Interviews

Ambrosial Wafts: An Interview with A.J. Naddaff

February 10, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alex Tan

I believe literature is the conduit to the deepest understanding of society.

The first time I corresponded with A.J. Naddaff was after I had read an early issue of his excellent newsletter Untranslatable, devoted to extensive conversations with Arabic-to-English literary translators about their craft. Startled by the sharpness, intimacy, and candour of each interview, I emailed him merely to convey my appreciation for the work he was doing and how fortuitous it seemed to me that he had begun this initiative at the time that I found myself falling in love with the limitless depths of classical Arabic literature. He wrote back, expressing genuine curiosity about my interests, saying: “Connecting with people who share this love makes the world feel a bit smaller and kinder.” That told me all I needed to know about how A.J. makes space for his interlocutors to arrive at such acute insights as “Every poem is a linguistic event which reimagines its entire tradition” (Huda Fakhreddine) and “That joy and pleasure of someone having it on with you is the very pleasure of literature. You know it and yet you still fall for it” (Maurice Pomerantz).

Besides being a gracious person and a master’s student in Arabic Literature at the American University of Beirut, A.J. wears many other hats: he is an award-winning multimedia journalist, translator, and social science researcher. He’s met and reported on people of diverse stripes, from Sufi intellectuals to ISIS extremists, co-translated Hassan Samy Youssef’s Threshold of Pain with Rebecca Joubin and Nick Lobo, and is currently working on a thesis regarding the translation of the pre-Islamic mu’allaqat into English. I was excited to encounter someone with his feelers in so many different worlds and to hear his meditations on the translatability of Arabic literature, the meanings of home, the in-betweenness of negotiating both the journalistic and the literary, and the state of contemporary Lebanese art in the aftermath of trauma.

Alex Tan (AT): In one of the first issues of your Untranslatable newsletter, you quote the brilliant Moroccan literary critic Abdelfattah Kilito, who wrote of how in the classical Arabic literary tradition, the ancients “endeavoured to make their works untranslatable.” What does untranslatability signify in classical Arabic literature? Why did you decide to name your newsletter after a quality that appears to defy the possibility of translation?

A.J. Naddaff (AJN): In my opinion, and this is up for debate, the idea of untranslatability is the wrong framing for understanding tensions that exist when translating Arabic. Alexander Key has proposed that the idea of untranslatability is a modern idea—that the ancients thought mental content (maʿnā) was always transferable between languages, from Persian to Arabic. So untranslatability was birthed out of early modern European notions, and we should push ourselves—as many translators are doing—to reimagine limits when translating Arabic into English.

Shawkat Toorawa takes it even further and believes that it’s possible to translate something sublime, like the Qur’an, into another language and to still convey the cadence, movement, and the beauty of the original, which I’m totally on board with.

AT: Most of the scholars you’ve chosen to interview so far are translators of pre-modern Arabic literature and contributors to the NYU Library of Arabic Literature series. I’d like to ask about your thoughts on the relationship between the pre-modern and the modern in Arabic writing. You work on the Mu’allaqat (hanging odes), but you’re also interested in contemporary Levantine literary production. How do you position yourself between these two worlds? Does your knowledge of pre-modern genres and forms haunt your approach to the modern?

AJN: Coming into my master’s at the American University of Beirut, I carried this notion that bifurcated “old” or classical Arabic literature from “modern.” I remember distinctly telling my teacher Bilal Orfali that I was excited to read old Arabic literature and he politely cut me off and encouraged me to think of literature more as a continuum. I think this is probably how we should think of literature in all traditions, but especially in Arabic.

So now, I position one foot in each world with no problem. I’m not haunted by my knowledge of pre-modern genres and forms besides by how little I know. Salim Barakat, one of the most celebrated modern Arabic authors, claims he only reads pre-modern works. Rachid el Daif’s novels are full of references to “pre-modern” literature: One Thousand and One Nights, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyei, the Kitab al-Aghani, al-Jahiz, Majnun and Layla, and Pre-Islamic (Jahili) poetry all make appearances. Mahmoud Darwish has a famous poem where he draws on elements from the sixth century poet-king Imru’ al-Qays’s final trip to Constantinople to allegorically critique the Oslo Accords. As T.S. Eliot said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did. Precisely, and they are that which we know.”

READ MORE…

Earthquakes and Opium: Mariam Rahmani on Translating In Case of Emergency

January 27, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

[To translate this text] was a decision based in some idea of community, as an avid reader and lover of literature.

In Case of Emergency, our Book Club selection for December, is a novel that does not stand still. Led by the frenetic pace of its narrator, Shadi, it journeys across disaster-ridden Tehran in an unrelenting, electric surge. Mahsa Mohebali’s prose, gritted in satire, unwaveringly paints a linguistic celebration of Iranian vernacular, as well as a transgressive portrait of feminine anti-heroism. For the arrival of this world in English, we have to thank the brilliant work of Mariam Rahmani, to whom Assistant Editor Lindsay Semel spoke with in live dialogue, discussing the translation of humour, the transgression of Shadi, and the many voices that live inside a single individual. 

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.   

Lindsay Semel (LS): In choosing to translate this title, you’ve talked about some of your motives being political, and about how radical of a character Shadi is. Now that the book is out of your hands and into the world, you’re receiving a lot of media attention regarding that thread of the book. Now that the conversation has become public, how do you feel about the politicization of the text and the discourse around it?

Mariam Rahmani (MR): In Case of Emergency is a political novel, so in that sense, the reception hasn’t politicized it. However, I really believe that [the political] is only one level on which the novel is operating in its original context—another level being that of craft. From what I have seen of the conversation that has ensued since the novel’s publication, however, I think it’s been pretty well understood and well interpreted; it hasn’t struck me as moving in any wrong direction.

I think the novel speaks substantially to politics that really resonate with contemporary readers outside of Iran—particularly regarding gender and sexual issues. They perhaps figure more quietly here than we might expect in a contemporary Anglophone novel, but are quite present and resonant in certain ways. All of that is familiar in one sense, but nevertheless it establishes the presence of a contributing voice, intersecting in an ongoing conversation readers are already having outside of translated literature.

LS: Is Shadi’s subversiveness the main thing that you want readers to engage with?

MR: As a translator, I don’t think that it’s my place to tell people how to relate to the text or how to relate to Shadi; my goal is to present what I think is a faithful rendition of the landscape that the novel presents in Farsi. Shadi speaks for herself, and various readers will relate to her in different ways. Maybe some readers will connect with the crassness or jocularity of the voice. Other readers might be more attuned to her crossdressing or the flirtations she has throughout the novel. Or they could identify with the general dissatisfaction Shadi has with the world around her, complicated by the respectability politics she encounters throughout the text, whether at home with her family or [on the street]. All these elements are there, and the world is full enough that different readers will connect to different aspects of her character, as well as to the critique she is waging. READ MORE…

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

January 26, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translating Past Into Future: Joshua Lee Solomon and Megumi Tada on Dialect Storytelling in Northeastern Japan

January 5, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Mary Hillis

No matter how different the languages are, there are similar emotions.

In their work introducing the rich tradition of oral storytelling in the Tsugaru dialect, Joshua Lee Solomon and Megumi Tada of Hirosaki University are moving beyond traditional geographic and linguistic boundaries. Having translated the unique folklore of northeastern Japan from its local vernacular into English, they’ve also facilitated a workshop combining English language education and studies of the region. In the workshop, students learned to perform the tales under the guidance of master storytellers from the preservation society Wa no mukashi-ko, and eventually performed in English alongside the storytellers performing in dialect. We discussed, via Zoom, the interrelated areas of translation, cultural preservation, and language education. Listening to their retellings of favorite folktales, I experienced firsthand how the emotions of storytelling—nostalgia, laughter, heartache—transcend space and time.

Mary Hillis (MH): Could you give some background information about the local Japanese dialect in Tsugaru?

Joshua Lee Solomon (JS): There is a lingering perception that the Tsugaru dialect is used by uneducated or somehow uncivilized people, and this is connected to a long history of prejudice against the poorer regions in northeastern Japan. The Tsugaru region was historically isolated for a very long time by mountains and its relative distance from the political and economic centers of the country, so it’s a repository of very old Japanese words.

One of my favorite examples of this is the word in the Tsugaru dialect of “udade.” Depending on the age of the person you’re talking to, they might say this word only means something really bad or uncomfortable, whereas young people are more likely to use it meaning cool and good—the same way you use “yabai” in contemporary standard Japanese (like certain expletives in English used in either positive or negative connotations). But actually, I think this word comes from the Manyoshu, which is an ancient collection of poetry. In the text, there’s the word “utate” and that word is an intensifier—meaning “extreme” or “very much.” In this way, there are older Japanese words that are kept in the current language.

READ MORE…

Motion and Emotion: Curtis Bauer on Home Reading Service

December 23, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

As a poet, I need to hear how words sound to my ear, but also how they feel in my mouth.

Our November book club selection, Franco Morábito’s award-winning Home Reading Service, is a fast-paced tour de force rife with twists and turns. It seems fitting, then, that its discussion should touch upon various forms of change and movement. In the following abridged interview, Editor-at-Large Josefina Massot and translator Curtis Bauer talk about the possible shifts within an author’s oeuvre, the back-and-forths between translation drafts, the significance of a character’s subtle motions, travel’s impact on a poet’s work, and movement as great poetry’s defining trait—understood, among other things, as its ability to move us.

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.

Josefina Massot (JM): I read somewhere that you discovered Morábito’s work through El idioma materno (2014), a collection of short pieces that he originally wrote for Argentine newspaper Clarín. You said you found it different from anything you’d encountered before; that it instantly struck you as something you wanted to engage with. What was your first reaction to El lector a domicilio? Did it seem to follow some kind of line relative to Morábito’s prior work, or was it fundamentally different?

Curtis Bauer (CB): It’s a great question—thinking about the movement an author can have across different kinds of work. I immediately loved El lector a domicilio, and I found it very “Morábito-like” in that I didn’t know what to expect but when it happened, it somehow made sense. What I love about his work, whether it’s the short prose pieces or stories or this novel, is that (and I believe you wrote about this in your review) the characters are just average, run-of-the-mill people that don’t seem to have such interesting lives—but of course they do. Morábito finds that aspect to them, or rather, he exposes it; he shows us that we’re surrounded by interesting things taking place all the time.

JM: I think that’s a good point, and for me, it’s one of the most appealing aspects of the book; the other is that it’s very much centered around poetry—there’s Fraire’s poem (which you did a stunning job of translating), a very whimsical piece by Gianni Rodari, and in between the two, all this varied prose. Given that you’re a poet yourself, and that you’ve translated both genres before, what was it like dealing with the two within the scope of a single work? Did you find that you shifted from one headspace to the other? Or was the translation process overarchingly similar?

CB: I wish! The Fraire poem seemed to change throughout the book, because it appears in different sections. I gave myself this framework or “rule” where I couldn’t go back and look at what I had translated previously, so I just tried to translate from memory as I was moving through the drafts. With each draft, it would change, and when I’d go back and look at the beginning of the book, I’d question my choices.

I started out translating poetry, and I still do, but it was the hardest part about translating this book. It does indeed require a different headspace for me, a different pace or breath, although I also recognize some similarities in how I translate the prose: I’m listening to the rhythm of the sentence, and I think about repetitions of sounds and other issues that a poet naturally takes into account. At any rate, yes, the Fraire poem was the most difficult part overall; I was making little tweaks to it up until the last edit, and I’m really thankful to my editor at Other Press for allowing me to do that.

As for the Rodari, it’s actually different in the Spanish original. I think I may have translated it directly from the Italian, because Morábito truncates it in the Spanish. In the novel, Eduardo talks about certain parts of the poem, certain rhymes, with the Vigil children; he has them moving their feet to the rhythm, and I didn’t think it was enough to have these seemingly deaf kids reacting to just a few fragments. Initially I was focusing only on preserving the poem’s meter, but my partner is a linguist and insisted that I do the end rhyme as well. So even though it’s more playful than the Fraire poem, it was equally as difficult to translate.

READ MORE…

Thoroughly Mainstream or Decidedly Alternative: An Interview with František Malík

December 16, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Sherwood

The arts are indispensable as a way of sensitizing people, contributing to equality, pointing out what is truly important, and setting priorities.

František Malík is an extremely busy man. Just over the past few months, he has organized several book festivals; the Martinus Literature Tent at Slovakia’s largest music festival, Pohoda; and several episodes of the literature review podcast, LQ (Literárny kvocient)—to name just a few. Editor-at-Large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood has managed to catch him in a rare moment of respite, and in the following interview, they discuss various facets of arts and literature in Slovakia today.

Julia Sherwood (JS): For a country of five million, Slovakia has a quite an astonishing number of literary festivals taking place throughout the year. You have been associated with several of them, most notably the BRaK Literature Festival. How did this festival start, and what makes it different from all the others? 

František Malík (FM): Eight years ago, when we started BRaK, the Slovak literary scene was far less diversified than it is today. While it is true that we now have more literary festivals than we used to, I wouldn’t go as far as to claim that it’s a disproportionate amount for a country of five million. Not long ago, I visited Iceland with a group of Slovak writers; Iceland’s population is less than one-tenth the size of Slovakia’s, and yet its cultural and literature policies are much more advanced and the arts receive far more funding. They also have quite a few literary festivals. This is just one example; a similar trend can be seen in all developed countries.

If I may correct you slightly—what we have emphasized right from the start is that BRaK is a book festival. This is not just a terminological difference, it also has to do with the content. We try to see a book—an aggregate of various artistic approaches—in a holistic way, rather than focusing solely on the literary element. At BRaK, we highlight all the constituent parts of the book—from publishers at the centre of the festival, graphic designers and illustrators who often host workshops, to copyeditors and translators, as well as writers. BRaK has always striven to be international and to showcase the greatest names throughout the book world, not just from Slovakia and the neighbouring countries.

JS: Of the various festivals you have organized, which do you regard as the most successful and which were the most fun?

FM: In the course of eleven years on the scene, I’ve helped to launch several festivals, and I’ve also been fortunate to work with some great teams. I like your question—having fun, and enjoying something in the broadest sense is what really matters, although the COVID-19 pandemic has taken some of the fun out of it.

I enjoy organizing everything I’m involved in. For example, I really enjoyed the first edition of the Slovak/Czech festival Cez prah/Přes práh (Over the Doorstep), an apartment festival now in its fifth year. It’s held in actual homes in the centre of the capital, Bratislava, but also in apartments that have since gained the status of institutions, as there is a growing trend to hold cultural events in flats. In the previous regime, flats played a specific cultural role. They served as educational and cultural institutions, as venues for lectures in philosophy, theatre performances, exhibitions . . . People were driven out of official venues and into their homes. Over the Doorstep aims to commemorate these flats and the role they played.

READ MORE…

A Language Like Life Itself: An Interview with Chus Pato

December 6, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Chus Pato and Erín Moure

Poetry has no future because the time of poetry is always the present.

Chus Pato is one of Europe’s most significant contemporary poets. She lives in Galicia, in Northwest Spain, and writes in Galician, a language that over time has weathered censorship, dictatorship, colonialist policies, and administrative neglect, all aimed at impeding its survival. Here, she converses with Erín Moure, Canadian poet and her translator into English for twenty years, on the occasion of the 2021 Poesiefestival Berlin. They discuss the current situation of Galician, the ways that poetry allows us to think out or rethink our relation to politics, the language of the poem and its difference from the language of consensus, and her current explorations into articulated language and human action in her work-in-progress, Sonora, from which she read in Berlin.

The original Galician conversation and German translation by Burghard Baltrusch are available; the interview has been translated into English by Moure with permission from Poesiefestival Berlin. Chus Pato’s most recent book in English, The Face of the Quartzes, appeared in Erín Moure’s translation from Veliz Books in fall 2021.

Erín Moure (EM): We’ve often discussed your choice to write poetry in Galician and how it is a political decision, a demand for justice for the language of your people—a language prohibited under Francoism—as well as a resistance to the political undermining of Galician and subtle promotion of a single and compulsory language, that of the unitary state of Spain, which we in English call “Spanish.” What I’d like to point out is that on the other side of the Atlantic, for your audience that is not Galician and that reads you in English translation, Galician is not a minor or defective tongue but simply a European language, and you a European poet. How do you see your role as poet, in Galicia, in Spain, in Europe, and now in the city of Berlin, a European capital of poetry as well as meeting point of the west and the east of Europe?

Chus Pato (CP): I think that in Galicia and in general I am well known enough as a poet and am read by the community of those interested in poetry. I know many loyal readers read my books when they are published. This is what I most value. Even so, I still perceive resistance on the part of canonizing institutions that I think has to do with what these institutions see as the difficulties in reading what I write (hermeticism, experimentalism, etc.) and with issues related to my political stance, a position that coincides neither with the right that governs us nor with majority nationalism.

That my work is known at all in the Spanish state is due in great measure to the efforts of my publishers and translators, and my feeling is that they have been remarkably successful. I can’t really gauge how I am perceived elsewhere in Europe. I feel I’m read more on the American continents. In Europe, my gratitude goes to Frank Kaizer, my Dutch editor at De Vrije Uitgevers, for his efforts and courage, and also to the Rotterdam festival and its former director Bas Kwakman.

EM: How would you describe the current situation of the Galician language, both in cultural milieus—where Galician figures prominently—and in daily life?

CP: The situation of Galician is dramatic, really. The Council of Europe, in its recent report on the fifth evaluation of Spain’s implementation of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, warns that only 23.9% of children in Galicia under the age of fifteen can express themselves in Galician.

Galician continues to suffer from a covert criminalization that has prevented generational transmission. The linguistic policies of the political party that systematically wins Galician elections are largely responsible for putting us in this extreme situation. Today, we can no longer say that Galician is strong in the private sphere, at least not in the case of younger generations.

We have to distinguish diverse political positions on linguistic diversity of the State: the Spanish right is always intolerant, and within the left there are degrees of tolerance. In the forty years that separate us from the end of the Franco dictatorship, we have not advanced much toward what is desirable, at least in my opinion.

What matters to me is what happens in Galicia, what the majority of Galicians think of their native language, and the reasons that lead them to turn away from it and not transmit it to their children as their mother tongue. These reasons have to do with the economic policies of the State, which has always viewed Galicia as a land from which to extract raw materials and labour. Two centuries of emigration and of the continual destruction of the values that constituted and still constitute us as distinct as Galicians largely explain the situation that faces us now.

READ MORE…

“Precise Tactility”: Polly Barton Interviewed by Xiao Yue Shan

December 1, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Language is a source of great fear, but it's also a source of great joy and connection.

At page 124 of Polly Barton’s Fifty Sounds, I found myself smiling impossibly wide, reading out loud to the empty room: “Kyuki-kyuki . . . The sound of a pen writing on a whiteboard.” Part of the joy that pervades and grows in reading this “memoir-dictionary” is in its subtle invitation to speak: to feel, as the author says, the “sensory bombardment” of encountering each new word, and the world that arrives with it. Written in fifty essays that each orbits off—sometimes tangentially, sometimes straightforwardly—from one of Japanese language’s vast selection of onomatopoeic words, the book generates a curious, sensual portrait of Barton’s life in Japan as a young woman, informed by the Wittgensteinian notion of language being defined by its utility, and in similar spirit to Lyn Hejinian: “Language . . . nearly is our psychological condition.” Through explorations of how the myriad self comes to match and distinguish itself from the world in words, Fifty Sounds creates an ecstatic realm of what happens in, between, and across languages—and the people who speak them.

Barton is a prolific translator from the Japanese; her repertoire includes Akutagawa winners like Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden and bestsellers like Misumi Kubo’s So We Look to the Sky, as well as English PEN Awards for Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are and Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job. Though we’ve spoken to her in the past about her translation work, I wanted to hear more about the linguistic and textual discoveries that catalysed this desire to work with language, in the quiet and admiring affinity between all people who love words and their secret conspirations. I spoke with Polly on-screen in our opposing time zones; she answered my questions in thoughtful bursts of speech that carried with them a vivid, various nature, her hands occasionally gesturing at the immeasurable distance between us, that which only language can attempt to breach.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Did Fifty Sounds begin in its current structure?

Polly Barton (PB): Not at all. I started working on it when I’d just got back to the UK after years of living in Japan, and at first, it was just notes for essays about the Japanese language. The inclusion of the onomatopoeia happened quite naturally, but the “fifty sounds” structure came about when I started writing the proposal for the [2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions] Essay Prize; I wanted to do it as a way of consolidating my thoughts, because I felt like there was meat in there and I was really enjoying writing about it, but it was kind of all over the place.

But the more I was writing, the more this concept started coming to me, and it seemed so out there that even while I was writing, I was thinking, can I do this? Can I write a memoir in fifty essays about Japanese onomatopoeia? Still, the callout for the contest said, “rewards ambitious writing,” so I was like, they want ambitious, I’ll give them ambitious. It’s funny because I am so grateful for that structure. It was just a crazy idea I hit upon, but I think it was very good for me to have that as a constraint, to start over fifty times—so I could do some sections like prose-poems, and a couple bits that are more academic.

XYS: Freedom dressed up as a constraint. There are definitely pieces that feel as though they could be portioned into separate texts, but because all the sections are encompassed in the umbrella of one experience, it feels cohesive.

PB: I don’t know if I intended this, but the experience of being in Japan, and learning Japanese, was so chaotic to me. I think a lot of people who learn a different language when they grew up and live in another culture—particularly one where they’re visibly different from most people around them—do have this real panoply of conflicting experiences, and the book is about embracing chaos in a way.

READ MORE…

Intelligentsia Under Dictatorship: Karen McNeil and Miled Faiza on The Italian

November 25, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

The story [of The Italian] is beautiful; it’s the story of my generation, that I myself witnessed when I was a student.

Shukri Mabkhout’s The Italian, an epic tale of romance and revolution in the tumult of 1980s and 1990s Tunisia, won the prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2015, making it the first Tunisian novel to achieve this accolade. As our Book Club selection for the month of October, Mabkhout’s wide-ranging novel gives an intricate look into the inner workings of young idealism under dictatorship, with all the brilliance and hardship that comes with hope. In the following interview, Rachel Stanyon spoke live to the translators of The Italian, Karen McNeil and Miled Faiza, on their working process, the representation of women in a literary scene dominated by men, and working towards a greater representation of Tunisian literature in the Arab world.

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. 

Rachel Stanyon (RS): I’ve read in an interview on Arablit.org that your translation strategy involves Miled first doing a quite literal pass, and Karen then revising the draft for idioms, flow, etc. Did your translation of The Italian also involve a dialogue with the author, Shukri Mabkhout?

Karen McNeil (KM): Yes, it did, and that was really Miled’s role throughout the project. During both the translation and revision, we contacted Shukri a lot. There were sometimes words that we had no idea about! Miled was killing himself looking for this one word in every dictionary imaginable, and it turned out it was just this particular word that Shukri’s family uses, and probably no one else in Tunisia does. There are always these little idiosyncrasies. All the translations I’ve done have been in circumstances where we could work with the author—I almost can’t imagine it otherwise; there are just so many difficulties that require follow-up questions.

Miled Faiza (MF): Shukri was very supportive, which was really nice. I don’t think there are many passages that are difficult in the novel; we just wanted to be as accurate as possible—even with small things, such as recipes. I am from the central east of the country, and he’s from the north, the capital. Tunisia is a very small and culturally homogenous country, but there are a few small things that Shukri probably grew up with: what they cooked at home, or the clothes they wore, or things that are very specific to Tunis, the capital. He was very helpful with my queries about those specific questions.

I was able to find the word Karen mentioned in an Arabic dictionary; Lisan al-Arab, one of the oldest and largest dictionaries in the world, has an entire passage on it. But the meaning didn’t work in the context, so it was driving me crazy. I sent him a message, and he told me: “Oh, I’m sorry, that is a French word that my father used to say.” So it was a word very specific to his family, and he just threw it in there.

RS: The language of The Italian tends to be quite descriptive, and involves a lot of very detailed information on things like philosophy, Tunisian cuisine, or the process of publishing a newspaper. Miled, I’m particularly interested in how you, as a poet, found translating what I found sometimes to be quite dry, academic passages. Did these aspects of the translation pose any problems for either of you, and, in general, what were the biggest challenges for you in translating this novel?

MF: Our great friend, Addie Leak, edited this book and worked with us very closely—it’s really important to always mention her because she is amazing. I asked her: “How did you find the novel? What do you feel about the section on the political history of Tunisia?” She told me she loved it, which was a little surprising. Certain sections, especially those with a lot of details about the union and the different branches of Tunisian student activists, I found dry—and maybe it would have been possible to just summarise and get rid of a lot of it. But that’s my point of view as a Tunisian. I was more interested in the story of Abdel Nasser and Zeina, with the background of everything going on in Tunisia. I thought the very small details—of every congress and every meeting, important dates from Tunisian history—were not that interesting; they were a little bit dry for me.

KM: I think the parts when Abdel Nasser is at university, and especially the philosophical points, are actually even drier in Arabic. It was very challenging to make that flow in English, because it’s very much like a lecture or a philosophy textbook. It was difficult to render that in English without doing harm to the integrity of the original. Even though it was painful while I was doing it, though, with a little perspective I think I can appreciate why it goes on for so long. In the structure of the novel, that activism was Abdel Nasser’s whole life, but once he graduates from university, one realises that all the things the university students are doing, thinking that they’re changing the country—none of it really matters. I think it captures Abdel Nasser’s viewpoint of it being very important. READ MORE…

A Translator’s Humility: An Interview with Leri Price

November 17, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Realizing the Myriad Possibilities of the Text: An Interview with Arunava Sinha

November 4, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Suhasini Patni

This is the truth of the world, that we live in various languages and not just one.

Arunava Sinha is a Delhi-based translator literary translator who works from Bengali to English and English to Bengali. He is the winner of the Crossword Book Award for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), and sixty-six of his translations have been published so far, including a collection of Modern Bengali Poetry, novels by acclaimed writers such as Buddhadeva Bose and Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay, and a collection of Bengali short stories. He teaches in the creative writing department at Ashoka University and works as the books editor at Scroll.in.

I met him for the first time in 2019, when I worked as his teaching assistant. In a small class of six students, translating out of Hindi, Tamil, and Bengali, we worked on hearing the voice of a book and how to articulate it in a different language.

In this Zoom conversation, Sinha talks about translating Khwabnama by Akhtaruzzaman Elias, the questions he receives in his literary translation classes, and the publishing industry in India.

Suhasini Patni (SP): You’ve been translating for many years. In your latest interview with Forbes, you said you developed an interest in literary translation after realizing that Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was a translation. Can you talk about your journey so far?

Arunava Sinha (AS): It began as an interest in college. I was an English literature student, and as you said, it struck me that these words we’re marveling over when we’re reading Garcia Marquez are really written by somebody else. I wanted to know what writing those words might be like. And of course, it immediately showed me that translation is completely different from what we assume it is. It’s all that is not said but that you are hearing at the back of your head. It is so little about the dictionary meaning because that’s the most easily solved problem. That is what makes a text so rich and what makes translation so interesting.

I had forgotten about translation because I moved to Delhi and switched jobs. It wasn’t until an editor at Penguin called me, asking me about Sankar’s Chowringhee that I rekindled my journey. And it was just at the right age for a midlife crisis, too!

SP: What kind of books did you begin with translating?

AS: I started with the canon, partly because there were not too many translations of the best-known books from Bangla at the time. There were a number of English publishers, and they were hungry for books to publish and there were not enough writers in English. So, it was quite a happy combination of circumstances. There was plenty of variety in the writing in the canon, but if you really step back and look at the big picture, it represented just one segment of possible writing in Bangla. That is what led me to start looking for texts with more diversity, both in terms of the content and the writer. People who wrote regularly did with a certain kind of lucidity which I think was market-facing even if they didn’t tell themselves so. But their books were written to be read by large numbers of people. They adopted a certain lucid idiom. Their art lay in playing with lucidity, but they never became obscure except for some experimental writers. When the field widened and I had other types of books to look for, they were not as bothered about the market. And they wrote in much stronger, much more literary—by literary I don’t mean high literary—but much more of an idiom that only literature can accept and accommodate. This of course has also made translation a more complicated but invigorating task. As you do more of the same thing, you want your challenges to get bigger.

It was partly this that led me to the text, until now, I think was the toughest to translate, which is Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s Khwabnama, which is daunting not just because of the actual language but also because you immediately realize the quality of that book and you are terrified that you will not be able to preserve it in the translated version. I think this was the biggest concern for me. I’m still not sure if it has worked or not. And I don’t think I ever will be. When you’re translating, your real challenge is the language, it’s not the literature. At that point, you’re not thinking of the literature, you’re just thinking of how to get a sentence across. Miraculously, somehow if you do it right, then all the pieces fall into place.

READ MORE…

A Sublime Flame of a Text: Jeffrey Zuckerman and Laurel Taylor Discuss Kaya Days

October 28, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

It didn’t take long for me to realize what a brilliant, sublime flame of a text it was . . .

Kaya Days, our Book Club selection for the month of September, is Mauritian author Carl de Souza’s electrifying bildungsroman, set amidst the 1999 riots on the island nation. In getting de Souza’s world of revolutionaries, music, and fire, Assistant Editor Laurel Taylor spoke to translator Jeffrey Zuckerman on his work on Mauritian novels and his processes of translation, especially when working on texts as experimental as de Souza’s. Their conversation spanned the intricacies of handling the many cultures de Souza brings together in his work, and the ethics which face a translator handling such a text. Look out for our second instalment of Kaya Day‘s interviews next Monday, when Laurel Taylor will be speaking with the Carl de Souza. 

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: How did you first come to Carlo’s work? What was it that drew you in?

Jeffrey Zuckerman (JZ): Oh, this goes back to the beginning of my career in translation. The first book I saw to publication was that of another Mauritian author—Ananda Devi’s Eve Out of Her Ruins. It was as I was reading more of her œuvre and learning more about her compatriots that I started drawing connections. I was put in touch with Nathacha Appanah—whose The Last Brother is absolutely stunning, incidentally— and I asked if she had recommendations for books from Mauritius that hadn’t been translated. This was her answer:

My mind has a list ‘longue comme la semaine’, as we say in Creole, of books that haven’t been translated but then you’ll think I’m pestering you. So just one title which has been snubbed and I don’t understand why. It’s Ceux qu’on jette à la mer by Carl de Souza, published at L’Olivier in 2001. It is a story about Chinese people stranded at sea.

She didn’t add any further info. At the time, I had heard Carlo’s name, but not delved into his work. I managed to lay hands on Ceux qu’on jette à la mer (literally “Those Thrown to the Sea” but which Carl loves the idea of being condensed to “Jettisoned”) about a boat full of Chinese workers from Guangzhou that ends up stranded in Mauritius, and the lives of the men both on and off the boat. I also picked up that short, intense novella of his, Les Jours Kaya, and was blown away by the way in which it wove in and out of the experiences of people across the island, some in the rioting, some at a remove, some forced to make their way through the chaos. It didn’t take long for me to realize what a brilliant, sublime flame of a text it was, or to appreciate the way it was held together by a rhythm akin to Kaya’s songs, and I fell in love with it straightaway.

LT: Carlo himself is multilingual and has recently started writing in English. To what extent did you collaborate on the process of translation? What was your working process with him like?

JZ: I got to visit the island of Mauritius for the first time ever after having translated three novels from there—two by Ananda Devi and one by Shenaz Patel—in late 2018. A few months before that, I got in touch properly with Carl, and in the intervening months, I did sample translations of these two major novels of his, of which he was clearly happy with. Then I came to the island and spent two days at his house, overlooking the island’s sugarcane fields, and over the course of our conversations and drives around the island, it became so clear to me how his books and his personality are a perfect expression of this island and its unique position between an insular space and a teeming nexus of multiculturality. In terms of our process, Carlo has been the best sort of author for a translator to work with; he’s been very clear that he trusts me and wants me to feel free to make the choices that I make—and also very, very willing to answer all sorts of questions, no matter how trivial they may seem! READ MORE…

Omnipresent Music: Carl de Souza and Laurel Taylor Discuss Kaya Days

October 27, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

My project was about my own feeling of being absolutely disturbed after the events and how I had lived the days.

Carl de Souza’s Kaya Days is a labyrinthine, densely packed novel, exploring the lives of everyday Mauritians amidst the chaotic days following the death of seggae singer Kaya in police custody. A lush landscape of wealth and poverty, ethnicity and language emerge under de Souza’s hands, guiding the reader through a moment of intense transformation and rupture. Kaya Days was our Book Club selection for the month of September, and Assistant Editor Laurel Taylor spoke live to author Carl de Souza about his response to the novel twenty years after publication, as well as his feelings about how literature can illustrate the fault lines of race and culture. The interview with the translator of Kaya Days, Jeffrey Zuckerman, can be read here.

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): In the twenty years since Kaya Days first came out, and during the process of translating the novel, working with Jeffrey—have you discovered anything new about the novel?

Carl de Souza (CD): The novel has served as a good reminder for me, which can be taken in several ways. The first is that such public displays of resistance are persistent in our societies—how overlooked communities tend to go to the streets and set towns on fire because they are not being given their proper share of participation in life. I was reminded of this recently, when I was editing some writing about the local Creole community. The Creole community, as you probably know, is rooted in the slave trade, and this trauma has been self-perpetuating, transmitted unconsciously generation after generation. To this day, this community does not have proper access to the reestablishment of their rights, reestablishment of their education, or full participation in public society. This looks very much like what has led up to the Black Lives Matter movement, for example.

This is quite similar to the idea that people who seem very tame—the term seems pejorative, but it’s really that they have been taught to be tame—suddenly take to the streets because they can’t withstand any longer. And what happened in Mauritius twenty years back is a reminder for us in these difficult days—with the pandemic and the loss of jobs.

And it’s also a reminder of a sort of Proust transition in the way I was writing; in the sense that my previous novels were more figurative, were more plain descriptions of what I had in mind, whereas this novel was something that really burst out of me. At that time, I realized there was no real frontier between prose and poetry in its transmission of emotions.

LT: Mauritius is a really interesting island nation of an incredibly diverse population. Could you talk a little bit about where the novel was coming from, and how those different cultures met each other within the text?

CD: The first thing is to situate the story—and my other stories as well—in the island context. When you’re living on a small island, and there is input from, let’s say, the European colonizers who came for business—sugar, mainly; slavery from Africa being brought in by force; slavery being replaced by Indian indentured labor; and then Chinese people coming in for business, living quite peacefully with everybody else. . . That had been maintained throughout the centuries, in a very peaceful coexistence. READ MORE…

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

October 13, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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