Language: Catalan

In Good Company: Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall on Translating The Left Parenthesis

September 22, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Rachel Farmer

[B]eing able to share genius in whatever way or form is the most beautiful thing there is.

Muriel Villaneuva’s The Left Parenthesis takes place by the sea, a fitting setting for a story that weaves in-between motherhood and mourning, loss and reinvention, the mind and the body. In the stunning autofictional tale of a recently widowed mother attempting to piece together her shifting roles in the world, Villaneuva merges the surreal and the intimately physical to chart the mystifying journey one takes back to get to oneself. In the following interview, Rachel Farmer talks to the co-translators of The Left Parenthesis, Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall, about the book’s feminism, Catalan specificity, and its “uncomplicated” representation of motherhood.

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

Rachel Farmer (RF): First of all, before we dive into The Left Parenthesis, I’d be really interested to hear about your process as co-translators. In the brilliant conversation recently published in the Oxonian Review, the pair of you talked about working together on another co-translation of Montserrat Roig. Can you tell us just a little bit about this relationship?

Megan Berkobien (MB): Well, my dissertation is about co-translation, especially as a socialist and ecological phenomenon; it really came from the fact that basically all my translation experiences have been collaborative. I went to school at the University of Michigan for both my PhD and undergrad, and in the translation workshop there, everything was done together. So, it came naturally when I met María Cristina. The first thing we worked on as a team was a little anthology on women writers in Catalan—that’s when I realised we were really on the same page. We wrote the opening essay together, and it just really worked. We just feed off one another’s poetic creativities, I guess.

María Cristina Hall (MCH): For us, having the interaction of editing together was a way to build trust, to understand that our voices were similar enough to co-translate. Our process involved dividing the book up, each doing fifteen pages, then looking at each other’s version and editing it as if it were our own piece—so there’s never that feeling of holding back. It seems very natural to edit, sometimes heavily and sometimes not. If ever a word comes up where we think, “how should we translate that?”, we have a back-and-forth, and it goes smoothly from there. It’s very enriching, and I think something Megan touched on in her dissertation was the importance of working in a community and having company. Translation is usually very solitary work, so it’s very different to have this practice.

MB: In a lot of ways, the fact that translators are artists insinuates at the worst part about being an artist: that you have to work by yourself, and that you have this “grand genius” inside you. I just don’t think genius is never located in one person, and being able to share genius in whatever way or form is the most beautiful thing there is.

RF: Was there anything in particular about The Left Parenthesis that needed a different approach?

MCH: Well, it was our first project together, and then we did Goodbye Ramona by Montserrat Roig. In that book, the voices are so distinct that we divided it by character, so I worked on the one from the 1900s and Meg did the one from the 1960s—and the one from the 30s, we shared between the two of us. Because Meg is more active in the Socialist party, she could be the character who was politically involved, while I took on the conservative one since I live in Mexico and I have more of a background in Catholicism. But The Left Parenthesis is just one character talking about herself.

MB: We did have to attend to making sure it was all one unified voice, and as such it made a lovely first project because it’s almost as if our voices were weaving together. If we take a cue from the book to describe this, it’s kind of like waves were flowing over us, and each new wave made us come together a little bit more. READ MORE…

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: The Left Parenthesis by Muriel Villanueva

August 31, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Farmer

As the novella progresses, there is a blurring between author and protagonist, between the author’s writing and the writing within the writing.

In Muriel Villanueva’s poetic, undulating The Left Parenthesis, a young mother works towards repair and reinvention, threading together the disparate reflections of selfhood. Under the guise of notes on reprieve, Villaneuva delves into surreal ascriptions of consciousness, of a psychological journey that braids together experience and fantasy. In beautiful, spare language, The Left Parenthesis is an open punctuation, seeking outwards to define that which is in constant flux—life.

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

The Left Parenthesis by Muriel Villanueva, translated from the Catalan by María Cristina Hall and Megan Berkobien, Open Letter, 2022

I knew you weren’t well, but I pretended it wasn’t true, because the whole thing made me sick, too. If you died, so did I. If we were a pair, what would that make me afterward?

What do you do when you define yourself by your relationship to another person, and that person ceases to exist? How do you go about allowing the self that you have become to crumble away, making room for a new self to grow? Muriel Villanueva’s The Left Parenthesis—a slim, surreal novella tracking a woman’s trip with her young baby to a small beach town—examines precisely such questions in sparing, direct prose.

The narrative follows the inner life of a woman seeking to understand herself. Throughout the novella, the protagonist, also named Muriel, unpacks and dissects her three selves: the self that is a mother to her daughter Mar, her wife-self (she tells us at the start that she is a widow), and the self that acts as a mother to her own husband. She grapples with the fact that she was never sure which of her selves would emerge when she opened her mouth, a response to her husband’s oscillation between his child-self (the one she felt compelled to mother) and his burgeoning man-self. This three-week excursion, a brief parenthetical phrase within the novel that is her life, is something she undertakes to hopefully catalyse a transformation within her, a process of purging and healing.

Threaded through this book is the eponymous theme of an opening parenthesis, an explanatory and exploratory phase of existence that is separate—parallel—to the day-to-day. “At the beginning of my stay here I thought the cove with the shape of a waning moon. Now I think it’s only a parenthesis. It opens over here and I don’t know where it closes.” The cove to which the protagonist retreats is curved like a parenthesis, simultaneously opening out and welcoming in. This symbolic shape is mirrored in the curve of her arm as she breastfeeds her infant daughter, nurturing her baby as she herself is being nurtured by this trip, this secluded spot to which she has retreated. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 19, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Charlie Ng, and MARGENTO

Literary news from Catalonia, Hong Kong, and the Philippines!

Our team of editors from around the globe bring you the latest in literary news on the ground. Read on to find out about regional language promotion in Catalonia, author talks in Hong Kong, and translation awards in the Philippines!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Catalonia

The old part of the city of Barcelona is getting drowned in the infectious salsa and rumba rhythms of the Festa Major de Gràcia this week, with the burro’s alleys and pedestrian areas being taken over by local crafts and cuisine alongside decorations ranging from overhead wooden chairs to colourful balloons to giant dragons you can walk through. But another more discrete yet equally pervasive phenomenon is also underway. The fiesta’s versatile mobile app is indicative of the overwhelming digital initiatives in the city and across the province of Catalonia, which are more often than not closely tied with the region’s rich literature, arts, and assertive linguistic and cultural individuality.

The exhibition Nova Pantalla. El videojoc a Catalunya (New Screen: Videogames in Catalonia) at Palau Robert, for instance, boasts a wide range of on-site interactive pieces from both small/indie studios and major players committed to making Catalonian language and culture more present in the industry. As short of sixty percent of the sector’s output involves games and apps in the region’s language, the featured designers and programmers make clear statements about the creative multi-art poetics of their endeavors. Innovative technology is informed by traditional storytelling, visual arts, and text, resonating with other strong trends in present-day Catalonia.

A rich repository of Catalonian and transnational cultural data is represented by the free digital journalism platform VilaWeb, which claims the legacies of writers as diverse as Albert Camus and the thirteenth-century Catalan poet and Neoplatonic-Christian mystic Ramon Llull as inspirational for the development of the contemporary Catalan language. Another example of Catalonian culture in the digital space could be experienced in May of this year, when the festival Barcelona Poesia reemerging from the pandemic with a vigorous multilingual and cross-artform approach to poetry (as did the more avant-garde but less publicized Festival Alcools) substantially present in digital space and social media. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Landscape with Winter” by Anna Dodas i Noguer

December 7, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Clyde Moneyhun

at night constellations / observe themselves in isolation

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you a thirteen-part poem by Anna Dodas i Noguer which was first published as a chapbook in Barcelona and was awarded the prestigious Amadeu Oller Prize in 1986. Blending the fragmented images of a snowy landscape with moments of gentle, philosophical questioning—the hypnotic rhythm of Dodas’ language recedes and surges with the force of the river that courses through her long poem. As translator Clyde Moneyhun suggests, this poem is reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s description of her own collection, Winter Trees. That is, “Landscape with Winter” is a poem which contains what Plath calls “small descriptions where the words have an aura of mystic power.” Marking the first time that Dodas’ work is available in English, we are proud to present to our readers this exquisite work of Catalan poetry. 

Landscape with Winter

The tormented earth groans like a heart.
—Verdague

1

Hair is undone
and the stars shoot
across a milky firmament.
The acceleration, the jolt.
My heart fits
in the paw of an ogre.
Gallop, gallop
jump
gallop, gallop
the mountains ferocious
as the sea.
They cry, the bells,
they cry.
A faucet drips
like a streaming
tear.
All is sleeping.

2

A flock of clouds
white boulevards
snow, snow, snow.
Arrow of silence
flattens the air.
Life itself
            is mute.

Make me a place, make me a place
surface like skating rink
                         ice.
I see nothing, I am blind
the light
            dazzles
                        echoes.

It’s snowing.
Sacrifice spaces
take away the image, if you can:
nothing remains
                        nothing more
than a vast
                        desolate sorrow. READ MORE…

How to Start Women in Translation Month Off Right

August 5, 2021  |  in News  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Stock up this August with some of our favourite presses and titles!

The impetus to read women is very similar to the desire to read the world; one does not necessarily do it out of a purely social cause—though that can hardly be argued against—but because the profound, intelligent curiosity that sustains the act of reading can only be validated by reading variously, probingly, and with an awareness of life as it is being lived now. Even as the world of letters is slowly ridding itself of entrenched biases and definitions, it remains an indisputable truth that the idea of being a woman in this world continues to throb with chaos and fragility, and increasing globalist awareness only reinforces the fact that womanhood remains replete with mystery, inquiry, and greatly variegating methods of approach.

To find the language that does justice to this experience of living—whether or not womanhood is the subject—requires a persevering intellect and originality that one finds in the greatest of minds. A reader does not pick up a work of translated literature to learn how being a woman is done in that part of the world, but to be allowed entrance into a vast, ridiculously under-explored, realm of humanity, whose inner workings often prove to be—as a result of challenges that must be overcome—intellectually complex, stylistically thrilling, and revolutionary in their uncoverings of human nature.

That is why I, for one, am grateful for the existence of causes like Women in Translation Month, which celebrates the excellent work produced by women around the world and also urges towards an increased conscientiousness about our reading choices. In solidarity with our fellow comrades who support global literature, below are some incredible opportunities you can take advantage of this August.

Many presses are currently offering promotions for the duration of WIT Month. One of our favourites, Open Letter Books, is offering a generous discount for the women-written and women-translated books in their lineup. Some recommendations I can make confidently include Mercè Rodoreda’s Garden by the Sea, a gorgeously lyrical fiction of 1920s Barcelona; Marguerite Duras’ The Sailor from Gibraltar, of that terrific Durassian ardor and intimate poetry; and Can Xue’s Frontier, masterfully multilayered and graceful in its surrealism. Fum D’Estampa, a press specialising in Catalan literature, is also offering discounts on all their titles, with Rosa Maria Arquimbau’s brilliant melding of the personal and the political, Forty Lost Years among them.

The wonderful Charco Press, which time and time again has brought out exceptional Latin American works, has put together special bundles of their texts—three carefully curated sets of three books each. “Revolutions” includes Karla Suárez’s Havana Year Zero, a sharp and attentive novel about unexpected connections during Cuba’s economic crisis; “Interior Journeys” features the subversive, cerebral work of Ariana Harwicz; and lastly, “Stories of Survival” gathers narratives of persistence against violence and trauma, with Selva Almada’s incredibly powerful Dead Girls among them.

World Editions is another publisher getting it right, partnering with Bookshop to provide a list of highlighted titles. Included is Linda Boström Knausgård’s October Child, a poetic and elegant autofiction about the escaping borders of reality in her experiences with mental illness and memory loss. The Last Days of Ellis Island, the award-winning novel by Gaëlle Josse that centres around the painful tenets of migration, is also up for grabs. READ MORE…

Jordi Llavina’s Poetry & Prose Blurs the Lines Between Reality and Fiction, Writer and Reader

July 8, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Alice Banks

The author's unusual style allows readers to “write” the text along with him.

Poetry & Prose, by Jordi Llavina, translated from Catalan by William Hamilton, is a stunning collection of, as the title suggests, poetry and prose. The book opens with one astounding long-form poem—its English translation parallel to the original Catalan—and ends with an equally beautiful short prose piece. Themes of memory, time, and nature are prevalent in both, and Llavina’s lyricism flows effortlessly throughout the whole collection. Poetry & Prose—as well as the only other publication of Llavina’s work in English, London Under Snow—makes clear that this award-winning writer is an expert at blurring the lines between reality and fiction, and bringing reader and writer closer together than ever.

Poetry & Prose begins with Llavina’s breathtaking poem “The Hermitage,” its lines recounting one man’s climb up a long, dusty hill to visit the hermitage perched at the top. This climb is not just a physical journey, but a journey through the past in which the narrator revisits memories through Llavina’s brilliant imagery. Speaking at Sant Jordi NYC 2020, Llavina stated that the opening lines came to mind one day and stood out to him as symbolic of a return to the landscape of his childhood. These initial words and the ideas behind them came to Llavina somewhat naturally, thus leading him to embark on the feat of creating a long-form poem that stemmed from these seeds. Llavina put forth the idea that “[w]hen you have the first lines of the poem, it is easy to begin […] The most important thing is to have the first lines.” These all-important first lines, then, were the key to Llavina’s staggeringly beautiful “The Hermitage”:

Lone I climb once more, years later,
up to Sant Pere’s hermitage.
The air is still, and the glare of
a raw July sun will leave my
neck and shoulders burnt and tender.

READ MORE…

Translators Weigh In on the Amanda Gorman Controversy

March 17, 2021  |  in News  |  by Allison Braden

The incident sparked industrywide conversation about who gets to translate.

On March 1, The Guardian reported that Amanda Gorman’s Dutch translator, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, had quit. Amanda Gorman, the poet who catapulted onto the world stage after an astounding performance at U.S. President Joe Biden’s January inauguration, had approved Rijneveld, an acclaimed Dutch writer, themselves, but the announcement that Rijneveld would translate Gorman’s book The Hill We Climb provoked backlash. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2020

December 14, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden, MARGENTO, and Sarah Moore

The latest in literature from Spain, Romania, and France!

Our final selections in excellent translations for the year of 2020 are fittingly full of thought. Throughout these texts, one finds the endless potential roadmaps that chart out from the individual mind’s interrogation and contemplation of their surroundings, and one’s own place within them. From a wandering mind, everything is a pool for endless reflection; a Catalan collection draws from the sea, a Romanian notebook is filled with musings and defiances of authorship, and a French diary novel tells the lives of many through the life of one. 

salt water

Salt Water by Josep Pla, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush, Archipelago Books, 2020

Review by Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large for Argentina

On a recent virtual happy hour, my friend described a weekend camping trip on a secluded barrier island off the coast of Georgia, in the southern US. My envy verged on rage as I listened from my living room, which doesn’t get enough natural light. He said that after he and his wife kayaked over and set up their tent (annoying a resident heron in the process), they had done absolutely nothing—not even read. They sat on the shore and watched the sea. It’s easy to believe how that could have been enough.

Josep Pla would understand. In Salt Water, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush and released by Archipelago Books this month, Pla writes that “the mere presence of the sea is enough to sink into the deliquescent bliss of the contemplative life.” His curiosity courses through the book, a series of ten sketches that revolves around the coast of Pla’s native Catalonia: he describes shipwrecks, submarines, and harebrained sailing schemes. He relates stories from a salty, one-handed raconteur and imbues the rambling tales with strikingly lifelike texture. Though his plots unfold on or near the sea, human culture is ever present. Pla revels in detail, describing at length the joy of nearly black coffee on a marginally small boat: “That beverage makes an almost immediate impact: your mind projects itself onto the outside world, you are fascinated by everything around and a gleam comes to your eyes.” This book is a product of that fascinated, caffeinated gaze.

In the preface, Pla describes the stories as writings from his adolescence. In the translator’s note at the end of the book, however, Bush clarifies that they were written in the 1940s and hypothesizes that the preface was a canny attempt to evade censorship. He points out that Pla’s “articles containing veiled critiques of the dictatorship made him the most censored journalist in Spain.” Indeed, his biography offers helpful context for the conflicting claims that bookend the collection.

As a university student a century ago, Pla developed a clear, intelligible writing style and deployed it throughout his career as a journalist. He traveled widely across Europe as a foreign correspondent and served briefly as a member of Parliament for the Commonwealth of Catalonia, a short-lived assembly notable for its symbolic value. Over its eleven years in existence, the Commonwealth promoted Catalonia’s unity and identity, and evinced strong support for the Catalan language—Pla’s language. He became a chronicler of Spain’s tumultuous early twentieth-century history and spent multiple stints in exile. In the 1940s, he took to exploring his native coast and writing dispatches for Destino, a Burgos-based magazine at the forefront of the reemergence of Catalan-language culture. Throughout his peripatetic career, Pla never stopped writing: his complete works, compiled shortly before his death in 1981, stretch over thirty-eight volumes. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Short Tales” by Pere Calders

April 28, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Tiago Miller

Between going to heaven and staying at home, he preferred the latter.

This week’s Translation Tuesday presents a series of absurdist snapshots from one of the modern masters of Catalan literature. In this collection of contes breus (Catalan ‘short stories,’ often only a few sentences in length), Pere Calders embraces fragmentary quips as a mode of subversive storytelling. At times aphoristic, we’re taken through a series of disjointed narratives that shift between a satirical third-person to a self-referential first-person. We can follow this surrealism and satire as a kind of montage, connecting pieces of ironic wisdom to a kind of irreverent philosophical theme. Alternatively we can read the tales as a collage, allowing the shift in point-of-view to reorient ourselves to a new (and again, ironic) life lesson. Like a master class in non-sequiturs, Miller’s translation invites us to laugh and scratch our heads at the hapless soul who speaks here in mordant proverbs.

Biographical Note

My name is Pere plus two surnames. I was born the day before yesterday and it is already the day after tomorrow. Now, I only think about how I will spend the weekend.

Balance

Just as he was about to take hold of the pail, his leg gave way and he plunged into the well. As he fell, he experienced that well-known phenomenon of seeing one’s life flash before one’s eyes. And he found it so predictable, monotonous, and commonplace (to remain strictly between us, of course) that he let his lungs fill with water and drowned with exemplary resignation.

Obstinacy

Between going to heaven and staying at home, he preferred the latter, despite the powerful propaganda against it and the fact that his house was full of leaks and a whole host of privations. READ MORE…

Unhurried Melancholy: Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño on Translating Mercè Rodoreda

March 19, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Alyea Canada

In my opinion, it’s the perfect novel for a digital detox . . . or a quarantine.

Renowned Catalan author Mercè Rodoreda’s tender and meditative novel, Garden by the Sea, was our February Book Club selection. An essential name in postwar Catalan literature (and past Asymptote contributor), Rodoreda’s immersive yet subtle language is beloved for its captivating lyricism and simple, poignant depictions of everyday life. In these chaotic days, when many of us are looking to literature for comfort, the patient world of Garden by the Sea offers a quiet reprieve. In the following interview, assistant editor Alyea Canada speaks to the translators, Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño, a mother-daughter duo with a unique process and an unceasing admiration for Rodoreda’s singular style.

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!

Alyea Canada (AC): This is the second book by Mercè Rodoreda that you two have translated together. What drew you both to Rodoreda’s work in general and Garden by the Sea specifically?

Martha Tennent (MT): This is indeed the second Rodoreda novel we have translated together, since in 2015, Open Letter published our translation of her novel War, So Much War. I have always been an admirer of Rodoreda’s work, and for many years my apartment in Barcelona was just a couple of blocks from where she was born and grew up, in the Sant Gervasi neighborhood that figures in many of her short stories and in Garden by the Sea.

I started publishing translations of a few of her short stories, and that led, in 2009, to my translating her Death in Spring for Open Letter. At that time, I would say almost no one in the United States had heard of Mercè Rodoreda. Death in Spring is such a brutal, haunting book, but at the same time it is lyrical and painfully beautiful. Neither I nor Open Letter expected the book and the author to gain the following they have. It’s been amazing. Then I received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to translate her stories, also with Open Letter. And then came the two commissions to translate jointly her War, So Much War, and now Garden by the Sea. No one has done more to promote the work of this exceptional writer than Open Letter.

Maruxa Relaño (MR): The chance to translate Rodoreda was a treat to say the least. Garden by the Sea is my favorite of her novels. I like the unhurried melancholy that imbues the writing; you can open the book wherever you choose and find yourself in a Mediterranean villa in the middle of one “long hot summer,” with its occupants wandering about aimlessly, sunning themselves and squabbling on the veranda, a life of perpetual waiting, where as you mention, nothing seems to happen and much goes unsaid. We were especially drawn to Garden by the Sea for the vision of behind-the-scenes domesticity provided by the quiet, observant gardener, and the slowly developing unease and intrigue as the protagonists move gently toward catastrophe. In my opinion, it’s the perfect novel for a digital detox . . . or a quarantine. READ MORE…

Announcing our February Book Club Selection: Garden by the Sea by Mercè Rodoreda

February 27, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada

Both the translators and the author seem to know that the power of Garden by the Sea lies in the spaces between the words.

Deemed one of the most formative and influential writers of contemporary Catalan literature, Mercè Rodoreda’s prolific body of work details the profundity of “essential things . . . with a certain lack of measure.” For the month of February, Asymptote Book Club presents her most recent work to be translated into English, the contemplative and timeless Garden by the Sea. Rife with sensuous detail and quiet notes of transition, this novel is the poignant result of a patient life, of time marked equally by conversation and silence. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers in the US, the UK, and the EU. 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!

Garden by the Sea by Mercè Rodoreda, translated from the Catalan by Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño, Open Letter Books, 2020

Being someone who is unfamiliar with Mercè Rodoreda’s work, I read the description of Garden by the Sea and was expecting Gatsby-esque schadenfreude. I was wrong. Garden by the Sea is something quieter, more tender, and mournful. It has a sense of longing for a time when summers at your seaside villa could really be carefree romps and endless parties without the tragedy and trauma inherent in postwar society.

Taking place outside 1920s Barcelona over six summers and one winter and narrated by an unnamed gardener, Garden by the Sea is the story of a rich couple, Senyoret Francesc and Senyoreta Rosamaria, and their friends whose idyllic summers are rocked by the construction of a grander villa next door. (Surely you can see how it’s difficult to avoid The Great Gatsby coming to mind.) What unfolds is a collection of personal tragedy, lots of gossip, some light one-upmanship, swimming, and, of course, something of a love triangle. There are also brief appearances by a mischievous monkey and a lion cub, and a great many lush descriptions of plants and flowers. “Look at the linden trees. See the leaves, how they tremble and listen to us. You laugh now, but one day if you find yourself walking in the garden at night, beneath the trees, you will see how the garden talks to you, the things it says . . .” The book opens with the gardener saying, “I’ve always enjoyed knowing what happens to people. It’s not because I’m garrulous, but because I like people, and I was fond of the owners of this house.” However fond he was of the owners, it is clear that he is that much fonder of his garden. He takes such care in his expertise that when he looks at the neighboring villa’s garden and its bearded irises, he says he’s “really distressed.” The only times we see the gardener critical of the Senyorets and their friends are when their revelry comes at the cost of his flowers, or if his expertise is questioned by people who clearly know less. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Gemma Gorga

December 3, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Sharon Dolin

Like sad eyes / gestures are also inherited

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the poetry of Gemma Gorga. The poems revolve around themes of domestic labor and consumption; but they are not what they appear on the surface. Fastidious consideration of fish-flesh or mercury or cautionary affects inherited by one’s grandmother hint at a nuanced understanding of the traces of events left on the body and the mind. “Still the smell does not want to leave them, / as if tiny bags of memory remained,” Gorga writes, indicating the complex and grotesque traces that always remain after affects. Visceral, but not overly descriptive, the style weaves potent materials with potent concepts in metaphoric embraces. These poems show that whole lives, whole beings, can be explained and articulated by the smallest things: an anchovy’s spine, a pellet of mercury, a poem.

Poetics of the Fragment

When you return from the market
you must clean the anchovies,
which means ripping off the head and tail,
removing the thin strips still sticky
with life, the central spine
that detaches with a slight zip,
afterwards washing them,
purifying them under tap water
(even death requires baptism),
making sure no tiny eye remains
trapped in the moist blindness of your fingers,
finally soaking them in vinegar,
waiting until the flesh whitens
cured in acid, cured all the way through.
They have lain for hours beneath the planetary
light of oil and pepper.
Still the smell does not want to leave them,
as if tiny bags of memory remained
hidden in the folds forming matter and air.
Making sure no one sees me,
I smell the backs of my hands
(for the sea trace from fish bellies)
and I know they are yours. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

March 15, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Erik Noonan, Manel Mula Ferrer, and Nestor Gomez

Start your weekend with up-to-the-minute literary dispatches from around the world!

This week, we highlight a new Latinx literary magazine, an award-winning Catalan poet and translator, and a German-American literary festival in New York. We also learn about a Salvadoran who hopes to increase access to literature in his city by raising enough funds to build and stock a new library.

Nestor Gomez, Editor-at-Large for El Salvador, reporting from El Salvador

The Fall 2018 debut of Palabritas, an online Latinx literary magazine founded by Ruben Reyes Jr., is good news for Latinx writers from a variety of genres, especially those who are unpublished. Palabritas’ creation was inspired by a night of celebration of spoken word, poetry, and performances hosted by Fuerza Latina, a pan-Latinx organization of Harvard College. Reyes, a Harvard student and the son of Salvadoran immigrants, felt it was important to give access to unpublished writers from Latinx communities that are often ignored, such as LGBTQ+, the diaspora, and mixed-race communities. By providing a space for Latinx writers from all communities, Reyes hopes to minimize the exclusivity of published writers and bring them side-by-side with previously unpublished writers in the magazine.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

January 11, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Barbara Halla, Nina Perrotta, and Rachael Pennington

Find the latest in world literature here!

This week, join our wonderful Asymptote staff members, Barbara, Rachael, and Nina, as they bring you literary updates from Albania, Spain, and the United States. From prestigious national literary awards to new and noteworthy titles and translations, there is plenty to discover in this week’s dispatches. 

Barbara Halla, Editor-at-Large for Albania, reporting from Albania:

December was a productive month for Albanian publishers, a natural result of the conclusion of the Tirana Book Fair and the expected increase in book sales that marks the holiday period. On December 18, 2018, the Albanian Ministry of Culture conferred the National Award for Literature for the best books published in 2017. Henrik Spiro Gjoka won the “Best Novel” award for his work Sonatë për gruan e një tjetri (A Sonnet for Another Man’s Wife), which details the life of a psychiatrist who falls in love with one of his patients. Translator Aida Baro won the “Best Translated Novel” award for her rendition into Albanian of Primo Levi’s The Truce (translated into English by Stuart J. Woolf), the continuation of Levi’s autobiography, If This is a Man.

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