Language: English

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…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 5, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Clémence Lucchini, Darren Huang, and Thuy Dinh

The latest news from the Vietnamese Diaspora, Taiwan, and the United States!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from the Vietnamese Diaspora, Taiwan, and the United States. The diasporic Vietnamese community has been mourning renowned poet Nguyễn Lương Vỵ; in Taiwan, Leo Ou-fan Lee and Esther Yuk-ying have released their highly acclaimed co-authored memoir; and in the United States, PEN America has announced the Longlist for the 2021 PEN America Literary Awards. Read on to find out more! 

Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Vietnamese Diaspora

The diasporic Vietnamese community is mourning poet Nguyễn Lương Vỵ, who recently died of COVID-19 at aged sixty-eight. Tributes and essays devoted to his fruitful legacy have appeared online, with mentions of his March 3, 2021 funeral in Midway City, California.

Born in Quảng Nam, Central Vietnam—a hardscrabble terrain famous for its revolutionaries and poets—Nguyễn Lương Vỵ used onomatopoeic speech to create multivalent “compressions” of sound, image, and sense. Instructed in Chinese and Nôm scripts by his grandfather, Nguyễn Lương Vỵ gravitated toward Tang poetry, haiku, and Zen philosophy. These influences shaped his lifelong exploration of Âm, a Vietnamese homonymic concept that represents the motherlode of sound, voice, language, female, and night, overlapping with the Buddhist, Hinduist, and Jainist Om. READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2021

February 8, 2021  |  in News  |  by Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, Eva Heisler, Garrett Phelps, Lee Yew Leong, and Sam Carter

Our section editors present their favorite works from our Winter 2021 issue!

Our Winter 2021 issue marks a decade of diving into the languages of the world (our archive now boasts 113 of them!) in all their incredible singularity and variegation. Spanning thirty-one countries, this milestone edition feels like a fitting way to honor a decade of hard work behind the scenes. After hearing from our blog editors last week, let’s pass the mic to the very editors who had a hand in putting together the issue itself.

“Is it a Comedy? Is it a Tragedy?” Thomas Bernhard asks in our debut issue from January 2011. Ten years later, Brazilian author Adelice Souza’s fever-dream of a story (in Padma Viswanathan’s pitch-perfect translation) provides a direct enjoinder: “The play wasn’t a comedy, nor was it a tragedy . . . It was a drama very specifically for those two women.” Just as in Bernhard’s story, the point is not the play at all—we hardly know what the play is about, other than the fact that its two actresses play a lonely woman and her dog, and that tragedy ensues when one demands to switch roles with the other. In contrast to Bernhard, who focuses squarely on the theatre-goer, Souza makes it all about the two actresses whose eight years of traveling with the play to multiple cities have “put them through every type of relationship.” It’s not a story one imagines being plotted out; rather, the work feels like it has been ejected, like toothpaste from a tube, sentence by exhilarating sentence. In the “Brave New World Literature” Special Feature, we also come full circle but in a different way via the return of frequent contributor Jeremy Tiang, who debuted as a translator in our first issue. Combining pop-cultural references with theory, “The World Is Not Enough” is full of quotable gems, but nowhere is Tiang more on-point than when he muses, “Perhaps if the dominant anglophone culture actually acknowledged itself to be part of the world, rather than treating ‘world literature’ as a spice rack to save itself from total blandness, more than three percent of books published in the United States would be in translation?” Finally, anyone who is curious about the workings of a magazine of world literature other than our own will find plenty of food for thought in John Freeman’s riveting piece on how he remade Granta into a global publication.

—Lee Yew Leong, Fiction Editor and ”Brave New World Literature“ Special Feature Editor

Max Rojas is a constant enthusiasm of mine and so I was thrilled to showcase a pretty sizable excerpt from Zane Koss and Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz’s translation—the very first in English—in all its shining, breathless glory. Even though it’s a mere sliver of a doorstop-sized poem, it’s an excellent sample of Rojas’ talent and an overdue introduction for the Anglosphere. The language of Bodies is both baroque and ephemeral, rugged and philosophical, and its tone swings between that of a theologico-political treatise and a declaration of war. It’s some of this last century’s densest and most sophisticated Spanish-language verse, and some of the most woefully unknown.

—Garrett Phelps, Poetry Editor READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 5, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Clémence Lucchini, and José García Escobar

The latest news from Central America, Hong Kong, and France!

This week our writers bring you news from Central America, Hong Kong, and France. In Central America, renowned Guatemalan writer Eduardo Haldon has released his latest novel, Cancón, and Savladoran writer Claudia Hernández’s book Slash and Burn has been released in English translation by & Other Stories. In Hong Kong, literary journal the Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine has pertinently published a special feature about “Distance,” while in France, Italian writer Sandro Veronesi has won the Foreign Book Prize for Le Colibri, to be published in English translation in spring. Read on to find out more! 

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America

Guatemalan poet Carmen Lucía Alvarado was recently nominated for the Rhysling Award for her poem El vacío se conjuga entre tus manos (The void blends in your hands), translated by Toshiya Kamei. Read the poem in English and Spanish here. Famed Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon released his new novel called Canción (Song). Published by Libros del Asteroide, his latest book tells a new chapter of the history of Halfon’s family, centering on his maternal grandfather and his kidnap during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996). You can read an excerpt of Canción in English at The New York Review of Books site.

Also in Guatemala, the veteran poet and journalist Ana María Rodas released a new collection of short stories entitled Antigua para principiantes (Antigua for beginners). This new book includes several of Ana María’s most renowned short stories, plus other unpublished stories. This marks Ediciones del Pensativo’s first book of the year.

Additionally, in early January, & Other Stories published Slash and Burn, by the Salvadoran short story writer Claudia Hernández. The book was translated into English by Julia Sanches, who has translated the work of writers such as Daniel Galera (Brazil) and Noemi Jaffe (Brazil). READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

January 8, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Clémence Lucchini, and Darren Huang

2021's first roundup brings you news from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States!

Asymptote‘s Weekly Roundup is back for 2021 and this week our editors bring you news of major prize events in Taiwan, an event honouring the renowned writer Xi Xi in Hong Kong, and a refreshing online poetry series in the United States. Read on to find out more! 

Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Taiwan   

On December 15, the winners of the 2021 Taipei International Book Exhibition (TiBE) Book Prizes and the 17th Golden Butterfly Awards for book design were announced by the Taipei Book Fair Foundation. Both awards are major events at the annual TiBE, which starts on January 26. The winners featured a variety of forms and themes by writers from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, whose works reflect the prize’s investment in the “freedom of expression and freedom of publication as well as the tolerance and openness of this land.” Fiction prize winners include Huang Chun-ming, whose fiction has been featured in Asymptote, Kuo Chiang-sheng, and Pam Pam Liu’s graphic novel, “A Trip to Asylum.” Kuo’s novel concerns a piano tuner who bonds with the widower of a dead pianist, while Liu’s work, the first graphic novel to win in the fiction category, describes the experiences of a man who is admitted and finally released from a psychiatric hospital. In the nonfiction category, Hong Kong writer Hon Lai-chu won for her essay collection, “Darkness Under the Sun,” in which the author reflects on Hong Kong’s 2019 democracy protests.

In late November 2019, President Tsai Ing-wen awarded a posthumous citation to the nativist poet Chao Tien-yi for his contributions to contemporary Taiwanese poetry and children’s literature. Chao was one of the founders of the Li Poetry Society, a collective of Taiwanese nativist poets. Chao worked in a realist mode, through which he lyrically portrayed Taiwan’s landscape and the everyday lives of the working-class in such poems as “Cape Eluanbi,” an ode to the Pacific Ocean, and “Song of the Light-Vented Bulbul,” a nostalgic portrait of his hometown of Taichung. In 1973, the poet suffered a disappointing setback in his career when he lost his position as acting director of National Taiwan University’s (NTU) Department of Philosophy due to false accusations of Communist sympathies. Chao transformed his despair into the poems, “Daddy Lost His Work” and “Don’t Cry, Child.” The Ministry of Culture cited Chao’s works as “both mirror and window for reflecting upon a particular era in Taiwan for generations to come.”

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A Full Zola Cycle: England Welcomes the Rougon-Macquarts

January 6, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Samuel Kahler

Many . . . translations bear [the] unfortunate marks of censorship, which more broadly detract from the impact of Zola’s naturalism and integrity.

Émile Zola, master of nineteenth-century naturalism, was revered by most but reviled by some: his unflinching account of social decadence during the Second Empire didn’t sit well with France’s more puritan neighbors across the Channel. For decades, English translations of his Rougon-Macquart cycle were bowdlerized in the name of good morals, depriving readers of the full scope and weight of his social critique. Over twenty-five years ago, one of Britain’s most reputable publishers began to make amends, and it has recently completed the mammoth task of fully and faithfully translating Zola’s famed cycle into English. In this incisive historical essay, former Communications Director Samuel Kahler walks us through what was lost to undue censorship, and why it’s such a joy to get it back.

Fans of French literature, it’s time to read and be merry! With the recent publication of Doctor Pascal by Oxford University Press, those at work on new English translations of Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle have at last—after more than a quarter century—completed their epic and honorable task. For the very first time, anglophone readers may fully appreciate the scope and vision of the twenty-part masterpiece as its author intended it.

During his lifetime, Zola enjoyed widespread popularity in France and abroad (wherever translations of his novels, stories, and plays were available); he was viewed as the standard-bearer for a groundbreaking style of literary naturalism that presented an unflinching, often critical view of society through its portrayal of vice and corruption across all strata.

The clearest examples of this approach are found in the novels that comprise Les Rougon-Macquart. Similar in certain ways to Honoré de Balzac’s earlier La Comédie Humaine—a compendium of novels which were grouped together and sorted by theme—Zola’s cycle differs crucially in its design: it follows the members of one family rather than miscellaneous characters, and it was purposely conceived by its author from the onset (he initially planned a series of ten works, but soon expanded its scope). Inspired by breakthroughs in psychology and theories of heredity, it was further fueled by Zola’s desire to candidly portray life during his time.

The opening novel, The Fortune of the Rougons, makes no subtle hints about the author’s ambitions for the larger project. By weaving the family’s origin story into a larger plot, Zola announces to readers that the Rougon-Macquarts are not just a family; they serve more broadly as avatars for the passions and qualities of the era. His preface to the work states that “the dramas of their individual lives tell the story of the Second Empire, from the ambush of the coup d’état to the betrayal of Sedan” (indeed, the cycle’s subtitle is Natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire).

The Rougon-Macquarts are by and large—though not universally—a cutthroat clan of dreamers and schemers who stubbornly pursue grand ambitions, short-sighted affairs, and noble sufferings. When their passions lead them down dangerous paths, they do not stray or turn back; that would seem to be against their nature. Their behavior is part and parcel of Zola’s vision, which he delivers through vivid portraits of their interior and exterior landscapes, warts and all; he shows no prudery in depicting their immoral thoughts and acts.

But Zola’s intention was not simply to titillate audiences with sketches of naughty pleasures, bitter rivalries, and lavish excesses. Though the novels may foreground a mad rush of egos and appetites, the theme of nature’s cycles undergirds them; indeed, this theme frames the entire corpus. The subtleties of Zola’s overarching vision, however, did not make a strong enough impression on those who viewed his novels as cheaply sensational and injurious to society’s moral wellbeing. Many thought his works vile and opposed their publication, especially in England. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

December 11, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, José García Escobar, and Josefina Massot

The latest news from Central America, Sweden, and Argentina!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Central America, Sweden, and Argentina. A poetry festival featuring Latin American heavy hitters has just wrapped up in Guatemala, where, in addition, a new YA title draws from a military coup and a reprint tackles guerrilla warfare; Sweden’s most prestigious literary prize has been awarded in the fiction, non-fiction, and children’s book categories, and the Swedish Arts Council is trying to keep the literary sector afloat; a series of sundry voices gathered at a non-fiction festival in Argentina, where they spoke about how hard it is to narrate the pandemic—and how easy it is to honor another viral phenomenon. Read on to find out more!

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America

Guatemala just finished the sixteenth edition of the celebrated Festival Internacional de Poesía de Quetzaltenango (FIPQ). As a virtual festival, it included readings and presentations of notorious poets including Cesar Augusto Carvalho (Brasil), Isabel Guerrero (Chile), Yousif Alhabob (Sudan), Rosa Chavez (Guatemala), and Raúl Zurita (Chile). Relive FIPQ’s closing ceremony with a performance of the Guatemalan indie-pop band, Glass Collective, here.

Guatemalan novelist and translator David Unger just put out a new YA book. Called Sleeping with the Light On, it is based on how the author and his family experienced the 1954 US-backed military coup, which overthrew the democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz. Sleeping with the Light On (Groundwood Books) is illustrated by Carlos Aguilera.

Finally, before the end of the year Catafixia Editorial will reissue two essential books of Guatemalan history and literature, Yolanda Colom’s Mujeres en la alborada and Eugenia Gallardo’s No te apresures en llegar a la Torre de Londres porque la Torre de Londres no es el Big Ben. READ MORE…

From Epic Hero to Modern Bro: On Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf

December 9, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Kwan Ann Tan

Modern translations of medieval writings are not only a link to the past, but also a reflection of what our current culture finds important.

Throughout the year and across the world, people have reluctantly adopted and updated a medieval custom: quarantine in times of plague. Other remnants of the era, however, have been much more readily embraced. The Middle Ages continue to capture our fancy (sometimes even frenzy), and the latest version of a classic tale is a perfect case in point. By keenly zooming in on some of the boldest, most innovative aspects of American author Maria Dahvana Headley’s recent translation of Beowulf, our very own Kwan Ann Tan (editor-at-large for Malaysia and medievalist-in-training) reflects on the value of bringing the past into the present.

The modern fascination with medieval language and culture is not particularly new—from the pre-Raphaelites to Hollywood blockbuster depictions of the medieval era, it’s clear that something about the Middle Ages still captivates us. In January 2020, for instance, the Facebook group ‘We Pretend It’s 1453 Internet’ was created, and it has since amassed close to 200,000 members; it’s filled with humorous posts imitating medieval speech and pretending to ask for advice on ‘medieval’ subjects (they’re not always period-accurate, but it’s the spirit that counts). Likewise, a subgenre of ‘medieval TikTok’ is gaining speed, with some genuinely funny skits reimagining what it would be like if knights were Twitch streamers—again, reformulating medieval staples to suit the modern imagination. On a more academic note, the Global Medieval Sourcebook project at Stanford University collects rare, previously untranslated medieval texts in modern English for the adventurous reader. In fact, new translations of medieval writings are being released every day, be they for academic or creative purposes.

As a child, I had vaguely heard of the story of Beowulf, but I always assumed that Beowulf himself was the monster, the antagonist—not the hero. After I memorised huge swathes of the text in the original Old English, the line between monster and hero only became more blurred; in fact, the poem’s elusive complexity has fuelled debate on this dichotomy for decades, if not centuries. There is something about Beowulf that keeps us coming back, and this lasting interest is reflected in the number of translations of the epic published over the past few decades.

When news of American author Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) first broke on Twitter earlier this year, my timeline was quickly filled with messages from disgruntled medievalists complaining that yet another Beowulf translation had been unleashed upon the world. I myself approached it skeptically, but was quite literally hooked from the first word. For those who haven’t had the agonising pleasure of trying to decipher Old English for a year, it’ll teach you one word for sure: ‘Hwæt,’ the famous opening of Beowulf. It has been historically translated to varying degrees of formality, but Headley knocks conservatism aside to give us the earth-shattering ‘Bro.’ This brilliantly sets the tone for the rest of the text, and one thing is clear: it definitely isn’t your grandma’s Beowulf. READ MORE…