mar,” sputtered Zarema. Marjan knew she had no more than a few seconds before she fully returned to herself, so she quickly leaned in, wrenched the gray hair closer to her face, and hissed, “You go anywhere near her one more time, and I’ll rip your eyes right out of your face.”
And she let go. Looked around in a daze. Within an instant, Dana and Zarema jerked her away, and the three of them walked off briskly, in shock. No one said a word.
At home, Marjan cleaned herself off in the yard, using the faucet meant for watering the lawn. All the fingers of her right hand were bleeding, and only after she washed off the red-brown crud did she discover the deep bite mark.
“What if they call the police, Marjan? They’ll put you in jail, like Papa!”
“Doubt it. That rabid dog got what was coming. Don’t worry—everything will be fine.”
And no one ever did call the police. The next day, both Dana and Husky played hooky from school. After that, it was the weekend. On Monday, they skidded past each other, looking in opposite directions. Someone slipped a rolled up piece of paper into Dana’s bag. Half the money was there.
Marjan had to go around with her hand bandaged for a few days, shrugging the whole thing off and telling jokes if her classmates asked any questions. Zarema seemed less talkative than usual and every once in a while seemed to look at her sideways.
Marjan caught her eye one time and asked, “Everything okay?”
“Marjan! Can I tell everyone?”
“You’re nuts. Of course not.”
“Only our friends. I can’t hold back anymore. No, really, I’m about to explode!”
“I said no.”
A guilty look came across Zarema’s face. “Shit. Why? Why?” It turned out Zarema had already told her mother, father, and brother. And a couple of classmates, too. And maybe a few other people. How was she supposed to keep quiet, anyway? Everyone needed to know that one of her friends was the Kazakh mini-version of G.I. Jane. Marjan might have been angry, but this image made her laugh.
“Teach me,” said Zarema.
“What?”
“How to—how to pounce on people like that.”
Marjan thought about it, then answered honestly. “I’d love to, but I have no idea. Something just comes over me. It’s like… like I jump out of my body. I’m a different person. It was like that when I used to win horse races, and then one time—one time I hit my neighbor on the head with a shovel. You don’t want to be like me, trust me. Not at all.”
“Why would you say that? You don’t do it on purpose, right? Plus, they deserve it.”
“I’m dangerous. I could’ve killed that little shit the other day.”
Dana decided against switching schools. Instead, she signed up for taekwondo, developed a massive crush on her trainer, and even learned a thing or two. One day, the sisters were coming from the store, and some drunk came at them ranting and raving. Dana got a little spooked, but Marjan laughed him off. She took her sister by the hand and dragged her away quickly. At home, they told Zaytuna all about it.
“I’m not worried as long as you have Marjan with you,” she said, hugging Dana. “I don’t care how short you are, you’ve got to have spirit! And Marjan’s got it up to here,” putting her hand up to her neck.
The sisters cracked up, which flustered Zaytuna. Putting two and two together, she realized there was more to the story than she knew. She smiled. “And now it’s teatime! Apple cake! Come on, let’s go, wash your hands!”
Slava Faybysh was born in Ukraine and immigrated to the United States as a child. His first full-length fiction translation, a historical thriller set in 1970s Argentina, called Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case, by Elsa Drucaroff, was published by Corylus Books in 2024. His short story translations have been published in venues such as AGNI, New England Review, and the Southern Review. Ainur Karim is an award-winning playwright and prose writer from Kazakhstan. Her play Chins Up! Shoulders Back!, translated by Ellen Vayner and Slava Faybysh, won the 2022 Plays-in-Translation Contest, sponsored by the American Literary Translators Association, and in 2021 her family comedy, called The Passport, won first place in the BBC International Radio Playwriting Competition. Her prose has been published on The Common Online and is forthcoming from The Georgia Review. She currently lives in Thailand, teaching yoga and selling children’s products online.