Language: English

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

November 4, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Eva Wissting, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary developments from Palestine, Sweden, and Kenya!

This week, our editors report on the rebirth of theatre in Palestine, the best Swedish crime novels, and the Kenyan Readathon Challenge from September. From the Palestine National Theatre Festival to the Nairobi International Book Fair, read on to learn more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

In Palestine, there is a generation of people who don’t really know what a theatre is! This might sound like an exaggeration, but sadly, that’s reality—or at least, that’s how it looks on the surface. 

When the first Intifada broke out in late 1987, all theatres and cinemas were closed and most did not reopen or regain momentum until the late nineties. With simple arithmetic, we can see that the chances are low today of finding high-caliber theatre actors or actresses, let alone directors, aged in their thirties and forties. 

With that in mind, I must admit I wasn’t too enthusiastic to attend the third Palestine National Theatre Festival running in the last week of October. Little did I know! All that was needed to get fully hooked was one play. 

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We Stand With Ukraine: “Charred Snow” by Deborah Kelly

April 16, 2022  |  in We Stand With Ukraine  |  by Deborah Kelly

and all words swallowed hard / on themselves.

In this edition of our column that spotlights literature expressing support for the citizens of Ukraine, we present Deborah Kelly’s poem, “Charred Snow.” Through tightly coiled lines, the poem evokes both the ongoing devastation and the inarticulable grief of victims of war. 

Charred Snow

Who sings a folksong on the steps of ruin
knows, there are words one swallows
under bombardment,
but I, in another town, could cry devastation,
as many times as it fell.
In the charred snow, burnt bread.
The least of it. To say devastation,
I cried sons, daughters.
But then, Bucha,
and all words swallowed hard
on themselves.

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Bercer un poème: On Nursing Poetry in the Showcase Ù Ơ | SUO: A Poetic Exchange

March 28, 2022  |  in Essays, Reviews  |  by Phuong Anh

Sound, she argued, is the space in which an utterance bears meaning.

“What is language if it is not sound?”—Trần Thị NgH

Speaking of translation in one of the pre-recorded sessions of the poetic showcase Ù Ơ | SUO, writer Trần Thị NgH reminded the audience of the importance of sound in language. Sound, she argued, is the space in which an utterance bears meaning.

This focus on sound and other sensory aspects of poetry permeated the week-long Ù Ơ | SUO, which brought together poems in translation and multilingual works mixing Welsh, English, and Vietnamese, as well as panel discussions and visual and performative responses. This collaborative work was the result of a three-month residency for Welsh and Vietnamese women and non-binary writers.

Ù Ơ | SUO’s point of departure, according to Nhã Thuyên’s introduction, was the “familiar sounds of lullabies” and how they might serve as a clue to the “origins of poetic language and the role of women in transmission of language and memory within families.” The title of the showcase, which refers to the act of singing a lullaby, inspired me to experience this showcase through the dialectal metaphor of “bercer un poème“: cradling a poem as a mother would a crying child. The reader is also important to the “growth” of the piece: reading is how we cradle a poem. Nous sommes bercés par le poème, et nous berçons le poème—we are cradled by the poem, and we cradle the poem.

As I viewed the exhibition, Piaget’s theory of cognitive development came to mind. His theory deals with the nature of knowledge: how a child comes to acquire it, build it, and use it. According to Piaget’s framework, children go from experiencing the world through actions, to learning how to represent it through words, to expanding their logical thinking and reasoning. It isn’t that children know less, Piaget argued; they just think differently. This thinking “differently” is then a space where creative potential can emerge.

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We Stand With Ukraine: “invasion” by Jonathan Chan

March 26, 2022  |  in We Stand With Ukraine  |  by Jonathan Chan

rough-worn faith / that this will make them listen. . .

In our third installment of this weekly column, we continue to highlight works from writers around the globe responding to the war in Ukraine. In this poem, Jonathan Chan, in a series of haunting stanzas, expresses the desperate but unflagging faith of a people resisting invasion of their homes.  

invasion

“The town watches.”

—Ilya Kaminsky

i speak not of civility

ambassadors in their pretty suits in
pretty chairs, faces walled by panels
of glass, spittle for war criminals who
will bypass purgatory, chilled before a
passive, bloodless face.

i speak not of civility

another tranche, another round of
sanctions announced on virtual
squares, rough-worn faith that
this will make them listen, this must
make them listen,

i speak not of civility

the instincts of past clicks, strategic
shares, swipe, image, swipe, clip,
swipe, image, swipe, prayer, swipe,
share, sudden rush of yellow and
blue, billowing, billowing,

i speak not of civility

all these groups suddenly dropped
on their knees, candlelight vigil
at 8 pm on zoom, learning again
the violence of intercession, a
century’s ghost moaning please,
Lord, please

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We Stand With Ukraine: “To Memorise a Crocus” by Sam Garvan

March 19, 2022  |  in We Stand With Ukraine  |  by Sam Garvan

a half-opened door / like a wing-bone.

In this second installment of our new weekly column, we collect the works of writers around the world in response to the ongoing war in Ukraine—texts of compassion, of endurance, of commemoration, and of reaching outward. When there is the time of violence, there is the time of poetry, reminding us of the immense actions of language. This poem, an elegy in both images and the inverse of what can be seen, is written by Sam Garvan for Captain Sidorov, killed on February 19, 2022 by Russian artillery. 

To Memorise a Crocus

 Mariupol 10.3.22

And so the winter storm blew in, casting its cold eye
over the house I love.

Already on a clear night you can see a half-opened door
like a wing-bone.

To memorise a crocus, my father said, do so as hail
is falling round it.

Sam Garvan won the Troubadour Prize 2021, and joint runner-up Keats-Shelley Prize. His recent work is published / forthcoming in Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Alchemy Spoon, and the Keats-Shelley Review. He has a PhD from London University and works for a London beekeeper.

*****

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A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

March 17, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Andriana Hamas, MK Harb, and Suhasini Patni

Because, as Emily Dickinson once said, "There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away."

Tired of doomscrolling? We think you’d like these staff recommendations—hailing from the UK, India, and Turkey. Sign up for our newsletter to get these recommendations delivered right to your inbox.

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Like so many of us in this pandemic, my reading has turned to sci-fi and magical realism. When our world is wedged between the hybrid machination of zoom and an increasingly taxing everyday life, fantasy provides an escape into a world of pleasure. Perhaps no one has done this as masterfully as British author, Susanna Clarke, in her recent fantasy novel Piranesi. Set in a disenchanted world of The House, Piranesi, a futuristic scribe of sorts records his everyday life in an infinite universe consisting of severed statues, columns and fringe pockets of water. His universe is awfully lonely, yet he finds a way to narrate it with an uncanny curiosity. He has an endearing voice, which he often uses to enchant the only other member he interacts with, a dapper and sordid gentleman by the name of “The Other.” Together they enter a surreal journey searching for “Great and Secret Knowledge,” encountering the most mundane of objects along the way. Though The Other is not able to value this world in the same way Piranesi does, the latter often lends him his eyes to make him understand. The beauty of Clarke’s writing is not its construction of a highly centralized and systemized future universe, rather its focus on collapse and the journey that lurks between empty halls. I hope you give it a chance and let Piranesi guide your night.

—MK Harb, Editor-at-Large for Lebanon

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A Storehouse of Affection: On Tijan M. Sallah’s I Come from a Country

February 3, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Dr. Nibir K. Ghosh

[Sallah] seems to be carrying The Gambia within his heart and soul.

I Come from a Country by Tijan M. Sallah, Africa World Press, 2021

If The Gambia as a nation figures on the globe as “one of the world’s poorest and least-developed countries,” according to a recent article in The Guardian, there may be much cause for despair. As I leaf through the pages of Tijan M. Sallah’s latest poetry collection I Come from a Country, I can see a great deal of hope emanating from the vigorous pen of The Gambia’s leading poet, writer, and critic. The very first poem “I Come from a Country,” that gives the collection its title, shows how Sallah negotiates the dark terrains of poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, and urban squalor through images and pictures of what he considers essentially human. The opening lines of the poem, “I come from a country where the land is small, / But our hearts are big,” immediately suggest that it is the people who constitute a nation rather than geographical lines or boundaries. This is a land where “every one knows your name / . . . Where poverty gnaws at our heels, / But we have not given up hope / We continue to work.”

The collection’s recurring image of the sun signifies hope eternal. Hope, for Sallah, is not a “thing with feathers” as Emily Dickinson would have us imagine in her poem, “Hope is the thing with Feathers,” but it is a reassurance that “rises daily with the sun.” Life is difficult but with the resilience reminiscent of Hemingway’s Santiago, the common folks of The Gambia believe that “a man can be destroyed but not defeated”:

And if resilience were a person,
She will live in my country.
She will be a calloused-handed woman
In sun-drenched rice-fields,
With a child strapped on her back;
But with a love enormous as the sea.

. . . Where we still believe in such things as
Sweating with your hand,
And still remember God and family.
And still support the indigent,
And carry Hope like oysters,
Sun-peeping from their shells.

Though based in the USA, Sallah’s intimate relationship with The Gambia remains deeply embedded in his sensibility. It is not restricted to a mere poetic expression of “imaginary homelands.” He seems to be carrying The Gambia within his heart and soul. If he is eager to show his love and esteem for the people of his homeland, he is no less vehement in offering his harsh indictment of tyrants like Yahya Jammeh who brought untold misery to the subjects for whom he was elected to be their custodian. Celebrating the overthrow that led to Jammeh’s exile, Sallah warns his fellow Gambians in “Jammeh-Exit”:

The detractors of freedom prey
On the unfulfilled pledges to the poor . . .
We must not be fooled;
That history does not repeat itself.
But, damn well, it does, if
Those who guard the doors of liberty
Sleep like dunderheads at sunrise.

Sallah is equally unsparing of leaders with dictatorial intent as is evident from the poem “Nasty Palaver of Donald Duck,” where his target is Donald Trump. Infuriated by Trump’s reference to natives of Africa as “people from the shit-hole continent,” Sallah castigates the “insolence from a drake, holding the scepter” for creating fissures in the most powerful democracy in the world with his hate-speeches against immigrants and people of colour. Sallah desires to see the earth rid of “such unbridled / Arrogance and greed” that cannot treat fellow human beings with respect and dignity. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

January 28, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa and Charlie Ng

The latest from Mexico and Hong Kong!

January brought a plethora of literary events, from author talks to publishing announcements. In Mexico, the publishing house Juan de la Cosa / John of the Thing put out a new bilingual poetry volume. In Hong Kong, the Dante Alighieri Society hosted a discussion on writing in your second language. Read on to find out more!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

The first month of 2022 has seen many commercial and independent publishers announce new books, both in Spanish and in translation. Though the year, like the two before it, will also be strangled by the global pandemic, the exciting vitality of the publishing scene brings momentary solace and hope.

North American publishing house Deep Vellum published The Love Parade, George Henson’s translation of El desfile del amor, a detective fiction by acclaimed Mexican writer Sergio Pitol originally published by Anagrama in 1985. An expert in contemporary fiction from Latin America, Henson has also contributed to Asymptote in the past, publishing the translated work of other outstanding Spanish-speaking authors such as the Mexican Alberto Chimal and the Peruvian Pedro Novoa. Deep Vellum is not new to Mexican literature either; its catalogue includes the names of contemporary international luminaries from Mexico, among them the poets Carmen Boullosa, Rocío Cerón, and Tedi López Mills.

The renowned Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli co-edited the sixty-fifth edition of independent San Francisco-based literary journal McSweeney’s, assembling a stellar collection of stories, letters, and translations. The compendium is not only dazzling but also urgently political. According to the journal’s website, the issue “delves into extraction, exploitation, and defiance.” The quarterly includes work by several internationally acclaimed writers from the American continent. Many are authors whom Asymptote has featured in the past, such as Gabriela Wiener, Samanta Schweblin, and Claudia Domingo. Their names are listed alongside other famous voices who have rapidly achieved international fame, including Laia Jufresa, Megan McDowell, and Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil.

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“Precise Tactility”: Polly Barton Interviewed by Xiao Yue Shan

December 1, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Language is a source of great fear, but it's also a source of great joy and connection.

At page 124 of Polly Barton’s Fifty Sounds, I found myself smiling impossibly wide, reading out loud to the empty room: “Kyuki-kyuki . . . The sound of a pen writing on a whiteboard.” Part of the joy that pervades and grows in reading this “memoir-dictionary” is in its subtle invitation to speak: to feel, as the author says, the “sensory bombardment” of encountering each new word, and the world that arrives with it. Written in fifty essays that each orbits off—sometimes tangentially, sometimes straightforwardly—from one of Japanese language’s vast selection of onomatopoeic words, the book generates a curious, sensual portrait of Barton’s life in Japan as a young woman, informed by the Wittgensteinian notion of language being defined by its utility, and in similar spirit to Lyn Hejinian: “Language . . . nearly is our psychological condition.” Through explorations of how the myriad self comes to match and distinguish itself from the world in words, Fifty Sounds creates an ecstatic realm of what happens in, between, and across languages—and the people who speak them.

Barton is a prolific translator from the Japanese; her repertoire includes Akutagawa winners like Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden and bestsellers like Misumi Kubo’s So We Look to the Sky, as well as English PEN Awards for Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are and Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job. Though we’ve spoken to her in the past about her translation work, I wanted to hear more about the linguistic and textual discoveries that catalysed this desire to work with language, in the quiet and admiring affinity between all people who love words and their secret conspirations. I spoke with Polly on-screen in our opposing time zones; she answered my questions in thoughtful bursts of speech that carried with them a vivid, various nature, her hands occasionally gesturing at the immeasurable distance between us, that which only language can attempt to breach.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Did Fifty Sounds begin in its current structure?

Polly Barton (PB): Not at all. I started working on it when I’d just got back to the UK after years of living in Japan, and at first, it was just notes for essays about the Japanese language. The inclusion of the onomatopoeia happened quite naturally, but the “fifty sounds” structure came about when I started writing the proposal for the [2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions] Essay Prize; I wanted to do it as a way of consolidating my thoughts, because I felt like there was meat in there and I was really enjoying writing about it, but it was kind of all over the place.

But the more I was writing, the more this concept started coming to me, and it seemed so out there that even while I was writing, I was thinking, can I do this? Can I write a memoir in fifty essays about Japanese onomatopoeia? Still, the callout for the contest said, “rewards ambitious writing,” so I was like, they want ambitious, I’ll give them ambitious. It’s funny because I am so grateful for that structure. It was just a crazy idea I hit upon, but I think it was very good for me to have that as a constraint, to start over fifty times—so I could do some sections like prose-poems, and a couple bits that are more academic.

XYS: Freedom dressed up as a constraint. There are definitely pieces that feel as though they could be portioned into separate texts, but because all the sections are encompassed in the umbrella of one experience, it feels cohesive.

PB: I don’t know if I intended this, but the experience of being in Japan, and learning Japanese, was so chaotic to me. I think a lot of people who learn a different language when they grew up and live in another culture—particularly one where they’re visibly different from most people around them—do have this real panoply of conflicting experiences, and the book is about embracing chaos in a way.

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Realizing the Myriad Possibilities of the Text: An Interview with Arunava Sinha

November 4, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Suhasini Patni

This is the truth of the world, that we live in various languages and not just one.

Arunava Sinha is a Delhi-based translator literary translator who works from Bengali to English and English to Bengali. He is the winner of the Crossword Book Award for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), and sixty-six of his translations have been published so far, including a collection of Modern Bengali Poetry, novels by acclaimed writers such as Buddhadeva Bose and Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay, and a collection of Bengali short stories. He teaches in the creative writing department at Ashoka University and works as the books editor at Scroll.in.

I met him for the first time in 2019, when I worked as his teaching assistant. In a small class of six students, translating out of Hindi, Tamil, and Bengali, we worked on hearing the voice of a book and how to articulate it in a different language.

In this Zoom conversation, Sinha talks about translating Khwabnama by Akhtaruzzaman Elias, the questions he receives in his literary translation classes, and the publishing industry in India.

Suhasini Patni (SP): You’ve been translating for many years. In your latest interview with Forbes, you said you developed an interest in literary translation after realizing that Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was a translation. Can you talk about your journey so far?

Arunava Sinha (AS): It began as an interest in college. I was an English literature student, and as you said, it struck me that these words we’re marveling over when we’re reading Garcia Marquez are really written by somebody else. I wanted to know what writing those words might be like. And of course, it immediately showed me that translation is completely different from what we assume it is. It’s all that is not said but that you are hearing at the back of your head. It is so little about the dictionary meaning because that’s the most easily solved problem. That is what makes a text so rich and what makes translation so interesting.

I had forgotten about translation because I moved to Delhi and switched jobs. It wasn’t until an editor at Penguin called me, asking me about Sankar’s Chowringhee that I rekindled my journey. And it was just at the right age for a midlife crisis, too!

SP: What kind of books did you begin with translating?

AS: I started with the canon, partly because there were not too many translations of the best-known books from Bangla at the time. There were a number of English publishers, and they were hungry for books to publish and there were not enough writers in English. So, it was quite a happy combination of circumstances. There was plenty of variety in the writing in the canon, but if you really step back and look at the big picture, it represented just one segment of possible writing in Bangla. That is what led me to start looking for texts with more diversity, both in terms of the content and the writer. People who wrote regularly did with a certain kind of lucidity which I think was market-facing even if they didn’t tell themselves so. But their books were written to be read by large numbers of people. They adopted a certain lucid idiom. Their art lay in playing with lucidity, but they never became obscure except for some experimental writers. When the field widened and I had other types of books to look for, they were not as bothered about the market. And they wrote in much stronger, much more literary—by literary I don’t mean high literary—but much more of an idiom that only literature can accept and accommodate. This of course has also made translation a more complicated but invigorating task. As you do more of the same thing, you want your challenges to get bigger.

It was partly this that led me to the text, until now, I think was the toughest to translate, which is Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s Khwabnama, which is daunting not just because of the actual language but also because you immediately realize the quality of that book and you are terrified that you will not be able to preserve it in the translated version. I think this was the biggest concern for me. I’m still not sure if it has worked or not. And I don’t think I ever will be. When you’re translating, your real challenge is the language, it’s not the literature. At that point, you’re not thinking of the literature, you’re just thinking of how to get a sentence across. Miraculously, somehow if you do it right, then all the pieces fall into place.

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Because Reading (Subtitles) Is What? Fundamental!

August 18, 2021  |  in Essays, Multimedia  |  by Francesca Leveridge

RuPaul’s Drag Race demands translation sensitive to global and local queer cultures.

In the twelve years since RuPaul’s Drag Race first premiered on the relatively unknown LGBTQIA+ cable channel Logo TV, the Emmy award-winning series has gained an immense global following and become one of the defining shows of our age. The reality TV show, which boasts thirteen seasons (along with six All Stars series), follows drag queens competing in a range of performance-based challenges to be crowned “America’s Next Drag Superstar.” More recently, the race has expanded overseas, with Spain becoming the latest in a series of international spinoffs, joining Thailand, the UK, Canada, Holland, and Australia/New Zealand. In its evolution from a niche talent show for US drag performers to a global cultural phenomenon, Drag Race has propelled a queer subculture from the margins to the mainstream and put drag performance in the international spotlight. In the journey to globalize the show, translation has played a key role in giving drag and LGBTQIA+ culture visibility around the world.

It is of course thanks to the subtitling and dubbing of Drag Race into multiple languages that the US original achieved global success and found audiences worldwide. For translators, capturing the nuances of the show is no small feat. Much of its entertainment relies on verbal and cultural humour, each episode packed with English-based puns, double-entendres, and innuendos that can be hard to translate. Similarly, the dialogue showcases slang terms, neologisms, and catchphrases that are deeply rooted in the drag and LGBTQIA+ culture of the US. Take “mothertuckin’,” for example. In drag culture, tucking, used here to rhyme with a certain English swearword, refers to a taping practice used by drag queens to make their genital anatomy appear more feminine. Recreating this kind of wordplay poses a challenge for translators working in a context with a less developed drag culture and associated vocabulary.

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Physical Object and Metaphysical Destiny: To the Lake Journeys to the Heart of the Balkans

May 19, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Andriana Hamas

Kapka Kassabova’s English-language travelogue invites readers in the Balkans to consider local culture with a fresh perspective.

On a website called Lost Bulgaria, anyone curious enough can browse thousands of carefully preserved and curated photographs depicting the poignant yet essential ways in which the people, customs, and landscape have transformed or been transformed from the last quarter of the 1800s until 2010. About a dozen of the blurred images kept in this time machine take us back to the first half of the twentieth century and Lake Ohrid, one of the world’s oldest and deepest, which nowadays is split by the border between North Macedonia and Albania. The majority of the visuals reveal everyday life near the shores, the monasteries that dot the mountainous terrain, the traditionally clad locals, or the passers-by who felt the need to extend a prayer to Saint Naum of Ohrid. Kapka Kassabova’s latest travelogue with distinct autobiographical elements, To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace, offers a similar but much more powerful passage through the lake’s past and present.

The book, which reviewers often place in the travel fiction genre, is pronouncedly personal, even though the disclosed memories, both on an individual level and as an outlet for the collective subconscious, undoubtedly remind readers from diverse regions of the globe of their unique roots and unending voyage of self-discovery.

The author (b. 1973) spent her childhood and teenage years in Sofia and later moved with her family to New Zealand, only to finally—or at least for the time being—settle down in the Scottish Highlands. Her extensive travels have informed her writing, which encompasses poetry collections and novels, in addition to literary travelogues. Although Kassabova’s mother tongue is Bulgarian, she writes in English, a practice that evokes the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, Khalil Gibran, and Joseph Conrad and makes her Bulgarian translations all the more fascinating.

Located on the edge of her grandmother’s homeland, Lake Ohrid is where she passed a few of her summer holidays. Once considered the pearl of the Balkans, nowadays it is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site and boasts endemic species and unique prehistoric remnants. Despite this international protection however, its pristine waters are still threatened by climate change and widespread pollution. While making a convincing case for immediate preservation action of global scale, Kassabova’s fictionalized reportage can also be perceived as a continuation to her previous one, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, in which she sets on a quest to comprehend the meaning of the separation points not only between countries, but also between people. In a similar fashion, To the Lake prompts us to tag along as she traces the ancient Via Egnatia and dives into the bloody history of the region, where Bulgarians, Macedonians, Albanians, and Greek are always at crossroads, especially in the aftermath of the two Balkan wars and the ensuing decades under communist rule. 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…

The Dangers of Complacency: An Interview with the Founders of Sandorf Passage

March 10, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Moore

. . . there are a lot of mental borders that writers and translators are crossing every day. I think publishers also have to do that.

Sandorf Passage is a new independent nonprofit publishing house, whose first titles have been launched this month. Its founders, American Buzz Poole and Croatian Ivan Sršen have both previously worked as editors and obtained EU funding to bring works from the former Yugoslavia into English. Sandorf Passage focuses on “writing inspired by both conflict zones and the dangers of complacency.” Their first title, From Nowhere to Nowhere, by Bekim Sejranovic was published at the beginning of March. Now, with their second, Vesna Maric’s The President Shop released yesterday, and two more books due for release next month, Blog Editor Sarah Moore spoke with the founders of Sandorf Passage about the importance of translated works and what to expect from their titles.

Sarah Moore (SM): How did you both come to editing?

Buzz Poole (BP): I was a lifelong reader, studied literature in college as an undergraduate and then graduate student at San Francisco State University, where I got involved with a handbound letterpress literary journal called Em. At the time it was a hotbed of indie lit journals. I moved to New York, got a job as editor at Mark Batty Publisher (MBP), and moved on to be Managing Director of Black Balloon Publishing, which is now an imprint of Catapult—that’s where my story and Ivan’s started to merge. We had met at the Frankfurt Book Fair when I was at MBP and hit it off. Ivan was there as an agent and translator, and at the time we thought that we might try to do something, though it never quite worked out. Then fast forward to Black Balloon. I saw Ivan and said, “Hey, I’m acquiring fiction now—what have you got?” And he had Robert Perišić’s Our Man in Iraq, which was critically acclaimed and unlocked the floodgates in terms of our continuing collaborations.

Ivan Sršen (IS): During my studies I started working in a small bookstore that was owned by a small publishing house in Zagreb. I was just a twenty-year-old student, watching all these great authors and translators coming into our small bookstore. Being part of that collective was very important for me and shaped my view of the business of publishing and what editing really is. It’s a lot about communication: knowing the people, what they are looking for, what they have to offer, and where their horizon is spreading. I was lucky enough to get a job as an intern editor working on music books, which launched me into the world of creative publishing—a small scene but very diverse, with the legacy of former Yugoslavia. Many big writers came from Yugoslavia, like the Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić, and I wanted to pursue a literary editing career. So I worked with a few publishers until, in the end, I realised I would have to start something on my own. That’s how I started Sandorf in 2008—basically without any savings and on the verge of the world economic catastrophe! So those were interesting years, but that’s the time when I met Buzz. I always knew that I wanted to go beyond the borders. Not just national borders, but all kinds of borders—imaginary, mental—and in working with books there are a lot of mental borders that writers and translators are crossing every day. I think publishers also have to do that.

SM: So how did Sandorf become Sandorf Passage?

BP: We’re very similar and we both have the desire to be as self-sufficient as possible and to do things the way we want them done. The Our Man in Iraq project was the first stepping-stone in this becoming something more official. Ivan was representing Robert as his agent and the book had already been published in a UK English-language edition so I had the benefit of being able to read it. When I read it, I liked it, but immediately said—with my editor’s cap on—that it needed to change and could become so much better. Robert and Ivan were open to that, and that’s the reason why the book got as much attention as it did; it’s a better book now, having received a more thorough edit than it had received originally in the Croatian or in the UK edition. This opened the door to its potential. Then Ivan and Robert were given funding from the Croatian Ministry of Culture to start a literary festival called Lit Link, which still exists. We started being able to invite international writers and editors to Croatia to meet Croatian authors. For the first project, Journey to Russia, Ivan was able to secure some funding for a Croatian domestic English-language edition that I worked on with Ivan and Will Firth, the translator. Then at an ALTA conference in Minneapolis three years ago, Ivan and I were both there. Sandorf had gotten to a very good place so we thought, what if we did a US imprint? And here we are. We got a grant from the EU to provide subsidies for bringing writing from the former Yugoslavia into the English-language market.

IS: Yes, having these four books that are now coming out, buying the rights for them, and discussing them with Buzz marked the beginning of Sandorf Passage. I already had the rights for late Bekim Sejranović’s novel From Nowhere To Nowhere. Then Vesna Maric sent me her new manuscript, The President Shop. And we had Journey to Russia, already translated by Will Firth and published by Sandorf in Croatia in English. So with these three main books in English, we agreed that we had to continue—we couldn’t say no! It’s great when you start a new independent publishing project because you can really enjoy the books and dedicate your time to each title. That’s what it’s all about in publishing: having time to work on the books, to take care, and to discuss them with the author. READ MORE…