Posts by Tiffany Troy

“lyreless poet oh unlyred one”: A Roundtable with Translators Odile Cisneros, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Charles A. Perrone on Translating Haroldo de Campos’s galáxias

January 29, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

To say that galáxias is a tour de force is an understatement.

galáxias, a book-length poem by the Brazilian avant-gardist Haroldo de Campos, is composed of fifty intertextual constellations that traverse multilingualism, incorporating slippages of word play in melody-harmony, explicitly in tune with the Poundian concept of “make it new” and Campos’s own “transcreation.” In August of 2024, Ugly Duckling Presse published his groundbreaking text. With the work of five translators, responsible in varying degrees for different portions of the text, the volume brings Campos’s “planetary music for mortal ears” to an English-speaking audience. Here, Asymptote is excited to present a roundtable featuring three of the co-translators: Odile Cisneros, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Charles A. Perrone (Christopher Middleton and Norman Maurice Potter have passed). Below, we speak about their individual encounters with Campos, their translation of the constellations as a collaborative and iterative process, and what they discovered in their translations.

Tiffany Troy (TT): What is the act of literary translation to each of you? 

Odile Cisneros (OC): For me, literary translation stems from curiosity and the desire to share a literary work with others. At least, that’s how it started for me. In the early 90s, I lived in Prague, where I learned Czech, a language that hardly anyone outside the Czech Republic speaks. When I left to go to graduate school in New York, a friend gifted me a beautiful facsimile edition of a modernist poetry book: Na vlnách TSF, by the Nobel laureate Jaroslav Seifert. I fell in love with Seifert’s whimsical, surprising poems and wanted to share them with my friends, but alas, they didn’t speak Czech, so I figured I’d try my hand at translating some. A Czech friend helped out.

For me, then, translation emerged from friendship—friendship with a text, friendship with a language, friendship with others. My forays into other languages and texts, primarily Portuguese and Brazilian poetry, had similar origins, which we can talk about more.

As to what the act of literary translation is, there have been countless discussions. I always think of translation as a kind of puzzle that needs to be figured out by first taking the text apart in the source language and then putting it back together in the target language. There are many ways to do this, but some are better than others. The process is both challenging and rewarding. READ MORE…

“alchemic / exchange / we fade bruises here”: Rajiv Mohabir on Editing I Will Not Go: Translations, Transformations & Chutney Fractals

October 2, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

I offer these translations as a door that opens to a field of ancestral knowledge, with a threshold that is familiar while moving into a new space.

The cover of I Will Not Go: Translations, Transformations & Chutney Fractals features “Ties That Bind,” a mixed media piece on archival paper by Renluka Maharaj. In the pixelated color photo of an Indo-Caribbean wedding, the groom is about to fall asleep, the bride looks demure—perhaps trying to hide her laughter, carefree children chat in the corner, two fierce-looking women look daringly into the camera, and an elder female relative holds a moneybag. Following the ingenuity and the personality of the anthology’s cover—with sequins that imbue historical reality with fantasy—the contents of the text, divided into an introduction and five sections, are even more astonishing. I Will Not Go contains two translations, two fractals, and various lyrical essays about the translation/ writing process of seventeen Indo-Caribbean writers: Krystal Ramroop, Aliyah Khan, Divya Persaud, Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard, Nadia Misit, Alex Bacchus, Simone Devi Jhingoor, Andre Bagoo, Eddie Bruce-Jones, Anu Lakhan, Will Depoo, Natasha Ramoutar, Nicholas Peters, Anita Baksh, Miranda Rachel Deebrah, Elizabeth Jaikaran, Suzanne Persard, Chandanie Somwaru, and Ryan Persadie. Like Maharaj, each of the featured translators are descendants of indentured South Asian peoples or part of the Coolie diaspora in the Caribbean.

In Mohabir’s foreword, “Like Chutney Masala,” he describes the music that fuels these writings and translations: “Chutney music as cultural production is poetry: oral and performed. There is flexibility in the writing down of these words, the singing of them, the performance of them.” In terms of its sound, it “blends Afro-Caribbean beats with Indo-Caribbean experience and music.” Beginning with the base of two chutney songs, the translators reimagine the music and lyrics, adding their own inflections and personality that is oftentimes “smoothed out” as incorrect in the Western publishing process. As this multivocal and imaginative collection seeks to reveal, chutney music forces its listeners to hear in its lyrics and melodies the gender violence, sexism, and expectations of marriage within the Indo-Caribbean community—“an open secret.”

Tiffany Troy (TT): In your foreword to I Will Not Go, “Like Chutney Masala,” you wrote of how this collection is “. . . a kind of Caribbean, diasporic response to [Eliot Weinberger’s] 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. . .” How does I Will Not Go draw inspiration from and go beyond 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei in its conceptualization of chutney music?

Rajiv Mohabir (RM): For me, this book extends into a kind of spiritual realm whereby the translators all are descendants of indenture, and as such, they hold the particularities of our diaspora’s nuances in particular regard. What I mean is that this is not just an academic experiment; this work blends our own familial histories, our embodiments of music and rhythm, and writing skill. While 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei uses the editors’ essays to discuss what each translation does, the translators in I Will Not Go respond to their translational acts.

This brings me into another element that differs from I Will Not Go from Weinberger’s text: the translators add their original poetry that responds to their individual vision of chutney music’s afterlives. That we are haunted by our language loss is no secret—this is how colonization worked for many of us; we take in the colonizer’s messages about ourselves, and they go on to dwell in the deepest parts of our psyches. This anthology plumbs that depth, reaching into ourselves to see where chutney music (if it does at all) lives and loves inside of us. It’s personal and intimate, wrapped up in identity and ancestral trauma and joy. READ MORE…

Rudderless in the samidare-rain: On Naoko Fujimoto’s Reinterpretation of Heian Period Japanese Woman Poets

September 25, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

. . . Fujimoto has rendered her translations to “restore some of the freedom of form in which these original works were made.”

09/09 Nine Japanese Female Poets / Nine Heian Waka Poems, translated from the Japanese by Naoko Fujimoto, Toad Press/Veliz Books, 2024 

My parents were criticized for allowing a girl to study advanced language skills and piano lessons–for what–“Why don’t you keep your daughter in Nagoya?” Some teachers looked at me saying, “You are not even the smartest, nor a boy.”

Have you ever wished to be a boy? And have you ever interrogated the root of that wish? Perhaps you have been told by your family members that a woman’s role is not to utter garbage-talk like a hen pooping. Or perhaps your family’s insistence that you get married off has grown more insistent over the years. Maybe it’s shameful to admit that you’ve never been seated at the center of the table, that you’ve internalized a certain misogyny, or that you live in a society that has instated men as the heads of households, as breadwinners and intellectual superiors—not because they are smarter, but because they were given the opportunity to pursue their education.

This was the case for the men and women in my grandparents’ generation, who grew up under the Japanese occupation of Taiwan and the Confucian teachings that compare the “tiny man” (the scoundrel) with the “women.” I grew up learning about the Nineteenth Amendment and the Declaration of the Rights of Women in a neighborhood that largely continues to unlawfully segregate jobs by gender. The number of times I have been told that my writing is “frivolous” and that I was “not serious” about my literary career is innumerable.

How remarkable it is then to behold 09/09 by Naoko Fujimoto as a testament to the resilience and remarkable artistry of Japanese women writers during the Heian period (794 to 1185), a time of both gender segregation and cultural flourishing. I find myself seeing my obstacles mirrored in the Heian court custom of referring to women by their relationship with their male relative, or in Fujimoto’s lament in being called out as “not even the smartest”—with smart being measured by her ability to repeat what she has memorized verbatim on these make-you-or-break-you high stakes examinations that are characteristic of East Asian countries like Japan, Korean, or Taiwan. The idea that only the “best women” are afforded the same education as the most ordinary man is pernicious and deeply ingrained in East Asian society, even with the ongoing women’s rights movements in those countries. That identity is further complicated in East Asian-American communities overseas, where western values of independence clash with Asian values of Confucian filial piety and female subservience to men, and where leadership positions continue to be wielded by men in all types of professions. READ MORE…