Posts by Areeb Ahmad

Domestic Escapisms: The Many Lives of Pauloma Chattopadhyay by Devangi Bhatt

August 19, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

Domestic bliss is clearly not as it seems, as there is still room for dissatisfaction and silent rebellions against complacency. . .

The Many Lives of Pauloma Chattopadhyay by Devangi Bhatt, translated from the Gujarati by Mudra Joshi, Niyogi Books, 2024

In The Many Lives of Pauloma Chattopadhyay, Devangi Bhatt’s novel of fantastic realism, the extraordinary is prefaced by a scenario of extreme normalcy. In Kolkata, Pauloma Chattopadhyay lives out her days as an ordinary middle-aged housewife. Her husband, Nikhil babu, is a civil servant and a man of a few words, set in his routine. Sharing their house are two sons and their families; there is a daughter too, but she is married and hence resides elsewhere. Theirs is a standard joint family and Pauloma is unquestionably the matriarch of the household, but it would be hard to say that she has any power to go along with that position—and even if she did, she is not one to exercise it. All things go about in harmony in house no. 11 with the well-practised dailiness of domesticity, and from the beginning, Bhatt makes it clear that her movements are not curtailed, and nor does she live in a state of unhappiness:

Pauloma is a vivacious woman with an abundant love for life. She likes gossiping with the neighbours, bargaining with the saree seller, watching Bengali plays with her daughters-in-law, and feeding her grandkids sondesh. Though Nikhil babu and Pauloma are very different, it can be safely said that their world provides a sense of stability. Everything has been well for a long time, and there have been no problems.

Stability, however, tends to get stale after a point in time, and even more so for a housewife whose life mostly takes place within four walls. While Pauloma is not exactly crushed by the mundanity, she nevertheless recognises it: “But… but sometimes a strange thought crosses Pauloma’s mind as she sits by the window, rubbing oil on her scalp. . . . As she turns the shell bangle on her wrist, she thinks that life shouldn’t be like a straight line without any exciting deviations.” These short moments are akin to revelation, brief ripples on a still body of water, and it is this feeling of the past slipping through her fingers, of the transience of her life, that sends her to the storeroom in search for her late mother-in-law’s large storage vessels—which have been gathering dust and are set to be sold. On a whim, she climbs into one of them, only to be immediately pulled inwards and magically transported. READ MORE…

Macabre Absurdities: The Meat Market by Mashiul Alam

July 1, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

Violence is the throughline of Mashiu Alam's fiction ... it remains viscerally bubbling, right under the surface.

The Meat Market by Mashiul Alam, translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya, Eka Westland, 2024

From its first story, The Meat Market amply indicates the weirdness that awaits readers. Written by Mashiul Alam, who was born and brought up in northern Bangladesh, this collection brings together short fiction originally written in Bengali, translated into English by Shabnam Nadiya, who continues to prove her skill. Described as “surrealist political horror,” the politics of The Meat Market is not an extraneous element limited to politicians and statecraft, but an omnipresent, embodied aspect of people’s lives; there is not a single sphere, no matter how small, devoid of it. Alam makes full use of affective disgust to drive this point home, letting the macabre and the absurd rise as the defining forces, thereby showcasing the hypocrisies of Bangladeshi society and the daily realities of the citizenry. These stories challenge social mores and underline existing fault lines, hidden behind the veneer of normalcy.

Perhaps the most chilling work in this collection is “Field Report from Roop Nagar,” which is written from the first-person perspective of an editor at a daily newspaper. As a regular work day passes, he slowly discovers that he is unable to get in touch with anyone who lives in Roop Nagar. He tries friends, colleagues, relatives—but the call either does not connect or just keeps on ringing, no one ever picking up. He asks people who live near the area to go and ascertain the situation, but they too become unreachable. Soon, the general public and the government also catch up to the fact that there is no way to connect to Roop Nagar. Only one piece of evidence is revealed: supposed field notes from one of the narrator’s eccentric colleagues, consisting of a video clip and some audio recordings. Together, they relate, in graphic detail, the horrific murder of a girl. READ MORE…

Glimpses of Kashmir: On For Now, It Is Night by Hari Krishna Kaul

May 16, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

[For Now, It Is Night] is a collection that represents Kaul as a chronicler of his times, mapping memory and history.

For Now, It Is Night by Hari Krishna Kaul, translated from the Kashmiri by Kalpana Raina, Tanveer Ajsi, Gowhar Fazili, and Gowhar Yaqoob, Archipelago Books, 2024

Hari Krishna Kaul (1934-2009) was a Kashmiri writer dedicated to inscribing the quotidian lives of people in the valley, releasing their stories in both fiction and dramatic works throughout his life. Some of these pieces have now been collected in For Now, It Is Night, which features seventeen stories picked from the four collections spanning Kaul’s career—two written and published before the watershed year of 1989, while the writer still lived in Kashmir; and two published after he and his family had migrated—just like many other Hindu families—in the Kashmiri Pandit exodus, which occurred upon the onset of militancy and rise in communal tensions after India’s Independence in 1947. As Kalpana Raina, Kaul’s niece and one of four translators in this volume, writes:

There are no grand themes in Kaul’s work, but an exploration and an acceptance of human limitations. He used his personal experiences to explore universal themes of isolation, individual and collective alienation, and the shifting circumstances of a community that went on to experience a significant loss of homeland, culture, and ultimately language.

One would assume that Kaul would become prejudiced after his exile, but that could not be farther from the truth. As Gowhar Fazili, another translator, states: “Unlike a partisan trend in contemporary Kashmiri writing—particularly in English—that victimises a community, demonising the other while valorising the self, Kaul subverts the binaries of good and evil, friend and enemy, self and other.” As exemplified in this selection, Kaul does not create reductive caricatures in the guise of characters, whether Muslim or Hindu. Moreover, neither the exodus, nor the events surrounding it, make up the sole focus of his narratives; he is not interested in the incidents themselves so much as the rootlessness and unbelonging they engendered. Tanveer Ajsi elaborates: “Not assuming the inclusive character of Kashmiri society, he excavated the strengths that bound it together, while also exposing the fault lines that lurked behind its cultural veneer.” As such, Kaul’s work can also be seen as a questioning of Kashmiriyat, the much-romanticised idea of communal harmony and religious syncretism in the Kashmir valley, which—despite its gradual erosion—still sees people swearing by its steadfastness.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 19, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Areeb Ahmad and José García Escobar

News from India and Central America!

The future is in translation! Catch up on global literary news as our editors report on major international award winners, breakthrough publications, and exhibitions fusing poetry with visual art.

Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

On April 9, Madhu Sriwastav was announced as the winner of the 2023 Muse India’s GSP Rao Translation Award for her work on Post Box 203 Nala Sopara by Chitra Mudgal, translated from the Hindi. Three other translators on the shortlist also received the jury’s commendation: Priyamvada R for her translation of Jeyamohan’s Stories of the True from the Tamil; Sridhar M and Alladi Uma for their translation of Telugu: The Best Stories of Our Times, edited by Volga; as well as Ratan Kumar Chattopadhyay for his translation of Manik Bandyopadhyay’s The Puppet’s Tale from the Bengali.

In other book prize news, the jury of the 2024 JCB Prize for Indian Literature was recently announced. Chaired by writer and translator Jerry Pinto, the other members include art historian and curator Deepthi Sasidharan; filmmaker and writer Shaunak Sen; scholar and translator Tridip Suhrud; and the artist Aqui Thami. The prize is currently open for entries, with the shortlist, the longlist, and the winner announced in September, October, and November respectively. Since the prize began in 2018, five out of six winners have been books in translation, with three out of those five being originally written in Malayalam. READ MORE…

Movement and Stagnation: On Virgula by Sasja Janssen

March 28, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

The comma is . . . perpetually in motion . . . a relentless zest for life, a desire to fill the emptiness with words, to delay the inevitable.

Virgula by Sasja Janssen, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison, Prototype, 2024

I write to you because you hover in the corner of my eye
I write to you because you never answer
I write to you because, like me, you dislike stagnation

In Wit, Margaret Edson’s 1999 Pulitzer-winning one-act play, the main character, English professor Dr Vivian Bearing, re-lives crucial moments of her life while undergoing an experimental chemotherapy treatment for late-stage ovarian cancer. In one instance, she remembers a comment made by her college professor, Dr E M Ashford, reprimanding her for taking language too lightly in an assignment on Donne’s sonnet, “Death Be Not Proud”; Ashford is quick to point out that the edition Vivian consulted contained faulty punctuation, and surmises that the simple message of the poem—“overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death, and eternal life”—gets sacrificed to the ‘hysterical’ punctuation of semicolons and an exclamation point. Vivian’s iteration—“And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die!”—distorts what is conveyed by a single comma: “And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.” One can clearly see the importance of one simple symbol: how it can make or break a poem.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 8, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Areeb Ahmad, Carol Khoury, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from China, India, and Palestine.

New arrivals of a Sinophone Proust, a celebration of Lucknow and Urdu culture, and a new solidarity campaign to share Palestinian literature. Our editors are bringing you the latest literary news from on the ground, and there’s plenty to discover.

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China 

“Life is too short, and Proust is too long.” This snarky remark by (maybe) Anatole France has long hovered over the labours of translators worldwide, as much a challenge as it is an implicit acquiescence to just how difficult and time-consuming the text is. As multiple as his English appearances, Proust in Chinese also comes to us through a plethora of voices. There exists at present only one complete collection of À la recherche du temps perdu《追忆似水年华》in the Chinese language, published in 1989 through a concerted effort by Yilin Publishing House and a total of fifteen translators (who called themselves the “Suicidal Translators Squad”). This is the only version that has accompanied readers for over thirty years—with plenty of updates, corrections, and criticisms along the way—though the possibility of alternative editions always beckoned temptingly from the beyond; critics are always quick to note (not entirely without resentment) that in neighbouring Japan and South Korea, five or six full translations of this masterwork has been made available to the public.

Short as it may be, life presents plenty of distractions and exits for the overwhelmed translator. Luo Xinzhang exhausted himself after 50,000 characters. Xu Jun made it until halfway through the fourth volume before giving up at an impressive 230,000 characters, having expended eight hours a day for over two years (and also suffering from depression). Xu Hejin passed away. Zhou Kexi plead a lack of physical stamina, saying that he was drained by the text’s beauty. Many of them, along with readers, expressed tremendous regret that there would not be a single unified representation of Proust in the Chinese language, fluid in style, levelling up to the original, rooted in a single, persistent mind.

Then in 2020, something changed. The Dafang offshoot of CITIC Publishing Group suddenly announced the “Proust Project”, involving a plan to newly translate À la recherche du temps perdu with a single translator at the helm, based on Gallimard’s revised and annotated 1987 edition. The individual selected for the job was Kong Qian, a professor of French at Nanjing Normal University, who had been named Best New Translator at the 11th Fu Lei Translation Awards for her work on Kaouther Adimi’s Our Wealth. Kong has since been given ten years to complete the task—one that is, for any literary translator, a dream. It is the opportunity to occupy a permanent estate in world literature, a claim to a text that has embedded itself in both the literati and the public consciousness of China, even amidst the hurried days. (The book is so famous in China that directors will use it as a prop, in order to directly communicate a character’s highbrow tastes or worldly intellect.) READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2024

February 12, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad, Christina Chatzitheodorou, and René Esaú Sánchez

New writing from Etel Adnan, Satish Alekar, and Djamila Morani!

This month, our selected titles of new publications carry wisdom, mystery, and humour. Below, find reviews of plays by one of India’s most accomplished and innovative playwrights; a compilation of interview with the inimitable Etel Adnan, conducted by Laure Adler; and a PEN Translates Award-winning novel of revenge and self-discovery, set in the Abbasid period.

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Two Plays: The Grand Exit and A Conversation with Dolly by Satish Alekar, translated from the Marathi by Shanta Gokhale, Seagull Books, 2024

 Review by Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large for India

This nifty volume of plays collects two of Alekar’s works, “Mahanirvan” and “Thakishi Samvad”, written forty-six years apart—Born in 1949, Satish Vasant Alekar is a Marathi playwright, actor, theatre director. He was a founding member of the Theatre Academy of Pune and is well-known plays such as for Mahapoor, Begum Barve, Atirekee, and Pidhijat. He is considered among the most significant playwrights in modern Marathi and Indian theatre, along with Mahesh Elkunchwar and Vijay Tendulkar, and lately, he has come to be recognised for his acting in Marathi and Hindi feature films.

“Mahanirvan” or “The Grand Exit” was first performed in 1974, and is a play where a dead man has more dialogue than any living character. The description on the cover is not wrong to equate the character with Sophocles’ Antigone, for he also strongly insists on the method of his last rites; Bhaurao wants to be traditionally cremated at the shamshan ghat, but the cremation ground is in the process of being privatised. Thus, the dead—or rather their relatives—are now being redirected to a new facility which uses electrical incineration.

So Bhaurao lingers around as his body malingers, rotting and fly-infested, while his wife Ramaa grieves intensely, coming to terms with the sudden loss, and his son, Nana, tries to convince him to just go ahead with the cremation, and pass on. While working on the play, Alekar had realised that a dead man cannot speak prose, so Bhau’s dialogues instead take the poetic form—one resembling keertans (religious recitations). READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 4, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Areeb Ahmad, Charlie Ng, and José García Escobar

Dispatches from Hong Kong, Central America, and India!

In this week of dispatches from around the world, our Editors-at-Large report on literary awards, the establishment of a literature museum, and book fairs! From controversy surrounding the new museum in Hong Kong to the most recent Indian texts in translation, read on to learn more!

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

Public voices demanding for a museum of literature have been around for years in Hong Kong. On July 22, during the Hong Kong Book Fair 2023, Poon Yiu-ming, the Chairman of the Federation of Hong Kong Writers, announced that the Museum of Hong Kong Literature would be inaugurated in April next year in Wan Chai with support from Chief Executive Lee Ka-chiu and the Hong Kong Jockey Club. Poon petitioned Lee last year on the establishment of a literary museum. However, the announcement has attracted controversy in the literary arena. 

The concept of a museum for Hong Kong literature was proposed by a group of local writers and scholars, including Dung Kai-cheung, Tang Siu-wa, Yip Fai, Liu Waitong, and Chan Chi-tak, among others, who formed the “Hong Kong Literature Museum Advocacy Group,” in 2009. A signed petition that successfully solicited signatures from hundreds of local and international Chinese writers and scholars was published in Ming Pao, which proposed to establish a literary museum in the West Kowloon Cultural District. Since the suggestion was not adopted by the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority then, the Advocacy Group proceeded to establish the House of Hong Kong Literature as a non-governmental organization for promoting and preserving Hong Kong literature.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

May 26, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Areeb Ahmad, Eva Wissting, and MARGENTO

Literary news from India, Sweden, France, and Belgium!

This week, our editors are bringing some fascinating news from their respective regions: the controversy surrounding a new prize for translated literature; the newest additions to the Swedish Academy (which adds two extra voices to the future electors of the Nobel Prize for Literature); and the latest visual art exhibitions and programmes that study the intersection between image and text. Read on to find out more!

Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

Earlier in May, the winner of the inaugural edition of the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation was announced to be Musharraf Ali Farooqi, for his translation of Siddique Alam’s The Kettledrum and Other Stories from the Urdu. The book will be published next year by Open Letter, and an excerpt is available now on Words Without Borders. The prize, however, has had its fair share of controversy over the last few weeks regarding another author, Nandini Krishnan, who had appeared twice on the shortlist. According to her, the prize had confidentially informed her that she was chosen as the winner for her translation of Charu Nivedita’s Raasa Leela from the Tamil and then asked for more excerpts; upon receiving the text, however, they then withdrew the win, citing “reputational risk and potential liability.” Krishnan in turn withdrew both of her books from consideration after revealing the incident, and the prize eventually released a statement; the announcement of the winner was then postponed from early April to mid-May.

Zubaan, a small feminist press that only publishes women, recently released The Keepers of Knowledge: Writings from Mizoram, edited by Hmingthanzuali and Mary Vanlalthanpuii—the fourth entry in a series of anthologies that seek to highlight work from Northeastern states of India, which are often neglected from the mainstream. The project is in collaboration with the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, and the four anthologies so far have featured writing in English and in translation—poetry, prose, essays—as well as visual art. It is significant in collating various indigenous literatures and making them available to a wider audience, going far beyond the limits of an archive. The fifth entry, We Come from Mist: Writings from Meghalaya, edited by Janice Pariat, is currently in the works and expected to be out in a few months. Zubaan has also consistently championed Indian women writers in translation, and two other notable recent releases were Andhar Bil by Kalyani Thakur Charal, translated from the Bengali by Ajit Biswas, and The Stomach that Chewed Hunger and Other Stories, edited by Bama and translated from the Tamil by Ahana Lakshmi. READ MORE…

Spinning Stories: On Black Foam by Haji Jabir

May 4, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

In inscribing his protagonist with an ever-shifting self, Jabir asserts that stories are a potent tool for self-fashioning. . .

Black Foam by Haji Jabir, translated from the Arabic by Sawad Hussain and Marcia Lynx Qualey, Amazon Crossing, 2023

In a 2019 interview with Marcia Lynx Qualey for Arab Lit, Haji Jabir gives a fascinating response when asked whether he writes “political novels”: “I write about the people of my country, because they are a persecuted and suffering people, and so my novels come in this manner. I would like to write far from politics, but I would betray these people if I turned away from their issues.” At the time of the interview, Jabir had recently published (رغوة سوداء (2018), which has now been jointly translated into English as Black Foam by Sawad Hussain and Qualey. The novel follows an Eritrean man on a journey to find his place in the world, and as he uneasily moves from one location to the next, unable to find a place where he can lay down roots, he changes names and identities fluidly in order to fit in, to have a better chance at a new life.

Given the name Adal at birth (or so he says), he claims to be a ‘Free Gadli’, the Eritrean term for children “born of a relationship between soldiers on the battlefield that goes against religious law.” The Eritrean War for Independence against Ethiopia went on from 1961 to 1991 and Adal, by his admission, was born during this conflict, growing into a seventeen-year-old soldier when Eritrea was finally liberated. To avoid the association with “Free Gadli” in the post-war nation, he changes his name to Dawoud. He is then sent to the Blue Valley prison camp for infarctions committed when he is supposed to be in the Revolution School, but when he supposedly escapes—though he never divulges how—to the Endabaguna refugee camp in Northern Ethiopia, he becomes David. From there, he manages to enter the Gondar camp by posing as a Falash Mura named Dawit, and gets resettled in Israel. These changing names indicate transformation by association, from a Muslim to a Christian to a Jew.

In inscribing his protagonist with an ever-shifting self, Jabir asserts that stories are a potent tool for self-fashioning; they dictate affiliations and guide assimilations, helping Adal become whoever he needs to be at that very moment. The oral traditions of storytelling are further reflected in the way the novel is structured. The narrative is circuitous and fluid, the chapters quickly moving between the past and present in order to flesh out details, with the name Adal uses as the quickest identifier of time and place. In Jerusalem, during an interview with a sociologist, he is asked which of his three names he prefers: “Should he say Dawoud, with all the defeats and losses that old name carried? Or should he choose David, a newer name, yet with as many bitter experiences? Or should he stick with the infant Dawit, without knowing for sure whether it was any different from its predecessors?” Seemingly a simple question, it clearly throws him into existential confusion. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

April 21, 2023  |  in Dispatches  |  by Areeb Ahmad, Eva Wissting, and MARGENTO

Literary news from Sweden, Romania, and India!

In this week’s updates on world literature, our Editors-at-Large bring you updates on literary awards and interdisciplinary festivals! From applied computer science for literature to books for Dalit History Month, read on to find out more!

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

Earlier this month, Norwegian novelist Vigdis Hjorth was announced the recipient of the inaugural Sara Danius Foundation Prize. Vigdis Hjorth is one of Norway’s most prominent writers, with over twenty novels and several young adult books published over the last forty years. English-language readers know her from titles like Is Mother Dead (2022) and Will and Testament (2019), both available in translation by Charlotte Barslund. Is Mother Dead was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, and Will and Testament was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award in the USA for best translated novel. The Danius Foundation emphasized Vigdis Hjorth’s “groundbreaking and magnificent narrative that disrupts the order with style and clarity” in explaining their motivation for awarding Hjorth the Sara Danius Foundation Prize. The award consists of SEK 50,000 and an artwork depicting Sara Danius, painted by Stina Wirsén. Sara Danius was a Swedish scholar of literature and aesthetics, a literary critic and an essayist, and the first female permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy. After her passing in 2019, her family created the Sara Danius Foundation, with the purpose of supporting female pioneers in literature, humanities research, criticism, essay writing, journalism, and artistic activities. This year’s award ceremony will take place at the Sven-Harry Art Museum in Stockholm on May 3. READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

March 20, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Andriana Hamas, Areeb Ahmad, and Sofija Popovska

Put on your seatbelts: This month’s edition takes us to Egypt, Sudan, and Japan!

2023’s first installment of A Thousand Lives takes us back in time (as far back as 1966) to unearth gems from around the world that some of us may have overlooked. Tackling topics ranging from colonialism to women’s place in society, they are as relevant today as when they first saw light of publication. Join our editors-at-large as they open three fabulous time capsules!

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Originally published in 1975 and first translated from the Arabic into English by Sherif Hetata in 1983, Woman at Point Zero, one of Nawal El Saadawi’s most well-known novels, sadly remains relevant as ever. In the preface, she writes that the book is based on a real woman, a true story seemingly down to the name Firdaus. The frame narrative is that of a journalist, a stand-in for Saadawi, who has been unsuccessfully trying to talk to Firdaus and is finally able to meet her the night before her slated execution. The framed narrative is Firdaus’s story: her traumatic childhood, how she became a prostitute, and why she is now on death row. While it’s certainly tied to a specific time and place for Arab women in Egyptian society, the novel is an indictment of patriarchy at large everywhere. The issues that Saadawi explores—the subjugation of women, women as goods, the hypocrisy of men, men as consumers, state and power, money—have not been resolved almost half a century after it first came out. There is a surprising immediacy, made all the more apparent by the pulsating prose. Here’s the portrait of a woman who has fatally unveiled society’s ugly truths. Buy a copy here.

–Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large for India

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Tayeb Salih was a Sudanese author, cultural journalist, and key figure in the Sudanese literary scene. Published in 1966, his most famous novel—Season of Migration to the North—was translated from Arabic by Denys Johnson-Davies. In a distinctive style, oscillating between a trenchant and a dreamy timbre, Salih tells the story of a young Sudanese man returning to his home village to find the people he’d grown up with succumbing to the charms of a mysterious stranger. The secretive newcomer develops a kinship with the protagonist, having shared a similar past—both had left their native land to study in England—and reveals his troubling biography, adumbrated by a series of dangerous games of seduction and violence. The stranger’s presence in the village is all but benign: soon, events of unprecedented brutality begin to take place, leaving the protagonist to observe powerlessly as his homeland falls apart. Now translated into more than 30 languages, Season of Migration to the North explores themes of exoticism and authenticity, growth and revenge, as well as delving deep into the complicated interplay between colonizer and colonized, on the individual and collective scale. Buy a copy here.

—Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large for Macedonia READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 3, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Areeb Ahmad, and Wambua Muindi

Dispatches from Mexico, Kenya, and India!

This week at Asymptote, our Editors-at-Large report on book fairs, Annie Ernaux’s visit to India, and celebrations of International Mother Language Day all around the world. From the efforts of Trans activists and performance artists in Mexico to a recent multilingual anthology published by Olongo Africa, read on to learn more!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

The literary community in Mexico City has been vibrant and active in the first months of 2023. Between February 23–March 6, the Feria Internacional del Libro del Palacio de Minería took place in Mexico City. This forty-fourth edition of one of the biggest international book fairs in Mexico brought together writers, scholars, editors, and artists from all over the world. They gathered in the historic downtown to host readings, panels, and roundtables on literature, social sciences, and politics.

There were more than a hundred events, ranging from book presentations to movie screenings to workshops for children. In one panel, Asymptote contributor Tedi López Mills presented an edited anthology of her poetry, published by the National University of Mexico in its pamphlet series Material de lectura. The publication will bring López Mills’s poetry to a wider public. In another event, Cuban poet Odette Alonso moderated a talk with Lía García and Jessica Marjane, two Trans performance artists and organizers that have been at the forefront of the movement for Trans rights and recognition in Mexico. García and Marjane founded the National Network of Trans Youth, which has strengthened the community bonds among Trans young people in Mexico. García has acquired international recognition, having been invited to perform and read to institutions outside of Mexico, among them Harvard University and the University of Illinois’s Humanities Research Center.

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“. . . I am sure of it”: On Deranged As I Am by Ali Zamir

February 15, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

The readers . . . become interlocutors, individuals who would not easily dismiss him or his story, and give a patient ear to his list of troubles.

Deranged As I Am by Ali Zamir, translated from the French by Alice Banks, Fum d’Estampa Press, November 2022

In Ali Zamir’s third novel, Deranged As I Am, narrator-protagonist Deranged is an impoverished man, somehow surviving on the paltry daily wages he manages to earn through hard labour at the docks from transporting goods and cargo, who keeps himself aloof from his fellow workers who make fun of him, using his clothes as a calendar: “Deranged as I am I have only seven ancient shirts in all. Seven pairs of trousers and seven pairs of shorts all pocked with holes and on each of them a day of the week so I don’t forget remaining me that I shouldn’t wear the same outfit twice you see?!” The novel itself begins intensely in medias res with Deranged trapped in a confined space, wounded and on the verge of death, his limbs tied up as flies swarm around him. His crying out, while exaggerated, highlights a jagged agony. 

The rest of the narrative recounts the incidents that led to this low point, with Deranged refusing to keep quiet and hunker down in the face of his many painful oppressions: “Let me make you understand this loud and clear as long as my heart beats your ears will bleed they will bleed until my soul is dizzy lest I disappear with a stream of tears in my charmless eyes.” Situated at the dizzy intersection of various vulnerabilities, he has minimal hope of having his voice heard or his exploitation compensated, because to the “angels of darkness,” as he calls the flies that represent his numerous tormentors, he is nothing but a speck of dirt that they can wipe away and then go about their day. The readers therefore become interlocutors, individuals who would not easily dismiss him or his story, and give a patient ear to his list of troubles and problems. 

READ MORE…