Language: Greek

Our Milestone 50th Issue Has Landed!

January 18, 2024  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Emily Wilson, Ilya Kaminsky, Michael Cronin, Nam Le, and Samer Abu Hawwash alongside new work from 35 countries!

Living today is a feat of coexistence. In Me | You | Us, our Winter 2024 edition—Asymptote’s landmark fiftieth!—people seek ways to equably share a world of jostling values, languages, and stories. Embracing the rare spotlight in mainstream English media almost never afforded translators, Emily Wilson discusses her groundbreaking translation of Homer and its place in the constellation of existing English Odyssies. Public intellectual Michael Cronin makes the case for translation’s centrality in the construction of new narratives necessary for the continued survival of our species amid other species. Headlining our Special Feature themed on coexistence, Nam Le’s frenzied poems are just as preoccupied with Carl Linnaeus’s taxonomy in the original Latin as they are driven to distraction by the insufficiency of that same scanty alphabet against the tonal splendor of Vietnamese. In Ilya Kaminsky’s Brave New World Literature contribution, truckloads of Dante’s Inferno being delivered to a besieged Kharkiv speak to a different, tenuous, and moving, coexistence. As support for Ukraine wavers in the US, we at Asymptote have kept up our coverage of the region also through Elina Sventsytska’s devastating poetry, a review of Oksana Lutsyshyna’s latest award-winning novel in English translation, and a dispatch about the chilling aftermath of a Russian dissident’s self-immolation. Alongside these, I invite you to discover the Mexican pioneer of magical realism Elena Garro, Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash, Cuban artist Gertrudis Rivalta Oliva, and Romanian playwright Edith Negulici amid never-before-published work from a whopping thirty-five countries. All of it is illustrated by the Netherlands-based guest artist Ehud Neuhaus.

Winter-2024-v9
If, as Taiwanese author Lin Yaode put it, “literature’s history is really a history of readers of literature,” the history of Asymptote might also be in part a tale of its readers. But why should it stop there? To all collaborators and supporters, past and present, I say gratefully: this one is for you! As hinted at by last year’s closures of The White Review and Freeman’s—both similarly prestigious journals with a focus on world literature—existence (by which I mean mere survival) has not been easy. We made it to our 1st, 2nd, 3rd . . . and to our 50th edition because of you.

If you are an avid reader of the magazine and haven’t yet signed up, we hope you’ll consider becoming an official sustaining or masthead member today for as little as USD5 a month in addition to subscribing to our socials (Facebook, X, Instagram, Threads) and our monthly Book Club. If you represent an institution advocating for a country’s literature, check out this (slightly outdated) slideshow and get in touch to sponsor a country-themed Special Feature, as FarLit has recently done. (The deadline to submit to our paid Faroese Special Feature is February 15th, 2024; the guidelines and a new call for reviewers to contribute to our monthly What’s New in Translation column can be found here). If you work for a translation program, prize, or residency, consider advertising through our myriad platforms, including our newly launched “Upcoming Opportunities in Translation” column. And, finally, if you’d like to join us behind the scenes in advocating for a more inclusive world literature, we just announced our very first recruitment drive of the year (deadline to apply: February 1st, 2024). Thank you for your readership and your support. We can’t wait to hear from you!

From Palestine to Greece: A Translated Struggle 

January 10, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou

. . . utopias are not solely objects of fantasy but are objectives to be built and lived . . . at the intersection of art and revolution.

Palestine and Greece have long enjoyed a strong relationship of solidarity and friendship, fortified by mutual assistance during political tumults, expressions of recognition, and profound demonstrations towards peace and independence. In this essay, Christina Chatzitheodorou takes us through the literature that has continually followed along the history of this connection, and how translations from Arabic to Greek has advocated and enlivened the Palestinian cause in the Hellenic Republic.

Following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut in 1982, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) was forced to leave the city. Its leader, Yasser Arafat, then fled Beirut for Tunisia, and, in fear of being captured or assassinated by Israel, he asked his Greek friend Andreas Papandreou for cover. The two had previously joined forces during the dictatorial regime in Greece known as Junta or the Regime of the Colonels, in which Arafat supported the Panhellenic Liberation Movement (Panellinio Apeleutherotiko Kinima/PAK) founded by Papandreou, and had also offered training in Middle Eastern camps to the movement’s young resistance fighters. 

Arafat arrived then from war-torn Beirut to Faliron, in the south of Athens. He received a warm dockside reception by the then-Prime Minister Papandreou and other top government officials, as well as a small crowd consisting mostly of Greek Socialist Party (PASOK) members and Greece-based Palestinians, who stood by chanting slogans in support of the Palestinian cause. Papandreou called Arafat’s arrival in Athens a “historic moment” and assured him of Greece’s full support in the Palestinians’ struggle; after all, while Arafat was coming to Athens, accompanied by Greek ships, pro-Palestinian protests were taking place around the country almost every other day. 

Although our support and solidarity with the Palestinian cause neither began nor stopped there, that day remains a powerful reminder of the traditional ties and friendship between Greek and Palestinian people. But more importantly, it comes in total contrast with the position of the current Greek government. Now, despite the short memories of politicians, it is the literature and translations of Palestinian works which continue to remind us of Greece’s historical solidarity to Palestine, particularly from left-wing and libertarian circles. 

READ MORE…

Seas Otherwise Too Treacherous To Navigate: Mario Aquilina on the European Essay and Its Planetary Histories

December 4, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

. . . the essay sustains a tension between experience and the attempt . . . to derive ideas or abstractions from experience . . .

In The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form (2021), Mario Aquilina, a Maltese literary historian and scholar, probes through the philosophies and ethos of the genre’s figureheads—from Montaigne and Francis Bacon to Samuel Johnson and Ralph Waldo Emerson—and considers the “paradox at the heart” of the essay: “the more resistant to genre an essay is, the more properly an essay it is.” The foundations of the ever-expansive, proliferating possibilities of the essay as a genre, form, and mode can be found in its pre-Montaignean roots from Azwinaki Tshipala of 315 CE South Africa, al-Jahiz of 8th-century southeastern Iraq, and Heian Japan’s Nikki bungaku (diary literature) comprising of court ladies Sei Shōnagon, Izumi Shikibu, Lady Sarashina, and others, to the Graeco-Roman philosophers Plutarch, Seneca the Younger, St Augustine of Hippo, and Marcus Aurelius.

In the contemporary era, this obscured historico-aesthetic timeline courses through the genre, from the New Journalism movement of the 60s (Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Annie Dillard, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe) to ‘memoir craze’ of the 90s (David Sedaris, Mary Karr, Frank McCourt), from the British life-writing movement and its American counterpart, creative nonfiction, to its present-day extra-textual permutations: essay films, graphic memoir, the imagessay, and video essays. But what of this “memoirization of the essay” and “essayification of the memoir”—to quote from David Lazar? “If we think of the ‘I’ of the essayist as collaborative, then we understand that the essay does not have to be as narcissistic a genre as it has sometimes been presented. Its value—literary or communicative—not simply expressive,” writes Aquilina for The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (2022). 

In this interview, I spoke with Prof. Aquilina on, among other topics, the histories of the essay within and beyond the Western literary imaginary, his thoughts on Montaigne and Montaigne’s Euro-American stalwarts Georg Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, Phillip Lopate, and John D’Agata, and the genre’s recalcitrant relationship with categorisation, alterity, and selfhoods. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I would like to begin this interview with your opinion on John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) which was part of his trailblazing yet contentious trilogy. D’Agata follows the essay to its genesis in ancient cultures of Sumer, Greece, Babylonia, South Africa, and China: miscellanies of Ziusudra, dialogues of Ennatum, self-interviews of Azwinaki Tshipala, and biographies of T’ao Ch’ien. 

Mario Aquilina (MA): Editing an anthology is always a contentious act. Literary anthologies are political in the sense that they organise a body of knowledge in specific ways, bringing to our attention that which we might otherwise not see or something hiding from us that we should see. Anthologies establish or disrupt hierarchies of value and relevance, and they influence in decisive ways what is preserved and circulated as well as what is lost. Anthologising is inseparable from canonisation, archivisation, but also representation and social relations as shown in the well-known debate between Rita Dove and Helen Vendler in The New York Review of Books around The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011). 

John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) is provocative in the sense that, unlike some other accounts of the history of the essay, it does not begin with Michel de Montaigne. It also casts its net beyond the Western Canon. It thus stretches both the temporality and geographical positioning of the story of the essay that we often tell ourselves. It forces us to consider the possibility that the essay is not necessarily a fundamentally modern form (Jacques Rancière calls Montaigne the ‘first modern man’) and not necessarily tied to the rise of humanism and a human-centred perception of the world. However, what is perhaps even more contentious for some is that, through this alternative history of the essay, D’Agata also makes an intervention in the present by shifting the parameters within which one might think of the essay as a genre. D’Agata’s instinct in this anthology is to open the genre, to find it in places and times in which we did not see it before. The consequence of this is that as readers we are fascinated by the extent of the potential of the essay but also possibly confused by being presented with a form that is so stretched that it almost starts to incorporate everything. I personally think that D’Agata’s book does important work and I consider it to be a valuable contribution to not only studies of the history of the essay but also to its theory. 

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

December 1, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Christina Chatzitheodorou, Georgina Fooks, and Marina García Pardavila

Literary updates from Greece, Palestine, the UK, and Spain!

The week, we bring more updates from writers around the globe as they continue to commemorate, resist, show solidarity, and contemplate our present moment. In Greece, the literary world remembers the historic Athens Polytechnic Uprising; in the UK, the prestigious Warwick Prize for Women in Translation is awarded; in Spain, an exciting young literary festival brings together some of the best names in Spanish-language writing today, to talk about that eternal subject—time; and lastly, our editor from Palestine expresses gratitude for those around the world who have continued to stand up and show support.

Christina Chatzitheodorou, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Greece

The book Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales was recently translated from English into Greek by Dimitris Koufontinas and published by Monopati Editions. In the collection, editors Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana have gathered and selected stories from Palestine that best exemplify the Palestinian Arab folk oral tradition, and the translation represents an important addition for Palestinian and Arab literature in the Greek language.

Recently, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Athens Polytechnic Uprising (1973), Giorgos Perantonakis wrote an article for Book Press, highlighting the continual legacy that this demonstration—and the dictatorship, the Regime of the Colonels (1967-1974), that it protested—has left on Greek literature, citing important works from poetry and novels to personal memoirs. However, Perantonakis omitted one of the most important anti-dictatorial titles: Ta Dekaokto Kimena (The Eighteen Texts), a collective volume of eighteen writers (including Georgios Seferis, Manolis Anagnostakis, and Stratis Tsirkas) and their political works, which was published in July 1970 by Kedros Publications. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

November 17, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou, Marina García Pardavila, and Miranda Mazariegos

News from Latin America, Greece, and Spain!

Join us this week with a new batch of literary dispatches covering a wide range of news from Latin America, Greece, and Spain; from censorship and literary awards to a slew of literary festivals, read on to learn more!

Miranda Mazariegos, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Latin America

In Colombia, Laura Ardila Arrieta’s book La Costa Nostra was pulled from publication days before going to print by Editorial Planeta, one of the most influential publishers in the Spanish-speaking world. Ardila Arrieta’s book investigates one of the most powerful families in Colombia and was pulled due to “three legal opinions that proved to us that the text contained significant risks that, as a company, we did not want to take on,” according to Planeta’s official statement. Ardila Arrieta was signed by Indent Literary Agency a few days later, and her book has instead been published by Rey Naranjo, an independent Colombian publisher who stated that the publishing of the book represents “the desire to contribute so that the future of our democratic system improves and that education and reading empowers us as a society.” 

READ MORE…

When Woe Means No: Translating Women’s Survival as Resistance 

July 13, 2023  |  in Essays, Retellings  |  by Hilary Ilkay

Carson grants her Trojan women agency, even if it seems that hostile men and unfeeling gods control their lives.

In our new column, Retellings, Asymptote presents essays on the translations of myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. Here, Hilary Ilkay considers the contemporary rendition of an ancient tragedy by Euripedes, as told by poet Anne Carson and artist Rosanno Bruno in the acclaimed The Trojan Women: A Comic.

Thanks to cinematic blockbusters like Troy and Emily Wilson’s bestselling translation of Homer’s Odyssey, the story of the Trojan War has established itself within the cultural mainstream. However, its continual revival is not just a contemporary phenomenon; as early as 5th century BCE, the mythical war had already taken on legendary status, and was ripe for adaptation and retelling.

Arguably the most tragic of the ancient Greek tragedians, Euripides’s plays are infamous for their bleak explorations of human hubris and divine cruelty. In his lifetime, as Athens was embroiled in the Peloponnesian War, a violent 27-year conflict with rival city-state Sparta, Euripides drew on the Trojan War specifically to reflect on the uncertainty of his time, making a connection between Athenian imperialism and the Greeks’ pretense of invading Troy for the sake of a single woman. Taking its cue from the ending of the Iliad, which features funeral laments from three women characters, Euripides’s play The Trojan Women casts a spotlight on the fates of the wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters of the male heroes—who typically occupied center stage in narratives of war. As a focused treatment of women’s suffering rarely seen in ancient Greek tragedy, the play is a brutal exploration of the commodification of women’s lives and bodies, as well as the ambivalence of “surviving” a tragedy when those remaining have lost all sense of meaning, stability, and security.

Given Euripides’ interest in the experience of women and the retelling of myths, it’s no surprise that his legacy continues through the work of poet and translator Anne Carson, who has received much acclaim for her rewritings of Greek classics. Carson constantly stretches the boundaries of translation in her work, dramatizing how every translation is necessarily its own “version” of the source material and not necessarily a “faithful” replica. In 2006, she published her loose translations of Euripides’s lesser known tragedies under the title Grief Lessons; in 2019, she adapted his infamously bizarre play, Helen, into Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, which interweaves the stories of Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Five Poems by George Sarantaris

January 10, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Pria Louka

about us hums / a mythical insect / a God

Part of the Generation of the 30s⁠—a group of Greek modernist writers and artists⁠—George Sarantaris has not received as much attention as the writers of that era, such as the Nobel laureate and poet Giorgos Seferis. This Translation Tuesday, translator Pria Louka brings five of Sarantaris’ poems into English. Read on and appreciate these imagistic, mist-like poems⁠—philosophical and sensual in their very reticence and brevity.

Philosophy

       For Kostas Despotopoulos

Conversation with the object
a lonesome thing,
deliberate silence
from an unknown listener
approaches us
and binds,
about us hums
a mythical insect
a God

The Mist

The mist teems
With anemones

Look at the branches
What a lake
What impatient heart
Peer into
The right drop
What drive
Takes the child
What languor
The woman

READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

August 25, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Cristina Pérez Díaz and Suhasini Patni

Our staff's recommendations from Greece and India!

This month, our editors select their recent favorite works, including Greek poetry that muses on the voices of cicadas and the natural world, as well as an Indian novel of friendship, philosophy, and the changing Delhi cityscape. Read on to find out more! 

Phoebe Giannisi already had me with her Homerica (2017), and now has got me again with her new book Cicada (New Directions, 2022). Beautifully translated, like Homerica, by Brian Sneeden, the book resounds with an “alien voice from the fence of the teeth.” Alien, not only because it is the song of the cicadas that is constantly evoked and lurks from underneath the pages since its clear-voiced announcement in the title, but even more so because the voice here belongs to all sorts of beings, especially the non-human ones. It’s the wind, and the earth, the figs, and the fish, and the egg, the sea, the rain. Words, “the thing that is most yours,” are borrowed from elsewhere. For how else could there be a meditation on the passing of time and transformations, unless out of attention to that which is always present yet is almost impossible to record: the sound or, to say it with Virginia Woolf, “the murmur or current behind it,” the humming of it?

–Cristina Pérez Díaz, Editor-at-Large for Puerto Rico

READ MORE…

Summer 2022: Highlights from the Team

August 8, 2022  |  in News  |  by Andriana Hamas, Caridad Svich, Daniel Naman, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Liam Sprod, M.K. Harb, M.L. Martin, Meghan Racklin, and Thuy Dinh

Don’t know where to begin with our latest issue? We’re here to help!

The most striking piece in this issue was Abdelfattah Kilito’s “Borges and the Blind” (tr. Ghazouane Arslane) for informing me of Borges’ deep affiliation with Arabic literature (something I wasn’t aware of before)—it opened my eyes to another dimension of Borges’ works as well as highlighted the blind spot of critics and readers of translation who might not be privy to the multifaceted aspects of the text behind the text. Cao Kou’s “The Wall Builder” (tr. Chen Zeping and Karen Gernant) is a truly wonderful and chilling fable on the idea of border, i.e., a porous wall between insider and outsider, individual and the collective in a repressive society. Anna Felder’s “Unstill Life with Cat” (tr. Brian Robert Moore) is a lovely, fully immersive tale from a cat’s point-of-view. The translation is magical, wondrously immediate. I love Rose Bialer’s perceptive questions and the resulting interview with Maureen Freely for revealing how Turkey’s political situation might affect the relationship between an author and his translator, and how there are so many layers of “the other” in Turkish society.

—Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

Kelsi Vanada’s translation is itself a reflection of Andrea Chapela’s long meditation on the meaning and mechanics of mirrors, with all the inevitable subtle distortions and complex reconfigurations that Chapela elaborates on. This extended reflection employs myriad angles of vision‚ philosophy, science, toys, personal narrative, literature, and history, from which to view the significance of mirrors, the act of looking at oneself, and the act of constructing a self-image, with and without the fragmented and inevitably distorted images that mirrors provide. Juan Calzadilla’s poems from Dictated by the Pack (tr. Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott) are virtuosic translations—the complexity of the diction and rhythms as well as the subtlety of how the language accretes are very challenging to carry over into English without disrupting the balance between sense-making and surprises in the language. The lines shift across the page, like waves lapping onto the shore, as if the rhythms of thought have been recorded faithfully in their syncopated arrivals, gaps, and runnings-over. Almog Behar’s long poem “First We’ll Speak Many Words About God” (tr. Shoshana Olidort) is a meditation on religion and god, but also an interrogation of our conception of god, an interrogation of the faithful as well as the faithless. It’s subversive and yet hopeful. Sa’eed Tavana’ee Marvi’s ”The Open Tome” (tr. Khashayar Kess Mohammadi) is set in a post-apocalyptic, interplanetary, post-Earth world. The voice of the poem shifts‚ from an unnamed speaker, to a television set, to an ”Oceandweller,” to an unnamed speaker again. The experimental formatting of the poem allows the reader to shift between these different lens ratios. As such, the reader experiences a telescoping which perhaps informs the experience alluded to in the poem‚ by a visionary which either documents the future, or foretells the otherworldliness of the present moment. I really enjoyed Rose Bialer’s interview with Maureen Freely, which touches on the craft of translation, the challenges and the advantages of translating through the prism of race, gender, sexuality, etc., and what it’s like to navigate a translator-author relationship that spans two very different cultures, especially when the author in question is famous, and at certain points even infamous.

—M. L. Martin, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

I have a distinct affinity for Mitteleuropa miserablism, and this edition contains two quintessential instances of this literary tendency: Elfriede Jelinek (tr. Aaron Sayne) and Thomas Bernhard (tr. Charlie N. Zaharoff). It does not get much more central European than Austria, and the Austrians seem to have an affinity for misanthropy, self-loathing, destruction, perversity, and psychosis, but all expressed in the most perfect prose, poetry, painting, and music. Part of my love for these two writers in particular, however, is their pushing, bending, and breaking of the formal rules of language. Perhaps this formalism is my own perversity, since, as a copy-editor, I should be forcing such language back into its grammatical and syntactical straightjacket; but as much as I know and can enforce such rules in a professional manner, I thrive and find a thrill in breaking them. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2022

August 1, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

This issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured.

The Summer 2022 Issue is our forty-fifth edition, featuring work from thirty-one countries! From newly translated fiction by luminaries such as Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard, to our special feature highlighting Swiss literature, and to probing essays that interrogate the adoption of new languages, these intricately linked writings feature characters who are thrown into abysses both personal and political but discover moments of solace, communion, and revelation. To introduce you to another rich, wide-ranging issue, our blog editors discuss their favorite pieces.

In Elisa Shua Dusapin’s 2021 National Book Award-winning novel, Winter in Sokcho, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins from the French, the unnamed narrator, a young French Korean woman living on the border between North and South Korea, experiences an ongoing crisis of identity due her inability to be seen, displacement, and strained relationships with her domineering mother and absent boyfriend. In the novel, the narrator seeks to recover a self that has been rendered invisible. One of Dusapin’s most fitting metaphors for this reassembling of the self is the narrator’s constant search for her reflection in the mirror of the guesthouse where she works. Similarly, the search for a true reflection emerges as a central theme in the introspective Summer 2022 issue. It is apt in these precarious times when the stability of the self is being shaken by forces of displacement and politics that this issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured. The building of the self is literalized by Lu Liu’s playful yet melancholy cover art, in which two boys nervously construct a sand tower out of words, alluding to the Tower of Babel made personal in Jimin Kang’s moving essay, “My Mother and Me.”

The mirror is the object of Andrea Chapela’s kaleidoscopic, multidisciplinary self-inquiry, “The Visible Unseen,” elegantly rendered by Kelsi Vanada. It adopts the fragmentary form of a series of failed beginnings, in the manner of Janet Malcolm’s famous essay on David Salle, Forty-One False Starts. Chapela’s variation of the form represents the difficulty of locating the self in one’s reflection. By extension, Chapela argues that at a given time, the self can never be completely isolated; rather, it can only ever be seen through a particular type of mirror, at a certain angle, beneath a certain light, yielding a fragment of the whole. Just as Chapela scrutinizes the mirror through a variety of perspectives—scientific, literary, philosophical, memoiristic—so must we be as comprehensive yet fragmentary when we search for ourselves. As Chapela writes, “Little by little, I start to accept that each new beginning of the essay is just one piece of the full picture.”

READ MORE…

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

January 21, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Allison Braden

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

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

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

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

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

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Constantine Cavafy

November 10, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Alex de Voogt

O memory, I pleaded / for you to assist me / to recreate the image / of the one whom I loved / the young face as it was.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday we present two newly translated poems from one of the most influential figures in modern Greek poetry, Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933). Though known primarily through English translations of his work (championed by Anglophone writers such as E.M. Forster), Cavafy has enjoyed increased attention as a formal innovator of Greek poetics. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, to Greek parents, and later educated in Britain, Cavafy would spend the bulk of his life in Alexandria writing poems for private circulation among friends, family, and local periodicals, eschewing the trappings of potential literary fame. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the poetry community of mainland Greece eventually embraced Cavafy’s bold new poetics, launching a modernist revival of Greek verse. Scholar and translator Alex de Voogt shares some of his insights on Cavafy’s formal stylings:

Cavafy built on the traditional Dekapentasyllavo or Greek folk song but allowed a flexible number of syllables, six or seven for either hemistich, together with a clear caesura. In later years, Cavafy would break the integrity of the meaningful phrase in each hemistich but never violated his own rules of syllabics . . . Syllabics look, feel and sound different when they are applied in translation. They are a hidden structure with historical antecedents. Cavafy used his hemistiches for an increasingly complex enjambment across line breaks as well as across the caesura.

“In the month of Athyr”

I am struggling to read                         an Ancient stone inscription
that says “Lo[r]d Jesus Christ.”            A “So[u]l” may be distinguished.
“In the month of Athyr”                        “Lefkio[s] w[ent] to rest”
With reference to his age                     “He lived this many years”
the Kappa Zeta shows                           he was laid to rest still young.
I see in the corrupted text                    “Hi[m] . . . Alexandrian”
And then there are three lines            especially disfigured
but some words can be made out      such as “our t[ea]rs,” “suffering”
then once again the “tears”                  and “his [f]riends are mourning [h]im”
It seems that Lefkios                             must have been greatly loved.
In the month of Athyr                            Lefkios was laid to rest.

* READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

January 28, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Karen Van Dyck

After Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke passed last week, we honor her life’s work with these two poems of eerie clarity, translated by Karen Van Dyck.

When Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke was a year old, the celebrated writer and critic Nikos Kazantzakis stood as godfather at her baptism. When she was seventeen, he published her poem “All Alone” in an Athenian magazine with a note saying that it was the most beautiful poem he had ever read. By her early twenties she was already an established poet. During the dictatorship (1967-1974), she and a group of younger poets spearheaded a new kind of poetry that grappled with the confusion and censorship of those years. Meeting regularly with the translator Kimon Friar, they produced an anthology of six young poets, one of the first books to break the self-imposed silence initiated by the Nobel laureate poet George Seferis in response to the colonels’ press laws. Linking the women poets of the previous postwar generation (Eleni Vakalo, Kiki Dimoula) to those of the generation of the ’70s (Rhea Galanaki, Maria Laina, Jenny Mastoraki), Anghelaki-Rooke stands out for the lyrical accessibility of her work. Hers is a poetry of flesh, indiscretion, and the divine all rolled into one. For Anghelaki-Rooke the body is a passageway anchoring the abstract metaphysics of myth in the rituals of everyday life. It is through the body that everything makes sense. As she once said in an interview: “I do not distinguish the soul from the body and from all the mystery of existence . . . Everything I transform into poetry must first come through the body. My question is always how will the body react? To the weather, to aging, to sickness, to a storm, to love? The highest ideas, the loftiest concepts, depend on the morning cough . . .” In commemoration of her passing last week, here are two poems of eerie clarity from her last collection in which it is already clear she is looking at the world “with other eyes.”
—Karen Van Dyck, translator

Epilogue Wind

Each time an act ends
humans feel the need
to write an epilogue
on paper or in the heart.
What was created by the mind
like lightening wants to shine
in the heaven of creation, to last
even if only in one small corner of history.
I find myself at that time of life
where I should “epilogue”
but I feel my past disappear
leaving only faint tastes and images
with no explanation.
The wind is there, though,
sometimes wild, sometimes cool,
carrying with it storms or calm.
Yes, the wind is the right epilogue
to a complete life
which, of course, when asked why
has no answer.
READ MORE…

Words Containing Multitudes: Theodor Kallifatides on Writing The Siege of Troy

October 16, 2019  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

A basic human need is also to remember and be remembered. That is why we put one stone on top of another, we paint, we sing, we write.

In September, we were honored to present Theodor Kallifatides’s The Siege of Troy as our monthly Book Club feature. This poignant, multilayered novel intertwines a modern coming-of-age wartime story with a psychologically profound retelling of the classic Iliad. In the following interview, Assistant Managing Editor Josefina Massot speaks with the author on overcoming writer’s block, writing about Greece in a foreign land and tongue, and humanizing ancient heroes.

Josefina Massot (JM): You had an unexpected bout of writer’s block at age seventy-seven, back in 2015, after almost fifty years of uninterrupted literary output. The Siege of Troy was, I believe, the first novel you wrote once you overcame it. Did your writing process change at all as a result? What was it like, rediscovering your narrative voice in novel form?

Theodor Kallifatides (TK): Yes, it affected me and my writing greatly. I felt free from all expectations, from all demands from the publisher, the public, and myself, and my writing got wings it never had before. I did not care about anything except doing justice to my deepest feelings and ideas. I got back both my eyes. Before it, I always had—as most writers do, I dare say—an eye on what people would think about my work. Suddenly, I simply did not care. I was free. READ MORE…