Language: French

A Sublime Flame of a Text: Jeffrey Zuckerman and Laurel Taylor Discuss Kaya Days

October 28, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

It didn’t take long for me to realize what a brilliant, sublime flame of a text it was . . .

Kaya Days, our Book Club selection for the month of September, is Mauritian author Carl de Souza’s electrifying bildungsroman, set amidst the 1999 riots on the island nation. In getting de Souza’s world of revolutionaries, music, and fire, Assistant Editor Laurel Taylor spoke to translator Jeffrey Zuckerman on his work on Mauritian novels and his processes of translation, especially when working on texts as experimental as de Souza’s. Their conversation spanned the intricacies of handling the many cultures de Souza brings together in his work, and the ethics which face a translator handling such a text. Look out for our second instalment of Kaya Day‘s interviews next Monday, when Laurel Taylor will be speaking with the Carl de Souza. 

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

Laurel Taylor LT: How did you first come to Carlo’s work? What was it that drew you in?

Jeffrey Zuckerman (JZ): Oh, this goes back to the beginning of my career in translation. The first book I saw to publication was that of another Mauritian author—Ananda Devi’s Eve Out of Her Ruins. It was as I was reading more of her œuvre and learning more about her compatriots that I started drawing connections. I was put in touch with Nathacha Appanah—whose The Last Brother is absolutely stunning, incidentally— and I asked if she had recommendations for books from Mauritius that hadn’t been translated. This was her answer:

My mind has a list ‘longue comme la semaine’, as we say in Creole, of books that haven’t been translated but then you’ll think I’m pestering you. So just one title which has been snubbed and I don’t understand why. It’s Ceux qu’on jette à la mer by Carl de Souza, published at L’Olivier in 2001. It is a story about Chinese people stranded at sea.

She didn’t add any further info. At the time, I had heard Carlo’s name, but not delved into his work. I managed to lay hands on Ceux qu’on jette à la mer (literally “Those Thrown to the Sea” but which Carl loves the idea of being condensed to “Jettisoned”) about a boat full of Chinese workers from Guangzhou that ends up stranded in Mauritius, and the lives of the men both on and off the boat. I also picked up that short, intense novella of his, Les Jours Kaya, and was blown away by the way in which it wove in and out of the experiences of people across the island, some in the rioting, some at a remove, some forced to make their way through the chaos. It didn’t take long for me to realize what a brilliant, sublime flame of a text it was, or to appreciate the way it was held together by a rhythm akin to Kaya’s songs, and I fell in love with it straightaway.

LT: Carlo himself is multilingual and has recently started writing in English. To what extent did you collaborate on the process of translation? What was your working process with him like?

JZ: I got to visit the island of Mauritius for the first time ever after having translated three novels from there—two by Ananda Devi and one by Shenaz Patel—in late 2018. A few months before that, I got in touch properly with Carl, and in the intervening months, I did sample translations of these two major novels of his, of which he was clearly happy with. Then I came to the island and spent two days at his house, overlooking the island’s sugarcane fields, and over the course of our conversations and drives around the island, it became so clear to me how his books and his personality are a perfect expression of this island and its unique position between an insular space and a teeming nexus of multiculturality. In terms of our process, Carlo has been the best sort of author for a translator to work with; he’s been very clear that he trusts me and wants me to feel free to make the choices that I make—and also very, very willing to answer all sorts of questions, no matter how trivial they may seem! READ MORE…

Omnipresent Music: Carl de Souza and Laurel Taylor Discuss Kaya Days

October 27, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

My project was about my own feeling of being absolutely disturbed after the events and how I had lived the days.

Carl de Souza’s Kaya Days is a labyrinthine, densely packed novel, exploring the lives of everyday Mauritians amidst the chaotic days following the death of seggae singer Kaya in police custody. A lush landscape of wealth and poverty, ethnicity and language emerge under de Souza’s hands, guiding the reader through a moment of intense transformation and rupture. Kaya Days was our Book Club selection for the month of September, and Assistant Editor Laurel Taylor spoke live to author Carl de Souza about his response to the novel twenty years after publication, as well as his feelings about how literature can illustrate the fault lines of race and culture. The interview with the translator of Kaya Days, Jeffrey Zuckerman, can be read here.

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

Laurel Taylor (LT): In the twenty years since Kaya Days first came out, and during the process of translating the novel, working with Jeffrey—have you discovered anything new about the novel?

Carl de Souza (CD): The novel has served as a good reminder for me, which can be taken in several ways. The first is that such public displays of resistance are persistent in our societies—how overlooked communities tend to go to the streets and set towns on fire because they are not being given their proper share of participation in life. I was reminded of this recently, when I was editing some writing about the local Creole community. The Creole community, as you probably know, is rooted in the slave trade, and this trauma has been self-perpetuating, transmitted unconsciously generation after generation. To this day, this community does not have proper access to the reestablishment of their rights, reestablishment of their education, or full participation in public society. This looks very much like what has led up to the Black Lives Matter movement, for example.

This is quite similar to the idea that people who seem very tame—the term seems pejorative, but it’s really that they have been taught to be tame—suddenly take to the streets because they can’t withstand any longer. And what happened in Mauritius twenty years back is a reminder for us in these difficult days—with the pandemic and the loss of jobs.

And it’s also a reminder of a sort of Proust transition in the way I was writing; in the sense that my previous novels were more figurative, were more plain descriptions of what I had in mind, whereas this novel was something that really burst out of me. At that time, I realized there was no real frontier between prose and poetry in its transmission of emotions.

LT: Mauritius is a really interesting island nation of an incredibly diverse population. Could you talk a little bit about where the novel was coming from, and how those different cultures met each other within the text?

CD: The first thing is to situate the story—and my other stories as well—in the island context. When you’re living on a small island, and there is input from, let’s say, the European colonizers who came for business—sugar, mainly; slavery from Africa being brought in by force; slavery being replaced by Indian indentured labor; and then Chinese people coming in for business, living quite peacefully with everybody else. . . That had been maintained throughout the centuries, in a very peaceful coexistence. READ MORE…

Here France Drowns Algerians: Literary and Cultural Afterlives of October 17, 1961’s Occulted Pogrom

October 18, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Alex Tan

How will France reconfigure its fragile self-image to accommodate the historical excesses that it has consistently balked at confronting?

This essay is written in memory of all those—predominantly Algerian—killed, deported, or otherwise injured by the violences of French colonialism, and in solidarity with the continuing efforts to resist the forgetting of October 17, 1961 and demand accountability from the French state.

For most of the English-speaking world, October 17 will not register as a date of any consequence. Yet, several days ago in the boulevards of Paris, scores of demonstrators marched from the Rex Cinema to the Pont Saint-Michel; they were tracing, in a defiant act of memory, the cartography of a heinous massacre of Algerian protestors by the French police force that took place, sixty years prior on the very same cobblestones. Their ancestors—most of whom did not survive that deadly evening—had walked those roads in peaceful opposition to the racism and surveillance they had suffered at the hands of the French, as well as the discriminatory night-time curfew that had just been imposed exclusively on Algerian workers.

The publicity posters of this year’s commemorative efforts feature the title “Un Crime d’État” (a crime of the state), handwritten in a ghostly chalk-like texture above two shadowed hands reaching out of murky, watery depths. To the survivors, descendants, relatives, historians, activists, and those who otherwise refuse to forget the bloody police brutality of October 17, 1961, that tableau of desperation will be familiar. On that night, besides beating and injuring countless men, French police officers handcuffed and threw an undocumented number of Algerian demonstrators into the river Seine, leaving them to drown. Historians estimate that around two hundred deaths occurred that night. In an eyewitness account cited in House and MacMaster’s monumental Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory, officers throttled the arms of a man clinging to the parapet “until he dropped like a stone into the river.” Subsequently, nearly six thousand Algerians who did not perish were rounded up, tortured, and deported back to detention camps in Algeria.

Of the scant images that have circulated of 1961, the most iconic is arguably a shot of graffiti spray-painted along the riverbanks, reading “Ici on noie les Algériens” (here we drown Algerians). What’s remarkable is its persistent afterlife in the infinitely reproducible medium of photography, elevated to a sort of metonym for Algerians’ collective trauma—despite the actual graffiti having been literally whitewashed out of existence not long after its writing. Street art continues to spring up here and there: a telling instance is “Ici la France a noyé des Algérien(nes)” (here France drowned Algerians), shifting the temporal frame of reference and naming the locus of guilt. Or, more recently: “Nous sommes les descendants des algériens que vous n’avez pas noyé . . .” (we are the descendants of the Algerians that you did not drown).

oct 17 poster

The state’s erasure of the incriminating graffiti emblematises an essential hypocrisy upon which France’s modernity is built, and perhaps no colony has borne the brunt more painfully than Algeria. It was there, during its struggle for independence from 1954 to 1962, that the French government engaged in one of its most violent and cruel wars while native peoples agitated for decolonisation. Yet the metropolitan French press, largely indifferent to what was transpiring across the Mediterranean, referred to the widespread killings, bombardments, and torture euphemistically as “the events.” Only in 1999—a full thirty-seven years after Algeria gained independence—did France officially bring itself to acknowledge that a “war” had occurred. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

October 15, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury and Suhasini Patni

The latest in global literary news from India to Palestine!

This week, our editors on the ground report news of book fairs, award winners, and recognition of presses publishing translated literature. Suhasini Patni highlights recent Indian fiction receiving acclaim, while Carol Khoury introduces us to an award named after Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, a prolific Palestinian writer, artist, and translator. Read on to find out more!  

Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

The JCB Prize announced its longlist on October 4, 2021. Two out of the three translations have made it into the shortlist (Delhi: A Soliloquy and Anti-Clock). The winner of the Rs 25 lakh prize—with an additional Rs 10 lakh for the translator if it is a translated title—will be revealed on November 13. A longer discussion on the JCB Literary Prize is available here.

Naveen Kishore, founder of Seagull Books, won the 2021 Words Without Borders Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature. Seagull Books was founded in 1982 and began with translating works by Indian regional dramatists into English. For his contribution to publishing, Kishore was made a Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the government of France in 2014 and received the Goethe Medal from the Federal Republic of Germany in 2013. Seagull Books has published English translations of fiction and non-fiction by major African, European, Asian, and Latin American writers with over 500 books and authors such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Mahasweta Devi, and Hélène Cixous. Seagull author Mo Yan was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Kishore published “Notes from a Journal I could have kept [But failed to. Keep]” on Words Without Borders Daily.

GQ released their list of best Indian Fiction of 2021. In this list, they feature The Thinnai by Ari Gautier. Translated from the French by Blake Smith, the book gives a glimpse into the working-class quarters of Pondicherry. A Frenchman chases after a mysterious diamond named after Goddess Sita and explores the social history of the former French colony. An excerpt of the book is available to read here.

READ MORE…

“Now You Fly and Sing”: Alice Paalen Rahon’s Shapeshifter in Review

October 14, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks

Paalen Rahon embodied the far-ranging imaginations of surrealist pursuit: a shapeshifter.

Shapeshifter by Alice Paalen Rahon, translated from the French by Mary Ann Caws, New York Review Books, 2021

Surrealism has left an indelible mark on our cultural imagination, a defining umbrella term for the experimental and the dreamlike, from poetry to imagery. Though a litany of artists come to mind when we think of surrealism—from its founder figures André Breton and Philippe Soupault to visual exponents such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, or René Magritte—the legacy, albeit impressive, remains overwhelmingly, and perhaps erroneously, masculine.

Some work has been done in recent years to revise that history—such as through new translations and a number of exhibitions for British-born Mexican artist Leonora Carrington. Now, translator and professor Mary Ann Caws has curated and translated the works of poet and painter Alice Paalen Rahon to further our reach towards the women of surrealism, in the volume Shapeshifter.

The visual arts have long dominated the conversation around surrealism, despite its origins as a literary term—coined first by poet and theorist Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917, then used in two manifestos in 1924, of which Breton’s has stood the longest and is now seen as definitive. Breton described Surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” Though first staked in terms of the “written word,” the paintings of Dalí or Magritte may now serve, for many, as the first introduction to Surrealism. This domination of visuality in Surrealism has also affected Paalen Rahon’s legacy. Her artwork has long been appreciated in her adopted home of Mexico, celebrated with a large retrospective in 2009 at the country’s Museum of Modern Art. However, with the arrival of Shapeshifter, we can gain valuable insight into this remarkable poet who was one of the best of the Surrealists, despite the lack of wider recognition.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

October 8, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar, Kristina Tatarian, and MARGENTO

The latest in global literary news from Ukraine, Guatemala, and Belgium!

The naming of Abdulrazak Gurnah as our latest Nobel laureate in Literature is what’s topping headlines around the world this week, but there’s plenty more happening outside of the Swedish Academy. Our editors on the ground is bringing news of multi-media literary festivals, architecturally transformative contemporary art, Ukrainian translation forums, and the passing of a beloved Guatemalan writer. Read on to find out more.

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brussels

Brussels Planetarium Poetry Fest was hardly over when another literature festival was announced in Europe’s capital: Les Voix en Ville (Voices in the City), organized by Lettres en Voix. This year’s edition featured mostly collaborative projects involving writers, musicians, and filmmakers presenting concerts, readings, workshops, and “cinematic poems.” The venues were as diverse as cathedrals, museums, theaters, pubs, and public squares, while the works presented were more often than not site-specific. Maud Vanhauwaert, for instance, after recently receiving ovations at Planetarium Poetry Fest, participated by reading an “Ode to the Socio-cultural Worker” at the legendary literary cafe La Fleur en Papier Doré. The poem culminated in a work that went beyond the text per se, resulting in a video of the reading which featured images of the venue and a music soundtrack—an illustration in and of itself of the many “workers” who had contributed from behind the scenes.

In the meantime, Brussels’ literary and arts scene is frantically resurfacing from the lockdown. Among the 300 exhibiting artists, 150 workshops, 100 animations, and “concerts, live, dance, street art, performance, and literature” events inundating Ixelles (the arts quarter of Brussels), there was also a “coup de coeur” (heartthrob, sudden crush) exhibition at the animated Demeuldre art gallery. Among the highlights was Bert Mertens, a senior artist with a fresh eye for estranging details and collaged panoramas who mesmerized the visitors from the moment they entered with the hyperrealist light radiating from his paintings. The diversity of forms and approaches of other artists—ranging from graphic art to photography to sculpture to installations to comic strips—also succeeding captivating one’s attention. Still, what really overwhelmed the audience and kept visitors wandering the upper floors and attic of the 19th-century china shop for hours on end was the Talk C.E.C. exhibition, which reunited dozens of artists from France, Belgium, Italy, and elsewhere in a joint project converting the place—its architecture, its interior and exterior walls, the literal holes in the walls, the cafe, kitchen, and even the bathrooms—into a powerful collective manifesto revisiting and fusing sacred traditions, unorthodox spiritualism, and transgressive eroticism from an urgently environmentalist and culturally inclusive perspective.

Kristina Tatarian, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Ukraine

As summer ended festively with the thirtieth annual Independence day in Ukraine, a succession of literary events showcased new national literatures and opened up conversations about the changing trends in translation. Not long ago, the Ukrainian Book Institute established Translate Ukraine, the first translation initiative of its kind to be sponsored by the government, and which has helped literary festivals turn their focus towards an international audience. As a result, a record number of Ukrainian titles were translated into English in the past five years. M any Ukrainian publishers have noted that international literary festivals are not the only places to showcase the wealth of contemporary literature available in the country, stressing the importance of supporting local literary forums to better promote Ukrainian letters globally. Earlier this year, the famous literary festival Kyiv Book Arsenal hosted publisher B2B meetings to facilitate international translation deals and pitch the best of Ukrainian literature to publishers. READ MORE…

Announcing Our September Book Club Selection: Kaya Days by Carl de Souza

September 29, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

De Souza’s densely packed novel is a disorienting one, purposefully so.

Carl de Souza began writing Kaya Days in the tumultuous throes of the very event it depicts—the 1999 riots in the East African island of Mauritius, following the death of popular singer Kaya. From the description of those frenzied days comes a work that renders the electric immediacy of sensation with vividness, kinetics, and a musician’s aptness for rhythm. We are proud to announce this singular work as our Book Club selection for the month of September—a formidable voice in Mauritian literature and an unforgettable novel of revolution, poetry, and becoming.

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

Kaya Days by Carl de Souza, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, Two Lines Press, 2021

If war is a matter of hurry up and wait, then the rest of life is often the opposite. As Hemingway says, “Gradually, then suddenly.” So it is with Santee Bissoonlall and her mystical journey in Carl de Souza’s Kaya Days, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman—“. . . all this had happened gradually, with the quiet of a new beginning.” For many years, Santee is a child. Then suddenly, over the course of a violent and chaotic few days, she is a woman, a queen, a figure receding. De Souza’s intricate novel propels her on the journey of becoming, as she traverses the tumultuous 1999 Mauritian riots.

The riots were an uprising of Mauritian Creoles following the death of Joseph Réginald Topize—better known by his stage name, Kaya—in police custody under suspect circumstances. The word kaya is a reference to Bob Marley’s 1978 album of the same name, and Kaya, as a musician, was a pivotal figure in the blending of Mauritian sega and reggae into a genre that would come to be known as seggae. He was also an activist for Creole rights and the decriminalization of marijuana, among other things. Yet this political-historical thread is not the primary melody of de Souza’s novel; rather, it serves as the thrumming pedal note to Santee’s journey through the burning streets.

We follow her as she quests for her lost brother, Ramesh—younger than her yet seemingly so much worldlier, as he has been permitted to attend school and traverse the outside world, while Santee has been kept at home, condemned to household drudgery by her sex and her family’s poverty. For Santee, the confusion of the riots is a distant rumble; it is the more immediate problem of a missing sibling which drives her on through the ruined streets.

It was getting dark under the mango trees. She had no hope of understanding, but that wasn’t what she needed to do, that wasn’t her job, she was just here because Ma couldn’t be. What she needed to do was find Ram; one of these alleys would lead to him, but which one?

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2021

September 27, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel and Sarah Moore

New work this week from Mexico and Algeria!

This month, our editors dive into two powerful works that look into the dominating subjects of human life: sex and war. An erotically subversive collection of stories by award-winning author Mónica Lavín moves to the darkest and most questioning arenas of desire, and a memoir by Algerian Freedom fighter Mokhtar Mokhtefi stands as a cogent and compelling text of witness of his nation’s struggle against French colonialism.

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Meaty Pleasures by Mónica Lavín, translated from the Spanish by Dorothy Potter Snyder, Katakana Editores, 2021

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

There is catharsis in transgression, and pleasure—especially the centering of one’s own pleasure—is all too often transgressive. The twelve short stories in Mónica Lavín’s collection, Meaty Pleasures, thoughtfully curated and translated by Dorothy Potter Snyder, capitalizes on this subversive desire, exploding the tranquil veneer of domestic life by compelling our complicity in the deeply uncomfortable and socially taboo.

It all begins and ends with the flesh. “Postprandial,” the decadent opening story, foregoes grounding details about setting and character in order to focalize an aphrodisiac tasting menu, offered from a hotel restaurant manager to a passerby, and the explicit sex that follows. It readies the reader for Lavín’s challenging approach to realism, intimacy, and power imbalance which pervades the rest of the collection. The final story, “Meaty Pleasures,” also emphasizes the sensual relationship between food and sex—but in a completely different way. Told from the perspective of an adult daughter who has watched her parents’ Saturday afternoon artisanal butchering hobby grow into an obsession that echoes over the course of their lives, the sex is left entirely to the implicit, straining in constant tension with the parental web of familial obligations. The daughter and her sister reflect: “Sometimes we’d ask each other, have you tried calling Papá and Mamá on Saturday afternoons? Because on that day of week, they never answered the phone to either one of us.”

In between, we meet many a troubled family. As is common in stories of nonconformity, various characters rebel against the numbing effect of matrimony, but their resistance does not lead them to any predictable conclusion—or perhaps any predictability is heightened to a manic extreme. In “What’s there to come back to,” a husband leaves his repentant wife on their doorstep for a whole winter’s night before he, begrudgingly, allows her back into their home. Snyder’s translation captures a certain languor and resentment in his stream of consciousness that induces anxiety when set against the excruciating awareness of her waiting, building a rawness that painfully and coldly leads to his reflection upon waking up in the morning: “Fried eggs again for breakfast, the TV news. I think she’s gone. Maybe she froze to death. Maybe we both froze to death.” In “You Never Know,” a son tires of the demons left to him by his mother’s abandonment. “Then, you kiss and hug them in the shadows of a movie theater, and you masturbate thinking about them, and when you start to want something more than their bodies, like their companionship and tenderness, you leave without saying goodbye.” Innocent—righteous, even—though his anger seems, his journey darkens with an incestual turn. “Roberto’s Mouth” finds a disgruntled housewife disappointed yet again when her own plans to leave her family are thwarted by her naughty-mouthed chat-room lover’s lazy approach to cuckholding. In such narratives that continually unpack and distort the concepts of familial intimacy, images of transgressively penetrated flesh dominate the collection, inviting the reader to reflect on the discomfort they inspire. READ MORE…

Brussels Planetarium Poetry Fest—A Unique Experience in the Heart of Europe

September 22, 2021  |  in Dispatches  |  by MARGENTO

[T]he Planetarium’s technicians have in fact “translated” the poets’ “texts and recordings” into the projections.

Since 2014, the Brussels Planetarium has been host to a poetry festival that wrangles in the celestial forces to commune with language. The resulting event is a brilliant amalgam of performance, verse, and media, with the latest in immersion technology being applied to transport the audience into the land- and soundscape of the poet’s imagination. This year, our Editor-at-Large MARGENTO reports from the festival, giving us a close-up of the works that lent the city their magic, and the global consciousness a sense of poetry’s endless potentials in the technology age.

Whether in hangover or relapse, (post?)pandemic times seem to be bringing about a bruised euphoria of collectivity and in-person proximity. If not packed concert halls, then outdoor gigs; if not crowded pubs, then nicely scattered and still-animated patios. In the meantime, artists and writers seem even more eager to embrace collaboration or collective action in reinvigorated ways that are nevertheless pungently critical of (post)pandemic prospects of communal life and culture. This year’s edition of Brussels Planetarium Poetry Fest intriguingly captured all of these trends while putting poetry, the arts, science, and, most urgently, the (post)human condition in perspective.

And I mean literally so. The unique venue of the Planetarium and its 3-D affordances can offer a unique experience and a “cosmic” medium poetry has perhaps always striven for, but has rarely had the opportunity to enjoy so palpably. And it is no coincidence that the festival itself has been organized there for eight annual editions (including in the midst of the pandemic in 2020). Indeed, it is not only that the name of the curator himself, Philip Meersman—poet and coordinator of the World Poetry Organization—aurally resonates with “immersion”; the concept has in fact been a long-standing preoccupation with the Belgian slammer, materializing in events such as Brussels Planetarium Poetry Fest or the Inclusive World Poetry Slam Championship (and also a PhD project he is working on at KASK Antwerp on visual poetry as… immersive experience). In his prefatory note in the festival’s programme, Meersman places the theme of the festival—the possible “dialogue between science, religion, immaterial heritage. […] (de)colonization, and white masculinity”—naturally in a celestial context, as “stars guide our most intimate ceremonies” towards a question that he deems prophetic: “How will you remember me?”

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On both nights of the festival, therefore, the audience found themselves from the very beginning plunged into an enveloping dark and then instantly hurled into a 3D, 360-degree dome projection that “physically” took them on an overwhelming multidirectional voyage across the universe and among celestial bodies and meteorites. What was even more impressive was that these projections were not simply Planetarium material played as (random) backdrop to poetry acts, but a shrewdly planned and accomplished fusion of the two that involved visuals—contributed by the poets themselves—embedded into, dialoguing with, or even deconstructing the all-engulfing astronomical vistas. As the website puts it, the Planetarium’s technicians have in fact “translated” the poets’ “texts and recordings” into the projection, drawing on existing material but also “specially acquired images, 3D-projection models, photos, and results of scientific research” (my emphasis).  READ MORE…

To Love God and Women: On The Last One by Fatima Daas

September 16, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Fairuza Hanun

The Last One . . . challenges what constitutes faith and its validity, between society’s shared meaning and love in all its variant forms.

The Last One by Fatima Daas, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud, Other Press, 2021

Of the human world, love is both conflict and destination. Our understanding of love—what it is, how to do it—is immensely varied, and its dominating presence rules our formative years. To be deprived of, or shamed from, an open expression of love can be a numbing experience, one that rearranges the nucleus of our social interactions and emotional familiarities into a sinister puzzle. Still, no matter in estrangement or intimacy, our lives revolve around our need, or lack thereof, for closeness; the life of The Last One’s narrator, Fatima, is no different. For Fatima, the precariousness of love applies to her human relationships, but are further compared and contrasted with the relationship she nurtures with God.

The novel, comprised of vignettes and fragmented memories, is coalesced by Fatima’s attempt to comprehend, or perhaps mend, the conflicting multiplicity of her self—queer, Muslim, Algerian-French, woman. Each scene opens in a diary-like manner: “My name is Fatima,” followed by a personal fact—sometimes trivial, such as the consequence of her naming or her like/dislike for commuting—and other times, a profound reflective statement: “I regret that no one taught me how to love”. The entire book charts her pilgrimage of probing about in the study of love, of creating and maintaining meaningful and intimate relationships with other people, with God, or with herself. All of this is interlaced with disparate interpretations of cultures and languages, often governed by paternalistic attitudes.

From the beginning, we learn the precious nature of her name—that it “mustn’t be soiled,” or “wassekh”: to “soil, stir shit up, blacken.” The origin and meaning of her name is sacred, derived from the Prophet Muhammad’s beloved daughter Fatima—which means “little weaned she-camel.” She analyses the different definitions of “fatm”—the Arabic for “to wean”—compiling all three in the same paragraph as if to correlate them with one another: “Stop the nursing of a child or a young animal to transition it to a new mode of feeding; feel frustration; separate someone from something or something from someone or someone from someone.” In the same scene, she compares and contrasts her strained familial circumstances with the other Fatima’s:

Like Fatima, I should have had three sisters. […]

Fatima’s father deems her the noblest woman in heaven.

The prophet Mohammed—may God’s peace and blessings be upon him—said one day: “Fatima is a part of me. Any who harm her harm me.”

My father would never say such a thing.

My father doesn’t say much to me anymore. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 20, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Eva Wissting, and Peera Songkünnatham

This week, our editors report from Thailand, Sweden, and the USA.

Around the world, the way we read is changing: Eva Wissting digs into book sales data in Sweden and finds a spike in digital subscription services amid the pandemic, Peera Songkünnatham reports that Thai poets are reinventing a classic form, and Allison Braden rounds up a slew of Women in Translation Month events. The annual celebration, dedicated to shaking up the canon, makes for a perfect moment to envision the heady, vivid future of literature.

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

A literary project called Bokbastionen (“The Book Bastion”) is finally about to launch in Sweden. The Swedish Arts Council has granted Svenska Bokhandlareföreningen, an association of Swedish booksellers, 400,000 SEK to support in-store events with authors. Although it was the challenges posed by the pandemic that led to the idea of supporting booksellers, coronavirus restrictions have delayed its start because gatherings have not been possible until now. Finally, the first event supported by the project will be held this coming week at a poetry festival in picturesque Söderköping. The initial plan for Bokbastionen included twenty author events this year, but about half of these will spill over into next year instead. The interest to host events has been particularly large among smaller, independent bookstores, which now are looking for ways to create interest among readers and book lovers.

Even though the pandemic has had severe consequences for much of the cultural sector, book sales have had a positive development in Sweden, according to a new report from the Swedish Publishers’ Association. In the first half of 2021, overall book sales have increased by over 10 percent, but there is an ongoing shift between sales channels. The largest growth is in digital subscriptions with almost 20 percent, followed by an almost 15 percent increase in online bookstores. Physical bookstores, on the other hand, have had an 8 percent decrease in sales during the first half of this year. Both digital and printed books increased in sales, by 14 percent and 7 percent respectively, indicating that ebooks are not replacing physical books. Out of all book sales in Sweden, almost 80 percent take place online—50 percent through online bookstores and 28 percent through digital subscriptions. The report concludes that book sales have been greatly influenced by the pandemic. More customers have turned to online options, including digital subscription services. Though there are more bookstores closing down permanently than there are starting up, readers seem to be returning to physical bookstores as vaccination rates increase. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2021

August 16, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan and Fairuza Hanun

New work this month from Lebanon and India!

The speed by which text travels is both a great fortune and a conundrum of our present days. As information and knowledge are transmitted in unthinkable immediacy, our capacity for receiving and comprehending worldly events is continuously challenged and reconstituted. It is, then, a great privilege to be able to sit down with a book that coherently and absorbingly sorts through the things that have happened. This month, we bring you two works that deal with the events of history with both clarity and intimacy. One a compelling, diaristic account of the devastating Beirut explosion of last year, and one a sensitive, sensual novel that delves into a woman’s life as she carries the trauma of Indian Partition. Read on to find out more.

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Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse by Charif Majdalani, translated from French by Ruth Diver, Other Press, 2021

Review by Alex Tan, Assistant Editor

There’s a peculiar whiplash that comes from seeing the words “social distancing” in a newly published book, even if—as in the case of Charif Majdalani’s Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse—the reader is primed from the outset to anticipate an account of the pandemic’s devastations. For anyone to claim the discernment of hindsight feels all too premature—wrong, even, when there isn’t yet an aftermath to speak from.

But Majdalani’s testimony of disintegration, a compelling mélange of memoir and historical reckoning in Ruth Diver’s clear-eyed English translation, contains no such pretension. In the collective memory of 2020 as experienced by those in Beirut, Lebanon, the COVID-19 pandemic serves merely as stage lighting. It casts its eerie glow on the far deeper fractures within a country riven by “untrammelled liberalism” and “the endemic corruption of the ruling classes.”

Majdalani is great at conjuring an atmosphere of unease, the sense that something is about to give. And something, indeed, does; on August 4, 2020, a massive explosion of ammonium nitrate at the Port of Beirut shattered the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. A whole city collapsed, Majdalani repeatedly emphasises, in all of five seconds.

That cataclysmic event structures the diary’s chronology. Regardless of how much one knows of Lebanon’s troubled past, the succession of dates gathers an ominous velocity, hurtling toward its doomed end. Yet the text’s desultory form, delivering in poignant fragments day by elastic day, hour by ordinary hour, preserves an essential uncertainty—perhaps even a hope that the future might yet be otherwise.

Like the diary-writer, we intimate that the centre cannot hold, but cannot pinpoint exactly where or how. It is customary, in Lebanon, for things to be falling apart. Majdalani directs paranoia at opaque machinations first designated as mechanisms of “chance,” and later diagnosed as the “excessive factionalism” of a “caste of oligarchs in power.” Elsewhere, he christens them “warlords.” The two are practically synonymous in the book’s moral universe. Indeed, Beirut 2020’s lexicon frequently relies, for figures of powerlessness and governmental conspiracy, on a pantheon of supernatural beings. Soothsayers, Homeric gods, djinn, and ghosts make cameos in its metaphorical phantasmagoria. In the face of the indifferent quasi-divine, Lebanon’s lesser inhabitants can only speculate endlessly about the “shameless lies and pantomimes” produced with impunity. READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (Aug 2021)

August 12, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

In addition to editing your favorite literary journal, Asymptote staff are publishing books and winning awards!

After organizing a #GraphPoem computational poetry event that attracted hundreds of participants and thousands of viewers at DHSI 2021, Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, is in the process of collaboratively starting a Digital Literature Lab at the Royal Library of Belgium on a FED-tWIN grant involving Université catholique de Louvain.

Chinese Social Media Manager Jiaoyang Li has received a China-Scotland Digital Collaboration Grant from the British Council and the City Artist Corps Grant from New York Foundation for the Arts to work on a series of community based literary events and workshops.

Assistant Director of Outreach Ka Man Chung’s English translation of Over the Left Bank of the River by Chung Wenyin has been awarded a translation and publication grant by Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture. The work is expected to be released by Serenity International in 2022.

Educational Arm Assistant Katarzyna Bartoszyńska’s new book Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature has just been published this month by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has a new short craft essay on the retrospective narration in J.D. Salinger’s “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” up at Fiction Writers Review.

Assistant Editor (Poetry) M.L. Martin’s collection of ekphrastic prose poems, Theater of No Mistakes, won the 2021 Rick Campbell Chapbook Award, and will be published later this year with Anhinga Press (USA). In addition, her anti-translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem by the anonymous, pre-10th c. proto-feminist, Wulf & Eadwacer, was named a finalist for CSU’s 2021 Lighthouse Poetry Series (USA). READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

August 11, 2021  |  in News  |  by Carol Khoury, Eva Wissting, Kent Kosack, and Mary Hillis

Here to help you diversify your bookshelf, a selection of staff reads from Asymptote’s Fortnightly Airmail

If, as the adage goes, readers experience a thousand lives before they die, then readers of translated literature experience a thousand cultures without ever leaving their armchair. Set in Canada, India, Finland, Italy, and Jordan, here is a selection of international reads recommended by our staff for the newsletter. Get ready to be transported!

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The year is 1506. The great artist Michelangelo is furious at his stingy patron the Pope, “the bellicose pontiff who had thrown him out like a beggar.” But as one door closes, another opens in the form of an invitation from the Sultan of Constantinople to come to his city and design a bridge to cross the Golden Horn. Tell Them of Battles, Kings & Elephants, written by Mathias Énard and translated by Charlotte Mandell, is a feat of richly-imagined historical fiction that tells the tale of this sculptor’s journey. Michelangelo is abstemious and driven, consumed by his art and ego. But he soon succumbs to the charms of cosmopolitan Constantinople, its sounds and smells, its poets and performers. Yet dark forces conspire to thwart the artist from completing his designs. Intrigue. Assassins. Daggers in the night. Will Michelangelo complete his bridge and join cultures and continents? What will be the legacy of his journey? You’ll have to read it to find out.

—Kent Kosack, Director of Educational Arm

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Kjell Westö’s novel The Wednesday Club, translated from the Swedish by Neil Smith, takes us to Helsinki in 1938–ten years after the Finnish Civil War. The Second World War has not yet started, but Hitler and his policies are already a recurring discussion topic far beyond Nazi Germany. Lawyer and recent divorcee Claes Thune wants to keep the gentleman’s club with his three friends amicable but not only the world around them but also the past keeps intruding. As some of the friends start drifting apart, Thune finds a friend in his new secretary Matilda Wiik. But why is she so secretive about her background? Westö is one of the most highly praised Swedish-language writers in Finland. Although he writes poetry and short stories as well, it’s with his novels set in twentieth century Helsinki that he has truly established himself as a writer. Readers of the engaging and intriguing The Wednesday Club understand why.

—Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large for Sweden

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Smita sends her daughter to the village school in Badlapur for the first time, an action that sets a daring journey in motion. Guila works in her family’s wig workshop, the House of Lanfredi in Palermo, but soon receives news that changes the course of their business forever. In Montreal, a successful lawyer, mother of two, and woman who has it all, Sarah’s priorities are about to shift dramatically. Laetitia Colombani’s The Braid, published by Picador in 2019, interlaces the stories of Smita, Guila, and Sarah—each on the precipice of change. Cinematic in scope and expertly translated from French by Louise Rogers Lalaurie, it is ideal for binge reading. Set in the present day, the alternating perspectives flow seamlessly and are further linked through a poem. Colombani creates a deeply personal tale of women building new paths upon generations of faith, culture, and tradition, while revealing unexpected ways in which our modern lives intersect.

—Mary Hillis, Educational Arm Assistant READ MORE…