Interviews

The Metaphysical Touch of Technology: An Interview with CŌEM

September 5, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

I am convinced that new poetic expressions that have never existed before will be born—and re-introduced to the page someday.

The Tokyo-based CŌEM is a multi-talented collective of poets, writers, and coders who explore the ever-evolving and curious intersection between poetry and technology. In creating immersive experiences and rethinking the potential of words, the group work to advance their writerly craft with feats of digital engineering, operating on the idea that poetry is not only a literary form or a vehicle for expression but a way of engaging with the world as it moves and changes. I spoke with two leaders of CŌEM, the award-winning poet Nagae Yūki and co-founder Jordan A. Y. Smith, our conversation touching on the singular life of the poem, how poetry can be enacted in physical and digital landscapes, and what transpires when minds of discreet intelligences converge.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): CŌEM brings together digital language and poetic language to create projects that aim to immerse readers further into the world of the poem. For you two as poets, what about virtuality entices you? What is particularly seductive or engaging about a poem existing outside of the page?

Nagae Yūki (NY): This addresses a fundamental question of how to determine the essence of poetry. The poetry on the page in the form of écriture can easily be understood as poetry itself—but spoken poetry, with the tongue and the throat and gestures, is a more primeval form than written poetry, as seen with the Iliad and the Odyssey. In fact, I feel that this physicality is key. Over the last ten years, as social media have reached the peak of their prosperity, the digital has largely been criticized as a medium that strips away human physicality; however, today, the latest technology (including the metaverse, which is a sensory technology) allows people to experience leaps in time and space that are possible only in virtual space.

Returning to the first question, what is poetry? Perhaps a metaphysical gaze that overlooks the branching, irreversible movements of time in simultaneity, a miracle of the tongue that freely draws in different places. Isn’t it the poet who makes such connections visible, translating them into something that can be sensed by others? If so, technology as a poetic medium can be considered to have this same power, allowing many people to approach the written word intuitively. Don’t get me wrong—I truly believe in writing, but at the same time, when poets manipulate digital devices and let their bodies and thoughts pass through the metaphysical touch of technology, I am convinced that new poetic expressions that have never existed before will be born—and re-introduced to the page someday. It is my intuition that within these exchanges lies hidden the actual potential for revolutionary changes in the expression of poetry.

Jordan A. Y. Smith (JAYS): Poetry on the page is a great nexus of experiences, but there’s nothing about the medium of paper except its tactility and scent that merits it being the primary locus of poetic form, and the digital “forms” that mimic paper actually sacrifice what’s good about it, remaining faithful to conventions like line shape and length, print-based traditions, and the simulation of book construction that actually deprive the digital of anything that could potentially justify that very sacrifice. There’s a place for poetry in printed forms such as books—I mean, I also edit Tokyo Poetry Journal—so this is not suggesting a replacement of “pages.”

What can be found “in” the poem through the digital is in many ways more akin to the actual poetic experience, which can be synaesthetic, hyperlinked, virtual, disembodied and re-embodied in new ways, spiritually haunting, uncanny, delusional, multilayered, and so on. I’m generally in favor of doing things with poetry—reading it out loud, writing it in my own handwriting, playfully removing parts to highlight, decontextualize, and emphasize them as units.

This sense of play is embodied in Oulipo writers as well, and when I designed and taught a course in digital literature (at UCLA back in 2014), we spent a fair amount of time looking at antecedents of digital literature. Now we have increasingly more versatile tools, so this is just as natural a change as writers switching from quill and ink to ballpoint or mechanical pencil, and from printing press to print-on-demand or e-books.

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Sculpting Words: An Interview with Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles and Paul Filev

August 24, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Carol Khoury

In these conversations with characters, I build imaginary convictions.

In Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles’ startling and tender work of speculative fiction, The Lisbon Syndrome, a comet has demolished the city of Lisbon to nothing, leaving people on the other side of the globe—in Caracas—to reconstitute the erupted world with only a strictly regulated stream of news, an overarching cloak of localized violence, and an unshakable faith in the potentials of storytelling. Translated expertly by Paul Filev, The Lisbon syndrome presents a powerful, telling perspective on the Venezuelan struggle against a repressive regime. In the following interview, Book Club manager Carol Khoury speaks to Sánchez Rugeles and Filev on the unique journey of this text, the learned method of its translation, and the courage and necessity of literature.  

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

Carol Khoury (CK): Eduardo, how was the novel received when it came out in Spanish—in Venezuela and elsewhere?

Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles (ESR): It’s strange—the novel wasn’t published in the usual way because the English translation came out before the Spanish edition. The Spanish edition will come out later this year, in October, with the independent publisher Suburbano.

I began writing the novel in 2019 and finished it in 2020, and I showed it to a few publishers here in Madrid. It was during the middle of the pandemic, things were really intense at the time, and they told me, “Well, we like the book, but we can’t publish it until 2025, or at the earliest in summer 2024 maybe. If we take it on, you’ll have to wait in line.”

And I was very impatient to have this book published, because the novel was very emotional for me, given that the events in the novel mirrored what was actually happening in Venezuela at the time. I can usually be more patient with my work, but I felt a little anxious to get this book out. A friend read the manuscript—a movie director—and he told me, “I want to turn this into a movie. What do you say—do you want to work on a script with me?”

And I said to him, “Yeah, we can write a script and turn it into a movie, but let me publish the novel first.” But with the pandemic going on, the whole process of getting the book published was very slow. I felt a little sad about having to wait so long to find a publisher, so I started talking with the director, Rodrigo Michelangeli, and one day I said to him, “You know what? I’ll self-publish the book with Amazon. Forget the traditional publishing route. Let’s make this happen.” READ MORE…

A New Way of Thinking About Voice: An Interview with Robin Myers, Part III

August 17, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa

When you’re translating, you’re never entirely by yourself in your own head.

This is the third and last installment of my interview to poet and translator Robin Myers. The first part was published on May 11 and the second on July 7.

Alan Mendoza Sosa (AM): I would like to delve a bit deeper into the relation between creative writing and translation. How does being a poet inform your translation practice or the other way around?

Robin Myers (RM): Poetry led me into translation, and I started translating only poetry, so what feels absolutely shared by my experiences of both writing poetry and translating anything is this compulsive contact with language as a material thing, as something that you get to experiment with. It happens of course in writing prose, too, but I think there’s something especially tactile about poetry, and this sense that it always could’ve been otherwise. There’s just a kind of intoxication I’ve felt with poetry that has made me think about translation as a site for looking for freedom within constraints. I do think there’s something different about writing poetry and translating it, however, at least for me. When you’re translating, you’re never entirely by yourself in your own head. I mean, in writing you’re not either, really. As we’ve been talking about, there’s always this sense of where you come from and who you’re seeking with. But with translating you’re writing toward something and with something that’s already concretely there. When I start writing poetry again after a long time of mostly just translating, there’s a renewed sense of me making something up out of nothing, which is both thrilling and scary.

AM: And there’s also not a harsh division between writing creatively and translating. In a way, when you write, you are translating a continuous flow of language or ideas into the more precise form of a poem on the page. So we can even consider writing a self translation.

RM: Yes, and I love how Kate Briggs talks about that in This Little Art. It’s easy to overgeneralize this stuff—Briggs says something like, “Say it too fast and it all goes down the trap door.” Like, okay, all writing is translating, we can agree on that, but how do we keep from getting lost in the abstraction? How else can we get at the differences or the similarities between the two practices?

I’ll say that translating has also helped me get through my fallow periods as a poet in a really gratifying way. I am a fairly off-and-on poetry writer. I have periods of writing a lot followed by long, long periods when I don’t write at all. And that used to fill me with despair. Translation keeps me company during those times in a way that lets me know that I’m engaged with language and that I’m collecting things and learning.

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Translating Multilingualism: An Interview with Ros Schwartz

July 21, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Sheela Mahadevan

Translation is the deepest form of reading.

Ros Schwartz is an award-winning British translator who has translated over one hundred works of French fiction and non-fiction into English, with a strong emphasis on authors including Dominique Eddé, Aziz Chouaki, and Tahar Ben Jelloun. Her most recent translations are Swiss-Cameroonian author Max Lobe’s A Long Way from Douala (Hope Road, 2021) and Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside (HopeRoad, 2022), and she is part of the team re-translating the works of Georges Simenon for Penguin Classics. Ros was made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009.

Earlier this year, I had the honour of interviewing Ros Schwartz to find out about her approaches to literary translation, and in particular, about the art and complexities of translating multilingualism. Owing to histories of colonisation and migration, literatures are increasingly hybrid and multilingual. A work composed in “French” may bear explicit or implicit traces, tones, and vocabularies of other languages, and processes of translation may be embedded within the source text itself. Such linguistic entanglements in source texts challenge the very boundaries of languages and pose distinct challenges for the literary translator. In this interview, Ros Schwartz shares her own experiences about translating multilingualism in creative and innovative ways.

Sheela Mahadevan (SM): Ros, you come from a multilingual background, and you have translated several multilingual works which depict experiences of exile and migration. You also have a Jewish ancestry and have translated a work which relates to this theme, entitled Traduire comme Transhumer (Translation as Transhumance) by Mireille Gansel (Les Fugitives (UK) and The Feminist Press (USA), 2017). How does your own background and experience of migration and multilingualism intersect with your career as a translator, and how does Gansel’s work influence your thinking about translation?

Ros Schwartz (RS): My background has some similarities with that of Mireille Gansel. I too am Jewish—second generation—and my grandparents spoke only Yiddish, so although different from Gansel’s experience, I share that multilingual background common to families descended from exiles. Gansel interweaves her memoir with reflections on the art of translation, constantly interrogating and refining her practice. Her ethos chimes with mine and her approach to translation helped me better articulate my own; by translating the book and being inhabited by it for many months, I was able to engage with Gansel’s ideas in a way beyond that of a casual reader.

SM: You have translated numerous multilingual literatures into English, including the Lebanese Francophone novel Cerf-volant (Kite) by Dominique Eddé (Seagull Books, 2003). The novel depicts multilingual experiences; sometimes the characters speak in French, sometimes they speak in Arabic, and sometimes they translate between the two. The work is also about multilingual writing and casts light on the ways in which another language can haunt the primary literary language. Could you tell us more about your experience of translating this hybrid work? To what extent is it necessary to collaborate with native speakers of the additional language or the author in the translation process?

RS: I worked very closely with the author. We went over the translation together literally line by line, in person, closeted in her Paris apartment. I had her read passages out loud to help me capture the intonations and rhythms. I would never have attempted a translation like this had I not been able to collaborate with the author.

The novel has a different sensibility, and its non-linear narrative took me out of my comfort zone. The reader is plunged straight in and the narrative is a mosaic, which the reader gradually has to piece together. Eddé’s writing functions like an Impressionist painting, with deft brushstrokes that evoke characters, places, and atmospheres. It has disconcerting metaphors: “. . . une bouche à mi-chemin du cœur et de l’oiseau.” Literally: “a mouth half-way between a heart and a bird.” You don’t question it in French, partly because of the music of the language. For the English, I made it slightly more explicit: “a mouth that was shaped like a heart or a bird.” READ MORE…

“Vulnerable” Languages: An Interview with Jim Dingley and Petra Reid

July 20, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Daljinder Johal

The journey of working on this text has led me to look at the whole field of literary translation much more widely than I ever had before.

The translators of Alindarka’s Children, our May Book Club selection, had good reason to think of the text as an enormous challenge. Alherd Bacharevič’s subversive take on Hansel and Gretel is written in a musical tangle of two languages: Russian and Belarusian, addressing the conflict of Belarus’ languages in a powerful tale of intimidation, suppression, and  postcolonial linguistics. Now released in a brilliant medley of English and Scots, the Anglophone edition adds new dynamism to the politics and cultures at work, immersing the reader in the complexities of what language tells and what it holds back. In the following transcription of a live interview, translators Jim Dingley and Petra Reid discuss their process, the pitfalls of classifying a language as “vulnerable”, and the creative potentials of dissonance.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Daljinder Johal (DJ): What were your first impressions of Alindarka’s Children? And what did you consider when making your respective decisions to work on its translation? 

Jim Dingley (JD): Alindarka’s Children was published in 2014, I first read it in 2015, and my immediate reaction was: how on earth could anybody even begin to translate this? Then, when I was in Edinburgh with Petra, another Belarusian author began talking about this book with great enthusiasm. It suddenly occurred to me then that there is much being said about Scots being a language—distinct from English—and therefore a source of real national identity. With Scotland’s movement towards independence, it seemed to me that we could try to do something by contrasting English with Scots. I found working with Petra very rewarding as well, because she had an innate feeling for what we were trying to do, putting Scots up against “standard” English.

I think this adds a whole new dimension to the book, which is what any translator does when the process is not purely technical. You’re trying to get the sense of something. When you’re translating a book written in two languages, you can only get to the dynamic between them by introducing some realia from a country where another two languages are spoken. That’s why, in Alindarka’s Children, you feel as though you’re both in Scotland and Belarus at times.

Actually, I hope people experience some confusion with this book. It sounds very strange to say, but I think a lot of language is about dissimulation, confusion, leaving the reader to work it out at every stage.

Petra Reid (PR): Jim and I had very different experiences, because he speaks and writes Belarusian, while I have no knowledge of that language. So when I was reading the novel, I was reading Jim’s translation—that was the first time I’d heard of the novel or the author. In a way, I was reading it through Jim’s filter, and in that, it gained the context of a relationship between the English and the Belarusian.

I also came to it as a third party, as a Scot who doesn’t speak Scots—I was frank with everybody from the beginning, I warned them! I’ve got a strong accent, but I don’t speak Scots. The translation, and my work on it, is a personal explanation of my attitude towards Scots.

DJ: Could you expand on how that exploration went and what you got from it?

PR: What I like to do when I’m reading a translation is to try and imagine how the original sounds in my head, so even if you don’t have the exact vocabulary, you can approach the rhythm of it, and different nuances become available.

That’s what I found interesting about Jim’s translation; I was beginning to feel the Belarusian nuances through Jim. It was a two-way mirror, because Jim and I have our own dynamics in terms of how we speak English, and Jim has his own dynamic in terms of how he speaks Belarusian. It was a multidisciplinary, 3-D process, holding all these nuances in your head and trying to find a way to express that on the page. READ MORE…

Death, Hope, and Humor: David Unger on Translating Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Mr. President

July 14, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

Translation is often an act of revelation—of revealing what is hidden.

In 1946, Nobel Prize laureate and Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias published his magnum opus, El señor presidente, which would become one of the boldest and most inventive works of Latin American literature, an important predecessor for literary giants including Gabriel García Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, and Roberto Bolaño. However, the text remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. In this intimate and revelatory interview, Editor-at-Large José Garcia Escobar speaks with Guatemalan American author and translator David Unger on the complexities of translating Asturias’s great work into English, balancing authenticity and readability, and its political and artistic legacy.

In 2015, I was living in New York and often got together with the Guatemalan-American writer David Unger. A year prior, he had won the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize (Guatemala’s highest literary honor), and his novel The Mastermind (Akashic Books) had just come out.

We met every other month, more or less.

We would go to Home Sweet Harlem, on the corner of Amsterdam and 136th, or Chinelos, a Mexican restaurant just around the corner, and talk about books, translation, and life.

He told me he was flattered that Cristina García had agreed to blurb The Mastermind. He told me of the time he met and had a strong disagreement with Nicanor Parra. When Parra died in 2018, David wrote a piece for The Paris Review. He told me to go see Andrés Neuman at McNally Jackson and read more of his work. Then one day, as we walked back to his office at City College, he said, “I’m translating El señor presidente.”

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Reckoning With the Idea of the Canon: An Interview with Robin Myers, Part II

July 7, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa

The tradition becomes this tidal flow that is always acting on us . . .

In the second part of a three-part series, Editor-at-Large Alan Mendoza Sosa continues his conversation with poet and translator Robin Myers. In this installment, they continue their discussion on multiplicity in translation, touching on canons in Spanish literature, conceptual writing, and collaboration. Read part one of the interview here.

Alan Mendoza Sosa (AM): Have you felt that commercial interests interfere with what gets published and translated?

Robin Myers (RM): Always, although I find it hard to express exactly how, beyond my own intuitions and observations, you know? Definitely. I sense that certain authors become “hot” authors, and so other writers will get grouped together or hyped in response to them or in comparison to them. And of course authors in translation are very susceptible to being treated as automatically “representing” the country or even the region they come from, which is hugely problematic. Among many publishers there is a real interest in contemporary Latin American fiction writ large, which is obviously never a balanced playing field. With literature translated from Spanish to English, there are lots and lots of books being translated from Argentina, Chile, quite a few books from Mexico, and far fewer from other places. You know, very unequal.

AM: Usually very little, next to nothing from Central America, I would imagine.

RM: Totally, next to nothing. Yeah, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, I’d say.

AM: Sometimes Peru, maybe? Or not even.

RM: Yeah, Peru a little more recently. I’m thinking of Katya Aduai, Gabriela Wiener. But anyway, my hope is that as interest in translation as a field continues to grow, and with increasing advocacy for translators as artists, the range and multiplicity of authors who get translated will also keep growing. I think all of that is on the rise, which is thrilling.

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Balancing Familiarity and Strangeness: Rebekah Curry on Translating Euripides

July 6, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Michal Zechariah

Making a poem or remaking a poem into new language—it’s all part of the same whole.

Euripides’ Alkestis, written in the fifth century BCE, tells the story of a queen who volunteers to die instead of her king and husband. Our Spring 2022 issue features an excerpt from the play in Rebekah Curry’s new translation—a delightfully contemporary rendition of this Ancient Greek work based on a collaboration between Curry and classics scholar Stanley Lombardo. In our conversation, Curry—an award-winning translator of old and current languages—reflects on humor in Euripides’ disturbing play, the appeal of ancient stories, and the different shapes collaborative translation can take.

Michal Zechariah (MZ): A new translation of an ancient text is always an exciting event—it seems to go beyond the text at hand and suggest a new relationship with the past, as in Emily Wilson’s recent translation of Homer’s Odyssey. How did you first encounter Alkestis, and what drew you to translate it? 

Rebekah Curry (RC): If memory serves, I first read Alkestis (in translation) as a sophomore classics major at the University of Kansas, while taking a “Greek Lit and Civ” class. Admittedly, I don’t believe I gave any more thought to it at that time than I did to the other texts I read for the class. Then, a few years ago, I was in a conversation with Stanley Lombardo, whose student I’d been at KU, and he proposed a collaboration. He’d spent some time on a translation of Alkestis that he wanted to take in a different direction, and his idea was for us to work on (and, we hoped, publish) it together.

MZ: I noticed you chose to title your translation Alkestis rather than the better-known anglicized Alcestis, a choice that reminds me of Willis Barnstone’s return to original name forms in his Restored New Testament. What made you choose to use the Greek forms of Alkestis’ and other characters’ names? Is this choice part of a wider approach you took to your translation?

RC: My idea in using Greek forms of the names rather than the Latinized/anglicized forms (“Apollon” rather than “Apollo,” “Herakles” rather than “Hercules”) was to create a sort of productive estrangement. The Greek names defamiliarize the story somewhat, distancing it from the accumulated versions and adaptations of classical mythology in English. At the same time as the translation aims at bringing Alkestis into the twenty-first century, the names are a reminder that this narrative is happening in a remote time and place. I should say, however, that this isn’t an approach that I would push everyone translating from Ancient Greek to take—it just depends on what kind of effect you’re trying to create.

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Finding Salvation: An Interview with Najwa Barakat

June 27, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Reem Joudi

I was among the first authors to tackle the theme of cruelty and violence, long before the Arab world witnessed its various collapses.

In turns spellbinding and labyrinthine, psychological and philosophical, tragic and bright, Najwa Barakat’s Mister N marks the triumphant return of the Lebanese author to writing. Through the story of an aging author who wanders the streets in shifting boundaries and realms, Barakat paints a painful, fearless portrait of contemporary Beirut. We were honored to present this powerful novel as our Book Club selection for May, and in the following interview, Reem Joudi speaks with Barakat about her fifteen-year hiatus, the ghosts and pariahs of Lebanon, and the “beautiful dream” of Beirut.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

Reem Joudi (RJ): You wrote Mister N following a fifteen-year break from writing. Could you describe your journey back, and why you chose to return with the story of Mister N?

Najwa Barakat (NB): I cannot say that I was completely cut off from writing during these fifteen years, but my literary activity was suspended for a short while of my own volition—and not because I was struggling with writer’s block. I had reached a certain juncture in my narrative journey and in my writings, which had materialized in the publication of three novels (The Bus, Oh Salaam!, and The Secret Language). These works addressed themes of violence, cruelty, and the ordinary human being’s capacity to commit evil in specific moments or contexts. I wanted to take a “break” to think about my next steps, what the title of my forthcoming literary chapter should be, as well as to focus on my permanent writing workshop, which is dedicated to helping young Arab writers develop their storytelling projects. Thanks to the workshop, twenty-three novels have been published thus far by renowned Arab publishing houses, and some of these works have received distinguished literary awards.

To tell you the truth, I felt an aversion to what was being published, consumed, and promoted as literary works of a high caliber—works which, in reality, are lacking the minimum standards for quality writing. Add to that the horrific changes that my home country, Lebanon, was experiencing, as well as the many wars, tragedies, and revolutions that countries of the Arab region were facing, all of it produced and propagated a dreadful cosmic chaos. Together, these factors presented silence as the best option during turbulent times: choosing silence, observing [what is around me], and attempting to find the meaning and purpose of literature amid all this destruction. Mister N encapsulates this experience in all its dimensions. It describes the labor of writing and the difficulty of belonging to a reality that resembles quicksand, capable of swallowing you whole at any moment. The novel also mends my relationship with Beirut, a city I returned to in 2010 following a long absence in Paris. Since then, I’ve witnessed the transformations and defeats that foreshadowed the city’s current state of collapse and decay.

RJ: There are many ghosts that haunt Mister N’s memory—Luqman, the former warlord and protagonist from one of your earlier novels Oh Salaam!; his mother and father. . . What do these multiple, multifaceted ghosts signify, and which of them do you think has the strongest pull on Mister N’s mind and spirit?

NB: Mister N is a writer with a heavy past and a troubled present. He is battling the ghosts of his childhood and the ghosts of his current tragic reality, where parts of Beirut—namely the neighborhoods he stumbles upon and begins exploring by chance—have transformed into the gutters of society. Luqman’s ghost, as you mentioned, is a person who committed atrocities during the Lebanese civil war; Oh Salaam! takes places in Beirut, in the wake of the war and at the beginning of the so-called transition to peace, and Luqman is killed by his friend’s mother after she discovers the horrors that both men committed against innocent lives. The same Luqman will reappear twenty years after the events of Oh Salaam!, very much alive and running an Internet cafe in one of Beirut’s working-class neighborhoods. A manhunt thereby ensues between him and Mister N, who, while he fears Luqman and seeks to escape him, is also drawn to him by a mysterious and obscure thread.

All this is to say that the people who committed the horrors of war are not dead, but living peacefully among us, a situation that Mister N—a writer who treads the thin line separating reality from fiction and truth from illusion—can neither tolerate nor comprehend. For Mister N, reality turned out to be more tragic than he could have ever imagined—harsher, darker, and more cruel. What could literature do in circumstances such as these, and where does a writer, worn down and defeated by reality, find their salvation? In fact, Mister N’s suffering captures my own struggle vis-à-vis all that was unfolding around me. I was among the first authors to tackle the theme of cruelty and violence [in my novels], long before the Arab world witnessed its various collapses. I intuited them, so to speak, then was terrified to face a reality which shook me to the core—one that heralded even harsher, darker, and more violent truths.  READ MORE…

A Descriptive Novel of Mysteries: Luke Leafgren on Translating Najwa Barakat’s Mister N

June 23, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Carol Khoury

It’s less about changing or influencing the English language, and more about what can be said in language at all.

In silhouettes, clouds, mist, and partially veiled names, this novel by Najwa Barakat speaks of the underbelly of Beirut through a cloud-shrouded figure dwelled by demons of his own writings. As our Book Club selection for May, Mister N is a story of what writing can and cannot do to us, how it resonates through individuals and communities, moving through borders both physical and psychological.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

Carol Khoury (CK): Since 2014, you have translated six ‎Arabic novels into English, three of which are by Muhsin al-Ramli, and two by Najwa ‎Barakat (the sixth by Shahad al-Rawi). Barakat is Lebanese, while al-Ramli and al-Rawi ‎are Iraqi. One obvious theme between these writers is their coming of age during various wartimes, and furthermore, all of the novels are to an extent shadowed ‎by, if not immersed in, themes relating to war.‎ How do you choose the novels you want to translate?‎

Luke Leafgren (LL): The first few novels that I translated were all very random—things that came my way. I started translating when I was about thirty, about twelve years ago; I was finishing my dissertation, and I needed something more enjoyable to do—some kind of creative outlet. When I expressed an interest in translation, one of my Arabic teachers at Harvard, Khaled al-Masri said, said: “I’ve got a friend, Muhsin al-Ramli, looking for a translator for his second book. If you like it, I can introduce you.” I read it, and, you know, I could hear how it might sound in English, and I felt like I related in some ways to the protagonist. That was how I translated my first novel. After that, Khaled introduced me to Najwa.

It’s only been after receiving The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize that I’ve been able to think more about projects that I would choose and which directions to go. Thinking about novels that I would choose, I feel a certain loyalty to authors I’ve translated already; I feel gratitude to them, and I believe in them, so I could imagine translating more novels by writers I have worked with in the past.

CK: Was Najwa Barakat involved directly in the process of translating this book?

LL: We have an email connection, so she was ‘involved’ in the sense that I could send her questions. As I translate, I make a very quick rough draft, highlighting in the Arabic text passages or words that I want to come back and focus on. Then I make lists of queries, and those lists I often prioritise, because I can’t ask everything; I’ll send them my top questions, and then that might resolve some other questions, then if necessary, I’ll come back with maybe another set. Najwa was very encouraging and supportive, but I think she had a certain amount of trust in my translation as well.

CK: Your BA degree is in English and theology, and in Mister N., Barakat employs several religious symbols, mainly from Christianity, but also Islam. What is your take on the numerous biblical connections in the text—Lazarus, in particular? It seems to me that the real function of this tale within Mister N. is not the awakening after death (resurrection), but rather Lazarus’ disapproval of it.  

LL: For my whole life I’ve been taken by the power of stories, and I think one aspect I especially appreciated was the way literature and religion interact—how religious ideas can shape literature or how texts can be used to communicate questions or beliefs. And that attracts me to this novel as well. I was very interested in the figure of Lazarus and how that figure is being used, and I think you’re right—it’s not so much about the resurrection. It’s asking a question I hadn’t come across in other contexts: of whether or not Lazarus really wanted it, of his impression after being called back to this world, his reactions and accounts. Mister N somehow sees this tale as a symbol, a representation of himself. The dirt in Lazarus’ mouth is being compared to the way words are getting tangled in Mister N.’s mouth, as a symbol for madness or writer’s block. The utility of that religious imagery is an excellent example of how a writer can tap into biblical narrative power and drama, while also kind of subverting it and challenging it. It’s a very effective technique. READ MORE…

Refuting Domination: Margaree Little on Translating Osip Mandelstam

June 22, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Michal Zechariah

I found particularly disturbing the tendency to play up Mandelstam’s death in the translations, sometimes changing the poems radically to do so.

Featured in the current Spring 2022 issue, Osip Mandelstam’s “Lines on an Unknown Soldier” is a nightmarish yet poignant reflection on war. Margaree Little’s new translation aims to bring out previously overlooked aspects of Mandelstam’s poetry by practicing devoted attention to his original text and to its historical and personal contexts. In her discussion of Mandelstam, Little glides between erudition and intimacy with his works. Our correspondence led to surprising discoveries like the everyday object Mandelstam despised, serious consideration of the political significance of translating Mandelstam today, and renewed appreciation for how literary insight can shape translation.

Michal Zechariah (MZ): Before translating Osip Mandelstam’s poem this spring, you published another translation of his work in American Poetry Review. How did you first encounter Mandelstam’s poetry, and what drew you to translate it? What usually guides your choice when you decide to take on a translation project?

Margaree Little (ML): About ten years ago, around the time I was in graduate school, I first encountered Mandelstam’s work in the Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin translations. I was drawn to the poems, but remember feeling that I was missing something, as though there was a screen separating me from the poems.

In 2016, I began to translate [Marina] Tsvetaeva’s work, focusing increasingly on her political poems that have largely been neglected in English-language translation. This work drew me further into that world, that moment. Then, two years later, my partner and I were visiting our friend, the poet and translator Eleanor Wilner, in Philadelphia. Eleanor has talked about the influence of Mandelstam on her own work and gave me her copy of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s extraordinary first memoir, Hope Against Hope. The book describes the last four years before Mandelstam’s second arrest and death, but more than that, it offers a window into the worldview that grounded his poetry and his entire life.

After reading this book, I went back to his poems and started to translate them to get closer to the original work. I found the originals so rich in music, in layers of meaning and feeling, and so varied in tone, including sharp awareness and wit.

I also began to realize the degree to which Brown and Merwin, as well as other dominant English-language translators, have altered the poems. These changes range from what could be considered more benign (clunky wording or phrasing) to distortions that fundamentally alter the poems’ meaning. I found particularly disturbing the tendency to play up Mandelstam’s death in the translations, sometimes changing the poems radically to do so. This tendency creates a romantic myth of the poet, while erasing crucial parts of his actual work. The gap between the originals and existing versions made me want to continue to translate the poems and honor them on their own terms.

I suppose these are the dual threads that run through my translation work, whether of Tsvetaeva or Mandelstam; a connection to the poems and the deep urgency within them, and a frustration with how they have previously been translated—or ignored, or distorted—in English.

READ MORE…

One for Another: A Conversation on Translation from the Chinese

June 16, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan and Zuo Fei

It seems to me that the world is a better place to live in simply because we translators are eternally making contributions to the Tower of Babel.

In Antena’s “Manifesto for Ultratranslation,” it is stated: “The politics of translation make us ultraskeptical and ultracommitted.” As such, the discourse and dialectics surrounding this artform are in an ever-evolving state of being challenged, argued, and explained. In the following conversation, Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan discusses her work in editing Chinese language translations with fellow translator Zuo Fei, touching on their separate values, priorities, and approaches.

Xiao Yue Shan: Translation is an intensely personal experience—perhaps the most transparent reflection of what occurs when idea is transmuted through the individual mind’s various channels. This is why we, as translators, are continually struck by our work’s mutating forms, its evolving methods, and continue to conversate with such intensity about our own logic; when one speaks of translation, one speaks of a way of seeing the world. When we were editing translations together, you wrote me a letter in response to some edits I sent on a final draft of some poems; in it, you stated that you believe in literal translation, in seeming opposition to my approach of preserving the ineffable by creating anew.

It’s interesting because we are both poets, and I’ve always assumed—presumptuously—that poets are all apart of the same passionate investigation, in which consciousness touches something and brings it to life, shaped in a precise and resolved concentration of words. In translation, there is no transposition of this consciousness, which is a singular encounter between the poet, their knowledge, and all that it reaches and contacts. So, the translator must take the place of the poet, and—with intelligence but without egoism—give the original poem something it can live with.

Essentially, there is a distinction between a poem’s components and its poetics. It seems to be a corrupt exchange should a text be translated word-for-word, when one acknowledges the multiple roles that words play in literature; they do not simply transmit meaning, but also voice, history, and music. Could you tell me why you work from a more literal approach?

Zuo Fei: I prefer literal translation to free translation simply because, in the time of science and technology, people believe translators should strictly follow the original text. By literal translation, I don’t mean word-for-word, which does not work for poetry in many cases; my intention is that we should adhere to the original work as much as we can, and put it into a target language according to our desires. That is to say, if translation is an impossible job, we try to increase the odds of it being possible. READ MORE…

When the Cannons Are Firing: Q&A with Sergey Katran

June 8, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Caterina Domeneghini and Irene Kukota

It’s a constant struggle that I face as an artist: the futility of my efforts and, on the other hand, the wish to speak up, refusing to be silenced

Connections between meaning and visual representation can be puzzling, just like the multiple negotiations that occur between science and art, between natural phenomena and human attempts to grasp, control and even reinvent them through craft. Puzzles of this kind intrigue Sergey Katran. The art critic Vitaly Patsukov has defined the artist as the inventor of intricate “mechanisms” because of the complex ways in which he develops ideas integral to our modern civilization. A former graduate in chemistry and biology, Katran likes to experiment with Science Art and Bio Art in a variety of media, such as installation, sculpture, performance, and video. On the occasion of his most recent exhibition in the UK, currently on display in Wolfson College at the University of Oxford until October 2022, Caterina Domeneghini spoke with the artist and his interpreter, Irene Kukota, about the war in Ukraine, Katran’s country of origin. Their conversation also focused on his current situation, the stance of artists in times of war, and the ways in which his work has captured the growing tensions between two countries he has lived in and loved over the past twenty years.

Sergey, let’s start from where you are right now and what you are doing at this critical moment in our history.

I am currently in Moscow. For forty days I couldn’t do anything, the whole situation came as an overwhelming blow. What is happening to me is precisely what you have been describing, almost a split identity . . . I mean, that’s exactly how I feel, split. I’m in this slightly schizophrenic situation where my heart and all these worries that I experience are in Ukraine and at the same time I physically remain in Russia. And this situation continues, because for various reasons it has to remain like this.

 I decided to resume my artistic work after a while, even though I might not be feeling entirely up to it. Many artists are leaving the country. I decided I am not going to leave for now. Instead, I am planning to make an artistic project at an independent art platform, dedicated to the current situation. Rather than fearing it, I want to still be able to express what I feel, though I cannot tell you much more for now.

You said that many Russian artists are leaving the country. Many artists, too, have withdrawn their participation from important international events, like the Venice Biennale. Does art still have reasons to exist in times like this?

You know, when the whole thing started, I was talking to some good artists, quite well known, and many of them were expressing different sentiments, emotions, thoughts. Some of them were saying, “What have we done wrong? How could we not prevent this from happening?” A couple of them were saying they didn’t want to be artists anymore.

It’s the usual thing, as clichéd as it may sound: art works with rather fine substances or fine energies, if you like this expression. It works with a certain germination of thought. Do you know the phrase “When the cannons are firing, the Muses are silent?” Art seems irrelevant in situations like this. Artists feel that their voices are not going to be heard, because there are other, more pressing issues of survival on people’s minds. Perhaps art should be using other media in times like these. It might need to be more performative, more poster-like, as it’s closer to action and speaks more directly about the current situation. READ MORE…

Everything is Permitted in Dreams: Corinne Hoex and Caitlin O’Neil on Gentlemen Callers

May 26, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

This book is more about feminine desire than erotic consummation, so it’s not pornographic at all.

Diving without abandon into the realms of sexual fantasy and desire, Corinne Hoex’s Gentlemen Callers is a series of vignettes that follows the erotic as it traverses into the pleasurable, the humorous, and the absurd. As our Book Club selection for the month of April, Laurel Taylor described Hoex’s text as “a truly astonishing outlier.” In the following interview, Taylor speaks to Hoex and her translator, Caitlin O’Neil, about the multi-layered operations of the epigraph, the difficult of translating wordplay and idioms, and writing with joy.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

Laurel Taylor (LT): The construction of Gentlemen Callers was really interesting—can you tell us a little bit about what your inspiration was for the novel?

Corinne Hoex (CH): Each time, it’s the situation—of the dreaming woman—that drives the inspiration. It always begins with the concrete, and from there on it’s a mixture of fantasy and reality; something comes from reality and introduces a rupture, an entry into dreams. Whenever the vignette was too realistic, or didn’t abandon reality through some kind of glitch or unexpected detour, I didn’t keep it.

There were texts with characters who were much too banal—a pizza delivery man, a doctor. . . There wasn’t that sparkle, that possible transformation, so I didn’t continue with those dreams. So even more than inspiration, it was an exercise in the material, in the writing process.

But a lot of the dreams, of course, correspond to anecdotes from my own life. For “The Astrologer,” for example, I had taken some astrology classes, and all of it—the books, the Ephemeris, all of those calculations—I found horrid, boring. I imagined this situation where she [the dreaming woman] is seated across from an astrologer, and this astrologer is trying to seduce her, but he’s tactless, he’s insufferable. He says: “My Mars is on your Venus,” and all that, but he isn’t pleasing her, so she waits and tries to find a way to escape. There have often been times in my life—at school, at conferences—when I would like to escape; in this fantasy, since we’re dealing with the stars, the comet comes in through the window and takes the woman away. It’s not the man who seduces the dreaming woman, but the comet.

Similarly, when the narrator’s with the geographer and he bores her, she sees a beautiful polar bear that’s much more pleasing to her. There are sometimes elements which are not human; everything is permitted in dreams. 

LT: Caitlin, how did you first encounter this text? And what made you want to translate it?

Caitlin O’Neil (CO): This is my debut book-length translation, so it was very much my own choice of what text to pursue. When I started, I got some very good advice, which was: for your first translation, make sure that it is a work that you love wholeheartedly. Because you’re going to be working more closely with this text than you have ever worked with any text before in your life, and you are going to work very hard for this text as well. There may be rejections, and you need to love this text so much that you are willing to work through all the rejections that come your way. When I first started, I was coming from an academic background, so this was really a chance for me to dive deep into the world of Francophone literature, and hunt down a book that wasn’t known in the US yet. READ MORE…