Monthly Archives: June 2020

Translation Tuesday: “On How to Be a Good Immigrant” by Elvira Mujčić

June 30, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Matilda Colarossi

Don’t worry about it, somebody had to cry. What the heck kind of story on immigration would it be if nobody cried?

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, two immigrants bare the wounds of their respective traumas in this excerpt from Elvira Mujčić’s novel On How to Be a Good Immigrant. Our narrator, a Bosnian immigrant haunted by the atrocities that robbed her of her family and her home, finds kinship with an immigrant from Mali, who opens up about the systemic racism he endures in Italy. Colarossi’s superb translation captures the subtleties of Mujčić’s prose: the uncomfortable silences, the hesitant divulgences, and the quiet pain that follows when the narrator’s emotional walls break down. A meditation on the myriad ways immigrants face trauma and are expected to appease Western stereotypes.

Chapter X

“Can you light a fire wherever you like in Italy?” asked Mele, a friend of my brother’s whom I had met the last time I was in Bosnia.

“What do you mean?” I asked surprised by the sudden turn the conversation had taken from the surreal dissertation on the non-existence of God of just a few minutes ago.

“I mean: can a man light a fire wherever he likes and cook lamb on a spit?”

“No, you can’t.”

“Well, life isn’t worth living in a country like that!”

Why did everything have to take a folkloristic hue, I wondered, annoyed and uncomfortable, like some sort of Austro-Hungarian elementary teacher sitting on an Oriental futon. I was going to meet Ismail when I remembered the incident. It was probably because of our last discussion and the African proverb with which we had greeted each other: “When you don’t know where you’re headed, remember where you came from.” You should have instructions on how to be a good immigrant when you go back to your homeland, I thought. And suddenly I realized that the longing I had felt for tens of years was gone, replaced with a renewed curiosity for that country’s present. But I only loved it if it was set in the past, because it couldn’t harm me from that distant place. My curiosity was not, however, light and untroubled: it was often laden with overwhelming sorrow and paralyzing fear. It was a visceral bond I could do absolutely nothing about, an incessant alternating of thoughts that went from the conviction that I had left something there that I absolutely needed to find, and the realization that what I was looking for was made of the same substance as fog. READ MORE…

Announcing our June Book Club Selection: A Hundred Million Years and a Day by Jean-Baptiste Andrea

June 29, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla

It’s a humbling, bittersweet experience, a beauty so terrible that you can’t quite bear to be in its presence for too long.

With expansive beauty and imaginative observance, Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s A Hundred Million Years and a Day has swept up a enormous amount of praise in its homeland of France, including being shortlisted for the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française and the Prix Joseph Kessel, and we are now proud to present it to our readers as our Book Club selection for the month of June. Andrea’s story of a man’s hunt for lost creatures pays equal tribute to the earth’s natural wonders and to human persistence and urge for discovery, culminating in a majestic and magnetic tale of what happens when the personal meets the eternal. Within its pages lies a thrilling poetry.

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 USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

A Hundred Million Years and a Day by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, translated from the French by Sam Taylor, Gallic Books, 2020

Stan, a middling French palaeontologist, is convinced that the skeleton of a “dragon” hides in the belly of the mountains that delineate the porous border between France and Italy. He heard about this dragon years ago, in a second-hand summary of the ramblings of a sour Italian man—the seemingly outlandish contents of someone’s childhood memories. Haunted by this skeleton, Stan drops everything in its pursuit: he quits his university job as a professor, sells his Parisian apartment, and self-finances an expensive expedition to these majestic mountains in the company of his former assistant Umberto, Umberto’s own mentee Paul, and Gio, a taciturn guide for whom the mountains are a second home. 

Of course, being a scientist, what Stan is looking for is not really a dragon. From the vague details he has heard, he surmises that the skeleton the caretaker had come across in fact belonged to a brontosaurus—a species that palaeontologists had agreed on being nonexistent, being simply a variation on the apatosaurus. While the book establishes early the love that Stan has for his discipline, for the fossils that he used to meticulously collect and treat as his friends during his lonely childhood spent in another set of mountains, the motives behind this expedition are not necessarily pure. For Stan, having lain forgotten, himself collecting dust in a basement office, this expedition presents his last chance at some glory. If he does find his brontosaurus, proving a theory disputed by palaeontologists for almost a century, the creature will bear his name, articles will be written about Stan, the “animal will give him back his voice.” READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 26, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Daniel Persia and Eva Wissting

Literary news from Brazil and Sweden!

As countries around the world are grappling around the walls of our new reality, their literatures respond in turn to the urgency of contemporary matters and the necessity of recognizing history. In this week’s dispatches, our editors report on publishers in Sweden taking on climate change and the world welcomes new translations of a canonical Brazilian author, among other noteworthy news. Read on to keep up!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

Publisher Natur & Kultur announced in their most recent sustainability report that they aim to become Sweden’s first climate neutral book publisher. The goal is to become climate neutral within 2020, which means that firstly, they will do what they can to minimize climate changing emissions, and secondly, they will compensate for any emissions from their activities or production. Their printing house, located in Estonia, will switch to ecofriendly electricity and they are investigating how to minimize transportation within the publisher’s business. Authors published by Natur & Kultur include historian and former Swedish Academy Permanent Secretary Peter Englund (The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War) and writer, columnist and August Prize winner Lena Andersson (Wilful Disregard and Acts of Infidelity).

Another reminder of the importance of action on climate change arrived recently with the fall edition of the triennial book catalogue from the Swedish book industry organization Svensk Bokhandel. This fall, Sweden’s most prominent environmental activist, and possibly most well-known person overall right now, Greta Thunberg, is having another book published by Polaris Publishing. Last year, photographer Roger Turesson and journalist Alexandra Urisman Otto travelled with Thunberg through Europe and the United States and the book is their depiction of the young environmentalist. Previously published works by Thunberg includes Our House is on Fire, written together with her parents and sister, and No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, which is a collection of her speeches.

Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brazil

As Brazil continues to grapple with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, its literary community perseveres. With the recent cancelation of the 26th International Book Fair of São Paulo, originally slated for October 30 to November 8, 2020, publishers, writers, and reviewers have carried the conversation to online platforms such as YouTube, Facebook Live, and Instagram. Despite current flight restrictions and limitations on travel, Brazilian literature continues to cross new frontiers, garnering new readers across the globe. READ MORE…

Textual Echoes: Elisabeth Jaquette on Translating Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail

June 25, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Daniel Persia

In the novel, social and political commentary operate at the level of events, as well as at the level of language.

As thousands of Palestinians protest against Israel’s newly announced annexation plans for significant parts of the West Bank and Jordan Valley, Adania Shibli’s haunting, persistent novel, Minor Detail, seems especially potent as our May Book Club Selection. The text is written in two parts: the first is set in 1949 and details a horrifying act of violence committed by Israeli soldiers, while the second takes place during present day, in which another young woman discovers the crime and makes a place for it within her own life. As Palestinians continue to struggle in turmoil, Shibli’s masterful language transposes the past into now, in a profound recognition of violence and its intricate legacies. In the following interview, Daniel Persia speaks to the translator of Minor Detail, Elisabeth Jaquette, about how she has rendered this powerful narrative for English-language readers.

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 USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Daniel Persia (DP): Time seems crucial to our understanding of Minor Detail, both in terms of its historical context and the passing of events. Can you talk a little bit about time in translation—how it’s expressed in the Arabic language, and whether this presents any challenges when thinking about English tenses or ways to recreate stillness and movement?

Elisabeth Jaquette (EJ): Time often poses challenges for me as a translator working from Arabic to English, but oddly enough this book didn’t pose particular conundrums in that regard. With other books, I’ve found that English publishing has a greater expectation that readers be able to place events on a precise timeline in relation to one another, whereas that’s somehow less crucial in the Arabic book. In Minor Detail, I felt that the reader’s sense of time was constructed less through events or tense, and more through repetition, pacing, and tone. In Part I in particular, there’s a somewhat paradoxical contrast between dates being directly stated: “9 August 1949 . . .Before noon, 10 August 1949,” and so on, and the way that the officer’s repetitive, enumerated actions make one day bleed into the next, creating stillness even though the passing dates are marked. In Part 2, I also felt that tone and voice, and especially narrative digression, were central to the reader’s sense of movement.

DP: The scene in which Israeli soldiers capture and hose down the young Arab woman is, I think, one of the novel’s most haunting. What was it like to translate this kind of trauma? Does a scene like this demand more of you as a translator—not only technical skill, perhaps, but something like emotional resilience?

EJ: In the face of such traumatic scenes, should we understand readers as bearing witness, or as implicated onlookers? Translators, like writers of course, are more intricately involved: a translator recreates the scene word-by-word in English, actively crafting it. The scene where the soldiers hose down the girl, and her subsequent rape, were certainly the most raw for me. There is tension between the emotional trauma of the actions and the matter-of-fact way in which they is narrated, and I consciously worked to maintain that impassivity at the level of language, following the Arabic’s choice of neutral words, even though the emotional impact of these scenes is high. In some ways I felt that the distanced style of narration amplifies the horror, because the girl is all the more isolated in what she endures. READ MORE…

Translation as Séance: Saudamini Deo on Forgotten Hindi Authors

June 24, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Tristan Foster

. . . in order to survive, they must get used to the absurd horror of life.

An unfortunate reality is that every language has great writers who have faded from the collective memory; either they fell out of favour, or their writing spoke only to their time, or perhaps they practiced on the margins, and their work never made it beyond a small readership. Difficulties in categorising a writer’s work is especially likely to put them in peril—writing that doesn’t fit neatly into one particular genre or tradition is easier to overlook than to perpetually seek its niche. And when these writings are forgotten, a small miracle needs to occur for them to be rediscovered again.

For the first time, English language readers will have the opportunity to read forgotten Hindi writers thanks to a new and, arguably, miraculous series from Seagull Books, based in Kolkata. First to be published are short story collections by Bhuvaneshwar and Rajkamal Chaudhary, names which may be unfamiliar to readers in their native India, let alone to readers beyond. Wolves and Other Short Stories by Bhuwaneshwar will be released in Fall 2020, and Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories by Rajkamal Chaudhary is due for release in early 2021.

To understand what was lost and what has been gained with these new translations, I asked translator Saudamini Deo why we should refresh the collective memory by reviving the work of Bhuvaneshwar and Rajkamal Chaudhary, and what it means for the English-speaking world to have access to their work for the first time.

—Tristan Foster, June 2020

Tristan Foster (TF): Your translations of short story collections by Bhuwaneshwar and Rajkamal Chaudhary are forthcoming from Seagull Books, with translations of work by other forgotten Hindi writers to follow. How did the series come about?

Saudamini Deo (SD): Last year, I wrote a series of articles published by Scroll.in about forgotten Hindi writers. Naveen Kishore of Seagull Books read those articles, and graciously offered to publish some of these writers as a part of their Hindi series under their India list. Neither Bhuwaneshwar nor Rajkamal Chaudhary has ever been translated into English before, which is indicative of a larger pattern: Hindi literature rarely gets translated.

TF: I want to talk first of Wolves and Other Short Stories by Bhuwaneshwar. His narratives are rhythmic, dreamy, and brutally pessimistic. The story “Wolves” tells of a caravan being chased by a pack of wolves in the night; girls are thrown off to lighten the load and stop the attack. In “Sun worship,” he writes: “This is hell, doctor, hell! A colony of the dead. This bustling city is a colony of the dead . . . Imagine that rain dissolves this place like a load of cow dung. But it will not make any difference in the world.” This harshness is even occasionally acknowledged—in “Alas, Human Heart,” the narrator discusses the carefree life he lived with friends, playing card games and going on hikes, all of them optimistic because “no one had yet had a break to look life in the eye.” The Bhuwaneshwar story looks death square in the eye. What was your experience immersing yourself in his world?

SD: As with most experiences, it was both strange and not strange. It was the first time that I was translating him, but I have been reading him forever—I wrote a paper on him during my master’s degree. So, I knew what I was getting into—I already knew the brutal pessimism and the omnipresent death in his work. What was new to me were the moments of tender insight and human ambivalence. In the story “Wolves,” right before the father is about to jump off of the caravan amidst wolves, he takes off the new shoes he is wearing and instructs his son to sell them (dead men’s shoes are never worn). I thought about this little detail for a long time. A man about to kill himself thinking about his shoes. In the story “Freedom: A Letter,” a single mother describes her life in a hill station hospital (she is a doctor) and the story is not dramatic, nothing happens, and in the end she just writes, “What is this thing called freedom? Nothing can be known about it without acquiring and using it.” It is especially moving because of its simple truth. It also acquires a political meaning considering Bhuwaneshwar was writing in pre-independence India, and he seems ambivalent about the idea of freedom itself, not necessarily politically—the idea of freedom as the ultimate harbinger of hope. Freedom can change everything except human nature. We are witnessing this in India right now. In any case, I can’t think of anything more symbolic of our times than wolves constantly chasing us. I think I emerged out of my immersion in his work with the feeling that perhaps we are all already immersed in Bhuwaneshwar’s world. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “A Sentimental Education in March” by Pavel Vilikovský

June 23, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Charles Sabatos

We’ve all dreamed about it before. At least it seems like it. Falling from a tower. Down the stairs. From the bottom.

This week’s Translation Tuesday honours one of Slovakia’s greatest writers on the eve of what would have been his seventy-ninth birthday (June 27). Translator Charles Sabatos writes:

The title story of Pavel Vilikovský‘s debut collection, A Sentimental Education in March (Citová výchova v marci, 1965), translated here for the first time, features the introspective meditation on everyday events that can be found in his later work, but in a more fragmentary style.  A group of young people take a trip to Popradské pleso, a lake resort in the Tatra mountains, where two of them have a brief sexual encounter that leaves the young man disillusioned with intimacy and alienated from reality.

Pavel Vilikovský (1941-2020) had a distinctively ironic style that was rooted in Central European culture yet parodied the national myths of the region. He spent most of his life in Bratislava, although he briefly studied film in Prague before returning to Slovakia, where he became an editor and translator from English. During the “normalization” period of the 1970s and 1980s, Vilikovský preferred self-imposed silence to self-censorship, although he was never officially banned.  He made up for this period of near invisibility with the appearance of three volumes during the last months of the Communist regime in 1989, including Ever Green is . . . (Večne je zelený) and A Horse Upstairs, a Blind Man in Vráble (Kôň na poschodí, slepec vo Vrábľoch), his first works translated into English (by Charles Sabatos for Northwestern University Press in 2002). His collection An Escalation of Feeling (Eskalácia citu), also published that year, was a mix of new and previously published stories, including a slightly revised version of “A Sentimental Education in March.” This reappearance was followed by three decades of prolific output, during which he won the prestigious Anasoft Litera award twice. Perhaps the most acclaimed of his later works was Fleeting Snow (Letmý sneh, 2014, translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood for Istros Books in 2018) which depicts a narrator dealing with his wife’s gradual loss of memory.  After writing five novels between 2013 and 2018, the last of which was The Thrill is Gone (RAJc je preč, 2018), Vilikovský (who always resisted technology and never used the internet) lost a completed text due to a computer error, leaving him so demoralized that he stopped writing entirely. Upon his death a few months later, friends and colleagues remembered his lifelong modesty and generosity along with his artistic brilliance. According to the critic Peter Darovec, Vilikovský “never stopped viewing sentiment as the most important part of how a person functions, whether in communicating with others or with the world. He was able to rationalize it, to think about it analytically . . . Before him no one else had managed that in Slovak literature, no one had even come close.”

At the station, they were waiting. Waiting and waiting.

“One, two, three,” cried the black locomotives. “Ohh. Ohh.”

“Then I cried,” he said. “I cried up there in that cottage, at the lake in the mountains, and it flowed down the Váh River. She told me no, I can’t, no. Then: those three years. That was in the hallway. She went up the steps. Yes? I asked. Yes. Then I cried. Those three years. Those three years. It all froze down my cheeks.”

They stopped to get some water. “Whoo-hoo,” cried the locomotive.

“When I cried,” he said, “everyone saw it. All night. Yes? Yes. And up the steps. And down my cheeks.” READ MORE…

“The past is anything but”: On Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults

June 22, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Victor Xavier Zarour Zarzar

Ferrante aims to shock, and she aims to please. But she also aims to critique.

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions, 2020

Reading is and has always been spatial. Zadie Smith has said it, Henry James said it before her, and I am certain someone else said it even before him. We often enter novels as if they were houses, taking in whole rooms at once, or stopping to admire a well-positioned taboret or fix a crooked frame. Because of this, reading different novels by the same author often gives us an uncanny sense of déjà vu, the familiar feeling of a thing estranged, of perhaps entering our neighbor’s house to realize that, unlike us, they have held on to carpeted floors, or have shown a preference for impressionist art or gaudy vases, but that, fundamentally, our house and theirs were designed by the same mind. This is exactly the kind of unfamiliarity I felt as soon as I began reading The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante’s latest novel, translated by Ann Goldstein. At first glance, fans and devoted readers of Ferrante’s work will not be surprised by this novel, which reworks some of the major themes that have made the pseudonymous author a worldwide phenomenon. It traffics in urgent issues like gender and its intersections with class, the tension between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of Naples, the perils of friendship and sexual desire, and the hypocrisy that often subtends the life of intellectuals. Ferrante isn’t exactly charting new territory here, and yet, as an undisputed master in rendering the familiar strange, her prose packs a punch just when we are about to settle into a sense of familiarity. With the publication of The Lying Life of Adults, we see an author at her peak, deftly synthetizing the density of her first three novels with the sprawling quality of the Neapolitan Novels, all while managing to uncover complex and challenging human truths.

Unlike its immensely popular predecessors, this novel does not trace a woman’s laborious ascent up the social ladder, but rather begins when the protagonist’s father has emerged victorious from the social battle and is comfortably settled into a middle-class life, which includes a position as a teacher in a prestigious liceo. The story is told in the first person, as are all of Ferrante’s novels. It’s hard to imagine otherwise at this point; prose, for her, serves as a conduit for the most rigorous kind of self-examination, often dragging us into psychic places we’d rather not inhabit. Take, for instance, the uncomfortable scene that opens the novel: Giovanna Trada, at age twelve, overhears a conversation between her parents in which her father calls her ugly. Or rather, she overhears him say that she is beginning to look like his long-estranged sister, Vittoria, a woman in whom “ugliness and spite were combined to perfection.” This aunt, whom Giovanna barely remembers ever seeing, has come to symbolize in the Trada household the squalor and indignity of the Neapolitan lower class—her name has, through the years, become a moniker for everything that Giovanna’s father has fought hard to leave behind. Thrown into disarray by her father’s words, an initiation into adulthood of sorts, Giovanna determines to establish contact with Vittoria, unleashing a series of events fated to unearth her family past and shed new light on her present. READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

June 20, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Sarah Moses

The mind is a strange and powerful mollusk, a flexible thing that gropes around in the depths until it takes hold.

As life—though never aptly described by that inadequate adjective, “normal”—begins its uneasy adjustment into a new reality, we here at Asymptote are wrapping up In This Together. Though the world has by no means seen the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are proud to have collected a selection of literature that bears witness to its beginning, and we continue to look forward to the texts that will surely continue to bring enlightenment and poetry to our circumstances. For our final edition, we present a text by Argentinian author and journalist, Cristina Macjus. Sarah Moses, translator, writer, and Asymptote’s co-Editor-at-Large for Argentina, introduces the piece:

In confinement in Buenos Aires, Cristina Macjus travels far from her apartment in the city via long-distance conversations with a high school friend. They imagine a return to their hometown in the northeast of the country, to the scents and sights that remain intact in their memory, though the town has long since changed. An acclaimed author of numerous books for children and young adults, Macjus began keeping a diary on March 20, when Argentina entered into quarantine in the early stages of the pandemic. “Walking with Agustín” brings together excerpts she wrote in lockdown, which continues to this day in the country.

Walking with Agustín

By Cristina Macjus

When the president said “quarantine,” I went blank. I’d been feeling all manner of things since social distancing measures had been put into place, but on March 20, when mandatory isolation was announced, I could feel nothing more.

I was in a haze for the first few weeks. I spent long periods of time seated in front of the mirror looking at my birthmarks as one would a galaxy. My WhatsApp messages accumulated; I’d answer, but my voice was faint, as though my head were inside a pillow.

In this state, I began to go for walks with Agustín.

Agustín and I had gone to high school together in the town we grew up in, close to the Iguazú Falls. Later, he moved to Bariloche, and I to Buenos Aires, and we lost touch. We remain thousands of kilometres away from each other, but the pandemic reconnected us during those first moments of turmoil on social media when everyone was asking about those they knew. Right away, we began to talk about our hometown. It’s not that we’d been particularly good friends, it’s that we took to walking.

“Do you remember how if you turned left, you’d get to Julito’s house?”

“Oh yeah, the one with that evil dog!”

“That’s the one. And if you kept going along that street you’d reach the park.”

This went on for hours over WhatsApp. We know, because others have told us so, that the town has changed, but since neither of us has returned, our memories remain intact. We walked each of our favourite routes. For example, the dirt road I’d bike along to get to English class. It was a good dusty run downhill followed immediately by a curve to the left where the pine forest began, the temperature changed, the air turned damp and smelled of resin, and you had to be careful so your bike wouldn’t slip on the red earth, which along that stretch of the road seemed a piece of recently polished ceramic. I can remember each of the turns in the road perfectly with my body; I could mould the topography in plasticine. Agustín remembers it as well. Together, the two of us possess a town that’s real, we confirm it to one another, and yet it no longer exists. His favourite spot is the country club, so we leave the town and walk the five kilometres it takes to get there, the final stretch along Highway 12 is one of the most dangerous in the province because of the trucks that drive by transporting logs. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 19, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Clémence Lucchini, and José García Escobar

This week’s latest news from Argentina, Central America, and the United States!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Argentina, Central America, and the United States. In Argentina, Chris Andrews’s forthcoming translation of César Aira’s novel The Divorce was awarded a PEN Translates award; in Guatemala, a new posthumous collection by Kaqchikel Maya writer Luis de Lión was published; and in the United States, bookstores and libraries have been supporting the Black Lives Matter protests by publishing recommended reading lists. Read on to find out more! 

Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina

English PEN announced the winners of its PEN Translates award earlier this month, and among them was Chris Andrews’s translation of César Aira’s The Divorce, forthcoming from And Other Stories in 2021. The Argentine author and translator continues to have a powerful influence both at home and abroad. His short novel Artforum, published in March by New Directions, earned glowing praise in an April NPR review: “Aira is unencumbered. He does what he does, and what we receive is giddy, unquestionably self-indulgent, and yet absolutely perfect.” The review, it should be noted, doesn’t reference the translator, Katherine Silver. It’s almost unbelievable that Aira can work at such a remarkable pace—he publishes two or three short novels a year—and continue to get such good reviews. (His most recent release in Argentina, Fulgentius, was also lauded.) The good news is that his pace of writing ensures work for translators and new releases into English for years to come.

Perhaps soon there will be a service to have Aira’s new releases delivered to your door monthly. Buenos Aires is a hotbed for independent publishers, and book clubs have sprung up as a way to promote and discuss new offerings. In a market inundated with new books each month—at least until recently—the clubs also provide vetting and a way to make sense of the noise. Some require members to obtain the book themselves, but others do the task of curating and sending members their selections each month. Pez Banana works this way (the name, which means banana fish, is a homage to Salinger). Founded by two veterans of the Buenos Aires publishing industry, Florencia Ure and Santiago Llach, the service sends a new release novel and reading guide each month. Among other book club choices, Bukku also sends out a monthly selection, and the decision of which service to subscribe to may come down to what else is in the box: Bukku deliveries include the book, a bookmark, a playlist curated by the author, and a surprise book-related, locally designed gift. Sign me up.  READ MORE…

The Tactility of Translation; The Translation of Tactility

June 18, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Marta Dziurosz

. . . just the original, the blank page, and the translator’s knowledge, experience, intuition, artistry.

Each translator’s relationship with their source text is utterly singular, and occupies all the emotional registers of human relationships: reverence, intrigue, and frustration. In the following essay, translator Marta Dziurosz, who works between the Polish and English, ruminates on the intricate development of this relationship: its precisions, intimacies, and sensitivities.

There’s joy in repetition

—Prince

In January 2020 I was due to speak at the British Library. It was a Holocaust Memorial Day event, and I was there to talk about my co-translation—with Anna Błasiak—of a book entitled Renia’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust, the wartime diary of a young Polish Jew, Renia Spiegel. The third speaker at the event was artist and writer Edmund de Waal, whose astonishing book The Hare with the Amber Eyes I read when it first came out. Half preparing for the event and half procrastinating, I watched Make Pots or Die, a documentary about de Waal’s work.

De Waal spoke about his work as evidence of spending time—how he places his pots in the vitrines in which they’re displayed very quickly and it’s almost always wrong or almost right, and then he needs to come back and look at them, look at them for a very long time, because there’s an enormous difference between almost right and right. The process struck me as familiar; as a translator, I think about the weight of a comma. I put it in, I take it out, I put it in, I take it out, I put it back in. I put a semicolon at the end of a sentence instead of a full stop, change it back to a full stop. I switch the second and the fifth words around. I change a noun to its diminutive, reconsider.

Once I had that thought, de Waal’s pots started to look like drafts. Perhaps he’s iterating. To me, every pot within an installation looks like a re-translation of a word, sentence, thought, text. The vitrine, taken together, is a mind subtly improvising on a theme. The difference is that in a de Waal vitrine, the audience can see many iterations, many expressions of a thought, if this is what they are; the reader of a translation only sees the last version, the one the translator (and, possibly, her editor) deemed the best, whatever that means.

the poems of our climate (detail), 2018 © Edmund de Waal. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian. Photo by Mike Bruce.

the poems of our climate (detail), 2018
© Edmund de Waal. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian. Photo by Mike Bruce.

What would a translation look like if every draft of every sentence, or even of just one sentence, was present at the same time? Unreadable, of course, but for a translator—how informative, how interesting. De Waal: “Repetition isn’t about repeating the same thing. It’s about minute differences between each moment, between each sound, between each object that you’re making.” Having to appreciate every shade of a sentence, calibrate every word choice so that meaning, register, mood, rhythm, emotional effect all work, and putting all those carefully chosen words in an order that suits the sentence, the paragraph, the whole book—all this makes translation seem impossible, but as some point you make the decision. You place pot A next to pot F and slightly behind pot R, and then lean tile N against pot V and somehow, you’ve arrived. READ MORE…

Contemporary Indigenous Poetry: Xun Betan on Tsotsil, Turkeys, and Aguardiente

June 17, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Shyal Bhandari

. . . when he writes, it is often with an audience in mind, namely, the future generations of Tsotsil speakers.

Tsotsil is a Mayan language spoken by the indigenous Tsotsil Maya people in the Mexican state of Chiapas and it is in danger of extinction. When writer and translator Shyal Bhandari went to the state for several months to investigate contemporary indigenous poetry, he quickly discovered the poet Xun Betan, who has been fighting hard to keep the language alive in literature. In this essay, Bhandari recounts his meeting with Xun Betan and introduces the pivotal work he has been doing through his writing, publishing, and workshops.

Over the few months that I was in San Cristóbal de las Casas in Mexico, I heard the name Xun Betan brought up plenty of times whenever I asked about contemporary indigenous poetry. “Tienes que hablar con él”—they told me I had to talk with him and that he is involved in many interesting projects, including a poetry workshop for young Tsotsil Maya writers that he runs at his house in the city. They informed me that he is a “unique individual” (in the best sense of the term), almost always to be found wearing traditionally embroidered shirts and his trademark sombrero.

So, when I saw a man dressed exactly like that, smiling and nodding along at the launch event for an indigenous poetry anthology, I thought, “Could that be Xun?” The spokesperson from the editorial Espejo Somos gave him a shout-out, confirming my hunch. At the end of the event, I swiftly approached him about the possibility of sitting down to talk and, to my delight, he suggested coffee the following morning. Anxious to make a good first impression, I arrived punctually, against my nature. I found a well-lit table in the centre of the café and ordered a cappuccino made with pinole (ground-up corn). By the time I had finished my coffee, it was 11:20 a.m. and Xun was yet to show. I was hardly surprised. So, it had to be that at the exact moment I resigned myself to the sobering thought that he had completely forgotten about our meeting, he walked through the door. Naturally, I told him I had only just arrived, hoping he wouldn’t pay much attention to the empty coffee cup beside me. It turned out that we have friends in common. I don’t care if it’s a cliché—the world is a very small place indeed. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Daughter from Jannina” by Vassilis Alexakis

June 16, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Rebecca Dehner-Armand

It feels as if I’m using this story just to see if I am able to write a more personal piece.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a proposed coffee date unearths secrets and regrets in Vassilis Alexakis’ “The Daughter from Jannina.” Our protagonist is a journalist awaiting the arrival of a young woman claiming to be his daughter. A conversation about the veracity of the woman’s claim reveals a bittersweet history of personal mistakes. Here we have the trademarks of Alexakis’ writing: straightforward exposition, quotidian detail, and a dryly comic voice, all of which belie a deeply complex interiority and emotional self-awareness. With emotional subtlety and humour, our protagonist weighs the importance of love and family life against the backdrop of national displacement. Translator Rebecca Dehner-Armand writes: “[Alexakis] has composed a singular œuvre, marked by his particular staccato and wry style, that illuminates the experience of a growing sector of French society: immigrants, exiles, and foreigners.” 

A cloud of smoke floats above the ping-pong table. I am seated at my desk, at the other end of the room. At the moment, I am not smoking. On the ping-pong table there is a mostly used-up roll of toilet paper, a paddle, and Lina’s camera, as well as a Tupperware container that I should return to Grigoris’ mother. A few days ago, she brought me some garbanzo bean soup in this container. Where has the other paddle gone? I don’t see the ball either. I played ping-pong last night with Vasso. The match was shit. Lina came over afterwards, around midnight. She slept here last night. It hasn’t been long now since she left.

I am listening to The Turk in Italy, a joyful opera by Rossini. The Turk falls in love with a married Italian woman and begins plotting to purchase her. She gently explains to him that this type of transaction is not done in Italy. In reality, I am not really paying attention to the opera. My mind is elsewhere. It seems the cloud of smoke is headed for the open French doors. It is quite chilly, but I don’t have the strength to get up and close the doors. Lina will no doubt come by sometime during the day to pick up her camera.

Normally, I should be prepping for my TV show by now – I am going to be interviewing the minister of maritime trade—or writing my column for The Investor. These notes surprise me; I am not used to recording my comings and goings. I am writing in pencil, which surprises me even more: for a long time now, I’ve typed out everything. Maybe I chose a pencil precisely because I ascribe no importance to this story, because I can envision a quick abandonment. I can see myself throwing it in the trash after ripping it to shreds. A little piece of paper will fall to the floor. Once I bend to pick it up, there will be a knock at my door: it will be Stavroula, this young girl who was not at our get-together last night and who thinks she’s my daughter. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2020

June 15, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Eva Wissting, and Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

New publications from Brazil, Japan, and Poland!

This month, our selections of newly published literature from around the globe seem to cohere under the umbrella of trauma and memory, and the way they inevitably turn into narratives in the process of retrospection. From a Polish work of non-fiction that traces the sufferings of Poles during WWII, to the journals that document a Jewish immigrant in Brazil, to the strange and unspoken secrets of a small village in Japan—these works are of both documentation and imagination.

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A Little Annihilation by Anna Janko, translated from the Polish by Philip Boehm, World Editions, 2020

Review by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Educational Arm Assistant

It is a grim fact, one that acquires increasing urgency in recent years, that those who were alive to experience the horrors of the Second World War are getting older: before long, we will no longer be able to talk to people who have direct experience of those times. Thus, we are increasingly grappling with the problem of second-generation memory: with the matter of how the descendants of survivors preserve and pass on the stories of the past for future generations, and with questions as to whether, or how, those descendants inherit the trauma of their ancestors. Anna Janko’s A Little Annihilation is a powerful meditation on these issues.

In this reckoning with the past, Janko describes the destruction of the Polish village of Sochy by the German military on Tuesday, June 1, 1943: the inhabitants massacred and buildings burned to the ground over the course of a mere few hours. Nine-year-old Teresa Ferenc, Janko’s mother, was among the survivors. In recounts of conversations, her mother describes her memories of that day—most especially, witnessing the death of both of her parents. Janko also chronicles interviews with other survivors from the village, interweaving their stories and noting the discrepancies between them, while describing efforts to tabulate the exact number of lives lost. The impossibility of establishing precise details is a crucial reminder of the intertwined nature of history and memory, a refutation of the common notion of their opposition, as well as a reflection on the challenges of documenting a massacre.

For some English-language readers, Janko’s text may be the first work they have encountered that discusses the sufferings of non-Jewish Poles during the Second World War. For Americans especially, to learn about Nazi atrocities is generally to learn about their efforts to exterminate European Jews, without a detailed understanding of how their eugenicist ideology shaped their policies and strategies in a broader variety of ways. Confusion over the fact that Poland was occupied territory has led to mistaken statements about “Polish death camps” (most notably, perhaps, when President Barack Obama used the term during a ceremony awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski in 2012; he later apologized for the error)—as Janko angrily reminds readers. “In my opinion it would be best if Germany gathered up all the camps they left behind in Poland. So that no one would be mistaken any longer.” READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

June 13, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Jennifer Feeley

You see she has ginger and scallions stuck in her teeth, but still, you think how elegant and beautiful she is.

In this week’s edition of In This Together, a curated column bringing you literature in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Asymptote is proud to present a short story by the Hong Kong writer, Wong Yi. Below, translator Jennifer Feeley discusses Wong’s work:

This story is part of Wong Yi’s ongoing fiction series Ways to Love in a Crowded City, which captures how ordinary Hong Kong residents compress and contort their love lives in the face of various constraints. Aside from the title story, the short pieces that make up this series have been published in her online columns for the Hong Kong periodicals Ming Pao Weekly and Fleurs des lettres, with a famous painting inspiring each story.

When Wong Yi began this series in March 2019, she was initially interested in exploring how physical space and work culture impact Hongkongers’ romantic lives, but as protests escalated throughout the city later that year, she began writing stories capturing people’s changing behavior and attitudes, highlighting their feelings of anxiety, fear, and anger. Wong Yi explains, “It was my way of coping with a very challenging period of time, and keeping record of the unimaginable things that were happening. Unusual circumstances and political events had become another category of constraints on people’s lives and love.”

In early 2020, the pandemic broke out, superseding the protests as the new “unusual circumstance” affecting Hongkongers’ lives, and she ended up writing “Patient” shortly after her friend moved back to Hong Kong from Australia during the height of the outbreak. As the virus spread throughout the world, people began referring to themselves as being in Edward Hopper paintings, prompting Wong Yi to pair her story with Edward Hopper’s Eleven A.M. Whereas being physically together typically is regarded as an act of love, the story demonstrates how during a pandemic, having the patience to stay physically apart becomes a new way to demonstrate one’s love.

Patient

by Wong Yi

(After Edward Hopper, Eleven A.M., 1926)

eleven-am

I’m back in town, you say. It’s good you’re back, she says. But it’s not good, you think. During the past two months, the virus has spread throughout Hong Kong. She and others who’ve been living in the city have moved past the initial frenzy of shock and panic buying, gradually adapting to daily life under the pandemic. They’ve even started letting down their guard, loosening their masks and venturing out on the streets again; you’d been in Australia, listening to her report such things for two months, always taking on the role of comforting her, constantly offering to send her hand sanitizer or a small gift to cheer her up, urging her to stay home as much as possible to avoid infection, and then, in mid-March, not long after White Day, the outbreak in Australia finally began to worry you both. When people all over the world started buying up toilet paper and advocating staying at home to fight the pandemic, your roles were reversed. Have you bought enough food? she asked. Can you buy masks in Australia? she asked. Australia’s customs restrictions are so stringent—I can’t send you any food. Please take good care of yourself, she said. You solemnly promised her, I will. I’ll make it through graduation, and then I’ll come back to Hong Kong and we’ll “sweep street,” hitting up all the good food places. I’m going to eat fried stuffed three treasures, mango pomelo sago, buttered pineapple buns, and rice noodle rolls with sweet sauce, you said. Okay, when the outbreak is over, we’ll go eat, she said. You talked to her over video, virtually hooking pinkies. A few days later, while you were still contemplating whether to be a dutiful daughter and heed your mother’s advice to buy a plane ticket back to Hong Kong, seeking refuge like other overseas students, she said she saw that confirmed cases in Australia were continuing to climb, and she was concerned for your safety, and so that very day, you made up your mind to pack up your belongings and booked a room in a Hong Kong hotel that previously had been used to quarantine university students returning to the city from the mainland. The next day, you cocooned yourself in a windbreaker, gloves, glasses, and a mask and flew back to Hong Kong, every nerve on edge, embarking on your life of fourteen days of hotel self-quarantine.

It’s good you’re back, she says. You feel the same way when you close the hotel door. A few days later, Qantas goes as far as grounding all international flights—if you hadn’t already returned to Hong Kong, you probably would’ve had to swim back. At least now you’re both in the same city. Even if the whole world is caught in the same war-like disaster that’s turned the planet on its head with absolutely no end in sight, at least you’re back, and from now on you can live and die alongside her within the borders of the same city. She makes you promise her you won’t set even half a foot outside the hotel for fourteen days. She’d rather use up a mask shopping for the numerous Hong Kong snacks and soft drinks you told her are your favorites, dropping them off at your hotel and asking the staff to deliver them to your door, tucking inside a few extra goodies to brighten your hotel stay: a card to boost your spirits, hand sanitizer, Japanese sheet masks, and nail polish. When you open the overstuffed plastic grocery bag, you can’t help but sweetly smile and tear up at the same time: Doll pickled vegetable and pork instant rice noodles, Four Seas toasted seaweed, Sze Hing Loong dried seasoned cuttlefish, Vita lemon tea, and Garden Lemon Puff cookies—she’s remembered them all. She says, C’mon, of course I remember! You think your hunch is really spot-on; she must like you too, since she remembers every word you’ve said, and you remember every word she’s said. READ MORE…