{"id":4473,"date":"2022-06-13T21:07:08","date_gmt":"2022-06-13T21:07:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=4473"},"modified":"2022-08-12T11:27:55","modified_gmt":"2022-08-12T11:27:55","slug":"the-translator-at-low-tide-by-vajra-chandrasekera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=4473","title":{"rendered":"The Translator, at Low Tide by Vajra Chandrasekera"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Translator, at Low Tide<\/em><\/strong> by Vajra Chandrasekera (Clarkesworld<\/em> #164, May 2020)1<\/sup> gets off to a rambling literary start:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sea lapping at my back and my face to the fire, I translate: poems, mostly. Now that entire languages and cultures are on the verge of being lost forever to the sea, the storms, the smog, the plagues, and the fires, now the art of the dead and the almost-dead have become quaintly valuable to a small but enthusiastic readership of the living. The wealthy and living, I should say, but are those not the same thing, now? I am alive; I breathe in and am overcome with riches. It itches, deep in my lungs.
The big publishing houses (we used to count their decreasing number; I don\u2019t know where the dice finally rolled to a stop) in distant walled New York pay an entire pittance for authentic translations from the lost world, which translates into a moderate income for me because of the horrific exchange rate. It keeps me fed and sheltered\u2014long may the fashion in third world ruin-poetry last\u2014and I pray now only for the goodwill of distant tastemakers. The world\u2019s decay is now the province of poets, not the useless powers and principalities of the world. There was a war on loss and we lost. It is now the age of mourning. I only wish it paid better.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The idea of written works being lost to climate change a few decades in the future seems rather unlikely (one would have thought they would all be scanned and on the internet by then), but I suppose this occupation lets the narrator give his thesaurus a work out and utter pretentious comments like \u201cPoetry causes delirium and weakness. It burdens the heart\u201d, and \u201cthe city\u2019s death will come apr\u00e8s moi\u201d, etc.
We also learn about the climate disaster future the narrator lives in, and how his home in a tower block has a flooded ground floor where the rugs stink of mildew (and yet they still have intermittent electricity\u2014I\u2019m not sure how that works in a building awash with water).
In amongst all this are a couple of trips to his friend\u2019s library, and a mugging by the local youths for his groceries. The same feral children who steal from him later start setting people of his generation on fire (drowning would have been better symbology).
In short: a poet\u2019s misery memoir crossed with climate-change hand wringing.
– (Tedious). 3,950 words. Story link<\/a>.

1. This was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award\u2014a group of voters who, it would seem, must like to see writers writing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Translator, at Low Tide by Vajra Chandrasekera (Clarkesworld #164, May 2020)1 gets off to a rambling literary start: The sea lapping at my back and my face to the fire, I translate: poems, mostly. Now that entire languages and cultures are on the verge of being lost forever to the sea, the storms, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1062],"tags":[79,296,622,548,12,1064,1063],"class_list":["post-4473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vajra-chandrasekera","tag-296","tag-clarkesworld","tag-climate-change","tag-short-story","tag-translators","tag-vajra-chandrasekera"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4473"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5340,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4473\/revisions\/5340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}