Essays

Life is Like a Box of Golgappas: On Transcultural Translations

November 20, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Sam Bowden

“Universality,” for interpretations of US products around the world, may also mean “unavoidable.”

Translators tend to like puzzles. Problem solving between languages is the definition of the trade, but what of the deeper, more invisible quandaries of culture and context? In this essay, Sam Bowden takes a look at two works that seem inextricable from the cultures of their origin—Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton and Rober Zemeckis’s 1994 dramedy, Forrest Gump—as well as their respective international adaptations into German and Hindi, to investigate the various methodologies and techniques utilized in fitting these quintessentially US productions for new audiences.

One of the translator’s greatest challenges lies at a level deeper than language: instead, it is rooted in the countless cultural and historical contexts which consciously and unconsciously inform a given work. Since language is inextricable from the culture and history within which it is made, translational processes often prove more complex than simply replacing words, rhymes, characters, and themes. Source-cultural conditions and consciousnesses can shape a text in structurally embedded ways that go far beyond its linguistic surface.

Speaking from the United States, I am well aware of the extent to which my country’s culture and history—one could even call it mythology—have deeply shaped the literary narratives it produces and exports on a massive scale. When American stories circulate through the world-system, the result can be curious to study: these are narratives visibly shaped by a suddenly-invisible context. How do translators maneuver around this? READ MORE…

Knausgaard Summons the Devil: On the Global Novel

October 21, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Elisa Sotgiu

But “what if,” asks Knausgaard, “Bellori’s ideas had won through, and Newton’s had sunk into oblivion? We’d now be living in a different world.”

In the following essay, Elisa Sotgiu considers the latest fiction series by Karl Ove Knausgaard, a Norwegian novelist who rose to global fame for his groundbreaking and controversial autobiographical saga My Struggle. Below, Sotgiu examines Knausgaard’s positioning in the literary canon, the critical reception of his novels, and the warped reflection of our world lurking beneath the characteristic mundanity of his oeuvre.

Like all famous authors of the past half century or so, Karl Ove Knausgaard is routinely asked about his creative process. He always replies with characteristic understatement, maintaining that he hardly knows what he’s doing when he sits down to write. He has no plan to speak of and does not make drafts or even sketch a plot; he simply starts with a rough idea of a situation or a character and follows it until it develops into something interesting. To be sure, the method is not conducive to brevity, and since as a rule he does not delete or substantially revise anything, his books tend to leaven into multi-volume series. His new cycle of novels, which started with The Morning Star (published as Morgenstjernen in Norway in 2020, and in English translation in 2021), was supposed to be a trilogy, but as of October 2024 five lengthy volumes have already been completed, with one more in the making.

It is probably this reckless expansiveness, however, that lends Knausgaard’s writing its inherent curiosity, its compelling tension. Anything can happen at any moment on the page; both reader and author are figuring it out together. In a literary world where novels are published on the basis of their polished pitches and synopses, Knausgaard’s liberty to send three pages a day of an undefined project to his editor (Geir Gulliksen at Forlaget Oktober) and have them published as they are is nothing short of miraculous. The resulting impression of open-endedness and unfiltered immediacy prompted some, at the time when Knausgaard’s autobiographical series My Struggle (Min kamp, 2009-2011, translated into the English by Don Bartlett in 2012) was galvanizing United States American and United Kingdom writers of autofiction to declare that the author’s humdrum confessional style was the literary counterpart of social media exposure. Similarly, the sprouting and shifting form of the Morning Star cycle could be considered apt to the era of ever-growing, unmediated Wattpad novels, more so than all the conventional stories that have been plucked from self-publishing platforms, neatly packaged, and endowed with an ISBN.

Knausgaard’s books are original, even ground-breaking, but they do not appear so at first. In fact, it is when Knausgaard becomes aware of their potential novelty, and embraces it, that the best outcomes are achieved. This is what happened in Book Two of My Struggle, when Knausgaard realized that he was not writing a novel with a beginning, climax, and ending, and decided instead to devise his own formal rules. And it has happened again with the third volume of his new series, titled Det tredje riket and now published in Martin Aitken’s English translation as The Third Realm by Penguin Press. What Knausgaard has recognized in The Third Realm is that something unexpected has emerged from his free flow of words. In the first interviews he gave after the publication of The Morning Star, Knausgaard had claimed that his initial idea for the novel was simply to have a gallery of different characters react to the presence of something unknown, a new star. But as in a psychoanalysis session, his unmeditated writing brought to the surface all the things that have been repressed in the polite republic of (global) letters. Within an international literary field where progressive social commentary is the prevalent mode of narration, Knausgaard conjures up hellish creatures, the after-world, religious horror, the politically sinister, and the Devil himself.

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Michele Mari’s “Obscene Excess” of the Literary

September 11, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Francesca Mancino

For [Mari's characters], collecting signifies a dependency on nostalgia and memory, all of which coexist with each individual object.

We all love our books, but at what point does that love become reductive—or even dangerous? Italian writer Michele Mari weaves elements of materialist obsession into his fictions, describing how one’s attachment to literature can create falsifications, egomaniacal delusions, and objectifications of the people around us. In this following essay, Francesca Mancino takes a close look at Mari’s You, Bleeding Childhood and the recently published Verdigris, tracing their narratives in their manifestations of literary greed.

In the threaded lines that clutter all but the gutters of his works, Michele Mari comes close to Becca Rothfeld’s fantasy of excess, as detailed in her essay, “More Is More.” There, she writes, “I dream of a house stuffed floor to ceiling; rooms so overfull they prevent entry; too many books for the shelves; fictions brimming with facts but, more importantly, flush with form; long tomes in too many volumes; sentences that swerve on for pages; clauses like jewels strung onto necklaces. . .” In both the collection You, Bleeding Childhood (2023) and the novel Verdigris (2024), translated into English by Brian Robert Moore, there is a feeling that the text cannot contain the objects described. It is as if the words command a vaster space than a page can allow for.

Mari’s work toes the line between the wonder and the obscenity of excess; in both You, Bleeding Childhood and Verdigris, the author presses his readers to think about its many forms and their respective limits. Reflected in his writing style, one could almost say that there is too much in Mari’s books—too many literary objects, household items, convoluted adjectives, coveted authors, and blended dialects. In Verdigris, the walls of a home have almost no free space because “everywhere has gradually been overrun by objects and signs drawn on paper, when not by symbols traced directly onto the plaster. Anyone walking into that room would have the impression of a random and compulsive clutter, as though owing to a kind of horror vacui.” The narrator, Michelino, reminds the reader that the objects are not arbitrary, since he and Felice, the house’s owner, share an intimate knowledge of “every single element” tacked onto its surfaces. READ MORE…

The Teacher’s Task: Translation in a High School English Classroom

September 4, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Kena Chavva

They had stumbled upon a fundamental question that interested them more than Benjamin: what does it mean to produce something original?

Where did you first encounter translation—at home, in a classroom, online? In the following essay, Kena Chavva reflects on her experience prompting high school students to consider their own interactions with language and translation, and the ways both shape their lives and the world around them. Throughout the course, she and her students delved into questions of authenticity and identity, of faithfulness and creativity, seeming always to come back to concerns of originality: translation or not, how can we make something that is truly our own? 

It’s not uncommon to hear teachers speak of the joy in teaching something that they, as individuals, love. I had experienced something akin to this in my first year of teaching high school English—I adore Frankenstein and have an abiding affection for Macbeth, and when I taught those texts, it was clear to both me and my students that we were having a better experience of the literature and one another than we’d had with The Canterbury Tales some several months earlier. But what I’ve always found less commonly discussed is how soul-crushing it is to teach something you deeply love when your students aren’t responding to it the way you hope they will.

For me, that text was an excerpt from Pascale Casanova’s 1999 book The World Republic of Letters. The first chapter, titled “Principles of a World History of Literature”, outlines some of the hidden rules that govern the world’s literary economy:

In thrall to the notion of literature as something pure, free, and universal, the contestants of literary space refuse to acknowledge the actual functioning of its peculiar economy, the “unequal trade” (to quote Braudel once more) that takes place within it.

Casanova goes on to explain how “Literary value therefore attaches to certain languages” and that “…literature is so closely linked to language that there is a tendency to identify the “language of literature”—the “language of Racine” or the “language of Shakespeare”—with literature itself”. When I first read this very same chapter as a junior in college, it felt the way that education should feel: like you were presented with a framework through which to understand your lived experiences.

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Risgröt or juk? On Han Kang’s We Do Not Part and Translating Between Small Languages

August 28, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Linnea Gradin

[Indirect translation] obscures the specific challenges that arise in Korean-Swedish translations, and thus the joy of these two languages meeting.

Behind the walls of the publishing industry, countless decisions are made to bring our favorite novels to our shelves. These decisions grow ever greater when it comes to translations, and particularly translations into languages other than English. In the following essay, Linnea Gradin explores the complex process of bringing Korean literature to Sweden, featuring commentary from Swedish translators and publishers in her analysis of monumental author Han Kang’s latest release in translation: 작별하지 않는다/Jag tar inte farväl/We Do Not Part. Discussing indirect translation, questions of form, and even the choices made in translating a single word, Gradin presents both the burdens and blessings of such a unique language pair.

Han Kang, one of South Korea’s biggest international authors, broke into the English-speaking literary fiction space with a bang in 2016 when she won the International Booker Prize for The Vegetarian (originally published in 2007), a darkly insightful look at Korean society told through the story of a woman who one day decides to stop eating meat in a quiet act of resistance that turns increasingly obsessive. That same year, Human Acts (originally published in 2014)—a novel that delves into painful parts of the country’s past—was also published in English, further cementing Kang as a leading voice of Korean literature worldwide.

Born in the city of Gwangju (where Human Acts is set), Kang is from a family of writers: her father is a teacher and award-winning novelist, and her two brothers are writers too. Kang herself has been widely praised and won many prestigious awards both domestically and internationally, and is known for her ‘poetic’ yet spare and quiet style among Korean readers. In her work, she often comes back to themes of remembrance and Korean history, approaching the subjects in a deeply empathetic though notably neutral way, never telling the readers what to feel or think. After winning the Booker Prize, her work—particularly the English translations of The Vegetarian and Human Acts by Deborah Smith—found itself at the center of discussions about the complexities of translation.

With her latest book, We Do Not Part, scheduled for English-language publication in January 2025 (almost a year after it was published in several European countries), I again find myself reflecting on translation and publication practices—and how different stories are mediated across different parts of the world.

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In my dreams I reply like this

August 15, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Oonagh Stransky

Either way, it too is a kind of reply—to the call of literature, the call of writing.

For her translation of Erminia Dell’Oro’s Abandonment, Oonagh Stransky received one of the prestigious PEN Translates awards in 2023; one year later, this powerful, lyrical novel is due to arrive by way of Héloïse Press on September 15. Rendered into English with great sensitivity and intimacy, Abandonment tells the story of a mother-daughter pairing in Eritrea, and their alienation from both local and the colonial Italian communities in the aftermath of racial laws. Stransky fought for its appearance in the English-language for twenty years, and in the following essay, she speaks on the emotional, introspective process of translating this tremendous work, and why she has remained so determined that the world should read it.

abandonment

It’s July 2024, and I’ve received the proofreader’s notes for Abandonment. I need to reply to an issue with the passage below:

“Then Sellass felt a deep languor come over her and she understood that her body was dissolving into the seawater, that the wave she had become was returning towards the light and slowly breaking on a beach where the shades of the dead had gathered. Even Mariam’s shells were there, specks of darkness on the sand, and a hand reached out to grab them. The wave tried to speak, to tell her that she was Sellass, but the voice was only a watery gurgle, and the shades, going through the gestures of life, ignored the coming and going of the wave.”

The proofreader says

This is a bit confusing—reads to me like the wave is speaking to Sellass, but if I’ve understood correctly the wave IS Sellass? And she’s trying to speak to Mariam? I think the confusion is using “she” to refer to the wave, if it read ‘to tell her that it was Sellass’ it would be clearer.

I reply

Using “it” does fix the problem but ambiguity and the gendering of the wave are important to both story and style. Actually, the original Italian doesn’t say that the wave is trying to speak to Mariam. It just says, L’onda tentava di parlare, di raccontare che lei era Sellass. . . I suggest modifying that line to: The wave tried to speak, to say she was Sellass. . . This keeps the female gender of the wave and retains an element of ambiguity.

In my dreams I reply like this

The world of this book is filled with objects that we readers might commonly see as neutral but that are attributed gender by characters who need them to survive, who see their fragile lives building and then crumbling, over and over, casually, randomly, like waves. Sellass in this instance is indeed the wave, and because the wave in Italian is a feminine noun, she is both wave and girl. More than trying to address Mariam here, Sellass is receiving a message from the universe that she is a mere mortal, that she coexists with death, with the shades. Her daughter, Marianna, will be made aware of her own mortality, but she is accepting of it, which in turn allows her to survive and not become a victim; this awareness is the key to her resistance.

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To Follow the Poet Into the Tunnels: On the American Translation of Carlos Soto Román’s 11

July 4, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Sarug Sarano

By discourse I mean a poem, a textual device that runs through a particular set of psycho-historical contingencies.

The following essay investigates the indelible wounds of the 1973 Chilean coup—which brought to end the democratic socialist government of elected president Salvador Allende and marked the beginning of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime. Seen through the fragmentary, poetic method of poet Carlos Soto Román’s collection, 11, Sarug Sarano examines the public role of the text as reflection, bringing pieces of recollection, ghostly testimonies, and sustaining structures to their archival and political context, ensuring that one does not forget about the terrors and erasure that continue to infiltrate the present.

I searched for you among the ruined, I spoke with you. What was left of you saw me and I held you.

—Raúl Zurita, “Song For His Disappeared Love” (tr. Anna Deeny Morales)

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Serpentine

June 24, 2024  |  in Essays, Retellings  |  by Kanya Kanchana

The loop of the ☥ ankh is the Ouroboros, the endless serpent that swallows its own tail, and there is a void at its heart. Mind the gap.

In our column “Retellings,” Asymptote presents essays delving into myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. In this rendition, Kanya Kanchana traces the winding path of serpents across world literature and translation in a longform lyric essay. Weaving between times and traditions, Kanya draws together the philosophical concepts, conflicting perceptions, and atavistic emotions that serpents inspire, such that we are not quite sure where one story ends, and another begins.

“In every story, if you go back, as far back as you can, to the point where every horizon disappears, you find a snake, the tree, water.”

– Roberto Calasso, Ka

cobra transparent

When the word nāga (Sanskrit: serpent) is uttered, the first syllable must rear its hood in the air like a cobra, and the second must root into the earth like the coil it lifts itself from. The sound is the word. Where the ouraeus, the symbol of the rearing Egyptian cobra, Naja haje, is found, it’s an unmistakable mark of sovereignty, the golden hood that guards the head that wears the crown. The symbol is the deed. Sound, symbol, story—myth is the skin beneath the skin of the world, that which shapes from within.

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To Tear Down Since They Won’t Let Us Build: Katerina Gogou and Her Impressive Invasion of the Poetic Realm

May 29, 2024  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou and Dimitris Gkionis

Since they won't let us create life, we're going to ruin what's existing, and the new will follow.

As one of Greece’s most bold and unwavering poets, there is a ruthlessness running through the work of Katerina Gogou. In ferocious, free-styling verse, she vividly identified the brutalities and loneliness around her, and, with the incendiary vibration of a radical cry, came up always on the side of anarchism. As sensitive to hypocrisy as she was to corruption, Gogou dreaded a poetics that stood aside from politics, in one of her poems confessing: “What I fear most / is becoming “a poet” . . . / Locking myself in the room / gazing at the sea / and forgetting . . .” So it is that she remained dedicated to the necessity of rebellion and freedom until her death in 1993.

In this following article by Dimitris Gkionis, translated from the Greek by Christina Chatzitheodorou, we are offered an insight of this powerful poet in the midst of her time, navigating rages, passions, injustices, and her own poetic urgency. A woman who believes in words as action, as weapon—this is what comes into view.

On October 13, 1980, this piece, featuring an interview between Dimitris Gkionis and the poet Katerina Gogou, was published in the newspaper Eleftherotypia. It has since then been re-published—along with other interviews of Gogou—in Katerina Gogou, Mou Moiazei o Anthropos m’enan Ilio, Pou Kaigetai apo Monos tou (The man reminds me of a sun that burns by itself, published by Kastaniotis Editions in 2018). In both her poetry and interviews, Gogou’s work had always reflected her unconventional, rebellious, and combative spirit—always rebelling against authority, no matter what form. A supporter of the radical movement, she spent most of her days in Exarcheia—the historical centre of radical left-wing/libertarian politics—and was in constant conflict with the establishment, eventually giving up a promising career in acting to write poetry instead.

Through her verse, Gogou denounced social inequality, condemned police violence, criticised the death penalty, and stood in solidarity with political prisoners. Her mind was never at rest, and neither was her pen. While some of her poetry has previously been translated in English, it is the interviews that have been able to directly capture Gogou’s reasoning behind her aesthetic interventions, providing a more holistic picture of her and her work. In these conversations, she explains why she writes what she writes, and her anger at a stagnant world that she wants to change: “I am writing to get rid of this rock (kotrona) that is weighing me down. If I didn’t write, my ears would buzz. Ιf I don’t take this action, if I don’t put words on this white paper to bring myself to life, I could do things that are horrible and unimaginable.” READ MORE…

The Ghost of Coexistence: On a Narrative of Jewish-Muslim Kinship

May 20, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Moumita Ghosh

A Land Like You is a historical rendition . . . but it is also, much more, a testament of a multicultural homeland that no longer exists.

On May 12, Egypt joined South Africa in its International Court of Justice case accusing Israel of genocide. As one of the first countries to recognize the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in 1988, Egypt has continually occupied a close position in this ongoing catastrophe; the nation opposed Zionism in the 1930s and accepted tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees in the aftermath of the Nakba but, in more recent decades, the government has worked to covertly “normalize” relations with Israel. This seeming contradiction culminates from the complex, multi-cultural, and syncretic history of the region, in which Jewish and Muslim peoples lived with intertwined fates, and it is that increasingly implausible reality which the French writer and psychologist Tobie Nathan explores in A Land Like You, an absorbing, panoramic narrative of Egypt in the twentieth century. In the following essay, Moumita Ghosh looks at how the nation of Egypt formed out of an overarching Ottoman unity, and how Nathan’s stirring novel of this tumultuous period can inform our understanding of the region today.

We live beside the Arabs the way a man might live beside his innards. Our tales fill their Qur’an, their tongue fills our mouth. Why aren’t they us? Why aren’t we them?

—Tobie Nathan, from A Land Like You (translated by Joyce Zonana)

In Ottoman Brothers, Michele U. Campos writes about how objective distinctions between empires and nations are often murky, especially as demonstrated in the late Ottoman context. In the years before the First World War, the rise of ethno-nationalist sentiments such as Zionism and Arabism were essentially in negotiation with the responsibilities of imperial citizenship in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious Muslim empire. Rather than separating from the Ottoman empire, there were attempts to preserve its existence. As familiar calls for a two-state solution re-emerge in Palestine, now undergoing a second Nakba, this history of collective identity and a shared homeland in the Middle East—though short-lived, incomplete, and within the context of imperialism—has gained a new relevancy.

In the wake of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and the collapse of the old Hamidian absolutist state, the new epoch of democracy linked the individual Ottoman citizen—irrespective of ethnicity, religion, or mother tongue—to the reforming constitutional state, and citizenship to the “Ottoman-nation” became a distinct socio-political identity. Palestine, even under rule, somewhat differed from the other Ottoman provinces in terms of being a site of worldwide religious devotion, as its daily life involved a mutuality whereby local Muslims, Christians, and Jews came together—especially in Jerusalem—to execute the vision of a “modern” urban city.

Sephardi Jews in particular were grateful to the Ottoman Empire for being their historical saviors, and were consistently mediating between the ideological commitments of multicultural, civic Ottomanism and the European import of particularistic Zionism in the years following the 1908 revolution. Shaped by cultural Hebraism, the Sephardi Jews of Palestine believed in the compatibility of Ottomanism and Zionism; they thought that the socio-cultural and economic rebirth of the Jewish community would be enriching for the Ottoman Empire and, most importantly, that such a revival would be taking place within the Ottoman body-politic. However, such views were not free of contentions—especially due to the continual forces of territorial colonialism. READ MORE…

From The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine

May 1, 2024  |  in All Eyes on Palestine, Essays, Visual Art  |  by David Shulman and Margaret Olin

At the heart of zulem is an unfairness that no human creature can understand or withstand.

These days, many of the images we see from Palestine are ones of unbearable violence—a necessary example of what Roland Barthes called “the experiential order of proof”. However, despite the vital role of these photographs in bearing witness and documenting the ongoing atrocity, there is an equally essential need to elaborate this unidimensional representation with the social soul and experienced terrain of these historically rich territories, and to thus unite the psychically separate fields of the unthinkable and the daily. 

As such, it is with great urgency that writers and scholars Margaret Olin and David Shulman have collaborated to produce The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine, a compilation of photographs and texts, to be published as part of the Critical Photography series by Intellect. In their brief introduction, they state only: “We will speak of what we have seen and heard directly and what we have experienced in our bodies.” From that dedication to perception, they illuminate the extent to which intersections of photojournalism and intimate speech can establish compassionate, mutual relationships between viewers and subjects, and how photographs and poetics can be used in ways that do not seek to control information, as in the mechanisms of tyranny, but that reassert their expressive, transformative function: impressing a fragment to open up interrogations into the whole; inducing the epiphany of recognition; and offering the potential of a unified political space.

In the following excerpt, which consists of the book’s fifth chapter, titled “Arabic”, Olin and Shulman describe the sonic and interpersonal fabric of language under occupation, pairing the text with an array of images that portray communication’s various appearances: books, letters, conversations. The resulting interplay is evidence of how a single word—injustice—can grow and grow until it contains an entire country; how there is no scale for such grief, just as there is no true physicality for words, but still it is felt and carried, every day.

1

Susiya, March 2016

First, the music. It changes from place to place. The city Arabic of Jerusalem and Ramallah becomes gruffer, rougher, in the desert, where the guttural “q”—often pronounced only as a glottal stop, that is, a quick catching of the breath in the throat—turns into a “g.” The shepherds’ language flows seamlessly into the cries and whistles and grunts they use to speak to the sheep. At the same time, they sprinkle their sentences with the astonishing formulas of courtesy that come so naturally to the tongue: May Allah heal you, give you peace, bless your hands. We thank you, you have honored us. Welcome, you are our guests. Go in peace. READ MORE…

Ambiguities, Ruptures, and Shifting Perspectives: On Enchanted Lion’s “Unruly” Imprint

March 20, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Colin Leemarshall

Each of these Unruly publications presents a semiotically hybrid and richly aporetic narrative.

The art of book illustration has long accompanied the story in its imaginary expeditions—to vivify settings, to enrich character, and to extend language along sensorial planes. Yet, in contemporary publishing, there are few fictions for older readers that truly explore this complex reciprocity between image and text. In fall of 2020, the independent press Enchanted Lion addressed this lack with the announcement of Unruly: a new imprint that would be dedicated to “the picture book’s full potential for readers of all ages”. This was followed by the issuing of several titles dedicated to the dialogues between visual and literary languages, manifesting in enthralling alternatives of description, evocation, and narrative realities. In the following essay, Colin Leemarshall takes a close look on the three works out now.

In the popular imagination, the picture book is a highly circumscribed form. The apparent consensus—fomented both by market protocols and by entrenched reading habits—is that picture-heavy storybooks are for children up to the age of about eight; beyond this age, children are expected to graduate to chapter books, then to young adult novels, then finally (it is hoped) to sophisticated adult literature. (Those who remain drawn to the artistic gestalt of text and image have recourse to the graphic novel—a form that is now widely afforded the status of ‘serious’ literature.) This imagined trajectory not only obscures the fact that the world of illustrated children’s literature has always had its more provocative practitioners (from Heinrich Hoffmann to Tomi Ungerer), it also erects an unnecessary palisade against any ‘incursions’ from the adult world.

The New York-based Enchanted Lion seems to be one of the few anglophone presses invested in upending this prejudice. The publisher has long been open to putting out more challenging and unexpected works, and several of the books on its main title list might be said to be as much for adults as for children. However, it wasn’t until fairly recently, with the 2021 establishment of its Unruly imprint, that Enchanted Lion canalised these preferences into something more systematic. On its website, the publisher writes:

We’re launching Unruly because we believe that the possibilities for the illustrated book are larger and richer than the categories of board book, children’s picture book, graphic novel, and art book that currently exist [….] Picture books are rich with design and story, and yet the genre has come to be seen as one strictly for children. At Enchanted Lion, picture books are for readers of all ages, and sparking awareness of this boundlessness might finally be what is needed to allow the unique form that is the picture book—where word and image live together as nowhere else—to be seen as the expansive narrative medium it is.

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Between Languages: The Politics of Class, Race, and Translation in the Novels of B. Traven

February 26, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Josh Todarello

Such is how the frontier in Traven functions: an arena of capital that both equalizes and reproduces extant racial hierarchies.

The identity of novelist B. Traven has spawned a delightfully layered and debated array of theories, stipulations, and investigations. Best known as the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, later adopted into a well-loved film by John Huston, Traven was the pseudonym of a German- and English-language writer who, in various hypotheses, has been the collaborative result of several individuals, an imprisoned actor, an enthusiastic explorer of Mexico, and a translator from Acapulco and San Antonio. The most fascinating aspect of this mysterious identity, however, lies not solely in the individual’s life, but also in the entangled multiculturalism and various iterations of his works, which render American landscapes in German language, examine the intersection of class and race politics, and create narratives in which complexities of social agency are examined in both local and international contexts.

If you’re reading B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in its English translation, it would be be hard to guess that it was written by a German author, let alone intended for German-speaking leftists, living in German-speaking countries in the interwar period. Even in the original German, the book bears no obvious trace of Europe or European culture—aside from the language, of course. It feels, on the contrary, quintessentially American, falling easily into the category of the western and full of the genre’s tropes and generic dictates. At least for this reader, it felt odd to be reading one’s way through many of the familiar elements of the western, in a language not commonly associated with it.

The novel takes place in a post-revolutionary Mexico during the interwar years, and its protagonists are white American vagabonds, property-less and looking for work. There are oilmen, Mexican “Indians” and Mexican ladinos, or mestizos. There are bandits, train heists, and Federales. There is gunplay. And there is gold. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was originally written and published in German as Der Schatz der Sierran Madre by Büchergilde Gutenberg in 1927, and was part of Büchergilde Gutenberg’s mission to provide impoverished workers with access to cheap entertainment and Bildung. The current Büchergilde Gutenberg website tells us, for example, that the publisher was founded in 1924 to facilitate easier access to Bildung for members of the working class, doing so by means of affordable but well-crafted, premium books. Bruno Dreßler, Büchergilde’s first chairman, had in mind the idea of a proletarian cultural community, a “proletarische Kulturgemeinschaft”; the publisher saw itself as part of proletarian literature and culture at a time when such a thing perhaps still existed, though its contours and possibility—or impossibility—were, even then, debated by Marxist critics and thinkers of every stripe. Even Diego Rivera, a card-carrying communist, argued that, properly speaking, there could be no such thing as proletarian art within capitalism. Only after the dictatorship of the proletariat has “fulfilled its mission,” Rivera writes, after it has “liquidated all class differences and produced a classless society,” can there be a proletarian art. READ MORE…

Sounds Like Fiction: Traversing Minor Detail Again, in the Time of Genocide

February 5, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Alex Tan

Amidst the ruins, I want to read Shibli's writing ... as a pedagogy of hope, of waiting, and of revolutionary becoming.

After the shameful decision to cancel Palestinian writer Adania Shibli’s LiBeraturpreis award ceremony at the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair, everyone in the Global North flocked to read Minor Detail (translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette), as thousands of writers, intellectuals, editors, and others in the literary ecosystem rightly condemned the cancellation. It was a symptom not only of Europe’s routine silencing of Palestinian voices but, more perniciously, of Germany’s particular brand of virulent anti-antisemitism, its Holocaust memory culture metastasised into a total interdiction on critiques of Israel.

Adania Shibli cites Samira Azzam—a writer whose seemingly unthreatening short stories describing everyday life in Palestine managed to pass the censorship bureau’s checks—as a formative influence. Azzam “contributed to shaping my consciousness regarding Palestine as no other text I have ever read has done”, Shibli writes, for it cultivated in her “a deep yearning for all that had been, including the normal, the banal, and the tragic”. For many of us, grappling with what solidarity and hope can mean in the light of Israel’s ongoing genocidal violence against Gaza, Minor Detail might be such an essential touchstone. How might we (re)read Shibli’s work today, not only as a prescient source of information about Palestine but also as a text that theorises and maps its own aesthetic possibility? With what voice does it continue to address us, reverberating through silence and the distortions of language?

One day, a splotch of black ink bloomed on my well-thumbed copy of Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail. I didn’t know where it came from. The blemish, to my consternation, appeared in the light-grey region of the cover, which depicts an undulating terrain. Misted waves, perhaps, or the volatile sands of a desert. Obsessed with keeping my books as pristine as possible, I took an alcohol swab and wiped the black dot right off.

The smudge was dispatched as swiftly as it had arrived. Days later, I noticed the alcohol had also dissolved the matte surface of the cover where I had rubbed it. A tiny glossy archipelago emerged, its lustre and its jagged edges visible only at an angle, under the light.

Now the sheen reproaches me for thinking I could make something disappear with no trace.

*

Desert / الصحراء

 I want to juxtapose without asserting equivalence; the unnamed Israeli military commander in Minor Detail, too, believes in the seamlessness of disappearance. In the novel’s first half, he helms a Zionist platoon in a mission to conquer the Negev desert. This ruthless assertion of sovereignty takes place in 1949, a year after the traumatic Nakba dispossessed most Palestinians of their homeland. It is also a rearguard response to Egypt’s invasion of an Israeli kibbutz a year prior.

Charged with purging the land of “infiltrators”, the Zionist soldiers massacre a band of Arabs. They capture a Bedouin girl, humiliating, gang-raping, and murdering her. The horror of these bloodthirsty actions is continually evaded: “Then came the sound of heavy gunfire.” The narrative camera, as it were, turns its back on the moment of life’s desecration. Landscape itself seems to consent to these crimes. The desert, an aggressive mouth, collaborates in the erasure of evidence, each occasion with a different attitude: “languidly”, “greedily”, “steadily”, the sand sucks blood, moisture, substance into its depths. READ MORE…