Contributions by Rachael Small
Rachael Small is a translator from French and Spanish into English. In 2010, she worked with Pola Oloixarac as part of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where she received her MFA in Literary Translation in December 2012 with her translation of the book My Morocco by Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa. In the summer of 2012, she was one of three student residents at the Banff International Translation Centre. Her translations have appeared in Fiction France IX and XI. Although she currently works at the Book Department of the French Embassy in New York City, she was ultimately drawn to translation by contemporary Mexican poetry and short fiction, and would love to translate Mis Días en Shanghai by Aura Estrada.
Smoke
Giovanna Rivero
translated by Rachael Small
The pointless memories are the most beautiful ones. I must have been, what, eight years old when this guy with a bird’s name, Piri, came to my grandparents’ house. He’d come to help my grandmother with the little sausage and bakery business she’d set up in her third courtyard. It sounds unbelievable, I know, but the house really did have three courtyards and in the third, as I said, my grandmother had set up a real life steam-powered manufacturing line for chorizo and bread. If you showed up very early in the morning, you could imagine the smoke belched out by the grinders, ovens, crushers, fillers and pots being, logically, the smog that rose in a frenzy from the First World’s last generation of machines.
In what should have been the house’s hall, … Read More »
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