Language: Danish

The International Booker Comes Home

April 4, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

There is much to be said about the (fleeting) feeling of accomplishment in seeing a favorite longlisted.

With the upcoming announcement of the Booker International shortlist on April 7, our in-house Booker expert is here to take you through the impressive longlist, discuss the intersection between closed-door judging and fervent public online discourses, and the increased visibility of the translator in bringing these vital titles into the English-language sphere, Read on to find out more!

The International Booker Prize, like a number of other British literary prizes, has become a unifying topic amidst a very active online community. Twitter is the kind of place where bubbles of connections and affinities naturally form, but participating in this nexus simultaneously fosters a detached sense of irony that makes any earnest acknowledgment to it a touch mortifying. I am willing to take the risk of too much earnestness today because, for the sake of honesty, my relationship to the International Booker would not be the same without this community.

I became a regular follower of the prize after attending a meeting with the judges at Shakespeare and Company in Paris back in 2016 (a discussion I left certain in the knowledge that Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, was going to win, as it did). But it was entering in conversation with other readers and translators through Twitter that made the International Booker an event that I await impatiently every March. We make a friendly race out of reading the entire longlist, and debates about the merits of each selection get unreasonably heated, as we work to change the minds of others about the books we love—or even loath at times. Not to mention that I would be very happy not to have the “what constitutes nonfiction” debate again in my lifetime, which was in full swing both last year, with the longlisting of In Memory of Memory and The War of the Poor, and in 2019 when The Years was shortlisted.

Perhaps more importantly, being part of this community has shaped the approach I take the reading (and reviewing) the list. Thanks to it, I am constantly aware of the labor that goes into each book, not merely the translation but the efforts by the translators themselves, often acting as both agent and publicist. For instance, when Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights won the International Booker in 2018, Jennifer Croft had spent a decade advocating for it to be published. Furthermore, participating even somewhat actively in the discussion happening on places like Twitter is to be aware of the uneven dynamics of the publishing world. Much has rightfully been said about the International Booker’s Eurocentrism (which this year’s longlist provides a refreshing break from), but at the same time, as an online participant in these communities, you see in real time that the Booker is probably replicating trends that exist within publishing at large. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

March 11, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Erica X Eisen, Julia Sherwood, and Lee Yew Leong

In which we discuss the International Booker Prize longlist and bring you literary news from Poland and Uzbekistan!

This week, our editors from around the world discuss the 2022 International Booker longlist (released just yesterday), the Polish literary world’s reaction to the war in Ukraine, and literary nationalism in Uzbekistan. Read on to find out more!

Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief, on the 2022 International Booker Prize Longlist

The longlist for the 2022 International Booker Prize landed yesterday and we’re chuffed to see so many of our past contributors (20!), former team members (five!), and Book club titles (two!) on it! We’re especially thrilled for Anton Hur, who debuted in a big way by making the cover of our Fall 2016 edition with his translation of Jung Young Su’s “Aficionados” (we are proud to have played a small role in ”changing his life,” as he himself attests). Hur has not one but two titles on the 13-book list—a feat which, as far as we know, has never been accomplished before in the (admittedly short) history of the International Booker Prize. You can find his very smart metafictional essay on translating Bora Chung from our Winter 2021 issue here (accompanied by a translation into the Korean by Chung herself!); Hur also facilitates Rose Bialer’s interview with Sang Young Park here (both Chung and Park appear respectively with Cursed Bunny and Love in a Big City).

In stark contrast to last year’s longlist, which saw only one work from Asia included, this year was a bumper year for Asian representation, with five titles—among these, nominees Norman Erikson Pasaribu and translator Tiffany Tsao also first appeared together in Asymptote (read their debut in English here). We extend our warmest congratulations to editor-at-large David Boyd, whose co-translation, with Samuel Bett, of Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven—Kawakami’s inclusion this year makes up for the glaring omission of Breasts and Eggs last year—is also nominated. Before we let you check out the list on your own, we note, with no small measure of delight, that Phenotypes, our Book Club pick for January 2022, and After the Sun, our Book Club pick for August 2021, were also selected for the longlist, proving that joining our Book Club is one of the best ways to encounter tomorrow’s prizewinners today. Find our interviews with the two respective author-and-translator duos here (Paulo Scott and Daniel Hahn) and here (Jonas Eika and Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg). Best of luck to all nominees—and may the worthiest pair (or trio) win!

Erica X Eisen, Blog Editor, reporting on Uzbekistan

The month of February saw celebrations in honor of the 581st birthday of the poet Alisher Navoi, a key figure in the history of Central Asian literature who was born in 1441 in what was then the Timurid Empire. While festivities occurred in several countries of the former Soviet Union, they were most pronounced in Uzbekistan, where Navoi’s work is seen as foundational for the country’s national literature. In various parts of the country, admirers of the poet held readings of his ghazals and reflected on his life and legacy.

READ MORE…

Something is Rotten—But What?: On The Dolls by Ursula Scavenius

November 10, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Sabrina Parker Greene

“The Dolls” leaves you with a simple, haunting feeling—what is enough for a life?

The Dolls by Ursula Scavenius, translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell, Lolli Editions, 2021

Ursula Scavenius has created an inexplicable environment in The Dolls, a collection of four stories that render the common traditions of narrative into cerebral mystery. Perhaps our characters are in Denmark, but what iteration of Denmark is it? She does not seem to call upon any particular reality or time period in which to place her characters; even the mention of actual years or eras, be they 1888 or 1999, don’t seem to hold much meaning. Amidst this ambiguity, you might say something is rotten in the state of Denmark. The epigraph of the text, deftly translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell, reads: “I’ll tell the story, even if no one is listening.” While not necessarily a unique sentiment, it aptly sets up a book that comes to us in English translation, which has found itself a new set of readers who are ready to listen.

Fittingly, this book is part of Lolli’s New Scandinavian Literature series—and it does seem to live within that hint of reinvention, avoiding any stereotypically Danish or Scandinavian elements. There’s no hygge—that adulated brand of upper-middle-class coziness—here: everyone is decidedly uncomfortable. Nor can they be categorized under the beloved genre of Nordic noir—no outright crime exists in these stories. Instead, we have paranoia, dread, perhaps some doomsday prep, but no hardboiled investigation or detective work. Although Scavenius may not explicitly belong to the traditions of Scandinavian literature, you could thread her particular type of psychological penetration and sense of displacement with the likes of Clarice Lispector, Wuthering Heights, perhaps Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss or Amparo Dávila’s The Houseguest and Other Stories (translated by Matthew Gleeson and Audrey Harris), taking part in a global narrativization of women who find themselves in archaic or alternative lifestyles, or otherwise alone—either by their own accord or against their will. A timeless situation.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from All the Birds in the Sky by Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild

October 26, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith

Before the big fire, they had roosted in the houses on land, but now most houses are at sea.

Published on the day Denmark entered lockdown, Danish writer Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild’s award-winning novel All the Birds in the Sky follows a young, nameless protagonist who—in the submerged wasteland of a post-apocalyptic world—has to find her bearings in this strange landscape alone. The excerpt we are featuring this Translation Tuesday poignantly depicts a moment of aphasia that our narrator experiences as she attempts to grasp the language of her new world in all its ineffability. In a prose style that captures both the stillness of its depopulated setting and the urgency of our human desire for home, Haslund-Gjerrild’s voice is a unique one in the pages of climate fiction today. Equally pertinent is how, as co-translators Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell show us, this novel demonstrates the role that words and translation can have at a time when the ground we stand on has never been more uncertain.

“All the Birds in the Sky begins with the wind reaching into a house and touching all the things inside—creating a sort of inventory, like a finger which points and names: knife, shovel, blankets, shoes, pails of grain, leaves. This taxonomizing wind awakens the main character, a young girl who is, we come to understand, the last human left on earth. It is a word that pulls her out of the murky depths of her slumber: why—a word that demands an answer, an explanation, a story. She uses word chains and associations to try to hold on, making up new terms for the ones she has forgotten. 

As translators, we too search for words. In a work about losing language, our task was to find a vocabulary for and recreate the voice of a girl who was losing hers. The words themselves were important, of course: Haslund-Gjerrild’s language is much like the wind in this novel—simple and unadorned, it functions to reach out and touch, to grasp and hold. But even more central to this endeavor was the musicality of the text—its rhythm and movement. The girl’s journey in these first pages is felt as the steady beat of walking, the fluidity of thought, the slippage of memory, the momentum of searching. Much of the translation therefore came together not on the page, but by being spoken aloud. We read out the text, letting its sound and rhythm guide our choices—this word or that, a comma here or there, one sentence or two.”

—Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell

Something darts past her, quick. Then again. Like a twitch in her eyelids. When she opens her eyes, the blue is full of black knives that draw lines between the houses. There’s a shrieking in her ears, a squealing, like knives being whetted, that’s how sharp the tongues and wings of the black cloud are, now drawing circles and figure-eights above her. Below her, the gentle thumping of the sea.

She lies there a little longer and tries to remember what Um called those birds. Their flat, metallic cries ring in her ears. A flock of flying birds that can say only one thing, which they repeat, again and again and again. She has always wondered what could be so important for them to say that a single word, almost just a scream, could suffice for an entire life. She can’t imagine what it might be. Maybe here-here-here-here.

Other birds prefer to fly alone, like the heron, which just is as it is. A quiet and precise bird. If she sees a heron staring at the water, she stops too and waits motionlessly with her net in hand. The heron is so still it stops time, not a single feather quivers. Only the rings of the raindrops in the water reveal that time is passing as usual, but then, a loud splash, and the next second the fish is in its beak. It swallows its catch whole and resumes its waiting. When it finally does say something, it speaks with the same precision with which it waits; a few hoarse calls that echo between the houses before it falls silent again.

Meanwhile, the little shriekbirds, maybe that’s what she should call them since she can’t think of the word, fly ceaselessly and cry ceaselessly. They always fly together, never alone, so there’s really no need for them to constantly call each other. Perhaps they’re not calling, perhaps they’re just shrieking us-us-us, for joy of flying together as one.

The shade is deep and the street is narrow, but apart from the quick, black slashes of birds, the strip of sky above her is blue. She stands and folds up the blanket. One of the birds shoots past her ear while she winds the tether around the door handle. Carefully she poles out onto the street, into the little birds’ morning frenzy. Um loved them, real city birds, Um said. Before the big fire, they had roosted in the houses on land, but now most houses are at sea. They lay their tiny eggs in nests of seaweed, grass and feathers in the houses’ cabinets and drawers, fly up and down the streets and over the rooftops, around and around until they crash into the windows. Sometimes the glass breaks and the bird hurtles into the house like a soft rock, but most often the glass holds and the bird tumbles into the water. READ MORE…

To Build New Emotions: Jonas Eika and Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg Discuss After the Sun

September 23, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

I think most of [my characters] are looking for a way out of society—this thing we call society.

 Jonas Eika’s After the Sun is a masterfully realised work of contemporary fiction. In potent combination of the lyrical and the visceral, the five stories that make up the collection span landscapes, relationships, and planes of reality, moving with intensity and poeticism to form characters and worlds which convince us of their reality through their strangeness. After the Sun was featured as our Book Club selection for the month of August, and Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan spoke live to Jonas Eika and translator Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg about the exceptional qualities of this text—its dream logic, its musicality, and its radicalism. Their conversation is as follows.

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.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): I had approached this collection from the underlying cohesion of dream logic—which seemed to me to be what rounded out all the narratives in this volume. So I was wondering—first of all—do you remember your dreams?

Jonas Eika (JE): I’m really bad at remembering my dreams. I used to be kind of good, but I lost it. One dream that I do remember—which is also relevant to this book—is the end scene of one of the stories called “Rachel, Nevada”, which is in the middle of the book. It ends with this old woman coming home from a concert in this very ecstatic state, telling her husband that the singer from the concert had and came to her and said, So good to see you. We’ve met before, we’ve met on the radio. And that dream is what sort of started the story—I just knew I wanted to find a way to get there, to find out what came before. But I must admit, it’s also rare for me that I use dreams so specifically in writing, or maybe it’s there without me knowing.

Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg (SNH): Actually, I often remember them. But I think my dreams are usually very easily interpretable. I’ve had a dreamscape that’s mapped onto every place that I’ve lived, which is interesting. So I have a Copenhagen scape, and a New York scape—slightly altered landscapes of the places. I grew up on Long Island and in the Long Island scape, there are wolves everywhere—though I’ve never seen a wolf on Long Island. I tend to remember dreams really vividly, actually, and then they kind of dissipate over the course of the day. But the scapes I remember.

XYS: There’s always these associations of dreams with the divine or the primordial, but what actually what related these narratives to dreams for me was the idea that anything could happen at any time, and no matter what was happening at whatever time, it always kind of made sense. There was this cohesion throughout the writing that allowed absurdities to occur without them seeming as absurdities. I mean, this might be just a cultivation of the stories’ surreal circumstances, but I also think it has a lot to do with the innate musicality and the structure of the writing. So I wanted to ask both of you—was this an intentional thing that you were constructing? Or is it something that was more of a stream-of-consciousness ideal?

JE: I really like that description—and I think that the dream logic you talked about is making sense for me now. One of the things I did attempt consciously while writing was to keep it very open in terms of genre and narrative, but with the scenes that seem to break most with the reality of the story, I wanted them to somehow come out of the same logic, or be born out of the same landscape—out of the same objects and emotions that are already in the realist world of the story. So I’m glad you think it feels sort of logical or that it makes sense, even though it’s surprising. And how that came about was actually by finding this musicality in the language. I feel like often when writing works for me, it is like I’m tapping into an underlying rhythm. I will usually have a few sentences, which are often the first sentences of the story that just play around in my mind, and then I really get into that rhythm, and then I start writing when I’m ready or when an energy has sort of build up. So there was something improvisational about it.

SNH: Maybe it’s the dream logic, or the musicality, that ties all of the stories together—because I do think it’s interesting that they are so different. They take place in different places, they have different tones, they’re shifting in perspective, they’re playing with different genres, but there still is something that makes it such a coherent work. Perhaps that does have to do with that specific kind of musicality, that maybe is also in its own way, connected to a logic—or this dream logic.

XYS: I’m always pleasantly surprised when I read prose writers who also kind of have this insistence on continuity of music in their work; we tend to think of fiction as a lattice built architecturally, and then ornaments placed on top of that, but there’s something attractive about the idea that prose writers are paying equal attention to the movement of one sentence to the next—as poets do. Do either of you read or write poetry at all?

JE: Maybe I write a poem now and then, and just hide it in my drawer quickly. But I do read a lot of poetry and I just came to think of the Japanese poet Hiromi Ito, who I really read while writing this book, actually. And, I mean, she writes poetry, but a lot of narrative poetry. I read mostly Wild Grass by the Riverbank, and there’s something about the way she used rhythm and repetition to make even the weirdest things—the scenes where the distinction between life and death or human and non-human totally dissolve—make total sense, because she introduces it by the same patterns and rhythms that constitutes the universe of those poems. So I do read a lot of poetry, and I take that into my prose writing as well.

SNH: One of my guilty pleasures is reading poetry really fast—reading it as if it was prose, because I love that feeling of just being completely overwhelmed by language. And sometimes I’ll go back and read it more slowly, but I think that also has something to do with the way that I translate—a sort of expectation of having this full sensory experience wash over you without thinking too much about it, just letting the craft that’s been put into it do its work. READ MORE…

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: After the Sun by Jonas Eika

August 30, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Eika has convinced the cacophony and sensory exhilaration of dreams into the accounts of narration.

In the last act of summer, the Asymptote Book Club is proud to present an award-winning collection of short stories by Danish writer Jonas Eika. In five deeply immersive studies of sensation and cognition, After the Sun is an introduction to a stunning new voice in descriptive prose, establishing a new narrative tradition with non-linear dreamscapes and astounding evocations of the physical body as a site of storytelling. As our own world continues to evolve ever more into the intangible, Eika is a writer that makes corporeal the unreal realities of our times. 

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.

After the Sun by Jonas Eika, translated from the Danish by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg, Lolli Editions, 2021

To throw things into relief, I’ll play an old trick and say there are two kinds of people—those who seek to understand their dreams, and those who prefer that they remain in the inscrutable realm from where they came. The deciding quality—which also contributes to one’s ability to endure an intensive retelling of another’s dreams—is perhaps having to do with one’s own understandings of a life’s compartments; if within the rationale of time’s chronology, strangeness and encryption can occasionally take on the roles of logic and comprehension. Whether one sees a life’s events as a series of why-questions seeking the compatibility of answers, or if what we perceive as happenings are innocent to their order, oblivious of our insistence on purpose, and the phenomenon of them all fitting into the elapse of a life is simply an incredible feat of human storytelling.

It is incredible: that what baffles us about our own lives—mysteries, coincidences, appearances, and disappearances—is given such distinct clarity when organised into the perpetuity of sentences and pages. They move the world, they provide instruction, they are understood. A gun never appears to not go off. Fiction gives dreams a language that we also speak, ascribing to their impossible nature the subtle conviction of a greater design. In the reassuring procession of language’s patterns, we read life, with all the pieces fit somehow in place.

The stories in Jonas Eika’s collection, After the Sun, move firmly against this reassurance of knowledge; instead they insist forward with all the strangenesses of reality. Time is liquid, settings shift like cards in a deck, the present arrives as if already in memory. The logic of dreams dominate the prose in a determination that thwarts simple comprehension, and as such, Eika has convinced the cacophony and sensory exhilaration of dreams into the accounts of narration. In these five stories, the interruptions of the world—antithetical to our egocentric perceptions of individual purpose—is what drives the reading forward. We are led not by the simple fact of our choices and pathways, but by the world as it happens in experience. Before the discerning objectives of order intervene, we are allowed to luxuriate awhile in the immediate poetry of sensation—consciousness amidst the inexpressible moments of a new encounter.

Eika is especially interested in those dreaming moments where one is estranged from our lives and our bodies. “Alvin,” the story that begins the collection, establishes its opening shot in the aftermath of an “extremely fictional flight.” Then, nothing goes quite according to plan. The bank he’s meant to work at has burned to the ground, his savings and accommodations along with it. Eventually, he falls into the company (and the apartment) of a man he meets on the street. In confrontation with the dissonance between world and interiority, language serves to confirms the singularity of experience; in the wide landscape of world-events, we speak of what is happening to us as a confirmation of being. But where this iteration of feeling and knowing is so often a seeking of solidarity and mutual recognition, these stories instead maintain the volatility of selfhood: life as easily mutated by us as we are by it. The domino-effect of Eika’s narratives then signal a thrilling ceaselessness of possibility, speaking to the world as we know it now, boundless in abstraction. The speed by which we travel, the phantasmagoric architecture of financial markets, the way temporality collapses between reality and virtuality, After the Sun molds these accustomed surrealisms of our everyday into established reality. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from I Will Not Go Back by Caspar Eric

June 15, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Matt Travers

I can say nothing / that he himself / couldn’t say better, / say angrier

When the coronavirus struck Denmark in the early months of 2020, award-winning poet Caspar Eric adopted the practice of writing a poem a day for eighty days. Published eventually in Danish as I Will Not Go Back (Gyldendal, 2020), Eric’s practice finds in poetry the potential for serving as a mode of immediate witness to the unfolding of pandemic time and its political contexts. This Translation Tuesday, Matt Travers translates the poem Eric had written on Day 56, which eulogises the suicide of the Danish-Palestinian poet and political activist, Yahya Hassan, whose writing is praised for attesting to the link between “local violence with global violence” in his nominee citation for the 2020 Nordic Council Literature Prize. Written in one long, unbroken stanza, Eric’s voice pulses with a sharp political grief, and is a moving document to Hassan’s enduring legacy in literature as in politics.

DAY 56                                      228 hospitalised

I have to remind myself
that the crisis is here,
I cannot just
jump on the train to Aarhus.
They streamed Yahya’s funeral
on ekstrabladet.dk,
my thoughts are with his family,
my thoughts are with his loved ones.
And fuck those idiots
who whined on Facebook
about people not appearing
to keep proper distance.
Even on the day of mourning
Muslims are being shamed.
The racist narratives
lurking under the LCD,
fuck those people,
fuck their logics.
A hand in the air
for the poems of the impossible,
it is impossible to aim
towards the sentimental
without limiting
a boy to a poet
or to limit
the poet to a boy.
Nothing will ever be
the same again.
The moon’s corona
shone spiteful and beautiful.
I hammered down on the table,
dull tears,
in his own “Moonpoem,”
as salve and salvation,
he would not be killed
for nothing.
No, no one should die
for the majority’s peace.
I can say nothing
that he himself
couldn’t say better,
say angrier,
underneath his fury
a furious love.
I have already
quarreled with Ada
about what we can say
how it should be said.
It is a poor consolation
that everything has now changed.
What I miss
is also a young
human’s future,
the violence in the poems.
But the violence in the poems
is not only of the poems,
they are also the boy’s
and also his hands.
Everyone wants
A more real reality;
windows in the forehead,
concrete in the mouth.
Then they complain of the pain,
then they want it raw.
In with the shit
in the broken literature,
as long as the break
remains in the lines,
so we can stand on the sides
and clap very softly.
In these lonely minutes
it is a Brøndby fan,
let’s just call him Pervez,
who is my biggest ally.
Now we must lay
the identities in a coma,
try to find
a community
while the fire still
burns wildly.
Never let it go out,
never let it heat up.
Never let it heat up
a political project
if the project isn’t
also of doubt,
also of poetry,
like smoke forcing itself
down in the lungs,
forcing them to hack up
new melodies
in the petrified voices.

Translated from the Danish by Matt Travers

Caspar Eric was born in 1987 and studied Comparative Literature at the University of Copenhagen. He has written five collections of poetry (7/11, Nike, Avatar, All What You Own, and I Will Not Go Back — Poems from the days with COVID-19), and written a well-received experimental pop adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (#amlet). Nike, his long autobiographical poem whose starting point began with his own handicap and which reflects on the value of living with a disability in a hyper-mediated society, won the Danish Michael Strunge Prize, and Sherilyn Hellberg’s English translation won the Leif & Inger Sjöberg Award from the American-Scandinavian Foundation. Eric’s fifth collection, I Will Not Go Back — Poems from the days with COVID-19, published in November 2020, aimed to outlast the COVID disaster with one poem a day for the first eighty days. He has also translated Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel into Danish. 

Matt Travers is a writer based in Aarhus, Denmark. He has published poetry, reviews and translations with 3:AM Magazine, Zarf Poetry, Overground Underground, Firmament, and is currently working on the English translation of Søren R. Fauth’s Moloch: The Story Of My Rage.

*****

Read more from Translation Tuesday on the Asymptote blog:

The International Booker at the Border of Fiction: Who Will Win?

May 27, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

[T]his year’s shortlist . . . is explicitly focused with questions of archives, loss, and narration.

With the announcement of the Booker International 2021 winner around the corner and the shortlisted titles soon to top stacks of books to-be-read around the world, most of us are harboring an energetic curiosity as to the next work that will earn the notoriety and intrigue that such accolades bring. No matter one’s personal feelings around these awards, it’s difficult to deny that the dialogue around them often reveal something pertinent about our times, as well as the role of literature in them. In the following essay, Barbara Halla, our assistant editor and in-house Booker expert, reviews the texts on the shortlist and offers her prediction as to the next book to claim the title.

If there is such a thing as untranslatability, then the title of Adriana Cavarero’s Tu Che Mi Guardi, Tu Che Mi Racconti would be it. Paul A. Kottman has rendered it into Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, a title accurate to its content, typical of academic texts published in English, but lacking the magic of the original. Italian scholar Alessia Ricciardi, however, has provided a more faithful rendition of: “You who look at me, you who tell my story.” This title is not merely a nod, but a full-on embrace of Caverero’s theory of the “narratable self.”

Repudiating the idea of autobiography as the expression of a single, independent will, Caverero—who was active in the Italian feminist and leftist scene in the 1970s—was much more interested in the way external relationships overwhelmingly influence our conception of ourselves and our identities. Her theory of narration is about democratizing the action of creation and self-understanding, demonstrating the reliance we have on the mirroring effects of other people, as well as how collaboration can result in a much fuller conception of the self. But I also think that there is another layer to the interplay between seeing and narrating, insofar as the act of seeing another involves in itself a narrative creation of sorts; every person is but a amalgam of the available fragments we have of them, and we make sense of their place in our lives through storytelling, just as we make sense of our own.

I have started this International Booker prediction with Cavarero because I have found that this year’s shortlist—nay, the entire longlist—is explicitly focused with questions of archives, loss, and narration: what is behind the impulse to write, especially about others, and those we have loved, but lost? Who gets to tell our stories? It is a shame that Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette—as one of the most interesting interjections on the narrative impulse—was cut after being first longlisted in March. The second portion of Minor Detail sees its Palestinian narrator becoming obsessed to the point of endangerment to discover the story that Shibli narrates in the first portion of the book: the rape and murder of a Bedouin girl, whose tragic fate coincides with the narrator’s birthday. This latter section of the book is compulsively driven by this “minor detail,” but there is no “logical explication” for what drives this obsession beyond the existence of the coincidence in itself. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: April 2021

April 12, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Charlie Ng, Marina Dora Martino, and Rachel Stanyon

New work from Japan, Denmark, and Germany!

Our chosen texts from around the world this month denote a certain defamiliarization with one’s environment, whether due to an intrinsic sense of alienation, or an enforced strangeness by a world unexpectedly altered. In literature, disparity is a powerful, effective motif for both the urgency of social commentary, and the exploration of the personal psyche, and the works presented here are exemplifications par excellence in both respects. From a collection of short science fiction tales from a Japanese counterculture icon, to a dual text of two poetry volumes by acclaimed Danish poet Pia Tafdrup, and a harrowing tale of exile and forced peripatetics in the immediate fallout of Kristallnacht. Read on to find out more!

terminal boredom

Terminal Boredom: Stories by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan, Verso, 2021

Review by Rachel Stanyon, Copyeditor

Terminal complicity. Terminal addiction. Terminal jealousy. Terminal resignation. Terminal self-deception. Terminal love. Any of these could have been the title of Terminal Boredom, this engrossing first collection of short stories by Izumi Suzuki to appear in English translation. Given how prescient and succinct these tales are, it is surprising that they have taken this long to become available in English. With their worlds full of disillusionment and disaffection, youth unemployment and apathy, they will certainly strike a chord for modern readers interested in the emotional and societal effects of late capitalism, along with fans of sci-fi and speculative fiction.

In Japan, Suzuki is better known; there is even a novel (Endless Waltz by Mayumi Inaba, 1992) and a film (Koji Wakamatsu’s 1995 adaptation Endless Waltz) about the relationship between her and her jazz-musician husband, Kaoru Abe (Suzuki’s daughter sued over invasion of privacy at the book’s release, so read and watch as your conscience dictates). Suzuki, born in 1949, had a varied career, working as a key-punch operator, bar hostess, model, and actress, finding success as a writer before committing suicide in 1986, eight years after her then newly ex-husband had died of a drug overdose. These biographical details suggest that she understood intimately the sometimes hapless jobs, dependencies, and loneliness of the characters she depicts.

The scenarios constructed in the collections’ seven stories are varied enough to maintain interest, while the themes of apathy and detachment bind them together. “Women and Women” (tr. Daniel Joseph) describes a world plagued by resource scarcity in which men have been carved out of society and sent to a cunningly translated “Gender Exclusion Terminal Occupancy Zone” (GETO for short). This society is controlled through a sort of Orwellian erasure of history, and maintained by the complicity of the vast majority of its female inhabitants. Although the same-sex relationships are cast sympathetically, and, indeed, androgyny seems to be idolized throughout the collection, the story seems ultimately to condemn this ghettoized, vapid world. There does, however, remain a degree of ambivalence. The narrator soon comes across an escaped boy and “learn[s] the unexpected, dreadful truth about human life” before discovering that her mother was disappeared because she had fallen in love with a man and conceived naturally; in the end, though, our protagonist opts back into ‘normal’ life:

When I returned to my room, I noticed that my anguish was almost entirely gone. Women and women. Just as it should be. (. . .)

And yet . . . I put the pen down again before I was done. Now that I know about that thing, how can I ever be happy? To doubt this world is a crime. Everyone but everyone believes implicitly in this world, in this reality. I and I alone (well, probably not) know the great secret of this existence, and I’ll have to live out the rest of my life keeping it at all costs.

Right now, I have no intention of sacrificing my life for some underground resistance movement. But who knows, it might come to that someday.

The reader cannot, however, help but feel that it never will. READ MORE…

Anger, Sorrow, Compassion: On Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy

April 1, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Strange that to learn about one’s life, it is not sufficient to only live; one must also wander the halls of the past.

The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

When I was a young girl, when beginnings were pure and brute in their unknowing, my mother ruled alone over the great realm of truths. There was the education in sensual matters (the fragrance of her unfettered in the mornings, porcelain spoons filled to overflow) and the introduction of worldly wonders (mittens, pinwheels, rock sugar), but mostly she was the insistence of one, axiomatic certainty: no one will ever love you the way I love you. She said it often, matter-of-factly, without any cadence of sentiment or tenderness, to comfort just as well to condemn—no one will ever love you the way your mama loves you. This line never wavered. It never tarnished. And it has stayed with me my whole life.

The memoir can be a baffling genre, and the writer’s memoir most of all. One spends their whole life under the thrall of converting subjectivity into objectivity, studying the essence of things and their multiplicity, studying the losing journey living matters embark on in order to arrive at the page—at the culmination of such a discursive, cognitive, and all-bearing life, what is left for the private language to make public?

“a whole person / is too much to take,” Tove Ditlevsen writes in her ninth volume of poems, Det runde vaerelse. Yet in her memoir, The Copenhagen Trilogy, she still commands the facts of her life with that same prolific, torrential force that has sprawled through dozens of texts, telling of madness and poverty and femininity in the various violences they enact upon a single body, all in a fastidious discernment of what can be made material by ink and paper. In the reading of this monument to a life of letters, one is left with the sense that yes—a whole person is too much to take, in the way that anything, forced to be seen with such unimpeded clarity, is.

To tell the story of a life, there is always the light shone into the intimate, unthinking crevices of origin. Before Tove Ditlevsen was a woman, she was a daughter. The excavation of memory is a conscious act; some things may rise to the surface in gasps and startles, but in Childhood—the first act of the trilogy—the author is herself grasping the glimmers of what can be told to make sense of the now. In the way of Hayden White, who said, “What is at stake is not, ‘What are the facts?’ but rather, how are the facts to be described in order to sanction one mode of explaining them rather than another.” The first fact then, is that there was a girl, and there was her mother. It is the people who know you from your first moments who hand you the legends by which the world can be deciphered, and this, as Ditlevsen goes on to tell, is the making of a tragedy. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Lesbian Fairytales about Men” by Mette Østgaard Henriksen

March 3, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Sharon Rhodes

Once upon a time there was a man with a good explanation for everything. No one could stand him.

This week’s Translation Tuesday spins fairytales into absurdist comedies in these selections from Mette Østgaard Henriksen’s hilarious collection, “Lesbian Fairytales about Men.” Translator Sharon Rhodes explains her technique in preserving the Danish phrase, “Der var engang en mand”: “Literally, this could be translated as ‘there was once a man,’ but to preserve the fairytale element I have used the English fairytale idiom, ‘once upon a time.’” The fabulist literary convention established by this opening line is turned upside down when we actually meet these fairytale characters—mundane, awkward, hapless, yet still painfully human. Our narrator’s deadpan wit and subtle comic timing offers a glimpse into the hidden lives of these sad and clueless men, parodically portraying them as tragic (or tragicomic) heroes.

Once upon a time there was a man with a good explanation for everything. No one could stand him. He never considered that it might be because he trampled on ladybugs. In a rage he set fire to a cat’s tail because it was very soft. That’s part of the story of how he became a little lonelier with each passing day.

Once upon a time there was a man who liked to walk around bare balled. He also liked being whipped, but most found his nakedness overwhelming. They threw blankets at him and pointed at the clothes lying on a chair. When it got to be too much he’d crawl under the covers and press his face against the wall and tell himself he could live with it. READ MORE…

Translating Grief and Silence: Denise Newman on the Work of Naja Marie Aidt

December 18, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Nataliya Deleva

Translation is for me both stripping down and holding open to possibility.

Denise Newman is a poet and translator based in San Francisco. She has published four collections of poetry, and translated two novels by Inger Christensen from the Danish—The Painted Room and Azorno—as well as the short story collection, Baboon, by Naja Marie Aidt, which won the 2015 PEN Translation Prize, and most recently, Aidt’s memoir, When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back: Carl’s Book. The memoir, a semi-finalist for the National Book Awards and a finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize, is saturated with the trauma experienced by a mother grieving her son. Nataliya Deleva recently spoke with Newman about her approach to translating this deeply personal narrative across various cultural contexts, her proximity to the text and its author, and the role of rhythm in conveying silence on the page. 

Nataliya Deleva (ND): Translating is often co-creating, as it is not only the words and sentences of a text being translated, but also their meaning in a different cultural context. How did you find this process, considering this book is so painfully personal? Is grief universal?

Denise Newman (DN): Yes, the translation process touches on the mystery of language. I’ve often marveled at how translations of Bashō’s haikus seem to connect me directly to the moment of his observation. It doesn’t matter that the poem has traveled centuries, oceans, and languages. Maybe this is mostly possible when something is experienced and communicated directly, without any interference—then the original energy, which is outside the conditions of ordinary time and space, stays vital. I think this is what makes translating compelling; you have to go so deeply into a text that you depart from linear time and space. Working on Aidt’s book was hard, though, because of my own interference. She’s my friend, and my sorrow and concern for her sometimes got in the way, particularly while working on the passages that describe the last hours of Carl’s life. Her writing in this part is so direct, I felt as though I were actually present in the nightmare, and often needed to take breaks to clear my head. To get back to your question, I think all emotions are universal; we sense this when they are expressed directly, without any interference, as Aidt is able to do. Translating requires the ability to access those original emotions; they are what electrifies the language.

READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2019

October 28, 2019  |  in News  |  by Ah-reum Han, Caridad Svich, Ellen Jones, Henry Ace Knight, Lee Yew Leong, Varun Nayar, and Victoria Livingstone

Our Section Editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2019 issue!

Eleven days after its launch, Asymptote’s Fall 2019 issue continues to capture the zeitgeist. Many of its pieces, drawn from a record thirty-six countries, simmer with polyvocal discontent at the modern world, taking aim squarely at its seamy underbelly: the ravages of environmental degradation, colonial resource extraction, and media sensationalism of violence, in particular. If you’re still looking for a way in, perhaps our Section Editors can be of some assistance. Their highlights from the edition follow:

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, and Microfiction Special Feature Editor:

Via frequent contributors Julia and Peter Sherwood, an excerpt from Czech writer and dramaturg Radka Denemarková’s latest Magnesia Litera Prize-winning novel, Hours of Lead, brings us into the bowels of a Chinese prison, bearing witness to a dissident girl’s defiance of state repression and censorship. Inspired by Václav Havel, the protagonist’s struggle is entirely private and self-motivated, untethered from any broader democratic collective or underground movement. Her guards are driven mad by her equanimity and individuality in the face of savage interrogation: “Even her diffident politeness is regarded as provocative. As is her decency. Restraint. Self-control. Humility. . . The guards find her very existence provocative.” Renounced by her parents and rendered persona non grata, “a one-person ghetto,” by the state, her isolation is both liberating and the ultimate gesture of self-sacrifice.

Meanwhile, poet Fabián Severo—the only Uruguayan writing in Portunhol, the language of the Uruguayan frontier with Brazil—revels in an act of presence just as radical and defiant of the mainstream, resisting the state’s attempted erasure of his language. Laura Cesarco Eglin and Jesse Lee Kercheval’s translation sings: “This language of mine sticks out its tongue at the dictionary/ dances a cumbia on top of the maps / and from the school tunic and bow tie / makes a kite / that flies / loose and free through the sky.” Don’t overlook the luminous poems of prolific French and Martinican Creole writer Monchoachi, whom Derek Walcott has credited for “completely renewing our vision of the Creole language.” “The Caribbean could be considered a workshop for the modern world,” he conveys in Eric Fishman’s English translation, “with its deportations, its exterminations, and also its ‘wildly multiple’ side, its ‘ubiquity of voices and sounds.’” READ MORE…

Our Fall 2019 Issue Is Here!

October 17, 2019  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Radka Denemarková, Sylvia Molloy, Monchoachi, and a Spotlight on International Microfiction

Welcome to our spectacular Fall 2019 edition gathering never-before-published work from a record-breaking 36 countries, including, for the first time, Azerbaijan via our spotlight on International Microfiction. Uncontained, this issue’s theme, may refer to escape either from literal prisons—the setting of some of these pieces—or from other acts of containment: A pair of texts by Czech author Radka Denemarková and Hong Kong essayist Stuart Lee tackle the timely subject of Chinese authoritarianism. In “The Container,” Thomas Boberg performs the literary equivalent of “unboxing” so popular on YouTube these days, itemizing a list of things in a container shipped from Denmark to the Gambia—all in a withering critique of global capitalism.

The container lends itself to several metaphors but none as poignant or as on point as—you guessed it, dear Asymptote reader—the container of language itself, as suggested by London-based photographer Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee’s brilliant cover highlighting the symbolism of the humble rice grain. This commodity has, like language, been exported, exchanged, enhanced, and expressed in various forms from its various origins across the planet. Even when a state attempts to erase language, resistance remains possible, as poet Fabián Severo—the only Uruguayan writing in Portunhol, the language of the country’s frontier with Brazil—demonstrates: “This language of mine sticks out its tongue at the / dictionary,” he sings, “dances a cumbia on top of the maps / and from the school tunic and bow tie / makes a kite / that flies / loose and free through the sky.” In one of Argentine writer Sylvia Molloy’s many profound riffs on the bilingual condition, Molloy claims that “one must always be bilingual from one language, the heimlich one, if only for a moment, since heim or home can change.” READ MORE…