Language: Japanese

What’s New in Translation: May 2020

May 11, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Arabella Bosworth, Edwin Alanís-García, Marina Dora Martino, and Samuel Miller

New work from Hye-Young Pyun, Keiichiro Hirano, Andrés Neuman, and Jazmina Barrera!

The best that literature has to offer us is not resolution, but that Barthian sentiment of recognition—the nakedly exact internal sentiment rescued from wordlessness and placed in a social reality. In this month’s selections of translated works, the authors confront a myriad of trials and ideas—despair, rage, guilt, purpose, obsolescence—with stories that attest equally to the universality of human feelings and the precise specificities of localities. Read reviews of four spectacular texts from Japan, Korea, Spain, and Mexico now:

law of lines

The Law of Lines by Hye-Young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell, Arcade Publishing, 2020

Review by Marina Dora Martino, Assistant Editor

How does the world change us? Is it life and its unpredictable events that bend us; or is it something more fundamental, something that has always been hatching inside ourselves, ready to ripen at the right occasion? These questions act as the fundamental hinges of The Law of Lines, a novel written by South Korean author Hye-Young Pyun and translated by Sora Kim-Russell. Although ambitious and abstract, these existential questions acquire here a concrete form—they are investigated—not by philosophical or religious means—through the stories of two young women, Se-oh and Ki-jeong. Set in the vast South Korean suburban world, The Law of Lines travels through injustice, poverty, and grief, and exposes the thin threads that run between people who didn’t even know they were connected.

Ki-jeong is a teacher. She doesn’t like teaching—actually, she hates it. To get through her day, Ki-jeong transforms her life into a performance, and herself into a mere act of herself. Only in this way she manages, with varying degrees of success, to hide her frustration, her disengagement, and her lack of empathy for the people around her. Se-oh is a young woman who lives as a semi-recluse at her father’s house. She doesn’t go out because she fears the world, that churning machine that ruins and distorts everything. Ki-jeong and Se-oh don’t have dreams of a better life, or not exactly. They are dormant and static. But their stillness is not only a desire for tranquillity—it’s a method for concealment.

Soon, the world presents them with irreversible and unpredictable events, and their apparently quiet lives break irrevocably. In the middle of a stressful day at school, Ki-jeong receives a mysterious phone call that throws her on a desperate search for the truth. Her half-sister, the one Ki-jeong and her mother had never managed to really love, becomes her only thought and anchor to reality. Se-oh is almost home after one of her rare trips to the stores when she is startled by the view of her house enveloped by fire. She sees the paramedics carrying away a man on a barrel, and from then on, her life turns into a quest—to track down and plan the destruction of the man she blames for everything that went wrong. READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2020

April 27, 2020  |  in News  |  by Eva Heisler, Garrett Phelps, Henry Ace Knight, Lee Yew Leong, Sam Carter, and Varun Nayar

Our section editors guide you through the riches of our Spring 2020 issue!

Our Spring 2020 issue has arrived amidst a rising desire for unity and community. As we seek new sights from views made familiar by isolation, Asymptote is proud to have gathered some of the most vivid and singular works from literary talents from thirty countries, so that we may all benefit from the vitality of their distinct imaginings and realities. Here, our section editors share their favourites and guide you around this edition’s abundance of ideas and inventions.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Galician Poetry Feature Editor:

If you enjoyed watching Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, you’ll probably love “Red Ivory” by Italian writer Matteo Meschiari from the new issue: like the film, it’s a survival tale set in the extreme cold (in the Siberian permafrost, to be specific), riveting in its depiction of the elements, narrated urgently with brilliant flashes of lyricism—including one electric moment of human contact collapsing 12,000 years. By the end, it’s also a möbius strip of a story posing big existential questions. (Don’t miss the edifying note by emerging translator Enrico Cioni, who did an amazing job rendering the story.) The omniscient narrator of Mirza Athar Baig‘s “Junkshop” transports us similarly through history—this time centering around the objects of a contemporary junkshop—infusing an everyday scene with wonder at just how much we don’t know. Many delights abound in the Galician Poetry Feature headlined by Manuel Rivas, Chus Pato, and Alba Cid (translated by Jacob Rogers, who also helped put together the Feature), but be sure to acquaint yourself with Luz Pozo Garza, one of Galicia’s literary greats, who passed away at age 97 less than a week after the release of the issue. In the selection that translator Kathleen March presented, she used cadences of the canticle and other musical forms to sing of an ecstatic yet bittersweet love for an evanescent world.

From Henry Ace Knight, Interviews Editor: 

Kamila Hladíková’s conversation with Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser for the Spring issue’s interview section centers on the precariousness of Tibetan cultural memory and the poet’s resistance to its wholesale erasure. Citing Milan Kundera and Edward Said, Woeser suggests that the survival of marginalized collective identity is incumbent upon the insistence of individual eyewitness memory and testimony. “The history of a nation consists of the personal histories of its people,” she writes. “Descartes said, ‘I think, therefore I am’; but in Tibet, it should be, ‘I remember, therefore we are.’”

From Varun Nayar, Nonfiction Editor: 

Following the footsteps of the great Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō, Durian Sukegawa writes about a journey he made in 2012, traversing a landscape reshaped by the earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster the year before. Alison Watts’s vivid translation of Sukegawa’s written account of this journey acquaints us with the personal and political stakes of living in post-Fukushima Japan. Part travelogue, part political meditation, Sukegawa’s writing pairs the beauty of the Japanese landscape with the ugliness of government negligence. At the heart of this piece is a desire to bear witness to the lives rendered invisible in the eyes of the mainstream media and the country’s disaster management apparatus. In its sober reflection of the human cost of events still fresh in Japan’s collective memory, Sukegawa’s piece also conjures an eerie relation to the current pandemic we’re living through.  READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: April 2020

April 13, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Austyn Wohlers, Clémence Lucchini, Jacqueline Leung, and Sarah Moore

New literature from Algeria, Guadeloupe, Italy, and Japan!

In the newly ruptured world, the questions that arise all seem perplexingly novel. It is somewhat of a tonic, then, that one turns to literature to find that the queries that confound us now are more specific reiterations of questions that have plagued humanity for a long, long time. What is freedom? How do we persist through the turmoil of our nations? What does the past mean for the present? And, perhaps most pertinently, what survives? In this month’s selections in translated literature, four astounding works from around the world encounter and contend with these problems in their singular styles. Below, discover a passionate novel about a real-life Algerian bookseller, a Guadeloupe-set fiction that intermingles personal and national revolution, the latest English-language volume in Roberto Calasso’s grand series on human civilization, and a Japanese literary sensation which contends with feminine pain and perseverance.

our riches

Our Riches by Kaouther Adimi, translated from the French by Chris Andrews, New Directions, 2020

Review by Clémence Lucchini, Educational Arm Assistant

Though one cannot truly stress all the qualities of Our Riches, Kaouther Adimi’s first translated novel into English by Chris Andrews, within the limits of a book review, Adimi has certainly proved that she is able to convey Edmond Charlot’s life long passion for books in less than two hundred pages. In this historical fiction, recognized with two French literary awards, Adimi finds a new way to portray her native Algeria: through Edmond Charlot’s many literary endeavors.

For those who do not know Edmond Charlot (I was among that group before reading this book), he left a great gift to the publishing world by being Camus’ first publisher, by publishing under-represented authors, and last but not least, by pioneering the design of book covers as we know it today in Western Europe, referred to as “the talk of the publishing world” in Adimi’s work. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

April 3, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andreea Scridon, Barbara Halla, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest news from Albania, France, and Japan!

Many countries around the world are now weeks into their lockdown, but literature continues to thrive and is necessarily concerned with the current crisis. In Albania, literary events are moved online whilst booksellers are expected to continue working; in France, a Romanian writer and opponent of the Romanian communist regime sadly passed away from coronavirus. In Tokyo, pandemic literature sees a revival. Read on to find out more! 

Barbara Halla, Assistant Editor, reporting from Albania

There was a moment when it felt like an early April literary dispatch from Albania would just be a chance to mourn the events that I was excited about but that never came to pass. Albania registered its first cases of COVID-19 on March 8 and went into full lockdown less than 48 hours after. That obviously means that for almost the entire duration of March, literary news and activities have been scarce. There was one event that I was sad to see postponed: a panel and discussion to be held on the lost voices of Albanian women writers, something that was long overdue.

That being said, Albanians with a literary inclination have found other ways to remain engaged with their reading lists or interests. Radical Sense is a reading group that meets weekly in Tirana to read and discuss radical leftist texts at 28 November, a versatile bookstore/safe space for readers and activists, among its many other uses. Although the physicality of the charming attic where these discussions are held is sacred to the group, participants have taken a page from universities and workplaces across the globe and have just held their first online book club meeting through Zoom. Readings and discussion happen in English, so for those who live in Albania and are interested in participating, you can check in with the lovely owners of 28 November here for more details. READ MORE…

Translation as an Exercise in Letting Go: An Interview with Sam Bett and David Boyd on Translating Mieko Kawakami

April 1, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

What reading and writing have in common, and what makes translation possible, is listening.

Mieko Kawakami’s 2008 novella Breasts and Eggs won acclaim in Japan for its depiction of the tense, complex relationship between the narrator, Natsuko Natsume, her sister, and her niece. Haruki Murakami called Kawakami his favorite young novelist, and the novella went on to win the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. Kawakami later expanded the story into a novel of the same name. Its translation into English, forthcoming from Europa Editions (US) and Picador (UK), will be her English-language debut and has been listed among this year’s most anticipated releases by The New York Times, The Millions, Lit Hub, and others. The book’s award-winning translators, Sam Bett and David Boyd, are working together to translate all of Kawakami’s novels. Here, they discuss their co-translation process and some of the novel’s challenges: Kawakami’s musical prose, the characters’ Osaka dialect, and the plot’s focus on women’s experiences.

Allison Braden (AB): How does your work, in general, complement each other’s? What is it about the other’s product or process that makes for a good collaborator?

Sam Bett (SB): I discovered David’s work as a reader, through the magazine Monkey Business, and wrote him something of a fan letter. We’ve been each other’s first readers for almost five years now. Depending on the project, this sometimes means doing a close “side-by-side” read, where we offer comments on specific translation choices, and sometimes means reading the translation independently from the original, to see how well it stands up on its own. I think the most important thing is receptivity. Translation is, by nature, a group effort. Our collaboration is essentially a long-term workshop. When you have mutual trust and let your guard down, you can admit your fallibility, which is the only way to grow.

David Boyd (DB): Translating Breasts and Eggs with Sam was incredibly satisfying. That said, I could see how co-translation could go horribly wrong under different circumstances. If you asked around about experiences with co-translation, you’d probably hear more horror stories than happy endings . . . I agree with Sam. What made our collaboration work was trust. On top of that, if you’re going to co-translate, you’d better be happy with how your collaborator approaches writing. Otherwise it isn’t going to work. There was one other thing that I think made our collaboration work: the way we divided the text. Sam retained ultimate say over the translation of the narrative and I had the same degree of control over how we handled the dialogue. That division really helped. READ MORE…

The 2020 Booker International Longlist

March 2, 2020  |  in Essays, News  |  by Barbara Halla

This year the specter of violence, visceral brutality, and even hauntings loom large.

Every year, the prestigious Booker International Prize is always announced to a crowd of critics, writers, and readers around the world with much aplomb, resulting in great celebration, some dissatisfaction, and occasional puzzlement. Here at Asymptote, we’re presenting a take by our in-house Booker-specialist Barbara Halla, who tackles the longlist with the expert curiosity and knowledge of a reader with voracious taste, in place of the usual blurbs and bylines, and additionally questioning what the Booker International means. If you too are perusing the longlist in hunt for your next read, let this be your (atypical) guide.

I tend to dread reading the Booker wrap-ups that sprout immediately after the longlist has been announced. The thing is, most critics and bloggers have not read the majority of the list, which means that the articles are at best summaries of pre-existing blurbs or reviews. Plus, this is my third year covering the Booker International, and I was equally apprehensive about finding a new way to spin the following main acts that now compose the usual post-Booker script: 1) the list is very Eurocentric (which says more about the state of the publishing world than the judges’ tastes); 2) someone, usually The Guardian, will mention that the longlist is dominated by female writers, although the split is around seven to six, which reminds me of that untraceable paper arguing that when a particular setting achieves nominal equality, that is often seen as supremacy; and 3) indie presses are killing it, which they absolutely are because since 2016, they have deservedly taken over the Booker, from longlist to winner.

I don’t mean to trivialize the concerns listed above, especially in regards to the list’s Eurocentrism. Truth is, we talk a lot about the unbearable whiteness of the publishing world, but in writings that discuss the Booker, at least, we rarely dig deeper than issues of linguistic homogeneity and the dominance of literatures from certain regions. For instance: yes, three of the four winners of the International have been women, including all four translators, but how many of them have been translators of color? To my understanding, that number is exactly zero. How many translators of color have even been longlisted? The Booker does not publish the list of titles submitted for consideration, but if it did, I am sure we would notice the same predominance of white voices and white translators. I know it is easier said than done, considering how hard it is to sell translated fiction to the public in the first place, but if we actually want to tilt the axis away from the western literary canon, the most important thing we can do is support and highlight the work of translators of color who most likely have a deeper understanding of the literatures that so far continue to elude not just prizes, but the market in its entirety. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 28, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

This week's latest literary news from China and the United Kingdom!

This week our writers report on the impact of coronavirus on writers and readers in China, as well as the release of the International Booker Prize longlist. Read on to find out more! 

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting from China

“Fear can cause blindness, said the girl with dark glasses, Never a truer word, that could not be truer. . .” The words of José Saramago hover in the virus-stricken towns and cities of China: illness, the great equalizer. The streets freed of people, the antiseptic taste of disinfectant wafting, mask-ridden faces—outside China, the news grow its own, furious legends. Reports of the dead waver between hundreds and thousands, there is panic and disillusion and boredom and most of all, uncertainty.

So it is through this continual trajectory of doubt, compounded by fear, that Saramago’s renowned novel Blindness (published in China as 失明症漫记) has surged amidst the Chinese literary community as a compass towards what directions human nature may turn in times of encompassing hardship. In the growing scope of a blindness epidemic, Saramago unites fiction and ideology into a profound portrayal into how disease can infiltrate and dismantle the lattice of moral order, as well as how we may comfort one another, how the degradation of societal norms does not definitively mean the regression of one’s humanity. It is, albeit dark, a story of triumph, and triumph—even in books—is solace. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

February 19, 2020  |  in Asymptote at the Movies, Essays  |  by Rachel Allen, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Kicking off a new monthly column, our blog editors discuss Paul Schrader's visions of Yukio Mishima.

Despite a good deal of justifiable hysteria concerning the survival of print literature in the age of online publishing, new media, and a ruthless attention economy, it seems that the words of Umberto Eco have proven to be withstanding: the book will never die. The text has only become more malleable and diverse as new platforms are granted to it; literature’s performance is the same as that of a drop of paint in a glass of water—the entirety is invariably adopted into its presence. As devotees of the book, however, we at Asymptote found ourselves engaged by the artform that seems to lend itself particularly to the cooperation with literature: film. So, we present the debut of Asymptote at the Movies, in which we discuss cinematic adaptations of our favourite translated works and authors from the lens of readers, to discern and investigate that other enigmatic process of translation, that from the text to the screen.

Our first film is Paul Schrader’s masterful Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, an uncompromising and transcendent film that ideates scenes from the Japanese author’s life in juxtaposition to three of his novels: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko’s House, and Runaway Horses. Below, the blog editors talk about Yukio Mishima’s authorial presence in cinema, the literality of images, and the sensuality and emotionality of film’s structural elements.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): In a 1966 interview, Yukio Mishima quotes the pivotal line from Hagakure, the spiritual guide for samurai: “The way of the samurai is found in death.” He committed suicide four years later, after a lifetime under its fantastic thrall, leaving behind a legacy of language that dreamed in equal ecstasy of death; as a longtime reader of his work, I’m convinced that he intended his existence to be triumphantly underscored by this violent and dramatic end, and Paul Schrader evidently feels the same way. Of the many axioms that Mishima lived and wrote—beauty, purity, honour, truth—Schrader situates the author’s inveterate obsession with death as the ancestor of his work and life, and the suicide as the culmination of a lifetime of justification. So it is that he combines scenes from three of Mishima’s novels that delves most deeply into the psychology of devoted self-obliteration. I’d like to start by talking broadly about this film’s narrative, and as to what you both thought of the director’s Pirandellian choice, to render the author indistinguishable from his characters within such a fluid account, in which the fiction bleeds seamlessly into vérité.

READ MORE…

On the Road of the Beats in Japan

January 9, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Taylor Mignon

Who will carry on the Rexrothian torch to penetrate the nucleus of Japanese poetry and art in Japan?

The recognition of Japanese poetry is too often superficially doomed to the annals of tradition—and it’s understandable: what satisfies the Western fascination with the land of zen better than a haiku? But for those of us in search for something wilder, one only has to look back a few decades. Maddened and dazed, when the Beats exploded onto the global arts and literature scene, a new, ecstatic, insurrectionary poetry redefined the text, and poets from across the Pacific responded. Now, below is your crash course on the multitudinous and creatively proliferating intersection between Japan and Beat Poetry, by an expert at the scene of the beautiful crime, Taylor Mignon (with editorial assistance from translator and poet Jordan A. Y. Smith and Simon Scott).

This essay was originally published as the introduction to Tokyo Poetry Journal 5: Japan and the Beats.

It is the early 1990s, past midnight, and I am on a couch in a house in Yoyogi. The doorbell rings, and there’s knocking at the door. Shrugging off my slight inebriation, I scamper down the stairs to find cops who are enquiring about the loud TV, as the host had passed out, sound still blaring. I explain that the owner of the house made the disturbance, turn down the volume, and the cops leave.

The passed-out proprietor is Nishida Shunji, publisher of The Plaza: A Space for Global Human Relations, a bilingual journal of poetry, art, and prose. This was sometime after I had answered an ad in The Japan Times calling for a rewriter for Hitachi Review, a journal of technical articles written by Japanese engineers. With little idea of what I was rewriting, that production led us to what we really wanted to do, which was edit The Plaza. Mr. Nishida—a brilliant character, who liked to be called Leo—was a disheveled Japanese gentleman who could play a mean game of chess, liked to cycle, and often went around with his fly (social window) open. The connections made here at this job contributed to facilitating the meeting of several heavyweight Objectivist, Beat, and avant-garde poets.

One of the submitters to The Plaza was poet and editor Sherry Reniker, who had a knack for writing colorful correspondence and an experimental edge. At around that time, she was editing broadsides for the imprint published by Karl Young from Wisconsin, Light and Dust Books, whose authors included Morgan Gibson and a number of Japanese visual poets. Through her generous lead, I would correspond and eventually meet both Morgan and Objectivist poet Cid Corman, the latter based in Kyoto and the poet who first published Gary Snyder (Riprap, 1959) through his Origin press. (Cid told me he had met William Burroughs at the Beat Hotel in Paris, at about the same time he was putting Naked Lunch together, and thought that he was very disarming and quite approachable, not at all acting in a manner of affected notoriety as one could expect from someone of Burroughs’ reputation.) The Plaza would prove to be fertile ground to publish the koan-like poetry of Morgan, the nature poetry of Antler (who goes by that name only), Jeff Poniewaz, and Sherry and Cid, much with a Beat bent. READ MORE…

My 2019: Georgina Fooks

December 26, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Georgina Fooks

This year, I read more translated fiction than ever before, buoyed by my involvement in Asymptote

Here to continue our A Year in Reading series, please welcome Georgina Fooks, who made a conscious effort at the start of the year to expand her reading to include more women and non-European authors. Here is the result:

At the start of 2019, I consciously decided to read as much as possible. After several years of buying books and never reading them (a predicament neatly summed up by the Japanese word tsundoku), I resolved that this year, I wanted to read more books while buying less—so it is that I’ve done my best to read from my own shelves (although that doesn’t mean I have stopped buying books entirely).

The first half of this year was dominated by reading for academic purposes—so I read lots of French and Latin American fiction and poetry. My favourite author is Marguerite Duras, and I enjoyed Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein; there’s something special about the atmosphere she paints through language, her evocative style, and the way she explores desire. Throughout the whole book, Duras keeps you guessing as to who’s in control, who holds power, and she never answers that question for you. I was also really moved by A l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie by Hervé Guibert, which is an emotional read that blurs the boundaries between fiction and autobiography. When published in France, it caused a media stir for recounting how Michel Foucault died of an AIDS-related illness, but beyond media sensationalism, it’s a heart-wrenching account that explores betrayal in all its forms—betrayals between friends, broken promises, and the betrayal of oneself when writing an account of your own life. 

Some of my favourite Latin American authors are from Argentina, so in addition to reading Borges and Cortázar, two of my favourites, I also enjoyed exploring Silvina Ocampo’s stories for the first time; she is famously overshadowed by Borges (a fellow writer) and Adolfo Bioy Casares (her husband), but she’s received a lot more attention in recent years. My favourite story of hers, “Tales eran sus rostros”, has now been translated into English and serves as the title of a new collection of hers in English: Thus Were Their Faces, published by NYRB Classics. It describes a supernatural phenomenon, and is haunting and ambiguous in the best possible way. She writes that no one knew if what happened was terrible, but became beautiful, or beautiful, but became terrible—but she leaves it up to the reader to decide.  READ MORE…

My 2019: Barbara Halla

December 20, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

Much is made of relatability in fiction, but it’s not something that I really think about.

As December winds to a close, we at Asymptote are once again reflecting and reminiscing on a year spent with books, those that have spoken to us, accompanied us, and in their own discreet way, carved their paths in the tracks of time alongside us. So today, in lieu of our weekly roundup, we return to our annual series with the following recap of Assistant Editor Barbara Halla’s literary year, filled with character-driven titles that range from the intimate to the epic. 

I had this strange impulse, as I sat down to write my “Year in Reading”, to scrap my outline and do something different: write not about the books that have stayed with me because of how good they were, but focus instead on the books I did not like. A “year in books that made me wish I didn’t know how to read” meditation, so to speak. And that would certainly be fun. Unsurprisingly, I seem to have a lot more to say about the books that made me miserable than the ones I loved, but I fought the impulse. What good would that do, just more misery (and free publicity) to spread in the world. So, back to my outline, and the more traditional rundown of some of the books that meant a lot to me this year.

I am going to start in reverse-chronological order. Much is made of relatability in fiction, but it’s not something that I really think about, unless someone tells me that a specific book is supposed to be particularly relatable to someone of my age/gender/nationality, in which case my brain takes this as a challenge to actively dislike it. While reviewers certainly mentioned its style (Joycean!) and its girth (a brick!), I don’t remember anyone specifically telling me that I should read Ducks, Newburyport because I would find myself in its pages. Lucy Ellmann’s opus, where an American housewife from Ohio spends her day making pies and thinking about everything from the challenges of motherhood to the climate crisis, is certainly a book of our time. But I didn’t expect that my overwhelming reaction to it would be a sense of “if someone could scan my brain this is exactly what I’d imagine it to look like!” As for relatable, this is the only book I have read in my life that shows some pity for tortoise-owners like me, and the fact that our care and attention are treated with complete indifference by the subject of our affection. There is a lesson in there somewhere about love and letting go. READ MORE…

An Impeccable English: Notes on the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature

November 18, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Erik Noonan

The unstated significance of the way the books are written in English is the meaning of the Translated Literature Award.

As both writers and readers anticipate the results of the National Book Awards this upcoming Wednesday, we at Asymptote, to no surprise, are keeping a particular eye out for the outcome of the Translated Literature category. In this following essay, Assistant Editor Erik Noonan gives us a probing and interrogative look at the five books on the shortlist, looking beyond content to pursue answers regarding the linguistic journeys that these works have taken, in order to be chosen.

With the reinstatement of the Translated Literature category, the National Book Foundation is clearly attempting to correct the gender and culture biases of years past. From the beginning of the category in 1967 until 1983, when it was discontinued, every winning author was European with only four exceptions: Yasunari Kawabata in 1971, the anonymous author of The Confessions of Lady Nijo in 1974, the anonymous Chinese author(s) of Master Tung’s Wester Chamber Romance in 1977, and Ichiyō Higuchi with the Japanese authors of the Ten Thousand Leaves anthology in 1982. Lady Nijō and Higuchi were the only two women, albeit long deceased, to be awarded during the prize’s first iteration. Among the translators, Karen Brazell and Helen R. Lane won in 1974, Clara Winston won with Richard Winston in 1978, and Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link won in 1980. The rest were male. In 2018, the category was reinstated and the entry criteria revised, so that both the author and the translator had to be alive at the beginning of the awards cycle to qualify. Last year, the first of its new phase, author Yōko Tawada and translator Margaret Mitsutani took the award for The Emissary. This year, you can expect this corrective trend to continue (for example, every book on the longlist was written in a different language). READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2019

November 11, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden, Alyea Canada, Daljinder Johal, and Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

November’s best new translations, chosen by the Asymptote staff.

November brings plenty of exciting new translations and our writers have chosen four varied, yet equally enriching and timely works: Bohumil Hrabal’s memoir that is at once a detailed study of humans’ relationship with cats and an exploration of dealing with mounting pressures and stress; a debut collection of Chilean short stories which explores social and economic difficulties and sheds light on some of the causes behind Chile’s recent social unrest; Hiromi Kawakami’s follow-up novella to the international bestseller, Strange Weather in Tokyo; and a novel set on the Chagos Archipelago which recounts the expulsion of Chagossians from the island of Diego Garcia and examines cultural identity and exile. Read on to find out more!

hrabal_all_my_cats_jacket

All My Cats by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson, New Directions, 2019

Review by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Educational Arm Assistant

Bohumil Hrabal’s All My Cats is not for the faint of heart. Though fans of the author will recognize and appreciate the quirky humor and lyrical melancholy, one must also be prepared to take on the harsher aspects of the story, and I suspect that the uninitiated may find the descriptions of cats being murdered a bit much to take. The short memoir documents the author’s relationship to the feral cats living in his country cottage in Kersko, and his anguished labors to brutally limit their number. It is a lovely homage, and a richly evocative account of the pleasures of feline companionship, with lush descriptions of their delicate paws and velvety noses. We become acquainted with each individual kitty and their distinctive markings, habits, and personalities, but these rhapsodic stories are punctuated by episodes of grim slaughter that are depressingly specific—a morose account of an awful deed. And so, gradually, horrifyingly, this becomes a book about guilt and how it shapes one’s worldview, producing a strange reckoning of crime and punishment that reads retribution in the random alignments of events.

Witnessing Hrabal shuttling back and forth between his life in Prague and Kersko, we begin to notice that his concerns about his cats are combined with a steadily accumulating sense of anxiety and torment about his work, neighbors, and life. “What are we going to do with all those cats?” his wife asks, in an echoing refrain, as new litters of kittens, inexorably, arrive. The book is about the cats, but we start to realize that it is also not about the cats, not really, but rather, about how Hrabal struggles to manage the various stresses of his life more generally as he gains success and recognition as a writer. Haunted by his guilt over the murdered creatures, he surveys the world around him, reflecting on the relationship between art and suffering, and increasingly begins to feel that he is a plaything of fate, doomed to unhappiness, with no choice but surrender. READ MORE…

A Paltry Little Scrap of the Past: Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police

October 23, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Jacqueline Leung

Scrappy as memory may be . . . Ogawa emphasizes the importance of bearing witness to the past all the same.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder, Pantheon, 2019

It is easy to read Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police as a political allegory, along the lines of Milan Kundera’s oft-quoted proclamation in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Upon The Memory Police’s release in English this summer, publishing presses label the novel “Orwellian;” critics have similarly gravitated toward the timely themes of state surveillance and totalitarianism that form the novel’s backdrop, to which I relate in some way.

At the time of writing this essay, Hong Kong, the city where I was born, has been entrenched in protest for three months against the institutional violence committed by the government and the police force. With a crowdfunded campaign to place protest ads on international newspapers, a post on the August 19, 2019 edition of The New York Times asked readers to “[b]ear witness to Hongkongers’ fight for freedom. Tell our story—especially if we can no longer do it ourselves.” A month after, when two shafts of light went up in New York City to commemorate the eighteenth anniversary of 9/11, news headlines and Twitter posts abounded with the slogan “Never Forget,” used year after year to show the resilience of memory against trauma. Never have we been more well-equipped to record and share our experiences, but we are also more afraid than ever of not retaining control over our narratives, or of going unheard amidst the overflow of calamities documented around the world.

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