Posts by Peter Sherwood

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from “Father” by Ivana Dobrakovová

May 17, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood

I was horrified that one day I’d be as stingy as my dad. Because stinginess is hereditary, you see. It’s a genetic predisposition, I’m quite sure

This Translation Tuesday, we feature a story from Slovak writer Ivana Dobrakovová’s European Union Prize-winning collection of short stories Mothers and Truckers. Told from the perspective of a young woman who brings up memories of her father, this story—translated by our very own editor-at-large for Slovakia, Julia Sherwood, and Peter Sherwood—employs a first-person voice that is compelling and speaks from the very core of a childhood that is at once stained and sustained by these recollections. Hear from our translators on the themes and connections of the forthcoming collection which opens with this powerful story. 

““Father” is the opening story in Mothers and Truckers, a collection of five stories by Slovak writer Ivana Dobrakovová, set in her hometown of Bratislava, and in Turin, Italy, where she now lives. Each of the stories features a troubled young woman living through, or reliving, a variety of  traumatic events and Dobrakovová has given each a distinct voice in which they deliver cascading internal monologues that are intense, searingly honest and often very funny. As Hungarian literature scholar Anna Gács notes in her foreword to the English edition, due from Jantar Publishing on 30 June: “By focusing on the mental processes of her protagonists, sometimes almost in a stream-of-consciousness manner, she offers us five sensitive portraits written with an abundance of empathy, down to the most ironic details.” While four of the protagonists struggle to shake off the influence of dominant mothers and to escape from claustrophobic relationships with neglectful husbands or partners, or seek solace in imaginary relationships, here the author focuses on on the impact on the narrator of her father’s mental decline and descent into alcoholism.”

—Julia and Peter Sherwood

What do I know about my parents’ relationship? The less the better? To be on the safe side? Mum must have seen something in him. But what exactly?

She said that once Dad had told her, in the presence of other people, that she was not only intelligent but also beautiful. It must have been quite a statement, an exceptional compliment for her to cherish the memory of it so much. To want to share it with me. He had always had a drinking problem, which is why, as long as I can remember, I always thought of it as something inseparable from him, a part of him that was meant to be that way. Just like his illness. There’s no point trying to figure out which came first, the chicken or the egg, what was the cause and what was the effect: his unstable mental state, the age-old proclivity to drink, the genetic predisposition to both that got all mixed up, reinforcing each other until they came to form his very essence.

Nevertheless, some episodes do stand out.

One night, Mum, at the end of her tether, dragged us out of bed. ‘Girls, get up, go and tell your Apuka that we live one floor higher up’. My sister and I staggered out into the stairwell in our pyjamas, drowsy with sleep. We didn’t understand what was going on. We found Dad one floor below, persistently ringing our neighbour’s doorbell even though the neighbour was standing in his open doorway trying to stop him. With great difficulty, the two of us then helped Mum haul him upstairs and into our flat. I don’t know when exactly this happened. Or how old I was at the time. My sister was still at the same school as me, so I would have been in the third form. One of the first incidents of this kind, to be followed by many more. It felt bizarre. Like a bad dream. Like a night-time escapade foreshadowing my eventful youth. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Selections from A Woman Awaiting (The pandemic from a garret) by Agnieszka Taborska

September 15, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood

When the world goes back to 'normal,' how quickly will we regain middle age?

Writer, translator, and scholar Agnieszka Taborska reflects upon the literary and historical precedents of the global lockdown in these excerpts from A Woman Awaiting (The pandemic from a garret), our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. In coping with the trauma and uncertainty of the current pandemic, Taborska offers a bookish yet personal perspective, one informed by an expansive breadth of literary knowledge as well as familial accounts of another historical tragedy: the Nazi occupation of Poland. Paradoxically, the speaker’s isolation takes us on a necessarily cosmopolitan journey through books, recontextualizing the pandemic through the lenses of Gabriel García Márquez, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Bram Stoker, and Spalding Gray, among others. With candid, irreverent wit, Taborska chronicles her daily thoughts about the absurdities, losses, and shared anxieties of our current global crisis.

What was a day, measured for instance from the moment you sat down to your midday meal to the return of that same moment twenty-four hours later?

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain [1]

Friday, April 3

With every passing day our activities take on more of the characteristics of ritual. In the morning we top up the humidifiers on our radiators, rolling up the blinds to let the plants soak up the sun from the first minute, and wiping down with a wet cloth the leaves that haven’t had time to gather dust since we last cleaned them. For the umpteenth time we move the flowerpots around to make their residents feel as comfortable as possible. The tiles, the bathroom, the bathtub, and sink have been scrubbed raw.  We recall with relief that there are still windows to be cleaned. We have shifted the furniture around, surprising ourselves with the audacity of our experimental solutions. Our new routine makes us laugh at the previous one. We strive to create hothouse conditions in our limited space. When all this is over, will we deliberately let our flat go to seed? Will we stick to a daily agenda or—on the contrary—will we turn day into night, drop in on our friends unannounced, wake up our neighbours by playing loud music at dawn, will we ditch every schedule?

The habit of checking the weather forecast is now a thing of the past. The degree of air pollution has also become irrelevant. A million dollars to anyone who, asked out of the blue, can name today’s date and day of the week without having to stop and think. On the other hand, we are getting expert at telling the hour. We have our hand on the pulse. We are aware of the days getting longer. We are familiar with the path of the rays of the sun as they move across the floor. We could tell the shadows out in the street where and how far to fall.

Our window looks out onto a small grocery store. We have noticed a pattern: young people go in wearing gloves and face masks, the old behave as if nothing was happening. Our activist neighbour picks up litter from the pavement as usual. A sight that takes me back to the past.

The dogs waiting outside the shop are surprised that their two-legged friends have suddenly been spending so much time with them. Two Labradors who came with a gentleman on a bike kill time by simulating copulation, as always. They mount each other and make rubbing motions, too brief for ‘anything’ to really happen. The infection has not impaired their erotic fantasies. READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

June 6, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood

After many decades I am once again standing in a queue outside a shop. Spine-chilling memories come flooding back. I welcome them.

As the daily grim statistics recorded a growing global death toll from COVID-19, one small country in Central Europe prided itself on having one of the lowest, if not the lowest, mortality rates from the disease. Slovakia has attributed its success in fighting the pandemic to introducing a strict lockdown soon after the first cases were detected. At the time when the UK government was advising people to merely avoid going to pubs, all of Slovakia’s bars, cafés, and restaurants were ordered to close or switch to take-out service. However, this highly beneficial public health measure had at least one unintended consequence: it deprived an acclaimed Slovak writer (and past Asymptote contributor) of his favourite places to write. Balla, the author of a dozen collections of short stories and two short novels has often been compared to Franz Kafka, though Asymptote assistant editor Andreea Scridon has argued that he “might more reasonably be called a nihilistic Etgar Keret, given the thoroughly ironic, often absurdly amusing, take on contemporary life that characterises his work.” While this is certainly an apt definition of his writing, another reason why Kafka’s name keeps cropping up is the fact that Balla has never given up his day job in the audit department of the council office in his home town of Nové Zámky where he continues to live, drawing inspiration from the humdrum life of the people around him as well as his own. What makes the absurd stories of petty bureaucrats, blinkered nationalists, frustrated wives, neglectful husbands, and bullying fathers, as well as dishevelled publishers and burned-out writers so true to life is Balla’s uncanny ability to capture their voices, overheard in cafés and pubs. Balla’s translator and Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Slovakia, Julia Sherwood, wondered how he coped with being cut off from his source of inspiration and asked him to describe his life in the time of COVID-19 for this column. Balla obliged in his characteristic tongue-in-cheek style, blending fact and fiction. (N.B. since the time of writing, cafés in Slovakia have reopened.)

On the pandemic

by Balla

1.

Since the start of the pandemic I’ve been to the woods twice. I wanted to take a solitary walk among the trees. With my face mask on. But there were people everywhere. Our woods are small. And everyone has the same goal, a solitary walk among the trees. So here we all are, walking around, except we’re wearing face masks and we’re not solitary. After a while I start suffocating under my mask. I venture deeper into the woods. It’s muddy and smelly. I’m approaching the sewer where wastewater from the city pipes is discharged. This is where I spent my childhood. This kind of place is a source of amazement for a child. My mother warned me to stay away from the sewage-filled drain. Here I’m finally alone. I take a bottle of whisky out of my bag, take a drink and realise again that it’s not alcohol that I’ve been missing, it’s a café, complete with people, conversations, bad music, the tinkling of spoons, glasses, cups, and saucers.
I put the bottle away in disgust.
Obviously, only after I’ve emptied it: whisky is whisky after all.
But what about the trees?
The bushes?
The sewage?
I’m not interested in any of them.
I’ve seen these trees, these bushes and this sewage at least a thousand times before. The woods at the edge of town are small. They seem to be getting smaller and smaller. This is an objective fact: the woods are full of cottages, rubbish dumps, paths, clearings; there’s even a tiny pseudo-zoo, where I love the boar because of its positive relationship to the mud. But what I really love is the din of streets, cars, motorbikes, and pubs, roaring rock, blues, ferocious free jazz. The holiday destination of my dreams is a smog-bound city further west. Staying on the first floor of a boarding house in the city centre, on a noisy boulevard and with a pub on the ground floor that has nonstop live music. That’s where I would like to relax, write, reflect; these are the ideal conditions for me.
The woods are an alien, dangerous place.
Birds gawp at you from the branches and don’t understand you.
I’m standing under a tree watching a bumblebee as it climbs up its trunk, wondering when it will decide to climb on top of me, and thinking about ordinary people. Things are not that difficult for ordinary people at the moment, they’ve always lived like this. From work they head straight back to their flats or houses with the same flatmates, husbands, wives, children, do the same house chores, followed by TV, then go to sleep in the same bed with the same occupants. They live a life in permanent quarantine and state of emergency. Provided, of course, they haven’t lost their job because of the pandemic. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Some say that everything will have to change once the pandemic is over, we shouldn’t go back to the old world as it used to be.
I see their point.

2.

On Monday morning the porter didn’t let me into my office building.
I wasn’t wearing a face mask.
Who would have thought that one day I’d end up having to force my way in there?
Actually, I don’t mind face masks. All my life I’ve felt self-conscious about my face, my huge nose, my chaotically uneven teeth: now there’s finally a chance to cover up this handicap. I have plenty of those. For people like me the best thing would be for the state to order all men to wear male burkas. But the state has failed to provide the citizens with face masks, just told us to wear them, so it’s unlikely we would ever be issued with burkas. My girlfriend has sewn some face masks for me, but she’s stuck in another town and is justifiably scared of travelling so she’s sent them by post.
But you’re not allowed to go to the post office without a face mask.
I’m stuck right in the middle of an absurd drama.
This is my preferred kind of literature. It’s the only kind that still manages to capture some of what’s going on here. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Icelanders” by Vanda Rozenbergová

May 23, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood

But it’s wintertime, it’s been snowing a lot and as long as the weather stays like this the sky will be the same every day.

Shortlisted for Slovakia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Anasoft Litera, it will not be unfair to say that Vanda Rozenbergová is a master of the short story form. In this story, she explores domestic tensions and dashed dreams through the skillful use of a child narrator.

I was in my room playing with my toy cars but Becko kept taking my black sports car away so I had to give him a slap on the hand, Stop it, Becko! I said. I’d been working on a racetrack for my lorries but because it was a Sunday I had to listen to my mum cursing ‘cause the kitchen is next to my room. “Bloody Sundays,” she said, then I heard a pot lid bang on the floor and a knife strike a chopping board. I used to think she was crying but she was just moaning aloud about having to cook. “I’m as lonely as little orphan Annie,” she kept shouting but Daddy and I had no idea who little orphan Annie was. And there’s another thing I don’t get: why does my mum keep doing stuff she hates, why does she keep roasting meat, peeling potatoes, grating carrots, baking and frying, and why does she always clean up afterwards but never sit down with us to eat and instead say she’s had her fill, having breathed in all the cooking smells. And then in the morning she pulls my trousers up to my ears, bundles me into the car and starts doing her hair as we’re driving and tells me with hairpins in her mouth to eat all my sandwiches at school ‘cause she made them for me even though she didn’t feel like it, she hates making sandwiches, as if I didn’t know she hates making them. I’m sure by next year I’ll be making my own sandwiches. But why does she keep on doing stuff she hates? Why doesn’t she just stay in bed and rest and receive visitors, why doesn’t she give me, Daddy, and Becko a hug and ask us to bring her a cup of tea?

When I ask her about it she blames it all on Daddy, but he’s totally not like her, he loves to lounge around and crack jokes, never in a hurry to go anywhere, not even to work. All my friends like him, and sometimes they go to see him for a chat ‘cause he works in the kebab shop next to our school. He doesn’t serve people at the counter, he’s at the back prepping vegetables. He brings home kebabs and doughnuts but Mum doesn’t eat that kind of stuff so it never makes her happy. Becko is not my real brother, I’ve made him up. I told Dad about him and he said that it was OK, that there was this other world and Becko does exist there. When he said that he was lying on a rug under the window looking at the sky, and then he told me a secret, which is that sometimes on his way home from work he stops by the hospital to see his friend who’s sick. I didn’t know what to say so I asked if at least his friend had a nice room, if it had a telly and stuff like that. Of course there’s a telly, said Daddy, and went over to the next room to put some Icelanders on the stereo. Because my Dad loves Icelanders. He loves Icelandic music and Icelandic people.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “All the Countries of the World” by Krisztina Tóth

June 7, 2016  |  in Translations  |  by Peter Sherwood

"not that face, those hands, or youth’s sepia tint / but the body, the body, that’s all, that's it"

The poplars’ catkins, no “Crematory” sign,
then a tin roof, the stack’s angled design,
that’s it, in the yard a guy’s on his phone,
the gate’s open, hello, best leave it alone,
a man stops me: Yes? —The office? I ask,
the grandma’s yours, then, the one o’clock,
that’s good, he adds, the old lady’s just out,
you mean…I thought, but could hardly doubt,
I’ve still to confirm she’s of our nation
and so by law allowed a cremation.
I show the papers to a woman fiddling
at a screen, the passport flat, its stitching
lies open, in the room’s press like a window,
its stamps attesting: the bearer to
all the countries of the world can go.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An excerpt from Radka Denemarková’s A Contribution to the History of Joy

March 8, 2016  |  in Translations  |  by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood

“Call the police. This is what I want to say but words won't make it past my lips, my lips hurt, everything hurts, I’m all torn like an animal.”

We mark International Women’s Day with an extract from the latest novel by the award-winning Czech writer and Nobel laureate Herta Müller translator Radka Denemarková. Disguised as a crime mystery set in Prague and mixing fact and fiction, “A Contribution to the History of Joy” (Příspěvek k dějinám radosti, 2014) is a passionate indictment of all forms of violence against women everywhere, spanning the past 70 years of history. In the extract below Denemarková puts herself in the shoes of a victim of an infamous Manchester (north of England) gang that groomed vulnerable teenagers and forced them into prostitution.

***

Chandra Namaskar, the moon salutation. This isn’t like Honey’s birthday party. Then, our classmates had swarmed around her parents‘ house sipping drinks and strutted around screaming and shouting and dancing to booming music that made the walls shake.

Here, no noise passes through the walls, only silence. Cigarette smoke and still-glowing ashes in overflowing ashtrays swallow up any trace of noise. The windows aren’t blacked out. At the door to the flat, a boy collects my mobile. I’m not happy about that. I’ve been saving up for it for a long time. This is a compulsory admission ritual. It’s for your own good, the boy says, to make sure you don’t lose it, I’m kind of like a hotel safe here, he says with a reassuring wink. We’ve both been chosen.

I tread across the thick pile of Persian carpet. There are carpets everywhere. They spill across thresholds continually like a dense lawn, sticking out their tongues under my steps. I look forward to having my pictures taken by a professional photographer. That’s what Honey promised me.

The boy ushers me into a smoke-filled lounge. A man is snogging a girl on a sofa. They’re like a classical statue emerging from the mist. The girl might be about thirteen. As they peel away from each other, tiny stones in the girl’s braces sparkle like diamonds in her mouth. The man seems old to me. They glance at me. He looks me up and down, from head to toe. The girl‘s eyes connect with mine, her stare is swept clean and empty, I can read nothing from it, then they latch onto each other again. Two glass bowls of white powder sit on the coffee table before them. The smoke and nicotine mist make me nauseous but I don’t let on, I want to belong, I do belong, I’ve made it. After weeks of soundings and failed attempts I’ve finally done it. Curiosity is making my head spin. Honey is making my head spin. Here she comes. She gives me a welcoming hug. I giggle trying to boost my courage and get rid of my fear. Honey hugs me and charms me, saying how lovely I look, in my excitement all I manage is a stutter. She hands me a bottle of chilled vodka. It’s drunk straight from the bottle here. She swings her arm around me and summons the boy who collects and stores mobiles by the door. She is bossy with him, it’s obvious who’s in charge here. That’ll be all for today, she tells him. I can’t tell if she’s talking about girls or mobiles. The boy rolls me a joint. I take a puff and shake my head. I give him the spliff back. The boy passes the joint to Honey, who sticks it in the hand of the man glued to the lips of the girl with diamonds in her mouth.

READ MORE…