Interviews

The Language of Non-Existence: Ümit Hussein on Translating Burhan Sönmez

December 12, 2019  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Sarah Moore

Ultimately, I believe the main challenge of [translating] literary fiction is that it’s a labour of love.

For our penultimate Book Club selection of the year, we looked to the occupations of memory and philosophy to find Burhan Sönmez’s masterful novel, Labyrinth. Brought into English from Turkish with every bit of its poeticism intact by the author’s long-time partner in literature, Ümit Hussein, the work tellingly arrives at a time when we as readers are questioning the integrity of our collective memories more than ever. In the following interview, Asymptote’s Assistant Blog Editor Sarah Moore speaks to Hussein on her relationship with Sönmez, the necessity of knowing where a novel “comes from”, and the lonely profession of translation.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers in the US, the UK, and the EU. Today is the last day to sign up to give or receive our Book Club titles—starting from this month! Take advantage of our special Black Friday sale and get 10% off three-month subscriptions. Once you’re a member, be sure to join our online discussion group at our Facebook page!

Sarah Moore (SM): You’ve translated several other books by Burhan Sönmez. How has his work evolved over the years in terms of content or style? Can you point to some longstanding themes? What stood out to you about this particular novel?

Ümit Hussein (UH): Burhan and I first met when we were both starting out. I have translated all his novels to date, including his first, North—the only one yet to be published in English. I don’t want to misquote the number of books he told me he read in preparation for it, but I believe it was over a hundred. Because the novel was still in manuscript form when I translated it (it hadn’t yet found a Turkish publisher), he kept revising it. I must say, that’s something that hasn’t changed over time! He’s incredibly meticulous. Every word he writes has been carefully considered and rethought and rewritten. I know because I work very closely with my authors; I think it’s important to establish a rapport during the translation process, and consequently I’m one of those tiresome translators who is constantly in touch with questions and comments and requests for explanations. 

While each of Burhan’s novels bears his unmistakeable stamp, they are all very different and have evolved over time. Istanbul Istanbul may be his most mature in terms of craftsmanship and poeticism, but my personal favourite is Sins and Innocents. Both revolve largely around storytelling, as does Burhan’s work at large. In Istanbul Istanbul, four prisoners sharing a tiny underground cell distract each other with stories. Similarly, half of Sins and Innocents is set in Burhan’s native village in Central Anatolia, and each chapter in the Anatolian half is devoted to the often dramatic story of a real life village character. These chapters could, if developed, comprise novels in themselves: there are tales of young girls being buried alive, a student mistakenly shot dead by his brother who is embroiled in a blood feud, a beautiful woman scarred for life when she is attacked by a she-bear maddened with grief after the death of her cubs. Burhan is a born storyteller, because he comes from a culture where the oral tradition is very prominent. READ MORE…

Personal Histories, Sexual Politics: An Interview with Ayu Utami

December 9, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Lara Norgaard

The way we control our bodies and the way we control our morality is political. The two cannot be separated.

Jakarta in the 1990s was bubbling with new ideas of freedom. During the third decade of Suharto’s military dictatorship in Indonesia, punks met on the streets that soldiers patrolled. Cafés and bars pulsed with the energy of youth movements. Quality journalism found ways to wriggle its way around censorship, both official and communal. And when writers couldn’t get past the strict barriers imposed by military rule, they still circulated their critical narratives by donning pen names or disguising fact as fiction.

Ayu Utami was one of the journalists blacklisted from publishing openly in the late 1990s. A member of the group of artists and intellectuals that established Komunitas Utan Kayu, Jakarta’s first space dedicated to art and free expression under military rule, she nevertheless continued to publish her reportage anonymously. Only weeks before participating in the student movement that would pull Suharto from power, she also released her first novel, Saman, which caused massive controversy—in part because of its serendipitous timing, but also because of its uninhibited treatment of taboo topics, both political and sexual.

The novel follows the personal experiences of three young Indonesian women, their relationships to their bodies, as well as the life story of a socially conscious priest violently persecuted during the mass killings of perceived communists in 1965. In a total break from the prose of most of her contemporaries, who either perceived bodily concerns as lesser than politics or who used female sexuality as a narrative tool, Ayu’s fireball novel was not only wildly popular, but also set a precedent for contemporary feminist literature in Indonesia. In 1998, Jakarta exploded—and the shrapnel was Ayu Utami’s books, flying off shelves. READ MORE…

Your Perfect Holiday Gift: An Asymptote Book Club Subscription

December 5, 2019  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Lee Yew Leong

To celebrate two full years of the Asymptote Book Club, we're taking 10% off three-month subscriptions this holiday season!

We interrupt our regular blog programming with an announcement (and a bit of humble-bragging): The Asymptote Book Club has now entered its third year! To celebrate, we’re taking 10% off three-month subscriptions this holiday season—just sign up by December 12 at this link here (coupon pricing already applied).

We didn’t know what to expect when we first set up this Book Club, but adventurous readers (which fans of Asymptote tend to be) in the UK, the EU, and the US, have shown that there is strong demand for a curated service dedicated to world literature. 

Since the Book Club launched in December 2017, we’ve introduced compelling titles from all around the world. At our blog, we have interviewed both the authors and the translators of our book club picks, including Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and translator Jhumpa Lahiri among many others. One of our titles, Love by Hanne Orstavik (February 2018’s selection from Archipelago Books, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken) even won the 2019 PEN Translation Prize! We’re happy to live up to our promise of delivering contemporary classics and future critical hits to your door. On the occasion of the Book Club’s second anniversary, we’re revisiting a conversation with founder Lee Yew Leong (also our the magazine’s editor-in-chief) at the launch of the service two years ago.

Why a Book Club?

Well, in a nutshell: the idea was to take the important work we have done with our award-winning, free online journal and our Translation Tuesday showcases at the Guardian—that is to say, showcasing the best new writing from around the world, and giving it a physical presence outside of the virtual arena. We also wanted to celebrate (as well as support) the independent publishers who work hard behind the scenes to make world literature possible. READ MORE…

Epic Reasons to Love Greek: An Interview with Andrea Marcolongo

December 2, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

The study of a language that challenges us the way that Greek does teaches us the trade of living . . .

Andrea Marcolongo’s motivation for writing The Ingenious Language is refreshingly straightforward: the Italian writer, translator, and classical scholar wants everyone to fall in love with ancient Greek. Casting aside the rigid pedagogical practices and elitism traditionally associated with classical studies, Marcolongo focuses on the personal, exploring the “extraordinary” challenges, ecstasies, and opportunities ancient Greek offers to all who engage with it. Written for “those who have never studied it and are curious, those who have studied Greek and forgotten it, those who have studied it and hated it, and those who are studying Greek literature in school today,” The Ingenious Language is a bestseller in Italy and, in translation, has been embraced by readers around the world. Masterfully translated from the Italian by Will Schutt and published by Europa Editions, Andrea Marcolongo’s love letter to ancient Greek is now finally available in North America. To celebrate, Asymptote spoke with Marcolongo about falling in love with an ancient language, the “strange” appeal of studying Greek, the myth of Greek color blindness, and the need for a common utopia.

—Sarah Timmer Harvey

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): In the introduction to The Ingenious Language, you mention “falling in love” with ancient Greek as a young girl. Can you tell me why Greek was so appealing to you, why you fell in love?

Andrea Marcolongo (AM): I always say that the love story with Greek is the longest of my life. However, it wasn’t love at first sight: I don’t believe in that. Instead, it was a path of knowledge. I remember myself as a young girl waiting for the yellow bus to go to high school with a big Greek dictionary in my hands. It was a challenge, first of all, to learn an alphabet that I didn’t know, and then a challenge to myself, my openness to the world.

Obviously, every language is “ingenious” in its own way because it expresses thinking of those who use it every day. The adjective “ingenious” which gives the title to my book derives from three different languages: the Greek, where it comes from the verb root “to create” and means, as in Aristophanes, “creative mind,” the Latin, in which it refers to the “genium” which, according to mythology, is a small being that accompanied man throughout the course of life to make him happy, and then the French, in which “génial” means fun, or beautiful. I played with these same words in three different languages as a way of explaining why I, Andrea, a thirty-year-old woman, love Greek. I love it because it is a free and human language. Free, because its quirks—maybe even those that drove us crazy at school—were not made obligatory by grammar, but left to the free choice of those who used Greek daily to speak and write. It is, therefore, a human language because it leaves people the responsibility of choosing not only what to say, but also how to say it. And in doing so, Greek also allows the speaker the freedom to express who they are. READ MORE…

Navigating Identity through Translation: Jessica Cohen on Translating Ronit Matalon

November 25, 2019  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

I see myself trying to navigate or mediate between the two parts of my identity through my translation work.

For the month of October, the Asymptote Book Club is doubly proud to present our October selection, Ronit Matalon’s And the Bride Closed the Door, as it not only won Israel’s prestigious Brenner Prize, but was also translated by Man Booker winner Jessica Cohen. In the following interview, the translator talks to Asymptote’s Josefina Massot about her complex relationships with the author, her love for translating dialogue, and her bicultural self. 

The Asymptote Book Club is our gift to readers in the US, the UK, and the EU. Bringing the most notable titles in translated literature for as little as USD15 per book, you can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page.

Josefina Massot (JM): Your first book-length translation happened to be Ronit Matalon’s Bliss, her second novel and second work to be published in English overall. What drew you to her so early on, before she hit the level of international recognition she enjoys today?

Jessica Cohen (JC): Bliss (which in Hebrew was titled Sarah, Sarah) was Matalon’s second novel, but she had previously published a YA novel, a collection of short stories, and numerous journalistic and opinion pieces, so she was quite well known in Israel in both literary and political circles. I had read her first novel, The One Facing Us (translated by Dalya Bilu) and found it fascinating. I was certainly excited and honored to be asked to translate her novel, although since I was in the very early stages of my career, I was not really in a position to pick and choose anyway.

JM: You were each more or less getting started back then, and were also, I take it, able to exchange thoughts on the translation. And the Bride Closed the Door found you both in a radically different place: at the top of your game but presumably unable to engage as much due to Matalon’s untimely death two years ago. How did these factors—your evolution as translator and novelist, your sudden inability to fully interact—affect the translation process? What, if anything, didn’t change?

JC: When I translated Bliss I did meet with Ronit to consult with her about the translation, but our contact was quite minimal. This was both because I was an absolute beginner and still unsure of what the translator-author relationship typically looked like, and because Ronit was busy with other projects and explained to me that she found it difficult to step back into this novel that was, from her perspective, something she had moved on from. She did offer to answer specific questions should they arise, and we corresponded a little after I had finished my first draft (this was before email was such a large part of our lives, and if I remember correctly we exchanged faxes), but I think that at the time I felt I should do my best to struggle through difficult parts of the text and not “bother” the writer too much. I have since learned that discussing the text with the author is actually one of the most rewarding—and important—aspects of my work, and I have been told by a number of authors that they worry when a translator has no questions at all. READ MORE…

Words Containing Multitudes: Theodor Kallifatides on Writing The Siege of Troy

October 16, 2019  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

A basic human need is also to remember and be remembered. That is why we put one stone on top of another, we paint, we sing, we write.

In September, we were honored to present Theodor Kallifatides’s The Siege of Troy as our monthly Book Club feature. This poignant, multilayered novel intertwines a modern coming-of-age wartime story with a psychologically profound retelling of the classic Iliad. In the following interview, Assistant Managing Editor Josefina Massot speaks with the author on overcoming writer’s block, writing about Greece in a foreign land and tongue, and humanizing ancient heroes.

Josefina Massot (JM): You had an unexpected bout of writer’s block at age seventy-seven, back in 2015, after almost fifty years of uninterrupted literary output. The Siege of Troy was, I believe, the first novel you wrote once you overcame it. Did your writing process change at all as a result? What was it like, rediscovering your narrative voice in novel form?

Theodor Kallifatides (TK): Yes, it affected me and my writing greatly. I felt free from all expectations, from all demands from the publisher, the public, and myself, and my writing got wings it never had before. I did not care about anything except doing justice to my deepest feelings and ideas. I got back both my eyes. Before it, I always had—as most writers do, I dare say—an eye on what people would think about my work. Suddenly, I simply did not care. I was free. READ MORE…

“Guatemala has always produced great writers”: An Interview with Guatemalan Poet and Feminist Ana María Rodas

October 9, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

One day, poetry simply came out of me. One day, I was filled with poetry.

Wearing a thin sweater, a colorful scarf, and a dazzling smile, Ana María welcomed us to her house in Zone 15, Guatemala City. Outside it was pouring, much like when she presented her famed Poemas de la izquierda erótica (Poems from the Erotic Left), forty-six years ago. She offered us tea—“To fight back the cold,” she said, still smiling—and told us we had to do the interview in the living room, not upstairs, because, “There are books scattered everywhere; imagine, a lifetime spent collecting books.” And, yes, one can only imagine.

Ana María Rodas, born in 1937, is a veteran Guatemalan poet, journalist, and teacher. Her career spans more than sixty years. She has released close to twenty books, and her work has been translated into English, German, and Italian. In 1990, she simultaneously won the poetry and short story categories of the Juegos Florales de México, Centroamérica y el Caribe. In 2000, she won the prestigious Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature for her life’s work. She is also one of the leading figures of Guatemalan and Central American feminism. She has lived her whole life in Guatemala. And one cannot say this lightly. She grew up during the Jorge Ubico dictatorship (1931–1944), admired how the Guatemalan Revolution toppled Ubico in 1944, thrived during the so-called Ten Years of Spring, lamented the 1954 CIA-backed coup that removed the democratically elected, progressive president Jacobo Árbenz, and witnessed the atrocities of the Civil War (1960–1996). Many of her friends and colleagues were killed during that time. Alaíde Foppa, Irma Flaquer, and her dear friend, Luis de Lión, author of El tiempo principia en Xibalbá—considered one of the cornerstones of contemporary Central American literature. Even if she never picked up a rifle or joined the militarized resistance, her feminist struggle and intellectual defiance have influenced many generations.   

She’s not a cynic, though. Or bitter. She’s hopeful. “Even though we have a brute for president,” she says, “I believe in resisting.” And resisting, Ana María has done.

But as much as Ana María is grandmotherly and warm, as much as she’s a jokester and amicable, she is also analytical, astute, and disarmingly agile. She’s a force of nature, a rising tide, and an unmovable object. Her poetry is sensitive, electric, and subversive.

READ MORE…

Idiomatic Agony and Collective Vision: Izidora Angel on Bringing International Literature to the Forefront

October 3, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

I want to convince all publishers that putting the translator’s name on the cover of the book is the right thing to do . . .

Chicago-based Izidora Angel is one amongst only a handful of translators working to bring Bulgarian literature to English-language readers. Her experiences as an emerging translator working in an under-represented language prompted Angel to seek the support and knowledge of her peers, and what began as an informal workshop with fellow translators Lucina Schell and Jason Grunebaum has evolved into an international network of literary translators who seek to share resources and mentor each other, in addition to bringing literature in translation to a wider audience. Third Coast Translators Collective co-founder Angel spoke with Asymptote about forming the collective, the importance of community, activism, and her best translation practices.

—Sarah Timmer Harvey, August 2019

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Can you tell me about Third Coast Translators Collective and how it came to be?

Izidora Angel (IA): When I joined the group in early 2016, it wasn’t yet the Third Coast Translators Collective (TCTC), it was still more or less an informal group gathering of Chicago-land translators started by Lucina Schell, who translates from the Spanish, and Jason Grunebaum, who translates from the Hindi. But people kept wanting to join, and we all had this great chemistry, so we thought, why not make it official? Have a proper name, a mission and vision, a website, a digital presence, readings. Now there’s over thirty of us; it feels like a powerful entity.

STH: Why is being part of a collective important to you?

IA: Community is essential, regardless of what it might be that is bringing you together. Humans are social animals, and we need that connection for life. As translators, especially if we are translating from at-risk or vulnerable languages like I am, belonging to a group like this is integral for collaboration, workshopping, and knowledge sharing. Including minority languages like Bulgarian helps to shape the mission of a group like TCTC in a really important way. READ MORE…

Co-Translation: Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn on Translating Juan José Millás’s From the Shadows

September 19, 2019  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Jacqueline Leung

. . . Translation is a very curious combination of simultaneously being outside a text as an onlooker and deep within the guts of the thing.

For the month of August, Asymptote Book Club’s selection was From the Shadows, the English-language debut of acclaimed Spanish language writer, Juan José Millás. In the following interview, Asymptote’s Jacqueline Leung speaks to the novel’s translators, Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn, on the pressures of translating a national literary hero, the various processes of co-translation, and how the novel’s pertinent themes of isolation and alienation relate to our current times.

Jacqueline Leung (JL): Juan José Millás is routinely recognized as one of the greatest writers in Spain today, and From the Shadows marks his long overdue debut into English. How (if at all) did these factors play into your process? I’m referring to critics’s inevitably high expectations regarding a literary master’s very first work in English translation, as well as the author’s own ability to potentially chip in on or judge the outcome. Was there an added sense of pressure or due deference on your end, or were you as free as ever to “play around”?

Daniel Hahn (DH): I don’t think it was a factor, actually—it’s certainly not something Tom and I ever discussed, whether between the two of us or with our publishers. You really just have to take each text as it comes, and simply commit to doing whatever it tells you to do, without fretting about expectations or reputations. Besides, while Millás is a big deal in Spain, I’m not sure the English-speaking world has been waiting on tenterhooks for a chance to read this translation—for all intents and purposes, he’s being presented to the Anglophones as a debut. Of course, this first book could turn out to be a stupendous runaway success, which would indeed put extra pressure and expectations on book two, but if that added pressure is the price we have to pay for insane bestseller sales, I’ll take it . . . READ MORE…

“I Feel Free When I Write”: Linda Boström Knausgård on Her New Novel, Welcome to America

September 12, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

I am my dark, inner twin when I write.

Linda Boström Knausgård’s second novel, Welcome to America, is set not in the United States, but within the confines of a Swedish apartment swollen with family secrets and contrarian silence. Following the death of her father—a tragedy she is convinced she engineered through prayer—Boström Knausgård’s child narrator, Ellen, stops speaking. While the trauma inciting Ellen’s selective mutism is palpable, the young protagonist synchronously radiates power, wielding her silence as the only means of maintaining control in the face of a self-absorbed mother, her increasingly volatile brother, and the specter of impending adulthood. Meticulously translated by Martin Aitkin, Welcome to America is Boström Knausgård’s defiantly pithy portrait of a family disconnected and consumed by grief. On the eve of the novel’s publication in the United States, we asked the Swedish author, poet, and radio documentary producer about writing bravely, the experience of being written into someone else’s narrative, and the unexpected power of silence.

 —Sarah Timmer Harvey, August 2019

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Welcome to America is your second novel to be translated into English. Did you collaborate with Aitken on the translation?

Linda Boström Knausgård (LBK): I didn’t work with Martin on the translation. In fact, I didn’t hear from him while he was working on it. Martin is a very good translator, and I think that he’s produced a beautiful translation. I’ve read it twice in English, and I am very happy with it. I believe that if I had started to concentrate too much during his work and asked him all my questions before he was ready, I’d be exhausted. Our languages have a lot of differences—sentences do not start, or end, in the same way. I know Norwegian and Danish very well, and when it comes to translating work into these languages, it can be difficult not to intervene too much. When I finally had a book translated into Finnish, it was a relief because I didn’t understand a word. I think it’s best to let go as much you can, but you then must also be happy when you finally read it. If you have a good translator, you should stick with him or her!

STH: When you are writing, do you consider the language in which you are writing? For example, how Swedish might shape and contain the narrative? 

LBK: I write in Swedish and could not write in any other language, never! The language forms the story; it is my frame, and so I cannot abandon it. I love to write in Swedish. I like how it presents itself on the page, almost like a surprise. READ MORE…

Flowing Speech: On the Complexities of Audiovisual Translation

September 11, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

It’s really beautiful to get carried away by your emotions while translating.

Over the course of its four-season run, U.S. television show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend won acclaim and awards for its groundbreaking musical format, treatment of mental illness, and reinvention of romantic comedy tropes. Plus, it’s funny—really funny. Every episode contains jokes, quick banter, songs, and a slew of puns and double-entendres. Audiovisual translator Alicia González-Camino, who translated the scripts for Spanish dubbing, knew she’d have her work cut out for her. I spoke with González-Camino via email. Her responses to my questions, compiled below, illustrate her translation process and relationship to this project. Here she is, in her own words, discussing the show’s challenges and whether audiovisual translation counts as a literary art.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity and translated from Spanish.

—Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large for Argentina

As a translator, I started out doing any translation that fell into my hands, mostly technical, and it was so boring. I didn’t enjoy translating at all. Audiovisual translation, on the other hand, allows me to be more creative. I have fun translating, and I can feel proud of the result when I successfully make a scene or especially complicated speech flow well and sound natural. It’s a kind of translation where, on the same day, you can have animated drawings with rhymes and little made-up names, something with mafiosos, full of cursing, and something funny and comedic. And in my case, since I translate from five languages, you can also change from one language to another in one day. The result is that you can have really engaging days thanks to the variety.

Plus, in the case of dubbing, the translation comes to life in the voice of the actors. And if you’re lucky, a translation of yours can become part of the whole country’s vocabulary when a show or movie is really well-known and some phrase takes hold in the popular lexicon for posterity. That hasn’t happened to me yet with my translations, but leaving my footprint through language seems incredibly fun to me, in addition to being an honor.

I guess audiovisual translation is somewhat literary, because we’re all tied to a style we have to respect. We approach works that have existing souls and, in some sense, we create works with new souls that our respective audiences can understand, provoking the same emotions and reactions as the original.

READ MORE…

Transcribing Spoken Dialects: Sharidan Russell on Language Ideologies in Morocco

September 9, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg

I often think back to the famous saying that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

Sharidan Russell is a Rabat-based researcher who studies language ideologies. After graduating with a BA in Arabic and Middle East Studies from Dartmouth College, she was named a Fulbright fellow to Morocco, where she conducted research on transition of Darija, the dialect of Arabic spoken in the Maghreb, into a written language. Keenly interested in the ways new writing practices evolve, Russell’s work draws on sociolinguistics and the field of linguistic anthropology as she seeks to understand changing social practices through the lens of literature.

Hodna Nuernberg (HN): Morocco, where you have been conducting your research, has a very rich linguistic landscape. Could you please describe how Morocco’s languages interact and describe the role of Darija specifically?

Sharidan Russell (SR): Morocco has both official languages and what I refer to as “de facto official languages”. After its independence in 1956, Morocco began the process of Arabization by re-introducing Arabic as the language of government and education. By Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)—or Fusha—was meant. Today, MSA is the kingdom’s official language, but French, which is not in the constitution, functions as a de facto official language. There are very high standards for “fluency” in France and there are many ideologies around the continued use of French. In 2011, Tamazight—the name of a family of languages spoken by the Amazigh, or indigenous peoples of the Maghreb—became an official language in the constitution. Morocco is also home to a range of dialects, which are—or have been—largely unwritten. Darija is the most widely spoken of these dialects and it varies from region to region. Darija is also a de facto official language, in a sense, because it is so widely used for communication at a variety of levels, though it has no official status. Hassaniya, which is spoken in the south, is another dialect that is so different from Darija as to be mutually unintelligible. Hassaniya is recognized in the constitution—not as an official language, but as an important aspect of Morocco’s culture and diversity. Darija is the only of these that is not mentioned.

My research looks at the concept of language ideology against the backdrop of Morocco’s linguistic context. A language ideology refers to the thoughts and feelings we all carry about the languages we speak (or do not speak). For example, we sometimes see a stereotype in the U.S. about people who speak with a southern accent as being less educated. While stereotypes like this aren’t necessarily true, for research like mine it is important to understand where these ideologies come from and how they reflect other parts of the culture.

READ MORE…

“Unintentional Unity”: Deborah Woodard and Roberta Antognini on translating Amelia Rosselli’s Obtuse Diary

September 5, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

Translating Rosselli’s prose is not different from translating her poetry. Her language is equally challenging, her syntax equally subversive.

Amelia Rosselli’s work is deeply marked by her family and personal history. Born in 1930 to a British activist and a martyred Italian-Jewish antifascist, she lived as an eternal outsider in France, the US, the UK, and Italy. A polyglot with persistent depression, her poetry challenges. It challenges the confines of genre and conventional syntax, it challenges the society with which she was ever at odds, and it challenges the reader to accompany her through her brave literary wanderings. Rosselli ended her own life by jumping out the window of her fifth-floor apartment in Rome in 1996.

Obtuse Diary, published by Entre Rios Books in late 2018, is the first and only collection of Rosselli’s prose. The writing spans a number of years and is organized into three sections and two illuminating afterwords, one by the author and one by one of the translators. Asymptote’s Lindsay Semel spoke with Deborah Woodard and Roberta Antognini, two of the collection’s three translators, about the joys and challenges of rendering Rosselli’s stunning and difficult Italian into English.

Lindsay Semel (LS): Tell me about the origin of this project. How did you come to translate this text together? What was the collaboration process like?

Deborah Woodard (DW): Translating Amelia Rosselli’s Diario Ottuso into Obtuse Diary was quite the saga. It’s a little book, but it took forever to translate. Giuseppe Leporace, my first co-translator, and I brought out some sections of the Diary in The Dragonfly, a selection of Rosselli’s poetry, back in 2009. After we finished The Dragonfly and brought it out through Chelsea Editions, I decided to rework Obtuse Diary and publish it in its entirety.  When Giuseppe became too busy to review it with me, he graciously stepped down from the project. On Giuseppe’s suggestion, I worked on the Diary with Vanja Skoric Paquin, a talented young linguist with a particular gift for unraveling snarled syntax. When Vanja gave birth to her daughter she, in turn, stepped down. A year or so passed, and then I recommenced with Dario De Pasquale. Dario and I tore the earlier translation apart, sentence by sentence. When Dario became too busy to continue to translate with me (do we see a pattern here?), I was extremely fortunate to join forces with Roberta, my current—and from here on out, sole—co-translator on the final version. READ MORE…

All That Makes a Life: Jennifer Croft on Writing Her Memoir

September 2, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Sohini Basak

Translation requires striking a balance between two people’s voices that can be very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

From being the co-winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize alongside the writer Olga Tokarczuk, Jennifer Croft has just been announced as a judge of the 2020 International Booker Prize. Croft works across Polish, Ukrainian, and Argentine Spanish, and is currently translating The Book of Jacob, a nine-hundred-page epic by Olga Tokarczuk. She is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, and National Endowment for the Arts grants, as well as the Michael Henry Heim Prize.

In Homesick, Croft’s memoir, words and their meanings shift and shine through in unusual, tender, and life-transforming ways as the subject moves from a family home, to being the youngest person to be enrolled in her undergraduate class, to going through tragic heartbreaks. A most engaging read, the memoir itself has shape-shifted in interesting ways, having started as a Spanish novel and as a blog. The English-language version (Unnamed Press, September 2019) too is accompanied by photographs, which operate as their own language system, bringing, by turns, softness and sharpness to the storytelling. On the occasion of the release of Homesick, poet and previous Social Media Manager of Asymptote, Sohini Basak, spoke to Jennifer Croft over email.

Sohini Basak (SB): I want to start with the photographs. Could you tell us a bit more about the role of photography in childhood and consequently in your memoir?

Jennifer Croft (JLC): Although photography played an enormous role in my childhood and adolescence, I didn’t really remember that until I started writing Homesick. Because I was living in Buenos Aires, Argentina when I wrote the book, I wrote it in my strange Spanish, which is both foreign (since I started learning Spanish only in my late twenties) and very local (since I’ve only ever studied and spoken porteño Spanish in Buenos Aires). In that first Spanish-language version (called Serpientes y escaleras, coming out next year with Entropía), that language provided a sense of suspense about where this character from Tulsa, Oklahoma was going to go next, and how she was going to end up speaking the way she did. READ MORE…