Essays

How to Tell Stories Under Lèse Majesté? An Anonymized Novel Has Some Answers

September 8, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Peera Songkünnatham

How can a writer who traffics stories between the two worlds—whether in journalism, literature, or scholarship—do so responsibly?

In Carolyn Forché’s poem, “What Comes,” she writes: “To speak is not yet to have spoken.” Amidst the myriad of voices clamouring to be heard today, writers often aim to reconcile the journalistic motives of witness and the cultivated balance of narration, bringing the scattered language of a society into a solid, comprehensible whole. The best of these texts has proven to be a powerful tool in re-establishing the broken links between people living under a regime, and in a newly released book from Thailand, an anonymous writer seeks to do the same in a fascinating and deeply probing exploration of the country’s strictly enforced lèse majesté laws. 

What can literature do during times of emergency, wherein testimony takes precedence over much of storytelling? This year in Thailand, amidst the ongoing crackdown on anti-government protesters—exacerbated by viral outbreaks in prisons—witness accounts by lawyers and journalists have assumed the task usually assigned to literature: to describe the human condition and to build conscience. One particular book, however, has managed to straddle the worlds of journalism and literature. A collection of anecdotes about those affected by the lèse majesté law in the 2010s, ในแดนวิปลาส (In the Land of Madness, Paragraph Publishing, April 2021), has much to teach us about how to tell the stories silenced in the throes of oppression and censorship. It is anonymized yet revealing, packed full of pain but with surprising touches of humor. Perhaps due to its relevance to current events in the country, the book has seldom been considered as a literary object. Yet, in its description, the book categorizes itself as a “Thai novel.” This gets my puzzle-solving mind turning.

One might read the categorization as ironic, and—taking “novel” to mean fiction—come to the truism that, in the Kingdom of Thailand, the truth surrounding the monarchy and its victims must, for reasons of safety, make itself anonymous, dressed up as fiction. But reading the label as a genuine attempt to define itself may yield deeper and more surprising insights. In the author’s preface, a line is drawn between reporting based on facts and storytelling based on feelings:

All the stories in this book grew out of prying curiosity indeed. Half of its fruits became serious news and information while I worked as a journalist in a small but big-hearted news agency; the other half turned mostly into emotions and feelings I put away in a bag and didn’t know what to do with.

In a situation where rights and liberties were repressed for a long time, where injustice was standard practice, the bits and pieces being collected in my bag kept getting heavier and heavier, to the point where the bag seemed to be bursting. There were two parallel worlds. People lived normal and bright lives in one, while the other was pitch dark, cruel, and noticed by very few. One stranded between the two worlds would therefore find it extremely difficult to maintain one’s sanity and normalcy.

It isn’t that fact and feeling are necessarily opposed; rather, the preface suggests that there is a remainder left over from the work of journalism—that certain parts of a journalist’s experience can only be stored as feeling and emotion. Shining the “spotlight” on society’s darkest corners provides only one aspect of reality. The other sides—unspoken or unspeakable, unborn or unbearable—are best accessed via novelistic means. In the Land of Madness definitely ‘reads like a novel’ in the sense that it is a well-crafted, compelling story wherein some characters are depicted with vivid inner lives, whereas others remain unknowable despite their palpable presence on the page. Calling it a novel also allows for some artistic license, a deviation from factual description to get at a deeper truth; in the book’s most surreal moment, the narrator notices a friend’s “internal” injuries by seeing lances of sunlight piercing through holes in his frame. READ MORE…

The Art of Anguish

September 1, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Will Firth

The poignant novel is imbued with anguish rather than heated rage—both emotionally charged and deeply analytical.

Tatjana Gromača’s contemporary novel Divine Child centers on the narrator’s relationship with her mother, whose bipolar disorder diagnosis coincides with a startling descent into Croatian nationalism. The book earned the Croatian Ministry of Culture’s 2012 Vladimir Nazor Prize of the for t­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­he best work of prose and Jutarnji list’s Novel of the Year prize in 2013. Yugoslav émigré writer Bora Ćosić called Divine Child “a small masterpiece” and stated that the author stands out for her “precious crudity”—a reference to its often stark, earthy descriptions despite the prevailing poetic and philosophical vein. Divine Child will be released in North America by Sandorf Passage in October 2021. Here, translator Will Firth describes challenges he encountered along the way.

In 2020, I was commissioned by Zagreb publisher Sandorf to translate three books of contemporary fiction by Croatian writers with funding from the EU’s Creative Europe program. One of them was the short novel Divine Child (Božanska dječica) by Tatjana Gromača. I had not read anything substantial of hers before.

I immediately related to Divine Child. It’s a diarylike biography of the author’s mother, which focuses on her slide into bipolar disorder, when she is cold-shouldered and denigrated by society. It makes an important link between socioeconomic crises—the collapse of former Yugoslavia, accompanied by virulent nationalisms—and the individual. The mother’s Croatian-ethnic neighbors label her an undesirable minority, in this case an ethnic Serb, although she has spent all her life in Croatia and shows few, if any, signs of otherness. But this was a time when having the “wrong” name could cause you problems throughout the region, and arguably still can. The exclusion triggers the mother’s illness.

The poignant novel is imbued with anguish rather than heated rage—both emotionally charged and deeply analytical. As a review in Publishers Weekly noted, it “takes on the hatred that was manufactured, mythologized, and manipulated to feed, justify, and rationalize violence.”

The title—Divine Child—is a dual reference: to the mother’s turn to religion in later life, and to the formative influence of her disciplinarian father, a military man, whose expectations she always strove to fulfill, even after his death, thus making her something of an “eternal child.” Typical of literature from the region, character development is sparse, even with the central character of the mother, and we have to piece together her appearance, occupation, and family history from a range of allusions and asides. Setting her in a historical and social context is more important for the author and omniscient narrator, and the reader is free to decide whether this sparseness is an exquisite literary pleasure or unnecessarily tantalizing suspense.

The editor of the English edition, Buzz Poole, was not convinced by the looseness of the narration in combination with its poetic style and philosophical ambit, so he made a major structural intervention: the novel in translation begins with an event central to the story—a visit to Mother at the hospital. This directs the flow and helps transport the author’s delicate voice. As translator, I was a go-between in negotiating this significant change.

Inconsistencies in the original also put me in the role of editor, and I collaborated with Gromača to tighten the language in translation. I like to correspond with authors to check my understanding of the text, even when I’m pretty sure how I’m going to render a particular term or phrase. With Divine Child, Gromača and I exchanged quite a few emails. We got on well and were on the verge of meeting up in the fall of 2020, when I was at a residency in Zagreb, but the worsening pandemic foiled our plans. In any case, our good working relationship was important for facing the challenge of translating this novel.

The main difficulties in translating Divine Child were to do with its startling imagery and metaphors. Here are several examples:

Frigid Sphinxes

Gromača describes packs of stray dogs in her hometown that “roamed the streets (…) and floated in abandoned fishing boats like frigid sphinxes with piercing, hypnotic eyes.” The original conveys this image as “poput pomodrjelih sfingi,” i.e., like sphinxes that have turned blue. I wasn’t sure in what sense the author meant “blue”—I thought it could refer to the bluish light by the river and the silhouettes of dogs in the twilight. In fact, she meant that the dogs have literally turned blue from the damp cold on the riverbanks and also from their lowly thoughts and those of the surrounding human society. “Frigid” conveys that physical and spiritual cold. READ MORE…

Because Reading (Subtitles) Is What? Fundamental!

August 18, 2021  |  in Essays, Multimedia  |  by Francesca Leveridge

RuPaul’s Drag Race demands translation sensitive to global and local queer cultures.

In the twelve years since RuPaul’s Drag Race first premiered on the relatively unknown LGBTQIA+ cable channel Logo TV, the Emmy award-winning series has gained an immense global following and become one of the defining shows of our age. The reality TV show, which boasts thirteen seasons (along with six All Stars series), follows drag queens competing in a range of performance-based challenges to be crowned “America’s Next Drag Superstar.” More recently, the race has expanded overseas, with Spain becoming the latest in a series of international spinoffs, joining Thailand, the UK, Canada, Holland, and Australia/New Zealand. In its evolution from a niche talent show for US drag performers to a global cultural phenomenon, Drag Race has propelled a queer subculture from the margins to the mainstream and put drag performance in the international spotlight. In the journey to globalize the show, translation has played a key role in giving drag and LGBTQIA+ culture visibility around the world.

It is of course thanks to the subtitling and dubbing of Drag Race into multiple languages that the US original achieved global success and found audiences worldwide. For translators, capturing the nuances of the show is no small feat. Much of its entertainment relies on verbal and cultural humour, each episode packed with English-based puns, double-entendres, and innuendos that can be hard to translate. Similarly, the dialogue showcases slang terms, neologisms, and catchphrases that are deeply rooted in the drag and LGBTQIA+ culture of the US. Take “mothertuckin’,” for example. In drag culture, tucking, used here to rhyme with a certain English swearword, refers to a taping practice used by drag queens to make their genital anatomy appear more feminine. Recreating this kind of wordplay poses a challenge for translators working in a context with a less developed drag culture and associated vocabulary.

READ MORE…

Our Word Against Kafka’s

July 14, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Samuel Kahler

Kafka floats, shapeshifts, appears in many places at once; he is not a fixed subject.

Franz Kafka’s gigantic presence in the world of letters is undeniable, yet looking back along the labyrinthine volutes of history, one perceives distinctly the figure of a man who would likely be horrified at the depth and breadth by which we known his work. Having famously insisted that his texts be burned after his death, a betrayal by a close friend led to the remarkable corpus we freely access today. Since then, Kafka’s writings have undergone a dramatic escalade of ownerships, resulting most recently in its comprehensive release by the National Library of Israel. In the following essay, Samuel Kahler traces the events that led to Kafka’s legacy, delineating a writer’s intentions as they come up against the voracious appetites of the world.

 “I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”

—Franz Kafka

Part of the appeal of reading Kafka (or the madness, depending on who you ask) stems from the durability of the stories, parables, and novellas—their infinite resistance to decisive analysis enduring even after multiple readings. The texts evoke the quotidian anxieties of the modern age, achieving their incomparable effect by leaning into varied traditions of folklore, parable, horror, and the absurd, paradoxically balancing the polarities of universal relatability and a resistance against fixed interpretations. Can a body of work so ripe—so bursting with potential meanings—possibly be pigeonholed with a singular definition? To attempt a conclusive, complete answer—something like a grand unified theory of Kafka—would be the errand of a well-meaning but misguided fool.

Inseparable from the question, and equally difficult to answer, is another problem: namely, that of deciding which works belong in his official catalog and which do not. Mostly, we owe this state of affairs to a complex series of events that began with the discovery of Kafka’s will and continued onward through the next nine decades, through the many publications of his works and, later, the battles over his archival materials and the significance of the contents contained therein.

When the National Library of Israel released its newly digitized Franz Kafka collection this spring, it signified the end of a prolonged conflict over its acquisition. Yet, the collection’s publication does not portend a satisfying resolution for any facet of Kafka’s legacy; rather, it throws the spotlight on academia and the public at large, exposing our continued desire to make something concrete out of Kafka, despite his enigmatic condition.

Kafka’s posthumous drama—call it a tragedy, a passion play, a farce, or what you will—remains an unresolved mess, even after the curtain has supposedly come down. READ MORE…

Jordi Llavina’s Poetry & Prose Blurs the Lines Between Reality and Fiction, Writer and Reader

July 8, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Alice Banks

The author's unusual style allows readers to “write” the text along with him.

Poetry & Prose, by Jordi Llavina, translated from Catalan by William Hamilton, is a stunning collection of, as the title suggests, poetry and prose. The book opens with one astounding long-form poem—its English translation parallel to the original Catalan—and ends with an equally beautiful short prose piece. Themes of memory, time, and nature are prevalent in both, and Llavina’s lyricism flows effortlessly throughout the whole collection. Poetry & Prose—as well as the only other publication of Llavina’s work in English, London Under Snow—makes clear that this award-winning writer is an expert at blurring the lines between reality and fiction, and bringing reader and writer closer together than ever.

Poetry & Prose begins with Llavina’s breathtaking poem “The Hermitage,” its lines recounting one man’s climb up a long, dusty hill to visit the hermitage perched at the top. This climb is not just a physical journey, but a journey through the past in which the narrator revisits memories through Llavina’s brilliant imagery. Speaking at Sant Jordi NYC 2020, Llavina stated that the opening lines came to mind one day and stood out to him as symbolic of a return to the landscape of his childhood. These initial words and the ideas behind them came to Llavina somewhat naturally, thus leading him to embark on the feat of creating a long-form poem that stemmed from these seeds. Llavina put forth the idea that “[w]hen you have the first lines of the poem, it is easy to begin […] The most important thing is to have the first lines.” These all-important first lines, then, were the key to Llavina’s staggeringly beautiful “The Hermitage”:

Lone I climb once more, years later,
up to Sant Pere’s hermitage.
The air is still, and the glare of
a raw July sun will leave my
neck and shoulders burnt and tender.

READ MORE…

No Sea Left Uncharted: Dante in Japan

July 7, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Hideyuki Doi

What register should be used to translate a work so ancient, and yet so new?

In the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death, his works remain vividly alive. The ongoing stream of translations and editions of the il Somma Poeta, continuing to hold the world in rapture, is evidential of the text’s mutative and evolving qualities as it immerses itself in each discrete language. With this curiosity in mind, we are presenting a new Dante-centric series on the blog, taking a look at the Italian master’s works through the prisms of its variegating, global journey. First up is Professor Hideyuki Doi of Kyoto’s Ritsumeikan University, an accomplished expert on Italian literature. In the following essay, he traces the history of Dante’s presence in Japan, and discusses why the ancient texts continue to fascinate contemporary writers.

In order to understand Dante’s fortune in Japan, we must travel backwards exactly seventy years, when the first volume of Dante gakkai shi—annals curated by the Japanese Dante Society, founded the year before in collaboration with the Italian Dante Society of Rome—was published.

This release represented a validating acknowledgement of Dante Studies, or Italian Studies, in Japanese academia, reborn anew in the post-war period. For a long time, if the figure of Dante represented for the Italians questions of identity, for the Japanese, it posed questions of existence. In contributing to this cultural conception, there is a poem inspired by Dante’s work, composed by Akiko Yosano in the concise style known as waka or tanka:

Hitori ite  hoto iki tsukinu  Shinkyoku no  Jigoku no kan ni  warewo miidezu

Alone I breathe a sigh of relief having not found myself in the Inferno of the Divine Comedy.

This fragment, composed in 1921, restores the ancient form of thirty-one syllables subdivided into five units, and also shows how Dante touched Japanese readers closely. Yosano, today counted among the greatest modern poets, is the highest representative of that Japanese romanticism of the early twentieth century—considered a non-naturalistic aestheticism.

To draft that “Dantesque” poem, Yosano had read the first complete translation of the Comedy, edited by Heizaburō Yamakawa (1914, 1917, 1922), a Christian-inspired man of letters. Yamakawa, like many other Japanese people of that time, was spurred by a worldwide interest in the Florentine poet upon the sixth centenary of his death, as well as a curiosity cultivated by certain writers who had referenced Dante in their own works. For example, the modern novelist par excellence, Sōseki Natsume, in his autobiographic short story London tō (The Tower of London, 1905), described the imposing image of the famous Tower standing in the memories of his years spent studying in the capital—an image compared to that of Dante’s famous gate, which condemns to “eternal pain” those who pass through it. READ MORE…

Within This Language a Home: On the Linguistic Exiles of Minae Mizumura and Jhumpa Lahiri

July 5, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

We seek within language the stable perceptions of identification; we are looking for the words to pronounce ourselves.

Minae Mizumura was born speaking Japanese, adopted English upon moving to America, studied French diligently at the Sorbonne and Yale, then in adulthood, returned to Japan to become a novelist in her native tongue. Jhumpa Lahiri was born speaking Bengali, quickly gained fluency and rose to literary prominence in English, then in the mid-nineties, fell in love with the Italian language, and began a prolific transfiguration of translating and writing Italian texts. In this following essay, Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan discusses these two accomplished writers in the varying, intriguing ways they’ve travelled through the realm of language, and how the possibilities of exile provide for a rediscovery of selfhood.

The art of self-introduction is a practice in brevity and precision. When I lived in China, I was Xiao Yue—yue as in moon. When my family moved to Canada, I became but you can call me Shelly. Later, when I carved a home-like enclave for myself in Japan, I learned the concise method of mental hyphenation: Shelly-Chinese-Canadian. Such is the way I moved through the world, always in dialogue with its perceptions. The self is not a distinct article of qualities, but a myriad web of associations—one spends a life following its appendix.

When an individual’s place in the world is rendered fluid by border-crossings and trans-oceanic migrations, it serves to learn that identity is not an indefatigable statement of presence, but a tenuous and mutable clay. Names, meant to be cemented by the fact of birth, become vulnerable to the phonetic insistences of other tongues. Language, the intact system by which to categorise the world, becomes scattered and dismembered with interruptions, contrarian rules, and adversarial vocabularies. One learns to see the multiplicities innate in all things—the layers of presence dispersed across the world, evoked by the differences in seeing. What you call that I call mine.

“‘My name is Minae’: how many times did I say this and then feel my mind go blank?” In Minae Mizumura’s novelised autobiography, An I-Novel, she peruses the same delicate network of memories, beliefs, and influences to reach herself. The three-hundred-some pages are held within the bookends of one day and night, perched on the structural lattice of phone calls with her sister, Nanae. The two sisters behold each other in both the comfort of familial intimacy and the strangeness of difference, made bolder by the contrast of similarity. Nanae, accustomed to American patterns, has settled into a life—however precarious—defined by an apartness from Japan, a homeland resigned to being occasionally ached for and remembered. Minae, however, spends the duration of this long, diaphanous day gathering pockets of assurances and assertions so that she may get up the courage to tell her sister about her decision to return to Japan—and their first language—to become a novelist.

The pull that Minae feels towards her birth country has everything to do with a knowledge that she has the power to excavate something profound and secret in the earth of Japanese language, a richness that the stone facade of English does not betray—“. . . the act of writing in Japanese transformed me to someone with knowledge of a rarefied world conveyed through the mix of different writing systems, knowledge inaccessible through English.” The lilting elegance of hiragana enchants her—writing its sweeping shapes embroiders her into the brocade of The Tale of Genji, calling towards a graceful world of balance, beauty, and softness. Even the repetitive, metronomic nature of learning kanji beholds an element of magic, displacing her into the transcendent history of the characters: “I felt like a monk in a temple, his body freezing in the bitter cold of winter, copying a sutra by candlelight.” Language—even beyond its purposes of notation and definition—is a gateway, a stage upon which the fantasies of self may spiral in its complex, infinite choreography. READ MORE…

Emma Bovary’s Adventures in Saigon, Part II

June 3, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Thuy Dinh

Hoàng Hải Thủy’s 1973 Vietnamese translation of Flaubert’s classic complicates perceptions of domestication and foreignization.

This is the second in a two-part series that explores the mixed translation effects of foreignization and domestication, as illustrated by Hoàng Hải Thủy’s 1973 Vietnamese adaptation of Madame Bovary. Read the first part here.

Note: The below version has been revised to reflect important corrections. Lawrence Venuti’s theoretical framework, as reflected in the revised essay, does acknowledge the subaltern’s perspective and show that domestication and foreignization encompass both discursive approaches and their multifaceted effects.

Since the earlier version did not fairly reflect the full implications of Mr. Venuti’s work, the author owes Mr. Venuti an apology and would like to thank him for his forbearance and collegial support.

book

Hoàng Hải Thủy’s adaptation showcases his wit, creativity, and lyricism. In Người Vợ Ngoại Tình, Charles Bovary becomes Trần văn Bô, an inspired choice since the name represents both a phonetic and metaphorical rendering (although by Vietnamese convention Trần would be his family name and Bô his given name). Bô is a round, onomatopoeic sound that in Vietnamese evokes a chamber pot, and an idiot’s babbles.

Hoàng Hải Thủy changes Emma’s name to Ánh—which means “shadow,” “reflection,” and “refracted light” in Vietnamese. This domesticating approach nevertheless reflects Hoàng Hải Thủy’s concise and elegant understanding of Emma Bovary. In Flaubert’s original context, mirrors and windows are employed to accentuate Emma’s outsider status—she’s a reflected image, being gazed at by her solipsism, by other men. She is elusive, insubstantial, but also transcendent.

READ MORE…

Emma Bovary’s Adventures in Saigon, Part I

June 2, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Thuy Dinh

Hoàng Hải Thủy’s 1973 Vietnamese translation of Flaubert’s classic complicates perceptions of domestication and foreignization.

This is the first in a two-part series that explores the indeterminate translation effects of foreignization and domestication, as illustrated by Hoàng Hải Thủy’s 1973 Vietnamese adaptation of Madame Bovary. Read the second part here.

Note: The below version has been revised to reflect important corrections. Lawrence Venuti’s theoretical framework, as reflected in the revised essay, does acknowledge the subaltern’s perspective and show that domestication and foreignization encompass both discursive approaches and their multifaceted effects.

Since the earlier version did not fairly reflect the full implications of Mr. Venuti’s work, the author owes Mr. Venuti an apology and would like to thank him for his forbearance and collegial support.

In 1813, Friedrich Schleiermacher, the German translator of Plato, had proposed that a translator has two choices, “either such translator leaves the author in peace as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or the translator leaves the reader in peace as much as possible, and moves the author towards him.” The former technique could be defined as foreignization, and the latter domestication. Today translation scholar Lawrence Venuti has expanded on Schleiermacher’s perspective by constructing an ethics of difference in translation. According to Venuti, translations geared toward domestication effects risk perpetuating certain uncontested beliefs in the maintenance of the status quo. As a corrective, he has proposed a meticulous yet adaptable theoretical framework that can illuminate any translation, regardless of language and culture, regardless of their status as dominant or dominated, major or minor. In his view, foreignizing translations can expand the linguistic and stylistic resources of the translating language by broadening the parameters of readability.

If we define foreignizing as a translation approach that creates noticeable effects and variations from the prevalent standard, and domesticating as conforming to pre-existing norms, how do we gauge these effects against a translator’s stated intention, his unconscious bias, inadvertent omissions or errors? My essay attempts to illustrate these questions by discussing Hoàng Hải Thủy’s Người Vợ Ngoại Tình—his 1973 adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

READ MORE…

The International Booker at the Border of Fiction: Who Will Win?

May 27, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

[T]his year’s shortlist . . . is explicitly focused with questions of archives, loss, and narration.

With the announcement of the Booker International 2021 winner around the corner and the shortlisted titles soon to top stacks of books to-be-read around the world, most of us are harboring an energetic curiosity as to the next work that will earn the notoriety and intrigue that such accolades bring. No matter one’s personal feelings around these awards, it’s difficult to deny that the dialogue around them often reveal something pertinent about our times, as well as the role of literature in them. In the following essay, Barbara Halla, our assistant editor and in-house Booker expert, reviews the texts on the shortlist and offers her prediction as to the next book to claim the title.

If there is such a thing as untranslatability, then the title of Adriana Cavarero’s Tu Che Mi Guardi, Tu Che Mi Racconti would be it. Paul A. Kottman has rendered it into Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, a title accurate to its content, typical of academic texts published in English, but lacking the magic of the original. Italian scholar Alessia Ricciardi, however, has provided a more faithful rendition of: “You who look at me, you who tell my story.” This title is not merely a nod, but a full-on embrace of Caverero’s theory of the “narratable self.”

Repudiating the idea of autobiography as the expression of a single, independent will, Caverero—who was active in the Italian feminist and leftist scene in the 1970s—was much more interested in the way external relationships overwhelmingly influence our conception of ourselves and our identities. Her theory of narration is about democratizing the action of creation and self-understanding, demonstrating the reliance we have on the mirroring effects of other people, as well as how collaboration can result in a much fuller conception of the self. But I also think that there is another layer to the interplay between seeing and narrating, insofar as the act of seeing another involves in itself a narrative creation of sorts; every person is but a amalgam of the available fragments we have of them, and we make sense of their place in our lives through storytelling, just as we make sense of our own.

I have started this International Booker prediction with Cavarero because I have found that this year’s shortlist—nay, the entire longlist—is explicitly focused with questions of archives, loss, and narration: what is behind the impulse to write, especially about others, and those we have loved, but lost? Who gets to tell our stories? It is a shame that Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette—as one of the most interesting interjections on the narrative impulse—was cut after being first longlisted in March. The second portion of Minor Detail sees its Palestinian narrator becoming obsessed to the point of endangerment to discover the story that Shibli narrates in the first portion of the book: the rape and murder of a Bedouin girl, whose tragic fate coincides with the narrator’s birthday. This latter section of the book is compulsively driven by this “minor detail,” but there is no “logical explication” for what drives this obsession beyond the existence of the coincidence in itself. READ MORE…

Physical Object and Metaphysical Destiny: To the Lake Journeys to the Heart of the Balkans

May 19, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Andriana Hamas

Kapka Kassabova’s English-language travelogue invites readers in the Balkans to consider local culture with a fresh perspective.

On a website called Lost Bulgaria, anyone curious enough can browse thousands of carefully preserved and curated photographs depicting the poignant yet essential ways in which the people, customs, and landscape have transformed or been transformed from the last quarter of the 1800s until 2010. About a dozen of the blurred images kept in this time machine take us back to the first half of the twentieth century and Lake Ohrid, one of the world’s oldest and deepest, which nowadays is split by the border between North Macedonia and Albania. The majority of the visuals reveal everyday life near the shores, the monasteries that dot the mountainous terrain, the traditionally clad locals, or the passers-by who felt the need to extend a prayer to Saint Naum of Ohrid. Kapka Kassabova’s latest travelogue with distinct autobiographical elements, To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace, offers a similar but much more powerful passage through the lake’s past and present.

The book, which reviewers often place in the travel fiction genre, is pronouncedly personal, even though the disclosed memories, both on an individual level and as an outlet for the collective subconscious, undoubtedly remind readers from diverse regions of the globe of their unique roots and unending voyage of self-discovery.

The author (b. 1973) spent her childhood and teenage years in Sofia and later moved with her family to New Zealand, only to finally—or at least for the time being—settle down in the Scottish Highlands. Her extensive travels have informed her writing, which encompasses poetry collections and novels, in addition to literary travelogues. Although Kassabova’s mother tongue is Bulgarian, she writes in English, a practice that evokes the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, Khalil Gibran, and Joseph Conrad and makes her Bulgarian translations all the more fascinating.

Located on the edge of her grandmother’s homeland, Lake Ohrid is where she passed a few of her summer holidays. Once considered the pearl of the Balkans, nowadays it is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site and boasts endemic species and unique prehistoric remnants. Despite this international protection however, its pristine waters are still threatened by climate change and widespread pollution. While making a convincing case for immediate preservation action of global scale, Kassabova’s fictionalized reportage can also be perceived as a continuation to her previous one, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, in which she sets on a quest to comprehend the meaning of the separation points not only between countries, but also between people. In a similar fashion, To the Lake prompts us to tag along as she traces the ancient Via Egnatia and dives into the bloody history of the region, where Bulgarians, Macedonians, Albanians, and Greek are always at crossroads, especially in the aftermath of the two Balkan wars and the ensuing decades under communist rule. READ MORE…

The Strange—and Strangely Familiar—World of 1800s Science Fiction Novella Les Xipéhuz

April 28, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Andrea Blatz

Rosny suggests that colonialism will eventually end because of a lack of communication.

In J.-H. Rosny’s 1888 novella Les Xipéhuz, strange beings invade humans’ territory and immediately begin to kill them. Communication becomes impossible; translation is useless because the Xipéhuz threaten humanity’s existence. In today’s essay, Andrea Blatz argues that, whilst science fiction purports to tell stories foreign to our own experience, this French book represents an all-too-familiar colonial situation—and crystalizes the relationship between language and imperialism.

J.-H. Rosny—the nom de plume of brothers Joseph Henri Honoré Boex and Séraphin Justin François Boex—wrote during the Third Republic, when France was expanding its empire in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. But the country had also recently lost the Alsace-Lorraine region to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, and a loss so close to home was a brutal blow to national pride. Borders also shift in Les Xipéhuz, in which mysterious creatures invade the humans’ territory. The French empire claimed that its raison d’être was to bring its civilization to the rest of the world, and one way to do this was to spread its language. Consequently, the Alliance Française was established in 1883 to teach the French language and spread its culture and civilization, as well as to help create a new French identity.

In this context of imperial expansion, science fiction emerged. Belgian author J.-H. Rosny Aîné—the later pen name of elder brother Joseph—was one of the first authors to write science fiction in the French language, along with Jules Verne. In his works, Rosny pushes readers to imagine humans evolving to create a better world, free of colonialism, through science. The protagonist in Les Xipéhuz, Bakhoûn, represents the use of scientific knowledge for human advancement. Although seen as an outsider for his strange habits—for example, he farms instead of hunting and gathering—he is respected, and the nomadic Pjehou tribe turns to him when their methods against the invading Xipéhuz—who may or may not be from another planet—prove useless. Bakhoûn, who is thousands of years ahead of his time, represents modern rationality in comparison to the primitive beliefs of the other members of his tribe. His beliefs are based on logic rather than superstition:

Premièrement, il croyait que la vie sédentaire, la vie à place fixe, était préférable à la vie nomade, ménageait les forces de l’homme au profit de l’esprit. Secondement, il pensait que le Soleil, la Lune et les étoiles n’étaient pas des dieux, mais des masses lumineuses; Troisièmement, il disait que l’homme ne doit réellement croire qu’aux choses prouvées par l’expérience.

First, he espoused the idea that sedentary existence was preferable to nomadic life, allowing man to channel vital forces toward the development of the mind. Second, he thought that the Sun, the Moon and the Stars were not gods but luminous bodies. Third, he taught that man should only believe in things that can be proven by Measurement.

In other words, Bakhoûn bases his conclusions on evidence he has gathered, employing a quantitative methodology to learn about the Xipéhuz. During the weeks he spends observing them, he formulates and tests hypotheses regarding the invaders’ social, educational, and communication systems.

His findings mirror an anthropological study and the importance of science for the spread of the French empire. As the French did with their subjects, Bakhoûn used his newly acquired knowledge to gain a position of power over the Xipéhuz. Scientific advancement was said to measure how advanced a group of people were and thus was used as a tool in imperial expansion. Scientism, which promoted an objective view of the world, became the dominant ideology. To spread science, language also had to be spread. READ MORE…

Literature as Homeland: The English-Language Debut of Tezer Özlü

April 21, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Matt Hanson

[Özlü] attempted to make sense of life and death, and to create an individual by way of literature.

The conspicuous absence of Tezer Özlü’s work in the English language is, to many readers of Turkish literature, a huge oversight. With precise, knowing style and modernist sense of bending convention, the lyrically humanistic nature of her prose propelled her reputation as a writer in deep dialogue with the specificities and absences of her place and time. Now, in anticipation of her Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri, soon to be released as Cold Nights of Childhood by UK publisher Serpent’s Tail, Matt Hanson gives us a glimpse at the themes of Özlü’s oeuvre, as well as how the sensitivities of her writing continue to carry through to present day.

In 1980, a Turkish novel appeared under the name Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri (Cold Nights of Childhood), written by one of the country’s most beloved writers. As the text reached the public, Tezer Özlü had just six years left to live, before breast cancer would take her life at the age of forty-three. Even amidst illness, she continued to influence European literature from its fringes as internationalist writers—entering the late twentieth century—continued to adapt modernist expressionism as representative of individual, universal humanism.

Özlü wrote mainly in her mother tongue of Turkish, yet her style, temperament, voice, and life aligned technically and thematically with the earlier German and Italian writers she admired, from the Joycean experimentalism of Italo Svevo to the singular meta-fictions of Franz Kafka; yet, it was the atheistic loneliness of Cesar Pavese who inspired her to end her last book, Yaşamin Ucuna Yolculuk (Journey to the End of Life)—first published in German two years before her untimely death—in the very hotel room where he committed suicide. Along with the aforementioned, her four books, issued by Turkey’s prestigious publishing house Yapi Kredi, include a collection of letters with fellow lifelong comrade in literature Leyla Erbil, and a complete works edition of a plays, prose, and translations prepared by her sister, Sezer Duru.

In the last four decades, Özlü has not faded from the literary landscape of young readers. Between her books, the thirty-five printings of Yaşamin Ucuna Yolculuke are only outmatched by the thirty-eight printings for Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri. She is known, adoringly, as the melancholic princess of Turkey by the youngest generation of readers (such as the editor Dilara Alemdar), and as the wild child of Turkish literature by experts (such as NYU Turkish literature professor Sibel Erol). READ MORE…

The 2021 International Booker Prize Longlist

April 8, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Sarah Moore

As well as being notable for texts that cross geographical borders, the 2021 longlist features works crossing the boundaries of traditional genres

Last week, the judges of the International Booker Prize announced the 2021 longlist. The prestigious prize is always followed with great excitement by critics, writers, and readers of international literature, and is particularly pertinent to us here at Asymptote. This year’s eclectic list features eleven languages from twelve countries. While we await the announcement of the six-book shortlist on April 22, let this be your guide through the thirteen books on the longlist.

The announcement of the International Man Booker, which celebrates the finest translated fiction from around the world, is always a pivotal event in the year for those interested in world literature. This year’s judging panel, consisting of Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Aida Edemariam, Neel Mukherjee, Olivette Otele, and George Szirtes, has selected a longlist dominated by newcomers and focusing above all on migration.

A welcome inclusion on the 2021 longlist, which is (as always) extremely Eurocentric, is the renowned Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi. Written in Gikuyu, this is Ngũgĩ’s first attempt at the epic form and explores the theme of disability through the story of nine sisters journeying to find a magical cure for their youngest sibling, who cannot walk.

Ngũgĩ was previously nominated for the International Booker in 2009 but has made history with this second nomination by becoming the first writer to be nominated for the prize as both author and translator of the same book, and the first nominee writing in an indigenous African language. Given that Ngũgĩ began his writing career in English before resolving to write works in his mother tongue (works for which he was detained by Kenya’s government), this nomination opens the way for much-needed conversations about literature in indigenous languages, as well as about the fascinating practice of self-translation. With the recent controversies surrounding translators of Amanda Gorman’s poetry collection The Hill We Climb, and questions of diversity and visibility of translators, Ngũgĩ’s self-translation adds a new angle to the debate about who gets to translate a text.

Chinese author Can Xue has also been previously nominated for the prize. In 2019, Xue was nominated for Love in the New Millennium, while this year’s nomination is for her first collection of stories, I Live in the Slums (translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping). READ MORE…