Book Club

How the Void Fills: Soje on Translating Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon

June 24, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Alexandra Irimia

I hope that the books that I translate collectively present a tapestry of Koreanness that challenges and upends orientalist views of the country.

Though the pandemic that serves as the catalyzing disaster in Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon seems immediate to our times, the novel was actually published in 2017—indicating towards the larger, lasting ideas and occupations alive beneath the tide of current events. Indeed, as Choi’s sensitive, dreamy narrative unfolds, the uncanny nature of its topicality is overshadowed by its larger, human concerns of foreignness, settlement, and the way we meet one another. In the following interview, transcribed from a live Q&A hosted by Asymptote Book Club Manager Alexandra Irimia, Soje shares their thoughts on translating the unique novel, and the many invisible challenges of translating Korean into English.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive Book Club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom Q&As with the author and/or the translator of each title!

Alexandra Irimia (AI): From Italian opera and sound of the ocean, to radio static and the rain, To the Warm Horizon shapes a unique soundscape. The narrative relies a lot on its sensorial, synesthetic cues which usually demand a lot of skill and craft to be put into words and conveyed convincingly. Besides, as a reader, I felt a lot of intentionality in the author’s use of silence. Did you feel in this novel—or in the rest of your body of work—that there was any challenge particular to translating the musicality of the prose from the Korean into English? 

Soje: What a beautiful question! Virtually every translator of Korean literature has commented on this at some point, but repetition is a big deal in Korean literature. In prose, it becomes more noticeable because we, as readers, expect that kind of musicality more from poetry. One of the main stylistic things I noticed was the way Choi Jin-young breaks her sentences in staccato declarations, especially towards the beginning of the book where Dori is narrating her past life in Korea and journey to Russia. And because the fragmented nature of these sentences reflects the character’s state of mind, I tried to replicate every single beat in my first draft. But upon rereading and revising, I found that these dramatic pauses felt more gimmicky in the English than in the Korean, so I had to find a balance between the rhythm of the Korean and what the English language wanted me to do. My reasoning for this partly boils to the fact that the word count expands about 1.5 times from Korean to English, so the rhythm will absolutely change in translation unless details are cut.

There are seven speech levels in Korean, mainly indicated by the verb conjugation which comes at the end of the sentence. Korean novels usually employ the 해라체 (haerache), which means that every declarative sentence ends in the same syllable, 다 (da). So there’s almost this concealed rhyme, and I used to be so fixated on it that many of my sentences in English tended to parallel in structure. Thankfully, my excellent editors at Honford Star and translators such as Emily Yae Won and Anton Hur taught me to vary my sentence structures—something that I’m still honing as an early career translator.

AI: You manage to convey into English an intuition of lyricism that I often associate with East Asian poetry, and which I can imagine is deeply embedded in the original text. Is this lyricism something that flows naturally in your translation—an effortless emanation from the original text—or something that requires a deliberate attempt to preserve in the English version?

Soje: Wow, effortless emanation? I think that’s every translator’s wish! I probably struggled with this more because Horizon happens to be my first full length translation—the two poetry collections that I translated just happened to come out earlier. In the three years that it took to get this published, I think I did three or four major revisions, each time returning to the text with the knowledge I gained from working on the poetry projects. So maybe there’s some relevance there. READ MORE…

Announcing Our May Book Club Selection: To the Warm Horizon by Choi Jin-young

May 31, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Alexandra Irimia

Choi Jin-young focuses instead on the possibilities for love and caring connections in a time of societal breakdown and civilizational disarray.

As pandemic literature carves out a space of its own in contemporary letters, such writings unveil what is seemingly opaque or inscrutable about the presumed normalcy of “the before times.” In our Book Club selection for May, To the Warm Horizon, Choi Jin-young sketches a fragmentary, kaleidoscopic tale of survival and longing in the aftermath of a global catastrophe triggered by illness. The focus, however, is not on contagion itself. Instead, it falls on the variety of ways in which human interactions unfold within a more general dynamic of contrasting forces: fear and hope, reason and unreason, cruelty and love. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive Book Club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom Q&As with the author and/or the translator of each title!

To the Warm Horizon by Choi Jin-young, translated from the Korean by Soje, Honford Star, 2021

Among the many side effects of the pandemic, we have witnessed a global reawakening of the taste for narratives of contagion, (post-)apocalyptic scenarios, and disaster fiction. If in March 2020, readers rushed to revisit the classics (Boccaccio’s Decameron, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, or Camus’s The Plague), the public quickly moved to explore newer works as the pandemic stretched on, such as Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014). The early months of 2021 came with an entirely new crop of contemporary writing, whose publication in English translation was likely encouraged—if not sped up—by the timeliness of their subject matter. Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon, published originally in Korean in 2017 and in Soje’s translation in 2021, is an example of the newly acquired popularity of these viral themes.

An unnamed virus serves only as a distant background for the five first-person narrators whose voices echo one another in this book, wherein the disastrous toll of hundreds of thousands of victims a day has decimated the population of the globe in a matter of days, setting in motion massive flows of refugees headed for an ever-distant promise of warmth and safety lurking on the horizon. Not much is disclosed about the disease itself, except that it provokes a rapid death; Choi Jin-young focuses instead on the possibilities for love and caring connections in a time of societal breakdown and civilizational disarray.

Countering the entropy of a world in dissolution, the narrative stitches together twenty kaleidoscopic chapters, in which five nomadic voices each offer their own experience of the events. The fragments are titled after their narrators and read like curated journal entries, varying in length and intensity. Amongst the speakers, Dori and Jina are given the most depth and contour; they speak for themselves as queer women, and their burgeoning romantic relationship is at the core of the novel. Ryu is the spokesperson for her family’s story, while Joy and Gunji are episodic storytellers whose accounts center on their own desires. READ MORE…

Writing in Organic Formation: Federico Falco and Jennifer Croft on A Perfect Cemetery

May 20, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Shawn Hoo

I always thought about what else a short story could be beyond the usual. What would happen if I mixed short stories and poetry?

In our Book Club selection for the month of April, A Perfect Cemetery, Federico Falco’s writings do not tell so much as unfold, gently and masterfully, to elucidate the relationships between the human, the non-human, and the spaces in which such meetings take place. In precise and rich evocations, Falco plumbs the rich vocabularies and intrigues of landscape to lend delicacy, sensuality, and vividity to his prose, bringing his protagonists to life with a knowing rootedness. In the following interview, transcribed from a live Q&A hosted by Assistant Editor Shawn Hoo, Falco and translator Jennifer Croft share their thoughts on the cinematic aspects of A Perfect Cemetery, the relationships between the body and the land, and the pervading theme of isolation.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive Book Club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom Q&As with the author and/or the translator of each title!

Shawn Hoo (SH): I thought we could begin with the question of place. I read this book in Singapore, a dense city, and noted how A Perfect Cemetery has a distinct sense of place; Federico, you conjure a landscape of sierras, rivers, and forests across disparate short stories that belong to this very single novelistic world. In an interview with The Paris Review, Jennifer, you emphasize the importance of translators visiting the country they are translating from. How does your sense of place affect your approach to these stories?

Federico Falco (FF): Landscape transforms us and makes us different people; the people who live in big cities have one kind of experience of life and the people who live in different landscapes have another. There is an Argentinian writer, Juan José Saer—one of my favorites—who says that the poor who live in cities near the ocean, they have a heaviness; they become used to strange, different people arriving and leaving all the time. And the people who live in the mountains always think that there’s another place beyond the mountains. They can change their point of view because they can see things from a different point of view. The people who live in the plains here in Argentina, the Pampas, they see the same landscape all the time. They can walk ten kilometers, and the whole scene shifts ten kilometers.

So when I write, I try to think about where the character lives, where they grew up, what they need, where they differ, what was new for them—if they grew up in the plains and now live in the mountains. I used to live in the city, now I’m living in the mountains, and there are some things that you can feel in the body. Your body starts to change. The air is different. The muscles change because you’re climbing all the time. The way you relate to people in the city is really different from the way you relate to people here in the mountains. If I meet a stranger here in the street, I say hello, which I never do in the city.

Jennifer Croft (JC): I really loved listening to Fede talk about place. Obviously, translating these stories influenced me as well, and I have been thinking a lot about place in fiction. Right now, I’m working on a book of creative nonfiction called Notes on Postcards, and part of the question of this text is: why does it matter where we are when we’re communicating with someone? Or why does it matter where we are in general? I started thinking about this question in 2020, when all of my travel plans were cancelled. I felt really cut off from all of the places that I care about—first and foremost among those is Buenos Aires. I feel very panicked that I’m not allowed to enter Argentina right now because of my US passport. I’m currently in upstate New York at a writing residency called Yaddo, and I’ve had a hard time working on my project, but thanks to these conversations with Fede over the last week or so, I’ve been relaxing into it.

I like comparing my obsession with places to Fede’s, because mine is less about landscape and more about cities and cultures. Even though culture is such an extremely fluid thing, it is much more about how one feels in the context of other human beings. I’m more of a flaneur kind of writer, and it’s great for me to be able to incorporate these landscapes into my thinking too. READ MORE…

Announcing Our April Book Club Selection: A Perfect Cemetery by Federico Falco

April 29, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Shawn Hoo

Here is writing which transforms provincialism into the province of fiction, drama, and ultimately, nourishment . . .

The vast contours of the internal landscape are painted with delicacy and precise restraint by Argentine writer Federico Falco in A Perfect Cemetery, our Book Club selection for the month of April. With his studies of life on the rural outskirts, the author gently but determinately probes the stoicism and stillness of human existence, and how a perceptible smallness and inwardness can betray a complex and considered philosophy of living. In light of our days being increasingly filled with aspirational stimuli, Falco’s work is a respite of care, of untangling the secret threads that connect the nature of being with the ways of the world.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive Book Club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom Q&As with the author and/or the translator of each title!

A Perfect Cemetery by Federico Falco, translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Croft, Charco Press, 2021

In five impeccably crafted short stories, Argentine writer Federico Falco displays his distinctive gift for distilling and dramatising the quietude of rurality to generate—from such ostensibly minor landscapes—an intense and varied portrait of life on the geographical periphery. Take, for example, the titular story: Víctor Bagiardelli, a scrupulous engineer of cemeteries, is commissioned by the mayor of small town Colonel Isabeta to build their first cemetery. Mayor Giraudo no longer wants to have the town’s dead sent to nearby Deheza to rest, but he meets resistance from the town council, who accuses him of abusing public funds in the interest of ensuring that his father is buried at home. “A bunch of ignoramuses who care nothing for progress,” Giraudo grumbles of a council whose inertness, he believes, only serves to secure the town in its provinciality.

Giraudo’s description—though unkind—is perhaps not an inaccurate assessment of Falco’s characters who, in their locality, shun the promise of progress. They are searching, instead, for a place to rest. Whether a literal burial place at the end of one’s life, or simply a spot to retreat to in order to go on living—the quest for silence and solitude constitute the central drama of their phlegmatic dispositions. After all, ‘cemetery’—from the Greek koimētḗrion—refers first and foremost to a sleeping chamber. A perfect cemetery, as the dark comedy of the collection’s title suggests, refers then to an ideal place for rest, recuperation, and languor. Read together, Falco’s fiction cohesively articulates—as the book’s intellectual and emotional pleasure—retreat as a way of life against the hedonism of pursuit.

Meanwhile, even as Mr Bagiardelli oversees the cemetery’s construction on the hillside down to the last weeping willow, and residents are eager to reserve the best spots for themselves—the 104-year-old Old Man Giraudo refuses to die, much to his son’s consternation and the engineer’s chagrin. Even the pinnacle spot in the cemetery, under the shadow of a majestic oak, is unable to convince the centenarian to rest reliably, as he actively plots against not just the cemetery’s but his life’s completion; as such, we come to understand how the ideal resting place never comes easy for these characters. That is, the only legitimate form of pursuit for the people who populate Falco’s landscape is one that is restlessly in search of stillness; a philosophy of solitude that knows how a privacy to live and die can be a hard-won thing. READ MORE…

To Channel a Voice: Adam Morris on Translating Beatriz Bracher’s Antonio

April 22, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Nicole Bilan

[T]he concept of mediumship resonated with me as a metaphor for what it was that I was trying to do as a translator.

In Antonio, our Book Club selection for March, acclaimed Brazilian writer Beatriz Bracher uses the mystifying, sustaining story of one family’s tragedy to paint a larger portrait of a tumultuous nation’s political and sociological landscape, reverberating through the discrete lives of its citizens. Constructed in a triad of narratives and rich with the fullness of voices in distinct oration, Antonio is both an electrifying mystery and a carefully constructed study of inheritance. In the following interview, Assistant Editor Nicole Bilan discusses with translator Adam Morris about the rigors and pleasures of translating this multifarious, scrupulously woven text.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Nicole Bilan (NB): I’m going to be really reductive with my first question and say that Antonio is like a book of stories—or various perspectives of the same story—and this makes it quite difficult to kind of pin down its continuity. How did you navigate this ambiguity, that dynamic of mystery?

Adam Morris (AM): Well, one thing that helped was that I actually decided not to read the novel the whole way through before translating it. When New Directions accepted my initial proposal to translate I Didn’t Talk, they wanted to make sure that they had a follow-up. I recommended Anatomy of Paradise (2015), the author’s most recent novel, but the editors decided on Antonio, which I had only sampled for the purposes of writing the proposal. After reading about four or five chapters, I decided that if there was a chance I going translate Antonio, I wouldn’t want to know the explanations behind the novel’s central family secret as I worked; I wanted to find out as I was translating, to see if I could replicate that sense of not-knowing the reader is supposed to experience. So that’s what I did.

NB: That is an absolutely incredible thing to do, because even encountering it as a reader, you’re just constantly thinking: Wait, hold on, hold on, I’m lost. And then it hits you all at once. So how did you find it looking back in retrospect, trying to untangle those pieces of information—how did you refine something that’s so messily constructed in a way?

AM: I think “tangle” and “untangle” are the right verbs to use here; that was what it felt like to be working with the three narrators of Antonio. The way this novel is constructed, the voices aren’t interwoven. They’re tangled. It feels deliberately very messy, as you said; there’s conflicting information disclosed by the three voices as they evolve throughout, each becoming more familiar with their silent interlocutor, Benjamim. And one of the ways that I handled the untangling of these competing strands was to look at the novel in continuity, with each voice isolated, to see how they individually evolved without interference from the others—it’s almost impossible, of course, because their interlocutor transmits portions of each of their stories to the others, and they respond accordingly. So I tried to look at the story as a whole, and then as discrete narrative lines, and then finally reconstructed a synthesis with my revisions. But for the first draft, I just went straight through; I wanted the conversational approach that Bracher adopts to feel as natural as possible. That’s why, when I’d first started reading the novel, I knew I needed to stop. I wanted to preserve and capture the narrative effects. READ MORE…

Announcing Our March Book Club Selection: Antonio by Beatriz Bracher

April 14, 2021  |  in Book Club  |  by Nicole Bilan

Bracher vaguely nods toward the uncanny, peeping out from behind confrontational realism.

Our Book Club selection for the month of March comes from one of Brazil’s most powerful contemporary voices. With Antonio, Beatriz Bracher brings philosophy and narrative in a deeply ruminative and immersive expedition through familial lineage, uncovering the various fragments of a tumultuous paternal relationship in order to understand the myriad forces that carries an individual from their origin to their present.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Antonio by Beatriz Bracher, translated from the Portuguese by Adam Morris, New Directions, 2021

“The spectators were part of the show, but they only realised it once they had gone by.”

To read Antonio is to become part of its story. In the conversational style that has become one of Beatriz Bracher’s calling cards, the narrative begins in a direct address to the reader, immediately situating us as characters for whom the story is told, as though one was crowded around a fireplace, listening to a relative tell stories from an armchair. Adopting the same hushed tones and subtle drama of the fireside orator in her writing, Bracher crafts a layered story which brims with mystery and tension. Effortlessly weaving her way through points of obscurity and shocking revelation, she plays with the reader-turned-listener as she leads us through the undulating landscape of a murky family history.

READ MORE…

Breaking the Cycle of Indifference: Véronique Tadjo on Writing and Translating In the Company of Men

March 25, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

My intention was to have that space, which is at the same time recognizable and foreign.

In February, we introduced to Asymptote Book Club subscribers the multifarious, multivocal work of Véronique Tadjo. Her 2017 novel, In the Company of Men, fascinatingly combines document, and oration in a portrait of the West African Ebola epidemic, interrogating in turns how we as humans grapple with illness, as well as how the natural world—with its unseen forces—regards us. A pivotal read during this seemingly unending time of addressing our own pandemic, Tadjo’s unique linguistic style and sensitive artistry has introduced In the Company of Men as a text of both current relevance and long-lasting artistry. In this following interview, Assistant Managing Editor Lindsay Semel speaks with Tadjo on self-translation, personifying the non-human, and the inheritance of literary traditions.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!  

Lindsay Semel (LS): I’m fascinated by the subject of self-translation. You’ve translated some of your own children’s fiction, but this is your first foray into translating your adult fiction. Even though you’ve lived in so many different places, and you function daily in so many different languages, translating your own work is a separate beast. I’d love to hear about, first and foremost, what the process was like for you.

Véronique Tadjo (VT): Yes, I function in two languages, French and English; I’ve been studying English and living in Anglophone countries quite extensively—the longest was in South Africa for fourteen years. So I’m used to speaking both languages.

This process with In the Company of Men was fairly long, and it was a collaboration. It started with a draft with a friend; we worked quite a lot on the text, but the result was still very close to the French original. Maybe because I’ve done a lot of translation, I could see that myself—that there was something stalling the text. The last stage of the collaboration was with John Cullen from Other Press, a translator with a very good reputation. He looked at the text and finally lifted it up, in the sense that he was able to give it a more oral quality than the first version, which was a little bit wooden. I just didn’t feel that it was flowing the way it should flow, especially because English is a much more direct language [than French]. French tends to go round and round—it takes a bit more time to get there. Whereas English has some sort of efficiency. I think that the original French book was more lyrical, whereas the English translation is more to the point.

LS: Do you happen to have, off the top of your head, an example of a passage that wasn’t quite hitting its mark? Do you remember what changed through those conversations about it?

VT: Very simple things. Like, for example, “He’s a tall man.” You can’t do that in French. You can’t contract. It’s just a small example, but when you look on the page, how the language is written down, it makes a big difference.

LS: There are very clear parallels between the events that you chronicle in this text and what a lot of the globe is experiencing now collectively, and so I wonder if current events contributed to your decision to translate yourself rather than bringing in a translator. What was it like for you to put yourself back into this story?

VT: Yes, I think that because of the pandemic, I had a sense of urgency. I had it in 2017 when I was talking about the Ebola epidemic, but with the translation, it came back. This time, what we had feared was becoming reality, so there was a renewed sense of energy, which compelled me to want to be very involved in the translation—to really put myself fully in it.

There were certain words that came naturally which I sometimes had to resist. For example, there’s a chapter in which a nurse plays an important role. You would be tempted to call her an “essential worker.” But you have to be careful, because “essential worker” is an expression that has taken strength from the COVID-19 pandemic, but I’m not sure we were using it that much before. You see, today you read it differently. I didn’t want to introduce this “foreign language,” which would signal a shift from Ebola to COVID-19. It would not be right. So, although there was temptation to use some of the terms that are being used today, I didn’t want that contamination, in a sense. I had to stay true to the period, the time, and the context. READ MORE…

Each Sentence a Dagger: Tim Mohr on translating Alina Bronsky’s My Grandmother’s Braid

March 1, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Barbara Halla

Her world expands beyond the margins; there's the world that she's telling in detail, and then there's all this other stuff just outside the lens.

In our Book Club selection for January, we were thrilled to present Alina Bronsky’s brilliantly comic and irreverent My Grandmother’s Braid, a study of familial dysfunctions that renders its players in all their idiosyncratic fascinations. Now, Assistant Editor Barbara Halla talks with Bronsky’s translator, Tim Mohr, about his intimate connections to Germany and its language, the German tradition of immigrant literature, and the challenges of rendering Bronsky’s surprising and intuitive narration.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Barbara Halla (BH): You have a longstanding relationship with Alina Bronsky, having translated five of her books. Could you speak a little bit about how you came across her work and what inspired you to translate her?

Tim Mohr (TM): Her first book, Broken Glass Park, was either my second or third translation. It came after I attended a speech at Carnegie Hall, under the auspices of a festival called Berlin Lights. I sat in the audience to watch these ostensible experts speak on the German publishing world, and they claimed there was no tradition of immigrant literature there.

I remember thinking that the last ten German novels I’d read were all by what you might call “immigrant” writers, or writers writing in German as a second language. I was really adamant about working in that field and trying to get more of that material into the U.S. market, so people would be aware that this tradition did exist over there, and that it was booming. And then I came across Alina. I loved her debut novel, Broken Glass Park, and because the translation went well, we wanted to continue working together. I wouldn’t want another one of her books to come out with a different translator.

As far as our relationship goes, I tend not to work closely with the authors when I’m translating, and a lot of them speak really, really good English, so it’s all the more daunting in some ways—I don’t want them to be looking over my shoulder, basically! I’ll email them a few queries sometimes, but for the most part, I’m trying to do it on my own. I am somewhat friendly with Alina, but when we get together we don’t really talk about translation or her books, we just have a cup of coffee or something.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our February Book Club Selection: In the Company of Men by Véronique Tadjo

February 25, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

In the Company of Men beautifully articulates the tensions between old and new ways of existing.

Illness as subject is a challenge to writers not only for its dense manifestations and distinct physical consequences, but also for its realization of the physical body within the interconnected terrain of politics, relationships, and community. Originally published in 2017, Véronique Tadjo’s In the Company of Men takes as its subject the West African Ebola epidemic, choreographing a motley of voices in a humanizing portrait of how disease can define and obliterate boundaries both known and unseen. Instead of rendering the epidemic into metaphor, Tadjo realizes its immediate and tangible presence in our lives.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

In the Company of Men by Véronique Tadjo, translated from the French by the author, Other Press, 2021

Côte d´Ivoire, where Véronique Tadjo grew up, borders two of the three West African nations that suffered the 2014–16 Ebola outbreak. She wasn’t there at the time; she had finished a teaching position in South Africa and began to share her time between London and Abidjan. Tadjo is a chameleon of an artist. She works across genres, speaks various languages, and traverses cultures. At once fact and fiction, myth and reportage, the novel meets this contemporary moment in which borders and boundaries can feel like anachronistic global millstones and “some lives seem as worthless and irrelevant as the bruised fruit left over at the end of a market day.” Her amoebic narrative voice, both one and many, recounts the horrors of the epidemic and its aftermath, singing an ominous warning and calling for a modernized version of our lost solidarity cultures.

Many comparisons come to mind in describing the narration of In the Company of Men, which she recently self-translated from the 2017 French edition: a Greek chorus that guides the reader’s emotional responses, invoking the primordial without entangling itself in the individual; a spirit that possesses one after another; a mycelium with distinct fruiting bodies. We hear from, to name just a few, a Baobab tree, a gravedigger, an NGO volunteer, a woman who adopts an Ebola orphan, a researcher, a bat, and the virus itself. Though the writing inhabits so many different bodies, the voice still feels somehow cohesive, characterized by lyricism and gore, anger and compassion, helplessness and resilience. It rails and it soothes. The gravedigger reports quite literally, “The path ahead of us has been doused with chlorine,” and his words resonate with accounts from other narrators. Disinfectant becomes the flashlight that precedes each step in the dark and unfamiliar wood of the epidemic, the loitering of its scent paralleling most of our own accounts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Other features of the metaphorical wood include dangerous rumors. A medic laments, “the President of the Republic had supposedly paid the large sums of money to reduce the local population and thus get rid of the poor. Ebola, they said, didn’t exist.” It is populated by ghosts of the hastily laid to rest: “Actually, they’re lost souls, reluctant to leave the earth, hoping we’ll help them to return.” Resonance between the novel’s narrators replicates the resonance between them and the readers, reinforcing themes of interconnectedness and appeals to solidarity.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: My Grandmother’s Braid by Alina Bronsky

January 27, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla

My Grandmother’s Braid . . . takes the idea of dysfunctional to a whole new level.

The intricate latticing of a family’s dysfunctions can provide ample material for any writer, but that is no indication that the material is easy to render in its full complexity. In our Book Club selection for January, however, we are proud to present a text that explores the peculiarities of familial relations to tremendous result. My Grandmother’s Braid, written by acclaimed author Alina Bronsky, tackles the subject(s) with equal parts biting wit and generous compassion, culminating in a subtly sensitive portrait of what happens behind the closed doors of households, and the closed minds of our loved ones. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

My Grandmother’s Braid by Alina Bronsky, translated from the German by Tim Mohr, Europa Editions, 2021

Over the years, I have grown weary of that infamous Tolstoy adage that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Mostly because it seems to me that the sources of our unhappiness tend to be often so ordinary (and thus far more common that we’d like to admit); evil can lack imagination, and even the worst of pains can soon turn into dull aches as we get used to almost everything. Dysfunctional families, however, are another story, and the family at the center of Alina Bronsky’s My Grandmother’s Braid, translated by Tim Mohr, takes the idea of dysfunctional to a whole new level. Despite its relative slimness, this book takes the reader on a journey with so many twists and turns that I kept staring at the pages in disbelief.

At the age of six, our narrator Max immigrates from the Soviet Union to Germany with his maternal grandparents, taking shelter in a refugee home. The verb “immigrate” is technically correct, although there is a sense that Max and his grandfather, Tschingis, didn’t immigrate as much as they were dragged to the unnamed German town where the story takes place by Max’s grandmother, Margarita Ivanova, or Margo.

Margo is the driving force behind this story and almost everything that happens in Max’s life (and not only Max’s). Worried that Max’s health is too precarious for Russia, she exploits the family’s threadbare Jewish heritage to gain refugee status. Once in Germany, she seems to suffer from what can potentially be described as Munchausen syndrome by proxy: she is certain that Max is too fragile to live as a normal child would—that he is afflicted by a number of inexplicable maladies. She hauls Max from doctor to doctor, all of whom continually refuse her diagnosis as she grows ever more certain of their incompetence. She feeds Max only steamed vegetables and unseasoned barley and oats and refuses to let him go play with other children. When Max starts first grade, she insists on being seated at the back of his classroom and interrupting his lessons with her often-wrong advice on how to solve his math assignments. The dullness of Max’s school life eventually becomes too much for her, and it is only when Margo grows bored that Max is able to gain a little bit of freedom and agency. And it is here that the narrative begins to speed up, and the years slide by to the point where reader loses track of how much time has passed. READ MORE…

Announcing our December Book Club Selection: Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli

January 4, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden

Dissipatio H.G. is . . . an opportunity to unspool our own reaction to the loss of mankind—and perhaps find in it an unexpected sympathy.

Quietly, almost as if afraid to disturb, a new year has made its way into the world. The recession of 2020 into the distance of the past presents an opportunity to not only evaluate the changed world, but also to contemplate our responsibilities in readjusting, amending, and moving on. In a fitting selection, our last Book Club title of 2020 is Guido Morselli’s acclaimed novel, Dissipatio H.G., a text that reconciles the stark realities of mourning with poignant examinations of presence in and amidst so much absence. It is a rare feeling that has somehow, incredibly, become common: What is one to do upon waking up to an unrecognizable world? 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli, translated from the Italian by Frederika Randall, New York Review Books Classics, 2020

Near the outset of Guido Morselli’s short and surreal 1977 novel, Dissipatio H.G., the unnamed narrator sits in a cave at the edge of a steep drop into an underground lake, getting up the nerve to end it all. Meanwhile, down in the valley, in the invented, industrious city of Chrysopolis, the economy booms, not unlike the growth Morselli observed in post-war Italy. Leery of society’s so-called progress, the narrator has retreated to an isolated property in the mountains—but even that is threatened; he’s pushed to the lip of nonexistence when he finds a cluster of numbered stakes in the ground “a couple of hundred paces from my mountain retreat.” After a fever and a frantic investigation, he uncovers that a company plans to build a highway there, complete with entrance ramps, a cloverleaf, and a motel. “As Durkheim might say,” the narrator reflects, “there’s your trigger.”

In the end, he abandons his plan after contemplating the quality of the Spanish brandy he’s brought along for liquid courage. His body’s physical matter simply refuses to accede to his will; he bangs his head on the way out of the cave, just as a powerful groan of thunder rolls through the valley. “The truth is,” he thinks, “a man who draws back from killing himself does so (and Durkheim didn’t see this) under the illusion that there is a third way, but in fact tertium non datur—there is no third possibility: it’s either a leap into the siphon or a dive back into daily life, where the rhythm of everything has stayed exactly as it was and you must hasten to make up for the progress lost.”

But when he returns from the cave, the narrator discovers an entirely unexpected third possibility: while he has chosen to live, the human race has vanished. He inspects the newsroom where he once worked as a journalist, placing calls across Europe and across the Atlantic to determine that for all functional purposes, he is the last man alive. “I’m now Mankind,” he says. “I’m Society (with the capital M and the capital S).” He is, he says, “Incarnation of the epilogue.” READ MORE…

Announcing our November Book Club Selection: At the Lucky Hand, aka The Sixty-Nine Drawers by Goran Petrović

November 30, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

One could spend a pleasant hour wandering inside nearly every evocative sentence of At the Lucky Hand.

As we inch towards the end of a year that has tested in turn the limits of our imagination, the capacities of our patience, and the extent to which we indulge our escapist tendencies, we have been encouraged to examine closely the narratives that perpetuate contemporary existence: narratives that not only exist within the pages of books, but that also thread our day to day, commanded by something as curious as it is unknown. So, in our second-to-last Book Club selection of 2020, we are thrilled to introduce a complex, mysterious, and commandingly beautiful novel by Serbian master Goran Petrović, which inquires into the infinity of literary invention in order to infer how fantasy contributes to reality.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

At the Lucky Hand, aka The Sixty-Nine Drawers by Goran Petrović, translated from the Serbian by Peter Agnone, Deep Vellum, 2020

Goran Petrović’s At the Lucky Hand, translated from the Serbian by the late Peter Agnone, flatters the sensibilities of those enamored with the written word—within its pages, we become romantic leads and daring detectives. Our quality of “mild presence or mild absence at the same time” becomes a virtue, nearly a superpower, highly valuable to various profiteering types. In fact, the novel is Petrović’s contribution to what might be considered the devastatingly nerdy genre that animates literary theory. And yet, this is only one face of a multifaceted work. Irresistibly engaging and virtuosically crafted, At the Lucky Hand marries high theory with high drama in spaces so quiet and invisible, that their liveliness takes one completely by surprise.

Petrović strikes a winning balance between imaginative extravagance and sober social criticism. Adam Lozanić, a somber, lonely philology student and part-time proofreader, receives a lucrative job offer from a mysterious couple; he must revise a memorial already long out of print. The book, expensively self-published, contains six hundred pages of description with no plot or characters to speak of. Adam and his employers are practitioners of a sort of reading analogous to lucid dreaming, in which they can meet other readers enjoying the same book at the same time and explore the universe of the text in all the richness suggested, not explicated, by the words. The elaborately described estate, imagined by the deceased author in a state of devotion to a love no less real for having never escaped the page, provides a ripe stage. Adam and the few other readers, thrown together by happenstance, fill in the vacuums where conventional literary elements were missing. Love, murder, mystery, power, and ambition electrify places that tremble on the edge of existence and people who, by all appearances, sit in chairs moving nothing but their eyeballs.

Jelena, characterized mainly by her pleasant smell, fervent desire for escape, and careful companionship to an increasingly senile woman, unwittingly enchants the innocent Adam. But they are only the latest lovers to inhabit the home and garden. As the stories of their predecessors unfold, frustrated precisely because of the disjunction between the realities on and off the page, one yearns for Adam and Jelena to reconcile the two. However, the more decidedly a character chooses to exist inside the literary imagination, the more they develop a noble purity outside of it. Adam and Jelena learn what the more seasoned readers already know: that they neither need nor want anything of “real” life. The very food that nourishes them is cooked in fictional kitchens and the money they exchange in long-shuttered shops appears from memories of long-defunct banks. Using nothing, they are useful to no one, and the talismans that give them access to their imaginations are the only means one has to influence them. READ MORE…

Music, Midribs, and Mexicanisms: Christina MacSweeney on Translating Daniel Saldaña París’s Ramifications

November 26, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

It’s hard to judge characters as a translator . . . because you’re living with them. They're part of your life.

Our first-ever live Q&A could have hardly gone better: award-winning translator Christina MacSweeney chatted with Blog Editor Josefina Massot for a solid hour, covering everything from voice, rhythm, and expletives in our exquisite October selection to her “unfixed migrant identity” and its effects on her craft. Read on for a taste of this riveting conversation, which Book Club members can request in full—hearty laughs, pensive pauses, and all!

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Josefina Massot (JM): Ramifications is largely character-driven, and there are so many elements to the protagonist’s psyche and voice. I was wondering about your experience inhabiting that complexity: were there aspects of it that particularly resonated with you, or that you found especially challenging to tap into?

Christina MacSweeney (CM): One of the things that played into my experience is that I read the first fifty pages of the novel when they were still in the process of inception (Daniel will often send me work at early stages). As I read more—as he progressed and made subsequent changes—the character grew with me, with the reading. And he’s very complex, but what most came through to me was this sense of paralyzed masculinity, a sense of frustration that very much stayed with me. He’s somebody I want to root for in some way, for him to break through all the issues that are holding him back.

I often talk about translation as getting into a character’s shoes and walking around in them, feeling that I can wear them. Daniel’s writing is so beautiful and precise that it helps you get into it. When you’re translating, it’s usually months and months, and the characters’ voices are there with you all along: you wake up with them in the morning, you go to sleep with them at night, they talk to you while you’re washing the dishes. So I think it’s hard to judge characters as a translator; you can’t feel judgmental about them, because you’re living with them. They’re part of your life.

JM: You’ve lived with several of Daniel’s characters, too, since you’ve also translated his first novel, Among Strange Victims. There seem to be some commonalities between both books: the protagonist in Ramifications is in many ways passive, and at the same time, he’s trying to piece together clues about his mother’s disappearance; in Among Strange Victims, Rodrigo could be described as indolent, and Marcelo tries to retrace someone’s footsteps (not his mother’s this time, but an enigmatic boxer-poet’s). Could you point to other continuities? And might there be, in some sense, a “signature” Saldaña París book? I realize two novels are hardly enough to make such generalizations, and they’re also very different in tone, but perhaps you could point to certain tendencies.

CM: If we think about the two books, but also Daniel’s poetry and the non-fiction pieces that he writes, he is exploring masculinity. But in fact, in Among Strange Victims, the main character is Beatriz, the woman who is in Mexico with the boxer-poet at the beginning of the twentieth century. Rodrigo’s mother is also a very strong figure in his life. In that respect, the books are very different, because Among Strange Victims has a much clearer female presence. In Ramifications, you still have the mother figure (the absence of the mother) and the narrator’s sister, who is also an influence in his life. But they’re ultimately quite different. I don’t think Daniel is ever going to be the kind of writer of whom you can say, “This is a Saldaña París book,” because his writing is constantly changing—his point of focus changes, the angles from which he views things change. READ MORE…

Announcing our October Book Club Selection: Ramifications by Daniel Saldaña París

November 9, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Josefina Massot

[A]n absorbing character study, driven not just by voice . . . but by a deeply original theme: (a)symmetry as a curb on growth.

It is perhaps fitting (though regrettable) that our October Book Club announcement has been somewhat delayed: Daniel Saldaña París’s Ramifications is all about holdups. Via Christina MacSweeney’s seamless translation, the acclaimed Bogotá39 writer gives us a counter-formative tale that is both masterfully constructed and poignantly penned. In it, he exposes existential and political conservatism without dealing cheap blows, and introduces readers everywhere to a profoundly relatable narrative voice.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Ramifications by Daniel Saldaña París, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, Coffee House Press, 2020

Ramifications opens with a brilliant gambit; within a handful of paragraphs, it both sets up and crushes the prospect of a bildungsroman. A grown narrator feeds us the near-requisite opening, the painful loss at a much-too-tender age: in 1994 his mother, Teresa, flees their home in Mexico City, leaving ten-year-old him and teenage sister Mariana in the care of an oblivious father. Just a few lines later, though, we get a sharp taste of his current predicament—far from being the seasoned, thriving type mandated by the genre after years of fruitful struggles, he defines himself as “an adult who never leaves his bed.” 

The rest of the novel artfully explores the tension between the classic formative tale and its antithesis. Parts one and two delve into Teresa’s disappearance and her young son’s attempts to make sense of it, culminating in what could have been an archetypal “journey of self-discovery”—he tries to follow her to Chiapas, where she’s run off to join the budding zapatista movement. Part three, by contrast, hones in on the trip’s bland aftermath, both instant and deferred. It’s not as tidy as that, of course (the narrator jumps back and forth in time), but there’s an overarchingly grim shift from promise to flop. It’s made all the starker by a series of deliciously clever winks from the author: the protagonist’s childhood neighborhood and school are literally called “Education” (“Educación” and “Paideia,” respectively), and he’s thirty-three at the time of writing—an age that, for culturally Catholic audiences at least, can’t help but trigger unfavorable comparisons.

A disclaimer, lest readers think I’ve spoiled the plot: the novel doesn’t ride on events. It is, at its core, an absorbing character study, driven not just by voice (more on that later) but by a deeply original theme: (a)symmetry as a curb on growth. READ MORE…