Interviews

Shunning Stereotypes: Emma Ramadan on Translating Meryem Alaoui’s Straight From the Horse’s Mouth

October 22, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

It’s about Morocco, but not the cliched version . . . It’s a wild Morocco that is both more devastating and more fun than anyone might expect.

In her recent review of our fabulous September Book Club selection, Editor-at-Large Allison Braden praised the book’s candor, humor, and heart, as well as its fresh take on Moroccan culture. Below, she revisits these and other topics in conversation with award-winning translator and former Asymptote member Emma Ramadan. Straight From The Horse’s Mouth, they agree, defies our preconceptions of Morocco, its women, and the makings of great literature in translation.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Allison Braden: I want to start by asking how you found this book. What attracted you to the story?

Emma Ramadan: Other Press came to me and asked if I wanted to translate the book, and I read it through and loved it. What I really like about it, and what I have tried to look for in other translation projects I’ve pitched, is that it’s by a Moroccan writer and it’s about Morocco, but not the cliched version of Morocco that can get neatly packaged to American readers. This happens with a lot of countries where there aren’t that many English translations already in existence: there’s an expectation that they will read a certain way, or that they will educate us about a certain aspect of that country or culture, as if that were the only thing those literatures were supposed to do. I like that this book doesn’t really provide the view of Morocco that English-language readers might have in mind, or that publishers might want to sell to them. It’s a wild Morocco that is both more devastating and more fun than anyone might expect. I love Jmiaa’s story, and I love her voice, and I love that she’s allowed to have a painful existence as a sex worker but also a radical transformation into a famous movie star. It’s a really fun book, and we don’t get a lot of those from certain countries.

AB: I noticed on Twitter that you said you often wish for more fun and funny books in translation. I’m curious about why you think there aren’t as many of those.

ER: I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I’ll sum them up by saying that I think there’s a certain pressure when you’re pitching a translation, or when publishers are acquiring a translation, for it to be a big, important, prize-worthy book; it’s very expensive to do translations, and there’s this idea that they don’t sell very well, so to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth, there needs to be some important hook or payoff in the form of big reviews or awards. These more fun, funny, light books that have a lot to say—that definitely have their readers and an importance of their own—may not seem as appealing or worthy in that way, but I would really disagree. Sometimes you just want to translate a book because it’s really good, and good doesn’t necessarily mean heavy and political and invested with all this cultural capital about what it means to live in a specific place. Sometimes it can just be a great book. And that should be, and is, enough.

AB: You’ve also translated some very serious Moroccan literature—I’m thinking of Ahmed Bouanani’s The Shutters. Did translating that inform your translation of Straight From the Horse’s Mouth, even though it’s such a different tone and genre?

ER: It did inform my translation insomuch as I got to know Morocco very well through that project, living there as I was working on it. So then, in translating this other book that’s very much set there, I was able to say, “Okay, they’re going to this town, I know what that town looks like.” It was deeply informative in that way, even if it’s a very different kind of book. There are other comparisons to be made, too: Bouanani uses some language that resists being translated, and in Straight From the Horse’s Mouth, Meryem Alaoui uses Arabic words in her French text that I left in Arabic, so both authors are writing from a culture that uses multiple languages. The challenge for me there was letting all those voices come through and not forcing them into some kind of neat English. READ MORE…

The Making of the Murakami Industry: An Interview with David Karashima

October 14, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by David Boyd

Nobody expected Murakami to become the international phenomenon he has become.

In Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami, author and translator David Karashima examines the emergence of Haruki Murakami as a global literary phenomenon, bringing together an incredible amount of information surrounding this towering figure of contemporary Japanese literature—including a conversation with the man himself—and putting his eye for detail to excellent use as he seeks to uncover everything that went into the establishment of the “Murakami industry” in the 1980s and 1990s. Through this meticulous work—first published in Japanese in 2018 and now in English by Soft Skull Press—Karashima sheds light on the mysteries of Murakami’s translation into English (including an answer as to why, for example, dozens of pages were cut from the published translation of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World) and demonstrates the extent to which the process of bringing an author from one language to another involves countless decisions and a small army of agents, publishers, editors, and—of course—translators.

In this interview, conducted by Editor-at-Large for Japan, David Boyd, Karashima discusses Murakami’s translators, a potential re-translation of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and how Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami found its way into the English language.

David Boyd (DB): In your book, we meet all the major players in Murakami’s orbit, but it’s clear that the stars of your story are the translator Alfred Birnbaum and the editor Elmer Luke. Why did you choose to focus on them?

David Karashima (DK): In my mind, at least, the individuals that take center stage in the book are Birnbaum, Luke, and Jay Rubin, although I do feel that all of the dozens of people who speak in the book have important episodes to relate. There are perhaps two main reasons that Alfred Birnbaum and Elmer Luke stand out in the book. First, I decided—at least for this first book—to focus on the years when Murakami’s work first began appearing in English (1985 to 1998), because this was a period that relatively little was known about; Birnbaum and Luke played important roles as trailblazers during this time. I remember a staff member of the Murakami Office telling me that these (especially the eighties and early nineties) were the “black box years” for them too. The story of the quarter-century since Murakami began to really break through—with the publication of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle—would have a different cast of central characters, although Jay Rubin would still be one of them. I also think that Birnbaum and Luke perhaps come to life in the book because it has been many years since they were involved in what Murakami himself calls the “Murakami industry” and are therefore in a position to reflect more openly on their experience. Many people—including Murakami himself—were kind enough to talk to me for the book, but most people’s responses (quite understandably) tended to be more measured.

DB: When people talk about Murakami’s translators, they usually focus on Birnbaum and Rubin. People describe them as opposites—Birnbaum the Bohemian and Rubin the Academic. In your book, you quote Murakami: “My style has changed from around 1990. My prose has become more meticulous, so it’s a problem if Alfred translates it freely. I want my work to be translated properly . . .” What importance do you assign to “the changing of the guard”? What does that moment mean to Murakami in translation?

DK: Birnbaum, Rubin, Philip Gabriel, and Ted Goossen are all terrific translators and I have a lot of admiration for the work that they do—not only translating Murakami, but introducing other Japanese (and in the case of Birnbaum also Burmese) writers to English readers, both as translators and editors. Murakami says that he has trouble distinguishing between the translations by his different English-language translators, but his American editors have suggested that each translator has his (and people have pointed out to me that, unlike with other languages, all of Murakami’s English-language translators have been men) own style. I imagine people compare Birnbaum and Rubin for two reasons. One, because they were the first two translators into English of Murakami’s book-length works (although Gabriel and Goossen both translated a few short stories early on). And, two, because they’ve translated a number of the same or similar works that many readers feel very attached to, such as Norwegian Wood and parts of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. The “Birnbaum the Freestyling Bohemian versus Rubin the Meticulous Academic” dichotomy seems to have first captured people’s imaginations when Murakami tried to give credit to his translators in interviews he gave in the US and the idea has been explored by others since. It’s catchy, and there must be some truth to it, but I wonder if it doesn’t impede understanding of the complexity of each translator’s approach and the different contexts in which they were undertaking their translations. READ MORE…

The Visceraless State: An Interview With Cristina Rivera Garza

October 8, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

[W]riting is a community-making practice . . . intimately, necessarily connected to the communities in which we live and which, ideally, we serve.

Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza is a foremost voice in contemporary Mexican literature. Known for her frequently dark subject matter and hybrid styles, her work focuses on marginalized people, challenging us to reconsider our preconceptions about boundaries and transgression. She has won major literary awards and is the only author to have twice won the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award (in 2011 and 2009). Her latest work to be translated into English, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, has just been published by Feminist Press and is a hybrid collection of journalism, crónicas, and essays, that explore systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border. To coincide with its much-anticipated release, Asymptote’s Assistant Managing Editor Lindsay Semel spoke with Cristina Rivera Garza about the ideas behind this compelling work.   

“Let me just bring some tea, and I’ll be right back!” Cristina Rivera Garza dashed out of her Zoom screen briefly before settling back into her chair and adjusting her glasses with a warm smile, her air of familiarity challenging the oppressiveness of the geographical and technological distance to which we’ve lately become accustomed. In the following interview, we discuss Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, the striking latest collaboration between Garza and translator Sarah Booker. She reflects upon the demands that she makes of syntax, the enigmatic character of reality, the importance of solidarity and imagination, and how she and Booker coined the term “The Visceraless State.” Very much of the borderland between Mexico and the United States, her work meets the global, contemporary moment not despite its specificity, but because of it.

 —Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

Lindsay Semel (LS): You’ve stated in interviews, and it’s apparent in your work, that you intentionally test the limits between what language normally does and what it can do in order to discover new experiential possibilities between writer, text, and reader. I wonder if you could point to places in the text where you tested and stretched the limits of Spanish but were not able to do so the same way in English and vice versa. How do Spanish and English need to be challenged differently?

Cristina Rivera Garza (CRG): Every single project has to challenge language in specific ways. It always depends on the materials that I’m exploring, affecting, and letting myself be affected by, and there are specific ways that you can do that both in English and in Spanish. I tend to write longer sentences in Spanish and more fragmentarily in English, for example. When I am getting too long-winded in Spanish, I try to convey that thought with the directness and economy I associate with my relationship with English. At times, I try to use the semicolon in English, just because it is more common in Spanish and I want to see what happens to both sentence and sense. Constantly borrowing from English and borrowing from Spanish and taking traces and echoes from one language into the other, trying to honor and replicate the tension and friction that maintains them together where I live and how I think, has been almost a natural way of continuing to challenge both.

Sarah [Booker, translator of Grieving] is such a deft translator and we now know each other quite well. She’s been translating my work for a number of years and we have a very open, fluid conversation as she goes into the translation process: less a process of moving language from one context to a another, and more a search for similar effects based on the affective capacities of host and receiving languages. I work closely with syntax, especially if I’m exploring issues such as violence and suffering. Pause, breathlessness, all those aspects of a body going through tremendous pressure or pain inflicted—in terms of keeping both form and content responding to the same challenges, it is important that syntax and semantics are somehow reflecting and embodying that experience. That’s when writing occurs.

I think of translation as a creative process too. I see Sarah as my co-author and her work as a way through which I receive my book back anew. I think she’s a poet at heart. I don’t know if she knows that, but all those experiments with language, that’s something she’s very deft at. READ MORE…

Not Strictly a Serial Killer: An Interview with Carlos Busqued

October 5, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Samuel Rutter

A “monster” is made of the very same stuff as people who are, in theory . . . normal. We’re much closer to being monsters than we’d like to admit.

In September of 1982, Ricardo Melogno murdered four taxi drivers in Buenos Aires. The crimes happened in close physical proximity and over a short period of time, but to this day, neither the perpetrator nor the many teams of experts who have treated Melogno have been able to discern a motive. Writer Carlos Busqued spent over two years interviewing Melogno and compiling the material that would eventually become Magnetized, published in English for the first time in June 2020 by Catapult.

The novel’s translator, Samuel Rutter, exchanged a series of emails with the author that touched on the writer’s process, the singularities of Ricardo’s case, and life in Buenos Aires under quarantine.

Samuel Rutter (SR): How did you first learn about Ricardo Melogno, and is his case still well-known in Argentina today?

Carlos Busqued (CB): No, quite the opposite actually—it was quite a sensation when it first happened, but the news cycle at the time didn’t cover it for long. Ricardo committed the murders right at the end of the last military dictatorship—two months after Argentina lost the Falklands War—so his crimes were quickly buried under an avalanche of news and exposés that were even more macabre.

I was a kid at the time of the murders and never heard about them back then—I lived in Chaco, a province in the far north of Argentina, so we didn’t read the press from Buenos Aires so much, and we only got some of their TV channels. So it was many years later that I stumbled across Ricardo’s case by chance. I got to know someone who worked on his treatment team, and I noticed that on the occasions I joined the team for after-work drinks or a birthday party, they tended to speak of Ricardo with empathy and curiosity. Every now and again they’d speculate about one or another detail of the crimes, which piqued my interest right away.

SR: What drew your attention to the case as a writer? Was there something in particular that inspired you to write about it?

CB: It was the strangeness of the whole thing, the fact that there really was no motive. Even today there is very little understanding of crimes with no known motive, and barely any research on the subject. A person who commits four identical murders is not acting randomly, but even so, neither Ricardo nor the numerous teams of specialists who examined him have been able to come up with a motive. Broadly speaking, when someone kills, they do it to survive. How that applies to Ricardo’s mindset when he committed the murders remains a complete mystery. READ MORE…

Sadness Has No End, Happiness Does: An Interview with Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

September 21, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Serena Solin

I’m okay with “hybridity” and “identity” in the sense that they are procedural, but not to the extent that they are arrivals and conclusions.

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi is an artist working across mediums, from poetry and translation to net art, film, theory, and performance. Her work explores the relationship between politics, aesthetics, and phenomenology, with a particular focus on the vacillating potential of the internet as a public and personal space, equal parts diary and mechanism of empire. I first encountered her work in Algavarias: Echo Chamber (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), a translation of Syrian-Brazilian poet Waly Salomão. Gharavi renders Salomão’s “poems of ideal architecture” in all their immense complexity, as humorous as they are solemn, as splintered as they are universal. 

Serena Solin (SS): Something that intrigued me throughout Algaravias: Echo Chamber was the fragmentation of image. I’m thinking particularly of this quote from the poem “CARIOCA STREET 1993”: “clippings, replicas, reshowings, free samples, clots without blood, prostheses of the fantasmagoric Soap Street.” Virtual realities and “handycams” are also represented. As a contemporary artist, is fragmentation or reflection across multiple screens something you think about? Do you believe there is now, or ever was, an unbroken space for art?

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi (MMG): I think that Waly Salomão was certainly ahead of his time in writing that poem in the early nineties. Naming a poem “.doc” before we had AOL and Hotmail accounts is especially interesting for an artist in South America who was attuned to the burgeoning virtuality of how we see each other and ourselves.

One of the things I’ve been doing under quarantine is watching period dramas. If I were just living my ordinary, non-quarantine life, I wouldn’t be watching Vanity Fair and The Age of Innocence, but it’s fascinating to think about the idea that there was ever a time when the whole could be contained. We have a fantasy of ourselves as contemporaries, being post-everything, and to some extent there may be truth to that; our tools have shaped us to be different than Martin Scorcese’s characters. But watching period dramas and experiencing a different visual repertoire from my own, I’m struck by how much virtuality and narrativizing of lives and selves there was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Maybe we as contemporaries are so hungry for control that we have an impulse to find containers for everything. I think control is part of the artistic impulse, as well as a directive under quarantine—to not lose your mind, to think about the very few things within your control. I don’t know that I can draw a ready line to virtuality, but often our tools give us that sense of control. At the same time they are not just tools; they shape us.

SS: With regard to period dramas, I thought quarantine might be a good time to read Anna Karenina for the first time, and I was enthralled by the way the plot is reflected through characters who weren’t actually present for an event but heard about it from someone else—in other words, gossip as narrative style. Perhaps the conclusion is that there’s nothing new under the sun—not virtuality, not narrative fragmentation.

MMG: Anna Karenina was actually on TV the other day, dubbed into Portuguese, a real experience. Postmodernism is maybe the most boring topic ever, but the first thing to be given that word in literary theory was that moment in Mrs. Dalloway when multiple spectators are watching an airplane. That refractory self and the breakdown of representative, directive viewership is where postmodernism starts to exist historically. But I think we can go further back, and wider culturally.

At the same time, I think we are living something different. I live in the time of Uber. It’s significant that we know the technology we rely on is working when it’s most erased, which is profoundly interesting and understudied—we would have to give more attention to that to fully understand ourselves. READ MORE…

Of Dreams and Dames: Ted Goossen on Translating Hiromi Kawakami’s People From My Neighborhood

September 17, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

What Westerners . . . call magical realism … [is] a way of normalizing that which doesn’t easily fit into our categories.

Last month, we were delighted to bring you award-winning author Hiromi Kawakami’s latest in translation. Like much of her writing, our August Book Club selection tackles the everyday with a deliciously fantastic twist. In this interview with assistant managing editor Lindsay Semel, the inimitable Ted Goossen gives us a fascinating glimpse into the Japanese canon and the author’s place within it. He also shares his aversion to labels like “magical realism” or “women’s writing”: there are as many forms of the real and the female as there are cultures, he suggests, and that’s quite a gift.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

Lindsay Semel (LS): You’ve mentioned in interviews (mainly in connection to MONKEY, the magazine of Japanese literature you co-edit) that you strive to bring non-canonical Japanese writers to Anglophone readers. Do you think there’s a difference between the Japanese literary canon and the Western canon of Japanese literature in translation?

Ted Goossen (TG): That’s an excellent question, and of course there’s a difference. Regarding the Western reception of Japanese literature, one of the earliest works was The Tale of Genji: a 1,200-page, thousand-year-old novel written by a court lady, whose manuscript was initially hand-copied and circulated among her female peers. The first English translation, Arthur Waley’s, was published around 1920. At that time, Genji was highly exotic, even for the Japanese, because it was written in a way they couldn’t read. So Waley did us all a great service with his beautiful translation, and since then, there have been four or five more.

Other than that, Japanese literature didn’t really gain a Western audience until the 1960s; at that point, the US had made Japan—its enemy in World War II—an ally, and it had tried to resurrect its reputation. Because of the war, Americans thought of the Japanese as cruel and heartless, so the US needed to make them more “human,” render them more attractive. Not only was there an element of exoticism when it came to Japanese culture, then, but also a need to rehabilitate it. When Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize in 1968, Japanese literature was prized for the kind of poetic, Zen-like quality present in his writing. Kenzaburō Ōe, who won the Nobel in 1994, distanced himself from that whole stream, and his literature is unlike any that preceded it; it did garner a Western audience, albeit a relatively small one. Now, of course, it’s Murakami. He dominates the West to such an extent that when we speak of “non-canonical,” it’s almost like we’re saying “non-Murakami.”

You’ve mentioned MONKEY, and the paradox there is that Murakami is one of our biggest supporters; he and my co-editor Motoyuki Shibata are very close, I know him as well, and Jay Rubin, a frequent collaborator, is one of his best translators. So ironically, we’re using the magazine to highlight the work of writers who aren’t Murakami, but we use Murakami to draw attention to it by publishing lots of interesting interviews, essays, and dialogues about or with him. Still, certain authors like Mieko or Hiromi Kawakami are getting lots of buzz in their own right, simply because they’re so good. There are others, too, so we’re seeing the rise of quite a few Japanese writers in the English-speaking literary world. READ MORE…

Autoria Negra: An Interview with Cidinha da Silva

September 7, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva and Daniel Persia

We sought and insistently seek ways to affirm our existence, to demarcate places for the living human beings that we are.

I first met Cidinha da Silva about a year ago, at the International Literary Festival of Paraty (Flip), in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. At the time, I had just begun translating Sobre-viventes! (Pallas Editora, 2016), a collection of crônicas that approach Brazil, past and present, through everyday lived experience. In 2010, Cidinha coined the neologism Exuzilhar, a verb that combines the Portuguese encruzilhar (“to cross”) or encruzilhada (“crossroads”) with Exu (an Orisha in the Yoruba religion, the divine messenger or gatekeeper). Exuzilhamento is indeed a driving force of Cidinha’s work, which, as she reveals here, “revolves around Africanities, Orixalities, Ancestralities, and the tension and dialogue between tradition (African, Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Diasporic, and Afro-Indigenous) and contemporaneity.” The interview that follows, conducted alongside my fellow translator Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva, showcases the complexity of Cidinha’s creative process and her critical place in contemporary Brazilian literature.

                                                                                 —Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large for Brazil

Daniel Persia (DP): It’s great to connect with you again, Cidinha, especially after having featured some of your work in our Summer 2020 issue. Can you give us a general panorama of your career as a writer?

Cidinha da Silva (CS): I started publishing literature in 2006, in São Paulo, with a self-financed, independent book of crônicas, Cada tridente em seu lugar. It’s a book that still sells widely, fourteen years later. The fourth edition was just released, with Mazza Edições (Belo Horizonte, Brazil). I had always wanted to publish literature. I wrote crônicas for an online magazine and readers kept asking when we’d have a book. That’s what really got me thinking about publishing my first literary work; I had already published a book of essays in 2003, Ações afirmativas em educação—experiências brasileiras [Affirmative Action in Education: Brazilian Experiences] (Summus).

Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva (AO): Tell us about your creative process. Do you have a daily writing routine?

CS: My writing process has practical, creative, and other dimensions that are somewhat intangible. In practical terms, I’m a relatively organized and disciplined writer; I sit and write at predetermined times. I don’t have any problems with the “blank page,” but sometimes I’m faced with a lack of time to write. My writing routine depends on the volume of work at hand, on how much I need to accomplish to ensure survival: lesson planning; preparing and delivering lectures, workshops, and courses; reading; studying; traveling; keeping up with my online store and promoting my books. The time left for writing is very minimal, it boils down to just a few hours a week. I write very little on impulse; I usually write with a particular book in mind, one that I’m still developing or organizing. I also write a lot of commissioned work, for publications of the national press, primarily, but also theatre and essays.

As for the creative dimension, I prefer to write early in the morning, which is the best time of day for me. I write on my desktop computer, sitting in a comfortable chair in a large office, with a glass door on the balcony and the sun coming to visit me. I collect dictionaries and keep them in reach for consultation. My productivity is greatest in the morning, for about four to six hours (when I’m in a more intense process of production), but from the fourth hour onward, what I really do is reread, revise, consult reference materials. I read everything out loud, several times; that’s how I set rhythm and establish harmony. When I’m mulling over an idea for a new book, I tend to take a lot of notes in my notebooks—scattered things, like names for characters, beginnings of crônicas or short stories. I usually only write down ideas, but when I write down full sentences, they almost always unfold into one or two paragraphs at that very moment, when they’re first being recorded. And so there you have the beginning of a new text.

The unimaginable happens in dreams (of which I remember little or nothing), in conversations, in exchanges with real people, in observing the world, in interacting with stones, plants, flowers, water, earth and fire, and smoke, too. In intuition, which I’ve built over the years, in exercises and life tests, to pay full attention and remain confident. Spirituality communicates with me through intuition.

DP: What are some of the main themes in your work?

CS: Through two of my more recent books—Um Exu em Nova York (2018), a collection of short stories, and Exuzilhar (2019), the first volume in a series of selected crônicas—I’ve come to understand that my aesthetic interests revolve around Africanities, Orixalities, Ancestralities, and the tension and dialogue between tradition (African, Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Diasporic, and Afro-Indigenous) and contemporaneity. Other topics include racism, racial discrimination, and racial inequalities, though the central theme really is that tension and dialogue mentioned above. I’m also interested in themes of death, love, soccer, and politics. I write a lot about politics. READ MORE…

WIT Month: An Interview with Ariana Harwicz

August 27, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

I try not to be labeled as a feminist writer because I don’t want to be pigeonholed.

It seems fitting to crown our triple Women in Translation feature with something of a triple threat. On the one hand, Argentine Ariana Harwicz’s work has been published in fifteen languages, most notably English: her debut novel Die, My Love (translated by Carolina Orloff and Asymptote’s own Editor-at-Large Sarah Moses) was a 2018 International Booker and 2020 BTBA nominee. And yet, despite a hailed career in writing, Harwicz feels almost closer to translation—a love partly fueled by her experience as a longtime expat in France. Her latest book deals with exactly that: in the short and deliciously sweet Desertar (forthcoming in Spanish from Mardulce), she and French-Argentine translator Mikaël Gómez Guthart ponder the twists and turns of the craft.

But Harwicz isn’t just a woman in (and in love with) translation; adding to her appeal here is that, much to her chagrin, her work has been routinely couched in terms of her womanhood. In this interview with Blog Editor Josefina Massot, she talks about how even well-intentioned feminism can be used for literary profit, what it’s like to give voice to a man, and why she views her translators as lovers. Dealing no cheap punches or punchlines pour la galerie, Harwicz isn’t afraid to ruffle some feathers—and that is, in part, what makes her such a welcome voice in the context of WIT: thoughtful criticism is arguably the highest form of respect.

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Josefina Massot (JM): In Desertar, you claim books are no longer a linguistic fact but a “thing,” a product of the publishing market—which, in turn, often bows to ideological trends. One of these trends is a somewhat bastardized feminism—a particular strand of feminist discourse that you’ve also questioned. I can’t help but ask, then, at the risk of stirring up controversy: how do you feel about Women in Translation Month to begin with? No one doubts the good intentions of many of its advocates (Asymptote among them), but it’s worth asking whether it might not be exploited by others.

Ariana Harwicz (AH): It’s a very complex issue, and any attempt to annul, minimize, reduce, or stifle that complexity leads to a dangerous trap. If I told you that I straight-out condemned this celebration, this month devoted to women in English translation, I’d be sabotaging a literary movement that I, too, celebrate: at the end of the day, I’m one of these women, and being translated into English has opened many doors to other languages, cultures, and translations (pretty much all of them, in fact, except for Hebrew); there’s nothing more interesting to me than infiltrating these new environments. Some of my opinions are pretty different from those of many female colleagues, or just people I run into in general, but in order to be heard, read, or access the ongoing literary and political conversation, I must first be translated. If I get wrapped up in my own thoughts or turn to ostracism, I’ll only lose.

So, do I support the increased visibility of female literary discourse and poetics through initiatives like WIT? Absolutely. Do I support the application of gender-based discourse to literature? No. Do I support the marketing of women or social, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities? No. Do I think this rhetoric is a sign of the times? Yes. Do I think the publishing market profits from it? Yes. Do I think some presses abuse it? Yes, many do. But again, to be clear, I don’t condemn the drive for visibility—merely its exploitation.

JM: Speaking of exploiting feminist rhetoric as a marketing strategy, you’ve also complained about editors’ attempts to promote you as a female writer. You’ve said that you’ve had to fight in every language to avoid blurbs like “a feminist novel by a female rebel,” and that you weren’t always successful. How have publishers in different countries handled the promotion of your work in this regard?

AH: When the French translation of my first novel, Matate, amor (Crève, mon amour) was published by Seuil in January, I met up with several distributors. This is typical in France: the author holds a meeting with all the small bookshop owners. There are tons of independent bookstores here (which I guess is also the case in Germany and other European countries), and of course, they’re ultimately more important than the big chains in promoting non-commercial, non-bestselling literature. When I met with them, my editor (a wonderful editor and translator, too) described my book as “feminist punk” or something. I remember half-jokingly correcting him, but in doing that, I was also taking a political stance. We then had a chat and took a close look at the front and back covers of the book, after which I told him to scrap the term “feminist.” I always weigh in on this kind of thing, because it’s ultimately all about politics—the author’s and the text’s. For instance, if someone tries to push a sexy picture of me, or some crowd-pleasing slogan or a title that just doesn’t fit, I’ll have my say and they’ll usually listen.

I think I had the same issue everywhere. The novel has been translated into fifteen languages and published in Spanish by different presses, and I think they all tried to capitalize on the current moment, which clearly benefits female writing—especially if it’s strong, violent, and combative, which mine is. Still, there are differences among editors, because even if they all think this kind of marketing will benefit the book, some are not willing to make literary concessions to accommodate it; they’re not ultimately crowd-pleasers. Others are. READ MORE…

WIT Month: An Interview with Aneesa Abbas Higgins

August 26, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Moore

Fear makes fools of us all—I believe passionately in the power of literature and books to help break down the barriers that divide us.

According to the Index Translationum, a database published by UNESCO, texts written originally in French are the second most frequently translated, with over two hundred thousand titles published since 1979. Though the numbers exhibit a disappointing hierarchy, the fact that French occupies such a large presence is unsurprising; after all, as today’s interviewee, Aneesa Abbas Higgins, informs us: “French is a world language.” Spoken in diasporic populations around the world, the French of today is a linguistic carrier of resistance and individualism just as it once was a language of oppression.

Aneesa Abbas Higgins has translated numerous works from the French, including Seven Stones by Vénus Khoury-Ghata (Jacaranda, 2017) and Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin (Daunt Books, 2020). In her efforts to represent a variety of original French voices, her contributions to English-language readers have been invaluable. Now, in our second feature for Women in Translation Month, blog editor Sarah Moore speaks to Higgins about her most recent translation, All Men Want to Know by Nina Bouraoui (Penguin, 2020), how French female authors are represented in translations, and the challenges of translating today.

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Sarah Moore (SM): You translate from the French into English—could you talk about your relationship with French and how you learned it?

Aneesa Abbas Higgins (AAH): I started it at school at the age of eleven—I’ve always loved languages, and I added German, Latin, and Russian over the next few years. I’ve also dabbled in Italian and Spanish and made a real effort to learn Urdu; I even tried Japanese at one point. But French was the one that really stayed with me, and I’ve spent a good part of my life going back and forth between London and various parts of France. I did my MA in French and taught French at an American school in London for more than thirty years, so I’ve spent most of my adult life immersed in French language and literature in one way or another. Learning another language is a lifelong project, and I think of myself as still learning. As a translator, one learns more and more about one’s source and target languages all the time.

SM: How did you come to be a translator?

AAH: Translating was something I’d always thought about. I’ve been fascinated by it all my life and have vivid childhood memories of my father, an Urdu speaker who was working on translating Shakespeare at the time, talking about the endless challenges of conveying such rich, figurative language. I’ve been a reader all my life, and have also always loved to write. So when I decided to retire early from teaching, it seemed like a natural progression. I took some courses in translation and creative writing, sought advice from the wonderfully generous and supportive translation community, and set about researching, translating samples, and pitching books I wanted to translate to publishers. I was lucky enough to find a publisher and obtain a PEN grant for one of those books, and I went on from there.

SM: Which books did you initially want to translate when you began your career?

AAH: Looking back, I was definitely looking mostly at female authors, but I was primarily interested in works that originated beyond the confines of mainstream metropolitan France. French is a world language, just as English is. There are many, many authors who write in French and whose relationship with the language is complex. French, the language of the colonial oppressors, becomes the vehicle for voicing anti-colonial sentiment and raising black consciousness worldwide, in the same way as English has been used by writers from the Indian subcontinent and diaspora. I wanted to help bring more of those voices, the inheritors of the original mantle of the Négritude of Senghor and Césaire, into English. And for me, it’s personal. I’ve always been drawn to writers and books that express what it means, and what it feels like, to be both an insider and an outsider in the society one lives in. READ MORE…

WIT Month: An Interview with Ginny Tapley Takemori

August 24, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

. . . a book is like a musical score, and readers are the musicians; a book is only complete with their performances.

As we approach the end of a wonderfully celebratory Women in Translation month, Asymptote is proud to present a week of content featuring women writers and translators who are working at the top of their game. Since the first WIT Month in 2014, advances and improvements have been made for women working in global letters, but the significance of continuing to read and translate women’s voices remains. The act of reading women is indistinguishable from the act of reading the world—a truth we must continue to recognize.

First up in our spotlight series is translator from the Japanese, Ginny Tapley Takemori. Though Japanese literature is a landscape built by men and women alike, the nation-specific politics and postulations of gender makes for thought-provoking discussion as one examines the truths and concepts reflected in its literature. An advocate for women translators and writers in Japan, Tapley Takemori has translated award-winning texts by Sayaka Murata, Kyoko Nakajima, Kaori Fujino, among many others. In the following dialogue, she speaks with blog editor Xiao Yue Shan about her prolific endeavours of translating such vital, well-loved work.

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Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): While there isn’t necessarily a conspicuous lack of literature by women in Japan, the country’s publishing market does seem entrenched in a gendered hierarchy, with books by women largely being marketed towards and read by women. Has this been your experience in navigating Japan’s literature? And if so, do you think it has affected the way women in Japan write?

Ginny Tapley Takemori (GTT): I don’t think there is a lack of books by women—on the contrary, there are lots of women writers! A lot of women working in publishing as well, for that matter, and I don’t really notice works by women writers being particularly marketed towards and read by women. I wonder what the stats for that might reveal? There may be some truth in it, given the historical development of women’s literature in Japan. From my own present observations, however, I’d say it’s true in certain cases; for instance, Boys’ Love manga is written by women for women, but it’s super niche. In 2017, Waseda Bungaku published their whopping tome Joseigo (女性号, Women’s Edition) and it sold out in a week! I’m not convinced that only women bought it. One thing that is clear is that women are winning the big literary prizes (about par with men for the Akutagawa and the Naoki). And I don’t get the impression that these prizewinning authors are writing specifically for women at all.

XYS: Yes, I definitely agree that women have quite a prominent, well-regarded presence in Japanese literature—arguably more so than in most other countries! Yet as you said, there are certain indications in the historical development of Japanese literature that subject matter is ingrained with gendered notions: women engaging more with the occupations of day-to-day life, men with politics and metaphysical matters.

GTT: That has been the case until not so long ago, but I’m not sure the boundaries are so clear nowadays. There’s an enormous variety in women’s writing now in terms of genre, writing style, and subject matter. I don’t think women writers are content to be confined to any particular subject or style, and in some cases, they explode these boundaries in quite spectacular and innovative ways, like Sayaka Murata with Earthlings. Some also deliberately revisit literature of the past, like Hiromi Kawakami in The Ten Loves of Nishino (trans. Allison Markin Powell), harking back to The Tale of Genji. There are critics who claim that contemporary writers are nowhere near the standard of the greats like Mishima, Soseki, et al (all men, naturally), but I have a different view of literature myself.

XYS: Would you say that one of the aims of Strong Women, Soft Power—the collective you co-founded with fellow translators Allison Markin Powell and Lucy North—is to direct a spotlight on women writers in Japan, and in doing so, direct the country towards gender equality, as well as greater awareness and resistance to sexism?

GTT: Strong Women, Soft Power is first and foremost a translators’ collective, and our aim is to give Japanese women writers a voice to speak for themselves through translation. It is not our intention to impose any forms of feminism or feminist critique on them; we simply aim to create awareness of their work and highlight the imbalance in the translation of men and women writers (a phenomenon not exclusive to Japan). At the same time, we offer a platform for promoting work by women writers and to some extent for women translators, although we do collaborate regularly with our male colleagues too. READ MORE…

Internal Harmonics: Fionn Petch on Translating Luis Sagasti’s A Musical Offering

August 20, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

It is a very delicate balancing act . . . Any discordant note, and the whole might collapse.

True to its title and Sagasti’s style at large, our July Book Club selection reads like a Bachian fugue: it features countless shifts in pace, genre, tone, and content, but it weaves them into soulful patterns; it’s filled with deliciously nerdy in-jokes, but it ultimately strikes a universal chord. How does one transcribe such a complex score into English, making sure its author’s voice still sings? Fionn Petch has done it twice (he translated Sagasti’s Fireflies to great acclaim in 2018), and here he talks about it at length. One of many priceless takeaways: don’t get lost in theory—get lost with the author in a maze-like garden crammed with sculpture-poems instead.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

Josefina Massot (JM): Like Fireflies, A Musical Offering flaunts a striking variety of literary genres: narrative, essay, aphorism, the occasional script-like quotation, and even something like blank verse (e.g., a fragment on the Voyager probe towards the end of ‘Sky Ants’). You’ve translated fiction, poetry, drama, and children’s books, among other things; did your experience with these different genres come in handy when translating Sagasti? Is there a genre you particularly enjoy working with?

Fionn Petch (FP): First of all, I’d like to thank you for a wonderfully insightful and deeply thoughtful review in Asymptote. It’s no exaggeration to say it brought new perspectives to the book for me.

Yes, it’s true that the short sections that comprise A Musical Offering switch between styles very rapidly. Sometimes, readers barely have time to find their bearings before they are propelled onto the next one. Of course, this is also a reflection of the swift changes in pace in the Goldberg Variations—which rather undermines the story that it was composed as a cure for insomnia! So in translating, it was important to be alert to these abrupt changes in tempo and intensity, and to what Sagasti is trying to get across with each section: evoke a feeling, make a subtle observation, set up an unspoken echo with another passage, or just convey a piece of information. Even the disarmingly straightforward segments that read like a line from a biography or encyclopedia require careful attention to how they are structured, as they have a very deliberate weight and emphasis. These are what Sagasti describes as ‘poetic facts.’

So there’s no doubt that all the genres you mention are relevant to draw on. You need a poetic ear for the specific weight of single words, a dramatist’s attention to gesture and glance—Sagasti is very precise in describing these—and you also need the innocence and sense of wonder often found in children’s literature. Of all the genres you mention, this last is undoubtedly the hardest to translate . . . But they all have their pleasures and challenges. READ MORE…

Something Like Delight: An Interview with So J. Lee

August 5, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

The lines I love most in Korean are often the hardest to translate into English. Frankly, it’s a ridiculous language pairing.

For So J. Lee, 2020 has been a year of growth. Just two years after their first translations were published, the Seoul-based writer and translator became Modern Poetry in Translation’s current Writer-in-Residence, recently released the fourth issue of chogwa (their quarterly e-zine showcasing multiple translations of a single poem), and will publish their full-length translation of Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla next month, followed by Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon and Lee Soho’s Catcalling in 2021.

For an emerging translator working in the midst of a global pandemic, Lee’s list of publications is undeniably impressive. But one of the many things that 2020 seems intent on teaching us is that growth can no longer be measured solely in terms of productivity and output. In correspondence and conversation, it’s clear that So J. Lee has already embraced a new kind of metric, acknowledging growing pains and citing introspections, laughter, and everyday pleasures as equally significant indicators of their progression. This was especially evident when I contacted Lee in June, keen to learn more about their forthcoming books, zine, bilingual events, and drag performance. I wanted to begin our interview with a discussion around the imminent publication of Unexpected Vanilla, but instead, Lee asked if we could start the conversation with an unusual announcement . . .

—Sarah Timmer Harvey, July 2020

So J. Lee (SJL): Can I start this interview by announcing my hibernation this winter?

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Of course! Can I ask why you intend to hibernate?

SJL: When Kim Tae-ri was asked about her plans after shooting a film and a TV series back-to-back in 2018, she said, “I plan to enter hibernation. I grew ten cm over the winter break prior starting high school. Let’s see what happens this time.” I love her casual re-articulation of rest as an opportunity for growth. I mean, rest is also rest. I don’t want to glamorize busyness, in the slim chance anyone sees me as a glamorous being. My vibe is more Pizza Rat anyway.

STH: Apart from the obvious pressures facing the world at the moment, what has kept you from resting over the past few months?

SJL: Grief. Ineffable grief and rage. Somehow we have to rest and allow for joy amidst it all. I’m still practicing. 

I’m animated by my three forthcoming books, Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla, Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon (Honford Star, 2021), and Lee Soho’s Catcalling (Open Letter Books, 2021), all of which I reflect on in my recent essay, “Not Exactly a Sister.” I translate women writers who write about women for women, so the word Unni became an organic through-line for introducing their works all at once.

As Modern Poetry in Translation’s Writer-in-Residence, I’m also hosting a virtual workshop on Lee Jenny’s concrete poem “Space Boy Wearing a Skirt.” After that will be my interview with Lee Soho and the fifth issue of chogwa!

STH: Wow, you have been busy! Can we talk about your translation of Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla, which is set to be published by Tilted Axis next month?  In 2019, Asymptote published several poems from the collection, including my favourite, “Erasable Seeds.” The poem describes a connection between two people as “a newly thickening forest” grown from “small seeds.” I think about that poem a lot. Like most of Lee Hyemi’s work, it is incredibly sensual and also reminds me of that moment when you first read a poem or line in someone’s poetry or fiction that’s so striking, you know that you just have to translate it. Do you remember which line of Unexpected Vanilla did that for you?

SJL: I was assigned in a translation workshop to translate a poet I’d never read before, and I wanted to try someone younger than Heo Su-gyeong, whose poems I’d tried translating as an undergrad. Then a title caught my eye: Unexpected Vanilla. I read the poem “Femdom” in the final section and realized that this young Korean woman was writing surrealistically about kink! I wanted to tell all my friends about it, which remains my biggest motivation to translate.

I’ve written about the Unni line in “Cupboard with Strawberry Jam” so many times already, but it’s simply iconic. Plus, Lee Hyemi wrote a variation of that line in my copy of the book: “We must be one person, cunningly divergent. Sharing an intimate language.” I’ll always remember the way she pulled out a stamp shaped like a fish and blended multiple colors before pressing it to the page. READ MORE…

A Linguistic Emigration: Chinese Women Writers on Their Translation Practices

July 29, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Jiaoyang Li

You want to learn a language not only to fit in, but to create something new in it, like any native speaker would do.

Recently, I came across an interesting comment, that despite the fact that more POC writers are being published, the English publishing world will not actually become more diverse, as the editors and gatekeepers who select them for publication continue to be predominantly white.

Asian writers have perhaps heard similar feedback from their editors: “Your story is not Asian enough,” or: “Why don’t you write more about your family’s immigration stories?” Sometimes the endeavors of white editors to market POC writers may in fact reinforce stereotypes. The same could be said for translations: if the translators of foreign literature continue to be exclusively white, native English speakers, then English readers would likely continue to receive material that reinforces their expectations, rather than that which may broaden their perspectives.

The word translation is rooted in the Latin translātus (to carry over); it’s always about appropriation and transition, but that doesn’t mean we should stop thinking about how we can strive for a more inclusive and dynamic future in publishing—trusting and bringing in more POC translators to deliver English translations may be one solution.

Jianan Qian, Na Zhong, and Liuyu Ivy Chen are all millennial Chinese female writers who have received higher education in both China and the US. They write bilingually and translate between their two languages, having already introduced several talented contemporary Chinese experimental writers and young female authors to the English world. Their work has been tremendous thus far, and one expects their futures to be even greater.

                                                                                          —Jiaoyang Li, July 2020

Jiaoyang Li (JL): All of you were writers before becoming translators. What is the relationship between writing and translation for you? Is translation a kind of creative writing?

Jianan Qian (JQ): For me, the purpose of literary translation is twofold. First, the work pushes me to do intensive reading. Usually I choose my own translation projects, so I can take the time to appreciate the author’s writing on a granular level. I also consider translation to be a writing practice—it might be a sort of creative writing, but for me, it is more like an opportunity to see how beauty comes into being differently in the two languages. I work with a wonderful co-translator, Alyssa Asquith, and I always learn a lot about linguistic, aesthetic, and cultural differences from our exchanges.

Na Zhong (NZ): A great translator should think like a writer, and to be a great writer you have to be a great reader. Translation provides the reliable gymnastic exercise for me to maintain, stretch, and become aware of my linguistic muscles. A rich text demands that I pay maximum attention to its diction, syntax, voice, and many other elements of writing. And a carefully chosen word can lead me into the depths of the story that would be impossible to reach if I were only engaging with it as a casual reader.

And yes, translating is a kind of creative writing, as imitation lies at the heart of all art forms. In the most literal sense, translating is rewriting the story in another language. It allows me, the translator, to adopt a voice and way of storytelling that I have never embodied before. The writer creates the characters imaginatively; the translator recreates the implied writer imaginatively.

Liuyu Ivy Chen (LC): For me, writing in my second language is an act of translation; living in a foreign country is a daily work of translation. Reading a new book, meeting strangers, falling in love, visiting an old place, or forgetting about the past are all translations to be enacted or retracted. This distance to cross and reduce is not so much between two languages, but between me and the world. There is so much I don’t understand, and translation is one way to cope with the unknown, to stay open-minded, and to bring seemingly unattainable beauty closer to touch. I read, write, and translate to touch the world. Translation is not only a kind of creative writing; it is a way of living. READ MORE…

The Beauty of the Original: Sam Taylor on Translating Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s A Hundred Million Years and a Day

July 23, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Barbara Halla

. . . it’s always a special pleasure to translate someone who writes perfect sentences, which I think is the case with Jean-Baptiste.

The questions and ideas that Jean-Baptiste Andrea tackles in his lauded novel, A Hundred Million Years and a Day, beautifully inform the wisdom that all searches for truth are equally intrinsic as they are extrinsic. As our Book Club selection for the month of June, the work delves into psychological complexities with erudition and poetry. A Hundred Million Years and a Day is translated into English by the award-winning author and translator, Sam Taylor, who graciously spoke to our assistant editor, Barbara Halla, about his process and methods.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

Barbara Halla (BH): While reading A Hundred Million Years and a Day, I was reminded of another recent translation of yours: Hubert Mingarelli’s Four Soldiers. In both books, unlikely friendships develop under strenuous circumstances, and there is a certain reverence for the small interactions that make human connection possible. To the extent that you are able to pick which books you translate, do you find yourself drawn to specific themes?

Sam Taylor (ST): I hadn’t thought about that connection, but you’re right: there are similarities there. Both authors also share a very simple, controlled, vivid prose style that makes you feel as though you’re inside the minds and bodies of the characters. More generally, I’ve also translated quite a few books set in or referencing World War Two. However, this isn’t down to a conscious choice on my part. In fact, it probably has more to do with publishers ‘typecasting’ me to some extent. Thankfully, I’ve translated enough very different authors and books that it’s not really a problem. What I enjoy is the variety that comes with translation, rather than constantly being drawn to the same themes. On the other hand, it’s always a special pleasure to translate someone who writes perfect sentences, which I think is the case with Jean-Baptiste.

BH: How different is it to translate a book like this one from, say, Laurent Binet’s The 7th Function of Language? Do you conduct any substantial research before translating texts that rely heavily on a specific type of knowledge, be it palaeontology or semiotics?

ST: No, I think that kind of in-depth research is the author’s prerogative. When I wrote a novel set in Renaissance Italy, I spent a whole year researching it (including a two-week trip around Italy), but I don’t have that kind of luxury—in terms of time or money—when it comes to translations because I regularly translate between six and twelve books/screenplays every year. Some ‘research’ is needed for books with specialist vocabulary (as with this novel) and/or lots of quotes and references (e.g. for The 7th Function), but I do it online as I’m translating the book; I don’t read through lots of reference works beforehand. READ MORE…