Posts by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

Texts in Context: Ayelet Ben-Yishai on the Historicization of Crisis

December 7, 2023  |  in Texts in Context  |  by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

I know that the violence today, and the occupation of which it is part, has a history and a politics which are man-made and can thus be unmade.

In her fascinating monograph, Genres of Emergency: Forms of Crisis and Continuity in Indian Writing in English, author and professor Ayelet Ben-Yishai examines the relationship between fiction and history through the novels centering around the Emergency in India—a drastic instance of president Indira Gandhi’s imposition of power. Tracing the ways that this period continuously resurfaced in literary works, Ben-Yishai uses genre and textuality to consider how writing is not only a reflection of the world, but an active force that moves through it. In this interview, she gives her insight on this central thought, and also discusses the fundamental structure of global crises, the dangerous concept of inevitability, and some of India’s most important titles. 

Katarzyna Bartoszynska (KB): Could you tell us about Genres of Emergency?

Ayelet Ben-Yishai (ABY): Genres of Emergency is about what might be the most momentous political event that contemporary readers have never heard of. In June 1975, Indira Gandhi, the third Prime Minister of India, imposed a State of Emergency throughout the country in response to what she called a “conspiracy” against her. Convicted of corruption and threatened by a growing opposition and mass demonstrations, Gandhi acted ruthlessly. Basic civil liberties were suspended, thousands were detained without trial, censorship imposed, and corruption reached new heights. Surprisingly lifted after twenty months, the Emergency became an anomaly in India’s democratic history—and was all but forgotten for many years, except, significantly, from literary fiction. 

A group of novels in English, written about the period in the late twentieth century, thus forms my corpus for Genres of Emergency. Why, I wondered, did these novels return to the Emergency, long after it ended and was forgotten? There are of course different answers to this question, but overall, I would say that going back allowed the authors of such fiction to think about the ways in which the Emergency was both a one-off anomaly, and of a piece with the longer arc of Indian history and politics: a crisis for sure, but also in continuity with India’s past and future.

KB: The book was written during a different emergency: during the height of the COVID pandemic and lockdown. Did those conditions shape the argument at all, or did you find yourself noticing how your argument addressed or diagnosed that present? Did those resonances seem different from the ones you have just described?

AYB: COVID-19 brought a renewed consideration of states of emergency, employed variously world-wide to combat the global health crisis. In many of these countries, India and Israel prominent among them, the emergency measures sat far too easily with ongoing erosions of democratic government and governance. The severe limitations to individual and collective rights carried out for the sake of public health seemed oddly in keeping with those already in place in the name of “security” or “public safety.”

As I was revising my chapters and coalescing them while under lockdown at home, the connections between my research and my surroundings came fast and strong. Refracted in the pandemic emergency, it became clearer in my study that emergencies worldwide are not only similar to past emergencies, but that they are constructed on a template of “emergency”: a structure within which an emergency could be comprehended despite its ostensible singularity. In other words, emergencies are unprecedented, but need to be recognizably so. READ MORE…

Texts in Context: José Vergara on the Russian Afterlife of James Joyce

January 9, 2023  |  in Texts in Context  |  by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

[I]t made me slow down to appreciate how that convoluted language makes us understand life and experience anew.

This is the third edition of Texts in Context, a column in which Katarzyna Bartoszyńska seeks out academics who contribute to and elucidate the world of literary translation, revealing their deeper studies into texts both well-known and overlooked.  

Today, we trace the legacy of James Joyce to its significant resonance in Russian literature, which José Vergara examines in his cogent and deeply-researched text, All Future Plunges to the Past. By taking the work of five major Russian writers as example, Vergara illuminates the throughline of Joycean ideas and themes, both in their universality and their recontextualization and transformation amidst Soviet and Russian history. In this following interview, Vergara discusses how these writers used Joyce to make sense of their own realities, Russian-language literature in this present moment, and texts from within the prison.

Katarzyna Bartoszynska (KB): Tell me about All Future Plunges to the Past!  

José Vergara (JV): My book examines James Joyce’s impact on Russian literature from the mid-1920s, when the first Soviet translations started appearing, through 2020. Of course, that basically means I’m looking at his “influence”—but it goes beyond that. I’m more interested in how, on one hand, Joyce became emblematic of larger trends in Russian attitudes toward Modernism, intertextuality, generational conflicts, artistic identity, and other big issues; and, on the other hand, he took on various forms or manifestations based on how certain Russian writers read him—literally and figuratively. Previous scholars had examined the critical response to Joyce in the Soviet Union and émigré communities, but they paid much less attention to his place in Russian literature itself. So, in All Future Plunges to the Past, I present five case studies of major writers who addressed Joyce directly in their fiction: Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin. The book explores how and why they were drawn to Joyce’s novels and ideas, interpreting them as an alternative path in world literature based on their respective biographical, historical, and cultural contexts. In this reading, Joyce becomes a prism through which to interrogate the question of cultural heritage in Russia, and a means for these writers to better understand themselves and their work. That’s at the core of the book: the question of literary lineages and how artists fashion their own histories through their writing.

KB: How artists fashion their own histories in their writing: could you say a little more about that?

JV: The central through line of my book is fathers and children, primarily sons. It struck me that the aforementioned writers were all, in one way or another, engaging with Joyce’s Shakespeare theory, which Stephen Dedalus explains in episode nine of Ulysses. Basically, he argues that creative artists, such as Shakespeare, become fathers to themselves by leaving behind their works, their lineage, a version of themselves for posterity to—hopefully—admire. At the same time, Stephen suggests that you have to select a literary forefather to supplant the biological. Each of the writers I feature consider this theory and respond to it in their idiosyncratic ways. For instance, Nabokov’s protagonist in The Gift pursues this path, but not to replace his biological father, who disappeared on a scientific expedition. Instead, like Nabokov, he wants to unite the cultural heritage that he lost as a result of the 1917 Revolution, and to bridge those gaps in emigration. All their readings of Joyce are operating on this metatextual level, as they come to terms with who they are in the history of Russian literature. READ MORE…

Texts in Context: Manu Samriti Chander on Brown Romantics

December 8, 2022  |  in Texts in Context  |  by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

I’d say part of what “Romantic” does is activate ideas about the everyday in new and interesting ways.

This is the second edition of Texts in Context, a column in which Katarzyna Bartoszyńska seeks out academics who contribute to and elucidate the world of literary translation, revealing their deeper studies into texts both well-known and overlooked. 

In the following interview, we are taking a look at the groundbreaking work of Manu Samriti Chander. His book, Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century examines the international impact of Romantic poetry, and how its ideals and aesthetics were reconstrued into other national literatures and political contexts. In looking at how authors under colonialism utilized Romantic works to interrogate European dominance, Chander provides fascinating insight into how poetry and politics found themselves deeply intertwined during that tumultuous time of revolution and failed promises, and how our understanding of Romanticism must search beyond European confines.

Katarzyna Bartoszyńska (KB): Tell me about your book, Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century!

Manu Samriti Chander (MC): Well, we’ve long associated British Romanticism with a relatively small group of English poets: the so-called “Big Six” of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Keats, and Shelley. Of course, Britain in the nineteenth century included colonies across the globe, where, as I show, local poets often wrote in conversation with major English writers. Figures like Henry Derozio in India, Egbert Martin in British Guiana, and Henry Lawson in Australia drew upon and sometimes pushed back against the poetries, philosophies, and politics of their English counterparts. I’m interested in what these poets’ works tell us about the limitations and possibilities of that literary movement we call “Romanticism.” What happens, I ask, when we think of Romanticism outside the relatively limited geographical and historical boundaries convention has encouraged us to draw?

KB: So, part of your argument here is that we should define Romanticism differently, and more capaciously in terms of time and place. As academics, we have some investment in these categories—such that we really have to engage the problem—but are they useful or relevant to the general public?

MC: “Romanticism” is a way of organizing texts, just like, say, alphabetizing your books or ordering them based upon the color of the spine. It’s not perfect, and it’s certainly not definitive, but it’s useful for emphasizing certain commonalities. One of the reasons I find the term interesting is that, unlike other literary categories that emphasize a particular moment in history (The Victorian Era), “Romanticism” refers to an “ism,” a set of beliefs about, for example, the relationship between the individual and society, or the privileged role of the poet in shaping the mores of a people. As an “ism,” that is, as an ideology, “Romanticism” is portable: we can track the way people were committed to (in the example I just gave) the specialness of poetry and make unexpected connections between disparate communities. I’m not sure you could say the same about books organized by color (although I’d love to read an essay about that!).

KB: Can you say a little more about how you think about this in a world literature context? It has such European roots as a category—is it also inevitably Eurocentric?  

MC: Yes, I think so. One of the thinkers I draw on is the late Pascale Casanova, who has (rightly) drawn a lot of criticism for her Eurocentrism, but whom I find useful for mapping Romanticism in a global context. According to Casanova’s model of world literature, modern nations have continually struggled with (European) centers of literary dominance (especially, she argues, France) for the right to be acknowledged as literary centers. Insofar as colonial Romantics are engaging with European Romantics (and all the poets I look at are), they are doing so as both admirers and rivals of metropolitan writers. Their Romanticism—which, I should add, is just one aspect of their literary projects—has to be understand in relation to Europe. Now, other aspects of their work need not be read this way. Derozio, for instance, can be read as part of a burgeoning local literary scene in Calcutta with its own set of rivalries and alliances. Martin and Lawson, too, in their respective contexts. And there’s important work to be done on the South-South relations between these writers and their contemporaries, but, again, their Romanticism needs to be understood in relation to European cultural imperialism. READ MORE…

Texts in Context: Glynne Walley on Kyokutei Bakin

August 29, 2022  |  in Texts in Context  |  by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

Hakkenden represents a whole other side of premodern Japan: big, messy, intellectually sophisticated, verbose, and populist.

Welcome to our new monthly column, in which Katarzyna Bartoszyńska seeks out academics who contribute to and elucidate the world of literary translation, revealing their deeper studies into texts both well-known and overlooked!

The following interview, conducted with Glynne Walley of the University of Oregon, spans Walley’s unprecedented efforts in bringing a titanic work of classical Japanese fiction to light. In his monograph Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment, and Kyokutei Bakin’s “Natso Satomi hakkenden” (Cornell University Press, 2018), Walley explores the oft-ignored popular literature of nineteenth-century Japan, and how Bakin’s master epic foregrounds fundamental questions of morality, virtue, and the functions of fiction in society.

Katarzyna Bartoszyńska (KB): Tell me about your book, Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment, and Kyokutei Bakin’s “Natso Satomi hakkenden.” Can you briefly describe the central idea or argument?

Glynne Walley (GW): Essentially, I’m looking at how a mid-nineteenth-century popular writer with aspirations toward capital-L Literature used a rhetoric of didacticism to satisfy both the demands of entertaining readers and his own desire to turn the novel into something Serious. The writer in question, Kyokutei Bakin (1767–1848) was one of Japan’s first professional authors of fiction, and he accomplished that by being acutely aware of what audiences wanted. At the same time, under the influence of masterworks in Chinese vernacular fiction, he had an idea that fiction, which his society considered beneath intellectual notice, could be a vehicle for serious ideas. It was a negotiation that other novelists in other places were also engaged in, but since Japan was operating largely outside their influence at that moment, Bakin makes an interesting case study of how the tensions between commerce and Art played out in a different and very specific context.

KB: What led you to this topic?

GW: The novel I focus on—Nansō Satomi hakkenden (Hakkenden for short, and Eight Dogs in English)—was hugely popular in its day, acutely influential on the next couple of generations, and remains crucially important to literary history, both for its intrinsic worth and for the role it played in debates over the modernization of fiction at the end of the nineteenth century. Despite this, it has been almost entirely neglected in Anglophone scholarship—mentioned, but seldom analyzed. It was time for a monograph on Hakkenden, I felt, and if nobody else was going to do it, I figured I might as well give it a shot.

KB: I’m burying the lede here a little bit because you are also, of course, the translator of Bakin’s Hakkenden! This is a monumental task—Hakkenden is massively long, immensely complex, and challenging to translate. What were the particular difficulties that this translation posed?

GW: Hakkenden is a massively long work! The modern edition I work from is nearly six thousand pages. The biggest challenges relate to that—and no doubt that length is one thing that kept the work largely untouched by Anglophone scholars and translators. Perhaps the smartest thing would have been to come up with a volume of highlights (a few short excerpts had already appeared in anthologies), but since the scale was part of the point of the work, I really wanted to see the whole thing in English.

The other big challenge is the language. It’s written in classical Japanese, which is grammatically and syntactically quite different from modern Japanese. The author writes in a wide array of styles within classical Japanese, drawing from literary masterpieces from Japan and China as well as the popular theater and fiction of his day, making for a really diverse stylistic palette. And he’s also incorporating a lot of elements of vernacular (as opposed to classical) Chinese writing, which adds a distinctive flavor, but which is, in a way, much harder for the modern reader than classical Chinese. Understanding all these registers, which are freely mixed in virtuoso ways, is hard enough, but the translator, of course, wants to try to capture them in English . . .  READ MORE…

Describing the Entire World: On Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob

February 16, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

Tokarczuk does not glorify the past, but neither does she offer us the comforting illusion that we have left its barbarism behind.

Olga Tokarczuk has long been recognized in Poland as one of the most important authors working today, but it is only in the last few years that she has received her due recognition in the English-speaking world. The course of her rise to fame in English has been in some ways unexpected, beginning as it did with one of her more experimental fictions, Flights, which is also among her longer works. Although this seems to bode well for her continued success, it is in some ways unfortunate that Flights was the first of her novels to receive such attention, because it may give readers the wrong impression: Tokarczuk’s work, though ambitious and wonderfully complex, is in fact best characterized by an extraordinary vivacity and approachability.

That this grace and elegance can also be appreciated by Anglophone readers is due, in part, to the brilliance of Tokarczuk’s translators, and the particular genius of Jennifer Croft is once again on display in The Books of Jacob. Croft beautifully captures the distinct quality of Tokarczuk’s prose: the lightness, the playful curiosity, the lyricism. This is harder than one might think: I translated a few lines of The Books of Jacob myself for an academic essay I wrote on the novel, and it is humbling to compare my version to hers. As Croft recently explained in an essay on the process of translating the novel, part of the trick is managing word order, a complex phenomenon in Polish that, if rendered too faithfully in English, makes for an awkwardness that is utterly alien to Tokarczuk’s style. To get her right, it is necessary to take some liberties, and it requires a truly gifted translator to find the right balance.

A big part of what distinguishes Tokarczuk’s work is its spell-binding immersiveness. Many of her novels, like the much earlier Primeval and Other Times and House of Day, House of Night, have a fairy-tale quality (one that has much in common with the works of magical realism so popular in the 1990s), produced in part by her fondness for interweaving notes of magic or mysticism but also more generally by her narrators’ sense of wide-eyed wonder at the world. The Books of Jacob is very characteristic in this regard, particularly in its interest in the occult and otherworldly. At the opening of the novel, we meet Yente as she awakens on her deathbed and suddenly floats above the scene, viewing everything from on high. “And this is how it is now, how it will be: Yente sees all.” And so the story begins, establishing a perspective that hovers between life and death, outside of time and space, a striking combination of detachment and sensuous detail. At one moment, it ponders the conventions of geographical borders; at another, it notes the particular scent of a sweaty body.

But against expectation, Yente is not the novel’s narrator, nor even the book’s focal point, though she reappears occasionally to survey the scene and meditate on the vagaries of human designs and plans. Instead, the novel moves among a sprawling cast of characters, each with their own wonderfully idiosyncratic set of concerns and interests. There are the various members of the Shorr family (it is they who inadvertently make Yente immortal, having attempted only to keep her alive long enough that her death wouldn’t ruin ruin the wedding they are hosting.) There is the priest and encyclopedia author Benedict Chmielowski, who dreams of describing the entire world, and his pen-pal and aspiring poet, the noblewoman Elżbieta Drużbacka. There is the doctor Asher Rubin, whose cosmopolitan interests in European culture and philosophy draw him gradually away from the Jewish community. And one of my personal favorites, Moliwda, a lonely, wandering Polish nobleman who moves to Turkey, giving himself over to various utopian experiments in search of a place where he will belong. From these bits and pieces of the various characters’ lives, gradually, a larger story emerges.

READ MORE…

To Learn the Wider World: The Summer 2021 Educator’s Guide

August 2, 2021  |  in Asymptote for Educators  |  by Anna Rumsby, Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Kent Kosack, and Mary Hillis

Stories set in other places and cultures, written in different languages, widen the world; I try to bring that feeling into the classroom.

Since its inception in 2016, the Educational Arm has developed instructional materials to accompany select pieces from the nonfiction, fiction, poetry, drama, and visual sections of each issue of Asymptote. Now with twenty Educator’s Guides in our archive, and over one hundred lesson plans based on translations from over fifty different languages, teachers can truly experience the world with their students. We encourage educators to explore the myriad of ways Asymptote content can be adapted and used in their curriculums; most lessons can be readily applied in literature courses at the high school or university level, but are also flexible enough to be adapted for a variety of humanities classes such as English, creative writing, cultural studies, and modern languages. They can also be easily applied to engage lifelong learners at community centers or arts organizations.

The Summer 2021 Educator’s Guide features lesson plans based on a diverse array of texts from the latest issue of Asymptote, including nonfiction translated from Czech and Spanish, poetry from Brazil and Iceland, and visual art inspired by China and the U.S. In these lessons, students are invited to observe urban life through the lens of psychogeography; explore the multifaceted relationship between art, memory, and cultural identity; research poets and critically examine the concept of literary canon; and delve into the translation process while reflecting on their own experiences reading works in translation. We hope that the Educator’s Guide will serve as a springboard for the use of world literature in your own classroom.

In this following roundtable, four members of the Educational Arm—representing a variety of teaching contexts—sit down for a discussion about the Educator’s Guide. Anna Rumsby (English language teaching, U.K./Germany), Mary Hillis (English language teaching, Japan), Kent Kosack (creative writing, U.S.), and Kasia Bartoszynska (literature, U.S.) discuss their favorite lessons from previous Educator’s Guides—why they chose the pieces in question, how they adapted them, with additional discourse on teaching through the pandemic and the importance of reading world literature.

Mary Hillis (MH): How does translated literature fit into your teaching practice? Have you taught any lessons from the Educator’s Guide, or do you have any favorite lessons from previous guides?

Anna Rumsby (AR): I teach English to German speakers; most of my lessons revolve around the German school system, and therefore involve rather more pedestrian areas such as grammar and traditional style essays. As a relatively new addition to the Education Arm, I was deeply impressed and invigorated by the creative freedoms we enjoy in producing the incredibly unique material at hand, working from some incredibly talented authors and translators. It definitely highlighted what had sometimes been lacking for me in my other work. I suppose that, in a way, working on the Educator’s Guide means I can design lessons which I would love to teach, rather than those I teach day to day.

In the Fall 2020 Educator’s Guide, I was particularly struck by the lesson plan called “Writing About What is Lost,” on “Living Trees and Dying Trees” by Itō Hiromi, translated by Jon L. Pitt. I am a great lover of both folklore and the botanical world; my MA dissertation involves a lot of Black Forest folklore, and my partner is a gardener, so the exercise on the importance and meaning of trees in Japanese culture really struck me. It reminded me of strolling through botanical gardens in the pre-COVID age, being told the Latin names and significance of all the trees I pointed at. I love how the lesson plan uses Itō Hiromi’s work as a springboard for further research, which in turn explores specific topics in more depth.

Kent Kosack (KK): I’m glad you mentioned “Writing about What is Lost.” It’s a great example of what teaching world literature and literary translation can do—letting the students explore a different place, a culture or sensibility, and using it to learn more about the wider world. By the end of the lesson, they’re making connections to their own lives and—in this case—reflecting on what’s been lost. It’s difficult work, but especially during this pandemic, necessary and potentially cathartic.  READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2020

June 15, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Eva Wissting, and Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

New publications from Brazil, Japan, and Poland!

This month, our selections of newly published literature from around the globe seem to cohere under the umbrella of trauma and memory, and the way they inevitably turn into narratives in the process of retrospection. From a Polish work of non-fiction that traces the sufferings of Poles during WWII, to the journals that document a Jewish immigrant in Brazil, to the strange and unspoken secrets of a small village in Japan—these works are of both documentation and imagination.

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A Little Annihilation by Anna Janko, translated from the Polish by Philip Boehm, World Editions, 2020

Review by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Educational Arm Assistant

It is a grim fact, one that acquires increasing urgency in recent years, that those who were alive to experience the horrors of the Second World War are getting older: before long, we will no longer be able to talk to people who have direct experience of those times. Thus, we are increasingly grappling with the problem of second-generation memory: with the matter of how the descendants of survivors preserve and pass on the stories of the past for future generations, and with questions as to whether, or how, those descendants inherit the trauma of their ancestors. Anna Janko’s A Little Annihilation is a powerful meditation on these issues.

In this reckoning with the past, Janko describes the destruction of the Polish village of Sochy by the German military on Tuesday, June 1, 1943: the inhabitants massacred and buildings burned to the ground over the course of a mere few hours. Nine-year-old Teresa Ferenc, Janko’s mother, was among the survivors. In recounts of conversations, her mother describes her memories of that day—most especially, witnessing the death of both of her parents. Janko also chronicles interviews with other survivors from the village, interweaving their stories and noting the discrepancies between them, while describing efforts to tabulate the exact number of lives lost. The impossibility of establishing precise details is a crucial reminder of the intertwined nature of history and memory, a refutation of the common notion of their opposition, as well as a reflection on the challenges of documenting a massacre.

For some English-language readers, Janko’s text may be the first work they have encountered that discusses the sufferings of non-Jewish Poles during the Second World War. For Americans especially, to learn about Nazi atrocities is generally to learn about their efforts to exterminate European Jews, without a detailed understanding of how their eugenicist ideology shaped their policies and strategies in a broader variety of ways. Confusion over the fact that Poland was occupied territory has led to mistaken statements about “Polish death camps” (most notably, perhaps, when President Barack Obama used the term during a ceremony awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski in 2012; he later apologized for the error)—as Janko angrily reminds readers. “In my opinion it would be best if Germany gathered up all the camps they left behind in Poland. So that no one would be mistaken any longer.” READ MORE…

My 2019: Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

December 23, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

What follows is not a reckoning of everything I read this year, but rather a contemplation of the different ways that books assign themselves to me

Flaubert once said that one should read not for the purpose of instruction, but “in order to live.” Continuing our staff summations of 2019 in literature, Asymptote’s Educational Arm Assistant Katarzyna Bartoszyńska outlines an abundant year of reading, ranging from feminist favourites to autofiction to books about books, and in doing so, considers the sense of how books find their way to us, perhaps so that we may live.

Reflecting on my year in reading, I started to think about how various books came into my hands. I’m a literature professor, so a lot of what I read is determined by the classes I’m teaching, the syllabi I create. But making assigned book lists seems to have become a habit that spills over into the rest of my life as well—much of my reading seems to be part of various projects with lists of their own. It’s rare for me to randomly grab a book off my to-read shelf and just dive in, though I did just that with Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins, and it ended up being one of my favorite books of the year; a collection of formally dazzling short stories, whose pleasure was heightened for me, perhaps, because I entered it with almost no previous knowledge, and so was all the more delighted by every surprising twist and turn. I had a similar experience with Yiyun Li’s breathtaking A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. But as often as not, the result of such serendipity will be the creation of a new list—for instance, I’ve now resolved to read everything else Yiyun Li has written. What follows, then, is not a reckoning of everything I read this year, but rather a contemplation of the different ways that books assign themselves to me, and the highlights of these circumlocutious processes. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2019

November 11, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden, Alyea Canada, Daljinder Johal, and Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

November’s best new translations, chosen by the Asymptote staff.

November brings plenty of exciting new translations and our writers have chosen four varied, yet equally enriching and timely works: Bohumil Hrabal’s memoir that is at once a detailed study of humans’ relationship with cats and an exploration of dealing with mounting pressures and stress; a debut collection of Chilean short stories which explores social and economic difficulties and sheds light on some of the causes behind Chile’s recent social unrest; Hiromi Kawakami’s follow-up novella to the international bestseller, Strange Weather in Tokyo; and a novel set on the Chagos Archipelago which recounts the expulsion of Chagossians from the island of Diego Garcia and examines cultural identity and exile. Read on to find out more!

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All My Cats by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson, New Directions, 2019

Review by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Educational Arm Assistant

Bohumil Hrabal’s All My Cats is not for the faint of heart. Though fans of the author will recognize and appreciate the quirky humor and lyrical melancholy, one must also be prepared to take on the harsher aspects of the story, and I suspect that the uninitiated may find the descriptions of cats being murdered a bit much to take. The short memoir documents the author’s relationship to the feral cats living in his country cottage in Kersko, and his anguished labors to brutally limit their number. It is a lovely homage, and a richly evocative account of the pleasures of feline companionship, with lush descriptions of their delicate paws and velvety noses. We become acquainted with each individual kitty and their distinctive markings, habits, and personalities, but these rhapsodic stories are punctuated by episodes of grim slaughter that are depressingly specific—a morose account of an awful deed. And so, gradually, horrifyingly, this becomes a book about guilt and how it shapes one’s worldview, producing a strange reckoning of crime and punishment that reads retribution in the random alignments of events.

Witnessing Hrabal shuttling back and forth between his life in Prague and Kersko, we begin to notice that his concerns about his cats are combined with a steadily accumulating sense of anxiety and torment about his work, neighbors, and life. “What are we going to do with all those cats?” his wife asks, in an echoing refrain, as new litters of kittens, inexorably, arrive. The book is about the cats, but we start to realize that it is also not about the cats, not really, but rather, about how Hrabal struggles to manage the various stresses of his life more generally as he gains success and recognition as a writer. Haunted by his guilt over the murdered creatures, he surveys the world around him, reflecting on the relationship between art and suffering, and increasingly begins to feel that he is a plaything of fate, doomed to unhappiness, with no choice but surrender. READ MORE…