Language: Italian

Fall 2024: Highlights from the Team

November 13, 2024  |  in News  |  by Georgina Fooks, Joseph McAlhany, Julie Shi, Mary Hillis, Michelle Chan Schmidt, Sauvryn Linn, and Thuy Dinh

Looking to dip your toe in the new Fall edition but don’t know where to start? Check out these recommendations from our team!

The Fall Asymptote was a particularly special issue not least because of the focus on the ‘outsider’; many pieces resonated with the topic of alienation. In turn, the featured writers and translators—including many Asymptote colleagues—responded with sensitivity and care to questions of inclusion, liminality, and bordering. The most vital piece in the issue for me was colleague and editor-at-large for Palestine Carol Khoury’s translation of Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Gazan I Relate to. The translator’s note makes clear the stakes of translating even the title, and throughout the piece questions the limits of gestures of solidarity, especially when it is only the randomness of fate that means we are born in different nations, bounded by different borders, on one side, or the other. Al-Essa insists on the vitality of empathy but also the limits of solidarity; it is a piece that I am proud to see in the latest issue and I hope it spurs others to remember, reflect, and act.

He Wun-Jin’s short story “Guide Us, Chicken Booty!” (tr. Catherine Xinxin Yu) was a favourite, in its thoughtful exploration of grief for a trans sibling and the best way to remember them. As the title indicates, Yu translates with humour, but also with nuance, crafting a sensitive and moving text throughout.

Poet Ennio Moltedo (tr. Marguerite Feitlowitz) reflecting on the legacy of Chile’s neoliberal democracy in New Things was particularly potent, with a sharp critique of the limits of memory culture that feels even more potent since the failed attempt to reform the country’s  dictatorship-era constitution. Feitlowitz’s translator’s note demonstrates the thoughtfulness that is palpable throughout the translation.

It is always a joy to read Alton Melvar M Dapanas’s translations of Stefani J Alvarez (The Autobiography of the Other Lady Gaga is a favourite of mine from the archive) and Dear Sol continues with the question of life writing, reflecting on migration and loved ones left behind. The multilingual touches of Filipino and German paint an evocative picture.

From the Outsiders Special Feature‚ which seems to have set the tone for the issue more broadly‚ Odette Casamayor-Cisneros’s essay Home of the Maroon Women was a powerful read. Translated with skill and precision by Anna Kushner, the photos within the essay created a sense of history, of listening to and witnessing the Black women who have gone before. The voices of her family are braided with those of vital Black feminists: Audre Lorde; Maryse Condé’s grandmother,Victoire Élodie Quidal; Angelamaria Dávila; Victoria Santa Cruz. Casamayor-Cisneros reflects movingly on the journeys—both internal and external—that led her to the present moment, to the decision to stop running. Throughout, embodiment is key: “When Black women commit to fully living within and for our bodies, we become ourselves. We render our humanity too eloquent to be stifled, as we find the inner peace freeing from the external expectations that define us solely by our actions and roles for others.”

—Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2024

October 28, 2024  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel and Xiao Yue Shan

Exploring the breadth and depth of our latest issue!

Dive into our latest issue through the eyes of our blog editors, who take a close reading of the pieces that most moved them. In confronting shame and invisibilization, tracking the recurrent tides of grief, rending the mysterious forces of music and literature into poetry, and reimagining the painful, final moments of a migrant’s journey—these translations offer us avenues into wonderment, connection, and understanding.

When I was young, I developed a compulsion to count my fingers, pinky to thumb and back again, to fifteen, whenever I found myself in a situation I didn’t understand, or when I felt ashamed or guilty. The repetitive, reliable action was my way of putting a cork in my anxiety, to stem the building pressure that threatened to well up, and reorient myself in the world around me. No one else I knew had the same need—at least, not that I could see—and realizing this put a box around the world, shut by lock and key, depriving me of any access. In Ornela Vorpsi’s Offworld, in translation from the Italian by Antonella Lettieri, the main character Tamar feels similarly severed from the rest of the world. Where I experienced it like a dam ready to burst, Tamar feels a “fissure,” as if from an earthquake, splitting her brain and setting her apart from other people; where I had a box, Tamar views the world through a window, from which she observes the comings and goings of her neighbors and their visitors. Tamar’s fissure is fueled by an inexplicable wanting, a sense of shame and lust that she cannot put into words: “I could not tell my mother nor anyone else what was happening because I did not know either. I was brutally suspended in fear, under its control.”

From her window, Tamar watches the many sons of her neighbor Maria, entranced by their indulgence and languid masculinity, their bodies cast in light and smoke reminiscent of a Caravaggio. A Virgin Mary watches over the boys’ room, holding a baby Jesus—a reminder that God is always watching, and a source of the religious paranoia that haunts Tamar throughout her life. The religious undertones to her shame are in part what prevent her from recognizing what it is that she wants, even though she knows she lusts for something:

I too, Tamar, felt that I desired something uncatchable, even if I could not give it a name. It took many shapes, my desire, I only sensed that it was sly, that it deceived me, slipping like an eel from between my fingers, from between my thighs.

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Held Together by Dreams: On Erminia Dell’Oro’s Abandonment

September 19, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Rose Facchini

Her characters are profoundly human, each wrestling with their own fears, hopes, and desires . . .

Abandonment by Erminia Dell’Oro, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky, Héloïse Press, 2024

Why do we leave behind people and places? Is it painful or bittersweet? Does it indicate bravery or cowardice, altruism or egoism? Do we have complete agency in these decisions or are we instead constrained by necessity, oftentimes masked by the illusion of choice? What kind of person do we become in the aftermath?

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The Sea Will Dream In My Ears: Megumi Moriyama on Recasting Virginia Woolf into Japanese and Spiral Translation

September 18, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Translation can never be just a flat movement between two points, merely returning to its origins.

Japanese poet, critic, and translator Megumi Moriyama has so far worked on metamorphosing Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) into the Japanese and on a ‘back translation’ of Arthur Waley’s poetic rendition of the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, in collaboration with her sister, haiku poet and critic Marie Mariya, published by Sayusha. As a poet, Megumi confesses that even her original poems in Japanese are layered with translation across varying texts within and outside her native language. Of her forthcoming poetry collection, she told me, “Perhaps you might say that through translation, I have made a journey into the depths of Japanese language.”

In this interview, I spoke with Megumi, currently in Tokyo, on rendering Virginia Woolf and Waley’s The Tale of Genji into the Japanese; how spiral translation goes beyond back-translations; and the new-age scene of literary translation in Japan.

Author headshot courtesy of Benjamin Parks.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): You translated Virginia Woolf’s experimental classic The Waves into the Japanese as Nami (2021), published by Hayakawa. Could you speak about your process in rendering a 1931 polyphonic novel set in England by a prose writer known for her stream of consciousness narrative mode with the modern-day Japanophone readership in mind? I heard there was so much hype about it, especially on Japanese book Twitter, as it was the first translation of this novel in almost 50 years.

Megumi Moriyama (MM): The new translation of The Waves was welcomed much more enthusiastically than I had expected. When I posted the announcement on social media, it went viral. And after the publication, the book was immediately put into reprint.

I studied Virginia Woolf as a student, and The Waves was one of my favorites of hers, but I never thought I would have the opportunity to translate it. It was thanks to social media that I got the chance. I tweeted very casually that I was interested in translating The Waves, an editor took notice of it, and the project became a reality.

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Michele Mari’s “Obscene Excess” of the Literary

September 11, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Francesca Mancino

For [Mari's characters], collecting signifies a dependency on nostalgia and memory, all of which coexist with each individual object.

We all love our books, but at what point does that love become reductive—or even dangerous? Italian writer Michele Mari weaves elements of materialist obsession into his fictions, describing how one’s attachment to literature can create falsifications, egomaniacal delusions, and objectifications of the people around us. In this following essay, Francesca Mancino takes a close look at Mari’s You, Bleeding Childhood and the recently published Verdigris, tracing their narratives in their manifestations of literary greed.

In the threaded lines that clutter all but the gutters of his works, Michele Mari comes close to Becca Rothfeld’s fantasy of excess, as detailed in her essay, “More Is More.” There, she writes, “I dream of a house stuffed floor to ceiling; rooms so overfull they prevent entry; too many books for the shelves; fictions brimming with facts but, more importantly, flush with form; long tomes in too many volumes; sentences that swerve on for pages; clauses like jewels strung onto necklaces. . .” In both the collection You, Bleeding Childhood (2023) and the novel Verdigris (2024), translated into English by Brian Robert Moore, there is a feeling that the text cannot contain the objects described. It is as if the words command a vaster space than a page can allow for.

Mari’s work toes the line between the wonder and the obscenity of excess; in both You, Bleeding Childhood and Verdigris, the author presses his readers to think about its many forms and their respective limits. Reflected in his writing style, one could almost say that there is too much in Mari’s books—too many literary objects, household items, convoluted adjectives, coveted authors, and blended dialects. In Verdigris, the walls of a home have almost no free space because “everywhere has gradually been overrun by objects and signs drawn on paper, when not by symbols traced directly onto the plaster. Anyone walking into that room would have the impression of a random and compulsive clutter, as though owing to a kind of horror vacui.” The narrator, Michelino, reminds the reader that the objects are not arbitrary, since he and Felice, the house’s owner, share an intimate knowledge of “every single element” tacked onto its surfaces. READ MORE…

In my dreams I reply like this

August 15, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Oonagh Stransky

Either way, it too is a kind of reply—to the call of literature, the call of writing.

For her translation of Erminia Dell’Oro’s Abandonment, Oonagh Stransky received one of the prestigious PEN Translates awards in 2023; one year later, this powerful, lyrical novel is due to arrive by way of Héloïse Press on September 15. Rendered into English with great sensitivity and intimacy, Abandonment tells the story of a mother-daughter pairing in Eritrea, and their alienation from both local and the colonial Italian communities in the aftermath of racial laws. Stransky fought for its appearance in the English-language for twenty years, and in the following essay, she speaks on the emotional, introspective process of translating this tremendous work, and why she has remained so determined that the world should read it.

abandonment

It’s July 2024, and I’ve received the proofreader’s notes for Abandonment. I need to reply to an issue with the passage below:

“Then Sellass felt a deep languor come over her and she understood that her body was dissolving into the seawater, that the wave she had become was returning towards the light and slowly breaking on a beach where the shades of the dead had gathered. Even Mariam’s shells were there, specks of darkness on the sand, and a hand reached out to grab them. The wave tried to speak, to tell her that she was Sellass, but the voice was only a watery gurgle, and the shades, going through the gestures of life, ignored the coming and going of the wave.”

The proofreader says

This is a bit confusing—reads to me like the wave is speaking to Sellass, but if I’ve understood correctly the wave IS Sellass? And she’s trying to speak to Mariam? I think the confusion is using “she” to refer to the wave, if it read ‘to tell her that it was Sellass’ it would be clearer.

I reply

Using “it” does fix the problem but ambiguity and the gendering of the wave are important to both story and style. Actually, the original Italian doesn’t say that the wave is trying to speak to Mariam. It just says, L’onda tentava di parlare, di raccontare che lei era Sellass. . . I suggest modifying that line to: The wave tried to speak, to say she was Sellass. . . This keeps the female gender of the wave and retains an element of ambiguity.

In my dreams I reply like this

The world of this book is filled with objects that we readers might commonly see as neutral but that are attributed gender by characters who need them to survive, who see their fragile lives building and then crumbling, over and over, casually, randomly, like waves. Sellass in this instance is indeed the wave, and because the wave in Italian is a feminine noun, she is both wave and girl. More than trying to address Mariam here, Sellass is receiving a message from the universe that she is a mere mortal, that she coexists with death, with the shades. Her daughter, Marianna, will be made aware of her own mortality, but she is accepting of it, which in turn allows her to survive and not become a victim; this awareness is the key to her resistance.

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Principle of Decision: Translation from Italian

July 11, 2024  |  in Principle of Decision, Translations  |  by Antonella Lettieri, Candice Whitney, Catherine Xinxin Yu, Elena Pala, and Julia Conrad

How does one evaluate the works of a writer who paradoxically championed women’s rights and supported an ultra-patriarchal regime?

Principle of Decision takes a close look at the manifold, careful decisions made by translators in their interpretations. Each participating translator is given the same excerpt of a text to render into English, revealing the various incarnations that can stem from even a single word. In this edition, Catherine Xinxin Yu presents a piece from the Italian writer Ada Negri.

When I was casually browsing at a book fair in 2023, my eyes were caught by two descriptors on the back of a tiny claret booklet featuring Ada Negri’s works: ‘feminist literature ante litteram’ and ‘twice nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature’. I had to find out who this Ada Negri was.

Ada Negri (1870-1945), born in the northern Italian city of Lodi, grew up in a working-class milieu and began earning a living as a schoolteacher from the age of seventeen. She published her first poem La nenia materna (Mother’s Lullaby) in 1888, her first poetry collection Fatalità (Fatality) in 1892, and continued to garner literary acclaim through the 1910s. Her gaze was directed outwards, encompassing the struggles of the Italian working class of which she was a part, but also turned inwards, voicing her intense emotional turmoil as a woman, a lover, and a mother. At the same time, she actively participated in socialist projects like the Lega Femminile di Milano and co-founded the Asilo Mariuccia in 1902 for at-risk women and minors.

In 1917, Negri published her immensely successful short story collection, Le solitarie (Solitary Women), from which the excerpt below is drawn. Eighteen grayscale character studies provide ‘humble glimpses into the lives of women who fight alone: alone despite family, alone despite love, alone due to faults of their own, of men, or of destiny’, as the author wrote in the book’s preface (translated from the Italian). This collection was groundbreaking in its focus on the tribulations of lower-class women and unflinchingly tackles taboo subjects from female sexuality and abortion, to marital unhappiness and the lack of care for the elderly.

So far, so good, right? But Negri was also a controversial figure who achieved her status partly due to her staunch support of Mussolini’s fascist regime. In the 1890s, she befriended socialists active in Milan, such as Filippo Turati, the Russian-born feminist Anna Kuliscioff, Nobel peace prize winner Teodoro Moneta—and Benito Mussolini, who identified as a socialist at the time. But by the outbreak of WWI, as Mussolini’s break with socialism gave way to his avowed fascism, Negri definitively sided with Mussolini’s bellicose patriotism and distanced herself from the antimilitarist democratic socialism of Turati and Kuliscioff. She would go on to win the Premio Mussolini in 1930, become the first and only woman to be admitted into the Accademia d’Italia in 1940 (a short-lived hall of fame for intellectuals in fascist Italy, if you will), and follow government directives in her long-standing collaborations with major newspapers until her death in 1945. READ MORE…

Poem for a Vanishing World: On Translating Orlando Furioso

June 26, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sebastián Sánchez

Chivalric romances . . . had been popular for centuries. . . . At the same time, though, the world that they were describing was vanishing.

Ludovico Ariosto’s magnum opus, Orlando Furioso, has only been translated into English four times since 1900. After first appearing in 1516, this epic has become an indispensable entry in the Italian canon and remains one of the longest poems in European literature, numbering over thirty-eight thousand lines in forty-six cantos, telling tales of love, war, tragedy, and fantasy across continents, seas, and even the cosmos. In our Spring 2024 edition, we presented a daring translation by Steven Monte of one of the poem’s most famous episodes—a fantastical voyage to the moon, which demonstrates at once the ecstatic potentialities of poetry, the corruption of art by human vices, and all the ways by which the self can be lost.

In the following interview, Monte speaks to our very own Assistant Interview Editor Sebastián Sanchez about the challenges and delights of rendering the best-selling book of the sixteenth century into English.

Sebastián Sanchez (SS): Despite his influence on European literature, Ludovico Ariosto’s work is underappreciated in the Anglophone world. What drew you to translate Orlando Furioso?

Steven Monte (SM): The underappreciation is partly what drew me, but perhaps more than anything I wanted to translate the specific episode of Astolfo’s trip to the moon. Astolfo is my favorite character in Orlando Furioso, and translating one episode was plenty challenging. When I discovered that the most recent verse translation of the epic-romance—David Slavitt’s—did not include this famous section, I was even more motivated.

SS: Whenever I read an early modern text—I am thinking specifically of those by Rabelais and Cervantes here—I am surprised by its liveliness and audacity. Do you think Orlando Furioso has a contemporary relevance which might surprise new readers? 

SM: Absolutely. First off, as with the two authors you mention, Ariosto is funnier than twenty-first-century readers might expect. And again like those two authors, he is self-aware; the narrator often addresses the reader, or a subset of his readers, in a knowing and urbane way. Finally, Ariosto often feels modern in his depiction of female characters and gender relations. This last element is not so much present in the episode that I translate, which focuses on two male characters and is something of a spoof of Dante. But note the irreverent way in which Saint John discusses the entire epic tradition and the way in which other poets, like Virgil, misrepresented characters like Dido.

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Serpentine

June 24, 2024  |  in Essays, Retellings  |  by Kanya Kanchana

The loop of the ☥ ankh is the Ouroboros, the endless serpent that swallows its own tail, and there is a void at its heart. Mind the gap.

In our column “Retellings,” Asymptote presents essays delving into myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. In this rendition, Kanya Kanchana traces the winding path of serpents across world literature and translation in a longform lyric essay. Weaving between times and traditions, Kanya draws together the philosophical concepts, conflicting perceptions, and atavistic emotions that serpents inspire, such that we are not quite sure where one story ends, and another begins.

“In every story, if you go back, as far back as you can, to the point where every horizon disappears, you find a snake, the tree, water.”

– Roberto Calasso, Ka

cobra transparent

When the word nāga (Sanskrit: serpent) is uttered, the first syllable must rear its hood in the air like a cobra, and the second must root into the earth like the coil it lifts itself from. The sound is the word. Where the ouraeus, the symbol of the rearing Egyptian cobra, Naja haje, is found, it’s an unmistakable mark of sovereignty, the golden hood that guards the head that wears the crown. The symbol is the deed. Sound, symbol, story—myth is the skin beneath the skin of the world, that which shapes from within.

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The Story as Experience: Oonagh Stransky and Marla Moffa on Eugenio Montale’s Butterfly of Dinard

June 20, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

[A]s ephemeral, beautiful, and delicate as these stories are, they are firmly grounded in history. . .

In Butterfly of Dinard, the great poet Eugenio Montale leads the reader up to numinous looking points along the towers of everyday experience, pointing us towards an innate sublimity and magic—how individual vision and experience can strike pedestrian sceneries with an extraordinary intensity of meaning. Originally published as columns in the Corriere della Sera, fifty of these stories have been translated with extraordinary care and finesse by Marla Moffa and Oonagh Stransky, and in this interview, they speak to us about the affinity between Montale’s prose and poetry, the revelations of translation, and how such stories travel from the page into personal realities, deepening and celebrating the spaces, people, and objects that—if looked at closely—“reveal a great truth.”

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. 

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): I wanted to start with asking you both about the crossings between Montale’s poems and his prose works. What do both of you consider Butterfly of Dinard to be saying to us on its own? Is there an independent author to be found, or should we read his prose as dialogic with his poetry?

Marla Moffa (MM): I would say that there are various symbols in the poems that we can also find in the stories. Considering that he wrote Butterfly of Dinard when he was in his fifties—after the two main volumes of poetry, Cuttlefish Bones and The Occasions, and concurrently with The Storm and Other Things—it’s as if he’s regrouping in these stories everything that we find in the poems as well.

For example, as Jonathan Galassi points out in the introduction, Montale speaks about the eels in the story “The Best Is Yet to Come,” and just at the mention of the word eel on the menu for the protagonist, the narrator has this flashback, because the eels represented something special in his youth. There’s also the poem “L’anguilla / The Eel” in Montale’s poetry, which is one of his most important poems. It’s interesting to be able to read the two pieces in parallel, but at the same time, I feel like the stories are independent. If you don’t know his poetry, and you just read Butterfly of Dinard, you can still enter into Montale’s world. He even says himself that if one wants to know his story, that this is the book to read, because it is quite autobiographical.

Oonagh Stransky (OS): I agree with what Marla said, and the only thing I would add is that one of the things that appeals to me most about these stories is really the element of humour—the self-deprecating humour and irony. As in his poetry, there are moments of existential crisis, of gaps and sudden shocks, but there is also a delight in life, and a delightfulness that he attributes to so many different things. The nostalgia towards his past is one aspect of it, but I also like how he talks about himself—how he describes this figure, who may represent himself, as bumbling and Chaplin-esque, as Galassi calls it. It opens up new windows onto Montale the man, and who this very mysterious and obscure Nobel-winning poet was. Here we see him as a man in slippers, with a turban on his head, holding a rug up to scare away a bat—all those things are elements that allow the reader to feel more familiar with him. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: from “A Minimal Unhappiness” by Carmen Verde

June 18, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Katie Shireen Assef

Unhappiness is not only a state of the spirit... No. Unhappiness is a place, a real, physical place, a dark room that we decide to stay in.

This Translation Tuesday, we are excited to present the English debut of Carmen Verde, a finalist for the Premio Strega in 2023 for her very first novel, A Minimal Unhappiness, which we excerpt here in Katie Shireen Assef’s impeccable translation. Verde’s narrator is a habitué of sadness and madness, an accustomed yet discerning sufferer. If unhappiness is a room, as she claims with some authority, then hers is lush-black, Gothically plangent, and filled with lugubrious relatives.

God is the Highest. God is the Most High.
Isn’t that terrifying?

 

***

In photographs we’re always sitting close together, my mother and I: she, pale, uneasy, with a look that seems to apologize for itself.

In those days, she still prayed to God that my bones would lengthen. God had nothing to do with it, though. If it took stubbornness for a girl not to grow, I had more than enough.

I never thought I was ugly. And I never doubted that I resembled my mother, even if I didn’t have her thin ankles, her elegant proportions. Ours was an elusive, an indecipherable resemblance: the sort of resemblance that pierces the heart of those who manage to recognize it.

 

***

In my five years of primary school, she came to pick me up every afternoon. The window of my classroom looked out onto the street, so that between my desk and the bench where she sat waiting, there couldn’t have been more than a hundred fifty feet as the crow flies. I was happy when I saw her on the other side of the glass, even if I was soon overcome by the fear—the terrible certainty, even—that she would decide to go and leave me there, alone. I never believed I had a right to my mother’s presence.

In winter, on windy days, the dust from the street would cling to her silk stockings, to her camel-colored coat, to her hair that was so straight and smooth it seemed like velvet. On the first warm days in June, she would stand beneath the shade of the linden tree at the center of the piazza. If she stayed, I told myself, it meant she loved me. I couldn’t see her from where I sat at my desk (the shutters were closed to block out the sun), and so the fear would slowly build up inside me until, five minutes before the lesson ended, I had lost all hope of finding her. And yet there she would be, still in the same spot. Yes, Sofia Vivier was a good mother.

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Announcing Our May Book Club Selection: Butterfly of Dinard by Eugenio Montale

May 30, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

These stories are a spatial message; they tell of living amongst, and in this way, they belong to everyone.

In the fifty short stories that make up Butterfly of Dinard, the great lyric poet Eugenio Montale turns to prose to inscribe the world that moves the psyche to its most extraordinary heights. As one of the most inviting additions to a remarkable oeuvre, the collection moves from mystery to comedy, from reminiscence to fantasy, taking the reader on excursions and immersions, introducing an Italy grasped in historical and personal material alike. The Montale admirer will find motifs that correspond with his most famed poems, and anyone new to the writer will find an assured, perceptive voice, dedicated to documenting the most curious and complex intersections of our social reality. Reissued now by New York Review Books in an updated translation from Oonagh Stransky and Marla Moffa, and with an illuminating introduction by Jonathan Galassi, we are delighted to introduce Butterfly of Dinard as our Book Club selection for the month.

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. 

Butterfly of Dinard by Eugenio Montale, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky and Marla Moffa, New York Review Books, 2024

After the walkman came into common use, a reporter in the Nouvel Observateur did a self-directed study on its effects, going around and asking its users if they considered themselves psychotic or schizophrenic. Clearly, the world of music had grown a new frontier. There would be communal listening, through the radio or some other form of public broadcasting, and solo listening; one could have a personal sonic timeline, running separately—though parallel—with the rest of the world’s sounds. Since then, we’ve only found new and improved ways to insulate ourselves from the social environment, so when a friend and I took a rental car around Los Angeles a month ago, I hadn’t heard the radio in probably a decade. When we turned it on, running through station after station, I catalogued the brief soundbites of the local airwaves—jockey banter, garbled trap, Christian rock, upbeat grupera. That frenetic soundscape accordioned over the brushed hills and highway traffic, and we synced to it, suddenly adopted into the city’s musical timestream as insiders. After a little while, we stopped at a light, and I looked to the car beside me. I couldn’t hear what the driver was listening to, but the taps of his fingers hit the exact same beats as those from our radio.

Music, and its innate potential for disrupting separation, was on my mind while reading Eugenio Monatle’s Butterfly of Dinard, a collection of prose pieces first published in the daily Corriere della Sera. The newspaper, similar to the radio, is a halfway-abandoned arena of public consciousness—a gathering place where people can experience the same thing at relatively the same time, and be joined, if not in opinion, then in engagement. But the days in which radically dissonant lives and perspectives could be unified via song or text are largely gone; though the cultural artifacts themselves are more proliferate than ever, we meet them on terms that are ever more individualised, ever more catered to the psychic patterns that we build, alone. Passing through Montale’s slice-of-life writings, some tell stories of the past, some follow the mania of dreams, but running through all of them is a sense that they are being told in the textual version of the town square—meant for all to hear, no matter if you are sat in the audience or just passing through. These stories are a spatial message; they tell of living amongst, and in this way, they belong to everyone. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2024

May 13, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Danielle Pieratti and Sarah Gear

New titles from Italy and Colombia!

In a fecund month of new translations, our editors select two phenomenal titles: a collection of the later poems by the acclaimed Eugenio Montale, and an intimate epistolary fiction leading readers to a seldom-seen region of Colombia. 

Late Montale – New York Review Books

Late Montale by Eugenio Montale, translated from the Italian by George Bradley, New York Review Books, 2024

Review by Danielle Pieratti, Poetry Editor

“The world exists,” declared Eugenio Montale in the poem “Wind and Flags” from his first book, Cuttlefish Bones, published in 1925 (translated by Jonathan Galassi). Given the frank, existential agnosticism that governs the poet’s later work, it feels a little like whiplash to return to this otherwise characteristically subtle poem after reading Late Montale. Translated from the Italian by George Bradley, this collection comprises Montale’s published and unpublished poems from the second half of his life, offering glimpses of the poet first in the period of his Nobel win and later, as an increasingly reflective and skeptical widower. Yet ultimately, Montale seems to arrive where he began. “Unarguably / something must exist,” he writes in an unpublished poem at the end of his life,

But with [regard to] this,
science, philosophy, theology (red or black)
have all misfired.

If this isn’t faith,
O men of the altar or the microscope,
then go f. yourselves.

Given that these works range from the 1960s to his death in 1981, the fact that Montale circles back to this revelation bears noting. While his underlying ironies and symbolism persist, there’s a definitive “shift from formality to intimacy and self-revelation,” Bradley writes in his introduction, which “parallels the course of twentieth century poetry as a whole”. In poems taken from Satura, first published eight years after the 1963 death of his wife Drusilla Tanzi, Montale retains his characteristic imagery and density, but his focus has drifted from the tangible nature symbolism of his earlier works to more abstract questions of grief befitting an older poet experiencing loss. Many of the poems speak to memory and to individuals from Montale’s past, including several from two long sequences addressed to Tanzi. Others allude frequently to Montale’s former life as an opera singer. Indeed, the tension between then and now pervades Late Montale, and the poet’s apparent scorn for the passing of time lends a hint of tragedy to poems increasingly pensive and raw. “We were two lives too young to be old but too old to feel we were young,” he writes to Tanzi in “Lake Sorapis, 40 Years Ago”, which ends:

That’s when we learned what aging is.
Nothing to do with time, it’s something that tells us,
that makes us tell ourselves: “Here we are,
it’s a miracle and won’t come again.” By comparison
youth is the most contemptible of illusions.

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Spring 2024: Highlights from the Team

May 6, 2024  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Heather Green, Janet Phillips, MARGENTO, Matilde Ribeiro, Matthew Redman, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Vuslat D. Katsanis

More entrypoints into the glorious Spring Asymptote, courtesy of our generous team!

Aigerim Tazhi’s “Following the Breath of the Earth” is a refreshing reminder of another way of life through Kazakh spirituality—one that treasures the interconnectedness of nature and all of the species in it, where nature stands for truth in an undivided and nonhierarchical ecosystem. The ancestral belief in the gods of the sky (Tengri) and earth (Umai) echos the current calls for decolonial approaches to climate justice. And yet, the critique of the tourists who contaminate glacier lakes in Tibet, or the rise of yurts for camping trips North America, or the odd questions asked of the poet in Rotterdam, gently caution against the performative gestures that appropriate Indigenous beliefs. The story’s motif of nomadic travel and breath fits well in this conception of an interconnected world.

This theme of nature and the interconnected ecosystem for alternative worldbuilding is carried out in several other articles, including Jang Okgwan’s poems (tr. Susan K), with motifs of water and moonlight; and Leeladhar Jagoori’s poems (tr. Matt Reeck), of mountains and terrain.

I also appreciated the attention on language, the limits of the written word, and the rebelliousness of vernacular expression in this issue, especially in Sebastián Sánchez’s interview with Chilean author Diamela Eltit (tr. Fionn Petch) and in the poetry of German-Turkish Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç (tr. Özgecan Kesici). Each provides glimpses into the capacity of language play and hybrid rule-bending for community-building, political resistance, and memorialization.

 —Vuslat D. Katsanis, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

Chen Yuhong’s poem “Buddhist Pine” opened my eyes to different ways of being still/degrees of stillness. The way the poem successively transposes metaphors of animal, seasonal, granitic, and athletic stillness on the motionless pine made me understand that things can be still in different ways. That the pine might have a willed, disciplined stillness, or that it might be coiled, or frozen, or at rest, or somehow all at once.

 —Matthew Redman, Digital Editor READ MORE…