Pop-punk trio FRND CRCL have released their third studio album, Suburban Dictionary. The record is steeped in influence from the early-aughts, their genre’s golden days. It’s angsty and defiant, punctuated by jagged guitar riffs and sparklingly-polished vocals.
Suburban Dictionary is a deep-dive into the discontent of growing up through the lens of the suburban teenager, honing in on an emo-tinged view of entrapment and boredom. With melodic, hypnotizing centerpiece “Don’t Wait Up” paired with anthemic cuts like “No Bad Days,” “ADHD” and “Orange Tang,” FRND CRCL have taken an incredible leap in artistry on Suburban Dictionary.
Listen to “Don’t Wait Up” here and check out the artwork and tracklist for Suburban Dictionary below.
Suburban Dictionary Artwork:
Suburban Dictionary Tracklist:
7AM
No Bad Days
ADHD
Golden
Orange Tang
Clinically Insane
Fuck California
No Chill
47
Don’t Wait Up
Kids
Midnight
WYNWM
Alright
Every part of your body defines beauty.
Every gesture of yours proclaims youth.
Gorgeous woman
Looking at your heavenly beauty
The world is spellbound.
You too left your mouth half-opened
Perhaps to explain the secrets
Of that celestial magnificence.
Your lips that lit fires
In so many hearts
That it never met
Burnt on the pyre.
Perhaps to show your heart
Age has sculpted curves and attractions
In every part of your body.
But could not take away
The innocence contained
In your childlike eyes and gentle heart.
Your serene heart suffered betrayal
Expecting a charming experience
From this decadent society, which is
Drowned in greed and belligerence.
You know,
This world grabs light produced by Niagara
But never considers how that fire was born.
Falling from such a high altar
Breaking the magnanimous heart of water.
Human psyche developed
From puppet play to running machines
But has not moved an inch
In understanding compassion.
Maybe that’s why you could not settle anywhere.
You radiated for a while
Just like lightning on the faces of bloated clouds.
Your presence for that moment
Is still raining gold.
But still
You have not yet become
A “sacred” subject to write about.
We grind our mouths till they tire
To gossip of rumours and slander against you.
Don’t they say that
Stones and pebbles and even shoes of Ram
Got life and gave rise to epics?
But you, a complete human being
A symbol of sex to boot
You are not worthy of poetry!
This society wants to see you nude
But detests your heart from
Appearing unclothed, poignant and unblemished.
This world has closed its eyes
To the splendour of your heart
Which enhanced the elegance of your body.
That’s why your sleepless eternal search
for peace of mind
Resulted in that beautiful long slumber . . .
Translated by N Venugopal.
Supernova (1987)
As the light of the sun or the moon
Fills the earth, how many histories
Of stars does the darkness mask
How many rays of light escape
The entrails of darkness, how many
Luminous streams fall prey to the
Cravings of a galaxy?
The story of a star’s
Explosion has to travel lakhs of light years
To reach us, and in the present
In the place of a star that has long died
All we see is a fledgling star being born.
Translated by Rohith.
No Classes Tomorrow (1988)
Those kids helplessly stand
At the zebra crossing on the road
The hurry to hang on to their moms’ necks filling their eyes.
The weight of homework on their backs pulls down their neck
Hair like fallen petals of withered flowers
Uniforms that drain all the colour in their face
Shoes that stop the mercuric feet running before time.
In the midst of an urban forest
Those kids are listless visions of
Fallen stars.
Vehicles stop only for the red signal
But not for the kids.
The hands that turn the wheel
That manage the handle and apply brakes
All the hands otherwise embrace those kids
But now, no one looks at them.
I waved at them with affection
But they looked at my hand strangely
As if thinking
What is this melody amidst this din?
Recognising the smile from within the police van
They sniffed a message in my handcuffed and raised fist
“Tomorrow there won’t be any classes.”
As they cross the road noisily
The vehicles stopped
Like stones in the stream.
The children ran with wild joy
Without looking back.
Translated by N Venugopal.
Human Being with a Voice (1997)
Hidden in thick mango foliage
The cuckoo sings of the coming
Of spring.
The peacock with its thousand-eyed feathers
Dances in pleasure at the onset of rain
In the darkness of the forest.
The blue jay vanishes in the sky
While people march, heralding
The arrival of the right time
For taking arms from the jammi tree.
Birds in the forest
Make agitated noises
To alert the grazing cattle and the jumping calf
About the pouncing tiger.
Waves inform the fish in water
About the imminent net.
Rough weather tells the pigeon in the nest
About the preying snare.
Who then will tell good and bad
To that person who does not have voice
Who only has two hands that work
And a stomach?
Translated by N Venugopal.
To Teach Kids 1 (2006)
Today’s little ones,
Are beaten up, shouted at
And lied to.
That’s how they are trained to be
Tomorrow’s citizens of this country.
When they grow up
They will repeat what they were taught
Some of them from positions of power
Most of them downtrodden.
Translated by Rohith.
To Teach Kids 2
Kids, when they are still little
Smudge their clothes as they
Play in the mud, like a worker
From the coal mine who digs up
And carries loads.
They are dragged back
To tailored uniforms, sent to school
And disciplined.
It is only then
They grow up to be
Army generals and
Receive medals for chivalry.
Translated by Rohith.
Excerpted with permission from Varavara Rao: A Life in Poetry, edited by Meena Kandasamy and N Venugopal, Penguin India.
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While Finland is often depicted as a uniform country in which people are more likely to engage in cold-water swimming than small talk, the population is by no means homogenous, and there is no better place to see this than in the diversity of Finland’s contemporary literary scene.
Shaped by histories and narratives of exclusion and survival, Finnish authors are blurring the lines of genre to tell new stories in luminous, captivating prose. These prize-winning contemporary novels engage with the effects of war and inequality and offer deeply compelling explorations of what it means to be human.
The novel that I translated from Finnish to English is The Red Book of Farewells by Pirkko Saisio. With her experimental prose and long career starting in the 1970s, Pirkko Saisio can be seen as an influence on many of these writers. The Red Book of Farewells offers a beautiful portrait of a young woman finding her voice in 1970s Helsinki.
Here are seven Finnish novels I consider essential reading:
Bolla by Pajtim Statovci, translated by David Hackston
Born to Albanian parents in Kosovo in 1990, Pajtim Statovci fled with his family to Finland when he was two. Themes of exile, identity, and war feature prominently in each of his novels, and in Bolla, his latest, he delivers a tragic love story with his characteristically beautiful and propulsive prose. Set in Kosovo in 1995, the story revolves around Arsim, a newly married university student, and Miloš, a Serb. The two meet one day in a café, and their attraction to one another leads them into a secret but doomed affair: Arsim is forced to flee the war with his family, and Miloš is sent to the front line. They meet again at the end of the novel, broken by their experiences and an unforgiving society who cannot accept them for who they are. The bolla, a snake-like creature from Albanian mythology, appears throughout as an ambivalent symbol of hope and forbidden desire.
The Union of Synchronized Swimmers written and translated by Cristina Sandu
Like Statovci, Cristina Sandu grew up between two cultures, and she was born into a Finnish-Romanian family in Helsinki. In her second novel, she follows the lives of six young women who form a synchronized swim team in an unnamed Soviet bloc country in order to escape to the West. Once a tight unit always moving together in sync, they scatter to places like Helsinki, Rome, and California. These women do not necessarily find happiness or freedom; instead, their stories detail their aching inability to fit in, their desperate attempts to earn money and some semblance of security, and the vulnerability of being female. Each woman’s story delves deep into the heart of loneliness and the harsh realities of trying to survive in society as an outsider.
Purge by Sofi Oksanen, translated by Lola Rogers
A Finnish-Estonian writer, in Purge Oksanen depicts the corrosive effects of fear, torture, and jealousy during Stalin’s purges and the post-war Soviet occupation of Estonia. The story centers on two women, Zara, a sex trafficking victim who manages to escape her captors, and Aliide, an elderly woman who reluctantly takes her in and has her own secrets to hide. Zara is looking for her grandmother Ingel’s home in Estonia, who as it turns out was Aliide’s sister. A chilling drama plays out between them as the chapters alternate between the horrors both women have suffered and their distrust of one another, and it is only at the end of the novel that readers find out whether Aliide will ultimately save her own flesh and blood.
When I Forgot by Elina Hirvonen, translated by Douglas Robinson
In Elina Hirvonen’s accomplished debut, a young journalist named Anna Louhiniitty is trying to come to terms with the trauma of her past: the years she has spent trying to protect her mentally ill older brother, Joona, and the generational trauma she has inherited from her family and the legacy of WWII. She is sitting in a café, attempting to read Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, given to her by her lover Ian, a visiting lecturer from the U.S. It’s just over a year after 9/11, and as Anna processes her memories, she also tells us Ian’s story, who has suffered his own trauma as a bullied child with a father who succumbed to mental illness in the Vietnam War. In Hirvonen’s lucid prose, Anna grapples with her painful memories, as well as those of Ian and her family, and slowly begins to find the words to name her experiences and accept them. As she ends her quiet afternoon in the café, she knows she can go on, one day at a time.
Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo, translated by Herbert Lomas
In this masterpiece, a photographer nicknamed Angel finds an abandoned troll cub by the trash cans outside his apartment building. He feels compelled to take the enchanting creature home, and so begins Angel’s obsession with his new companion, which in the novel’s world is a real but very rare species. The novel is interspersed with excerpts from reference works that Angel consults to learn about the troll as well as Finnish novels that highlight the uncomfortable, fearful relationship humans have with other animals. Told in the first person, the narrative perspective also changes and includes various other outsiders who are part of Angel’s world: Ecke, Angel’s young and eager suitor; Dr. Spiderman, Angel’s ex-boyfriend and a veterinarian, and Palomita, an abused Filipino mail-order bride who lives with Angel in the same building. As Angel’s obsession with the troll deepens, he takes ever more desperate steps to hide it, but ultimately he is unable to prevent the violent ending the troll brings about.
The Colonel’s Wife by Rosa Liksom, translated by Lola Rogers
Veteran author Rosa Liksom delivers her darkest tale to date in this exploration of an unnamed woman enamored with fascism and her violent husband and idol known simply as “the Colonel.” The protagonist eagerly joins the Colonel on his trips to Germany in the late 1930s and early 1940s, a time when the Nazi top brass were supporting Finland in its efforts to rebuff Soviet advances on Finnish territory. However, the Nazis eventually turn against the Finns, and in his rage and disappointment, the Colonel becomes increasingly abusive towards his wife. Told in the first person, readers cannot escape the protagonist, who is by turns loathsome and sympathetic. Liksom based the colonel’s wife on a real person named Annikki Kariniemi and thus offers a fascinating portrait of a complex character from the beautiful wild lands of northern Finland.
White Hunger by Aki Ollikainen, translated by Emily and Fleur Jeremiah
This haunting debut novel takes place during the Finnish famine of 1867 which wiped out 15-20% of the population. This novel follows Marja and her young daughter and infant son on their journey south to Helsinki to find food, and the sparse, tightly-controlled prose is gripping in its relentless depiction of starvation and its effects: the desperate attempts to make bread out of lichen (often poisonous), pine bark, and even ground up bones; how a child’s long-empty belly bursts after eating too much thin gruel all at once; the dehumanization of Marja and her children who are abused and denied food and lodging again and again. Their misery is further emphasized by the story of two well-heeled brothers in Helsinki, one a doctor, and the other a government official, who remain personally unaffected by the mass starvation around them. All the while hunger blazes white through the long winter and constant blizzards, leaving only Marja’s infant son to survive the ordeal at the end.
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“Streaming” [verb / strEEm-ing]: Crossing a medium-sized body of water in short trousers to rescue one’s horse and carriage from sudden peril.
“Bop” [noun / bäp]: The sound of George Washington’s hand-crafted Masonic gavel landing on a ceremonial cornerstone.
“Cheugy” [verb / chew-ghee]: The act of using one’s wooden teeth to thoroughly masticate turtle soup.
“Taylor Swift” [noun / TAY-lor SWIH-ft]: A tradesperson who can alter silken blouses at an exceptionally quick pace.
“Bougee” [noun / BOO-jee]: The name of Thomas Jefferson’s childhood kitten.
“Clapback” [noun / klap-bAk]: An unfavorable condition for a racehorse’s spine.
“Ded” [adjective / DEH-d]: Obituary delivered via illiterate messenger.
“G.O.A.T.” [noun / GOH-t]: A delicious hearty stew.
“Texting” [verb / tEk-st-ING]: The act of carrying flat wooden printing platen across town in large satchels typically made from wool and miscellaneous hides.
“Stan” [noun / STAN]: James Madison’s personal errand boy.
“Lit” [adjective / LIT]: Candlelight used to brighten one’s living quarters in an effort to ward off complete and total darkness.
“Dank” [adjective / DAHN-keh]: Damp/musty conditions, typically used to describe wine cellars, houses of repentance, and Benjamin Franklin’s living room.
More than 6,500 Maya words have been translated into Spanish and integrated into a dictionary as part of the work carried out by the Autonomous University of Yucatán (UADY), in collaboration with Sedeculta, to create the first Peninsular Linguistic Corpus, stated Karina Abreu Cano, the coordinator of the UADY’s Institutional Language Center.
What is a linguistic corpus?
It is a collection of texts or language samples used for the study and analysis of a language. They can be written, spoken, or a combination of both, gathered from various sources such as books, articles, newspapers, conversation transcriptions, websites, and any other form of written or oral communication.
What is its objective?
To strengthen and preserve the Maya language as a valuable tool for teaching and academic projects related to this native language. This tool will also allow the creation of materials for language instruction, whether for speaking or writing; the generation of digital or interactive dictionaries; text predictors, among many other academic uses.
How much progress has been made in the study of the Maya language?
We already have a dictionary of 6,586 Maya-Spanish words, 65 affixes, and we have documented 68 linguistic variants throughout the Peninsula.
Is there only one Maya language?
Due to dialectal variations, there can be dozens of linguistic variants. We aim to cover the majority of areas where these variants are spoken. Some of the communities where Maya speech is analyzed include Tekax, Tahdziú, Pixila, Texán de Palomeque, Hunukú, Dzonot Carretero, and Tizimín in Yucatán; Dzitbalché in Campeche; and Tuzik, San Silverio, and Sabán in Quintana Roo.
Where do you obtain the information?
This Linguistic Corpus will also be based on the collection of audiovisual materials, for which we have the support of the Kellogg Foundation. The goal is to compile these materials in the Maya language and then process them for glossing.
What will be done with all this data?
The objective is to upload this work to a platform, which we are developing in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture and the Arts of Yucatán and CentroGeo. Through this project, a digital platform will be created that can be accessed by anyone to consult materials such as audios, videos, and images.
Who is involved in this research?
The compilation of information involves the Institutional Language Center of the Autonomous University of Yucatán (UADY), the Ministry of Culture and the Arts of the State of Yucatán (Sedeculta), and the Center for Research in Geospatial Information Sciences.
They have often been overlooked in the artistic and literary process, but translators have long claimed they have the power to change everything.
There are tales of myths being born, societies being forged and cities destroyed with just a slip of the pen, such as the supposed translation error that allegedly led to the US deciding to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or the speculation about life on Mars after the mistranslation of an Italian astronomer.
“[In the literary world] there are entire studies dedicated to tearing apart Constance Garnett’s many translations of Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Gagol, or Helen Lowe-Porter’s translations of Thomas Mann,” said Richard Mansell, a senior lecturer in translation at Exeter university.
“But there are also plenty of examples where we gain through translation. Would we have the same rich history of the sonnet form in English without the early translations from Petrarch? Or what about the hundreds of expressions in English which stem from the King James Version of the Bible?”
Last week, the work of translators was in the spotlight after the writer Yilin Wang said she did not receive any credit or reimbursement for her translations of the work of Qiu Jin in the British Museum’s China’s Hidden Century exhibition.
The museum has since called it an “unintentional human error”, removed the segments from the exhibition and offered to pay Wang £150 for the time they were displayed.
But for Wang, a translator, poet and editor who lives in Vancouver, the museum’s apology rang hollow. Speaking to the Guardian, she said the removal of her translations felt “retaliatory” and has demanded the British Museum explain its protocol for seeking copyright permissions and outline what had gone wrong.
“It’s really important to respect the labour of translators, who are often erased in publishing and academia,” Wang said. “Publishers neglect to put the name of translators on covers, book reviewers forget to name translators, and now, this happens.
She added: “Translation is an art, and it takes me just as long to translate a poem as it takes for me to write an original one in English. I have to work hard to research the poet, the times they’re living in, and the literary forms they’re working in, then find creative ways to convey the spirit of their work in English. Classic Chinese poetry has many cultural idioms, archaic diction, and completely different grammar and syntactical structures to English.”
This battle for recognition of translators has been raging for a long time, with the Booker-winning translator Jennifer Croft even saying she won’t translate any more books unless her name is on the cover. “Not only is it disrespectful to me, but it is also a disservice to the reader, who should know who chose the words they are going to read,” she said.
The sentiment has grown into a campaign, which led to Pan Macmillan vowing to name the translator on book covers.
“But there’s still a long way to go,” Mansell said. “Of course, translators share many traits with other writers, but there are other skills translators bring to the task, too.”
Shaun Whiteside, the former president of the European Council of Literary Translators Associations , said the incident with the British Museum was “a terrible example of the translator being passed over, or treated as a kind of afterthought”, which was made worse by the removal of Wang’s work from the exhibition.
“As we know, even today translators still often go unmentioned in reviews and even in publishers’ catalogues. Translations don’t just happen on their own, and translators, like any authors, deserve copyright, royalties, and proper credit and remuneration.”
Rebecca DeWald, the co-chair of the Translators Association, said they advocated for translator’s visibility because “you cannot understand what you cannot see”.
“If you don’t know that a book has been translated by a human being, you won’t even begin to think about what thought processes and how much work went into producing the translated text,” she said.
According to DeWald, the debate around AI in translation was emblematic of this misunderstanding. “Languages do not relate to one another in straightforward, one-to-one equivalences, not even the most cognate ones, so they cannot simply be plotted in a table of x in this language equals y in the other.”
Which means the translator always needs to activate their skill in crafting texts the reader wants to read. “It is a different kind of creativity to coming up with the plot for a novel or short story, which involves the imagination of inventing worlds that didn’t exist before. Translation is more closely related to crafting poetry, in that sense, as it is predominantly concerned with language itself.”
Sara Crofts, the chief executive of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, emphasised that translators played a vital role in building bridges between nations and cultures.
“Yet very often their work is undervalued and invisible. The sign of a good translation is that the reader isn’t aware that it is even a translation, making the translators’ work, by definition, unseen.”
