Posts by Meghan Racklin

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2024

July 22, 2024  |  in News  |  by Meghan Racklin and Xiao Yue Shan

A deeper look into our Summer 2024 issue!

With so many wonderful pieces in the Summer 2024 issue, where to start? Read the blog editors’ top picks.

We loved Eduardo Galeano when he spoke of “the infinite and invisible altars of our Latin America”, but perhaps we paid not enough attention when he called reality “. . . life that sings with multiple voices”. Despite the efforts of many historians and writers in establishing the distinctions and singular complexities of Latin American countries, outsiders tend to cohere the regions in a syncretic whole, held by the commonalities of language, Iberian colonialism, and modals of development. The term “Latin America” originated with the Chilean philosopher and politician Francisco Bilbao, who sought to contrast Europe and the Americas as past and future, instating a rhetoric in which the archaisms of the former could be overturned by the luminous visions of the latter: “. . . reason against religion, hope against tradition, union against isolation. . . the logic of sovereignty against oligarchic constitutions”. This summation of continents may have served him when the routes of imperialism carved the globe up into the Old World and the New World, but we’ve no use for such simplistic declarations today.

In “neozone”, the Chilean writer Juan Carreño is on the road. In a diaristic frenzy, this excerpt translated by Maya Feile Tomes moves from Mexico’s San Cristóbal to the city of Comitán, then past the Guatemala border with a stop at the capital, before urging its way towards the Nicaraguan capital of Managua (“crossing the whole of El Salvador and that little stretch of land where Honduras borders on the Pacific”). All the while the writer’s mind is running faster than the speed of any car or bus, threading in memories and markers across this immensely varied continent in the electric instantaneity of mobility, when every new encounter sends itself hurtling across the mind, awakening memories, desires, references, the middles of anecdotes, connecting itself to the great shifting web of a body amongst. Yet, even as the sights, the people, the landscape are playing their own pinball game within the ratting corridors of Carreño’s journals, the stark insider-outsider paradigm finds plenty of iterations in movements and border-crossings, illumed within the subtle details of social code—“I try to speak Spanish in a generic fashion”—that characterises the Chilean against the Guatemalan, the Mexican, the Nicaraguan. Regionalisms, habits, and assumptions abound, and the people who offer their company or a splinter of their story are as open as they are fleeting, honest in a way that is only possible without surnames. Holding to the shared language that occasionally sizzles with the separateness of nationalities, they share opinions, invitations, songs, insights. There’s something familiar, profound in this incidental intersection of the passing-through, when finding oneself in a different country and suddenly given the position of ambassador, as if a person is a miniaturised model of a nation. And when you tell them about where you came, you give the truth as only you could, and the country glows a little in response, in that stranger’s mind, and another house is built on the phantasmagorical, long accumulated, imagined atlas of the world—that which makes the maps seem paltry in comparison. READ MORE…

Call for Submissions: On Palestine

December 6, 2023  |  in On Palestine  |  by Carol Khoury and Meghan Racklin

Submit your pieces on Palestine to the blog by January 31.

Palestinian Weather Forecast 

Gaza is answering Pablo Neruda’s question, from LXVI poem in Book of Questions:

In which language does rain fall
over tormented cities?

Listen closely:

Its first shower is in the language of semiotics: deafening whirs; shaking grounds; curling heads; thumping smoke; …
Then comes the downpour in the language of math: sequence of raids; multiplied fears; subtracted lives; divided families; added damages; …
Lastly, a never-ending chilling squall in the universal language—no not music—, that is grief: when the heavy blanket is uncloaked, the glacier proves to be thickening.

Since words are stifled by politicians at the desks of the international community, Gazans have to scream to protest Israeli collective punishment—like banning electricity and water supply to 2.3 million Gazans—to supply this year’s season of rain. 

Until freedom’s dawn breaks, take care to stay sane in the shelter-less, sealed-off, open-air prison. 

—Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, and ABC manager

These words from Carol Khoury set the tone for the Asymptote blog’s call for submissions for a series of posts focused on Palestine. We are seeking dispatches from Palestine and reflections on Palestinian identity and Palestinian struggle. We are particularly interested in pieces written by writers or translators, or pieces that take up questions about language and literature in relation to the current conflict and its historical roots.

Please send pitches or completed drafts to blog@asymptotejournal.com by January 31.

Four-in-the-Morning Literature: On Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq

September 20, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Meghan Racklin

Insomnia does strange things to time, or time does strange things to insomniacs—it estranges, stretches, slips.

Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq, translated from the French by Penny Hueston, Semiotext(e), 2023

While writing this review, I began making a list of everything I’ve tried in my attempts to fall asleep. The first was reading, which didn’t help me fall asleep at all (though not sleeping has helped immensely with reading). The second, which I tried after the first time I told a doctor about my trouble sleeping at age eleven, was melatonin, and I took it dutifully, in varying doses, until stopping cold a year ago. I sleep no better and no worse since. Over the years, I have also tried: valerian root, passionflower, marijuana, CBD gel, NyQuil, keeping my phone in another room, counting sheep, white noise, earplugs, Xanax, watching the same six television shows over and over again, an eye mask, new sheets, exercise, an early and consistent alarm. I have a prescription for trazadone but don’t take it (the benefits of simply being in possession of sleeping pills are often extolled to insomniacs, though I haven’t noticed any). I often end up listing all the people I love, and this last is perhaps least helpful—I always end up imagining what I would say if asked to give a eulogy, or what they would say if they gave one for me. Sometimes I end up in tears, still sleepless.

This is insomniac thinking: each line on a list bends and branches outwards. Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq, in Penny Hueston’s translation, is written in this “totally insomniac mode.” The book, a meditation on this condition, is comprised of lists, footnoted investigations into the history of sleeping and not sleeping, worries about the meaning and morality of insomnia in the face of genocide and climate catastrophe, and a compendium of quotes and anecdotes about sleepless writers or the characters to whom they’ve lent their insomnia. It includes a two-page spread of photos of hotel rooms Darrieussecq has stayed—though often not slept—in. Researching, worrying, organizing, reading: all insomniac activities, which lead as easily away from sleep as towards it.

She circles around sleep, doubles back, spiraling like a Louise Bourgeois drawing (the artist, a prolific insomniac herself, often drew spiraling shapes when awake late at night, but spiraling which way?). Darrieussecq enacts insomnia in her style; the book is fragmentary, intense, shifting. Her metaphors are hypnagogic, caught between reality and analogy: “we insomniacs plummet into horrendous ravines and the bags under our eyes are bruise colored.” Metaphor, incidentally, is one of the things on Darrieussecq’s list of things she’s tried to help her sleep. “I tell myself that a good sleep would be to sleep like a mountain,” she writes, “Oh, metaphors, metaphors.” This effort, of course, failed.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2023

September 11, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Meghan Racklin and Samantha Siefert

New translations from the Catalan and the French!

This month in newly released translations, we’re featuring two authors of inimitable voice and style. From the Catalan, a surrealist masterpiece by Ventura Ametller sharply blends history with mysticism in an epic retelling of the Spanish Civil War; and from the French, the latest text by Annie Ernaux returns to some of the author’s most central themes—sex and memory—in a poignant examination of corporeal and psychological navigations.

Summa Kaotica by Ventura Ametller (Bonaventura Clavaguera), translated from the Catalan by Douglas Suttle, Fum d’Estampa, 2023

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

A monstrosity of a fish gnashes at a tiger, the tiger leaps towards a gun, the gun is aimed perilously at the prone body of a nude woman. . . It’s all so unexpected and moving, but what do these objects have to do with one another—or with anything at all?

Such is surrealism: the challenge of reconciling the disparity of absurdity. “Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the high and the low, the communicable and the incommunicable will cease to appear contradictory,” declared André Breton in his manifesto. Riding on the coattails of Dadaism, surrealism emerged as an impulsive reaction to the tragedy of the First World War: If reason had resulted in such great suffering, then what good was a movement rooted in realism?

The antithesis of reason, then, was the way forward, and the efforts of the avant-garde were so resonant that they continue to exist today as comfortable figures of popular culture, where the discordance of fish, tiger, and gun feel almost familiar in Salvador Dalí’s famous painting, “The Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening.” The surrealist world of letters, however, leave room for discovery.

In Catalonia with Dalí at the beginning of the twentieth century, the writer Ventura Ametller—the pen name of Bonaventura Clavaguera—was hard at work, producing a prolific collection of poetry, essays, and novels that turn the world upside down in raucous prose, described by essayist Lluís Racionero as “Dalí in words.” His work has remained only quietly appreciated, but perhaps the time has come for that to change with the new publication of Ametller’s groundbreaking magnum opus, Summa Kaotica, in a masterful translation from the Catalan by Douglas Suttle. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2023

July 24, 2023  |  in News  |  by Meghan Racklin and Xiao Yue Shan

Taking a closer look at pieces on landscape’s multiplicity, unrequited love, and memory amidst grief.

Launched four days ago, our blockbuster Summer 2023 issue gathers never-before-published writing from a remarkable thirty countries—including a spotlight on Indonesia. Don’t know where to begin with this thrilling mélange of established and emerging voices? To help you dip your toe into this brand-new edition brimming with literary gems, our blog editors take you through their favorite pieces. Read on!

Within the tensions of unrequited love, the transformative faculties of ardor conduct their most astounding magic. Time is stretched to its utmost limits, unbound feelings hit a multiplicity of extremes, and the physical proof of reality collapse under the extraordinary pressures of belief. There’s not a lot of happiness that can be found amongst the shifting phantasms and polarities of this condition, but there is plenty of beauty, of poetry, of hope and awe, all of it stemming from nothing but the imagination in overdrive, sparked brilliantly alive by the beckoning figure of desire.

There are many examples of such love to be found in life and art, but one that seems particularly difficult to understand is the love of a fan. The indulgent culture of fandom gives free reign to displays of love-as-devotion, ranging from pedestrian claims of destiny to reckless acts of sacrifice—and because it often inflicts the young and the hyperbolic, its passions are seen as lacking any certifying element of truth. A one-sided, disingenuous, superficial love. But just try telling that to a fan.

In an excerpt from her novel, Phantom Limb Pain, Heejoo Lee does much to redeem this expressive, unrestrained love. Tracing the contours of a fan’s deep—even vicious—adulation for an idol, Lee’s forthright prose, translated with a sensitive colloquiality by Yoojung Chun, reaches a tender, natural honesty, describing an emotion that gives a rhythm to the days and months, a thrill to the pedestrian events of waiting and wanting, and a vividity to the fantasies making life more beautiful. Manok, the young woman who paves the way for our nameless protagonist into fandom, is “downright shameless,” keenly following her idol’s every move, openly displaying her possessive jealousy, and attributing her love to an act of God. Being a fan in South Korea’s multibillion-dollar idol industry is nothing less than laborious; fans religiously attend promotional events, spare no expense in purchasing goods and merchandise, and “pour their hearts out” at every opportunity. From the outside, one is made to wonder what any individual gets out of this all-consuming lifestyle, and here, Lee explains it to us through Manok, with the eloquence of absolute sincerity:

Their presence stayed mysterious over repeated encounters, and it refused to be locked into language. Their real presence rendered everything in high relief, so that everything—even their shadows or things that might be their shadows—became amazing to me.

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2023

April 24, 2023  |  in News  |  by Meghan Racklin and Xiao Yue Shan

Diving deep into the issue with spotlights on Bolivia, Ukraine, Romania, and more!

Our Spring 2023 issue is alive. Animated with the wide plethora of voices, lifeforms, and phenomenon from thirty different countries, this selection of world literature is moving, feeling, singing, and changing—wonderfully emblematic of writing’s capacities to transcend the page or the screen. To aid you in your explorations of this multivalent “Vivarium,” our blog editors present their favourites from the issue, including our first ever feature of Bolivian literature, and work from Portugal’s famed modernist, Fernando Pessoa. 

“Love does not fulfill itself,” the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy once wrote, “it always arrives in the promise and as the promise.” Though it seems almost flippant, in this line is the (not so well-kept) secret that has always led me to look for love in poems, that moves me to believe there is still no better medium than poetry to offer us love’s canyons and shadows, and that it is the poem’s purposeful language which allows us to seek love out—not in the validating or reciprocating constructs of daily life, but in truer forms: those sublime visions, conquerings of time, and suspensions of reality. Nancy knew that love is unfulfillable because its absolution is impossible, but it still comes to us as inextricable from eternity: the promise of love is love’s own perpetuity, the promise that love’s law is the one that overcomes all others. And though there are great, sweeping narratives of love in novels, there are wondrous portrayals of love in theatre and in cinema, there are photographs and paintings that capture love’s possibilities and devastations, but the reason I return to the poem is that it, too, is a form that recognises its own innate impossibility (because how can a word capture any of this), and then goes on to form its own laws, which enact the impossible.

Mariana Berenice Bredow Vargas’s alluring, propulsive work, “Let it Go,” is one of the most magical love poems I have come across in some time. Translated with the expert, time-keeping ear of Forrest Gander (whose prowess is especially evident in his rendering of the last lines), the piece begins with an invitation and does not wait a beat before seemingly taking us by the hand to sweep over the landscape, magic carpet-ing over the exhaustive obligations of everyday patterns and collected burdens, up and towards the vast and imagined horizon that separates the awake and the dreamed, into the kaleidoscoped marvels and cacophonic frequencies of everything the world has to offer. The poem is an exalted plea for the lover to recognise the availability of immense beauty and profound joy, but also a tender admittance that one can only get there travelling alongside another: “. . . there’s life // dreaming you past the pain, let’s go, I want / to dream it too . . .” Balancing the imploring voice of a hopeful romantic with the resonant fact that fantasy is essential to anyone wanting to live, within Vargas’s impatient call is the promise of love—a promise so beautiful, it almost doesn’t need to be kept. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 31, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Meghan Racklin, and Thuy Dinh

The latest literary news from the United States, Vietnam and the Vietnamese Diaspora, and the Philippines!

This week’s roundup of literary news from around the world highlights exciting new publications and publishing trends! From a literary marriage in the United States to the return of a beloved author and history titles in the Philippines, read on to find out more!

Meghan Racklin, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting from the United States

Last week, at their annual awards ceremony—in person again for the first time since the onset of the pandemic—the National Book Critics Circle awarded the inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize to Grey Bees by Andrew Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk. The new award brings attention to books translated into English and published in the United States, where only a small number of books in translation are published each year—Publishers Weekly’s translation database lists only 419 books in translation published in the United States in 2022.

Dralyuk, the award winner, is a poet and critic as well as a translator and until recently was the Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His translation was selected from a competitive group of finalists which, notably, also included the translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob by Jennifer Croft—Dralyuk’s wife. Prior to the announcement of the award winner, the two gave an interview to the L.A. Times about their relationship to translation and to each other. Croft said “Once we started dating, I would find Boris on my steps, where he would tell me about what he had just translated. He gets so emotionally invested. . . . He’s so careful about every word. It was very moving and, I think, a large part of how we came together.”

READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Happening

March 6, 2023  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Georgina Fooks, Meghan Racklin, and Xiao Yue Shan

But how does the visual operate in cinema, as opposed to literature?

Annie Ernaux’s memoir of her 1963 abortion, Happening, originally published in 2000, and Audrey Diwan’s 2021 movie adaptation of the same name are the subject of our latest edition of Asymptote at the Movies. Ernaux’s memoir tells the story of an abortion she sought before the procedure was legal in France, and the story of her reflecting on the experience decades later, well after France legalized abortion. Diwan’s movie came out in a very different world than the one Ernaux’s memoir reflects on and, indeed, the one in which Ernaux wrote her memoir. Both the book and the movie follow young Annie’s struggle to find the medical care she needs—Ernaux said that watching the film “plunged” her back into the experience she wrote about. Taking the two together underscores the urgency of her situation and raises questions about the difference between cinematic immediacy and memoiristic distance. In the following roundtable, Meghan Racklin, Xiao Yue Shan, and Georgina Fooks discuss the relationship between these two works, the translation of memoir into fiction, and experience of reading and watching the movement of time.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Halfway through the pages of Ernaux’s Happening, there’s a line that I saw as a kind of summation of her entire corpus’ ethos: “I believe that any experience, whatever its nature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled.” It seems to me that a similar sentiment across nearly all of her texts—which are, after all, in their obsessive tunnelling and metaphysical depth, a refusal of any verdict that women’s lives are mundane, and their thoughts unserious.

And there is a particular impact to that Serious Verb—chronicled. In French, Ernaux opts for the less indomitable l’écrire, but I’d like to believe that Tanya Leslie, in her translation, understood that to write would have been too pliant for what Ernaux wanted to say: that such experiences needed to be inscribed into the archives of human history, that they needed to be preserved as well as they can for future excavation, and that such texts would fill the void in the scaffolding of time.

Happening, then, is a text about writing, but also the remembering that feeds the writing, and also the rupture that must be navigated when reality and recognition are trying to find one another on the page. If there was any image that came to mind while I read Happening, it was only of the older Ernaux holding a pen, gazing out the window, closing her eyes in conjuration of an image. Because Happening does not centralise the abortion that propels its narrative, but the intellectual clarity that is required to unveil “what can be found there,” I almost expected a cinematic replication of that once-removed perspective in Audrey Diwan’s adaptation: voiceover narration, analepsis/prolepsis, superimpositions . . .

The film, however, makes no use of such manipulations, and completely isolates itself within the parameters of the Event; it is a movie about abortion, and its illegality and ramifications in 1960s France. It is so dissonant from its source text—not in content but in intention—that it jarred me when Anamaria Varolomei, who plays Ernaux, is first addressed as Annie. It was impossible for me to connect her with the woman of the book—not only because the woman is older, but because the woman is remembering, not living through. The film is an intimate, occasionally chilling, and politically effective film about the alienation and humiliation of being accidentally pregnant in that era—and as such it is rooted in the immediate, in the physical, and in the cinematic present. Ernaux’s text read to me in direct opposition, weaving and defining that tenuous space of the eternal past. How did the two of you feel about this variation in treatment? Was it as disconcerting for you?

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2023

February 13, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Cecilia Weddell, Charlie Ng, and Meghan Racklin

New translations from Hungarian, German, and Spanish!

This month, we are excited to present new works in translation that consider survival and coexistence in many forms. From the Hungarian, renowned author Magda Szabó delves into the embittering effects of poverty and hardship. From the Spanish, Pilar Quintana creates a riveting familial portrait of vulnerable parents and too-wise children. From the German, Dr. Ludger Wess leads us on a journey to discover the smallest lifeforms amongst us. Read on to find out more!

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The Fawn by Magda Szabó, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix, New York Review Books, 2023

Review by Meghan Racklin, Blog Editor

In The Fawn, the latest of Magda Szabó’s novels to be translated into English, it is 1954 in Budapest. For Eszter, the novel’s main character (it is difficult to call her a protagonist), it is 1954—but it is also the interwar years and the years of the war, and it is also, disastrously, almost the future. “The Future . . .’” she thinks, “[t]hat was something I had no desire to build. I had enough of the past about me already for the thought to do anything but horrify me.”

The novel is Eszter’s account of her life and her surroundings, told in a monologue directed at the man she loves, and the language is as beautiful as Eszter is bitter. In Len Rix’s translation, Eszter’s sentences are full of clauses; she’s in a rush, trying to get out everything she wishes she had already said. She recalls, of the evening when her childhood home was hit by a bomb, “Mother neither wept nor blanched; we slept the sleep of the contented in the main hall of a school, along with everyone else who had lost their homes; I felt like the nation’s favourite child, everyone seemed to want to look after us, and the whole city shared our grief.” As her outpouring continues, details pile up like debris. 

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2023

January 23, 2023  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel, Meghan Racklin, and Xiao Yue Shan

. . . di Giorgio, standing in front of the rosebush, flicks the switch on, invites us to see.

Asymptote’s Winter 2023 Edition is out, showcasing literature from thirty-four countries and fifteen languages! Marking our twelfth year in world literature, this issue is headlined by César Aira, Geetanjali Shree, and César Vallejo. Here, blog editors Xiao Yue Shan, Meghan Racklin, and Bella Creel introduce their highlights from the issue, from an explosive, violent garden, to a perverse love story and vengeful doll, to a piece of criticism that reads more as art than review. 

In a short eulogy for the brilliant, transportive Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda, Gabriel García Márquez recounts a brief visit he once paid her in Barcelona, around a decade before her death. Slightly taken aback by her impeccable resemblance to her characters, namely in what she had described as her “innocence,” the García Márquez intuited that Rodoreda, like the people she had raised to such stark emotional reality, had a penchant for growing flowers. “We spoke about [gardening], which I consider another form of writing,” he recounts, “and between our discussion of roses . . . I tried to talk to her about her books.”

The botanic, as both these great writers knew, is transportive. There is nothing so beguiling as the language of flowers—their ancient names, colour, perfume, their mystic properties and secret variety; we know this, because the writers before us had long known it, just as the writers before them had known it, and on and on backwards, ever since the first poets looked at the world in bloom, and saw in it an opening to the sublime. Over and over, we’ve harvested from the natural world to give our poems tint and fragrance, to purple our prose and frame our visions, and in the same way that soil can be exhausted, the power of this invocation has since waned through countless verses. The challenge to the text now, when evoking landscape, is what García Márquez knew: the writer cannot simply pick the flowers—she must grow them herself.

In Marosa di Giorgio’s excerpt from The Moth, the garden is explosive. Translated with a musical ear by Sarah María Medina, the prose poems luxuriate in their sheer volume of lush imagery, of ripe fruit and their rainbow palette, bacchanalian sweetness and insatiable appetite. Di Giorgio has always been an exceptionally visual writer, with her prodigious use of images inspiring comparison to the works of Bosch and Dalí—and here her painterly instincts are once again ravishing. In broad strokes a feast is spread before us, peaches and dates and syrup, as her image-language fills the lines with taste and spectacle. She once said that “only the poet knows what colour to give each word . . . In The Moth, I paint myself as a reciter who interprets in front of the rosebush.” 

READ MORE…

Guided Improvisation: An Interview with Daniel Lupo

September 8, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Meghan Racklin

Translating feels very similar to dancing choreography to me.

Asymptote’s 2022 Summer issue featured two new hallucinatory, self-referential stories by Hérve Guibert and translated by translator and writer Daniel Lupo. In this interview, Assistant Editor Meghan Racklin speaks with Lupo on the challenges of translating Guibert’s various styles, ranging from the phantasmagoric to the spare, across his body of work. Their intimate conversation explores Guibert’s evolution as a writer, the role of improvisation in translation, and the relationship between translation and dance.

Megan Racklin (MR): The two Guibert pieces you translated for the latest issue of Asymptote both deal with the way market forces shape the process of writing. How do you see yourself, as a translator, fitting into that broader system?

Daniel Lupo (DL): At least in the United States, literary translation is a minor, severely underfunded sector of the two markets Guibert takes aim at in these stories: periodical publishing and book publishing. Hardly anyone pays their bills from literary translation alone, which means we don’t have to worry about buckling under the demand to produce a new text every week, as Guibert’s photography critic does—although we may very well have to worry about editors like the one in his other story finding our financial expectations “insolent.” In the absence of a profit motive, most translators I know, including myself, translate out of a love of the language, particular authors or texts, the practice of translation itself, or a combination of those. But of course, loving your work and making a living from it shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

MR: You’ve translated Hérve Guibert’s work extensively, including a wonderful translation of his novel Arthur’s Whims. Can you talk about the relationship between author and translator that develops through this kind of sustained engagement with their work? How do you see the relationship between your voice as a translator and Guibert’s as a writer?

DL: Guibert has a very intense, hypnotic voice. Often after reading him, I can still feel the rhythms of his text reverberating in my head long after the words have faded from memory. When translating him, it’s very easy for me to get lost in his voice, such that it’s only after finishing a draft and going back over what I wrote that I recognize signs of my own voice, my own anglophone quirks and idiosyncrasies that may or may not gel with his francophone ones. But it works both ways: his voice is filtered through my voice as much as mine is filtered through his. That’s something I love about translation: it’s a very intimate process in which the author’s voice and the translator’s voice rub up against and influence each other.

READ MORE…

Summer 2022: Highlights from the Team

August 8, 2022  |  in News  |  by Andriana Hamas, Caridad Svich, Daniel Naman, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Liam Sprod, M.K. Harb, M.L. Martin, Meghan Racklin, and Thuy Dinh

Don’t know where to begin with our latest issue? We’re here to help!

The most striking piece in this issue was Abdelfattah Kilito’s “Borges and the Blind” (tr. Ghazouane Arslane) for informing me of Borges’ deep affiliation with Arabic literature (something I wasn’t aware of before)—it opened my eyes to another dimension of Borges’ works as well as highlighted the blind spot of critics and readers of translation who might not be privy to the multifaceted aspects of the text behind the text. Cao Kou’s “The Wall Builder” (tr. Chen Zeping and Karen Gernant) is a truly wonderful and chilling fable on the idea of border, i.e., a porous wall between insider and outsider, individual and the collective in a repressive society. Anna Felder’s “Unstill Life with Cat” (tr. Brian Robert Moore) is a lovely, fully immersive tale from a cat’s point-of-view. The translation is magical, wondrously immediate. I love Rose Bialer’s perceptive questions and the resulting interview with Maureen Freely for revealing how Turkey’s political situation might affect the relationship between an author and his translator, and how there are so many layers of “the other” in Turkish society.

—Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

Kelsi Vanada’s translation is itself a reflection of Andrea Chapela’s long meditation on the meaning and mechanics of mirrors, with all the inevitable subtle distortions and complex reconfigurations that Chapela elaborates on. This extended reflection employs myriad angles of vision‚ philosophy, science, toys, personal narrative, literature, and history, from which to view the significance of mirrors, the act of looking at oneself, and the act of constructing a self-image, with and without the fragmented and inevitably distorted images that mirrors provide. Juan Calzadilla’s poems from Dictated by the Pack (tr. Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott) are virtuosic translations—the complexity of the diction and rhythms as well as the subtlety of how the language accretes are very challenging to carry over into English without disrupting the balance between sense-making and surprises in the language. The lines shift across the page, like waves lapping onto the shore, as if the rhythms of thought have been recorded faithfully in their syncopated arrivals, gaps, and runnings-over. Almog Behar’s long poem “First We’ll Speak Many Words About God” (tr. Shoshana Olidort) is a meditation on religion and god, but also an interrogation of our conception of god, an interrogation of the faithful as well as the faithless. It’s subversive and yet hopeful. Sa’eed Tavana’ee Marvi’s ”The Open Tome” (tr. Khashayar Kess Mohammadi) is set in a post-apocalyptic, interplanetary, post-Earth world. The voice of the poem shifts‚ from an unnamed speaker, to a television set, to an ”Oceandweller,” to an unnamed speaker again. The experimental formatting of the poem allows the reader to shift between these different lens ratios. As such, the reader experiences a telescoping which perhaps informs the experience alluded to in the poem‚ by a visionary which either documents the future, or foretells the otherworldliness of the present moment. I really enjoyed Rose Bialer’s interview with Maureen Freely, which touches on the craft of translation, the challenges and the advantages of translating through the prism of race, gender, sexuality, etc., and what it’s like to navigate a translator-author relationship that spans two very different cultures, especially when the author in question is famous, and at certain points even infamous.

—M. L. Martin, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

I have a distinct affinity for Mitteleuropa miserablism, and this edition contains two quintessential instances of this literary tendency: Elfriede Jelinek (tr. Aaron Sayne) and Thomas Bernhard (tr. Charlie N. Zaharoff). It does not get much more central European than Austria, and the Austrians seem to have an affinity for misanthropy, self-loathing, destruction, perversity, and psychosis, but all expressed in the most perfect prose, poetry, painting, and music. Part of my love for these two writers in particular, however, is their pushing, bending, and breaking of the formal rules of language. Perhaps this formalism is my own perversity, since, as a copy-editor, I should be forcing such language back into its grammatical and syntactical straightjacket; but as much as I know and can enforce such rules in a professional manner, I thrive and find a thrill in breaking them. READ MORE…