Language: French

The Winter 2023 Edition Has Landed

January 19, 2023  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Helping us celebrate our milestone 12th anniversary issue are César Aira, Geetanjali Shree, Alfred Döblin, and Choi Jeongrye in our Korean Feature!

Earthquake, war, disease, unrequited love, even a man-made hell conjured through scents—what haven’t the protagonists in our Winter 2023 edition been through? Tagged #TheReturn, this issue is not only a celebration of human resilience but also of our twelve years in world literature. Helping us mark this milestone are César Aira, one of the most beloved names in the canon, and Geetanjali Shree, 2022 International Booker Prizewinner—both give us exclusive wide-ranging interviews. Amid new work from 34 countries, we also have stunning short stories from Alfred Döblin and Dalih Sembiring, powerful drama by Anna Gmeyner, a brilliant review of past contributor Johannes Göransson’s latest publication, and a Special Feature sampling the best in contemporary letters from a world literature hotspot sponsored by LTI Korea. All of this is illustrated by our talented guest artist Weims.

In Emmelie Prophète’s slow-burning fiction, “The Return” is a dramatic answering of prayers when a former Olympic athlete turns up unannounced before his mother a lifetime after his escape from Port-au-Prince. That same longed-for return is impossible for poet Fadi Azzam—“a Syrian / who had to flee his homeland / to countries that wish to flee from him.” In Juana Peñate Montejo’s poems of exile—our first work from the Mayan language of Ch’ol—on the other hand, it’s the self that requires summoning and remembering: “Bring the scent of amber, / return me to myself.” Re-membering, in the most literal sense, is foregrounded in Kim Cho Yeop’s macabre but fascinating story, one work in a sci-fi-tinged Korean Feature of startling breadth, wherein we are initiated into a community of amputees-by-choice, since “the body is hardly capacious enough to contain the human soul, which is so full of potential.” So full of potential, perhaps, that even a lover’s reincarnation on the 49th day of his death in the womb of a stranger seems possible in a transcendent story by the Mongolian writer Bayasgalan Batsuuri.

“Six months before his death in 1991, Menke Katz had a dream. In it, his long-dead mother admonished him to return to writing in his native language, Yiddish.” This dream resulted in the Oulipian poems that Jacob Romm has beautifully translated for this issue. Proving an exception to Shree’s claim that “the creative writer is instinctively drawn to her mother tongue,” Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine describes an opposite impulse in his essay: writing in French—a second language—is his deliberate choice, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. Anyway, isn’t the true writer one who is “always a stranger in the language he expresses himself in”? In any case, even if the process of writing is estranging, the outcome when a piece of writing finds its intended reader can be sublime. For Lynn Xu, “the act of reading is the act of making kin . . . For example, when I read [César] Vallejo, I recognize that he is my mother . . .” By utter coincidence or divine fate, César Vallejo is also featured in these very pages, translated by another César, the intrepid César Jumpa Sánchez, who is determined to project Vallejo’s breakthrough collection, Trilce, to, in his own words, “a network of planetary outreach.”

Just as “encyclopedism has been the permanent horizon of [César Aira’s] work,“ the asymptotic impulse to realize a world literature that truly reflects the world has been our north star from the get-go. If our very existence has connected you with your kindred authors, help us get to our big 5 0 (in issues, not years!), just around the corner. The best way to support us is to sign up as a sustaining or masthead member—the New Year brings new perks and we’ll even put together a care package (rabbit theme optional) for supporters at the USD500-a-year tier and above. Thank you for being with us all these years!

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Announcing Our December Book Club Title: Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? by Max Lobe

December 30, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

To open up poverty is to open up migration is to open up blackness is to open up the love between two men.

For our final Book Club selection of the year, Asymptote is proud to present a work emblematic of how writing can transform, subvert, and negate borders. In Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, Swiss author Max Lobe traces how the complex factors of race, class, sexuality, and migration can cohere in a single life, and how nationhood can be refracted and reinterpreted by those who refuse to be defined by the standard. Speaking in the extraordinarily vivid voice of his protagonist, Mwana, Lobe balances tragedy with joy, freedom with entrapment, and home with home.

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 USD20 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.  

Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? by Max Lobe, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, Hope Road Publishing, 2022

As in love, mystery, and metamorphosis, the name of country draws a long throughline in our world of stories. Add to it a possessive—my country, your country—and the resulting narratives are instantly elaborated with the ontological intersections, demarcations, and dialogues that enmesh our landscape. Through this simple addition, a life is juxtaposed with a society, a single act comes to emblematise a culture, and an experience constitutes an identity—not necessarily out of any active political consciousness, but simply from having left, at some point, that arbitrary and mutable shape of one’s birthplace. Paul Gilroy, in conceptualising diaspora, described it as positing “important tensions between here and there, then and now, between seed in the bag, the packet or the pocket and seed in the ground, the fruit or the body.” To move across our jigsaw world is to know the fluid weight of difference and sameness—that they can be at once interchangeable and oppositional. These shifts from strangeness to familiarity do not begin with the boarding of a plane or a boat, but occur in minute swatches of conversation, in the passing from one minute to the next, between two people looking out at the same scene, not knowing what the other sees.

In Max Lobe’s Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, country is introduced by the most immediate and intimate of desires—food. Our narrator, Mwana, is lugging “two huge sugar-cane bags” across Switzerland, with all the provisions and gifts of another nation inside: “Fumbwa, saka-saka, makayabu, okra and dried impwa.” The list goes on, rich with sugars and starches and svelte oils. Wrapped meticulously by his mother, the treasured packages have been carried by his sister Kosambela, across the continental divide from what Mwana calls Bantuland, to the nation where they both now reside: Switzerland of the Grütli Meadow and the Rütli Oath, of white-out peaks and lakeshore villas.

A recent graduate of the University of Geneva and a settled Swiss resident, Mwana is black, queer, and unemployed; it is this lattermost factor that rules his life, his daily preoccupations, and his physical and mental wanderings. With repeated trips to the unemployment office, small yellow coins dug out of household crevices, kindly deceptive calls to his mother—this scarcity is the precipice that Mwana dangles from, and as such it is the swinging, breakneck angle by which he interprets everything. The two bags he drags onto the bus from Lugano to Geneva contain emblems of home, of care, and of a beautiful eradication of distance, but most importantly, they are an antidote to hunger. Amidst Lobe’s warm, loquacious prose, we first see the dissipation of difference into sameness, the shift from displacement in country to immediacy in the body. In all the discursive paths the mind takes to arrive at a single place, we see the need to live. READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #7 An Interview with Emma Ramadan

December 23, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

What I bring to the table as a translator is precisely that I come at books from a place of emotion.

We use our bodies to write, to type, to think, to read aloud, to listen, to gauge by our gut whether or not a sentence is right . . . When a sentence isn’t right, I feel it immediately in my back . . . what I bring to the table as a translator is precisely that I come at books from a place of emotion. That urge to translate a book comes from seeing what it can do for a reader emotionally, what it does to me emotionally, how it can impact the way people feel in the world.

For longtime followers of Asymptote, it will come as no surprise that our seventh most popular article of 2022 was Claire Mullen’s interview with Emma Ramadan from the Fall 2022 issue. An established, sensitive and sought-after translator from the French who not only interned with us way back in 2012, but also appeared in our pages throughout the years thereafter, Ramadan is the recipient of a Fulbright, NEA Translation Fellowship, the 2018 Albertine Prize, and the 2021 PEN Translation Prize.

In this interview, which easily topped our internal survey of favorite articles from the issue, Ramadan shines a spotlight on the lesser known role of the translator—that of the archive researcher, as demonstrated by her work on Marguerite Duras’s The Easy Life and Barbara Molinard’s Panics.

For example, she describes following a “little tingle” into the Providence Public Library where she finally discovered the elusive French manuscript of Panics that she had been looking for, to no avail, in France—no less.

This illuminating interview surely sets her apart as a translator whose practice goes beyond mere questions of language.

After reading what she has to say in our current issue, we invite you to revisit her other appearances throughout the years as well. For just a taste:

Former Blog Editor Allison Braden interviewed Emma Ramadan in October 2020 on her translation of Meryem Alaoui’s Straight From The Horse’s Mouth, in which Ramadan reveals “something that I do with every book, actually—is that I read out loud as I translate.”

In her September 2018 conversation with former intern Mallory Truckenmiller, Ramadan discusses her dual role as character and translator in Brice Matthieussent’s Revenge of the Translator, and the embodiment of the act of “Translation as erotic.” ”Getting inside the author’s psyche, recreating their words,” she says, is “incredibly intimate . . . intellectually stimulating . . . sexy.” 

If you find yourself itching for more insights into translation direct from the horse’s mouth—including the opportunity to pose direct questions to translators during the live Q&A session with the author and/or the translator of the title that we conduct each month—we invite you to join the Asymptote Book Club, for which past members have read Ramadan’s translations of Alaouai and Matthieussent alongside other cutting-edge works of world literature!

REVISIT OUR SEVENTH MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022

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Discover more on the Asymptote blog:

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #9 Two Stories from Hervé Guibert

December 20, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

In deft strokes, these brilliant short stories illuminate the tortured inner lives of an art critic and an editor

He lived off the economy of his body. After putting it deliberately to bed, he would annihilate it, as it were, when he forced himself to wake up early to write an article. And this was what displeased him: to be—just like a laborer—a producing machine, with even his body brought to heel, his sleep transformed into a positive, mechanical phase of work, a sort of battery, a rejection of sensual pleasure.

What happens when the bodily economy of writing meets the market economy of publishing? From the Summer issue, coming in at number 9, The Photography Critic and The Editor by cult author Hervé Guibert (tr. Daniel Lupo) captured the universal anguish of sacrificing your very self to fulfill the base needs of subsistence. Written in the 1980s, Guibert’s writing feels eerily timely, bringing into focus the relentless droll of capitalism, whose insidious reach extends even to such “artistic” fields as publishing. For those of us who fancy ourselves creatives, the market economy’s suppression of artistic impulses is particularly chilling, compelling the art critic of the story to write for money as opposed to for his own satisfaction.

Guibert, who was also a filmmaker, photographer, and critic, wrote prolifically in his last year, before dying at the age of thirty six from complications of AIDS. It is not surprising then that his writing is “close to the body,” as translator Daniel Lupo points out in his interview with Meghan Racklin, our Assistant Editor for Fiction, who wrote elsewhere that she is  “a fan of Hervé Guibert’s writing generally, but hadn’t encountered him in quite this mode before; the sentences are shorter, the stories more barbed and direct. It was a pleasure to see this different gradation of his work and his commentary on artistic production, the labor of writing, and the market realities that surround the creation of art seem enormously relevant to the work of writing today.”

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Texts in Context: Manu Samriti Chander on Brown Romantics

December 8, 2022  |  in Texts in Context  |  by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

I’d say part of what “Romantic” does is activate ideas about the everyday in new and interesting ways.

This is the second edition of Texts in Context, a column in which Katarzyna Bartoszyńska seeks out academics who contribute to and elucidate the world of literary translation, revealing their deeper studies into texts both well-known and overlooked. 

In the following interview, we are taking a look at the groundbreaking work of Manu Samriti Chander. His book, Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century examines the international impact of Romantic poetry, and how its ideals and aesthetics were reconstrued into other national literatures and political contexts. In looking at how authors under colonialism utilized Romantic works to interrogate European dominance, Chander provides fascinating insight into how poetry and politics found themselves deeply intertwined during that tumultuous time of revolution and failed promises, and how our understanding of Romanticism must search beyond European confines.

Katarzyna Bartoszyńska (KB): Tell me about your book, Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century!

Manu Samriti Chander (MC): Well, we’ve long associated British Romanticism with a relatively small group of English poets: the so-called “Big Six” of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Keats, and Shelley. Of course, Britain in the nineteenth century included colonies across the globe, where, as I show, local poets often wrote in conversation with major English writers. Figures like Henry Derozio in India, Egbert Martin in British Guiana, and Henry Lawson in Australia drew upon and sometimes pushed back against the poetries, philosophies, and politics of their English counterparts. I’m interested in what these poets’ works tell us about the limitations and possibilities of that literary movement we call “Romanticism.” What happens, I ask, when we think of Romanticism outside the relatively limited geographical and historical boundaries convention has encouraged us to draw?

KB: So, part of your argument here is that we should define Romanticism differently, and more capaciously in terms of time and place. As academics, we have some investment in these categories—such that we really have to engage the problem—but are they useful or relevant to the general public?

MC: “Romanticism” is a way of organizing texts, just like, say, alphabetizing your books or ordering them based upon the color of the spine. It’s not perfect, and it’s certainly not definitive, but it’s useful for emphasizing certain commonalities. One of the reasons I find the term interesting is that, unlike other literary categories that emphasize a particular moment in history (The Victorian Era), “Romanticism” refers to an “ism,” a set of beliefs about, for example, the relationship between the individual and society, or the privileged role of the poet in shaping the mores of a people. As an “ism,” that is, as an ideology, “Romanticism” is portable: we can track the way people were committed to (in the example I just gave) the specialness of poetry and make unexpected connections between disparate communities. I’m not sure you could say the same about books organized by color (although I’d love to read an essay about that!).

KB: Can you say a little more about how you think about this in a world literature context? It has such European roots as a category—is it also inevitably Eurocentric?  

MC: Yes, I think so. One of the thinkers I draw on is the late Pascale Casanova, who has (rightly) drawn a lot of criticism for her Eurocentrism, but whom I find useful for mapping Romanticism in a global context. According to Casanova’s model of world literature, modern nations have continually struggled with (European) centers of literary dominance (especially, she argues, France) for the right to be acknowledged as literary centers. Insofar as colonial Romantics are engaging with European Romantics (and all the poets I look at are), they are doing so as both admirers and rivals of metropolitan writers. Their Romanticism—which, I should add, is just one aspect of their literary projects—has to be understand in relation to Europe. Now, other aspects of their work need not be read this way. Derozio, for instance, can be read as part of a burgeoning local literary scene in Calcutta with its own set of rivalries and alliances. Martin and Lawson, too, in their respective contexts. And there’s important work to be done on the South-South relations between these writers and their contemporaries, but, again, their Romanticism needs to be understood in relation to European cultural imperialism. READ MORE…

Anger as Purpose: On Caroline Laurent’s An Impossible Return

December 1, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Annilee Newton

All of Caroline Laurent’s substantive artistry of story and language is in service to a faith that literature can change the world.

An Impossible Return by Caroline Laurent, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, Amazon Crossing, 2022

“Courage is the weapon of those who have no choice. We will all, in our poor lives, have to be courageous at one moment or another. Just you wait.”

In 1967, the local population of the Chagos Archipelago was forcibly expelled from their homes. A cluster of over sixty islands in the Indian Ocean, the Chagos Archipelago is a British colony, once home to over 1,500 inhabitants, most descended from indentured and enslaved laborers from Senegal, Madagascar, Mozambique, and India. When Diego Garcia, the largest island of the archipelago, was identified as a desired location for a United States military base, the government of the United Kingdom ripped the Chagossian people from the land of their birth, threw them into cargo holds, and deposited them in Mauritius with only what they were able to carry.

This real life human rights tragedy is the setting of Caroline Laurent’s novel An Impossible Return, translated from the French by Asymptote contributor Jeffrey Zuckerman. More than a backdrop, the political maneuvering that led to exile for the Chagossian people is the machinery that fuels Laurent’s plot, and our two main characters, Marie Ladouceur and Gabriel Neymorin, are wrenched apart by the gears of history.

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“Queen of the Czech Comic”: An Interview with Lucie Lomová

November 9, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Sherwood

To what extent are we shaped by the society we live in? How far are we willing to swim against the current?

In the first of two interviews on the thriving Czech comic art scene for the Asymptote blog, we introduce Lucie Lomová, artist, writer, and author of numerous comic books for both children and adults. Comic art and graphic novels are increasingly gaining recognition as a serious art and literary form; since the start of the millenium, the Czech Republic has seen a boom in the genre. In the second interview, two Czech literature scholars will paint a more comprehensive picture of the scene for Asymptote readers. Dubbed “the queen of the Czech comic,” Lomová is the best-known woman comic book author of the new, postcommunist generation, with three coveted Muriel Awards, including two—for original script and best original Czech comic—for her graphic novel, Divoši (Savages) to be published in English translation by Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Slovakia, Julia Sherwood, and Peter Sherwood. We are delighted to introduce Lucie Lomová to Asymptote’s readers through this interview, conducted by Julia over email.

JS: You are a graduate of the Theatre faculty at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU), but you switched to writing and drawing comics in the early 1990s. In those days, this kind of career change required quite a lot of courage—you said in an interview: “To choose comics as one’s profession was rather like trying to make a living by catching earthworms.” What motivated you to take the risk? 

LL: Did I really say that? Perhaps I wouldn’t use that comparison now, but it‘s true that in those days comic art was a totally marginal and underrated genre, with publication opportunities few and far between. But, it didn’t really require any special courage on my part. The year of the Velvet Revolution, 1989—a turning point in every respect for everyone—saw the publication of my first comic strip about Anča and Pepík, a couple of mice kids. My sister Ivana and I had worked on it together for three years, writing the story and doing the drawings. I had just graduated in dramaturgy and started working in a theatre in Šumperk, a small town about 200 kilometres east of Prague. When the Velvet Revolution came, I decided to return to Prague, although I didn’t really have a clear idea about what I was going to do. I wrote art reviews for newspapers, drew cartoons, and pondered what I should apply myself to in all this new freedom—just then, the children’s comic journal Čtyřlístek (The Four-Leaved Clover) invited me to write and draw more stories about Anča and Pepík for them, this time on my own, as my sister had moved on to other things. In the summer of 1990, I hitchhiked to Greece with my boyfriend. We were penniless, but overjoyed and excited about all the possibilities that had opened up before us. I remember that it was during the long rides in strangers’ cars that the ideas for the first three stories came to me, and once I was back home, I got drawing. For the following ten years, drawing comics for Čtyřlístek was my bread and butter.

Anca&PepikIlu02

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Fall 2022: Highlights from the Team

November 2, 2022  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Annilee Newton, Barbara Halla, Bella Creel, Caridad Svich, Heather Green, Ian Ross Singleton, Janet Phillips, Marina Dora Martino, Megan Sungyoon, and Sofija Popovska

Where to start with our glorious Fall 2022 issue? Here are some entry points, courtesy of our global team!

Emma Ramadan’s work as a translator has been so important to me and my literary journey—not least because of the attentiveness she lends to the writers she translates from Francophone North Africa, such as Ahmed Bouanani. I also really admire the way she speaks about her process with Claire Mullen in her interview, the passion and commitment and genuineness that shine through, for instance, in how she discusses her feelings at finally finding a copy of Molinard’s Panics. It reminded me a little of Alice Guthrie’s work with Malika Moustadraf’s Blood Feast, which was also out of print and circulated online as low quality scans.

I really love the slow, meditative writing of Dejan Atanacković’s absent narrator in Lusitania (tr. Rachael Daum). When it ranges with a kind of radical exteriority over the ephemera that remains of Teofilović, and the marginal annotations of Stojimirović that accompany his journals, it reads almost like the prose of Sebald—with the enigma of Teofilović as one such central, inaccessible figure around which the story endlessly circles, never losing sight of the larger political and social context.

Laksmi Pamuntjak’s “The Tale of Mukaburung” could easily have been written and translated to pander to a white gaze, and it’s really to the credit of both Pamuntjak and her translator Annie Tucker that there is a pervasive self-sufficiency to the story and its world, a refusal to explain itself, a matter-of-fact revelling in the ordinariness of its own magic and ritual. This seems especially commendable when a dominant affect in the story is puzzlement and defensiveness, in confrontation with foreigners whose presence and purpose are unknown, even to the reader, until much later in the story when it is revealed that many among them are political prisoners.

—Alex Tan, Senior Assistant Editor (Fiction)

Olavo Amaral’s “Steppe” (tr. Isobel Foxford) is exquisite in every way: the writing of the translation, the unusual subject matter, the relationship and emerging love between the two main characters and how it is described, the mood created by the atmosphere of snow and remoteness.

I have been following closely the horrors of Putin’s war in Ukraine and though still angry and frustrated by its continuation, I thought I was fairly hardened to the extent of Russian atrocities. But I broke down towards the end of Galina Itskovich’s War Diary (tr. Maria Bloshteyn), where the unspeakable rape and violence against children is put into words.

—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor

Kudos to Jonathan Chan for beautifully translating such ancient poems of Choe Chi-won, whose characteristic loneliness metaphorized in natural images is successfully rendered in translation.

I think one of the most important missions of Asymptote is to sustain languages under oppression, be that a national language that is close to extinction or the voice of a people amid a political process of erasure. Lauren Bo’s review of The Backstreets by Perhat Tursun undertakes this mission in remarkable earnest and rigor, by not only posing the biopolitical question of survival faced by the Uyghurs but also diligently analyzing the text via a close reading, and ultimately marrying the two to derive a conclusion that engages readers with the enduring challenge of humanity that surpasses the violence that is immediately palpable: “The Backstreets is an account of survival and a reminder that even the cruelest elements of humanity are fabricated out of absurdity and fear of the uncertain.”

The elusive language of Krikor Beledian’s “Unpeopled Language” (tr. Taline Voskeritchian and Christopher Millis) is delicate yet piercing, and while  the history of the Armenian genocide cannot be separated from the poetics of Beledian, its implementation of “the tool against the game of expression“ speaks to the broader context of the survival of a people and their language in and after the era of mass murder.  

—Megan Sungyoon, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

October 14, 2022  |  in Dispatches, New in Translation, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Katarina Gadze, and Rubén López

The latest in literary news from Belgium, Palestine, and Central America!

This week, our editors are introducing the most exciting literary voices with prize winners, debut novels, and familiar favourites. From El Salvador, a millennial writer wins the prestigious Mario Monteforte Toledo Award for a short story critical of the Salvadoran regime; from the Francophone, the latest winner of the unconventional Sade Prize is announced; and from Palestine, a lament as beloved poet Mahmoud Darwish is missed for the Nobel.

Katarina Gadze, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Belgium

This week, we’re taking a look at some of the eagerly awaited literary events that have been making waves in Belgium. Brussels has recently come across a number of interesting literary events: the closing event of Poetik Bozar, with an evening of reading and performances of Warsan Shire and her translators Radna Fabias (Dutch) and Sika Fakambi (French); the upcoming The wonders of multilingualism #3: to translate or not to translate?; as well as the Writers & Thinkers stage at the Bozar centre, a richly filled series of talks and debates welcoming some of the greatest contemporary voices such as Orhan Pamuk, Rachel Cusk, and Ian Kershaw.

A handy digest of the week’s Belgian literary news would also not be complete without mentioning some well-deserved prize winners. After an initial selection of forty books, the Hors Concours prize has revealed its shortlist with only five novels remaining in the running. As a “prize for publishing without a price,” the Hors Concours honors French-language books of fiction published by independent publishers—giving the rarely awarded authors a chance to access a larger audience in the competitive Francophone publishing landscape. Among the five books still in the running for the prize is Belgian writer Veronika Mabardi’s story Sauvage est celui qui se sauve, published this January by Esperluète. Other titles include: Le bord du monde est vertical by Simon Parcot (Le mot et le reste), L’arbre de colère by Guillaume Aubin (La contre-allée), Histoire navrante de la mission Mouc-Marc by Frédéric Sounac (Anacharsis), and Il n’y a pas d’arc-en-ciel au paradis by Nétonon Noël Ndjékéry (Hélice Hélas). The announcement of the winning novel, as well as the honorable mention, will be made on November 28. READ MORE…

The Redemption of the Collective Past in the Infinite Present: Annie Ernaux’s The Years

October 13, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Katarina Gadze

With her narrative having already begun, she must live, and in doing so continuing this act of physical telling.

The Nobel committee’s decision to award Annie Ernaux with the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature communicated a certain message: of writing‘s pivotal responsibility to situate the individual life amidst the ever-elaborating stream of history, and that personal experience—no matter how specific or inward-looking—speaks to the greater picture of a landscape, a culture, and a time. In this following essay, Katarina Gadze takes a close look at Ernaux’s 2008 memoir, The Years, an emblematic work of her masterful collapse of private and public time, of her mind’s stabilizing force as it moves through a constantly shifting world.

In attempting to decipher the uses of autobiographical writing, Sébastien Hubier, in his Littératures intimes, speaks of what he calls reflexivity: “the phenomenon by which discourse refers to its own enunciative activity rather than merely speaking about the world.” Autobiography is then defined by “the narrative of one’s life . . . infused with the critical discourse of the one who writes it.” As a “heuristic project,” it stands for all personal writing that makes, by fact of its production, “a mode of resolution for the conflicts associated with profound shifts in social space.” Objectification of an identity, recourse to writing and the distancing it entails, lends itself to all the symbolic manipulations—reconstructions and redefinitions—of that identity. Such was the mechanism of Annie Ernaux’s writing in The Years, and her lifelong experiments with the autobiographical genre, as well as her construction of temporalities—in relation to both herself and society at large. When the Swedish Academy awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize to Ernaux, they praised her “courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory,” perfectly summarizing her work. Indeed, by penning these paradoxically impersonal texts, she inevitably moves away from traditional autobiography and spares us the usual novelistic practices in The Years; the resulting memoir is less a traditional recollection and more an existential examination of Ernaux’s sixty years, told in the third person. The years meander along in the order of her life events, though chronology comes second to Ernaux, whose goal is to expose the illusion (or delusion) of time. She moves through time in leaps and bounds, talking about what it means to live not just as one person in the present, but as one person (and an entire generation) that exists across centuries.

Autobiography as reconstruction places the past in chronological order, which, as Hubier points out, is illusive. Despite the “temporal linearity inherent in an organized retrospection” that probes collective memory, to write truly of the constant scrambling that is our general experience of time interferes with the reader’s ability to feel any dynamic flow—which treads backwards into the past, the opposite direction that the narrator claims. Ernaux interrogates this literary device by highlighting the intertwining of its present, past, and future dimensions, as well as its inevitable divide into two distinct temporalities: personal identification and cultural identity:

Then, in a state of profound, almost dazzling satisfaction, she finds something that the image from personal memory doesn’t give her on its own: a kind of vast collective sensation that takes her consciousness, her entire being, into itself. She has the same feeling, alone in the car on the highway, of being taken into the indefinable whole of the world of now, from the closest to the most remote of things.

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Shifting Temporalities: An Interview with Bryan Flavin

October 3, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

We should consider an absence not as something that inhibits access but rather as an opportunity to actively discover. . .

Featured in the Summer 2022 issue, “The Ayah of the Throne,” by Habib Tengour, is a lyrical story that explores the French colonial power in Algeria toward the beginning of the Algerian War of Independence. The story centers around how colonial forces shaped the narrator’s experience of education, language, religion, and even how and when one can tell stories. With this vibrant and original account of his childhood, Tengour reclaims the power of storytelling and relays a life-altering moment with humor and compassion.

In his English translation, Bryan Flavin deftly captures Tengour’s voice and introduces Anglophone speakers to an important piece of writing from one of the foremost voices in contemporary Francophone Maghrebi literature. I had the opportunity to speak with Flavin over email about his experience translating “The Ayah of the Throne.” In the following interview, we discuss the intricacies of working with multilingualism, the importance of not explicating in translation, and the complex and interwoven histories of French and Arabic.

Rose Bialer (RB): I always like asking translators how they first began translating. I am even more curious in your case since you work in both French and Arabic.

Bryan Flavin (BF): I’ve always loved the precision and structure in linguistics and language studies, as well as the exploration and plurality of language in literature and creating writing. During my undergraduate education, I studied linguistics and French literature with a specialization in Arabic language and culture and ended up discovering literary translation as a sort of intersection for all my interests. I was lucky enough to take classes on French translation and global literacy toward the end of my studies and started with translating student writing with an undergraduate translation magazine I helped co-found. It was something I continued practicing on my own until deciding to pursue it in my graduate studies.

RB: You mention in your Translator’s Note that you had the chance to work with Habib Tengour during his Fall 2021 residency with the International Writing Program. This program sounds fascinating, and I would love to hear more about your experience, especially collaborating with Tengour in person.

BF: My translation program had the opportunity to pair with one of the residents to produce a translation of their work during workshop sessions devoted to each piece. Both the original writer and translator were present and active contributors during each workshop, and the balance (and sometimes friction, but in a generative way) between the author’s original intention and the translator’s means to produce something independent in the English was uniquely pronounced due to the workshop’s collaborative nature, which made for a great learning experience.

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Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Marie-Célie Agnant

September 20, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Danielle Legros Georges

Love my skin / dark as your childhood nights / my mouth / rebellious nutmeg

This Translation Tuesday, we feature two extraordinary poems by the celebrated Haitian-Québécois poet Marie-Célie Agnant. Drawn from her first collection, Balafres, ardent readers of Asymptote might recall Agnant’s work from our Fall 2016 issue featuring Canadian poetry. But these two poems reveal a more personal dimension of the socially engaged poet, as translator Danielle Legros Georges shows us, with its heady mix of myth and memory. 

“Balafres, renamed Gashes in English, consists of 36 poems originally written in French, some spanning several pages, others epigrammatic. Agnant’s is a poetics grounded in the Haitian engagée tradition, a literature of social commitment; one in which political dimensions are not divorced from aesthetic ones. The poems here, however, are among her love poems—which are not so well-known. In translating them, I was, at moments, challenged (and subsequently charmed) by Agnant’s images, image-systems, and metaphors. In “Orphée,” for example, the question arose of how best to treat the breath (souffle) of the lover in mon corps/ balafon d’obsidienne / mes cuisses bilimbao et / mon souffle touffeur de savane.  Was the sultriness of the breath to be emphasized, the dry heat of it, its connection to biome, or a combination of these? Such have been the knots to untie toward equivalence.”

—Danielle Legros Georges

Orpheus

Honestly, break your pen
I’m neither
exquisite nymph nor
Madonna walled
in the great book of your dreams
far from the realm and frippery
of your words
move on

Break your pen I am not
this goddess
fairy
Aphrodite
with seawater eyes
who haunts your dreams

Break your pen and your mirror
look at me and
love me
with both hands
full-bodied

Love my skin
dark as your childhood nights
my mouth
rebellious nutmeg
my body
obsidian balafon
my bilimbao thighs
the heat of my breath like a savannah’s  READ MORE…

“Translation involves dressing up the original text in a different outfit”: An interview with Canadian writer and translator Émile Martel

September 15, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Sheela Mahadevan

The translator should be polite and courteous to the poem, showcasing what he finds, and being faithful to its spirit.

Earlier this year, Sheela Mahadevan had the honour of meeting award-winning Canadian writer and translator Émile Martel in Montréal. In this interview, he provides fascinating insights into his multilingual experiences, the creativity involved in literary translation, and the intersections between translation and creative writing. He also describes the unique experience of familial and collaborative translation in the process of translating the much lauded Life of Pi, written by his son Yann Martel, into French.

Sheela Mahadevan (SM): Émile, you live in Montréal, a city in which code-switching between French and English is commonplace, and you have spent your career writing between various languages: French, English, and Spanish. Could you say a little about your relationship to all these languages, and why you employ French as your literary language? 

Émile Martel (EM): Several thousands of us here in Québec are descendants of the first French colonists who came to this region at the start of the seventeenth century. Our collective identity has always been linked to the fact that we speak French; along with the Catholic religion, this is the bond which has enabled us to survive, especially after the English conquest in the middle of the eighteenth century.

I believe that French is the most bountiful of all languages, for it always faithfully provides me with the words I need to describe a particular emotion, object, or location. And I find it musical when it is read aloud. I don’t think I’ve ever begun composing a literary text in English or Spanish spontaneously and unconsciously; not only would my vocabulary be more limited, but I’d feel like I was translating.

My relationship with Spanish is that of an adopted child. When I came to learn Spanish, I was already somewhat competent in English, but I really wanted to read the works of Federico García Lorca in the original language. My professors at Laval University fueled my enthusiasm; I was granted a scholarship to study in Madrid from 1960–1961 at the age of nineteen, and I spent that year entirely immersed in the Spanish language.

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Guided Improvisation: An Interview with Daniel Lupo

September 8, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Meghan Racklin

Translating feels very similar to dancing choreography to me.

Asymptote’s 2022 Summer issue featured two new hallucinatory, self-referential stories by Hérve Guibert and translated by translator and writer Daniel Lupo. In this interview, Assistant Editor Meghan Racklin speaks with Lupo on the challenges of translating Guibert’s various styles, ranging from the phantasmagoric to the spare, across his body of work. Their intimate conversation explores Guibert’s evolution as a writer, the role of improvisation in translation, and the relationship between translation and dance.

Megan Racklin (MR): The two Guibert pieces you translated for the latest issue of Asymptote both deal with the way market forces shape the process of writing. How do you see yourself, as a translator, fitting into that broader system?

Daniel Lupo (DL): At least in the United States, literary translation is a minor, severely underfunded sector of the two markets Guibert takes aim at in these stories: periodical publishing and book publishing. Hardly anyone pays their bills from literary translation alone, which means we don’t have to worry about buckling under the demand to produce a new text every week, as Guibert’s photography critic does—although we may very well have to worry about editors like the one in his other story finding our financial expectations “insolent.” In the absence of a profit motive, most translators I know, including myself, translate out of a love of the language, particular authors or texts, the practice of translation itself, or a combination of those. But of course, loving your work and making a living from it shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

MR: You’ve translated Hérve Guibert’s work extensively, including a wonderful translation of his novel Arthur’s Whims. Can you talk about the relationship between author and translator that develops through this kind of sustained engagement with their work? How do you see the relationship between your voice as a translator and Guibert’s as a writer?

DL: Guibert has a very intense, hypnotic voice. Often after reading him, I can still feel the rhythms of his text reverberating in my head long after the words have faded from memory. When translating him, it’s very easy for me to get lost in his voice, such that it’s only after finishing a draft and going back over what I wrote that I recognize signs of my own voice, my own anglophone quirks and idiosyncrasies that may or may not gel with his francophone ones. But it works both ways: his voice is filtered through my voice as much as mine is filtered through his. That’s something I love about translation: it’s a very intimate process in which the author’s voice and the translator’s voice rub up against and influence each other.

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