The Center for the Art of Translation has published the October installment of TWO LINES Online. This installment offers an intriguing story from the Urdu—”The Hyena Falls Silent” by Sayid Muhammad Ashraf (translated by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad)—and a poem translated by Victor Pambuccian: “The small rain” by Constantin Abăluță.

The author of “The small rain,” Constantin Abăluță, also has a poem in the current TWO LINES, titled Passageways. You can order that book here and se the fullt able of contents. “The small rain” begins:

I know the chronicler of the big rain.
For my part, I will write about a small rain,
a rain that’s slipping through your fingers.
A rain like a worthless thing

“The Hyena Falls Silent” is a very strange story about a train journey in India.

The train had just left the station, navigating the crisscross of tracks, blowing its whistle. Then each car’s brakes screeched from engine to caboose, before falling silent beneath the growing darkness of the monsoon evening. Quickly the voices of the passengers rose in confusion.

A hard rain began to pelt the windows. The rain struck the train’s roof and ran down its sides: drop after drop slowly slipped down, and when several met up they formed a thick line that flowed all the way down the windows. The boy liked watching this.

“Why’re we stopped?” Grandfather asked the person across from him. The boy was sitting right next to Grandfather; he repositioned himself and turned back to watch the rain.

“Who knows? Some school-boys must’ve pulled the emergency brakes,” said the man with the moustache.

“But today’s Sunday. It must be something else. Please go see what it is.”

“But it’s raining a lot, sir,” the man said, not wanting to cede his place on the jam-packed train.

See: Center for the Art of Translation

Also see: Podcast: interview with CJ Evans on the Center for the Art of Translation