Monthly Archives: June 2020

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 12, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Anna Aresi and Xiao Yue Shan

Find out what's going on in the literary worlds of Japan and Italy in this week's update!

Our editors bring you the latest news in global literature from Italy and Japan this week as COVID-19 continues to make its presence known, the one-hundredth anniversary of Gianni Rodari’s birth is celebrated, and traditionally paper-dependant Japan starts investing in a virtual literary presence. Read on for the scoop!

Anna Aresi, Copy Editor, reporting from Italy:

As is well known to people in the industry, the COVID-19 pandemic has deeply impacted the publishing sector on many levels. In particular, the cancellation of most book fairs has deprived many of an important opportunity to meet fellow publishers, authors, translators and illustrators, to discover new releases to potentially translate, and set up those professional relationships that keep the industry alive. However, as we’ve seen over and over again in these months, the scope of the pandemic’s impact has often been countered with inventive, creative solutions to hold these same events in a different format.

One of the book fairs that had to be canceled was the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, one the most important events for children’s literature, taking place in Bologna, Italy, every spring. Originally scheduled to be postponed, it soon became clear that holding the BCBF in praesentia was not going to be possible, and the event happened virtually this past May.

One of the highlights of this year’s edition was the celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of Gianni Rodari’s birth. Rodari is perhaps the single most important author of children’s books in Italy, having influenced and shaped generations of students, teachers, authors, and illustrators with his poems, short stories, books, and theoretical essays. The BCBF’s website hosts a virtual exhibition, Illustrators for Gianni Rodari, showcasing the works of many Italian artists who’ve illustrated Rodari’s books. In particular, Beatrice Alemagna, an award-winning Italian illustrator based in Paris, participates with her new illustrations for A sbagliare le storie (Telling Stories Wrong), in which an absent-minded grandfather keeps making mistakes when trying to tell the story of Red Riding Hood to her granddaughter, who has to continually correct him. As anyone who’s ever read to young children knows, consistency is key when telling them stories (over and over and . . . over again!), yet as the book shows, deviations from the norm might be as fun and rewarding as the canonical version. Alemagna’s beautiful new visual interpretation of this classic will hopefully be brought to other languages soon! READ MORE…

How Do We Remember Translators? The Many Lives of Barbara Bray

June 11, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Nathan H. Dize

There must be a way of acknowledging the care that Bray brought to her translations while simultaneously reckoning with their faults.

Barbara Bray was a British translator and recipient of the PEN Translation Prize in 1986. In addition to having translated leading French authors of her time, including Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, and the correspondence of George Sand, she also translated works by two renowned female Guadeloupian writers: Simone Schwarz-Bart and Maryse Condé. Though her work has undergone criticism—notably by Condé’s husband and translator, Richard Philcox in an recent interview with us at Asymptote—the importance of her legacy and contributions to global literature, as Nathan H. Dize proposes in the following essay, should not be undermined. 

In late December, I decided to go browsing at a used bookstore outside of Nashville to take a much-needed break from writing my dissertation. There are few things in this world more comforting than perusing the spines of books, never knowing what you might stumble upon. A few minutes into my trip, I found a hardcover copy of Maryse Condé’s Segu, translated by the late Barbara Bray. The dust jacket was pristine and its cover depicted a dying African man surrounded by his family beneath a pulpy font. I instantly knew that I had to buy it, having recently talked about the novel’s translator with a friend. Unfortunately, Barbara Bray’s name appears nowhere on the cover of Segu—not on its first edition or any subsequent editions—which led me to wonder, how do we remember translators when they are gone? What becomes of the many lives they’ve lived through the words of others? Since that day in the warehouse-sized bookstore in Middle Tennessee, I’ve considered how Bray’s translations of Maryse Condé and Simone Schwarz-Bart, Guadeloupe’s most prolific writers, might help us to remember her life and her contribution to Caribbean literature in translation.

***

Barbara Bray (née Jacobs) was born along with her identical twin, Olive, on November 24, 1924 in Maida Vale, not far from Regent’s Park in London. She was educated close to Maida Vale at the Preston Manor Grammar School in Brent and later studied English, French, and Italian at Girton College, Cambridge. After her university studies, Barbara married John Bray, a former Royal Air Force pilot, and they went to live together in Egypt, where Barbara took a position as an English teacher at the University of Alexandria in Cairo. In 1953, the couple moved back to London, where Barbara began a new job as a script editor for the BBC. In his obituary for Barbara Bray in the Journal of Beckett Studies, John Knowlson recalls conversations with Bray about her time at the BBC, when she and other producers had to fight with BBC executives and department heads to air avant-garde radio plays and programs, such as Harold Pinter’s radio plays. Three years before Barbara Bray left the BCC in 1961, her husband John died in a car accident, leaving her widowed and tasked with raising their two daughters, Francesca and Julia. After John Bray’s passing, Barbara met Samuel Beckett and the two began a multi-decade love affair in Paris that coincided with Bray’s entrée into the world of translation. READ MORE…

The Circumference of Love’s Primal Language in Ghérasim Luca’s La Fin du monde

June 10, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Jared Fagen

Love for Luca is not an ideal, but a configuration under constant scrutiny and forever reinvented (or misconfigured).

The legacy of Romanian surrealist poet Ghérasim Luca is his singular style: ferocious in desire, elaborate in theory, and fraught with the contradictions and impossibilities of translating human emotion into language. In the following essay, Jared Fagen situates Luca in his rightful place within the Surrealist canon in a comprehensive and discerning study of his love poem, La Fin du monde: Prendre corps.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
—Pascal

Ghérasim Luca’s La Fin du monde: Prendre corps (The End of the World: To Embody) deserves a place within any discussion of the surrealist love poem. Indeed, in the spirit of Pierre Reverdy’s contradictory conjoining of objects (following Lautréamont’s “dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella”), the chance amorous encounters of André Breton’s Nadja, and the startling, ambiguous juxtapositions of Robert Desnos’s Liberté ou l’amour! (Liberty or Love!), a resemblance between the French treatment of love and Luca’s own handling can be undoubtedly determined. But for all the impassioned intensity, violent eroticism, and revolutionary fervor it shares in common with the works of such surrealist masters, Luca’s poem can also rightfully be situated—like the poet himself—just outside this conversation, on the fringes, or raised perhaps after its conclusion, in the exhaustion and wake of interpretation.

A founder and member of the short-lived Romanian circle (1940–1947), with Gellu Naum, Dolfi Trost, Paul Păun, and Virgil Teodorescu, Luca and his contributions to surrealist aesthetics are distinct precisely because of the tradition from which they spring (and disrupt) and the origins they seek to restore. This subtle yet significant variation of love between Luca and the French surrealists relies primarily upon a deviation of linguistic usage: despite the spirit, a rift (or departure) can be discerned on the surface—the body—of La Fin du monde; one in which love is performed by a peculiar operation of language that is as native as it is natal, as in place as it is apart. “If I am speaking only the language I have been taught,” writes Breton in L’amour fou (Mad Love), “what will ever serve as a signal that we should listen to the voice of unreason, claiming that tomorrow will be other, that it is entirely and mysteriously separated from yesterday?” For Luca, the question is fundamental to his own poetic project, yet is itself futile: “Putting aside the precariousness of man’s existence, his rudimentary biology leaning towards the reactionary, the funereal, with the vague and progress-inducing hope that everything will be solved tomorrow, when I know that this very tomorrow will always be late in arriving, because any tendency to surpass and shatter our own limits is prohibited because of our good sense, because of our modesty and rationalism.”

These two quotes reveal an interesting disparity between an amorous poetic language in service to stifling the world of reason in order to eclipse and transform it, and an amorous poetic language whose endeavor to seek respite or refuge from the progressive world results in its anguished expression. This latter point is critical to our experience of Luca’s poem. For Breton, surrealist love offers possibility, optimism, hope: the perpetual pursuit, possession, and renewal of love’s meeting as if—like the penultimate poem in his L’air de l’eau professes—“Toujours pour la première fois” (“Always for the first time”). For Luca, love is a construct already narrativized, or “ready-made,” always despairing of the revolutionary freedom it purports yet ultimately fails to fully achieve. Like Antonin Artaud’s Van Gogh, the “I” of Luca’s La Fin du monde is suicided by society, discharging its lascivious behaviors within “the myth of reality itself,” a reality that is “terribly superior to all history, to all fable, to all divinity, to all surreality.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Another Biography of the Lunar Phases” by Amarji

June 9, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Sean McDonagh

from my creaking nocturnal crib / i saw the white and luminous beak of the kite / lacerate the pink skin of dawn

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, Syrian poet Amarji chronicles the cycle of the moon with visceral surreality in “Another Biography of the Lunar Phases.” Through the imagery of growth and decay, our speaker takes us through nine phases, each new phase unleashing a barrage of dreamlike (or perhaps nightmarish) scenes. We begin with the “nourishment” of a milk that stains the world, and we return to this bodily metaphor as it tarnishes the speaker’s very being. There are shades of Celan’s sublime and terrifying beauty; here the ‘black milk’ is persistent, its repetition adding a dizzying mantra-like meditation on death and the consumability of the body.

1. New Moon

black milk drizzles on the windows. it trickles on the northern forest. first on the sharp needles of the cedar and those blunt on the fir, and then on the other lesser kinds. black milk trickles on all of the families and all of the species. [nothing vanishes in front of the vanished white eye of the exposed black milk] as you see, as you don’t, the black milk makes everything tremble. one drop makes a blue roller tremble. one drop makes a cotoneaster tremble. one drop makes a squirrel tremble. one drop makes a blue rock thrush tremble. one drop makes a blue tit tremble. one drop makes an ash leaf tremble. one drop makes a maple leaf tremble. one drop makes a checker leaf tremble. one drop makes a thread of lichen tremble.
a black, black, black milk.
on the barbary nut iris: black milk. on the prostrate cherry tree: black milk. on the peony
flowers: black milk.
black milk that spreads and coagulates on everything.
black milk that coagulates on the bones of a dead lynx. black milk that coagulates on the skin
of a dying roebuck.
black milk on the corners of my mouth, on my Adam’s apple, and on my chest.
black milk that spills on all of the world, on all of my body:
as i, with my mouth, i pull towards the window and i suck
the black nipple of the night. READ MORE…

“It’s a floating world”: Yasuhiro Yotsumoto on Japanese Poetics

June 8, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

I’m very much interested now in the type of poet—not only in Japan but outside as well—who tries to cultivate resistance.

The life and work of poet Yasuhiro Yotsumoto is a testament to the conviction and omnipresence of poetics, profuse in every aspect of human life. In nearly twenty volumes of poetry and criticism, he has interrogated, in verse and prose, the reality and abstractions of family, romance, corporate fiscal structuring, Japanese linguistics, culture both global and insular, a struggle against cancer, and, in doing so, has revealed something essential about poetry as it coheres with all other ideas and facts. Having displaced himself from Japan by the means of an extremely successful career in business—something he calls his “real” job, despite every indication in his manner of speaking that he considers it a mere occupation—Yotsumoto has lived in Munich since 1994, and at the time of our meeting, has just begun a very tedious and significant transition back into Japanese daily life and society.

Despite meeting all the qualifications for a writer defined by (self-imposed) exile and exodus, Yotsumoto has cultivated a significant reputation in Japanese letters. As editor of the admired literary quarterly Beagle, host of the poetry podcast Poetry Talks, Japanese national editor of Poetry International, and diligent translator of poets ranging from Li Bo to Simon Armitage, he admitted casually, without any pretension or arrogance, that he is now considered somewhat of an insider (a word that he would go on to elaborate upon) within literary circles. We conversed in English, which he professed that he is able to “speak for about two hours, then the battery runs out and I start speaking nonsense.”

I met him on the very day the state of emergency—enforced within Japan due to the COVID-19 epidemic—was due to be lifted. In Yamashita Park, plentiful with roses and the bare shoulders and legs emblematic of spring-turning-summer, we ate ice cream cones overlooking the waters of Tokyo Bay. The conversation was peppered with his generous laughter, silences full of thought, and interruptions typical of the world, busy and vivid, brilliantly alive.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): It’s impressive to be able to balance—what I imagine to be—a very heavy workload on your day job with such a prolific poetry career.

Yasuiro Yotsumoto (YY): That’s right. I wouldn’t be able to do that if it was prose—novels, or something. But poetry is okay; I can finish it before breakfast every morning. And I write everyday.

XYS: I find that most Japanese writers have this very regulated schedule.

YY: Well, I always wanted to keep this balance. It was a challenge I put upon myself, the balance between “real life” and writing. And I made that conscious decision as I graduated from university, that I could take a very cultural job—copywriter, or something—but I somehow decided not to do that, and instead I pursued two separate worlds.

XYS: Mutually exclusive.

YY: Well, mutually exclusive in terms of lifestyle, but my first book was about corporate finance theory. I went to the University of Pennsylvania and got my MBA in corporate finance in my twenties, and I wrote a book of poetry by applying such theories of the Black-Scholes option model, etc., to describe Japanese society at that time—which was peaking economically, and everyone was sensing that the burst of the bubble was not so far away, yet we kept going and going and going. That was an overlap. So I had always been an outsider amongst Japanese poets; I live outside [of Japan], and I write about things that have never been touched before. I try to bring in this kind of prosaic, very banal, everyday subject into the domain of poetry. READ MORE…

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

June 6, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood

After many decades I am once again standing in a queue outside a shop. Spine-chilling memories come flooding back. I welcome them.

As the daily grim statistics recorded a growing global death toll from COVID-19, one small country in Central Europe prided itself on having one of the lowest, if not the lowest, mortality rates from the disease. Slovakia has attributed its success in fighting the pandemic to introducing a strict lockdown soon after the first cases were detected. At the time when the UK government was advising people to merely avoid going to pubs, all of Slovakia’s bars, cafés, and restaurants were ordered to close or switch to take-out service. However, this highly beneficial public health measure had at least one unintended consequence: it deprived an acclaimed Slovak writer (and past Asymptote contributor) of his favourite places to write. Balla, the author of a dozen collections of short stories and two short novels has often been compared to Franz Kafka, though Asymptote assistant editor Andreea Scridon has argued that he “might more reasonably be called a nihilistic Etgar Keret, given the thoroughly ironic, often absurdly amusing, take on contemporary life that characterises his work.” While this is certainly an apt definition of his writing, another reason why Kafka’s name keeps cropping up is the fact that Balla has never given up his day job in the audit department of the council office in his home town of Nové Zámky where he continues to live, drawing inspiration from the humdrum life of the people around him as well as his own. What makes the absurd stories of petty bureaucrats, blinkered nationalists, frustrated wives, neglectful husbands, and bullying fathers, as well as dishevelled publishers and burned-out writers so true to life is Balla’s uncanny ability to capture their voices, overheard in cafés and pubs. Balla’s translator and Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Slovakia, Julia Sherwood, wondered how he coped with being cut off from his source of inspiration and asked him to describe his life in the time of COVID-19 for this column. Balla obliged in his characteristic tongue-in-cheek style, blending fact and fiction. (N.B. since the time of writing, cafés in Slovakia have reopened.)

On the pandemic

by Balla

1.

Since the start of the pandemic I’ve been to the woods twice. I wanted to take a solitary walk among the trees. With my face mask on. But there were people everywhere. Our woods are small. And everyone has the same goal, a solitary walk among the trees. So here we all are, walking around, except we’re wearing face masks and we’re not solitary. After a while I start suffocating under my mask. I venture deeper into the woods. It’s muddy and smelly. I’m approaching the sewer where wastewater from the city pipes is discharged. This is where I spent my childhood. This kind of place is a source of amazement for a child. My mother warned me to stay away from the sewage-filled drain. Here I’m finally alone. I take a bottle of whisky out of my bag, take a drink and realise again that it’s not alcohol that I’ve been missing, it’s a café, complete with people, conversations, bad music, the tinkling of spoons, glasses, cups, and saucers.
I put the bottle away in disgust.
Obviously, only after I’ve emptied it: whisky is whisky after all.
But what about the trees?
The bushes?
The sewage?
I’m not interested in any of them.
I’ve seen these trees, these bushes and this sewage at least a thousand times before. The woods at the edge of town are small. They seem to be getting smaller and smaller. This is an objective fact: the woods are full of cottages, rubbish dumps, paths, clearings; there’s even a tiny pseudo-zoo, where I love the boar because of its positive relationship to the mud. But what I really love is the din of streets, cars, motorbikes, and pubs, roaring rock, blues, ferocious free jazz. The holiday destination of my dreams is a smog-bound city further west. Staying on the first floor of a boarding house in the city centre, on a noisy boulevard and with a pub on the ground floor that has nonstop live music. That’s where I would like to relax, write, reflect; these are the ideal conditions for me.
The woods are an alien, dangerous place.
Birds gawp at you from the branches and don’t understand you.
I’m standing under a tree watching a bumblebee as it climbs up its trunk, wondering when it will decide to climb on top of me, and thinking about ordinary people. Things are not that difficult for ordinary people at the moment, they’ve always lived like this. From work they head straight back to their flats or houses with the same flatmates, husbands, wives, children, do the same house chores, followed by TV, then go to sleep in the same bed with the same occupants. They live a life in permanent quarantine and state of emergency. Provided, of course, they haven’t lost their job because of the pandemic. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Some say that everything will have to change once the pandemic is over, we shouldn’t go back to the old world as it used to be.
I see their point.

2.

On Monday morning the porter didn’t let me into my office building.
I wasn’t wearing a face mask.
Who would have thought that one day I’d end up having to force my way in there?
Actually, I don’t mind face masks. All my life I’ve felt self-conscious about my face, my huge nose, my chaotically uneven teeth: now there’s finally a chance to cover up this handicap. I have plenty of those. For people like me the best thing would be for the state to order all men to wear male burkas. But the state has failed to provide the citizens with face masks, just told us to wear them, so it’s unlikely we would ever be issued with burkas. My girlfriend has sewn some face masks for me, but she’s stuck in another town and is justifiably scared of travelling so she’s sent them by post.
But you’re not allowed to go to the post office without a face mask.
I’m stuck right in the middle of an absurd drama.
This is my preferred kind of literature. It’s the only kind that still manages to capture some of what’s going on here. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 5, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, Jiaoyang Li, and Julia Sherwood

This week's latest literary news from Poland, Sweden, and China!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Poland, Sweden, and China. In Poland, Anna Zaranko’s translation of Kornel Filipowicz was awarded the 2020 Found in Translation Award; in Sweden, an anthology will soon be released of writings on coronavirus, featuring many international writers including Olga Tokarczuk; and in China, bookshops are responding to challenging times by moving to online engagement with their reading community. Read on to find out more! 

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Poland

Since she received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1996, Wisława Szymborska’s poetry has been appreciated around the world, while the work of her partner of twenty-three years, the master story teller Kornel Filipowicz (1913-1990) remained largely unknown outside Poland. Fortunately, this has changed with The Memoir of an Anti-hero by Kornel Filipowicz, published by Penguin Modern Classics in 2019 in a translation by Anna Zaranko. On March 31, Zaranko received the 2020 Found in Translation Award in recognition of her “quietly understated yet immensely evocative rendering of Filipowicz’s prose, which The Sunday Times’s David Mills described as ‘provocative, troubling, awkward, a proper classic.’”

On May 27, the winner of the eleventh Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage, awarded by the City of Warsaw, was announced online (the fourteen-minute video of the ceremony has English subtitles). The prize went to Katarzyna Kobylarczyk for Strup. Hiszpania rozdrapuje rany (The Scab. Spain Scratches its Wounds, 2019 Wydawnictwo Czarne), a book about grappling with historical memory. The jury praised it as “a fascinating story that blends the nightmarish and the grotesque, in which reality reveals its metaphorical dimension. It is proof that one can create real literature relying solely on facts.” READ MORE…

Why Living Is Not the Same as Life: Yan Lianke’s Village Memoir

June 4, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel

Perhaps the best way to describe Yan’s writing is that of brutal honesty.

Three Brothers by Yan Lianke, translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas, Grove Press, 2020

One of the most translated contemporary Chinese authors, Yan Lianke, has become quite the celebrity: he is featured in interviews in global media, invited to international literary festivals, and quoted on the coronavirus pandemic. Yet, despite this fame and international image, he remains fiercely loyal to his roots—the Chinese village where backbreaking hardship was the common lot until the 1990s. As he admits in his latest book to be translated into English: “I grew up in a household full of poverty and warmth.”

In this piece of non-fiction called 我与父辈 (first published in China in 2009) and rendered as Three Brothers in English through Carlos Rojas’ faithful and vivid translation, Yan pays tribute to the generation of his father, who survived an era of famine, political upheavals, social discrimination, and self-reliance in the 1960s and ’70s. By remaining faithful to their rock-solid values of decency, sacrifice, and stoic acceptance of life’s unfairness, this generation was able to provide better lives for their children. Yan, who belongs to the bridge generation, still remembers his early life of “吃苦” (chi ku, or literally, “eating bitterness”), whilst he has also directly experienced the benefits of China’s economic and social reforms that started in the 1980s but affected life in villages much later, around the late 1990s.

The book, which is subtitled Memories of My Family, describes the lives of three men: Yan’s father, Yan’s father’s second brother (called Second Uncle), and his cousin (called Fourth Uncle). All of them share similar characteristics: they are illiterate, extremely hard-working, and they all die as a result of the physical abuse that their bodies experienced in order to meet their most important obligations towards their families.

Perhaps the best way to describe Yan’s writing is that of brutal honesty. In this world of harsh masculinity—there are very few mentions of women in the book—life consists of the most important stations in life: giving birth, building houses, feeding and marrying off one’s many children (this was before China’s one-child policy started being implemented in 1979), providing education for the happy few, and ensuring a decent funeral. This is all accomplished through a philosophy that Yan describes as the difference between living in the village and in the city:

“ ‘Living’ suggests a process of enduring day after day, with each day being the same, and implies a kind of monotony, boredom, hopelessness, and idleness. ‘Life,’ on the other hand, conveys a sense of richness, of progress and the future. It has color and vitality and calls to mind the act of walking down a broad road illuminated by bright lights.”

READ MORE…

Ideology and Imagination in the Unequal Twenty-First Century: Thomas Piketty and the Global Fight Against Economic Inequality

June 3, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Ian Thompson

. . . thinkers like Piketty generate and agitate the kind of discussions needed to address our collective woes.

Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer, The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2020

It’s rare for an economics book to make much inroad into non-academic circles, but the French economist Thomas Piketty did just that with his surprise success Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in 2014 with an English translation by Arthur Goldhammer. This impressive work warns of the corrosive impacts of economic inequality, which has spiraled out of control in the last few decades. Piketty’s thesis—and perhaps the greatest success of the study—boils down to a simple equation: r > g, where r represents the rate of return on capital and g represents the rate of economic growth. Piketty warns of a future where returns on wealth will outpace all new forms of economic growth, entrenching all existing fortunes ever deeper, and only further those with more meagre supplies of capital. Piketty’s warnings seem to have struck a chord, although not without criticism. The global and historic scope of this study left many corners of the world understudied and with little room to understand the roots of inequality before the nineteenth century.

Piketty’s newest book, Capital and Ideology, again translated by Arthur Goldhammer, serves as a logical continuation of the project undertaken in his earlier research. If anything, it takes an even more ambitious approach to the seemingly intractable problem of economic inequality, offering both a diagnosis and potential treatments of our global malaise. Despite Piketty’s disciplinary background in economics, Capital and Ideology emphasizes the central importance of political and ideological change rather than changes in monetary policy or trade agreements. At his best, Piketty draws the potential dry discussion of economic systems into the complex interplay of human systems of politics, ideology, and history, and into the manifold ways these systems have taken shape throughout time and place. Perhaps most invigorating of all is the degree of faith Piketty places in human imagination and the ability to right wrongs and make active decisions to shape our collective future.

As he reminds us throughout Capital and Ideology, the accumulated wealth and power of the European elites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may have seemed intractable, and the political deference to the propertied classes total, but the century played out differently than many could have predicted at its onset. If the twenty-first century is to take such a path, global political and economic reforms will be necessary, and the range of ideological possibilities needs to be widened from those of the previous century. The crisis of the world wars and Great Depression coupled with new political mobilizations to rein in the influence of wealthy elites brought inequality to its lowest point ever. As Piketty likes to remind us, even Sweden, often bandied about as the paramount example of egalitarianism did not begin the twentieth century as such. In fact, he shows quite the opposite, where the amount of political representation in Sweden was proportionate to wealth. Nevertheless, the relative successes of social democracy were able to transform Swedish society in only a few generations. On the other hand, the relative equality of the postwar era has rapidly given way over the last few decades, showing no sign of slowing down.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Bestiary” by Mike L. Bigornia

June 2, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Bernard Capinpin

And for the first time, she felt throbbing from inside her chest.

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a wish bestows the meaning of life in this allegorical prose poem by Mike L. Bigornia, excerpted from his award-winning collection, Dark Prose. A Diwata, a divine spirit of precolonial Filipino theology, grants a wish to the World of Beings, which includes the moon, the stars, the stone, and the wind. But the river wishes for something unusual—and she might not be the only one making the request. “Bestiary” is a thoughtful modern-day creation fable about the primacy of human intimacy. 

This was the one and fateful hour. Though the Diwata be gracious, this was set to happen for the first and final time in the World of Beings.

Every being could make a wish to the Diwata but only once. Each granting of a wish lasts an entire night. So each wish should be of value; each fulfillment enough to stand the test of time.

That night, the Diwata went around the woods and listened to the wishes of the beings.

The moon made a wish and the Diwata giggled. The stone made a wish and it nodded. The wind made a wish and it puffed its cheeks. The stars made a wish and its eyes shone.

Until it saw the anxious river. “What is your wish, Beloved Child?”

“I want to know the meaning of life, Diwata. I believe I would find it once you give me breath.” The Diwata looked back, as if it had remembered something and gazed at the distance. But only for a moment. After, it smiled and turned back toward its companion.

Before the Diwata vanished, all the beings had made their wish. And before midnight, the river had now transformed to a beautiful maiden. Her complexion unblemished, fresh. Her hair flowed lavishly like waves. Under tonight’s unbelievable light from the clouds, her body seemed to glide through the woods.

What rare features, what rare sight! By her charm that surpasses the jasmine and the ilang-ilang, the cicadas resounded, the owls aroused in half-sleep, the civet made to sing. READ MORE…

Conversing on Paper: Richard Philcox on the Living Art of Translation

June 1, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

. . . by translating Maryse I am conversing with her, sometimes talking back to her, telling her fond thoughts, sometimes arguing with her.

For centuries, the process of translating literature has been likened to the art of acting, perhaps most famously by Ralph Manheim, who claimed “translators are like actors: we speak lines by someone else.” In his 2001 essay “Translating Maryse Condé: A Personal Itinerary,” translator Richard Philcox takes this idea a step further, writing that, when reading his translations of Condé’s work in front of an audience: “I become the author, and the translation becomes the text. I thus become Maryse Condé.” Certainly, as Condé’s husband and translator, Philcox has built an impressive career living and working with the Guadeloupean winner of the 2018 Alternative Nobel Prize, their personal and professional lives so enmeshed that Philcox and Condé share an email address. Yet, their divergent opinions on the importance of translation mean that Philcox has always approached his work with a surprising degree of independence. On the eve of the North American publication of Condé’s novel The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana, I corresponded with Philcox about “conversing” with Condé on paper, translating French Creole, and his long-held secret desire to become an actor.

—Sarah Timmer Harvey, May 2020

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): How did you come to translation as a career? Was it a path that you always intended to follow?

Richard Philcox (RP): I began my career as a technical translator with Kodak-Pathé, the French affiliate of Eastman Kodak, in Paris. The task of the technical translator was to translate into English the company’s annual, technical, and financial reports, instruction leaflets, and general correspondence that had to be sent back to the US headquarters in Rochester. It was when Maryse Condé’s novel Heremakhonon was published in 1976 that I launched into literary translation. I was approached by Three Continents Press in Washington DC for an English translation and used my time in the office to work on it. At the time I hadn’t much thought about the history and theory of translation and adapted much of the rules of technical translation to a literary work: i.e. absolute clarity, no ambiguity, short sentences, no time for lyricism, and nothing left to the imagination. None of this corresponded to a novel like Heremakhonon or for that matter anything literary or poetical. I think that if I had to redo the translation, it would be very different today. It was much later when I came to teach translation that I researched the many theories and history of translation and endeavored to convey my enthusiasm to the students.

STH: When and how did you first meet Maryse Condé?

RP: We met in Kaolack, Senegal in 1969 when we were both teaching at the Lycée Gaston Berger. At that time Maryse had not become a writer and had no published work to her name. I had little idea that I would become her translator. Maryse had gone through many difficult and harrowing experiences during her life in West Africa (see What is Africa to Me? Fragments of a True-to-Life Autobiography, Seagull Press) and it was she who taught me, a naïve Englishman, the politics of colonialism and its impact throughout the developing world. This helped me enormously later on while translating Frantz Fanon since he had put into theory what Maryse was writing in her novels.

STH: In 2018, Condé was awarded the New Academy Prize for Literature (the Alternative Nobel Prize) for her body of work. What has winning this prize meant for both of you?

RP: The award came to Maryse as a total surprise. Besides being happy and proud, she was relieved. For the first time, she was at peace with herself. She had been writing for many years without any special recognition, never having been awarded any of France’s prestigious prizes such as the Goncourt or the Renaudot. Now the voice of Guadeloupe, a powerful and magical voice, could be heard internationally. READ MORE…