Book Club

Every Word Translucent: Julia Sanches on Translating Eva Baltasar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: Mammoth by Eva Baltasar

August 29, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Hilary Ilkay

The spirit of the zoo has entered her bedroom: sex without pleasure, purely for the sake of regeneration, a blind but demanding impulse.

In the latest from lauded Catalan author Eva Baltasar, an animal desire is on the rise. Tired of the city, her studies, and the vacuity of contemporary life, the young protagonist of Mammoth seeks out a supposedly simpler provincial existence, and is willing to do anything to get there. Through both physical and psychological extremes, Baltasar’s heightened portrait is both shocking and absorbing, reflecting the chaos of an ego that vibrates with desire and spirals against expectation. The prose shivers with sensuality as this journey inward and outward carves its remarkable procession—the rampage of an unencumbered self, raging against the presumptions of civilised life.

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

Mammoth by Eva Baltasar, translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches, And Other Stories, 2024

Following on the heels of the 2023 Booker-shortlisted Boulder, Eva Baltasar’s latest novel, Mammoth, seizes the reader in a vice grip from the opening page and doesn’t relent even after its final words; the ending, in fact, delivers the sharpest blow of all. The narrative is a raw and visceral exploration of a young woman who shatters the routine of her daily life, learning to dwell among the shards of a new form of existence. Using a rich vocabulary of metaphors and similes, Baltasar creates a fictional space that is confrontational, explosive, and evocative, demonstrating her masterful ability to delve into the psyches of queer women who find themselves on the fringes, and Julia Sanches’s translation from the Catalan deftly captures the novel’s unique tone and voice.

Through its title, Baltasar thematically links Mammoth to her other two novels translated into English, Permafrost and Boulder: all three suggest weight, immovability. The unnamed protagonist in Mammoth is twenty-four years old and dissatisfied with her life, especially her research job at a university, which involves interviewing residents in nursing homes. “I hated my tool,” she reflects, “the specialist axe I used to cut up emotions and memories, the experience and suffering of those people.” This threat of dehumanization threads its way through the prose, hovering beneath the surface of every encounter. It’s telling that on the first page, the narrator reveals that her bedroom window faces a zoo, establishing a proximity to an animalistic wildness that has been broken and contained, on display for public consumption and enjoyment—a metaphor for her perception of her own existence. Returning to the zoo later, she thinks, “The animals didn’t live there, they rotted there—just like the visitors and no more nor less than the zookeepers.” READ MORE…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada

July 31, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan and Xiao Yue Shan

Tawada’s music-prose is a testament to the spirit of collaboration. . .

Yoko Tawada’s latest novel, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, presents us with the anatomy of a mind consumed by passion for a dead poet’s oeuvre. Ostensibly narrating the tale of a literary scholar mired in pandemic-era depression, the text expands into a reflection on various forms of friendship—and, one might venture, redemption—that might inhere between readers. At the same time, Tawada deftly traverses voice and perspective to meditate on language as pastiche, ventriloquizing another’s words within the space of one’s own consciousness. With this mysterious work, the German-Japanese author furthers her interest in questions of alienation and affinity across interpersonal, cultural, and temporal realms—polyvocal inheritances that are evocatively staged in Susan Bernofsky’s layered translation from the German. To enact and pay tribute to Tawada’s dialogic style through the spirit of collaboration, Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan and Assistant Managing Editor Alex Tan decided—for the first time in the Asymptote Book Club’s history—to co-write this following review.

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

Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky, New Directions (US) and Dialogue Books (UK), 2024

Paul Celan’s is a poetry riddled with hiatus and dislocation. Words are condensed into weighty German compounds or displaced into shreds, as if in a dream; adverbs are turned into nouns, and pronouns and prefixes are broken off, left stranded on the blank page. In the shadow of the Holocaust, his language concurrently reached for and estranged the singularity of experience, resulting in a body of work that yearns for nothing so much as silence—for that which writing itself would annul: something “absolutely untouched by language,” in philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s phrase. Poetry, as gesture, becomes nothing but the contour of an intention to speak, against which presence is felt only as a silhouette.

For the writer Yoko Tawada, Celan’s poems are less storehouses than “openings,” thresholds onto the inexpressible. What she gravitates toward, in the compact verse, is everything that resists and goes beyond the flatly nationalistic, the “typically German.” In her own literary production, she toggles adroitly between German and Japanese, writing across the two; her earlier novel The Naked Eye, for instance, was originally composed in both languages. Not only does Tawada seek unanticipated constellations of affinity with the foreign, she also refutes the common instinct to read literary texts for ethnographic value, consistently underscoring the mutability of selfhood, its unfixed boundaries.

Her latest novel, the pandemic-inflected Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, draws on the surrealist toolbox to sketch a solipsistic, obsessive mind haunted by Celan’s turns of phrase, floating through the ghostly streets of Berlin. Imprisoned in alienation and “intermission-loneliness,” he is known to us initially as “the patient,” his identity tethered to an unspecified malady. His name Patrik arrives almost as an afterthought several pages in, amid scrambled reflections on the pronouns with which he designates himself in his interior soliloquies. In his vacillations between the first person and third person, he is perhaps heart-sick, struggling to survive and bear with the burden of himself: “Opening hurts. Closing brings comfort.” READ MORE…

The Languages and Literatures at Play in Hong Kong: Jennifer Feeley on Translating Lau Yee-Wa’s Tongueless

July 25, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

I love the idea of translating something that people say is not translatable, because everything is translatable.

Jennifer Feeley is the Anglophone voice of renowned Hong Kong writers such as Xi Xi 西西, Wong Yi 黃怡, and Lau Yee-Wa 劉綺華—whose thrilling and chilling Tongueless is our Book Club selection for June 2024. Set in a vividly multilingual Hong Kong, Tongueless is a heartrending horror novel about the human face of language disappearance, and what it means when we no longer have the words to speak to one another. Despite the contemporary social and political alienation depicted in this vivid novel, Sinophone Hong Kong literature is flourishing in English, German, Italian, and other European languages, testifying to the diversity and dynamism of the Hong Kong literary scene. Asymptote is grateful to Jennifer Feeley for her humour as she shares the process of translating Tongueless; her generosity in recounting the complex heritage of literary Chinese(s); and her commitment to championing stories from Hong Kong for global 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 USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): How did your interest in Hong Kong literature arise?

Jennifer Feeley (JF): In the summer of 2005, I attended a poetry conference in Beijing, where I met the Hong Kong writer and scholar Leung Ping-kwan 梁秉鈞, also known as Yasi/ Yesi 也斯, or PK Leung. When PK came back from his trip to the mainland, he spent an entire day showing me around, and we talked a lot about Hong Kong poetry.

He recommended the work of Yau Ching 游靜—who’s also a filmmaker—and suggested that I also take a look at her film Ho Yuk 好郁 (Let’s Love Hong Kong), one of the earliest lesbian films from Hong Kong. Later in my graduate school career, an essay I wrote on Yau Ching’s poetry became my first academic publication. That was when I really started to consider Hong Kong literature—particularly poetry—and its genealogy. How do we define and categorise Hong Kong poetry? Can we do it by language?

As an academic at the University of Iowa, I taught Hong Kong cinema and literature, and began to write about Hong Kong film and research musical films from the 1960s. As I noted that a significant amount of Hong Kong literature had yet to be translated into English, I became increasingly frustrated. Even when translations existed, many were not available outside Hong Kong. For instance, I wanted to teach Eva Hung’s translation of Xi Xi’s My City《我城》, which was published by Renditions in Hong Kong in 1993, but the bookstore was unable to order it. I could only teach part of the novel through PDF versions of my copy, due to copyright restrictions.

When I finally bought a copy of Xi Xi’s Selected Poems, I fell in love with her work: her language was such a challenge. Purely for fun, I began to translate them. Shortly after, I was approached by an editor from Zephyr Press, who invited me to translate a book by an excellent Mainland Chinese poet. I liked this poet, but I was so in love with Xi Xi’s poetry that I decided to take a risk. I translated a sample of her work, and they obtained the rights to publish it. READ MORE…

Announcing our June Book Club selection: Tongueless by Lau Yee-Wa

June 27, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

Tongueless . . . [mirrors] Hong Kong’s plurality and [elucidates] the darkening, authoritarian clarity of Hong Kong’s future.

Lau Yee-Wa’s Tongueless was published before the 2019 pro-democracy protests that saw two million people take to the streets in Hong Kong, but its prescient atmosphere of psychological horror and brilliantly embedded language politics anticipated the curtailing of Hong Kong’s linguistic and social liberties after 2020. Demonstrating Lau’s percipience and sensitivity, Tongueless is a timely and vital addition to the growing corpus of Hongkongese literature available in English. Jennifer Feeley’s masterful translation follows in her track record of translating titles from Hong Kong—most recently Xi Xi’s Mourning a Breast (New York Review Books, 2024), for which she was awarded a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts.

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

Tongueless by Lau Yee-Wa, translated from the Chinese by Jennifer Feeley, Feminist Press (US) and Serpent’s Tail (UK), 2024

Allegory depends on wordplay, and Tongueless starts with its title. The two ideographs in the original Chinese title, 《失語》, stand respectively for ‘loss’ and ‘language’. Together, they can both denote aphasia, a form of brain damage that hampers speech, as well as a Chinese expression that refers to a ‘slip of the tongue’. In Jennifer Feeley’s acerbic translation of this novel by Lau Yee-Wa 劉綺華—originally published in 2019 in what the copyright page calls ‘Complex Chinese’—《失語》becomes Tongueless. Lau’s psychological story of horror and loneliness in Hong Kong transfigures the metaphorical resonance of tonguelessness—losing one’s language, or mother-tongue—into a near-literal embodiment of mutilation and physical deprivation, a bloody allegory for the silencing and violence that Lau charts through the interpersonal and institutional politics of contemporary Hong Kong society.

READ MORE…

The Story as Experience: Oonagh Stransky and Marla Moffa on Eugenio Montale’s Butterfly of Dinard

June 20, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

[A]s ephemeral, beautiful, and delicate as these stories are, they are firmly grounded in history. . .

In Butterfly of Dinard, the great poet Eugenio Montale leads the reader up to numinous looking points along the towers of everyday experience, pointing us towards an innate sublimity and magic—how individual vision and experience can strike pedestrian sceneries with an extraordinary intensity of meaning. Originally published as columns in the Corriere della Sera, fifty of these stories have been translated with extraordinary care and finesse by Marla Moffa and Oonagh Stransky, and in this interview, they speak to us about the affinity between Montale’s prose and poetry, the revelations of translation, and how such stories travel from the page into personal realities, deepening and celebrating the spaces, people, and objects that—if looked at closely—“reveal a great truth.”

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

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): I wanted to start with asking you both about the crossings between Montale’s poems and his prose works. What do both of you consider Butterfly of Dinard to be saying to us on its own? Is there an independent author to be found, or should we read his prose as dialogic with his poetry?

Marla Moffa (MM): I would say that there are various symbols in the poems that we can also find in the stories. Considering that he wrote Butterfly of Dinard when he was in his fifties—after the two main volumes of poetry, Cuttlefish Bones and The Occasions, and concurrently with The Storm and Other Things—it’s as if he’s regrouping in these stories everything that we find in the poems as well.

For example, as Jonathan Galassi points out in the introduction, Montale speaks about the eels in the story “The Best Is Yet to Come,” and just at the mention of the word eel on the menu for the protagonist, the narrator has this flashback, because the eels represented something special in his youth. There’s also the poem “L’anguilla / The Eel” in Montale’s poetry, which is one of his most important poems. It’s interesting to be able to read the two pieces in parallel, but at the same time, I feel like the stories are independent. If you don’t know his poetry, and you just read Butterfly of Dinard, you can still enter into Montale’s world. He even says himself that if one wants to know his story, that this is the book to read, because it is quite autobiographical.

Oonagh Stransky (OS): I agree with what Marla said, and the only thing I would add is that one of the things that appeals to me most about these stories is really the element of humour—the self-deprecating humour and irony. As in his poetry, there are moments of existential crisis, of gaps and sudden shocks, but there is also a delight in life, and a delightfulness that he attributes to so many different things. The nostalgia towards his past is one aspect of it, but I also like how he talks about himself—how he describes this figure, who may represent himself, as bumbling and Chaplin-esque, as Galassi calls it. It opens up new windows onto Montale the man, and who this very mysterious and obscure Nobel-winning poet was. Here we see him as a man in slippers, with a turban on his head, holding a rug up to scare away a bat—all those things are elements that allow the reader to feel more familiar with him. READ MORE…

Announcing Our May Book Club Selection: Butterfly of Dinard by Eugenio Montale

May 30, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

These stories are a spatial message; they tell of living amongst, and in this way, they belong to everyone.

In the fifty short stories that make up Butterfly of Dinard, the great lyric poet Eugenio Montale turns to prose to inscribe the world that moves the psyche to its most extraordinary heights. As one of the most inviting additions to a remarkable oeuvre, the collection moves from mystery to comedy, from reminiscence to fantasy, taking the reader on excursions and immersions, introducing an Italy grasped in historical and personal material alike. The Montale admirer will find motifs that correspond with his most famed poems, and anyone new to the writer will find an assured, perceptive voice, dedicated to documenting the most curious and complex intersections of our social reality. Reissued now by New York Review Books in an updated translation from Oonagh Stransky and Marla Moffa, and with an illuminating introduction by Jonathan Galassi, we are delighted to introduce Butterfly of Dinard as our Book Club selection for the month.

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

Butterfly of Dinard by Eugenio Montale, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky and Marla Moffa, New York Review Books, 2024

After the walkman came into common use, a reporter in the Nouvel Observateur did a self-directed study on its effects, going around and asking its users if they considered themselves psychotic or schizophrenic. Clearly, the world of music had grown a new frontier. There would be communal listening, through the radio or some other form of public broadcasting, and solo listening; one could have a personal sonic timeline, running separately—though parallel—with the rest of the world’s sounds. Since then, we’ve only found new and improved ways to insulate ourselves from the social environment, so when a friend and I took a rental car around Los Angeles a month ago, I hadn’t heard the radio in probably a decade. When we turned it on, running through station after station, I catalogued the brief soundbites of the local airwaves—jockey banter, garbled trap, Christian rock, upbeat grupera. That frenetic soundscape accordioned over the brushed hills and highway traffic, and we synced to it, suddenly adopted into the city’s musical timestream as insiders. After a little while, we stopped at a light, and I looked to the car beside me. I couldn’t hear what the driver was listening to, but the taps of his fingers hit the exact same beats as those from our radio.

Music, and its innate potential for disrupting separation, was on my mind while reading Eugenio Monatle’s Butterfly of Dinard, a collection of prose pieces first published in the daily Corriere della Sera. The newspaper, similar to the radio, is a halfway-abandoned arena of public consciousness—a gathering place where people can experience the same thing at relatively the same time, and be joined, if not in opinion, then in engagement. But the days in which radically dissonant lives and perspectives could be unified via song or text are largely gone; though the cultural artifacts themselves are more proliferate than ever, we meet them on terms that are ever more individualised, ever more catered to the psychic patterns that we build, alone. Passing through Montale’s slice-of-life writings, some tell stories of the past, some follow the mania of dreams, but running through all of them is a sense that they are being told in the textual version of the town square—meant for all to hear, no matter if you are sat in the audience or just passing through. These stories are a spatial message; they tell of living amongst, and in this way, they belong to everyone. READ MORE…

Poetic Justice: Will Firth on Translating Andrej Nikolaidis’ Anomaly

May 23, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

Oh, plans. I can't make plans. I'm a translator.

The apocalypse has always been a popular topic in literature, but Andrej Nikolaidis’ Anomaly is no regular walk around the end of the world. From one of the Balkans’ most fearless voices, the last day of humanity sees a complete collapse of the timeline as everything that has ever happened begins to occur at once. All sins rise to the surface, the dead return to testify, and the Devil himself makes wry commentary on all the fluff and frivolity we use to conceal our deepest secrets. Incisive, indicting, but not without compassion, Anomaly brilliantly exhibits the vital and intrepid nature of Nikolaidis’ work, which, coupled with a poetically lucid style and explosive intelligence, provoke readers to consider our world’s most central and incendiary contradictions. As our Book Club selection for the month of April, we had the opportunity to talk to Will Firth, the translator of Anomaly, about his remarkable work in bringing Nikolaidis’ writing to English, and what it means to be both translator and advocate.

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

Sofija Popovska (SP): Anomaly isn’t the first novel by Andrej Nikolaidis that you’ve translated, could you tell me more about how you two met and began to collaborate?

Will Firth (WF): I was first drawn to Andrej’s polished prose, coupled with his intelligent black humor—or cynicism as some would call it, and the remarkable imagery that he uses in all of his books. It’s basically the dense, intense intellectual challenge of his writing that I really like.

I didn’t actually meet him until 2012; I had translated his first novel, The Coming, and we had a launch event in London, at the now defunct Europe House. It’s a typical situation, actually; I don’t always meet authors before I translate their books, but I’m in touch with them while I’m in the process of translating, and several have become friends, which is a nice spin-off.

SP: You mentioned in an email to me that Andrej’s written about the apocalypse a lot, and this isn’t the first apocalypse-themed book he’s written. Has he said anything about why he loves this theme so much? And is Anomaly sort of a step—or a conclusion—in his literary project?

WF: Well, I don’t actually know what his greater literary project is. I’m not sure what he has in mind for the next few years and decades, but he certainly is fascinated by this idea of the apocalypse. In a text that I’ve quoted in various places, he calls himself an apocalyptist. He really feels it as a part of his existence: that the world we live in is doomed, in a way, and that better things, greater things, different things can arise from that.

But he’s playing with this idea all the time in his different books, and approaching the topic of the apocalypse from different angles. I’m not really sure why he’s so fixed on it, but it probably has a bit to do with his intellectual interests and the writers he’s into—Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, the post-Marxist, fairly radical writers.

But his personal experience of having to flee from Sarajevo in 1992 as a youth was certainly scary, if not traumatic. Add to that the experience of war, of systemic change, of being uprooted, being a refugee—and all sorts of other things. I mean, think of the massive earthquakes that the whole Balkan region has experienced: Montenegro in 1979, and Macedonia in 1963. Those are things that create a sense of insecurity, a sense that this world is dangerous and has its limitations, and we could be dead tomorrow. Those feelings perhaps flow into his interest in the apocalypse. READ MORE…

Announcing our April Book Club Selection: Anomaly by Andrej Nikolaidis

April 29, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

Nikolaidis’ very literal rendition of the Book of Revelation is unflinching, darkly humorous, and relentless in its pursuit. . .

In Andrej Nikolaidis’ Anomaly, no one is safe. Not only is the world ending, but everything is being unearthed up along with it—every confidence, every disgrace, every deception. With his signature blend of rapturous imagery and indomitable intellect, Nikolaidis forces humanity to face its horrors while still allowing us some potential for redemption, a characteristically penetrating move for an author who is also an outspoken activist against war and corruption. Just last month, Nikolaidis faced intimidation and public harassment for his bold political work in Montenegro, underlining the necessity and urgency of his dissent. We are proud to announce this exemplary title as our Book Club title for the month. It’s a hell of a ride, literally.

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

Anomaly by Andrej Nikolaidis, translated from the Montenegrin by Will Firth, Peirene Press, 2024

I am an Apocalyptist. I believe that Good will win out in the end, and when it does, the world as we know it will be abolished—it will no longer exist. So, once that world is gone, Good will prevail. If the concept of the Apocalypse isn’t the ultimate irony, I don’t know what is.

—Andrej Nikolaidis

Andrej Nikolaidis’ Anomaly, published in Will Firth’s translation, begins with a verdict: “The human race owes its history, as well as its future, to the fact that we’ve always been able to turn our backsides to the graves of those we maltreated, and then seek absolution.” Though this has been the case for millennia, the novel insists that human censorship will not be able to preserve its euphemized retellings for much longer. After a freak incident involving “a machine that would give each of us . . . all of the possible scenarios and outcomes of our lives”, past and present begin to merge: a mammoth falls and crushes a man brooding on a quay in Chile; a cruise ship collides with three women contemplating shop windows on Ferhadija Street; a man haunted by an incestuous affair is killed by a cannonball fired in 1805 by Napoleon’s fleet, while praying in the Kotor Cathedral. The truth of never-ending human cruelty—“one drop” of which is “enough to destroy the world”—finally refuses the revisionism afforded to us by the present, and becomes unignorable by physically unfolding everywhere, all at once. Nikolaidis’ very literal rendition of the Book of Revelation is unflinching, darkly humorous, and relentless in its pursuit of the uncomfortable details we tend to suppress.

In 1992, Nikolaidis and his parents fled to Montenegro from his native Sarajevo to escape the mounting ethnic strife that would soon erupt into the Bosnian War; the author, then, is no stranger to the tumultuous experiences at the core of Anomaly. Decidedly anti-war and anti-nationalist, Nikolaidis is also fearless in voicing his views. When his 2006 novel, Sin, was awarded the 2011 European Union Prize of Literature, the announcement detailed how his public defense of “victims of police torture. . . resulted in his receiving many threats, including a death threat during a live radio appearance”. His insistence on “freedom of speech [as] the basis of freedom” is obvious in his literary and journalistic work—and the way he implements this freedom is equally noteworthy. READ MORE…

Scream of Freedom: Samar Yazbek and Leri Price on Where the Wind Calls Home

March 21, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Alex Tan

I love the world in Arabic, so I started to write it as my personal space.

Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home is a poetic rumination that shifts through the land of the dead and of the living, between thinking and intuiting, and from the vast destructions of war to its intimate, embodied experience. In taking us to the “other” side—that of the military—in Syria’s unsparing civil war, Yazbek offers a method of understanding pain’s blind immensity, as well as the metaphysical phenomenon of life at the precipice of death. With the incredible work of translator Leri Price, whom Yazbek calls here her “voice in English”, Where the Wind Calls Home arrives to us with all the weight of contemporary tragedy, and all the light of a spiritual encounter. Here, Yazbek and Price speak to us on the recurring motifs of the text, the fluidity of the prose, and how writing can reveal to us our own secrets.

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

Alex Tan (AT): Samar, in your previous novel, Planet of Clay, we follow the perspective of a mute girl from Damascus, caught in the middle of the Syrian Civil War. For Where the Wind Calls Home, why did you select a dying soldier as your protagonist?

Samar Yazbek (SY): First of all, we’re not sure if he will die—what will happen to him, and with his life. Actually, it was a challenge in my own life, because I was in exile from myself, and I had stopped writing literature. I came back with Planet of Clay, to literature, but when I decided to write this novel, I started writing it as poetry. I tried something different. It’s a very personal thing.

Ten or twelve years ago, I decided for the first time to speak about the victims who are living on the other side of the Assad regime. It was a very difficult choice for me. There’s a perception that the soldiers on the side of the regime are not victims, but the problem is that this has been a long war, and everyone is a victim. And what we’ve got to remember is that there’s a class element; we have to remember the poor. A fundamental part of literature, in my opinion, is that we learn to look at things from an alternate point of view, and to have empathy with others. Without that, it’s absolutely certain that things won’t change.

AT: The figure of the tree plays such a central role in the novel—it becomes this recurring motif, with Ali crawling towards it in the narrative present, and thinking back to all the trees that have shielded him, including the one next to the maqam. Did you have any specific personal, religious, cultural, or literary motivations in opting for the tree as the essential anchor of the text?

SY: There are lots of reasons. First, every maqam in the mountains has trees. They’re all surrounded by trees, and these trees are huge and ancient, hundreds of years old. Second, the tree acts as refuge for Ali. It represents a shelter from daily violence—from the sort of physical violence that he encounters in the village.

The most important thing is that trees are silent. Trees die standing, silently, without speaking the language of humans—and in this death they have dignity. Ali is able to communicate with the tree, together in their silences. Silence is Ali’s language, his way of resisting against the violence in his society, so he invents a new language with the trees, with the sky, with the wind. It’s like he builds a bridge between himself and all the elements of nature. Trees are part of his world.

I’m also talking about myself and my vision; I believe we need to be like a tree sometimes.

AT: I want to pick up on what you said about the language of the trees being Ali’s language in the novel. I’m also thinking of what you said earlier, that the novel began as poetry. Could you tell us how it evolved from poetry into the novel, and whether you think the novel becomes a good channel for this silence? READ MORE…

Announcing Our February Book Club Selection: Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek

February 29, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

Where the Wind Calls Home sidesteps the instant of carnage and cruelty, focusing instead on its shattered aftermath. . .

Where the Wind Calls Home, Syrian author Samar Yazbek’s latest novel to be translated into English, is a stunning offering of spirituality, memory, and all those implacable, liminal spaces wherein only the mind may venture. Written from the perspective of a young soldier as he lays dying from his wounds, Yazbek describes both the unthinkable wreckages of conflict and the translucent totems of faith with her singular musicality and vividity, tracing backwards through recollections and reveries to collage all the brute realities of civil war with the individuals whose rich internal lives pattern the battlefields.

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

Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, World Editions, 2024

There is an unforgettable moment in Adania Shibli’s Touch when the child narrator, through whose eyes the world arrives in intensities of colour and sensation, attempts to decipher words emanating from the TV. Amid the flotsam and jetsam of indistinct syllables, she finally makes out “Sabra and Shatila”. She thinks then not of the horrific massacre in Beirut but of the sabr cactus growing in her vicinity; the name, stripped out of the matrix of history, can only signify as something tangible, close at hand.

Such strategies of defamiliarisation came to mind while I was immersed in the free-floating atmospheres of Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home. Its oneiric rhythms, elegantly recreated in the English translation by Leri Price, mimic the roving consciousness of an adolescent soldier, known only as Ali. Forcibly conscripted into the frontlines of the Syrian Civil War, he survives an enemy attack in the Latakia mountains only to hover on the edge of death. As he struggles to regain a feeling of where his injured, possibly dismembered body might begin and end, his mind takes flight; memories of childhood creep back into him. Time on the narrative surface runs the course of a single day, blue sky shading into a “raw and tender” moon. Beneath reality seethes the inexpressible current of remembrance, obeying its own laws of sequence and cadence.

Yazbek is more interested in the sensuous immediacies of embodiment than in the airy abstractions of power. Her previous offering, Planet of Clay—a finalist for the 2021 National Book Awards, also translated by Price—inhabited the perspective of a mute girl, similarly caught starkly within the crossfires on the Civil War. Against its barbarities, she seeks a sanctuary in crayoned drawings and imagined planets. Even in Yazbek’s non-fictional accounts of revolutionary betrayal, ranging from the diaristic to the journalistic, she retains a similar sensibility: “Oh spinning world, if my little heart, as small as a lump of coal, is wider than your borders, I know how narrow you are!” READ MORE…

Where the Change Comes From: Saskia Vogel on Translating Balsam Karam

February 22, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Here are the losses. Just listen this time. That directness is so wonderful.

In The Singularity, Swedish author Balsam Karam instills a startling and deeply profound gravity within the devastating fractures of life—mothers who lose children, migrants who lose countries, and the emotional maelstroms stirring at the precipice of disappearance. With an extraordinary style that exemplifies how poetics can search and unveil the most secret aspects of grief and longing, Karam’s fluid, genre-blurring prose is at once dreamlike and harrowingly vivid, with the remarkable sensitivity of translator Saskia Vogel carrying this richness through to the English translation. We were proud to select this novel as our January Book Club selection, and in this following interview, Vogel speaks to us about how Karam’s writing works to destabilize and shift majority presumptions, as well as how literature can echo, verify, and perhaps change the way we live.

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

Rachel Stanyon (RS): How did you come to Balsam Karam’s work?

Saskia Vogel (SV): I first encountered Balsam’s work through Sara Abdollahi, one of my favorite literary critics in Sweden—she’s full of integrity, and really cares about literature and its transformative potential. She had done a podcast with Balsam, and their conversation really struck me, especially Balsam’s extraordinary representation of solidarity. This is exemplified in her first novel, Event Horizon, which, as I understand, is connected to The Singularity like a kind of diptych; they’re of the same world, and written with the same sorts of strategies—for example, a lot of the details of place, location, and identity are unstated. I find this aesthetic really compelling.

Balsam assumes that she’s writing into Sweden and a majority white culture, and she doesn’t want to give people an easy out where they can say, “I’ve been to Beirut. It’s not exactly like that.” She instead strips away detail and, in The Singularity, focuses on loss and the effects of war on individuals, as well as on migration and racism.

Another extraordinary feature of her prose is that the white gaze is decentered, which works to shift how the presumed audience reads and perceives some of the most pressing and potent human experiences of our time. She moves us away from the particularities of politics, and tries to make us understand what it feels like to be in a certain position. In that way, she really encourages and facilitates a deep growth and compassion—if you’re open to it, I guess. READ MORE…

Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: The Singularity by Balsam Karam

January 31, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Karam stretches the limits of conventional narrative writing. . . the result is a work of true formal experimentation without . . . artifice.

With inimitable lyricism and an impeccable sense of balance, Balsam Karam’s The Singularity addresses some of the most complex elements of contemporary social reality. Yet, even as the thrilling narrative is intricately braided with the brutal realities of loss, displacement, motherhood, and migration, the novel’s innovative structure and bold, surprising style elevates it beyond story, revealing an author who is as precise with language as she is with illustrating our mental and physical landscapes. In starting off a new year of Asymptote Book Club, we are proud to announce this work of art as our first selection of 2024.

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

The Singularity by Balsam Karam, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel, Feminist Press/Fitzcarraldo, 2024

Meanwhile elsewhere—two women perched on the precipice in a tangential encounter, spun together by forces outside their control, as if in the singularity of a black hole. One woman is about to jump off the edge, bereft after the loss of her teenage daughter; the other will frame this moment as the beginning of the end for the child in her womb. No need for spoiler alerts here: what might feature as the climax in a more conventional narrative is laid bare in The Singularity’s prologue. That it nevertheless remains absorbing to its very end is a testament to the depth of feeling and dexterity with which the Swedish-Kurdish novelist Balsam Karam orchestrates the rest of this novel about grief, loss, migration, and motherhood.

Given this jarring beginning and its atypical (or absent) narrative arc, it is perhaps no wonder that as the rest of this novel unwinds, we are met with multiple displacements in time and perspective, echoing the geographical dislocation of the two central figures—both of whom are refugees—and the all-encompassing, omnipresent nature of the trauma they experience.

Before throwing herself off a tourist-thronged cliff in a bullet-ridden city, the first woman has been searching for The Missing One­: her seventeen-year-old daughter, who never came home from her cleaning job on the corniche a few months earlier. After fleeing from their home, receiving scant help from the relief organization that occasionally visits with a “hello and how are you all then here you go and we’ll be back soon, even if it’s not true,” and finding little sanctuary living in a tumble-down alleyway at the fringes of this unnamed city, the mother seems to experience the disappearance of her daughter as the final loss that makes her lose herself. “What mother doesn’t take her own life after a child disappears?” the first woman asks the universe, or “when a child dies?” the second woman asks her doctor. READ MORE…