Interviews

Vision, Capacity, and Patience: Interview with Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Part II

November 14, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Gear

Kazakhstani [authors] are . . . trying to decide what story to tell the world about themselves.

In part one of this interview, translator Shelley Fairweather-Vega spoke to Willem Marx regarding the complex, genre-traversing works of Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov, whose dramatic work, “Trinity,” was featured in our Spring 2024 issue. Today, we continue the conversation with an extended discussion of Central Asian literature—including the collection Amanat, a pioneering compilation of contemporary Kazakh women’s writing, edited by Fairweather-Vega and author Zaure Batayeva; the importance of raising women’s voices; shaking off old Soviet literary hierarchies; the complexities of working from pivot languages; and the links between colonialism and ecological disaster in Central Asia.

Sarah Gear (SG): You translate from Russian and Uzbek, and also work from Kazakh. How did you come to learn these languages, and what have the main challenges been?  

Shelley Fairweather-Vega (SFV): That’s right, and in the past year, I’ve made it through a Kyrgyz book, as well as an Uzbek text that includes Turkmen and Tajik—so my collection of major Central Asian languages is now pretty much complete. I know Russian very well, having studied it and worked in it for the longest by far, and having lived and worked in Russia for two years. I often tell people that I began learning Uzbek to pay my way through graduate school, which is the truth: fellowships for Uzbek paid for an intensive summer course and the last year of my master’s degree. Of course, I didn’t do it just for the money; I was studying the politics and recent history of the region, and had the sense that only knowing Russian would give me an incomplete picture of Central Asian society, not to mention its literature. When I began translating more work from Kazakhstan, I signed up for another intensive summer course, this time for Kazakh. The grammar and a lot of the vocabulary was very familiar to me from Uzbek, and now I’ve got a big Turkic section of my brain where Uzbek, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz words all jumble together. This means I can’t speak or write very well in any of those languages, but reading and translating them works out quite well, if I’m careful—and I try to be careful.

SG: You worked with Kazakh author and translator Zaure Batayeva on Amanat, a collection of Kazakh women’s fiction published in 2022.  Why did you decide to focus on contemporary women’s writing?

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The Dastardly Things a Translator Might Do: An Interview with Shelley Fairweather-Vega

November 7, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Willem Marx

My advice is to simply get started. Pick up anything from the region and go.

The enormously prolific Uzbek writer, Hamid Ismailov, is one of the vanishingly small number of Central Asian authors to crack the code of being translated into English. He experiments in virtually every literary form and genre—from the novel to the play, from translation to poetry; has lived in exile from Uzbekistan since 1992; and continues to build on the wealth of Central Asian culture and memory.

The breadth of history that informs his work can be felt in “Trinity”—a dramatic scene excerpted from a sprawling, six-book novel (Russian Matryoshka) that follows a peasant as he harvests a field of wheat only to have the yield stolen, again and again, when the wider world forces its way into his life. Published in Asymptote’s Summer 2024 issue, “Trinity” is a fragment of a fragmented text, a scene from an unfinished play embedded within an unpublished novel. In many ways, it is emblematic of the whole, knotted process that is translation. The short, dramatic scene is ripe with pungent symbols of the past, yet also exhibits a linguistic dexterity such that each word seems to impose its own gravity on the text. Longtime Ismailov collaborator Shelley Fairweather-Vega’s sensitive translation of “Trinity” achieves an exquisite balance between intimacy and distance, accessibility and mystery. I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with her about staging this piece, the influence translators exert on a text (and each other), and much more.

Willem Marx (WM): Your translations of Hamid Ismailov’s writing have introduced him to many English readers, myself included, so I’d like to start off by asking: how did you discover his work? And what set you on the path to become one of his principal English translators? 

Shelley Fairweather-Vega (SFV): Willem, that might be the most gratifying thing a translator can hear, that our work introduced a reader to a great author they might not have discovered otherwise. I’m so happy to hear it.

The story of my collaboration with Hamid Ismailov began more than a decade ago, when he happened across a pro bono translation I did of an essay by an Uzbek political prisoner. He contacted me through the organization who published that translation, looking to add to his very small list of people who could translate from Uzbek to English. Within a short time, he had convinced me to try translating his short story, “Tosh mehmoni,” which Words Without Borders published as “The Stone Guest” in September 2014. That story is so sad and powerful, and working with the author was such a good experience, that I was instantly, permanently hooked. So, you could say I also discovered Ismailov through my translations. You and I have that in common.

After translating several more of Ismailov’s short stories and essays, and now four of his novels, I’m nowhere near tired of his work and will always jump at the chance to translate it—but I do have competition, especially in the UK where he was first published in English, and where American translators sometimes aren’t eligible for the funding Ismailov applies for. A forthcoming short story collection combines work translated by me and several others. Ismailov did a very good job building that collection of translators.

WM: It’s telling to hear how tenacious an author must be in order to have their work translated into English. To shift slightly, I wonder if you ever find that your work is influenced by the way other translators have approached his writing. Do you notice different emphases or ways of tackling an aspect of voice among your fellow Ismailov translators?   READ MORE…

Towards a Greater Social Consciousness: Persa Koumoutsi on Translating Arabic Literature Into Greek

November 4, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou and Persa Koumoutsi

If a text is written simply to express our personal wants or concerns, it is not literature, in my view, but a form of self-centered expression.

Born and raised in Cairo, Persa Koumoutsi is a literary translator and a writer. Having returned to Greece after completing her studies at the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University, she began focusing solely on translating Arabic literature into Greek in 1993. She has since worked on the works of many distinguished authors, including fourteen novels by the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, as well many Arab poets. Her bibliography includes the first Anthology of Contemporary Arabic Poetry in Greek, for which she received the First Prize of the Hellenic Society of Literary Translators in 2017. Among her other works, the Αnthology of Modern Arabic Female Poetry was also widely lauded in 2022. She has also published the Αnthology of Palestinian Poetry and the Anthology of Egyptian Poetry.

In this interview, originally conducted in Greek, I spoke with Persa about the renewed interest in Palestinian literature in times of genocide, the importance of translation as a means to make struggles known and build solidarities beyond human borders and language barriers, prison literature, as well as the future of Arabic translation in Greece. The latter concerns not solely translation for the sake of itself, but as a powerful tool to bring forth voices of those marginalized.

Christina Chatzitheodoru (CC): Since October 7 and the ongoing genocide, several young Arab writers and poets have been translated into Greek, including your recent translation of Najwan Darwish. There is a renewed interest in Palestinian literature in particular. Can you tell us more about this?

Persa Koumoutsi (PK): Of course there is a renewed interest, not only in Greece but all over the world, especially in Europe. The tragic events in Gaza have brought to the fore an unspeakable tragedy, and thus many of my colleagues and translators around the world—and in Greece—have devoted themselves to translating works that highlight this problem and its dimensions, as well as its impact on our collective and individual consciousnesses—especially those of whom are concerned with contemporary Arabic culture and its literature. One such work is a collection by the renowned Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish entitled, in Greek, I Kourasi ton Kremasmenon (Exhausted on the Cross), which, as the title suggests, alludes to the enduring pains of the Palestinian people, the irredeemable trauma, and the grievous injustice they have been inflicted upon them. Poetry, in my opinion, is the most powerful literary genre in these cases, since everything can be said and highlighted through the condensed word of poetry. . .

CC: The Palestinian writer and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani once stated: “My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case, and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite.” How does this view relate to your own approach to translation? READ MORE…

A Country Grey with Sunlight: Samira Negrouche on Francophone and Arabophone Algerian Poetry

October 30, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

We are part of a country, a region, a language, sometimes of a generation or an aesthetic, but as authors we also try to bring a singularity.

Labelled by scholar Ana Paula Coutinho as one of the most gifted writers of the new Maghrebian literary movement, poet and translator Dr. Samira Negrouche sails across Algerian French, Tamazight, and Algerian Arabic languages. She is part of a group of Algerian writers collectively known as The October Generation, and her poetic vision (as sketched by one of her Spanish translators, the Argentine-born French author Carlos Alvarado-Larroucau) is in the same league as Stéphane Mallarmé and Alejandra Pizarnik. Resembling the Mediterranean Sea plainly visible from her Algiers apartment, her artistry and activism are fluid and expansive—crusading for the spirited interchange of literary and cultural thought across languages, artistic mediums, landscapes, and aesthetic style. ‘More literally than many poets, Negrouche has had her fingers on the pulse of Algiers’, Jill Jarvis summarises in Decolonizing Memory: Algeria & the Politics of Testimony (2021).

In this interview, I spoke with Dr. Negrouche on her body of work as a poet and translator; the current Algerian poetry and literary translation scene in the Francophone, Arabophone, and beyond; and the milieu that informs her philosophy and practise as a writer and cultural worker.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): You translate Algerian writers working in Arabic and Tamazight into French, and in turn, your works have been recast into several European languages. I’m interested in the ethnolinguistic milieu you come (and write) from—and write against. 

Samira Negrouche (SN): I was born in Algiers, a city that has always been multilingual. Growing up in this city, I have been surrounded by these three languages that I like to call my mother tongues (although there is a traumatic history behind it). I am lucky to be part of a Berber-speaking family that has kept our ancestral language, and it is a language I keep using every day. There is Kabyle, the local daily language we use in my family, and also is the standard Tamazight, used and taught by a much larger group.

As a citizen of Algiers, I use our common daily Arabic that is often mixed with words from other languages—mainly Berber and French. This language has its own music and images. It has a lot in common with languages used in other parts of Algeria, but retains certain specificities. Finally, the Arabic we use in newspapers and universities is more standard.

French is still the main language for scientific studies in local universities, and it is also used in many other fields. It is a vivid language, especially in urban spaces. Additionally, English is starting to gain more attention among the youngest generations. READ MORE…

A Gazan Woman’s Voice: Michelle Hartman and Caline Nasrallah on translating Asmaa Alatawna’s A Long Walk from Gaza

October 23, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

. . . even in the face of oppression, Arab women . . . take a role in constructing their realities, demonstrating agency despite what they endure.

When it was first published in 2019, A Long Walk from Gaza resounded with Asmaa Alatawna’s evocative descriptions of girlhood, migration, and life under occupation, gathered in an acute testament against the societal and political repressions of a woman’s liberties. Today, in light of the events over the last year, it also preserves a city that has since been overwritten with violence, layering the streets, neighbourhoods, and homes of memory over the present map of destruction. In this following interview, translators Michelle Hartman and Caline Nasrallah discuss their process in translating this nuanced portrait of Palestinian life, the element of double marginalisation within the narrative, and the emotionality of working with a story that evokes the now-gone.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Ibrahim Fawzy (IF): How did you come across A Long Walk from Gaza?

Michelle Hartman (MH): I have a relationship with Interlink Publishing. It’s a smallish, independent publisher based in Northampton, Massachusetts, and the only Palestinian-owned publisher in the United States. It’s committed to doing many different things, particularly bringing fiction written in Arabic to English readers—and it’s been doing this for a very long time. There’s a significant list of Arab writers whom the publisher wants to bring to life in English. They occasionally send me novels, and A Long Walk from Gaza was one of them. As Caline and I were working on another project at the time, I sent this book to her for her opinion.

Caline Nasrallah (CN): As Michelle said, we have already worked on several things together, so we have this relationship of her sending me books to read. I’ll then go through these books and decide if we could continue working on them. Once she sent me Asmaa’s novel, I was so taken by it, and I thought it was an important project we had to work on. I felt a duty. I read it, then we discussed it more, and we went ahead.

IF: That’s great. As a literary translator, I usually read a book and find something that speaks to me, motivating me to translate it. What drew you to this book? What are the elements that convinced you to spend much time with it?

CN: Asmaa’s novel is a must-read because of the way it describes life under occupation and all of the hardships that come along with that, specifically in Gaza. There’s little that comes out of Gaza because of the situation on the ground, so the book felt like a lens into something we had never really seen before—that made it feel more relevant. Asmaa reveals this double layer of life under occupation, tracing life as a girl and a woman under occupation, the reality of occupation and internal issues impacting the society in which she lived. While united within a cause, women were also affected by society’s actions. It’s imperative to recognise this aspect, even though it’s often overlooked in literature focusing on a common enemy. Calling out injustice wherever it exists is essential.

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Languages have their secrets: A Conversation with Mardonio Carballo

October 16, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by René Esaú Sánchez

...poets are simply those who pay attention, observing what happens, and find a way to tell it…

Poet, journalist, editor, actor, broadcaster, producer, translator, and Nahua activist Mardonio Carballo recently published La canción de las flores, a book that brings together forty-nine poems printed on paper made from corn leaves and vine, published simultaneously in Nahuatl-Spanish, Nahuatl-English, and Nahuatl-French. In this interview, originally held in Spanish, I spoke with Mardonio Carballo about the experience of writing in Spanish and Nahuatl, the relation of memory and language, and the role of translation in preserving an indigenous language.

René Esaú Sánchez (RES): I was reading some of the poems you wrote in La Canción de las Flores, and many of them are quite synesthetic. So I wanted to ask: what smells, sensations, or tastes do you experience when writing poetry?

Mardonio Carballo (MC): This latest collection is atypical. I had resisted for a long time the theme of nature—this tradition of “Flor y Canto” that is always associated with Nahuatl poetry. To a certain extent, it annoyed me. On this occasion, unlike my previous collections, which have been more combative, expressing Mexico’s painful reality, I chose to step away from that theme of pain, blood, and death. In another book, I asked myself how much the dead weigh, for instance. But I realized the same thing happened to me years ago when making documentaries. I no longer wanted to focus on journalists, activists, and the same topics. So, I embarked on a journey to film a series of documentaries called We Insist on Hope. It turned out that all those defending land, water, and forests were either threatened with death or had been harmed in some way, which led me to a reflection: the one that guides this collection.

Just as there are no languages without people to speak them, there are no territories without flowers. That premise is what nourishes this collection, and yes, the physical book—the way it was designed—makes it seem like the typography changes, like everything is in motion. I believe it pays homage to the flowers, birds, and trees. After the whole COVID situation, I was left with the feeling that we were suddenly writing poems that were too profound, sometimes inaccessible and incomprehensible to most people. So in this collection, I sought the ease of understanding. In fact, one of the lines that deeply inspires me is from a Charles Simic poem: “I write so that dogs can understand me.” That line struck me. Because at some point, we start using grandiose words that make us seem special, fantastic, intellectual… but to me, poets are simply those who pay attention, observing what happens, and find a way to tell it. READ MORE…

Guilty But Not Intentional: Carla Bessa on Traversing Germanophone and Lusophone Literary Worlds

October 7, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

We [translators] have to . . . make the text breathe (like an actor on stage) in the language, time, and culture of the target audience.

Carla Bessa wears many hats: theater actress, director, poet, short story writer, novelist, and translator. Born in Rio de Janeiro and now based in Berlin, she has translated Germanophone writers—Max Frisch (Switzerland), Ingeborg Bachmann (Austria), Thomas Macho (Austria), Christa Wolf (Germany), and more—into Brazilian Portuguese for São Paulo-based publishers WMF Martins Fontes and Editora Estação Liberdade, as well as Editora Trinta Zero Nove in Mozambique. As a translator, she works on fiction and nonfiction as well as young adult and children’s literature. As a writer, she writes what may be termed as “cross-genre” or “hybrid works,” questioning the boundaries demarcating limitless possibilities; this would eventually earn her Brazil’s most important literary award, the Prêmio Jabuti, given to her short story collection Urubus (The Vultures, Confraria do vento, 2019).

In this interview, I spoke with Carla on her award-winning works that cross the conventional genres of poetry, play, and prose; linguistic politics in the Lusophone world; and the intricacies of translating German-language writers into the Brazilian Portuguese.

Author photo by Hubert Börsig.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Urubus and Todas uma, two of your short story collections, were translated by Lea Hübner into the German for Transit Verlag. Your 2017 book, Aí eu fiquei sem esse filho, on other hand, was rendered into the Greek by Nikos Pratsinis for Skarifima Editions. In the Anglosphere, you have been translated by Fábio Mariano and Elton Uliana. To anyone working on your works from their Brazilian Portuguese originals, what demands do you think these translators would face—in particular those translating you into German and English?

Carla Bessa (CB): The other day, I read an interview with my colleague Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel—the German translator of Nobel laureate Jon Fosse—in which he said: “Every literary text is an aesthetic project in its own terms. The translation is good if it realizes this aesthetic project in a style that is appropriate and consistent without breaks.”

I agree with that, despite the particularities of syntactic and verbal structures between Brazilian Portuguese and German. (As for English: I haven’t mastered this language in depth, but I dare say that the differences are minor.) I believe that the greatest difficulty in translating my texts is not of a textual or grammatical nature, but a cultural one. In my writing, I work very closely with spoken language, sometimes even using a kind of verbatim technique. So the translator of my work needs to have an in-depth knowledge not only of the environment where the stories take place—specifically the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro—but also, and above all, of the musicality of the Brazilian Portuguese spoken in these layers of society that I portray. I was very pleased that the translators who have translated me into English so far—Elton Uliana and Fabio Mariano—are Brazilian. Normally, we tend to think that a literary translator should have the target language as their mother tongue, but I don’t think that applies to all types of texts. In my case, the main challenge lies precisely in transferring this specific social environment with its many overlapping layers of cultural influences into the language and reality of German- and English-speaking countries, because this environment and its characters are the basis of my aesthetic project: to return here to the idea presented by Schmidt-Henkel.

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“alchemic / exchange / we fade bruises here”: Rajiv Mohabir on Editing I Will Not Go: Translations, Transformations & Chutney Fractals

October 2, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

I offer these translations as a door that opens to a field of ancestral knowledge, with a threshold that is familiar while moving into a new space.

The cover of I Will Not Go: Translations, Transformations & Chutney Fractals features “Ties That Bind,” a mixed media piece on archival paper by Renluka Maharaj. In the pixelated color photo of an Indo-Caribbean wedding, the groom is about to fall asleep, the bride looks demure—perhaps trying to hide her laughter, carefree children chat in the corner, two fierce-looking women look daringly into the camera, and an elder female relative holds a moneybag. Following the ingenuity and the personality of the anthology’s cover—with sequins that imbue historical reality with fantasy—the contents of the text, divided into an introduction and five sections, are even more astonishing. I Will Not Go contains two translations, two fractals, and various lyrical essays about the translation/ writing process of seventeen Indo-Caribbean writers: Krystal Ramroop, Aliyah Khan, Divya Persaud, Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard, Nadia Misit, Alex Bacchus, Simone Devi Jhingoor, Andre Bagoo, Eddie Bruce-Jones, Anu Lakhan, Will Depoo, Natasha Ramoutar, Nicholas Peters, Anita Baksh, Miranda Rachel Deebrah, Elizabeth Jaikaran, Suzanne Persard, Chandanie Somwaru, and Ryan Persadie. Like Maharaj, each of the featured translators are descendants of indentured South Asian peoples or part of the Coolie diaspora in the Caribbean.

In Mohabir’s foreword, “Like Chutney Masala,” he describes the music that fuels these writings and translations: “Chutney music as cultural production is poetry: oral and performed. There is flexibility in the writing down of these words, the singing of them, the performance of them.” In terms of its sound, it “blends Afro-Caribbean beats with Indo-Caribbean experience and music.” Beginning with the base of two chutney songs, the translators reimagine the music and lyrics, adding their own inflections and personality that is oftentimes “smoothed out” as incorrect in the Western publishing process. As this multivocal and imaginative collection seeks to reveal, chutney music forces its listeners to hear in its lyrics and melodies the gender violence, sexism, and expectations of marriage within the Indo-Caribbean community—“an open secret.”

Tiffany Troy (TT): In your foreword to I Will Not Go, “Like Chutney Masala,” you wrote of how this collection is “. . . a kind of Caribbean, diasporic response to [Eliot Weinberger’s] 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. . .” How does I Will Not Go draw inspiration from and go beyond 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei in its conceptualization of chutney music?

Rajiv Mohabir (RM): For me, this book extends into a kind of spiritual realm whereby the translators all are descendants of indenture, and as such, they hold the particularities of our diaspora’s nuances in particular regard. What I mean is that this is not just an academic experiment; this work blends our own familial histories, our embodiments of music and rhythm, and writing skill. While 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei uses the editors’ essays to discuss what each translation does, the translators in I Will Not Go respond to their translational acts.

This brings me into another element that differs from I Will Not Go from Weinberger’s text: the translators add their original poetry that responds to their individual vision of chutney music’s afterlives. That we are haunted by our language loss is no secret—this is how colonization worked for many of us; we take in the colonizer’s messages about ourselves, and they go on to dwell in the deepest parts of our psyches. This anthology plumbs that depth, reaching into ourselves to see where chutney music (if it does at all) lives and loves inside of us. It’s personal and intimate, wrapped up in identity and ancestral trauma and joy. READ MORE…

Every Word Translucent: Julia Sanches on Translating Eva Baltasar

September 26, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Hilary Ilkay

I think Eva is still trying the novel form on for size, figuring out what suits her.

In Mammoth, our Book Club selection for August, Eva Baltasar masterfully builds a sensually invigorating, intensely lucid character study of a woman that follows desire to its most extreme ends, drawing on the author’s cultivated themes of rebellion and self-liberation to lay wreckage to social norms, sexual standards, and the pretense of civility. Translated with finesse and lyric precision by her long-time English voice, Julia Sanches, the novel is by turns thrilling and disturbing, meticulously structured in its lines and its narrative; in line with Baltasar’s work as a poet, every word serves a purpose. Here, Sanches speaks to Hilary Ilkay about working with such fine prose, the necessary care taken on both linguistic and musical levels, and moving between strangeness and sense.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Hilary Ilkay (HI): Mammoth is the last of Eva Baltasar’s trio of novels that reflect uniquely on motherhood and maternity—and you’ve been the translator of all three. I’m wondering how you see Mammoth fitting in with the other two, Boulder and Permafrost?

Julia Sanches (JS): I’m still working through my views on that. Eva has said in the past that Mammoth crystallizes her work in the triptych, and the more I’ve thought about the book, the more I’ve realized that their defining tension is between the societal expectations of motherhood and its instinctual, more primal side. If I’d read Boulder and not known Eva had children, I’d have found it impossible to believe that this woman—who’d written a character so allergic to motherhood—could be a mother, too. But from her position as a mother, Eva is always questioning the push and pull of norms and expectations, asking: what is motherhood for human beings as animals? And what is motherhood for human beings as part of a social fabric? I think this is what the triptych is exploring.

HI: In Baltasar’s work, I find the blurring between animal and human to be so striking—and that tone is set right from the beginning, so you see both the loss of self and the finding of oneself in that slippage. That tension, exactly as you describe it, is so alive in her novels. Did Mammoth in particular pose any unique challenges as a translator that the other two didn’t?

JS: Mammoth was slightly easier to translate because it’s the third book I’ve worked on by Eva, so I’ve become used to her style. She’s very, very controlled. The three sections of Mammoth are practically the same length, and her sentences are nearly all constructed in the same way. I had to play a little bit with the structure, because in Romance languages you can start a sentence with a verb, so the repetition of “I” doesn’t grate as much; that’s not the case in English, and I had to find a workaround.

I also struggled with some of the more agricultural terminology. Eva, who is an endlessly fascinating person, worked as a shepherd for at least one year (possibly as many as three) in the Pyrenees, and so in the novels, she uses some of the offhand language of a shepherd who knows the ins and outs of lambing, as opposed to the technical terms. The British editor and I discussed these sections in detail. For example, at some points, she refers to the sack that the lamb is birthed in as the placenta, but I thought English lay readers like myself might get confused because we have a very specific idea of what a placenta is.

While Permafrost has these intricate, paragraph-long metaphors that are difficult to unwind and render in English, Mammoth is a lot more pared down. So it was a matter of dialing things back and making sure the language remained very clear. I wanted no spare words whatsoever, and I don’t know if I succeeded in being as ascetic as I intended. It was a challenge. I am not terse by nature, so I had to go against the grain of my usual writing. READ MORE…

Blurring the Lines of Time: A Conversation with Ruoyi Shi

September 23, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Junyi Zhou

This sense of displacement, which many might perceive as humor, mirrors my relationship with language.

From a glass casket for sculptures, to a piece of a burial figurine cast into edible gummy bears, and gelatin-based fish placed on silver platters, Ruoyi Shi’s whimsical oeuvre spans the realms of the organic and the inorganic, the imaginary and the real to interrogate the nature of truth, storytelling, and language. An interdisciplinary artist working across the domains of sculpture, video art, and writing, inspired by the oral histories and mythologies she grew up with, Ruoyi invents a singular kind of artistic practice that transforms not only personal memory but also collective history. “I am interested in how people are encouraged to appropriate any image they encounter, and how our vocabulary was chosen and formed in today’s society. I consider my work as fragments I collected for creating an alternative reality,” she says in a talk with Shoutout LA. In the following interview, I spoke with Ruoyi about the role that humor plays in her projects, reinventing historical objects, and the everyday precarity of living with language and mass media.

Junyi Zhou (JZ): I’d like to begin with your work Tomorrow’s Comforts are Here Today, in which you built a casket for your glass skeleton sculpture, as if it were a living entity. “I always call my art creations creature,” you wrote in your artist statement for this piece. It seems that the relationship between the organic and inorganic, or the dissolving boundaries between the two, are central to your body of work. Could you speak more about this?

Ruoyi Shi (RS): Exploring the boundaries between nature and artificial existence, as well as the notion of truth and its fabrication, has been a central theme of my practice. I see my art-making as a process of building an alternative reality—one that can be fragmented, chaotic, and full of coincidences. This reality of mine lies in the area where the organic and the inorganic slowly merge into one another. My goal is to mimic nature and capture the moments when nature exposes its unnatural side.

Many decisions I had to make in my art were neither preplanned nor expected. My immediate environment, materials, and time worked together to provide me with options, and my choices were directed by instinct rather than logic. It’s a form of collective creation. In this era we live in, the term “organic” has been deliberately shaped into a manmade concept. By placing our collective creations on a more equal footing, I aim to express greater honesty and respect for the elements beyond my control.

Tomorrow's Comforts

Tomorrow’s Comforts are Here Today (2021). Performance, writing.
Courtesy of the artist.

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The Sea Will Dream In My Ears: Megumi Moriyama on Recasting Virginia Woolf into Japanese and Spiral Translation

September 18, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Translation can never be just a flat movement between two points, merely returning to its origins.

Japanese poet, critic, and translator Megumi Moriyama has so far worked on metamorphosing Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) into the Japanese and on a ‘back translation’ of Arthur Waley’s poetic rendition of the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, in collaboration with her sister, haiku poet and critic Marie Mariya, published by Sayusha. As a poet, Megumi confesses that even her original poems in Japanese are layered with translation across varying texts within and outside her native language. Of her forthcoming poetry collection, she told me, “Perhaps you might say that through translation, I have made a journey into the depths of Japanese language.”

In this interview, I spoke with Megumi, currently in Tokyo, on rendering Virginia Woolf and Waley’s The Tale of Genji into the Japanese; how spiral translation goes beyond back-translations; and the new-age scene of literary translation in Japan.

Author headshot courtesy of Benjamin Parks.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): You translated Virginia Woolf’s experimental classic The Waves into the Japanese as Nami (2021), published by Hayakawa. Could you speak about your process in rendering a 1931 polyphonic novel set in England by a prose writer known for her stream of consciousness narrative mode with the modern-day Japanophone readership in mind? I heard there was so much hype about it, especially on Japanese book Twitter, as it was the first translation of this novel in almost 50 years.

Megumi Moriyama (MM): The new translation of The Waves was welcomed much more enthusiastically than I had expected. When I posted the announcement on social media, it went viral. And after the publication, the book was immediately put into reprint.

I studied Virginia Woolf as a student, and The Waves was one of my favorites of hers, but I never thought I would have the opportunity to translate it. It was thanks to social media that I got the chance. I tweeted very casually that I was interested in translating The Waves, an editor took notice of it, and the project became a reality.

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The Delimitation of Self: Kevin Claiborne on Mixed-Media Art, Blackness, and Material

September 5, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Junyi Zhou

I’m interested in how the layering of text and image can create or disrupt tension, structure, rhythm, perception, and interpretation.

In Kevin Claiborne’s multimedia work, he sources from personal archives, landscape, and anthropological studies to coalesce a vision of Black American history into its contemporary variations, spanning the realms of collective and private histories. “Starting with the gaps in my own family history, and the space between ‘what I know vs. what I should know,’ the missing information between where my ancestors come from and where I am today, I am digging and mining the sediment of histories, passed down, erased, and avoided,” he writes. In “BLACK ENOUGH,” his 2020 exhibition at Thierry Goldberg, he poses a series of questions against the landscapes of Joshua Tree. Some of his questions, such as “Is Black enough?” and “When is Black enough?,” are clipped in the frame, leaving the sentences unfinished, like the Black lives that are prematurely cut short. Extending his reflections on Black identity and memory, Claiborne’s 2023 exhibition, “Family Business,” took a slightly different turn. Drawing from a box of family photographs, he applied green and blue pigments to the images, condensed moments in which his mother, beaming with a radiant smile, once gazes affectionately at his father. The result is a heightened revision of his family archive, a rediscovery of the ties that bind him to his kinsfolk: their shared passions, dreams, and tears. In this following interview, he speaks on materiality, capturing Black lives in Black contexts, and embedded dialogues within his visuality.

Junyi Zhou (JZ): From the beginning of your career, you’ve combined written texts with visual materials. How did this idea come to you initially?

Kevin Claiborne (KC): For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an interest in the power of words—their potential, their malleability, their limitations, and their ability to shape meaning. I’ve always been impressed with people who have mastered their expression of the written word, and who understand how to literally and metaphorically paint with text. My earliest inspirations were graffiti artists, poets, and rappers, all of whom understood the nuances of language, how the weight of words changes with scale, and how to use text as a material.

When I first started using photography and archival images in a conceptual manner, incorporating text seemed like a logical next step. Words change meaning depending on present context, and context can change depending on the words that are present.

JZ: I know that you started out as a photographer. How do you see your multimedia/cross-media approach? Does it impose certain limitations on your objective (if there is one) as an artist, or is it the ultimate means for you to channel your message?

KC: Sometimes my mixed-media or multimedia approach offers the ability to enhance and increase the complexity of my work, and other times, it shifts the focus from the material composition of the work to the ideas embedded within. Every material has a story, a purpose, a history, and a language or logic to its usage. Sometimes, the material becomes the focus, and sometimes certain material combinations allow the viewer to have more entry points into appreciating, understanding, or engaging with the work. It depends on the context. READ MORE…

Nocturnal Tonguejests: Susan Bernofsky on translating Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel

August 22, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Great writers use language in really weird ways, but if it’s a great writer, the work absorbs the linguistic strangeness. . .

Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel is an absorbing, daring novel about collaboration, friendship, and trans-continental interpretations. Originating in the author’s own discourse with the titular German poet, the story tells of the engagement between two Celan readers, unfolding an exploration of literary texts as they traverse oceans and cultures—a phantasmagorical, radical exploration of words and their potential for transformation. Translated with great finesse by Susan Bernofsky, who has worked with the author on many of her German-language works, the novel takes further steps in English to multiply even more fascinating tangents along our globalized era, drawing on the miraculous nature of conversation. In this following interview, we speak with Bernofsky on her process and ideas of multiplicity in authorship, how the translator lives in and writes the worlds of their favorite texts.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Given how richly textured Tawada’s novel is with literary and cultural references, not only to Celan’s poetry but also to other arenas of knowledge, could you speak a little to the kinds of research that you undertook in preparation for translating this text?

Susan Bernofsky (SB): Yoko Tawada wrote the book during the pandemic, and I also translated it during the pandemic, during the active period of shutdowns in the US. I had a lot of time to look things up, so I sat down and read a whole lot of Paul Celan, because I wanted to be able to spot the words and images that Tawada was taking from his poetry. The novel is also full of opera, and references to literary works by other writers who meant something to Celan. Some of it were things I already knew, because I’ve been translating Tawada since 1992, and I have a sense of who she likes and who’s important to her. Nelly Sachs is in there, and Ingeborg Bachmann and Franz Kafka, the usual suspects and her favorites in the world of German-language literature.

XYS: Were there any specific rabbit holes that you remember going down, or any particular segments that you had trouble with?

SB: I wound up reading a lot about acupuncture, because I wanted to be able to translate the passages that pertained to this subject. Tawada writes in this playful, slanting way, but you can still understand what’s going on. And as I’m translating, I’m trying to also write in a playful, slanting way—but I wanted somebody who understands acupuncture to not think that my descriptions were absurd. It’s a very Celan-ian thing to take scientific language and apply it to literature. Like his great poem, “Engführung,” has a lot of geological terminology, and he uses the words in a way that they sound psychological. I feel like Tawada was also playing with that possibility of taking language from one sphere and applying it to a different sphere. READ MORE…

Having Become the Sky’s Tongue: Leeladhar Jagoori on Nature Poetry in Hindi Literature

August 21, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I consider a poet’s job to consist of three things: writing about the society, the time, and the country.

Limned as an enmeshing of “lyrical ecopoetics with subtle political critique,” Leeladhar Jagoori’s 1977 Hindi poetry collection Bachi hui prithvi (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan) has been translated into English by Matt Reeck as What of the Earth Was Saved—now out from World Poetry Books. His avant-garde poetic and political positioning is evidenced by this book, which was published in the last year of Indira Gandhi’s the Emergency. In the words of translator Matt Reeck, Bachi hui prithvi (1977), the Hindi original of What of the Earth Was Saved, is a testament to the fact that Leeladhar was ahead of his time, writing around “regional consciousness and environmentalism,” a literary forefather to today’s Hindi-language and Indian writings on nature and ecology.

In this interview, I spoke with Leeladhar, who is currently in Dehradun (with translator Matt Reeck translating my questions from English to Hindi, and Leeladhar’s answers from Hindi to English), on his trailblazing poetry collection—the first full volume of his poems to be translated into English—and modern Hindi verse, especially poetry on prakŗti (nature).

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your poetry collection What of the Earth Was Saved is now out from World Poetry Books—translated by Matt Reeck from the Hindi original Bachi hui prithvi, which was published in 1977 by New Delhi-based Rajkamal Prakashan. Could you take us back to 1977 and before that: what was your creative process like and what were the poetic underpinnings to the poems in this collection?

Leeladhar Jagoori (LJ): In school, I practiced everything. I wrote songs and ghazals. I wrote anuṣṭubh verse, a traditional poetic form in Hindi poetry, like it was conversational—like talking.

My first volume was published when I was a student at Banaras Hindu University. I had come back from the army and I went to Banaras to earn an MA. I was invited to read at a poetry event, and a publisher heard me and asked to publish my work, and I said fine. Those poems are about mountain life. I finally came around to seeing that it was a young person’s poetry. It was immature in a sense. It’s usually read as nature poetry. Then my second volume, Now Things Have Begun (Natak jari hai, 1971) was published from the standpoint of a young unemployed man looking for work. It’s spare, unsparing, tough-minded poetry. Its images are new, rough, not polished. In the 70s, poetic language sought to dig down to the very core of experience. Instead of ornamentation, it went in for bare language. Now Things Have Begun is full of these things, the things that young people then were thinking about.

Then my third volume was On This Journey (Is yatra men, 1974). Its poems are more tender, dreamy and full of love. Agyeya, Shamsher Bahadur Singh, Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena, and Dhumil all praised it. Manglesh Dabral, Trinetr Joshi, Prabhati Nautiyal, Madan Kashyap, and Avadhesh Preet, Prem Sahil, and Om Thanvi said the book ushered in a new direction in Hindi poetry. In the May 1975 issue of the magazine Dinman, Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena wrote a review that featured the book on the magazine’s cover. It was my good fortune that Agyeya praised it, and that Nirmal Verma was taken by the poems as well.

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