Language: Arabic

Spring 2022: Highlights from the Team

May 2, 2022  |  in News  |  by AM Ringwalt, Amaryllis Gacioppo, Andriana Hamas, Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, José García Escobar, and Liam Sprod

Still don’t know where to start with our latest edition? Here are some more entry points, courtesy of our generous multicontinental team!

I felt that the Spring Asymptote was an incredibly timely and unsettling issue and I hope that broader readers can use it as a lens to think about ongoing dynamics of imperialism, capitalism, and more. I was drawn immediately to Kim Hyesoon’s poems from The Hell of That Star (tr. Cindy Juyoung Ok), with its overwhelming and abundant female presence that kept mutating. In Signe Gjessing’s poems from Tractatus (tr. Denise Newman), I really enjoyed the tension between the abstract and the material—for example, the fact that shampoo is able to exist alongside transcendence. The voice of Nina Yargekov’s “The Obedient Little Girl” (tr. Charles Lee) was immediately disarming! I was delighted by the emphasis on disobedience at the end. Last but not least, I enjoyed reading Agnieszka Taborska’s The World Has Gone Mad: A Surrealist Handbook How to Survive (tr. Soren Gauger). Leonora Carrington is my favorite artist and writer (I actually have a tattoo of one of her paintings); it was exciting to see her mentioned at the conclusion. I also enjoyed the automatic writing components. This is a text I do need to spend more time with and I am so glad that it was included in this issue.

—AM Ringwalt, Educational Arm Assistant

I have a love for Nordic literature in general, there is something about its directness and its simplicity, and yet at the same time its ability to confront existential issues through the details of the everyday. As I live in Sweden and yet am not Swedish, I see literature as a way into understanding the place and society where I am. I was struck by how so many of the pieces in the Swedish special feature confronted the deep hypocrisy that is there in Sweden’s self-presentation as a tolerant, progressive, consensual, and equal society: The uncovering of misogyny and violence against women in the Kristina Lugn (tr. Zach Maher), Lina Hagelbäck (tr. Freke Räihä) and Hanna Nordenhök (tr. Saskia Vogel) (there is a reason that the original Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was Män som hatar kvinnor [Men Who Hate Women]); or history of institutionalized homophobia in the Jonas Gardell (tr. Elizabeth Clark Wessel); and racism in the Majgull Axelsson (tr. Kathy Saranpa). These all show that there is something deeply troubling in the supposedly comfortable Swedish society that people here live in. And yet, for all this social awareness, these texts are not themselves sanctimonious or worthy. There is a distinct existential edge in each of them, they show how these social issues penetrate deep down into the world of the characters affected by them. Oppression is not an accident or mistake that can be simply rectified or remedied, it is a constitutive fact of the world as it exists and is revealed and experienced: violence, oppression, and torment penetrate and persist right through the world, into each blade of grass, bunch of flowers, childhood memory, or everyday action, and all this writing captures something of that pain and its penetration. This is the world. And it needs to be shown and seen again, recognized for what it is, as it is in this writing; and through the seeing again that this writing provides, it can also be recreated as other than it is.

—Liam Sprod, Copy Editor

Andrii Krasnyashchikh’s As Bombs Fall (tr. Matthew Hyde) made me cry. This account of daily life in Kharkiv made me think of my grandmother living in Rome under Nazi occupation—the immediacy of daily life while the world crumbles around you. Accounts such as this allow us a window into the individual human impact of war that newspaper reportage does not. Johannes Lilleøre’s My Sick Friend (tr. Sharon E. Rhodes) read like prose poetry. I love the way it plays with time: we move through a life, and then once illness strikes, time slows down. The taut, matter-of-fact sentences, with their seemingly throwaway observations and details, evoke not just the immediacy created by bodily illness and suffering, but also convey the pain and helplessness of the narrator. Kate Tsurkan’s interview with Zenia Tompkins discusses so many vital questions, for example: what responsibility do we children of the diaspora have to our homelands? How much is our image of homeland shaped by the trauma of our parents and grandparents?

—Amaryllis Gacioppo, Newsletter Editor

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Foal” by Mohamed Makhzangi

April 26, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Chip Rossetti

One of Egypt’s best short story writers, Mohamed Makhzangi traces the numinous, almost supernatural, connections between our species and others.

Each story in Mohamed Makhzangi’s unique collection Animals in Our Days features a different animal species and its fraught relationship with humans—water buffalo in a rural village gone mad from electric lights, brass grasshoppers purchased in a crowded Bangkok market, or ghostly rabbits that haunt the site of a long-ago brutal military crackdown. Other stories tell of bear-trainers in India and of the American invasion of Iraq as experienced by a foal, deer, and puppies.

Originally published in 2006, Makhzangi’s stories are part of a long tradition of writings on animals in Arabic literature. In this collection, animals offer a mute testament to the brutality and callousness of humanity, particularly when modernity sunders humans from the natural environment. Makhzangi is one of Egypt’s most perceptive and nuanced authors, merging a writer’s empathy with a scientist’s curiosity about the world.

 Like Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, Haruki Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes, or J. M. Coetzee’s Lives of Animals, Makhzangi’s stories trace the numinous, almost supernatural, connections between our species and others. In these resonant, haunting tales, Animals in Our Days foregrounds our urgent need to reacquire the sense of awe, humility, and respect that once characterized our relationship with animals.

We are happy to partner with Syracuse University Press to present an excerpt of its debut in English.

FOAL

A wise man was asked: “What possession is the most noble?” He replied: “A horse, followed by another horse, which has in its belly a third horse.” 

—al-Damiri, Major Compendium on the Lives of Animals 

Trembling, the small foal scurried between his mother’s legs when the sound of explosions struck his ears and the lightning flash of bombs glimmered in his eyes. He couldn’t hear the voices of any of the humans he was familiar with, not even the terrifying voice of the president’s son, whose arrival at the palace race track instantly caused the grooms to tremble and made the horses quake. His voice was rough, and his hand heavy and brutal. He had big teeth that showed when he scowled at other people or laughed with the foal—for him alone the president’s son laughed. He would place his right hand around the foal’s neck and burst out laughing while taking some sugar out of his pocket for him, the purest kind of sugar in the world. He would feed it to him with affection and delight, but he was harsh and irritable toward everyone else. Once the foal saw him beating a stable hand who was slow to saddle his horse. After the stable hand fell to the ground, the president’s son kicked him with the iron spurs of his riding boot, and kept kicking his head until blood poured out of his nose, mouth, and ears. He gave the foal’s own mother a hard slap when she shied away a little just as he was about to ride. He kept slapping her on the muzzle while she bucked, whinnying pitifully, until blood poured from her jaws. He didn’t stop hitting her until the foal ran up and came between him and his mother.

The foal felt the tension in his mother’s warm stomach above him. She was stifling the restless movement in her legs so as not to bump against the body of her little one taking shelter up against her. She stood in place and trembled whenever bombs reverberated or the flash of explosions lit up the sky. During the few lulls, no sooner did she relax and he could feel the warm flow of her affection, than the noise and flashes would start up again. Deafening noise, then silence. Deafening noise, then silence. Fires, the sound of buildings collapsing, and screams. Then after a long grueling night, a terrible silence prevailed. With the first light of dawn, the foal heard a clamor of human voices shouting at each other, and hurrying footsteps, then a lot of people burst in on them, their faces covered in dust and their eyes red. They started fighting with each other around the fenced corral. Then the gate was thrown open, and the foal could feel his mother’s body trying to get away from the rough rope around her neck. Another piece of rope went around his neck, too, and he saw himself running with his mother, bound together to a rope tied to the back of a ramshackle pickup truck that clattered down long rubble-filled streets. Fires blazed on either side of them. Corpses were scattered about. Chaos reigned.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Moon’s Desire” by Ines Abassi

March 29, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Karen McNeil and Miled Faiza

They say that children with iron deficiency will peel the lead paint off the walls and eat it. What about souls with love deficiency?

This Translation Tuesday, Tunisian writer Ines Abassi pens a powerful story of a woman who escapes her violent husband in order to furnish her account of things. In a breathless first-person narration captured brilliantly by translators Karen McNeil and Miled Faiza—who also translated Shukri Mabkhout’s The Italian, our October 2021 Book Club selection—the power of this piece comes from its agile movement between the mind’s self-doubt and the certainty of one’s bodily experience. This memorable story shows us how Ines Abassi is a compelling voice working in Arabic today.

“I have wanted to translate this short story from the moment I read it in the Egyptian cultural magazine Mirit in 2019 because of its powerful expression of resistance. Resistance here is manifested in the ability to say no, to challenge the toxic masculine mentality that sees women’s bodies as a commodity to be consumed on demand. Resistance is also manifested in the author’s alternation of description, contemplation, and the narrative, in which time overlaps in a way that expresses the complexity of life and relationships. Inas Al Abbasi, one of the most important writers of her generation, is able to express in this short story the inevitability of continuing to confront and challenge violence in closed rooms and in an open writing in which colors, music, and events overlap to create food for a broken soul.” 

—Miled Faiza

The night is stained with light.

It might end, this night, with a translucent fog covering the tops of the cypresses, like last night. Or it might end with a pale morning, crowned with a laurel wreath of terror and with an urge to run away, like the morning of that one summer night. Where does the road home start from? From the last house that I escaped from? Or from the last hurriedly booked hotel room?

I remember clearly: his hand was around my neck. The cloudy look in his eyes. The moon was alone outside, with no poems to praise its illusory beauty. I remember, at the same time, the delicate light flowing into the room through the open windows. We were in our room. We were together and his hand was around my neck, on that night and the other nights like it throughout the years, his hand pressing on my soul.

The road winds through the trees. There are scattered farms on each side of the road, and I see ducks and other farm animals here and there. When my heart starts to pound at the heights, I close my eyes. I remember my eyes clouding over from the pain. The scene in front of me is extravagantly beautiful. My eyes drink in the greenery at every bend, until I forget the hands that choked me one summer night. I feel dizzy from the extravagant beauty of the road as it ascends toward Bouisse, and I forget.

They say that children with iron deficiency will peel the lead paint off the walls and eat it. What about souls with love deficiency? They feed on the bark of trees—every single one, the trees on the road as well as the forest trees. Souls that are hungry for love touch trees, get close to them and embrace them. I did this every time, in every trip I took after becoming free of him, and from his hand and the frying pan. Every time I stopped the rental car and get out to embrace the trees.

A life can completely change between one night and another. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Identity” by Rolla Barraq

March 15, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Jeffrey Clapp and Muntather Alsawad

From the clouds piled up in the eyes of mothers

This Translation Tuesday, Muntather Alsawad and Jeffrey Clapp team up to translate a poem by the Iraqi poet Rolla Barraq. Within the poem’s lilting anaphora and its prayer-like solemnity, the speaker beholds an Iraq marked by alternating scenes of hope and hardship; a mise en scene that structures, one may surmise, a young person’s selfhood. As “the track of tanks on the grass” continue to resonate with ongoing world events today, let Rolla Barraq’s words remind us of how words can be one way we remember and recite for our time. 

Identity

From the smile of a child begging at the traffic lights on the hottest day of July
From the rough hand of a porter tired of dreaming
From a woman’s forehead burned by the oven of absence
From the blood that flowed until it became water for the rebellious
From the lover whose soothing voice did not soften his farewell
From a roof cracked by an orphan
From the tears of the homeless, measuring the distance with insults
From old friends who meet along the roads by chance alone
From the slums of death, sidewalks, homes and people
From the tales of a city filled with drunkards, salt
           and women confiding in bits of overheard conversation
From the windows of narrow alleys and their faint noises at night
From the track of tanks on the grass
From the image of God scattered among the victims
From a palm tree still bowing in the shade of the watchers
From a journey between the reeds of the marshes and the gaps between
           strangers
From the singing of a loyalist, about the boy who saw nothing
From the sadness of the white mountains, and the rock of their dark heart
From the clouds piled up in the eyes of mothers
From a flame that slept in the belly of the whale—
You all came to me in Iraq, and I fell in love with you. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

March 4, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Carol Khoury, and Eva Wissting

Literary awards, bookstore revivals, and political upheavals from Sweden, Bulgaria, and Gaza!

This week, our editors bring news of a major literature prize in Sweden, disturbing governmental policies repressing freedom of speech in Bulgaria, and the rebirth of a central bookstore in Gaza. Read on to find out more!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

The Nordic Council has announced the nominees of its annual Literature Prize, which has awarded a work of fiction in a Nordic language­­­ since 1962. The languages include Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Icelandic, Greenlandic, Faroese, and Sámi. The literary works considered may be novels, plays, essays, short stories, or poetry of artistic and literary quality. The purpose of the award is to create interest in the literatures and languages within the cultural community of the Nordic region. This year, eleven nominated writers represent all the countries and languages of the region, and four of the works are novels written in Swedish.

Kerstin Ekman is one of Sweden’s most acclaimed writers, with a long list of publications since her debut in 1959. In 1994, she was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize for the novel Blackwater, available in English translation by Joan Tate. This year, she is nominated for The Wolf Run, a novel about a man in his seventies and his relationship to nature as he comes to terms with his life. The other Swedish nominee is Jesper Larsson, for Den dagen den sorgen (literally translated as That Day That Sorrow, or also as “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it”), about a single father and his relationship to his teenage daughter. Finnish writer Kaj Korkea-aho, nominated for Röda rummet, also writes in Swedish, and so does Ålandic writer Karin Erlandsson, who is nominated for the novel Hem. The winner will be announced on November 1, during the Nordic Council’s Session in Helsinki. Previous winners include the internationally renowned Sofi Oksanen (Dog Park, Purge, When the Doves Disappeared), Jon Fosse (The Other Name, Trilogy, Morning and Evening), and Nobel Prize laureate Tomas Tranströmer.

More financial support to Swedish writers is on the way in the form of a crisis package. Because of the consequences of the pandemic faced by many writers during the past two years, the Swedish Authors’s Fund has received thirty million SEK from the government. The organization has now decided that around 1,500 writers and literary creators who were previously granted scholarships will each receive an additional amount of approximately twenty thousand SEK.

READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (Feb 2022)

February 21, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

What do Asymptote staff get up to when they're not seeking out the best in world literature? Answer: Quite a lot!

Senior Copy Editor Anna Aresi recently translated a selection of Laura Corraducci’s poems for The Antonym.

Various Wanted. An (almost) missing original and five—literary, computational and visual—translations, the latest collection by Chris Tanasescu, aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, co-authored with Steve Rushton and Taner Murat, has recently been described by Servanne Monjour at the Sorbonne as “a pioneering translation using topic modeling for the very first time.“

Editor-at-Large for Sweden Eva Wissting was longlisted for ROOM Magazine’s annual poetry contest. She has also had essays published in Nordic literary journal Kritiker, issue #61-62, and Finland-based cultural journal Horisont, issue #2021:3.

Educational Arm Assistant Katarzyna Bartoszyńska recently published a book review of Nastassja Martin’s In The Eye of the Wild at the KGB Bar Lit Mag.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has new essays in Minor Literature[s] and the Cincinnati Review.

Copy Editor Nadiyah Abdullatif recently published a short extract of her English co-translation, with Anam Zafar, of Lebanese author Lena Merhej’s hit graphic novel Mrabba wa Laban at The Markaz Review. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2022

February 14, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan and Andrea Blatz

New work this week from Tunisia and Russia!

In this week’s selection of translated literature, we present Hassouna Mosbahi’s expansive, dreaming portrait of Tunisia through the recollections of one man’s life, as well as Nataliya Meshchaninova’s precise, cinematic cult classic of a young girl carving her own way through abuse and neglect in post-Soviet Russia. Read on for our editors’ takes on these extraordinary titles.

mobsani

Solitaire by Hassouna Mosbahi, translated from the Arabic by William Maynard Hutchins, Syracuse University Press, 2022

Review by Alex Tan, Assistant Editor

The essential core. The innermost heart. The pupil of the eye. The central pearl of the necklace.

These are epithets lifted from a tenth-century anthology of poetry and artistic prose by the literary connoisseur Abu Mansur al-Tha’alibi—a privileged arbiter of what counted as the era’s innermost heart. Determined to immortalise the remarkable cultural efflorescence of his contemporary Arab-Islamic world, al-Tha’alibi took upon himself the task of gleaning the anecdotes, biographies, epigrams, and panegyrics he deemed exemplary of his epoch: “sift[ing] our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls”, as Virginia Woolf once wrote.

Not for nothing did al-Tha’alibi name his compilation Yatimat al-Dahr fi Mahasin Ahl al’-Asr: “The Unique Pearl Concerning the Elegant Achievements of Contemporary People.” From the inheritance of this opulent work, the Tunisian writer Hassouna Mosbahi drew inspiration for his own dazzling, shape-shifting novel Yatim al-Dahr—cleverly rendered in English by William Maynard Hutchins as Solitaire. Hutchins contextualises the title in his helpful preface, explaining that “yatimat” refers to both a “unique, precious pearl” and “fate’s orphan.” “Solitaire” reflects these prismatic valences.

Solitaire, also, is a game one plays with oneself; Mosbahi’s book, in many ways, is a puzzle with no straightforward answers. It is encyclopaedic and uneven and oblique. Stories proliferate, nestled within other stories, structurally echoing the classic Thousand and One Nights.

On a first reading, it is easy to sink into the sediment of the novel’s non-linear chronology, before being pulled abruptly out of the seductive illusion and back onto the newly destabilised present. Mosbahi’s work dissolves temporal barriers, saturating the present with echoes of the past. It feels vertiginous to remember that all the action spans a single day, kaleidoscoped through the mind of the eponymous orphan-protagonist Yunus and taking place mostly along the coast, at the threshold of sea and sand. Language arrives on the page like slips of paper curled up in glass bottles: Sufi prayers, journal entries, newspaper articles, quotations of verse, orally transmitted tales, autobiographical monologues—shored up in their rawness. Digressions expand, often without warning, to constitute entire chapters. Hutchins’ translation captures these tonal shifts impeccably. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 11, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, José García Escobar, and Suhasini Patni

New translations and upheavals in publishing from India, Central America, and Palestine!

Around the globe, February has seen upheavals in Indian publishing, the release of new translations of Central American literature, and the loss of a giant in Palestinian letters. Read on to find out more! 

Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

The Indian publishing industry was taken by storm on February 1, when Amazon India announced that it was shutting down Westland Books, home to some of the fiercest writing from the country. The details of how it will affect the backlog of books, whether they will remain available or be taken out of circulation, are still unclear. Westland is one of the largest English-language trade publishers in India, with an imprint called Context that publishes literary fiction and another called Eka that publishes translations. They have consistently released daring titles, such as The Price of the Modi Years by Aaker Patel and Modi’s India by Christophe Jaffrelot.

The Mint Lounge, one of the first publications to break the news, wrote: “The editors of Westland were informed about the impending closure only earlier today, a member of the staff at the publishing house said, requesting anonymity.” After hearing the devastating news, many have posted on social media to appeal to readers to buy books before they run out. The Bookshop, an independent bookstore in New Delhi, wrote: “For a company to acquire an independent, local publisher of books that will in future certainly prove to be foundational texts of Indian literature, and then to arbitrarily shut it with no forewarning is a highly reprehensible act that the entire community of booksellers condemns.”

Westland recently published best-selling Malayalam author KR Meera’s latest novel Qabar, translated by Nisha Susan. A short novella of magical realism, the book is a riff on the Babri Masjid case. It explores increased communalism in India and ultimately magnifies the tensions that lead to lynching, mob-making, and dehumanization.

READ MORE…

Ambrosial Wafts: An Interview with A.J. Naddaff

February 10, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alex Tan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2022

February 2, 2022  |  in News  |  by Barbara Halla, Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, and Lee Yew Leong

Highlights from the Winter 2022 edition, presented by our section editors!

Gathering new work from 43 countries, the Winter 2022 edition might be overwhelming at first. But don’t let that stop you from diving right in! Whether you consume the issue from cover to cover or click on whatever catches your fancy, we just hope you enjoy reading this eleventh anniversary edition as much as our section editors have loved putting it together! Here to tell you more about their lineups are Yew Leong, Barbara, Bassam, and Caridad. If, after reading the issue, you’re inspired to submit work, don’t forget that we welcome submissions all year round; if you are a Swedish-English translator, take note that we’re currently inviting submissions to a paid Swedish Literature Feature, slated for publication in Spring 2022. For guidelines on how to submit, go here.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, Special Features, and Interview Editor:

The statistics are undeniable: With one language dying every two weeks, ninety percent of all languages will go extinct within the next one hundred years. Even as we at Asymptote celebrate another milestone with our most diverse issue yet, loss—specifically that of entire worlds indexed by languages—is never quite far from our minds. In Dear You, translated brilliantly by Samantha Farmer, Croatian author Jasna Jasna Žmak takes us on a playful thought experiment inspired by Barthes: ”What if one word was removed each time a speaker of its language died as an act of remembrance?” Intended as an enjoinder to Eliot Weinberger’s essay published in these very pages one year ago, Yeshua G. B. Tolle’s submission to this issue’s Brave New World Literature Feature examines Aaron Zeitlin’s poetry, written in a language “half of whose speakers had been wiped off the face of the earth” when Nazis invaded his native Poland. “On what world do we gaze,” he asks poignantly, ”when the poet himself believes the world is over?” Whole worlds are rendered believably before our eyes in Matt Reeck’s skillful rendering of Rachid Djaïdani’s 1999 classic of banlieue literature that smashed Parisian tropes, and in Kim Su-on’s atmospheric science fiction brought to us by talented translators Spencer Lee-Lenfield and Lizzie Buehler. My two personal highlights from the Poetry section couldn’t be more diametrically apposite: the first (the Kazakh poet Anuar Duisenbinov) is as light (and alive with defiance) as the second (Spanish poet Pepe Espaliú) is weighted (with clear-eyed acceptance of inevitable death); both are powerful and moving. Rounding up the issue’s stellar lineup, Neske Beks and Charlotte Van den Broeck (in the Flemish Literature Feature I curated) as well as Jamaican-born artist Cosmo Whyte (in the Visual section, which Eva Heisler assembled) make important contributions to the conversation on our collective racial past.

From Barbara Halla, Criticism Editor:

In many reviews, the very act of translation can feel like an afterthought; usually reviewers will include a short line or paragraph to acknowledge the deftness of the translator’s skill, but that will be the extent of their engagement. I can understand why that happens: at times, without some familiarity with the original, it can feel impossible to speak in detail about the translator’s craft—which is why Tom Abi Samra’s review of Huda J. Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen’s translation of Salim Barakat’s poetry is such a revelation. In his review, the translation features front and center, as Abi Samra investigates how Barakat’s attempt to defamiliarize Arabic is rendered into English, doing an almost phrase-by-phrase analysis of the translation. There are some texts, however, where the reviewer does not have a choice but to engage with the translator, because the very book they are reviewing questions the porous borders between author and translator. This is the case with Catherine Fisher’s fascinating review of Tomaž where Joshua Beckman appears not merely as a translator, but as a co-writer having had a direct hand in choosing how to present Tomaž Šalamun’s poetry into English. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

January 21, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Erica X Eisen, and Julia Sherwood

New festivals, publications, and films from Slovakia, Palestine, and Kazakhstan!

This winter, festivals and events across the globe introduce new literature in translation, while literary magazines and film festival screenings amplify underrepresented voices. In Slovakia, recent works explore sexual identity, the weight of twentieth-century history, and trauma. From Palestine, Arablit and Arablit Quarterly launched its first “In Focus” section, spotlighting Iraqi literature. In Kazakhstan, the film Akyn highlights the political power of writing, acquiring greater significance in the context of recent governmental restrictions on free speech. Read on to find out more!

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Slovakia

In October 2021, Barbora Hrínová was declared the winner of Slovakia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Anasoft Litera. The jury praised her remarkable debut collection Jednorožce (Unicorns) for writing “about otherness without exoticizing or exploiting it, thus enabling us to accept different ways of life or the search for identity.” As the author herself put in a recent interview: “Otherness in Unicorns occurs on two levels; one is literal, where the characters from the LGBTI+ community belong by definition, and the other is universal, all-human; after all, every person is a minority in their own right. I didn’t want to emphasize the element of sexual identity or outward difference in the characters, because I think that such people are part of everyday life and no different from the majority in any essential way. Rather, I was interested in and irritated by the way they are perceived by society, which often reacts very dismissively and critically to even a minor deviation from the norm. I wanted to create a space in the stories where we could also look at the ‘different characters,’ or a variety of shortcomings in a somewhat more human way.” The fact that Hrínová’s collection also won the 2021 René Prize, chosen by secondary school students, testifies to the author’s empathetic handling of a sensitive subject.

November 2021 marked the centennial of the passing of Slovakia’s national poet, Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav. This brief video, recorded for the Slovak consulate in New York City by Columbia University professor Christopher W. Harwood, is a great primer for anyone not familiar with Hviezdoslav’s work. Literature scholar Charles Sabatos gave a captivating Zoom talk on Gejza Vámoš (1901–1956), another Slovak writer not yet widely known in the English-speaking world. Sabatos, who is translating Vámos’s seminal Atómy boha (God’s Atoms), published in 1928 and 1933, focused on issues of language and identity in this book, summed up by one critic as “a novel of heroism and syphilis.”

While this translation awaits publication, two recent works by contemporary Slovak writers appeared in October, inaugurating Seagull Books‘s Slovak list: Boat Number Five by Monika Kompaníková (translated by Janet Livingstone) and Necklace/Choker by Jana Bodnárová (translated by Jonathan Gresty). TranslatorsAloud features excerpts from both books: a bilingual reading by the author and translator in one case and a reading by the translator in the other, while an interview with Jana Bodnárová is available on Trafika Europa Radio.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

January 14, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, MK Harb, and Peera Songkünnatham

From Scheherazade to Avicii, the literary news of the week spans new looks at pivotal figures.

From book fairs to bestsellers, the world of international letters knows no rest. In Qatar, the 31st Doha International Book Fair has launched with an in-person schedule. In Japan, a new project aiming to promote Southeast Asian and Indian literature has published an impressive roster of short fiction, and in Sweden, two beloved figures are immortalized in text. Read on to find out more!

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

Happy New Year from the world of Arabic literature! With Omicron, media frenzies, and restrictions around the world, we could all use some escape. Travel might be limited, but how about an escape to the fantasy world of Arabian Nights? The iconic collection that has inspired countless others around the world, from the Brothers Grimm to Naguib Mafhouz, has received a fresh new translation by Yasmine Seale—known for her riveting new translation of Aladdin. Enter the world of ghouls, mystics, and enchantresses, and enjoy your COVID-free time travel (it has some brilliant images!).

The theme of time travel continues with the launch of the Winter issue of Arab Lit Quarterly! Responding to the theme of folk and featuring great writers such as Palestinian author Sonia Nimr, this issue promises to “cover stories, songs, and poetry from the last millennium, from Andalusia to Yemen, with stops across the cities in between!” You can get your copy here.

That being said, the world is not entirely being relegated to the virtual, as Qatar launches the 31st Doha International Book Fair for the year of 2022, under the theme of “light is knowledge.” Finally, we will visit our first in-person book fair in years, which will host renowned Arabic book distributors such as Samarkand Books from Qatar and Antoine Cachet from Lebanon! READ MORE…

Salvation Written Elsewhere: Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa at the Limits of World Literature

January 13, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Alex Tan

[T]he works of Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa narrate points of silence to enact the difficulty of speaking as oneself.

In the first part of this essay, Alex Tan discussed Arab texts that anticipate their own reception in translation or as world literature, and how Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa—in For Bread Alone and Salvation Army—desacralise the languages of Classical Arabic and French respectively. Here, the discreet elements of these two “autobiographical” works are further analysed, in order to understand how a self can be written into existence amidst erasure, shame, and even the savagery of love.

“All of us already wanted to forget our past, forget last night,
forget the troubles that brought us here and couldn’t be shared no matter who asked.”

—Abdellah Taïa, Salvation Army (tr. Frank Stock)

“And So I Felt Ashamed”: An Affective Education

Caught in between Arabic and Western autobiographical conventions, the works of Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa narrate points of silence to enact the difficulty of speaking as oneself. Whereas the Arabic tradition is associated with a concealment of the shameful and a preference for collective voices, the Western takes pride in confessing the abject and centering the individual’s coming-of-age. In negotiating one’s place within the collective, the self-portraits in Choukri’s and Taïa’s work inevitably confronts a culture that, to secure deference to authority, forbids people from thinking as individuals.

Both texts are abundantly punctuated with moments of non-verbal expression amidst Moroccan society’s conspiracies of silence. In Salvation Army, the parents of Taïa’s narrator—also named Abdellah—have a “preferred language” of “sex”; here, the father’s silence conveys his desire. Less benignly, Choukri’s surrogate, Mohamed, in For Bread Alone ironises his father’s draconian assertions by addressing him “without speaking”: “O Khalifa of Allah on earth.” Left unelaborated, this phrase evokes the quiet imaginative gestures that the author performs as a mode of survival—as it is known only to himself. It mirrors the larger vocabulary of violence that saturates the book, such as when his father speaks “only in shouts and slaps,” a dialogue of abuse which forms their exclusive mode of interaction.

The narrator grows to be adept at reading signification into embodied cues, like those of Yasmina and an unknown young man whose “eyes tell me” he “wanted something”—the language remaining vague as if to re-enact the man’s reticence. A European woman, catching Mohamed “staring” at her handbag, similarly communicates with “her eyes.” They “seemed to be saying: Aren’t you ashamed? And so I felt ashamed.” The woman’s eloquent silence performs an affective education: Mohamed learns how a white person views someone of his class and race, and realises where and when he should feel shame. Yet in giving language to these moments, Choukri displaces the locus of shame from the personal to the systemic. READ MORE…

Languages of Silence: Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa Desacralising Adab and Isnad

January 12, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Alex Tan

Nothing about a translated novel—or anything that has warranted the fraught label of “world literature”—can be taken for granted.

Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa have been celebrated by the literary world as writers defying tradition in their transgressive tellings of migration, sexuality, and selfhood; yet, in the Anglophone sphere, their works have also been exoticised and misappropriated in Orientalist contexts, filtered through the othering perspectives of a western literary hierarchy. In this following essay, Assistant Editor Alex Tan delineates a reading of these two Moroccan writers that situates them in the vehicles of their own language and cultural context, with the unique ways their writing interrogates the borders of being. This essay is part one of two, the second of which can be read here.

 “The Maghrebin is always elsewhere. That’s where he makes himself come true.”

— Habib Tengour, Exile is My Trade (tr. Pierre Joris)

1998, Cairo. Midway through her Modern Arabic literature class at the American University in Cairo (AUC), Professor Samia Mehrez receives urgent missives from the university administration. Though she does not yet suspect the storm to come, she is compelled to cease the lecture and dismiss the students. Walking over to the administrative office, she is greeted with the news that several parents have complained about the inclusion of “pornography” on her syllabus, sufficiently blasphemous to “corrupt an entire generation.”

What text could claim such power? At the heart of the controversy was Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri’s Al-Khubz Al-Hafi (translated by Paul Bowles into English as For Bread Alone), which would soon precipitate the eruption of a nation-wide culture war over the uses of literature in the classroom.

Fast forward to 2012—El Jadida in Morocco, six years after Abdellah Taïa comes out as gay in the magazine Tel Quel and is hailed as the first Arab writer to be open about his homosexuality. Certain Islamist groups, anxious about moral taint, are clamouring for the outlawing of his oeuvre. Taïa had been invited to speak at a university about his latest work to be translated from French into Arabic; unfortunately, before it could happen, professors and students organised a protest to shut down the event. Slogans such as “don’t spread homosexuality on campus” were intoned.

It has become, by now, somewhat commonplace for the West to fetishize Arab writers and intellectuals who suffer widespread condemnation in their countries of origin—particularly from Islamist quarters—before enshrining them in the exclusive club of world literature. One thinks of works like Sonallah Ibrahim’s That Smell, banned immediately upon its 1966 publication in Egypt, or Haidar Haidar’s A Banquet of Seaweed, which induced accusations of heresy from Al-Azhar clerics and protests by university students against its inclusion on syllabi. At times, it almost seems as if censorship, political oppression, and exile are a rite of passage for international renown—a disturbing reality that signals to us what Anglophone literary markets value in a work from the Arab world. READ MORE…