Language: French

The Beauty of the Original: Sam Taylor on Translating Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s A Hundred Million Years and a Day

July 23, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Barbara Halla

. . . it’s always a special pleasure to translate someone who writes perfect sentences, which I think is the case with Jean-Baptiste.

The questions and ideas that Jean-Baptiste Andrea tackles in his lauded novel, A Hundred Million Years and a Day, beautifully inform the wisdom that all searches for truth are equally intrinsic as they are extrinsic. As our Book Club selection for the month of June, the work delves into psychological complexities with erudition and poetry. A Hundred Million Years and a Day is translated into English by the award-winning author and translator, Sam Taylor, who graciously spoke to our assistant editor, Barbara Halla, about his process and methods.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

Barbara Halla (BH): While reading A Hundred Million Years and a Day, I was reminded of another recent translation of yours: Hubert Mingarelli’s Four Soldiers. In both books, unlikely friendships develop under strenuous circumstances, and there is a certain reverence for the small interactions that make human connection possible. To the extent that you are able to pick which books you translate, do you find yourself drawn to specific themes?

Sam Taylor (ST): I hadn’t thought about that connection, but you’re right: there are similarities there. Both authors also share a very simple, controlled, vivid prose style that makes you feel as though you’re inside the minds and bodies of the characters. More generally, I’ve also translated quite a few books set in or referencing World War Two. However, this isn’t down to a conscious choice on my part. In fact, it probably has more to do with publishers ‘typecasting’ me to some extent. Thankfully, I’ve translated enough very different authors and books that it’s not really a problem. What I enjoy is the variety that comes with translation, rather than constantly being drawn to the same themes. On the other hand, it’s always a special pleasure to translate someone who writes perfect sentences, which I think is the case with Jean-Baptiste.

BH: How different is it to translate a book like this one from, say, Laurent Binet’s The 7th Function of Language? Do you conduct any substantial research before translating texts that rely heavily on a specific type of knowledge, be it palaeontology or semiotics?

ST: No, I think that kind of in-depth research is the author’s prerogative. When I wrote a novel set in Renaissance Italy, I spent a whole year researching it (including a two-week trip around Italy), but I don’t have that kind of luxury—in terms of time or money—when it comes to translations because I regularly translate between six and twelve books/screenplays every year. Some ‘research’ is needed for books with specialist vocabulary (as with this novel) and/or lots of quotes and references (e.g. for The 7th Function), but I do it online as I’m translating the book; I don’t read through lots of reference works beforehand. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2020

July 20, 2020  |  in News  |  by Edwin Alanís-García, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Oral poetry, plague journals, and surrealist masters: our blog editors are here with their selections from the Summer 2020 issue!

With our Summer 2020 issue, Asymptote has brought together new work from thirty-one countries drawn under “This Strange Stillness,” acknowledging all the fearful, sorrowful, and newly arriving things that are in great need of language. It is a timely collection, though we also hope that it is a lasting one, as the texts of this issue remains full of beauty, grace, craft, as well as a knowledge of these unnerving times. If you are in need of a place to start, let our blog editors be your guide.

In these varying todays that blend into one another, I am thinking of Audre Lorde: “seeking a now that can breed / futures.” With the daily cycles of news, statistics, and corresponding tides of political turbulence, the act of reading is accompanied by the weight of scrutiny into factual truths, and the attempts to form a set of principles out of them. All this in the hope that the formidable now will be rescued into a manageable, comprehensible future. As readers and thinkers, we find ourselves in the position of insisting on the importance that literature has always taken, yet literature that thinks only of its utility is powerless—any potency can only result from a craft that knows equally of its form as it does its function.

In perusal of the Asymptote Summer 2020 issue, I returned to indulging in the pure pleasures of reading—linguistic play, secret collaborations of words, and the mysterious harmony of object, image, sound, and divinity that culminates in the sublimity of poetry. I took a particular joy in the Iranian lickos, an anonymous collection of the indigenous, oral poetic form. They are brief, curious, and contain both the wideness and aliveness of a language meant to be passed between two people. The couplets and tercets, translated brilliantly and cohesively by Mahdi Ganjavi, Amin Fatemi, and Mansour Alimoradi, possess a fluidity and attention that draw the beauty of simple conversation, and the immensity of a single day’s emotions, sharply into view. From petty humour to profound loss, their visual simplicity are an entryway into the profound origins of a poetics.

There is also a great vivacity in Sanja Mihajlovik-Kostadinovska’s “(In)Finite Models of the Short Story,” in which the concept of narrative itself is taken on a wild spin throughout its wanderings into people, places, things, feelings, and myths. Too often we are distracted by semantics, and Mihajlovik-Kostadinovska, along with translator Igor Popovski, bring the reader back into the exhilarating disarray of imagining, reorienting the story back into control of itself. 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

What’s New in Translation: July 2020

July 13, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Charlie Ng Chak-Kwan, Jiaoyang Li, and José García Escobar

New publications from Argentina, Quebec, and Portugal!

This month, our selections of the best in newly translated global literature consists of a thrillingly varied medley of styles, from a fictional Argentine study on an obscure poet, a French-Canadian narrative of images and their thrall, and Fernando Pessoa’s cheekily fabricated dossier of a fascinating character. Though they may perhaps be united by a mutual captivation for how the mundane strikes the artistic process, the writers of these exciting works are transforming what may be familiar matters with a unique and singular language. Read on to find out more!

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Notes Toward a Pamphlet by Sergio Chejfec, translated from the Spanish by Whitney DeVos, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020

Review by José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large

As much as Sergio Chejfec’s Notes Toward a Pamphlet offers a detailed voyeuristic look on trains, passengers, silence, and a radio announcer eating carrots, it’s also a gripping character study filled with philosophy and subtle humor. The use of randomness and meticulous narration of everyday, seemingly ordinary events, are no rarity in Chejfec’s work—the internal monologue of Masha, the meditative hotel clerk in his novel The Incompletes, as one example. Though they may appear disjointed, they often ignite the narrative and strengthen the enigma.

I think of Onetti and Piglia, and Chejfec, with his hidden tension and disarmingly beautiful writing—amplified by Whitney DeVos’ fiery translation—holds his ground against such giants.

In Notes Toward a Pamphlet, we see a nameless narrator following, or rather, discovering a poet named Samich. Unknown and unpublished, Samich does not even have a completed book to his name. He is solitary and lives a sedentary life in rural Argentina. His work, we learn, is scattered in magazines and “collectively-authored books.” But we can’t talk about poems per se. For these publications, Samich takes a fragment, at random, from the “writing mass.” There are no themes in his writing. No topics, concerns, or inspiration. No coherence or unity. But this is not an eccentricity. This, we understand, as we get to know Samich, is the way he viewed and experienced literature, based on “intuition instead of ideas.” Samich’s literary ways and lifestyle are almost like the antithesis of Bolaño’s Visceral Realists.

Notes Toward a Pamphlet is not bound by plot. There is no plot, but there is movement. But movement, motion, progression, and development, though noticeable, is rarely explicit. There’s barely any dialogue, action, interaction between characters, or issues to be resolved. Instead, we watch Samich grow. We see his flaws and contradictions. But his evolution occurs not in an artificial, literary way, but closer to how people experience it in real life: subtly and slowly. Samich’s growth is almost imperceptible. And while his life seems unexceptional and tedious, Chejfec’s mesmerizing writing, and the narrator’s prying, maintains the momentum. READ MORE…

Announcing our June Book Club Selection: A Hundred Million Years and a Day by Jean-Baptiste Andrea

June 29, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla

It’s a humbling, bittersweet experience, a beauty so terrible that you can’t quite bear to be in its presence for too long.

With expansive beauty and imaginative observance, Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s A Hundred Million Years and a Day has swept up a enormous amount of praise in its homeland of France, including being shortlisted for the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française and the Prix Joseph Kessel, and we are now proud to present it to our readers as our Book Club selection for the month of June. Andrea’s story of a man’s hunt for lost creatures pays equal tribute to the earth’s natural wonders and to human persistence and urge for discovery, culminating in a majestic and magnetic tale of what happens when the personal meets the eternal. Within its pages lies a thrilling poetry.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

A Hundred Million Years and a Day by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, translated from the French by Sam Taylor, Gallic Books, 2020

Stan, a middling French palaeontologist, is convinced that the skeleton of a “dragon” hides in the belly of the mountains that delineate the porous border between France and Italy. He heard about this dragon years ago, in a second-hand summary of the ramblings of a sour Italian man—the seemingly outlandish contents of someone’s childhood memories. Haunted by this skeleton, Stan drops everything in its pursuit: he quits his university job as a professor, sells his Parisian apartment, and self-finances an expensive expedition to these majestic mountains in the company of his former assistant Umberto, Umberto’s own mentee Paul, and Gio, a taciturn guide for whom the mountains are a second home. 

Of course, being a scientist, what Stan is looking for is not really a dragon. From the vague details he has heard, he surmises that the skeleton the caretaker had come across in fact belonged to a brontosaurus—a species that palaeontologists had agreed on being nonexistent, being simply a variation on the apatosaurus. While the book establishes early the love that Stan has for his discipline, for the fossils that he used to meticulously collect and treat as his friends during his lonely childhood spent in another set of mountains, the motives behind this expedition are not necessarily pure. For Stan, having lain forgotten, himself collecting dust in a basement office, this expedition presents his last chance at some glory. If he does find his brontosaurus, proving a theory disputed by palaeontologists for almost a century, the creature will bear his name, articles will be written about Stan, the “animal will give him back his voice.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Daughter from Jannina” by Vassilis Alexakis

June 16, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Rebecca Dehner-Armand

It feels as if I’m using this story just to see if I am able to write a more personal piece.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a proposed coffee date unearths secrets and regrets in Vassilis Alexakis’ “The Daughter from Jannina.” Our protagonist is a journalist awaiting the arrival of a young woman claiming to be his daughter. A conversation about the veracity of the woman’s claim reveals a bittersweet history of personal mistakes. Here we have the trademarks of Alexakis’ writing: straightforward exposition, quotidian detail, and a dryly comic voice, all of which belie a deeply complex interiority and emotional self-awareness. With emotional subtlety and humour, our protagonist weighs the importance of love and family life against the backdrop of national displacement. Translator Rebecca Dehner-Armand writes: “[Alexakis] has composed a singular œuvre, marked by his particular staccato and wry style, that illuminates the experience of a growing sector of French society: immigrants, exiles, and foreigners.” 

A cloud of smoke floats above the ping-pong table. I am seated at my desk, at the other end of the room. At the moment, I am not smoking. On the ping-pong table there is a mostly used-up roll of toilet paper, a paddle, and Lina’s camera, as well as a Tupperware container that I should return to Grigoris’ mother. A few days ago, she brought me some garbanzo bean soup in this container. Where has the other paddle gone? I don’t see the ball either. I played ping-pong last night with Vasso. The match was shit. Lina came over afterwards, around midnight. She slept here last night. It hasn’t been long now since she left.

I am listening to The Turk in Italy, a joyful opera by Rossini. The Turk falls in love with a married Italian woman and begins plotting to purchase her. She gently explains to him that this type of transaction is not done in Italy. In reality, I am not really paying attention to the opera. My mind is elsewhere. It seems the cloud of smoke is headed for the open French doors. It is quite chilly, but I don’t have the strength to get up and close the doors. Lina will no doubt come by sometime during the day to pick up her camera.

Normally, I should be prepping for my TV show by now – I am going to be interviewing the minister of maritime trade—or writing my column for The Investor. These notes surprise me; I am not used to recording my comings and goings. I am writing in pencil, which surprises me even more: for a long time now, I’ve typed out everything. Maybe I chose a pencil precisely because I ascribe no importance to this story, because I can envision a quick abandonment. I can see myself throwing it in the trash after ripping it to shreds. A little piece of paper will fall to the floor. Once I bend to pick it up, there will be a knock at my door: it will be Stavroula, this young girl who was not at our get-together last night and who thinks she’s my daughter. READ MORE…

How Do We Remember Translators? The Many Lives of Barbara Bray

June 11, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Nathan H. Dize

There must be a way of acknowledging the care that Bray brought to her translations while simultaneously reckoning with their faults.

Barbara Bray was a British translator and recipient of the PEN Translation Prize in 1986. In addition to having translated leading French authors of her time, including Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, and the correspondence of George Sand, she also translated works by two renowned female Guadeloupian writers: Simone Schwarz-Bart and Maryse Condé. Though her work has undergone criticism—notably by Condé’s husband and translator, Richard Philcox in an recent interview with us at Asymptote—the importance of her legacy and contributions to global literature, as Nathan H. Dize proposes in the following essay, should not be undermined. 

In late December, I decided to go browsing at a used bookstore outside of Nashville to take a much-needed break from writing my dissertation. There are few things in this world more comforting than perusing the spines of books, never knowing what you might stumble upon. A few minutes into my trip, I found a hardcover copy of Maryse Condé’s Segu, translated by the late Barbara Bray. The dust jacket was pristine and its cover depicted a dying African man surrounded by his family beneath a pulpy font. I instantly knew that I had to buy it, having recently talked about the novel’s translator with a friend. Unfortunately, Barbara Bray’s name appears nowhere on the cover of Segu—not on its first edition or any subsequent editions—which led me to wonder, how do we remember translators when they are gone? What becomes of the many lives they’ve lived through the words of others? Since that day in the warehouse-sized bookstore in Middle Tennessee, I’ve considered how Bray’s translations of Maryse Condé and Simone Schwarz-Bart, Guadeloupe’s most prolific writers, might help us to remember her life and her contribution to Caribbean literature in translation.

***

Barbara Bray (née Jacobs) was born along with her identical twin, Olive, on November 24, 1924 in Maida Vale, not far from Regent’s Park in London. She was educated close to Maida Vale at the Preston Manor Grammar School in Brent and later studied English, French, and Italian at Girton College, Cambridge. After her university studies, Barbara married John Bray, a former Royal Air Force pilot, and they went to live together in Egypt, where Barbara took a position as an English teacher at the University of Alexandria in Cairo. In 1953, the couple moved back to London, where Barbara began a new job as a script editor for the BBC. In his obituary for Barbara Bray in the Journal of Beckett Studies, John Knowlson recalls conversations with Bray about her time at the BBC, when she and other producers had to fight with BBC executives and department heads to air avant-garde radio plays and programs, such as Harold Pinter’s radio plays. Three years before Barbara Bray left the BCC in 1961, her husband John died in a car accident, leaving her widowed and tasked with raising their two daughters, Francesca and Julia. After John Bray’s passing, Barbara met Samuel Beckett and the two began a multi-decade love affair in Paris that coincided with Bray’s entrée into the world of translation. READ MORE…

The Circumference of Love’s Primal Language in Ghérasim Luca’s La Fin du monde

June 10, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Jared Fagen

Love for Luca is not an ideal, but a configuration under constant scrutiny and forever reinvented (or misconfigured).

The legacy of Romanian surrealist poet Ghérasim Luca is his singular style: ferocious in desire, elaborate in theory, and fraught with the contradictions and impossibilities of translating human emotion into language. In the following essay, Jared Fagen situates Luca in his rightful place within the Surrealist canon in a comprehensive and discerning study of his love poem, La Fin du monde: Prendre corps.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
—Pascal

Ghérasim Luca’s La Fin du monde: Prendre corps (The End of the World: To Embody) deserves a place within any discussion of the surrealist love poem. Indeed, in the spirit of Pierre Reverdy’s contradictory conjoining of objects (following Lautréamont’s “dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella”), the chance amorous encounters of André Breton’s Nadja, and the startling, ambiguous juxtapositions of Robert Desnos’s Liberté ou l’amour! (Liberty or Love!), a resemblance between the French treatment of love and Luca’s own handling can be undoubtedly determined. But for all the impassioned intensity, violent eroticism, and revolutionary fervor it shares in common with the works of such surrealist masters, Luca’s poem can also rightfully be situated—like the poet himself—just outside this conversation, on the fringes, or raised perhaps after its conclusion, in the exhaustion and wake of interpretation.

A founder and member of the short-lived Romanian circle (1940–1947), with Gellu Naum, Dolfi Trost, Paul Păun, and Virgil Teodorescu, Luca and his contributions to surrealist aesthetics are distinct precisely because of the tradition from which they spring (and disrupt) and the origins they seek to restore. This subtle yet significant variation of love between Luca and the French surrealists relies primarily upon a deviation of linguistic usage: despite the spirit, a rift (or departure) can be discerned on the surface—the body—of La Fin du monde; one in which love is performed by a peculiar operation of language that is as native as it is natal, as in place as it is apart. “If I am speaking only the language I have been taught,” writes Breton in L’amour fou (Mad Love), “what will ever serve as a signal that we should listen to the voice of unreason, claiming that tomorrow will be other, that it is entirely and mysteriously separated from yesterday?” For Luca, the question is fundamental to his own poetic project, yet is itself futile: “Putting aside the precariousness of man’s existence, his rudimentary biology leaning towards the reactionary, the funereal, with the vague and progress-inducing hope that everything will be solved tomorrow, when I know that this very tomorrow will always be late in arriving, because any tendency to surpass and shatter our own limits is prohibited because of our good sense, because of our modesty and rationalism.”

These two quotes reveal an interesting disparity between an amorous poetic language in service to stifling the world of reason in order to eclipse and transform it, and an amorous poetic language whose endeavor to seek respite or refuge from the progressive world results in its anguished expression. This latter point is critical to our experience of Luca’s poem. For Breton, surrealist love offers possibility, optimism, hope: the perpetual pursuit, possession, and renewal of love’s meeting as if—like the penultimate poem in his L’air de l’eau professes—“Toujours pour la première fois” (“Always for the first time”). For Luca, love is a construct already narrativized, or “ready-made,” always despairing of the revolutionary freedom it purports yet ultimately fails to fully achieve. Like Antonin Artaud’s Van Gogh, the “I” of Luca’s La Fin du monde is suicided by society, discharging its lascivious behaviors within “the myth of reality itself,” a reality that is “terribly superior to all history, to all fable, to all divinity, to all surreality.” READ MORE…

Ideology and Imagination in the Unequal Twenty-First Century: Thomas Piketty and the Global Fight Against Economic Inequality

June 3, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Ian Thompson

. . . thinkers like Piketty generate and agitate the kind of discussions needed to address our collective woes.

Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer, The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2020

It’s rare for an economics book to make much inroad into non-academic circles, but the French economist Thomas Piketty did just that with his surprise success Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in 2014 with an English translation by Arthur Goldhammer. This impressive work warns of the corrosive impacts of economic inequality, which has spiraled out of control in the last few decades. Piketty’s thesis—and perhaps the greatest success of the study—boils down to a simple equation: r > g, where r represents the rate of return on capital and g represents the rate of economic growth. Piketty warns of a future where returns on wealth will outpace all new forms of economic growth, entrenching all existing fortunes ever deeper, and only further those with more meagre supplies of capital. Piketty’s warnings seem to have struck a chord, although not without criticism. The global and historic scope of this study left many corners of the world understudied and with little room to understand the roots of inequality before the nineteenth century.

Piketty’s newest book, Capital and Ideology, again translated by Arthur Goldhammer, serves as a logical continuation of the project undertaken in his earlier research. If anything, it takes an even more ambitious approach to the seemingly intractable problem of economic inequality, offering both a diagnosis and potential treatments of our global malaise. Despite Piketty’s disciplinary background in economics, Capital and Ideology emphasizes the central importance of political and ideological change rather than changes in monetary policy or trade agreements. At his best, Piketty draws the potential dry discussion of economic systems into the complex interplay of human systems of politics, ideology, and history, and into the manifold ways these systems have taken shape throughout time and place. Perhaps most invigorating of all is the degree of faith Piketty places in human imagination and the ability to right wrongs and make active decisions to shape our collective future.

As he reminds us throughout Capital and Ideology, the accumulated wealth and power of the European elites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may have seemed intractable, and the political deference to the propertied classes total, but the century played out differently than many could have predicted at its onset. If the twenty-first century is to take such a path, global political and economic reforms will be necessary, and the range of ideological possibilities needs to be widened from those of the previous century. The crisis of the world wars and Great Depression coupled with new political mobilizations to rein in the influence of wealthy elites brought inequality to its lowest point ever. As Piketty likes to remind us, even Sweden, often bandied about as the paramount example of egalitarianism did not begin the twentieth century as such. In fact, he shows quite the opposite, where the amount of political representation in Sweden was proportionate to wealth. Nevertheless, the relative successes of social democracy were able to transform Swedish society in only a few generations. On the other hand, the relative equality of the postwar era has rapidly given way over the last few decades, showing no sign of slowing down.  READ MORE…

Conversing on Paper: Richard Philcox on the Living Art of Translation

June 1, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

. . . by translating Maryse I am conversing with her, sometimes talking back to her, telling her fond thoughts, sometimes arguing with her.

For centuries, the process of translating literature has been likened to the art of acting, perhaps most famously by Ralph Manheim, who claimed “translators are like actors: we speak lines by someone else.” In his 2001 essay “Translating Maryse Condé: A Personal Itinerary,” translator Richard Philcox takes this idea a step further, writing that, when reading his translations of Condé’s work in front of an audience: “I become the author, and the translation becomes the text. I thus become Maryse Condé.” Certainly, as Condé’s husband and translator, Philcox has built an impressive career living and working with the Guadeloupean winner of the 2018 Alternative Nobel Prize, their personal and professional lives so enmeshed that Philcox and Condé share an email address. Yet, their divergent opinions on the importance of translation mean that Philcox has always approached his work with a surprising degree of independence. On the eve of the North American publication of Condé’s novel The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana, I corresponded with Philcox about “conversing” with Condé on paper, translating French Creole, and his long-held secret desire to become an actor.

—Sarah Timmer Harvey, May 2020

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): How did you come to translation as a career? Was it a path that you always intended to follow?

Richard Philcox (RP): I began my career as a technical translator with Kodak-Pathé, the French affiliate of Eastman Kodak, in Paris. The task of the technical translator was to translate into English the company’s annual, technical, and financial reports, instruction leaflets, and general correspondence that had to be sent back to the US headquarters in Rochester. It was when Maryse Condé’s novel Heremakhonon was published in 1976 that I launched into literary translation. I was approached by Three Continents Press in Washington DC for an English translation and used my time in the office to work on it. At the time I hadn’t much thought about the history and theory of translation and adapted much of the rules of technical translation to a literary work: i.e. absolute clarity, no ambiguity, short sentences, no time for lyricism, and nothing left to the imagination. None of this corresponded to a novel like Heremakhonon or for that matter anything literary or poetical. I think that if I had to redo the translation, it would be very different today. It was much later when I came to teach translation that I researched the many theories and history of translation and endeavored to convey my enthusiasm to the students.

STH: When and how did you first meet Maryse Condé?

RP: We met in Kaolack, Senegal in 1969 when we were both teaching at the Lycée Gaston Berger. At that time Maryse had not become a writer and had no published work to her name. I had little idea that I would become her translator. Maryse had gone through many difficult and harrowing experiences during her life in West Africa (see What is Africa to Me? Fragments of a True-to-Life Autobiography, Seagull Press) and it was she who taught me, a naïve Englishman, the politics of colonialism and its impact throughout the developing world. This helped me enormously later on while translating Frantz Fanon since he had put into theory what Maryse was writing in her novels.

STH: In 2018, Condé was awarded the New Academy Prize for Literature (the Alternative Nobel Prize) for her body of work. What has winning this prize meant for both of you?

RP: The award came to Maryse as a total surprise. Besides being happy and proud, she was relieved. For the first time, she was at peace with herself. She had been writing for many years without any special recognition, never having been awarded any of France’s prestigious prizes such as the Goncourt or the Renaudot. Now the voice of Guadeloupe, a powerful and magical voice, could be heard internationally. READ MORE…

Reflections on the Daily: Jean Giono’s Occupation Journal

May 25, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Sarah Moore

This is the journal of an established writer, who, even within these pages, grapples between his own identity and the "legend" of Jean Giono.

Occupation Journal by Jean Giono, translated from the French by Jody Gladding, Archipelago Books, 2020

This is not a journal. It’s simply a tool of the trade. My life is not completely depicted. Nor would I want it to be. As I’ve said, here I practise scales, I break up my sentences, I try to stick as closely as possible to the truth. But sometimes events are so rich with drama or pathos . . . that practising scales—my scales— isn’t sufficient and I have to invent. For me, anyway, expressing truths of this order is impossible without inventing. Moreover, it’s to be able to express them simply that I force myself to do this daily work.

—Jean Giono, “December 25, Christmas”

In his own words, this book is an exercise: a series of attempts to train himself in writing, for when his “trade” is truly called upon. His goal? Simplicity and truth. Yet, reading this work in 2020, now available for the first time in English and translated by Jody Gladding, it is so much more than a mere exercise. Jean Giono’s Occupation Journal is a fascinating record of life under Nazi occupation in France, and an insight into the daily reading and writing practices of a dedicated author. Written between September 1943 and September 1944 whilst living in the town of Manosque in the south of France, it was only published in French in 1995 (by Gallimard, as Journal de l’Occupation). The diary entries are a fascinating historical record as well as immensely clever insights into the presence and importance of literature in a writer’s life.

By the time he began Occupation Journal, Giono was already a well-known writer, with over ten works published, including his famous “Pan trilogy.” He was also equally famous for his pacifism. Having been called up to fight on the frontline in WW1, Giono would never forget the horrors of his experience, and the resulting principles influence all of his early work. This journal, therefore, comes at a crucial time in his development; the majority of his work published after the war left behind pacifism, whose failure he witnessed in the coming of a second war, and adopted a greater pessimism with regards to human nature. Certain writers, including Stendhal and Balzac, also heavily impacted his later writing. This journal is a key into discovering this period of transition—a period so evidently crucial in the development of his thinking that its importance cannot be underestimated.

The infusion of literature into his daily living is remarkable. Giono notes profusely what he is reading, what he intends to read, and his reflections on what he has read. His reading is structured and often consists of long classics: Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, Balzac, Homer, Virgil. It’s almost enviable in its attention to detail and its scope—”I’ve read all of Proust carefully ten times”! Fascinatingly, he often views literature as a model, a possibility of this world, and he judges the world by the standards of those encountered in fiction. He views “nobility” and “grandeur,” for example, in terms of Lancelot and Don Quixote and applies this to war taking place in the “modern, mechanical world,” where, of course, society falls short:

But the quest for the Grail made the knights-errant gallop in a straight line. Even Don Quixote walks straight. Today it seems as though the Grail has shattered and they are chasing all the scattered bits of it in every direction.

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What’s New with the Crew? (May 2020)

May 20, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

From hypermedia performances to publications, Asymptote staff have been keeping busy—even under lockdown!

Communications Manager Alexander Dickow’s co-translation, with Sean T. Reynolds, of Gustave Roud’s “Air of Solitude” followed by “Requiem” is now out with Seagull Books.

Executive Assistant Austyn Wohlers, who has just been admitted into Notre Dame’s MFA program in Fiction, recently published a story, “Lila,” in Short Fiction.

Editor-at-large for Romania and Moldova Chris Tanasescu (aka MARGENTO) will be presenting in late May a Twitter-based (@GraphPoem) hypermedia performance preview of a computationally assembled Belgian poetry anthology he is editing in French and in English translation and in early June an interactive coding computational poetry performance at Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2020.

Contributing Editor Ellen Elias-Bursać’s translation of Robert Perišić’s novel No-Signal Area, out recently with Seven Stories Press, was reviewed by Ken Kalfus in The New York Times.  

Editor-at-large for Guatemala José García recently published the final instalment of a four-parter about the migrant caravan at The Evergreen Review. Click here, here, here, and here for the full series.

Editor-at-large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood recently translated an essay by Czech journalist Apolena Rychlíková for the anthology Europa28: Writing by Women on the Future of Europe published by Comma Press in March 2020.

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City of Signs, Empire of Signs

May 18, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

[Barthes] comes to know Japan not for her certain qualities, but for what she inspires within him about the art of living.

“If I want to imagine a fictive nation . . .” With those words, Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs, his study of Japan and its available reality, begins. Going on to infuse the elements of Japanese existence—everything from haiku to monolids—with his singular manner of interrogation, the Japan that Barthes illustrates is one that exemplifies the mental journeys that arise in correspondence with physical ones. Now, fifty years after its publication, Xiao Yue Shan takes contemporary Tokyo as a point of origin to discuss the Japan that corresponds to the Barthian instinct for examination, and how his fascination with this country’s collection of signs is a direct result of the city’s peculiar composition.

The urban environment is a contract between humans and their machines, between conscious and unconscious topographies, between vessels and inhabitants. It is a haven of both creativity and consumption, a spatial and experiential experiment. Of its understanding there comes a need for the discretions of a knowingly discontinuous cognizance; it is impossible to know the city wholly, and there is also no need for such knowledge.

In Tokyo there is a discreet strangeness in the negotiation between the city and its inhabitants—movements are organized covertly around narratives and histories. All that is built requires a reverence for what was there before. The past is hidden and present, the city is whole and in parts. When Roland Barthes arrived here in 1966, he recognized the enormous task that it assigned to him, that “Japan has afforded him a situation of writing.” The resulting 1970 text, Empire of Signs, is a luxury of the imagination, in which a mind perforates the scene with both an intent to investigate and an egoism that affords one the comfort to discern and judge. Japan was an amalgam of facts and fictions, to be navigated with all the directions of thinking.

Foreigners assign themselves to the subject of Tokyo with a fascination first. To achieve the perfect balance between knowledge and impressions, of experiences both living and mythical. In his assignment Barthes accomplished a passion of translation, which is to fearlessly integrate the insights of the foreigner with the extant, accumulated comprehensions of the local. Where someone who was born and lived the entirety of her life in Tokyo may have accumulated a wealth of notes in the slow, linear fashion of smallness to bigness—from the room to the home, from the home to the neighbourhood, from the neighbourhood to its vicinity, and from thereon the entirety—the foreigner comes to involve herself with the city via a series of shocks, of enthrallment with “ordinary” things, of curiosity that encourages in turns awe and despair, and of constant referral to her lack of knowing. Inevitably one sees what the other cannot, and inevitably in this interchange an enormously valuable body of knowledge arises. READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

May 16, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Sarah Moore

I remember that when everything starts to crumble, there are always people you can rely on, people who heal...who make everyday life more bearable.

For this week’s edition of In This Together, we present a text from the French writer, journalist, and musician Tania de Montaigne. Sarah Moore, translator and Assistant Blog Editor at Asymptote, introduces the piece:

This week, France ended its national lockdown that had been in place for almost two months. Yet, of course, life has not returned to normal and people have been adapting to the déconfinement, along with the many changes it has brought. During the lockdown, French daily newspaper Libération (popularly known as Libé) continued to publish its weekly column “Écritures” in its weekend edition, written alternately by four French writers including Tania de Montaigne. This particular article, “Pour mémoire” (“For the record”) looks back on everyday life before the COVID-19 pandemic, recalling past normality. Saying something ‘for the record’ is to let a voice ring out, to publicly declare that these words have value and should be remembered. The text’s power lies in its simplicity and honesty—evoking nostalgia for a pleasurable but naïve innocence that has been lost. 

De Montaigne alludes to the many small cultural references that can stir and unite a collective memory—song lyrics, TV shows, books, exhibitions—as well as our old habits and the importance of touch, which we perhaps took for granted. She also draws a link with the AIDS crisis and our various responses to something that is frightening, new, and unknown—that will inevitably be used politically. Most importantly, referencing other times of hardship, including the terrorist attacks in Paris and Nelson Mandela’s apartheid resistance, de Montaigne upholds the continual value of powerful words, voice, and support during times of crisis. 

For the record

by Tania de Montaigne

I remember the day when the word ‘AIDS’ entered our lives.
I remember Barbara’s song, “Maladie d’amour / Où l’on meurt d’aimer / Seul et sans amour, / Sid’abandonné”. (“Love sickness / Where you die from loving / Alone and loveless, / Aidsabandoned”.)
I remember fear.
I remember people who had first-hand info through “my mother’s aunt’s cousin who works at the hospital” or “my brother-in-law’s cousin’s best friend who works for the government”.
I remember the National Front saying: “People with AIDS are like lepers, they should be locked up in an Aidsatorium.” And how they also said: “It’s a lie, condoms don’t protect you from the disease.”
I remember how some people claimed that there were miracle cures.
I remember Hervé Guibert’s book, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life.
I remember a philosophy exam and this quote from Aristotle: “The ignorant man affirms, the learned man doubts, the wise man reflects.”
I remember when Corona was a Mexican beer that you drank with a slice of lemon.
I remember the quiz you always found at the end of summer magazine editions: “What about you, what would you take with you to a desert island?” I went crazy trying to decide.
I remember how we used to go to the theatre, to concerts, how everyone was packed tight, focused, emotional, vibrating in unison and how that’s what was beautiful. READ MORE…