Posts by Rose Bialer

Writing From the Frontlines: An Interview with Ostap Kin and Kate Tsurkan

November 16, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

Writing is the most significant response to war and death; writing is, in this case, life.

Yaryna Chornohuz is a combat medic in the Ukrainian Marines, currently serving on the frontlines. She also happens to be a brilliant poet, capturing the reality of the Russian invasion with powerful lyricism. I was very moved by Chornohuz’s “A Cycle of Wartime Poems” translated by Kate Tsurkan and Ostap Kin, which were featured in our Summer 2022 issue. I had the opportunity to interview Tsurkan and Kin about the importance of literature in the time of war, and we conducted our conversation over email, from our respective homes in Ukraine, the United States, and Ireland. I am proud to share this dialogue, in which we discuss—among other things—how language can be an act of resistance and how it is crucial, now more than ever, to amplify the work of Ukrainian writers and artists. 

Rose Bialer (RB): I would like to begin by asking how each of you came to translating Ukrainian literature? How did you first encounter Chornohuz’s poetry?

Kate Tsurkan (KT): Well, I am first and foremost a trained scholar of French literature, but life is truly full of surprises. By a twist of fate, I moved to Ukraine, and a year later, I met my husband and ended up staying here. What was simply a field of interest in my work as a literary magazine editor became an obligation to understand and delve deeper into the culture that I’d married into. 

As for Chornohuz, I first learned of her poetry through the journalist Justina Dobush, who read aloud the poem “too red a spot” for Asymptote. She also did an interview with Chornohuz for Apofenie, and kept telling me that this is a writer to keep my eye on. I owe a lot to Justina because when I was just starting out and admittedly knew very little, she was one of those Ukrainians giving me much-needed insight on the contemporary literary scene and Ukrainian culture in general. Chornohuz is part of the growing genre of Ukrainian veteran literature; prior to her role in the military, she was an active member of the Ukrainian literary sphere and also worked as a translator. These days, Ukrainians know her best for her military service and activism. Her poetry and overall perspective on war had such a visceral impact on me that I felt it needed to be shared with the world. 

Ostap Kin (OK): I’m originally from Ukraine, born and raised there. When I switched continents, I started translating from Ukrainian into English. It all started as a combination of factors, including challenge, curiosity, and a need to experiment; I wanted to get firsthand experience about how work that appeals to me may sound in English, and what the whole process looks like. Lastly, I did hope to share Ukrainian literary works with others.

I heard about Yaryna Chornohuz from the news sometime in 2020. As an activist, she protested, I remember, in the governmental headquarters. Kate Tsurkan is the one who introduced me to her poems and invited me to work on their English language. 

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Shifting Temporalities: An Interview with Bryan Flavin

October 3, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

We should consider an absence not as something that inhibits access but rather as an opportunity to actively discover. . .

Featured in the Summer 2022 issue, “The Ayah of the Throne,” by Habib Tengour, is a lyrical story that explores the French colonial power in Algeria toward the beginning of the Algerian War of Independence. The story centers around how colonial forces shaped the narrator’s experience of education, language, religion, and even how and when one can tell stories. With this vibrant and original account of his childhood, Tengour reclaims the power of storytelling and relays a life-altering moment with humor and compassion.

In his English translation, Bryan Flavin deftly captures Tengour’s voice and introduces Anglophone speakers to an important piece of writing from one of the foremost voices in contemporary Francophone Maghrebi literature. I had the opportunity to speak with Flavin over email about his experience translating “The Ayah of the Throne.” In the following interview, we discuss the intricacies of working with multilingualism, the importance of not explicating in translation, and the complex and interwoven histories of French and Arabic.

Rose Bialer (RB): I always like asking translators how they first began translating. I am even more curious in your case since you work in both French and Arabic.

Bryan Flavin (BF): I’ve always loved the precision and structure in linguistics and language studies, as well as the exploration and plurality of language in literature and creating writing. During my undergraduate education, I studied linguistics and French literature with a specialization in Arabic language and culture and ended up discovering literary translation as a sort of intersection for all my interests. I was lucky enough to take classes on French translation and global literacy toward the end of my studies and started with translating student writing with an undergraduate translation magazine I helped co-found. It was something I continued practicing on my own until deciding to pursue it in my graduate studies.

RB: You mention in your Translator’s Note that you had the chance to work with Habib Tengour during his Fall 2021 residency with the International Writing Program. This program sounds fascinating, and I would love to hear more about your experience, especially collaborating with Tengour in person.

BF: My translation program had the opportunity to pair with one of the residents to produce a translation of their work during workshop sessions devoted to each piece. Both the original writer and translator were present and active contributors during each workshop, and the balance (and sometimes friction, but in a generative way) between the author’s original intention and the translator’s means to produce something independent in the English was uniquely pronounced due to the workshop’s collaborative nature, which made for a great learning experience.

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A Gesture of Togetherness: An Interview with Ian Russell

April 18, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

I became more comfortable translating the work as a gesture of togetherness with the artist.

In my reading of the current Winter 2022 issue, I was drawn to the vivid and imaginative poetry of Spanish artist Pepe Espaliú. The featured excerpt, translated beautifully by Ian Russell, was taken from Espaliú’s only collection of poetry, En estos cinco años (Through These Five Years). The collection was written in the years preceding his death from AIDS, gracefully exploring the topic of mortality. Russell’s translations introduce a new audience of Anglophone readers to a dynamic activist, who fought to call attention to AIDS through his art while many political leaders refused to even acknowledge the disease. Russell was generous enough to agree to speak with me over email, and in the following interview we discuss Espaliú’s legacy as a performance artist, the communal aspect of translation, and some interesting parallels between birding and poetry.

Rose Bialer (RB): Before we start discussing your translations of Espaliú’s work, I’m curious to know how you became interested in translation in the first place. What was your introduction to the craft?

Ian Russell (IR): I can think of two starts. I got offered some freelance work to translate articles from Spanish to English while I was in grad school and took them purely to make a little extra money. I actually felt like I wasn’t very good at it. But right around that same time I had some friends that wrote poetry ask me to help translate their work. I felt totally unqualified since I had only done these academic articles, but after working on them and talking through the poems it became a really gratifying creative outlet for me.

RB: How did you come across Pepe Espaliú’s art? What initially attracted you to his poetry?

IR: I came across Espaliú’s visual work in researching HIV/AIDS in Spain. Later, I discovered he had written quite prolifically, and I found a copy of the first printing of En estos cinco años in the library (this was before Jesús Alcaide’s stunning 2018 La imposible verdad); I really loved the sort of smallness, the roundness, that I encountered in that short edition. I don’t know if that makes sense—the book is comprised of several different sections that seem pretty hermetic at first read, and many poems have an aphoristic quality. Other prose poems sit in their text blocks on the page. I felt a smallness and roundness that was easily digestible, maybe.

RB: In your translator’s note you mention that a challenge you faced in rendering this excerpt of Espaliú’s poetry was understanding that his poems are only a part of his artistic repertoire—he was also a visual and performing artist. How did you go about translating this poetry with consideration of Espaliú’s larger body of work? Did you translate while immersing yourself in it?

IR: I actually started writing about Espaliú’s performance work first. During the pandemic, I found it more difficult to keep up with that sort of critical analysis, and turned to translating Espaliú as a way to think about his performances, as if translating might offer some clue to approach the visual/performance. I think the main piece that came together for me in that process was how the installation, performance, and poetic pieces all read as a reaching out, a convocation of togetherness. So, in that way, I became more comfortable translating the work as a gesture of togetherness with the artist.

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David J. Bailey on Translating Jorge de Sena’s “The Green Parrot”

April 6, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

Discover Portugal’s colonial legacy in de Sena’s humorous and heartbreaking account of life under the Estado Novo dictatorship

Featured in the current Winter 2022 issue, “A Tribute to the Green Parrot” by Jorge de Sena manages to be both a humorous and heartbreaking account of life under the Estado Novo dictatorship in Portugal. The story centers around an unlikely friendship between a young boy growing up in a stifling conservative household and the family’s pet parrot, an “impassioned” and “exuberant individual” from Brazil. In his English translation David J. Bailey captures the colorful hues of de Sena’s language and introduces Anglophone speakers to a beautiful piece from one of the greatest Lusophone writers of the twentieth century. I had the opportunity to speak with Bailey over email about his experience translating “A Tribute to the Green Parrot,” and in the following interview we discuss representations of colonialism in language, the power of children in conveying narratives, and the different measures that Lusophone writers have taken to overcome dictatorial censorship in their careers.

Rose Bialer: I wanted to start by asking: How did you first begin translating from Portuguese?

David J. Bailey: I became interested in Portuguese almost by chance, opting to study it at degree level alongside Spanish. I quickly grew fond of the language and culture and eventually took a PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian literature to pursue an academic career. I’ve done commercial translation in the past, but this was my first serious attempt at translating a literary piece.

RB: When did you first come to encounter the work of Jorge de Sena? How did your engagement with his writing develop into your translation of “A Tribute to the Green Parrot?”

DB: When I started lecturing at the University of Manchester, I inherited a course on Portuguese colonialism from my predecessor, Prof Hilary Owen. Some of Jorge de Sena’s stories were on the reading list and I was especially moved by this one, which ends the collection Os Grão-Capitães. De Sena was a key figure in the resistance to the Portuguese dictatorship, on a par with other writers from his generation such as Miguel Torga and José Régio. “A Tribute to the Green Parrot” was something of an anomaly in not having been translated before. I looked at it with some M.A. students last year and ended up translating the entire story during lockdown. READ MORE…

To Protect Oneself From Violence: An Interview with Mónica Ojeda

March 16, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

I want to know what fear is. Why are we so afraid? What does fear make us do or not do? How does fear change our bodies?

Mónica Ojeda is one of the most powerful and provocative voices in Latin American literature today. With influences spanning from H.P. Lovecraft, to Stephen King’s Carrie, to anonymous internet horror legends called “creepypastas,” Ojeda’s novel Jawbone (Coffee House Press, 2021), translated expertly by Sarah Booker, explores the darkest aspects of relationships between women, amidst the suffocating atmosphere of an Opus Dei school for girls in Ecuador. 

In Jawbone, popular girls and best friends Annelise and Fernanda have created a religion of their own, outside of the classroom. The girls set up camp in an abandoned house, form a secret cult that worships “The White God”, and engage in a series of increasingly dangerous dares that threatens to tear their friendships apart. Meanwhile, their Spanish literature teacher, Ms. Clara, haunted by the ghost of her dead mother, begins to lose her grip on reality. Things take a sinister turn when Ms. Clara takes Fernanda hostage in a deserted cabin, intending to show her pupil the true meaning of fear. In her multivocal and lyrical prose, Ojeda demonstrates the pernicious ways that violence against women can be exercised, and reveals how victims can be transformed into perpetrators. I was lucky enough to be able to meet with Ojeda in person at a coffee shop in Madrid. Over orange juices, we discussed psychoanalysis in language, the implications of Latin American gothic literature, and her favorite horror films.

Rose Bialer (RB): The first book I read of yours was the poetry collection, Historia de la Leche, which investigates the strange violence of family relationships—specifically those between mothers and daughters. What drove you to return to this theme in Jawbone?

Mónica Ojeda (MO): I don’t remember if I first wrote Historia de la Leche or Jawbone. Well, I know that Jawbone was published first, but I don’t remember which book I wrote first. I could have been writing them at the same time. However, I do know that at the time, I was very interested in the violence within passionate relationships between women. I think the relationships between best friends, or sisters, or mothers and daughters are intense, and so of course there are a lot of possibilities for violence to get in. I’m kind of obsessed with how desire and love can be taken to the next level—the next level being sometimes absolute violence.

RB: I think your poetry comes through in your writing, especially in such highly imaginative phrases such as “mother-God-of-the-wandering-womb,” “umbilical-cord love” and “that sleeping-angel-of-history voice.” Tell me about the process of constructing these new terms.

MO: I think invention comes to me because I do see the act of writing as a way of putting language in some kind of crisis. In conflict. So sometimes, you have to develop some new forms to express certain things; that is something which pulls me back to poetry even when I am writing narrative. Because I think that poetry does that. Poetry reverts language, re-births language. Sometimes when words join together, developing new concepts and images, it can sound strange because you have no familiarity with something which has just been born. As such, it develops some kind of extrañamiento (estrangement), which also provides an atmosphere that I like, having to do with the strange and something that Freud called lo siniestro (the uncanny), which is when something unknown reveals itself in the middle of what is ordinary, during your daily routine. That is scary: when you are surrounded by the things that you know and then the strange comes in. I like to do that not only in the story of my narrative or my novels, but also in language. READ MORE…

A Portrait of Twenty-First-Century Seoul: An Interview with Sang Young Park, Author of Love in the Big City

January 26, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

I just happen to think the ugliness of love is just as close to the essence of love as the beauty of it.

Sang Young Park’s English-language debut Love in The Big City follows Young, a queer man in search of love and meaning. An aspiring writer who drinks and dances the night away in Seoul’s gay clubs, Young tries to make sense of his life through short stories in the morning, watching anxiously as others around him seem to be growing up and leaving. After many unsuccessful dates and arrogant boyfriends, he finally meets the man who could be his soulmate, but the two must come to terms with the cruelty of reality. With dark and humorous prose translated from Korean by Anton Hur, Park navigates the messiness of friendship and dating while capturing the rawness of breakups. The result is a book as addictive as the pack of Marlboro Reds that Young and his roommate keep in their freezer. In our interview, translated by Hur over email, Park and I discuss writing about love, being a person in the twenty-first century, and finding inspiration in pop music.

Rose Bialer (RB): I don’t like the cliché of a setting in literature being viewed as another character. However, in Love in The Big City, Seoul seems to have a developed personality. It can come off as melancholy, exuberant, romantic, and—depending on its current mood—Seoul affects how the characters live and love. Since you live in Seoul, I wanted to ask how you experience the city. Like the characters in the book, has it changed how you interact with the world?

Sang Young Park (SYP): I think a person’s environment decides their character. I was born in a city called Daegu—one of the most conservative places in Korea. When I was a teenager, I dreamed of Seoul as a kind of platonic ideal; I arrived here in my twenties for college, and that’s when my life began for real. Living here has made me realize that I resemble Seoul—it’s multi-faceted and passionate and at the same time, a very lonely and bleak city. I think these are my own sensibilities, as well as sensibilities that are present in the novel.

RB: How would you say that the city affects how the characters both love and receive love?

SYP: Each “big city,” as they appear in the book, possesses different aspects. Seoul is complicated and crowded but lonely and sorrowful at the same time; Bangkok is like a Mecca for gays—that kind of thing. The characters’ situations shift according to where they are. I think there’s definitely an organic interaction between the characters and their settings.

RB: I wanted to talk about the book’s structure. It is written as four short stories which connect to form the compelling whole. Each section is set at a specific moment in the narrator’s life, spanning from the time he is in college to when he is in his thirties. What drew you to this narrative form?

SYP: I wanted to show a different kind of love in each chapter. Part One, through Jaehee, I wanted to show the love we call friendship; Part Two was maternal love, along with first love; Part Three romantic love; and Part Four about what remains after the end of love. Through the last chapter, I wanted to wrap up my thoughts on the previous chapters, so the entire book would be a treatise on love itself. I thought, by showing the various emotions the narrator feels as he encounters different people in his twenties, I could effectively show the changes a character goes through, and at the same time see the emotion of love from different angles through this structural choice. READ MORE…

A Translator’s Humility: An Interview with Leri Price

November 17, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

[C]onfronting biases you didn’t realise you had is a lifelong exercise, and it’s painful but necessary, especially in work like this.

Leri Price commands language, and—similar to the narrator in Syrian author Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay—does so with a prowess for invention. Furthering Price’s accomplishments as an award-winning translator of contemporary Arabic fiction, her translation of Planet of Clay was recently named as a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. The novel is a haunting exploration of the Syrian civil war, as seen through the eyes of fourteen-year-old girl named Rima. At a checkpoint one afternoon in Damascus, Rima’s mother is killed, leaving her and her older brother alone to survive. To escape from the surrounding horrors, she turns to reading, drawing, and daydreaming—creating her own magical universe à la her favorite book, The Little Prince. Though an unflinching account of war, Planet of Clay is, in many ways, a hopeful novel: a testament to the power of our own imaginations in the alleviation of suffering. In the following interview, Price graciously shares her thoughts on the importance of translator visibility, the nuances of translating from Arabic, and the books that have changed her life.

Rose Bialer (RB): Last month, Planet of Clay was announced as a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature—just two years after your translation of Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work was a finalist for the same prize. How has your journey as a translator been up to this point? Have you noticed any changes or shifts in the literary translation field?

Leri Price (LP): It’s genuinely an honour to be counted among such amazing colleagues on the longlist and shortlist. Like most people in this industry, literary translation is not my only field of work, so it has been hard at times to maintain—especially when holding down full-time work in a completely different area. I’ve been so lucky that I have been able to translate authors like Khaled Khalifa and Samar Yazbek; a translator is a reader first of all, and having the chance to engage so deeply and intimately with a text is a privilege when it comes to writing like theirs.

My first translation was ten years ago, and I would say there has certainly been a shift in the field since then, in no small part thanks to translator/activists like Anton Hur and Deborah Smith. Among translators from Arabic, you have people like Sawad Hussain, Yasmine Seale, Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, and Lissie Jacquette (among many others) who all advocate for the incredible richness and variety of texts written in Arabic. Prizes like the National Book Award in the U.S. and the International Booker in the U.K. acknowledge that a translated work of literature requires recognition of the translator (without whom the work would not be accessible to English-speaking readers). There are more presses devoted to translation and more acceptance among others that translated literature is something that people are interested in reading. Maybe it’s part of the broader social movement to seek out and amplify voices that have been overlooked in the past—I certainly like to think so.

I also think that current conversations about the visibility of translators is long overdue— not (just) because translators deserve more credit for their craft, but because readers deserve to know how the text came to be in their hands. For instance, given how influential editors can be in the final version of a text, I actually think they should also be noted prominently. The final book is the result of so many people’s work, so much discussion and negotiation, and I wish that was recognised and celebrated more often. Jennifer Croft recently made excellent points about this issue.

RB: What was your relationship like with Samar Yazbek? Was there a collaborative element to the translation?

LP: I always consult with authors where possible; I think it’s vital to get author input, but personally speaking, I need to have a strong sense of how I see the text first. It’s much easier to go back and revisit things after a conversation with the author than having two or three versions of scenes or characters in your head while drafting the English version. (Of course, that can happen anyway, especially in a text like Planet of Clay!) I tend to consult authors after I have a draft in fairly good shape, and then again during the editing process, as many times as needed. So I don’t know that I would call it a collaboration as such, but I would never feel comfortable producing a translation without consulting the author as long as I have a chance of doing so. Samar and I had two or three long phone calls, as well as email exchanges, and they all took place in a sort of mishmash of Arabic, English and French, which was fun. READ MORE…

To Translate Trauma and Violence: An Interview with Janet Hong, Translator from Korean

October 13, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

It is especially heartbreaking to see the bias that everyone carries and the injustice of who suffers, or who suffers most.

Janet Hong is a Vancouver-based writer and literary translator who has brought acclaimed Korean authors such as Han Yujoo and Ha Seong-nan to an Anglophone audience. Her newest translation, the novel Lemon by Kwon Yeo-Sun, is a masterfully crafted novel of grief’s maddening proportions.

During the chaos of the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Korea, high schooler Hae-on is murdered and her killer is never charged. Over the next seventeen years, Hae-on’s sister, Da-on, works by any means possible to piece together the truth of what happened that summer. Taut and propulsive, Lemon expertly weaves the past and present in a page-turning thriller, riding on suspense but sensitive and precise in touching upon the societal contexts of a violent crime—that of class, of gender, of feminine beauty. In the interview below, Hong discusses how she captures the specificities of Korean literary references in English, as well as the intricacies and opportunities in translating dark stories.

Rose Bialer (RB): Kwon Yeo-sun is an award-winning author and Lemon is her first book to appear in English. Can you tell me a bit about how you came to this project and what attracted you to the novel?

Janet Hong (JH): A contact I know at Changbi, the Korean publisher of Lemon, flagged the book for me when it first came out. I read it and loved it, so I mentioned I was interested in translating the book. Shortly after, the book came to be handled by a literary agency, and Changbi let them know about my interest in the project. Luckily, the agents responsible and I knew each other, so everything progressed smoothly from that point.

I was attracted to the polyphonic nature of the book and wanted to take on the challenge of trying to render the different voices and points of view in English. I’m usually more interested in literary fiction, but I like that this work transcends the crime novel genre and plumbs the depths of grief, death, guilt, revenge, and injustice.

RB: Let’s discuss the polyphonic style you mentioned, which I also found very compelling. Lemon follows Da-on and two of Hae-on’s classmates over the seventeen years following Hae-on’s murder. All of these women have very distinct tones and styles of speaking—though I may add that none of them are particularly reliable narrators. What was it like channeling the perspectives of different characters? Did you find one of the women’s voices to be more difficult to translate than the others?

JH: It was quite a challenge to capture their voices. Not only are the three women very different from one another, but they each have distinct styles of speaking, as you mentioned. I wanted it to be very clear for the reader who is speaking, not only by the content of what they say, but by their diction and syntax. I struggled particularly with Yun Taerim’s sections, since they’re monologues in a sense—if there was a way to make her speech sound natural and quirky, as if we were actually overhearing a one-sided phone conversation, yet also make sure that the whole thing also can be understood as a work of art. I’m not sure I succeeded. For that reason, I don’t like to re-read my work once it’s published. READ MORE…