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    Little Bird
    Little Bird
    Little Bird
    Ebook127 pages1 hour

    Little Bird

    By Claudia Ulloa Donoso

    ()

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    About this ebook

    After moving from Peru north of the Arctic circle to begin graduate school, Claudia Ulloa Donoso began blogging about insomnia. Not hers, necessarily – the blog was never defined as fact or fiction. Her blog posts became the bones of Little Bird, short stories with a nod to fervent self-declaration of diary entries and the hallucinatory haze of sleeplessness. Blending narration and personal experience, the stories in Little Bird stretch reality, a sharp-shooting combination of George Saunders and Samanta Schweblin. Characters real and unreal, seductive, shape-changing, and baffling come together in smooth prose that, ultimately, defies fact and fiction.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDeep Vellum Publishing
    Release dateAug 17, 2021
    ISBN9781646050666
    Little Bird

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      Book preview

      Little Bird - Claudia Ulloa Donoso

      Little BirdHalfPageTitlePage

      Deep Vellum Publishing

      3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226

      deepvellum.org • @deepvellum

      Deep Vellum is a 501c3 nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013 with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature.

      Copyright © 2015, 2021 Claudia Ulloa Donoso

      ©Laurel Editores, 2015 as in the original Spanish edition of the Work

      Published by arrangement with VicLit Agency

      Originally published as Pajarito by Laurel Editores, Santiago, Chile, 2015

      Translation © 2021 by Lily Meyer

      first edition, 2021

      All rights reserved.

      Support for this publication has been provided in part a grant from The Dallas Office of Arts and Culture.

      ISBN: 978-1-64605-065-9 (paperback) | 978-1-64605-066-6 (ebook)

      library of congress control number: 2021939697

      Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution

      Cover design by Justin Childress | justinchildress.co

      Interior by KGT

      Printed in the United States of America

      All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted for review purposes,

      no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by

      any means, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

      contents

      Translator’s Note

      WORK EXPERIENCE

      Little Bird

      Puppeteer

      Wood

      Developments

      A Writer’s Pastimes

      First Person

      Lifeguard

      BETWEEN US

      A Bollywood Story

      Line

      The Wrong Girl

      Plant

      Eloísa

      Between Us

      Plastic

      HERE AND THERE

      Type B

      Plasticine Dreams

      Fish

      I Remember

      I Don’t Remember

      PLACEBO

      Placebo for Bleeding to Death

      Take Charge

      Oppfølgingstjenesten

      Tom

      D.

      BLOOD AND WATER

      Swimming Pool

      The Drowning Man

      Phalange

      Blood Calls

      Å HÅPE

      Waiting

      A Trip

      Acknowledgments

      Translator’s Note

      Not long before releasing her convention-defying novel Outline, the British writer Rachel Cusk told a Guardian interviewer that, in the wake of critical backlash to her memoir Aftermath, she came to find fiction fake and embarrassing. She continued: Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous. I remember reading that line and feeling both seen and sick. I write fiction in addition to translating it, and I didn’t want to acknowledge the absurdity of the form to which I’ve devoted so much of my love and time.

      Among the many beauties of Claudia Ulloa Donoso’s work is that, rather than closing her eyes to the fundamental illogic of fiction, she embraces it. The stories in Little Bird transform the stuff of daily life—the mundane details and events that another writer might use to make an invented person seem more real—into surreal magic. She turns lawn mowing into performance art, bus rides into high drama, fly swatting into a life-or-death rescue mission. As a result, her stories feel wildly inventive even while winking constantly at the irrationality of invention. After all, the inventory of her world is exactly like the inventory of ours. How, then, does she manage to produce fiction that seems so loosely tethered to Earth?

      I asked myself that question hundreds of times while translating Little Bird. Claudia writes in a tone like nobody else I have read. Reproducing it—or, more accurately, creating an English-language analogue to it—was a tremendous challenge, and, eventually, a mind-expanding one. Claudia’s narrators approach their surroundings with a mix of innocence, bafflement, and wonder. Nearly all of them sound detached, but are, in fact, deeply emotionally invested in the story’s goings-on. In order to translate them properly, I had to train myself into a version of their mental state. Rather than rejecting the confusion I sometimes felt at a character’s interpretation of events, I learned to fold it into the translation process, lending my own puzzlement to the prose. Rather than deconstruct the empathy I felt and still feel for these stories’ protagonists, I tried to channel it into my work.

      I recognize that this sounds abstract, and potentially a little woo-woo, but translation is a vaguer art than it may seem. Substituting an English word for a Spanish one, Google can do. To my knowledge, though, no AI can yet teach itself to slip into a short story’s emotional landscape, which I got used to doing every time I sat down to work on Little Bird. Years after first translating Eloísa, a story in which the narrator discovers that his girlfriend’s voice has magical properties, I can still readily access his precise mix of envy, insecurity, and astonished delight at having met such a woman, and I can identify those feelings in my translation choices. In my English rendition of Eloísa, the words I and my are everywhere. Even when describing Eloísa or her surroundings, the narrator refers back to himself as much as I could make him do. His combined pride and self-doubt pop into nearly every sentence of the story. In Spanish, Claudia achieves this effect by loading sentences and passages with verbs conjugated in the first person: volví, logré, soporté. In English, though, the verbs for first and third person are the same—I returned; she returned—and multiple verbs can stack themselves behind a single pronoun. I needed a different strategy to maintain the narrator’s insistent focus on himself, and so I looked for word choices and sentence structures that would force me to keep him present.

      I took the opposite approach in I Remember and I Don’t Remember, two paired stories whose loving nostalgia, even now, makes my chest ache. Both stories seek to conjure their narrators’ past selves and past lives, and so I concentrated on rendering their descriptions of the past as evocatively as I possibly could, while using very plain language for the present. My goal was to emulate Claudia’s choice to tip the scales toward memory, rather than toward the sensation of remembering. Her decision here is the opposite of, to pick a famous example, Virginia Woolf’s in Mrs. Dalloway, where Clarissa Dalloway dwells in the process of memory, variously questioning and reveling in it. Claudia’s narrators just dive right in—another way, perhaps, in which she keeps her stories grounded in real and present life, but not fastened tightly to it.

      Translating Little Bird has helped me fret less over the connection between fiction and reality, or imagination and observation. After all, the stories collected here are grounded more in personal fact than a reader might guess. Claudia wrote them after moving north of the Arctic Circle; her first summer there, she suffered severe insomnia from the endless daylight, which created the feeling of dislocation so many of her characters express. Sleep deprivation can make the everyday seem impossible or surreal—as fake and embarrassing, to borrow Rachel Cusk’s language once more, as any fiction. Reading Claudia’s stories has the same effect, though far more pleasant. In her hands, surreality feels inviting, a place where I always wish to return.

      I still remember the first time I entered Claudia’s world. I picked Little Bird up in a bookstore at random, flipped through, leaned on a shelf to read the title story. When I looked up, I had that bemused, sun-dazzled feeling I associate with leaving a movie theater during the day—where am I? What time is it? How did I get here? I remember that I barely oriented myself in time to pay for the book, rather than simply taking it home. In hindsight, it seems to me that I knew, even then, that I wanted to translate the book. In actual fact, I think I just wanted to let it transport me again.

      I know Little Bird has a similar effect on other readers. In the six years Claudia and I spent translating and revising this collection, she’s won awards, been named to the Hay Festival’s Bogotá 39 list of the best Latin American writers under forty, and released editions of Pajarito—the collection’s Spanish title—in four more countries. Her fan club seems to

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