In this month’s selection of the best in translated literature, our editors present a selection of texts that range from the intimate, to the surreal, to the furious. From Galicia, a mother writes a poetic rumination of abortion and post-partum depression. From Hong Kong, a love story unfolds between two unlikely characters as the city clamours in protest. From France, an interpreter gives a searing account of the immigration system and its many failures, in the aftermath of her own violent act.
The Dear Ones by Berta Dávila, translated from the Galician by Jacob Rogers, 3Times Rebel Press, 2023
Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager
Five years after becoming a mother, a woman chooses to have an abortion. This uneasy duality forms the premise of Galician author Berta Dávila’s intimate, probing exploration of motherhood in her memoir, The Dear Ones, now available in an excellent English translation by Jacob Rogers. “It takes nine months for a child to form in the womb and be born, but no one knows how long it takes for a mother to do the same,” Dávila muses, never pretending to know or even seek a precise answer to the unstated question, instead dedicating this short but intense novel to articulating plainly the spaces between the themes of motherhood—the ones discussed openly, and the ones that are not.
The Dear Ones earned the 2021 Premio Xerais de Novela, and Dávila’s previous work comes similarly attached to accolades. She is what one would call a writer’s writer, infusing her ideas of life with her ideas of craft. But more specifically, she is a poet. Her words are engrossing but sparing, setting her subjects up to be displayed in artful contemplation—a still-life in language. In The Dear Ones, she invites us into her process; the book opens with an acknowledgement that writing about writing can be trite, but Dávila disagrees and proceeds with uncommon success. “The paragraph originally ended there,” she shares at the end of the first chapter, “but my friend Andrés said it might be a good idea for me to clarify whether two coloured lines signify a positive or negative result.” Immediately, the reader is disarmed, transformed into a close confidant. We enter into these meditations on such equal footing with the author that the text feels transparently true, leaving readers to wonder about the line between compelling memoir and masterful fiction.
The action of The Dear Ones is contained within the span of our narrator’s recent pregnancy and the overlapping festivities and reunions that populate the final weeks of the year, but memory runs parallel throughout the story. She reflects on relationships of different sorts—with her grandmother, with her partners, with her friends, but most importantly with her son, who was born just five years earlier. “The desire for my first child came fully formed, the way we’re led to believe it should,” Dávila remembers, evoking a familiar sentiment, “I imagined that having a child would bring me closer to a platonic ideal of happiness.” As the past unfolds, however, we are confronted with an unexpected picture of motherhood, fraught with otherness and uncertainty. Dávila had become “the mother” rather than herself, a foreign identity that was difficult to inhabit, and a role that began to pose questions in her work. “I was a mother, so I should, in some way, have been a mother in my fiction, too,” she writes of the obligation that began to encroach.
Writing is not therapeutic, Dávila asserts, in contrast to what many of her friends and readers may suppose. Although it can perhaps reveal the “particular gleam” of a wound, it cannot cure. She therefore aims for precision in her account, to avoid hiding truth in poetic stylings, as she had done in the past.
To begin with, I hated the vocabulary. The word pregnancy, for example. Or baby. I couldn’t stand the word embryo, either, and I felt that the technical concepts we only have one word for always spoilt the poetry. The word abortion, of course. I’ve written about abortion and embryos without ever using the words abortion or embryo.
The Dear Ones, then, unfolds with resolute astuteness. She walks us through the discovery of her pregnancy and her choice to pursue an abortion, drawing parallels between the private fertility clinics of her previous pregnancy and the private abortion clinics in the present. Even the clinics are careful with their language, she notes, observing the different weights of words like rate and cost, or consequences and side effects.
In the time between the pregnancies, however, quieter phrases begin to emerge: duty, inadequacy, shame. The birth of her son was the beginning of something unexpected:
Whatever joy I’d felt before, not only upon my arrival at the hospital, but at any point in my life, morphed, with the baby’s birth, into a quiet estrangement. I found myself unable to share in his father’s excitement, or to register the staff’s congratulations when they were addressed to me.
All the memories following her son’s birth come veiled in this particular sadness. In the early photos of them together, she holds him by the waist, away from herself. She describes the new baby as fragile and creaturelike. Worry for his wellbeing, doubt that she is equipped to care for him, and comparisons to other mothers—good mothers—fill the pages. All her careful descriptions trace the one thing she chooses to never name directly: postpartum depression.
If there is a why at the basis of this novel, then postpartum depression is at its root. This painful condition opens up an exploration on the text, the difficulty of writing, motherhood, and all the unimaginably complicated choices that comes with it. A powerful epilogue highlights the absence of the word in the narrative:
Postpartum depression is the number one cause of death in mothers during the perinatal period in most Western countries, above hypertension and haemorrhaging. I wrote this book because I’m alive.
In The Dear Ones, Berta Dávila confronts the notions we may have about motherhood through her commitment to sharing her personal experience with unrestrained openness and sincereity. “A new mother is a place without room for controversy or regret, meant to be wholly occupied by happiness,” she says of the burden placed on expectation. Yet in choosing to speak both about the child she did have and the one she did not, she makes space for the complexity of experience, negotiating within the bonds of maternal love.
Owlish by Dorothy Tse, translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce, Graywolf Press (US) & Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK), 2023
Review by Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor
In Aristophanes’ chirping comedy, The Birds, two men leave greed-wrecked Athens, disdainful of its rhetoric and its courtrooms, to seek a legendary king that has transformed into a hoopoe. When they find the grand bird, his regaling of peaceful avian life inspires the duo to make plans for a city in the skies—a utopic capital that would represent all the fantasies of the wingless when they look upward. This city, to be named “Cloudcuckooland,” is one carved out of impossibility and assembled by the sharp tools of imagination, a city holding as much might as it does pleasure. As such, the only plot of space where it can be built is the realm of Chaos—a once-great territory now diminished to the small strip of open air that shelters beneath heaven and suspends above earth, home to the birds.
Dorothy Tse’s Hong Kong novel, Owlish, shares certain qualities with this ancient piece. A bird-like creature that propels fantasy forward, a cacophony of empire in the background, and a city mapped over by desire. Taking place within an alternative-universe Hong Kong that seems to be bisected into two realms of light and dark, reality and dreams, the coastal city is given the name of Nevers:
. . . located to the south of Ksana. Nevers had been built up by the kingdom of Valeria and ruled by her for over a hundred years. . .
It takes very little deduction to figure that Ksana is China and Valeria is Britain, and the first chapter lays the background of this elaborate triangulation—describing the British colonisation, the mainland refugees fleeing from the Civil War, the 1997 handover, and the peninsula’s own diffused population that varies from the homegrown to the imported, drifting in the liminal space between nations. Beyond laying down Hong Kong’s urban texture, however, Tse does not dwell on either the city’s tortured transition or its boiling political temperature. She conjures instead a lurid, magic-driven, symbol-packed affair between a myopic academic, Professor Q, and Aliss, a music-box ballerina—giving the novel’s rule over to that capricious empress: fantasy.
Written with a full view on the Umbrella Movement, Owlish is very much a political novel. But as Tse divulges in the afterword, this story had been in her mind for over a decade, and in that time, Hong Kong’s many tumults shook its characters and its sceneries, and every shudder that ran through the metropolis, one imagines also ran through Tse’s mind, taking the narrative from the front pages into the mind’s hidden alleyways, shadowy doorframes, and dreamscapes. The external wildness is regulated into the labyrinth of internal wildness; in the passageway between what is witnessed and what is seen, a thousand transformations take place. I felt distinctly this sense of a running-wild imagination, moved by all that is going on beyond it, while reading Owlish—a prismatic book that, depending on the page, refracts a vision that is either charming, miserable, poetic, or insane.
Professor Q is a mid-level teacher who has failed to gain tenure twice. Married to Maria, an elegant woman with whom he has never been intimate, he insulates himself against sexual frustration with a rich dream life, in which his wife occasionally stars (though always in a virginal, domestic role), but more often features a rotating cast of dolls, animated to extreme erotic functionality. At an auction house, he encounters Aliss, a human-sized ballerina who sleeps in a music box, and wins her in an act of almost divine intervention. He falls in love with her porcelain figure, described almost sickeningly with “so many mouths” (including the one between her legs). Not knowing how to handle his first foray into adultery, he consults an old friend, the titular Owlish, who then heaves his full support into building the two a lovenest. A small church on an abandoned island is cleared of its sacraments and remodelled into a home, in which Q’s belongings and Aliss is instated, and the double life begins.
Though the professor continues to dutifully wander through his daily responsibilities, he is only waiting to come alive during the nights with Aliss—“playing music to her, reciting poetry to her, or sitting with her reading all those novels and philosophical tomes.” In a series of metamorphoses familiar to any of us who have experienced the radical expansions that come with falling in love, the mediocre academic turns into a grand philosopher and rhetorician in his captive audience’s presence:
He began, as though possessed, to refute and expand on great philosophical and academic debates, seeking to express his views on love, time, consciousness, desire, existence, and as yet unnamed new fields of thought. . . Never had his mind been so sharp! Never had his opinions been so incisive and thought provoking! . . . This was his ticket to greatness.
He becomes brilliant, romantic, a poet bursting with new intuitions on how to lead an old language to greatness. He is brave, almost insolent, he is a man in full prowess of his intellectual and sexual powers. Led by the soft hand of fantasy to a place where his full potentials can finally be unleashed, he ascends. From the outside, it reads as bizarre, even pitiable: an ordinary man seduced by a doll into delusions of grandeur. But so often, that is what love does: it makes us a stranger to others, taking us closer to our dream-selves.
Elucidating the historical context of The Birds—which some insist has no meaning beyond delightful absurdity—the classicist William Arrowsmith describes the failed Sicilian Expedition of the Peloponnesian War, which ended in an obliterative defeat of Athens. He determines that Cloudcuckooland is nothing but a “fantasy-mirror of Athenians, sent soaring into world conquest by erotic politics. . . created by the sheer power of speech.” He describes that in fifth-century Athens, “words have such power to create not only political fantasy. . . but fantasy politics. . .” This fantasy politics is equally disastrous and seductive; one can sweep up the hearts of millions by projecting a singular vision of greatness, leading to the thoughtless advance of an annihilating agenda. But within the ancient theatre, one was able diffuse this allure by carrying fantasy politics to its most absurd end, using the strategy of drama to project a ridiculous, distorted future.
When one tries to diffuse the wrought relations between Hong Kong, the West, and China, fantasy can be a useful entryway. The western fantasy of Hong Kong as a capitalist stronghold in East Asia, the Chinese fantasy of Hong Kong as a long-lost sibling returning prodigally home, and Hong Kong’s own fantasy of what Xi Xi coined as the floating city, held in limbo with its tensions at a simmer. The fine line between fantasy and desire, here, is that desire aims to take action with reality, to manipulate it or nudge it towards ecstatic fulfilment, but fantasy simply conjures a new world—one that may or may not be compatible with the existing one. A perfect, inconceivably isolated universe of peace, built in the kingdom of chaos but sheltered from everything that may disturb its singular pleasure, protected by the illusory moat of ignorance, of dreams.
All throughout Professor Q’s love affair, we are given hints of all that is going on beyond it. A harmless prank involving the switch of a prestigious portrait with a much ruder, surreal work sets off tremors of hostility. Students stop showing up at lectures, being occupied instead by protest. Police raids and crackdowns are glimpsed at, subtly parallel to the narrative line. Yet, the professor remains clueless, utterly obsessed with Aliss—who, by the way, comes to life for a while. One senses that in the metamorphosing topography of Nevers, there are millions and millions of fantasies, of dream lives, pushing against one another and at the seams of reality. The city is filled to the brims with wanting, with people working ceaselessly to make the world they want to live in. Reality is almost incapable of holding it.
Tse, then, does not treat her narrative as a story, but more of a teetering platter of events, ideas, and visions. The tone veers from naïve, to solemn, to comic—giving away, perhaps, that it was written over a long duration of time. Despite this occasionally jarring melange, the translation is to be commended, as Natascha Bruce has found very satisfying solutions to the many puzzles that the original poses: even the title, Owlish, has a brilliant rendering—the original title refers to a 鹰头猫, which essentially plays with the word in Chinese for “owl”, turning a “cat-headed hawk” into a “hawk-headed cat”. Though some of the more lyric or florid passages have come out somewhat stripped on the English end, the text largely preserves Tse’s illusory prose. Most notably, the thrilling undercurrent that runs throughout the entire novel never dissipates. Through this stained-glass story of Professor Q and Aliss, one never loses sight of the backgrounded demonstrations, of the city in pieces.
There are certain texts that seem at rest on the page; they tell what they have to tell assuredly, determinedly. Owlish is different. It feels alive, like it is still being written—which seems less strange when you consider that Hong Kong, in its own way, is too an unfinished manuscript, a fury of voices.
Eileen Chang, who herself left China after the Communist takeover, once wrote: “I think that people are more straightforward and unguarded in love than they are in war or revolution.” In fantasy, when we are truly given the delimited space to imagine what it is we want, we are shaping the contours of what we think we deserve. There is no sacrifice in fantasy—and no guilt. We allow ourselves the liberty to want rapaciously, to want in a way the world does not allow, to alter the schematics of logic and the linearity of time. And this is how fantasy separates a self from the masses—by brute honesty. Because despite all of it being make-believe, there is no deception there. Fantasy is the container of our most private humiliations, our most licentious thoughts, and also our most direct response to the power structures that organise our existence. As much as it teaches us about ourselves, it also hints as to what we have been taught to want. We fantasize of power when we are downtrodden, when we are weak. We fantasize about control in the midst of collapse. And though a fantasy politics is indeed dangerous—because politics require a radical openness to the vast variety of futures, and fantasy is blind to anything but itself—if one can separate the fantasy from the politics, allowing each to occupy its own realm and instruct with its separate knowledge. . . Well, that’s how you bring yourself into the unknown future, intact.
As I read through Owlish, I was frustrated with Professor Q, following his flippant indulgences and ignoring everything else, tunnelling ever-inward. I read one line after another, impatient at his inane gestures, his utter obliviousness. But when his world is eventually, inevitably shattered, I could not help but feel despondent at the system that dismantled it: a merciless reality that cannot bear to entertain even a frivolous, selfish dream.
Down With the Poor! by Shumona Sinha, translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan, Deep Vellum, 2023
Review by Rachel Stanyon, Senior Copy Editor
In Shumona Sinha’s Down with the Poor!, we spend a night inside the heavy thoughts of an imprisoned woman who has just assaulted a fellow immigrant, following as she tries to untangle the events and motivations that have brought her to this cell. Our unnamed narrator is a “language gymnast” who works as an interpreter in “two speech factories”—an asylum seekers’ office and a courtroom—on the outskirts of what we assume to be Paris, acting as a bridge between petitioners and their interrogators, lawyers, and judges. Occupying this liminal position, she seems to feel permanently peripheral and displaced.
In a text equally full of beautiful metaphor and crushingly endless negative constructions, we find out much more about what she is not than what she is. We do not learn her name. She has left a boyfriend, but we don’t know why. She once had another career, but we don’t know what: “It was a year of break-ups, of scarcity, of a lack of everything. I was living in a state of exasperation and confusion.” She remains an outsider to broader French society (“I could spend my entire life here and never belong in this country”), but despite her mother tongue and skin color (“. . . of clay, which would always connect me to the man I attacked”), she is also viewed suspiciously by those for whom she translates—who, when threatened, accuse her of not really speaking their language. Even her family remains distanced; in episodes that slide in and out of dream and memory, she describes an inability to connect with or even love the parents she has left in India—perhaps because “to love is to understand,” and she fears she no longer does either.
These qualities could draw her to her fellow interpreters—most of whom have also come to the job with histories of migration—and she does often speak of them as a collective, a troupe of linguists, suggesting a sense of belonging mostly absent from her relationships. However, she remains doggedly unlike them: “Some interpreters couldn’t have cared less about what they were hearing and translated without emotion. They talked to their friends, gossiped, smoked with the lawyers in front of the big bay windows at the entrance. Cigarettes left a bitter taste in my mouth and the cold wind slapped me.” Her insistence on remaining neutral, which might seem counterintuitive given her inability to stop caring, and her literary nature—which causes her colleagues to suspect her education and wealth—seem to set her apart.
The narrator appears in many ways to be the archetypal educated immigrant, but to suggest a reductionist reading of the highly complex and ambiguous perspective Sinha has authored would be to fall into the trap of those who, like the immigration system itself, place people into neat boxes. Beyond being merely caught between two worlds, the narrator seems overwhelmed by the assumptions and expectations of others, which she often triumphantly rejects. Exhausted as she is by the contortions required of the “language jugglers” to impassively relay stories that are often repetitive, jumbled, and largely invented, she will not give into one lawyer’s exhortation “not to translate the hesitations and muttering, the contradictory statements of her clients, only the essential, which conformed to her own arguments, smooth sentences, as brilliant as the truth”. In other words, she forfeits confected clarity for reality. Like the ideal translator, she aims to faithfully re-present what her clients say, but she baulks at making representations for them, and does not wish to be seen to represent them. In delivering their stories—within the interrogation rooms as on the page—she must contend with all the concomitant complexities of politics and identity, of which she is painfully self-aware: “. . . after all, who am I to talk about them? I am stealing their stories. I sublimate them in poverty and ugliness. I am a narco-pirate. I am trying to get high.”
As such, the narrator exhibits the wide range of human contradiction. Despite her obvious compassion for those less fortunate, she sometimes articulates typically xenophobic tropes, describing her (mostly male) clients as all looking alike; using dehumanising or animalistic language to describe the petitioners; and unveiling the scripted lies that reveal most of them to be economic migrants rather than refugees. In Down With the Poor!, those who actually manage to enter France’s immigration system are fraudsters by rule, not the exception. Along this line, Sinha constantly skewers the reader’s expectations of what would be politically correct to write: the narration is full of explicit references to people’s skin colour or the frizz of their hair; poverty comes with a “suffocating stench”; and her protagonist is frequently critical of the petitioners—both because they themselves are often conservative and bigoted, and because their lies show them to be less deserving of asylum than those who are unable to seek it:
. . . the poor become poorer, their lands swallowed by the thousand tongues of Kali, their lands surge up from the bottom of the bay, like the backs of giant turtles, the poor sell vegetables, spinach and radishes, die where they are, the militants who are right and those who aren’t lash out where they are, kill each other, men fall like banana trees while small merchants sell their shops and pay the smuggler, pay for the journey, pay for the story, land in the European city, shout and cry and demand and plead and end up insulting the one who looks like them but who betrays them.
Yet, it would be impossible for this novel to be co-opted by the loud anti-immigrant movement that would have us shut our borders to “genuine” refugees, in case they might be “mere” economic migrants. Overarchingly, this novel suggests that a desire for a better life is an absolute and inextricable element of human nature—even if not protected by the supposedly all-encompassing umbrella of “human rights”. As the narrator acerbically explains: “Human rights do not mean the right to escape poverty. . . So they had to hide, forget, unlearn the truth and invent another one.” The system seems rarely capable of even getting at the truth it seeks—and when it does, it seems not to help. In focusing on the individual, the bureaucracy disregards their actual needs and, moreover, leaves the broader political and social systems that necessitate migration, along with the “dealers of men” who profit from trafficking “the slaves of the new millennium”, completely immune to interrogation.
The narrator’s language—translated into wonderfully poetic and at times beautifully idiosyncratic English prose by Teresa Lavender Fagan—and her ultimate explosive actions are harsh and raw—not because she hates the people she describes, but, perhaps, because she has “lost [her] old map. And [her] compass with it.” As she says in the very first words of the novel, she is left “weary and defeated”: by expectations of what it means to be a woman and a foreigner; by the migration system; by her disillusionment with “the theater of charity”; by the capitalist modern world from which she feels alienated; and by the tensions between her generalisable circumstances and ultimately singular experiences. To voice others’ stories, the narrator says, “My role was to erase myself,” and the increasingly hostile world around her leads her to deeply internalize this training, seeking erasure not only in her job but in anonymous sexual encounters, and in her dreams and fantasies. “Nothingness,” she proclaims, “is a magnificent festival.”
But in effacing herself to act as a vessel for others, she is forced to confront elements of her culture and experience that she has sublimated: “The weary slurring of their voices penetrated my summer days, slow and lazy, and everything blended together and was mixed in my head, which for a long time had been able to erase the memory of poverty.” Instead of offering the escape she longs for, the façade of impassivity and the almost masochistic surrender to silence and erasure increasingly oppress the narrator, until we reach a point of rupture that draws on both French belles-lettres (the novel’s title and climax are a reference to Baudelaire’s poem “Assomons les pauvres!”) and Hindu tradition (the goddess Kali hangs like a spectre over the action), and yet, ultimately, belongs to neither.
So often, we are asked to loudly proclaim who and what we are, framed through a series of endless binaries: the self and the other, truth and lies, citizen and non-citizen, rich or poor, refugee or fraud, conservative or progressive, cruel or kind, for or against. But what happens, Down with the Poor! seems to ask, when we realize that this tidy binary system is incapable of supporting or even describing the complex reality of experience, and these simple distinctions collapse? What happens when we are asked to occupy two of these artificially constructed opposites simultaneously, holding ourselves aloft in a neutrality as impossible as uncomplicated identification? Well, you might just end up smashing a wine bottle over a stranger’s head.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog:
- What’s New in Translation: May 2023
- What’s New in Translation: April 2023
- What’s New in Translation: March 2023