Language: Finnish

Commodifying the Woman’s Body: On Sofi Oksanen’s Dog Park

January 10, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Megan Sungyoon

When a system fails, along with its sustaining ideology and its citizen's lives, how does the unstable society make use of its minority population?

Dog Park by Sofi Oksanen, translated from the Finnish by Owen F. Witesman, Knopf, 2021

A woman sitting on a park bench, pretending to read to avoid unwanted conversation while gazing at people playing with their dogs in the park. Translated from the Finnish by Owen F. Witesman, Sofi Oksanen’s novel Dog Park begins with this image redolent of solitude, set to unravel the narrative that flickers between two main time-spaces filled with sociohistorical references. The year that marks the first scene of the novel is 2016, two years after the break of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war over Crimea and the Donbas region of Ukraine. Afterwards, the author guides us back and forth between the 1990s–2000s and 2016, continuously indicating to which year and location each chapter belongs. The invisible third spaciotemporal layer would be, of course, the readers’—who are inevitably made aware that the weight of the narrative depends on their own year and location. In Dog Park, Oksanen deftly interweaves the lives of Ukrainian women in the mid-2000s, a happy Finnish family in 2016, and readers in 2021 through overlaps of intentions, memories, and citizenships.

So the story begins. The identity of the woman sitting on the park bench is gradually revealed. Then the narrative flashes back to the late 2000s when she matches potential donors to desiring would-be-parents who shop the eggs under the premise that they are genetically infallible, meaning their producers should be free of not only heritable diseases but also physical unattractiveness, mental health issues in the family, and experience of poverty. Our protagonist, Olenka, jumps into this line of business after failing to make a living as a fashion model in the West, having been desperate to leave her home in Snizhne, where her mother and aunt run a small poppy farm that produces compote (homemade heroine). She contrives a new life in Dnipro, which allows her much-desired urban extravagance and upward social mobility. In the process, Olenka gets reintroduced to a long-time family friend, contacts the Kravetes, a family from Ukraine’s upper echelon, and meets “you,” who is constantly addressed throughout the novel. How Olenka’s plans are laid out, at times successfully and at others catastrophically, keeps the narrative going until the end. There’s not a single moment when the novel leaves readers sure of what’s happened, happening, or going to happen. At the end of almost every chapter begins a new suspense, usually marked by Olenka’s gradual revelation of an unmentioned aspect of the main narrative. These mini-plot twists—a death, a birth, or a warped relationship—turn the pages to the very end.

The main narrative of Dog Park extends from three key concepts: social turmoil of post-Soviet Ukraine, the economic codependency between the peripheral East and the central West, and commodification of women’s bodies amid such social and economic unrest. Olenka’s family moved from Tallinn, Estonia, to Snizhne, Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union, mostly for her father’s dream of scoring big in his rural hometown by operating kopanka, an illegal and hazardous coal mine. Olenka grows up to despise Snizhne because of her traumatic memory and the label of poverty associated with it. She strives to leave the town both physically and mentally, only to find herself unable to ever return even if she wanted. Having lived in Finland for a decade, Olenka keeps comparing the lives of the Finns with her own and of those who were close to her in Ukraine. The carefree lives in the safe, affluent states of the West are illustrated in stark contrast to the disorderly, corrupted, and murderous lives in Ukraine, mostly to emphasize her contempt toward her air-polluted home of Snizhne. Americans and West Europeans disguising themselves as tourists to buy eggs, Finns who can afford to be sympathetic to an immigrant woman, and the cutthroat yet glamorous fashion industry in Paris are sources and traces of Olenka’s desire for a stable life that once seemed to be within her reach. Deliberately retained in Witesman’s English translation, Oksanen’s use of Ukrainian terms and Slavic slang demonstrates the unrelenting grip of Olenka’s origins, which she can neither reclaim nor be completely rid of at any point in the narrative. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Small Crescendos” by Pirkko Saisio

August 3, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Mia Spangenberg

But all love strives towards that big crescendo.

From the Finlandia Prize-winning author who published the first Finnish-language lesbian novel, this week’s Translation Tuesday features a genre-defying work of autofiction from Pirkko Saisio. The eroticism of encountering a stranger—be it in a tram or a seminar room; in real life or one’s imagination—is what ties together this attempt to follow the ruminating mind. In relating the path of her own desire, our narrator asks: “Is this story actually going anywhere? And is this even a story?”—cognisant of the limits of narrative in pinning down unruly desire. In Mia Spangenberg’s translation, Siasio’s virtuosity and playfulness is on full display. “Small Crescendos” is a perfect addition to your reading list this Women in Translation Month. 

“As a reader and translator, I’m enchanted by the lightness of Saisio’s prose and its rhythm and pacing, but it also poses a challenge, since Finnish is an agglutinative language and more concise than English. During revision, I focused on reading the translation out loud, as if it were a spoken word piece. Finnish can exhibit a gender fluidity that does not exist in English (there are no gendered pronouns as “hän” refers to both he and she), which may seem radical but is simply a tolerance for knowing less about people’s gender in writing. However, when Saisio writes about her love affair with an actor, I ultimately chose the word “actress” because it is otherwise easy to assume that Saisio is describing a heterosexual relationship when she is in fact not. This would be clear to most Finnish readers as Saisio came out publicly as a lesbian in the 1990s and has long advocated for LGBTQ+ rights in Finland.”

— Mia Spangenberg

When a wave crashes against a rocky shore, it sprays
glistening pearls of water into the air. Like small crescendos.

A gaze. One is at the bottom of the stairs, and another is descending
the stairs.
There’s a gaze, and the beginning and ending of a relationship are in that
   gaze, with a slight
acceleration in the middle, an accelerando.

A hand grips a pole on the tram. It’s a man’s
hand, slender and beautiful, meant for some instrument, maybe
a cello or viola.
I place my hand beneath his and squeeze the pole.
And yes!
The cellist’s hand slides down the pole and covers my own. Oh those long,
thrilling seconds between stops!

And that gaze again. READ MORE…

The Queen’s Argot: The Language of Chess Around the World

January 21, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Allison Braden

Players worldwide understand the pieces . . . but our understanding . . . depends in part on what we call them.

Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit illustrated the international culture of chess. As it turns out, the game’s spread around the globe is a story of translation. In this brisk and brainy rundown, Editor-at-Large Allison Braden tackles its evolution through time and space, setting up a board in which pawns can be farmers, bishops can be fools, and queens can be counselors.

In December of last year, Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit smashed viewership records for a limited-run series on the site. In the show’s first month of streaming, over 62 million people around the world tuned in to the story of a young woman who overcomes several challenges in her quest to become a world chess champion in the 1960s. The series was based on Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel of the same name, and like readers before them, viewers rooted for plucky chess prodigy Beth Harmon. Her eventual triumph was, for many, a bright spot at the end of a long and difficult year.

You won’t become a grandmaster by watching the series. (In fact, one of the only aspects of the show that pro chess players took issue with was the speed of the games. In a concession to viewers, they were faster paced than matches at real tournaments.) But The Queen’s Gambit is a crash course in the culture of chess. It’s fiercely competitive, requires visual and strategic intelligence, and remains extremely male dominated (despite studies showing men aren’t inherently better at the game). Chess is also truly universal—and where there’s an international pastime, there are translators.

In the show, Harmon travels to Mexico, France, and the USSR. As her skill grows, her competitors increasingly hail from foreign countries, and as it becomes clear that the ultimate test of her ability will come in Moscow, she begins to study Russian. In the heady final scenes, commentators relay her moves in a variety of languages for listeners around the world. After The Queen’s Gambit was released, interest in chess boomed. One of the most popular ways to play is online. Chess.com boasts users from dozens of countries, and they can all play one other. Like many sports, chess transcends language; in a way, it is its own language. Players worldwide understand the pieces: the king’s hesitance, the queen’s might. The bishop, which can only move diagonally, speaks his own sideways tongue. READ MORE…

A Postmodern Jouissance: On Douglas Robinson’s Transcreation of Volter Kilpi’s Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomimia

January 20, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Ivan Delazari

Translatory meekness is not for this translator, whose Kilpi speaks so modern by speaking obsolete.

Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomimia by Volter Kilpi, in a transcreation from the Finnish by Douglas Robinson, Zeta Books, 2020

All reference sources on Volter Kilpi (1874–1939), Finland’s most renowned prose fiction experimentalist from the early twentieth century, will unanimously cite his novel In the Parlour at Alastalo (1933)—with its nine hundred pages conveying just about six hours of story time—as the writer’s main masterpiece. Difficult reading in the original, this modernist tour de force is also deemed untranslatable, with only a Swedish version available to a non-Finnish audience. As a result, Kilpi’s fame does not traverse lingual borders easily, and his reputation as James Joyce’s literary peer is established by proxy: most of us would just take a Finnish professor’s word for it. The arrival of Douglas Robinson’s English “transcreation” of Kilpi’s posthumously published last novel, Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomimia (1944), indicates a seminal challenge to this status quo.

The original Kilpi novel pretends to be the Finnish-language publication of an English manuscript that a Finnish librarian (presumably, Kilpi himself) happens to discover among old manuscripts in stock, “caked with dust.” It turns out to be Lemuel Gulliver’s own account of the fifth round of his exciting travels, which Kilpi “translates” for his local readership’s convenience. Kilpi began working on the novel in 1938 and wrote twenty-five chapters before suffering a debilitating stroke, but articulated an approximation of his plans for the remainder. Taking up this playful design of a sequel to Jonathan Swift’s 1727 classic, Robinson then develops and intensifies it: not only does he translate the Kilpi text into a stylized version of Swiftian English, with eighteenth century spellings and phrasings to make it resemble the “original” Gulliver manuscript, but he also supplies it with a bunch of metafictional “Introductory Texts” and an ending—another seventeen chapters, an intratextual sequel to Kilpi’s intertextual one. READ MORE…

Our Summer 2020 Issue Is Here!

July 16, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Discover Yang Lian, Frédéric Beigbeder, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and a "Vignettes" Special Feature alongside new work from 31 countries

Asymptote’s Summer 2020 Edition, “This Strange Stillness,” confronts our troubled moment head-on, and yet displays the world’s creative wealth and resilience. Discover timely poetry on the pandemic by Misty School cofounder Yang Lian, a shout-out to George Floyd and #BlackLivesMatter in Gonçalo M. Tavares’s “Plague Diary,” and new translations of Pessoa’s eternal heteronym Alberto Caeiro in a knockout issue spanning 31 countries and 23 languages.

Everything seems to stop or slow down during a pandemic, even as the mind rushes ahead. In our exclusive interview, Frédéric Beigbeder talks candidly about the unexpected thrills of lockdown, his desire for immortality, and the xenophobia of English readers. Koko Hubara knows xenophobia all too well: she writes to her white-skinned daughter as a “Brown” Jewish woman in ethnically homogenous Finland trying to live in difference. This fear of standing out turns into an urgent question of survival in Tomáš Forró’s heart-thumping first-hand account from the frontlines of the War in Donbass, or in Balam Rodrigo’s heartbreaking evocations of the existential plight facing Central American migrants.

In the weird calm we may yearn for adventure, like acclaimed Cuban writer—and friend of Hemingway—Enrique Serpa’s narrator, who turns from fishing to smuggling in his novel Contraband, introduced to English readers for the first time. American artist Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s verbo-visual collage is adventurous also: grocery lists and metro tickets collide with piercing, crystalline aphorisms. Translator Fortunato Salazar, for his part, shatters and reconstructs Sophocles through distinctly modern eyes; there, we slip between ancient Greece and our own present. When, in truth, are we?

Whenever and wherever we are, we can all spread the news of Asymptote’s latest wonders on Facebook or Twitter, where we will be plugging every single article in a 48-hour tweetathon. If you’re out and about, brave reader, feel free to distribute this magnificent flyer of the issue in real life. We live in interesting times—and that surely makes for interesting reading. Enjoy, with many thanks from us at Asymptote!

Read the issue

My 2019: Eva Wissting

December 25, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Eva Wissting

Staying involved with the Swedish literary scene is a way to stay connected to my home while abroad.

Next up in our A Year in Reading series is Eva Wissting, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Sweden. A book reviewer and an avid book club member when she is not contributing to Asymptote, Wissting shares with us the literary discoveries that lit up her 2019.

At the beginning of this year, I started reviewing books for a Swedish online site, Dagensbok, which has published one book review every single day since the year 2000. I first stopped by the office to pick up books to write about around this time of year, during what we in Sweden call “the middle days”—the slow and lazy days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve that feel like holidays, even though they’re not really. The entire office building appeared to be empty, except for me and the editor whom I was there to meet. To walk up to a filled bookshelf and be told that I could pick anything, get to write about it, and people, supposedly, would read what I’d written—this, for sure, was a second Christmas.

One of the books I picked up that day I most certainly wouldn’t have come across otherwise. It’s an amazing Finnish-Swedish poetry and graphic book by Jolin Slotte and Pauliina Pesonen, about finding your own words and your own voice in difficult circumstances, even when it labels you a traitor. The word-for-word translation of the Swedish title is All These Dead Eyes. The whole book is in black and white, and each right-hand side in Finnish is accompanied by a left-hand side in Swedish. I don’t speak or read Finnish, but this book is constructed so that you only need to understand one of the languages. And then, of course, the words are also accompanied by the beautifully drawn images, which is yet another language. Considering how many of us live with multiple languages—whether we fully master them or they exist more as a backdrop—it surprises me how rare truly multilingual books are.

Another book I discovered thanks to Dagensbok was Kristen Roupenian’s short story collection You Know You Want This, which I read and reviewed in the Swedish translation by Amanda Svensson. It wasn’t until I got to the story “Cat Person” that I realized I had read this author, and this short story, before—though by then I was already completely hooked on this careful study of evil. The stories are written with a great sense of craft, not only in carving out a narrative, but also in understanding how humans operate. These are also horror stories, though not the kind with monsters or ghosts or other supernatural elements; the evil in these short stories comes from within the relationships between people––normal, everyday people like you and I—which is the most horrifying kind of horror stories there are. “Cat Person” differs from the other stories in the collection in that the evil is not so clearly expressed. This is the short story that was published back in 2017 by The New Yorker and went viral. Not a lot of short stories go viral. Not a lot of emerging writers have their short stories published by The New Yorker and then have them go viral. This is certainly an author I look forward to following. READ MORE…

An Impeccable English: Notes on the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature

November 18, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Erik Noonan

The unstated significance of the way the books are written in English is the meaning of the Translated Literature Award.

As both writers and readers anticipate the results of the National Book Awards this upcoming Wednesday, we at Asymptote, to no surprise, are keeping a particular eye out for the outcome of the Translated Literature category. In this following essay, Assistant Editor Erik Noonan gives us a probing and interrogative look at the five books on the shortlist, looking beyond content to pursue answers regarding the linguistic journeys that these works have taken, in order to be chosen.

With the reinstatement of the Translated Literature category, the National Book Foundation is clearly attempting to correct the gender and culture biases of years past. From the beginning of the category in 1967 until 1983, when it was discontinued, every winning author was European with only four exceptions: Yasunari Kawabata in 1971, the anonymous author of The Confessions of Lady Nijo in 1974, the anonymous Chinese author(s) of Master Tung’s Wester Chamber Romance in 1977, and Ichiyō Higuchi with the Japanese authors of the Ten Thousand Leaves anthology in 1982. Lady Nijō and Higuchi were the only two women, albeit long deceased, to be awarded during the prize’s first iteration. Among the translators, Karen Brazell and Helen R. Lane won in 1974, Clara Winston won with Richard Winston in 1978, and Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link won in 1980. The rest were male. In 2018, the category was reinstated and the entry criteria revised, so that both the author and the translator had to be alive at the beginning of the awards cycle to qualify. Last year, the first of its new phase, author Yōko Tawada and translator Margaret Mitsutani took the award for The Emissary. This year, you can expect this corrective trend to continue (for example, every book on the longlist was written in a different language). READ MORE…

Narrative Repatriation: Inari Sámi Folklore: Stories from Aanaar in Review

April 1, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Paul M. Worley

Frandy’s edition openly rebels against the moment when these stories were first recorded.

Inari Sámi Folklore: Stories from Aanaar by August V. Koskimies and Toivo I. Itkonen, revised by Lea Laitinen, and edited and translated by Tim Frandy, University of Wisconsin Press, 2019

Whatever the cosmopolitan politics of many people living in cities like London, New York, or Paris, the majority of museums in such places continue to struggle with the colonizing narratives forwarded not only by the layout of the physical space of the museum—a prime example being the room dedicated solely to Egypt, separate from the rest of the African continent—but also by the fact that many objects within these collections were stolen, looted, or otherwise removed from the communities that produced them.

Should these objects be returned or, in an argument that many see as dripping with colonial paternalism, are they indeed “safer” under the protection of Western institutions? One only need think of the ongoing controversy surrounding the so-called “Elgin” Marbles and their possible repatriation, or any number of recent developments concerning Native American peoples in the United States requesting the return of sacred objects, to understand how such objects touch on themes like intellectual and cultural sovereignty in the twenty-first century. The “Elgin” Marbles may have inspired Keats’s meditation on truth and beauty, but how would these same marbles appear, at a distance, to a poet writing from Greece during the Romantic period or in the age of Brexit? How would the nature of the marbles’ famed “truth” and “beauty” appear to someone who understood them as a piece of cultural heritage that had been looted for the express benefit of a cosmopolitan other? What would the return, or so-called repatriation, of such objects mean not only for those who have been robbed of such items, but for the descendants of those who stole them in the first place?

READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2019

January 28, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News  |  by Ah-reum Han, Caridad Svich, Ellen Jones, and Joshua Craze

Explore the Winter 2019 issue with our section editors!

Not sure where to start with the brand new Winter 2019 issue of Asymptote? At 35 countries represented, this issue is our most diverse yet, and marks the eighth anniversary of Asymptote. Here, our Section Editors recommend some of their favourite pieces from their respective sections.

The writing of María Sánchez tracks close to the ground; she hunts experience. In “The Next Word,” compellingly translated by Bella Bosworth, we accompany Sánchez in her truck, as she drives around the Spanish countryside, working as a field veterinarian. There is a great slowness to her prose, born of hours of careful observation of people and things. The letters that composed this piece read like prayers, written to an unknown God, in praise of those small moments in which, as Sánchez writes, “life stands still and nothing happens.” There is a delicate empiricism at work here—an empathy with the world and its rhythms that Sánchez reads by looking at her, as if she were the geiger counter of existence. “Sometimes”, she writes, quoting Gabriella Ybarra, “imagining has been the only option I have had to try to understand.”

— Joshua Craze, Nonfiction Editor

READ MORE…

In Ismail Kadare’s Shadow: Searching for More in Albanian Literature

August 15, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

There is beauty in this multilingual cohort of writers and the way they break linguistic boundaries to tell their stories and talk about identity.

In the past seven months I have written five dispatches covering Albanian literary news for Asymptote. Only one of these dispatches does not mention Ismail Kadare. It feels impossible to avoid him. Kadare is the only Albanian author speculated as a potential winner for the Nobel in Literature (when the Nobel still meant honour and prestige). He has been recognised with a medal by the French Legion of Honour and won Spain’s Princess of Asturias Award for Literature. Kadare is also one of the few Albanian authors to be published in Asymptote. While other Albanian writers struggle to find translators, two different titles by Kadare were published in English this year alone: A Girl in Exile (translated by John Hodgson) and Essays in World Literature (translated by Ani Kokobobo).

It would perhaps be improper to complain of Kadare’s success and his place in world literature.  He has contributed immensely to the field, writing novels that portray Albanian history from Medieval times to the present, while also producing essays and studies in the field of Albanology. Not to mention the recognition he has brought to Albania abroad, where for many to speak of Albania is inherently to speak of Kadare. But Kadare’s success is unique in Albanian literary history. And with its singularity come certain dangers and drawbacks, common to all national cultures that are represented through the often-homogenous lens of a single figure.

READ MORE…

Dispatch: Bologna Children’s Book Fair

April 18, 2018  |  in Dispatches  |  by Anna Aresi and Maria Polita

Human representation has acquired a renewed central position, previously abdicated in favor of animals and such.

Four days of intense work within a whirlwind of smiling people who convene here year after year like old friends, while at the same time looking for, proposing, and selling stories that will hopefully enchant today’s children. It is the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, the most important event for children’s literature in the world, taking place every year in Italy. This year’s edition ended almost three weeks ago. From March 26 to 29, seventy-seven countries and regions, 1,390 exhibitors, and 27,642 publishing professionals gathered in a bustle of illustrators, authors, publishers, agents, translators, booksellers, and journalists.

Walking through the stands, one can run into tidy lines of novice illustrators who, nervous and creatively dressed, are waiting to exhibit the works they clutch in their hands. One could also bump into celebrations of publishing houses’ “birthdays” or other anniversaries, while inside the stands, agents exhibit new books’ plates before the publishers’ and journalists’ attentive eyes. Just around the corner, interesting educational events are taking place while trembling crowds of aficionados await to meet their favorite artists in flesh and blood. The air is international: in just a few steps one can walk from the forests of Northern Europe to the colossal American stands, to the elegant French stalls. From there you can meet the Japanese artist who collects pebbles and encloses them in personalized books, along with artists, writers and editors from Iran, Chile, Africa and India.

These four days are a vortex of fatigue, legs grinding mile after mile among the stands and eyes taking in an extraordinary amount of illustrations, images, and stories. Once back home, it is necessary to take a few days to detox and reflect upon what one has lovingly noted.

READ MORE…

Translator Profile: Jennifer Scappettone

November 13, 2017  |  in Interviews, Translator's Profile  |  by Allegra Rosenbaum and Jennifer Scappettone

The notion of a unitary, homogenous, and monolingual “America” is as much an alternative fact as Spicer’s attendance numbers at the inauguration.

Former Asymptote blog editor Allegra Rosenbaum interviews translator and scholar Jennifer Scappettone, whose profile appeared in our Winter 2016 issue. Her translation of Italian poet Milli Graffi was featured on the Asymptote blog last week and her translation of F. T. Marinetti’s futurist poetry appeared in our Spring 2016 issue. 

Who are you? What do you translate? (This is just a preliminary question! To be taken with an existential grain of salt.)

I am a poet and scholar of American and Italian nationalities who grew up in New York, across the street from a highly toxic landfill redolent of the family’s ancestral zone outside of Naples (laced with illegal poisonous dumps). I translate Fascists and anti-Fascists; Italian feminists and a single notorious misogynist; inheritors of Futurism and the historical avant-garde; and contemporary poets who are attempting to grapple with the millennial burden of the “Italian” language by channeling or annulling voices from Saint Francis through autonomia.

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Section Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2017

July 24, 2017  |  in Dispatches  |  by Ah-reum Han, Caridad Svich, Eva Heisler, Joshua Craze, and Lee Yew Leong

From an essay investigating a literary hoax to new art responding to Trump's xenophobia, our editors share their favorites from the new issue!

Asymptote’s glorious Summer issue is chockablock with gems. Some of our section editors share their highlights:

“To assert that Tove Jansson’s invention of the Moomin world may be partially rooted in ancient lore is, for this writer, to fear performing an act of sacrilege,” confesses Stephanie Sauer in her essay on renowned Finnish author-artist, Tove Jansson. This confession is the crux of Sauer’s questionings. Journey with Sauer from the moment the Moomins were conceived, to its unlikely, subversive evolution. Hold tighter still as she dives into Jansson’s personal life, her questions of war, artistry, womanhood, and sexuality, and the fearless, unconventional course she cut through history.

—Ah-reum Han, Writers on Writers Editor

This issue features excerpts from two plays that deal with aspects of “disappearance” and surveillance. In Blanca Doménech’s The Sickness of Stone, translated from the Spanish by William Gregory, we take a look at a cold, dark world where random pieces of text read from discarded books become a kind of key to unlocking society’s ills or sickness. Gregory’s eloquent, tart translation finds the humor, bite and despair in this fascinating play.

In Hanit Guli’s Orshina, translated from the Hebrew by Yaron Regev, a father must decide how he will disappear from his family’s life and what he will or will not tell them. An odd, compassionate family drama, Regev’s translation of Guli’s one-act is evocative and clear.

—Caridad Svich, Drama Editor

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

April 21, 2017  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Hanna Heiskanen, Jessie Stoolman, and Nozomi Saito

The latest news from our word-nerds in Finland, Cuba, and Morocco!

Contributor Hanna Heiskanen checks in from Finland:

Over in Finland, several prominent authors have expressed their concern for the writing skills of today’s young people. What began as a Facebook post by Anja Snellman, who has written more than 20 novels and is a recipient the Pro Finlandia Medal, on the quality of the letters she receives from school children around the country, has since been echoed by Salla Simukka and Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, authors of the Snow White Trilogy (Hot Key Books/Amazon Children’s Publishing) and The Rabbit Back Literature Society (Pushkin Press/Thomas Dunne), respectively. Children and teenagers appear to struggle with understanding metaphor and long sentences, and are increasingly unable to write in literary, rather than spoken, language, the authors said. Reading is still generally held in high regard in the country, with 50 million books borrowed from libraries by the 5 million strong population in 2014, though these figures have been in decline.

The national broadcaster YLE shines a light on Elina Ahlbäck, the founder and director of the Elina Ahlback Literary Agency. The eight-year-old agency is behind the string of success stories of the aforementioned Salla Simukka who, like Maria Turtschaninoff, also represented by Ahlbäck, signed a Hollywood film deal some months back. Other good news for the agency is the recent nomination of Laura Lindstedt’s Oneiron for the Nordic Council’s 2017 literature prize, the winner of which will be announced in November. Finnish literature in translation is having a moment, according to Ahlbäck: “Finland is an undiscovered treasure trove, and a source of unique stories and storytelling,” she says in the article. The country still lags behind its western neighbour, however, when it comes to marketing efforts: more than 30 agencies work to export Swedish literature, now a familiar sight on global bestseller lists.

The literature festival Helsinki Lit has published its schedule for this year. The event, May 12-13, will feature discussions with the likes of Orhan Pamuk, Linda Boström Knausgård, and Laurent Binet.

And to wrap up on a more unusual note, a Danish crime literature festival has gained nationwide interest for an advertising campaign gone awry. The Krimimessen festival, the largest of its kind in the Nordic countries and organised earlier this month, was advertised by staging fake crime scenes using fake human bodies. After, naturally, distressed reactions from the general public, the campaign was promptly terminated. “I am horribly sorry”, said the organising town’s Mayor, according to the Copenhagen Post Online.

READ MORE…