Language: Portuguese

The Blurriness of Intimacy: On Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries

June 1, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks

Abreu has the ability to narrate big emotions while undercutting them with a self-consciousness that means these moments never feel trite.

Moldy Strawberries by Caio Fernando Abreu, translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato, Archipelago Books, 2022

Moldy strawberries: just past the point of ripeness, bursting with life until they exude decay. Sweet yet bitter, delicious yet spoilt, nourishing yet rotten. It is this dichotomy that sustains Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries, tenderly translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato: a collection of short prose pieces and stories that brims with life even as its flesh bruises.

Abreu (1948-1996) came of age in a turbulent time in Brazilian political history. In 1968, the Department for Political and Social Order put him on the watch list they used to target their ideological opponents, and Abreu subsequently spent time in exile across Europe—in Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, England, and France. While his writing was heavily censored by the Brazilian authorities, he nonetheless became one of the country’s most beloved queer writers, winning the prestigious Jabuti Prize for Fiction three times for his luminous work.

Moldy Strawberries is considered by many to be his magnum opus. Published in 1982, its vivid depictions of queer communities amidst the perils of the military dictatorship, rising homophobia, and the looming AIDS crisis serve to affirm life even when the threat of death feels ever-present. In eighteen prose pieces, which range from dialogues and vignettes to fully developed stories, Abreu’s writing bears witness to humanity in all its fragile glory. His prose affirms the possibility of love, desire, and connection—or at least indulges that dream. READ MORE…

David J. Bailey on Translating Jorge de Sena’s “The Green Parrot”

April 6, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

Discover Portugal’s colonial legacy in de Sena’s humorous and heartbreaking account of life under the Estado Novo dictatorship

Featured in the current Winter 2022 issue, “A Tribute to the Green Parrot” by Jorge de Sena manages to be both a humorous and heartbreaking account of life under the Estado Novo dictatorship in Portugal. The story centers around an unlikely friendship between a young boy growing up in a stifling conservative household and the family’s pet parrot, an “impassioned” and “exuberant individual” from Brazil. In his English translation David J. Bailey captures the colorful hues of de Sena’s language and introduces Anglophone speakers to a beautiful piece from one of the greatest Lusophone writers of the twentieth century. I had the opportunity to speak with Bailey over email about his experience translating “A Tribute to the Green Parrot,” and in the following interview we discuss representations of colonialism in language, the power of children in conveying narratives, and the different measures that Lusophone writers have taken to overcome dictatorial censorship in their careers.

Rose Bialer: I wanted to start by asking: How did you first begin translating from Portuguese?

David J. Bailey: I became interested in Portuguese almost by chance, opting to study it at degree level alongside Spanish. I quickly grew fond of the language and culture and eventually took a PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian literature to pursue an academic career. I’ve done commercial translation in the past, but this was my first serious attempt at translating a literary piece.

RB: When did you first come to encounter the work of Jorge de Sena? How did your engagement with his writing develop into your translation of “A Tribute to the Green Parrot?”

DB: When I started lecturing at the University of Manchester, I inherited a course on Portuguese colonialism from my predecessor, Prof Hilary Owen. Some of Jorge de Sena’s stories were on the reading list and I was especially moved by this one, which ends the collection Os Grão-Capitães. De Sena was a key figure in the resistance to the Portuguese dictatorship, on a par with other writers from his generation such as Miguel Torga and José Régio. “A Tribute to the Green Parrot” was something of an anomaly in not having been translated before. I looked at it with some M.A. students last year and ended up translating the entire story during lockdown. READ MORE…

The International Booker Comes Home

April 4, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

There is much to be said about the (fleeting) feeling of accomplishment in seeing a favorite longlisted.

With the upcoming announcement of the Booker International shortlist on April 7, our in-house Booker expert is here to take you through the impressive longlist, discuss the intersection between closed-door judging and fervent public online discourses, and the increased visibility of the translator in bringing these vital titles into the English-language sphere, Read on to find out more!

The International Booker Prize, like a number of other British literary prizes, has become a unifying topic amidst a very active online community. Twitter is the kind of place where bubbles of connections and affinities naturally form, but participating in this nexus simultaneously fosters a detached sense of irony that makes any earnest acknowledgment to it a touch mortifying. I am willing to take the risk of too much earnestness today because, for the sake of honesty, my relationship to the International Booker would not be the same without this community.

I became a regular follower of the prize after attending a meeting with the judges at Shakespeare and Company in Paris back in 2016 (a discussion I left certain in the knowledge that Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, was going to win, as it did). But it was entering in conversation with other readers and translators through Twitter that made the International Booker an event that I await impatiently every March. We make a friendly race out of reading the entire longlist, and debates about the merits of each selection get unreasonably heated, as we work to change the minds of others about the books we love—or even loath at times. Not to mention that I would be very happy not to have the “what constitutes nonfiction” debate again in my lifetime, which was in full swing both last year, with the longlisting of In Memory of Memory and The War of the Poor, and in 2019 when The Years was shortlisted.

Perhaps more importantly, being part of this community has shaped the approach I take the reading (and reviewing) the list. Thanks to it, I am constantly aware of the labor that goes into each book, not merely the translation but the efforts by the translators themselves, often acting as both agent and publicist. For instance, when Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights won the International Booker in 2018, Jennifer Croft had spent a decade advocating for it to be published. Furthermore, participating even somewhat actively in the discussion happening on places like Twitter is to be aware of the uneven dynamics of the publishing world. Much has rightfully been said about the International Booker’s Eurocentrism (which this year’s longlist provides a refreshing break from), but at the same time, as an online participant in these communities, you see in real time that the Booker is probably replicating trends that exist within publishing at large. READ MORE…

Happy World Poetry Day!

March 21, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Celebrate with an eclectic selection of the best poems from our archives!

In honor of World Poetry Day, we invite you to revisit some of the best international poetry from our eleven-year archive. For a start, Brazilian poet Lêdo Ivo’s work soars to great heights through its accumulation of brilliant specificities. But it also catches one unawares with looser, breath-taking lines like these: “Life itself is a round thing / so that when we go wrong, we go wrong roundly.” Revisit Lêdo Ivo’s “The Earth Is Round” from our Summer 2021 issue.

 

A leading light of South Korea’s contemporary poetry scene, Yi Won takes ‘avant-garde’ to new extremes. Catapulting the reader into a future where technology rules the human spirit, her lacerating social commentary interrogates the very nature of poetry itself. Courtesy of translator Kevin Michael Smith, discover Yi Won’s radical work from our Summer 2018 edition. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Breath” by Ana Luísa Amaral

February 22, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Margaret Jull Costa

The woman sitting opposite me / plays with her handbag— / distractedly

This Translation Tuesday, we are thrilled to feature a poem by the award-winning Portuguese writer Ana Luísa Amaral. In “The Breath,” the speaker’s observation of the mundane everyday on public transport turns into a moment of poetic transport. Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, this life-affirming poem from a frequent contributor duo is one to hold and behold, to turn over in our hands until, we realise, it becomes something too that breathes, something that moves.

The Breath 

The woman sitting opposite me
plays with her handbag—
distractedly 

She flips the handle-cum-wing
of the bag
back and forth
twines it around her fingers 

Like a small
dancerly bird,
the wing-cum-handle comes alive
between the woman’s fingers  READ MORE…

Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: Phenotypes by Paulo Scott

January 31, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Farmer

In raising the issue of racism and one’s actions in the face of it, the book itself is arguably a force of social progress and understanding . . .

In the first few pages of Paulo Scott’s striking Phenotypes, the protagonist and narrator describes the appearances of himself and his brother in contrasts: blond and brown, fair and dark. What follows is an immersive and urgent novel that addresses the ethics and injustices of Brazil’s colourism in Scott’s signature fluidity and perspicacity, exploring the limits of intentions and justices to probe at the centric forces of activism. As our first Book Club selection of 2022, it is a vital and incisive look at a nation—and a world—stricken with crises of race and identity.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, 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.  

Phenotypes by Paulo Scott, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, And Other Stories, 2022

What is the price of activism? Of wanting to change the world for the better? Do motivations, or true intentions, make a difference?

Federico, the protagonist of Paulo Scott’s engrossing and astute novel Phenotypes, is an activist by most definitions. He is co-founder of the Global Social Forum in his hometown—the “whirring blender” that is Porto Alegre; he has researched colourism in Brazil; he has advised NGOs in Latin America and beyond; and now, he is serving on a commission tasked with solving the problems caused by racial quota systems within universities.

Activism, from catalyst to consequence, forms an unavoidable part of his reality. The son of a white mother and a Black father, Federico has always been light-skinned while his brother Lourenço is much darker, and this ability to pass as white has afforded Federico privileges that his brother has never been able to enjoy. The discrepancy has been a lifelong source of awkwardness and discomfort, forcing him into a complex relationship with his own identity. Over time, Federico has ensconced himself in layer upon layer of guilt—a self-inflicted yoke around his neck that continually fuels his activism and shapes his life’s ambitions.

Federico’s impressive resume of achievements stem from his efforts to tackle Brazil’s seemingly insurmountable racism problem—but are these noble actions merely attempts at controlling his circumstances? Is he simply—as his former girlfriend Bárbara puts it—surrounding himself with “noise”? Bárbara, a psychologist who provides clinical care for those traumatised by activism, knows all too well the price people pay fighting for causes they believe in. In her patients, the constant struggle to topple a seemingly insurmountable system, as well as exposure to the true extents of injustice, has left them physically and emotionally drained. In certain cases, the trauma is irreparable. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2022

January 24, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

The reconstituting of memories that have been erased is a central concern for the playful yet meditative Winter 2022 issue.

Asymptote’s Winter 2022 issue is now out, marking the magazine’s eleventh year in publication! The newest edition features writing from a record forty-three countries and twenty languages. Here to introduce you to what this issue has to offer are our blog editors with some thoughts on the pieces that stood out to them the most.

In Maria Stepanova’s 2021 genre-defying work In Memory of Memory, she wrote that her excavation of family history was motivated by a desire to discover “the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.” Stepanova was absorbed with not only recovering the stories of her Jewish family but also probing her own obsessive relationship with memory itself. The memoir suggests the faultiness of memory in its rips and tears, while betraying an anxiety over its artifice in the way the memoirist manipulates the archive through inclusion, exclusion, and distortion for the purpose of her narrative. The reconstituting of memories that have been erased through the forces of time and displacement is a central concern for the playful yet meditative Winter 2022 issue. Like Stepanova, the authors of these varied works construct complex inquiries into the past through reappraisals of memory, dreams of alternate lives, and imaginative play with form. They seek the truth through memories while contesting their inevitable artificiality and malfunctioning.

In Rose Bialer’s deeply affecting interview, the Hungarian poet, memoirist, and translator George Szirtes speaks of returning to certain memories and themes in his personal history throughout his career in poetry, sometimes writing new poems that function as continuations of collections published decades before. This idea of Szirtes’s “return” to the same moments for their comprehension reflects his mistrust of memories but also his belief that truths are embedded within them. One of the talk’s many astonishing moments is when Szirtes claims that the return over time to the same memories in his poems reveals parallel narratives that add up to a palimpsest of personal history and identity. For Szirtes, formal constraints such as the terza rima continuously open the same memories to new facets and understandings. This illuminating conversation demonstrates how the fluidity of memory allows the poet-translator to construct an unstable past and self while “registering the sense of truth in all its complexity.”

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Place of the Living-Dead” by Gabriela Ruivo Trindade

January 18, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Gabriela Ruivo Trindade and Victor Meadowcroft

Some nights, my two legs and left arm come to visit me . . .

This Translation Tuesday, we feature a story that treads the line between the fantastical surrealism of dreaming and the brutal reality of living under conditions of war. In award-winning writer Gabriela Ruivo Trindade’s compact and evocative story, a disoriented narrator reckons with the aftermath of having stepped on a mine, where her lost limbs visit so as to relate to her the physical and spiritual damage that had been wrecked upon her body and her family. Translated from the Portuguese by the author herself and Victor Meadowcroft, the narrator’s voice exhibits a remarkable restraint. This quietly moving story brings the reader to a psychological space where the narrator’s processing of trauma feels at once real and irreal, at once emotional and strangely muted, an always liminal place. 

I don’t know my name, or where I was born, or how many years have passed since that day.  Around me there is only a grey haze, through which I try in vain to peer. I’ve lost track of the days: entire evenings are condensed into minutes. I’m surrounded by many others, stretched out on countless cots like mine. 

My head rests on a damp, foul-smelling straw pillow. My head is the only part of my body supporting me. The rest—my torso, my pelvis, both legs cut above the knee, and my right arm—I can barely feel. They’re entirely numb and don’t respond to my commands.  

Some nights, my two legs and left arm come to visit me; the arm, poor thing, always hurrying after the other two. That’s how I used to move, always rushing from place to place. I loved dancing, I remember that well, and people even used to say I would become a great dancer. Too bad. I heard one of the women who come to feed us say I’d stepped on a mine, a mina. I don’t know what that is; I can only remember Granny Mina, who used to tell stories of witches and sprites to all the neighbourhood kids.

But I was telling you about these visits from my arm and legs; it’s through them that I hear news of my family and other things I’ve long forgotten. They turn up every night, come through the door and begin talking right away, as if I were already fully awake, awaiting their arrival. And I am, really; I don’t know if it’s some kind of presentiment. On their first visit I was startled. I awoke to a hand shaking me and, upon opening my eyes, noticed there wasn’t a body attached to the arm. I thought it was a ghost and cried out.

Relax, said a voice, nobody’s going to hurt you. Come on, don’t you recognise us anymore?  READ MORE…

Domestic and National Dramas: On Empty Wardrobes by Maria Judite de Carvalho

January 6, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

The novella manages to cast the eye of a worried oracle on an entire nation.

Empty Wardrobes by Maria Judite de Carvalho, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, Two Lines Press, 2021

The year is 1966. Conservative Portuguese dictator António Salazar is advancing in age. During his thirty-four-year reign, economic policies have failed to fulfill their initial promise, the regime’s supposed “political stability” has stifled the nation, and costly colonial wars have wearied its citizens. The Carnation Revolution, which will end his corporatist Estado Novo with virtually no blood spilled, is still eight years away. Into this climate of looming uncertainty and cautious hope, Maria Judite de Carvalho inserts her simmering novella, Empty Wardrobes, asking impossible questions about the nature of self-determination, ambition, and love. On the eve of a revolution, it dares to doubt whether or not the people will be brave enough to support each other, rather than the powers that be.

Empty Wardrobes sets its existential drama in the domestic sphere. Dora Rosário is a young widow with a daughter, Lisa—young by today’s standards, but “both ageless and hopeless” to the onlooker. She had loved her husband Duarte desperately while he lived, upheld his purity of character, and believed their life together to be a happy one—albeit with some financial troubles.

An egotistical Christ, she used to think; a secular, unbelieving Christ who had only come into the world in order to save himself. But save himself from what, from what hell? She felt no bitterness, though, when she thought all this, only a slight bittersweetness, or a secret sense of contentment because she did love him. He was a good man, a pure man, untouched by the surrounding malice and greed. He remained uncontaminated.

In his death, she devotes herself to his goodness like a nun. Her name, after all, means “rosary”’ and indeed she does seem to be ticking off days like beads. She passes one to get to the next, her mind wholly focused on “the good times”—the happy days of her marriage, which she hopes neither to retrieve nor improve upon.

We come to know Dora as a rather pitiable creature—self-effacing, above all. The precarious period of early widowhood leaves her with the impression that “she and Lisa were on one side, and all the others were on the other side. The others were the enemy from whom she could expect nothing good, only evil.” Isolation and poverty, however, degrade her pride much more easily than the memory of her late husband; ultimately, one cannot live on integrity alone. A lingering acquaintance gets her a job at an antique shop, though her husband had never wanted her to work. She raises Lisa in a bourgeois manner of which he would surely disapprove. There’s an inconsistency between Dora’s idolization of her husband and the actions she takes in order to survive—a paradox analogous to that of her fellow citizens, and of anyone who has been failed by a beloved ideology. An ideology, whether implemented on the national or domestic level, is not necessarily flexible enough to meet the challenges of daily life. Though she may toe the party line in public—and even in private—it’s a less obedient resourcefulness that allows her to prepare her daughter for a more optimistic future.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 20, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Eva Wissting, and Peera Songkünnatham

This week, our editors report from Thailand, Sweden, and the USA.

Around the world, the way we read is changing: Eva Wissting digs into book sales data in Sweden and finds a spike in digital subscription services amid the pandemic, Peera Songkünnatham reports that Thai poets are reinventing a classic form, and Allison Braden rounds up a slew of Women in Translation Month events. The annual celebration, dedicated to shaking up the canon, makes for a perfect moment to envision the heady, vivid future of literature.

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

A literary project called Bokbastionen (“The Book Bastion”) is finally about to launch in Sweden. The Swedish Arts Council has granted Svenska Bokhandlareföreningen, an association of Swedish booksellers, 400,000 SEK to support in-store events with authors. Although it was the challenges posed by the pandemic that led to the idea of supporting booksellers, coronavirus restrictions have delayed its start because gatherings have not been possible until now. Finally, the first event supported by the project will be held this coming week at a poetry festival in picturesque Söderköping. The initial plan for Bokbastionen included twenty author events this year, but about half of these will spill over into next year instead. The interest to host events has been particularly large among smaller, independent bookstores, which now are looking for ways to create interest among readers and book lovers.

Even though the pandemic has had severe consequences for much of the cultural sector, book sales have had a positive development in Sweden, according to a new report from the Swedish Publishers’ Association. In the first half of 2021, overall book sales have increased by over 10 percent, but there is an ongoing shift between sales channels. The largest growth is in digital subscriptions with almost 20 percent, followed by an almost 15 percent increase in online bookstores. Physical bookstores, on the other hand, have had an 8 percent decrease in sales during the first half of this year. Both digital and printed books increased in sales, by 14 percent and 7 percent respectively, indicating that ebooks are not replacing physical books. Out of all book sales in Sweden, almost 80 percent take place online—50 percent through online bookstores and 28 percent through digital subscriptions. The report concludes that book sales have been greatly influenced by the pandemic. More customers have turned to online options, including digital subscription services. Though there are more bookstores closing down permanently than there are starting up, readers seem to be returning to physical bookstores as vaccination rates increase. READ MORE…

The Full Spectrum of Phrases: An Interview with Annie McDermott

July 28, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Sophia Stewart

I like to jump around and work on different passages at random; it’s a way of coming at them fresh and seeing what stands out.

Annie McDermott is a London-based literary translator working from Spanish and Portuguese into English, bringing to readers the works of acclaimed Spanish-language authors like Mario Levrero, Ariana Harwicz, and Selva Almada. She now adds into her exceptional oeuvre Brenda Lozano’s Loop, a fragmented novel that takes the form of its protagonist’s personal notebook, kept while her boyfriend Jonás is away in Spain. A wonderfully wandering text that traces the myriad pathways of the mind, Loop is the English debut of one of Spanish-language literature’s rising stars and an immersive, innovative introduction to Lozano—who is already a widely influential writer in her native Mexico. I recently had the pleasure to correspond with McDermott over email, and quickly took to her; she is as excellent an epistler as she is a translator, her prose suffused with wit and poise. During our exchange, McDermott graciously shared with me her approach to dialectical difference, her fragmented method of translation, and her love of phrasal verbs. 

Sophia Stewart (SS): You translate fiction and poetry from Spanish and Portuguese. How did you come to pursue both of these languages? What’s your literary-translation origin story? Do you find you enter a different “zone” depending on which language you’re translating?

Annie McDermott (AM): I learnt Spanish by mistake and Portuguese on purpose—or maybe “by chance” is more accurate than “by mistake.” I moved to Mexico after finishing university, on a bit of a whim, and ended up staying for a year, teaching English and learning Spanish and living the sort of bilingual life that I’d always found both completely fascinating and completely distant from my monolingual upbringing in the south of England. I realised I loved spending time in the space between languages, and that was what led me to think about translation. I then moved to Brazil, to São Paulo, with the specific aim of learning Portuguese so I could translate Brazilian literature as well.

As for the zones: I think mostly the zone depends on the text rather than the language, but the zone does change from language to language as well. I learnt both Spanish and Portuguese as an adult, and when you learn languages as an adult you often vividly remember the circumstances in which you first encountered particular words, meaning that your existence within that language is strewn with all these different memories of people, places and situations. So in a sense, switching between languages means switching between different sets of memories.

SS: Allow me to geek out for a second, because I studied Spanish dialectology and sociolinguistics in undergrad. With so many regional differences in Spanish, how do you approach issues of dialect in your work? Translating, for instance, a Mexican author and an Argentine author would be totally different, from the conjugations to the slang. Did you learn a specific dialect of Spanish first, and then expand out to others from there? Do you feel most comfortable with a particular dialect?

AM: What a great thing to study! I’m jealous. Yes, there are so many regional varieties, and it’s one of the things that makes Spanish such a fascinating language. One of my favourite things is looking something up on the WordReference forum and finding an extensive thread full of people weighing in from different countries, and even different regions of different countries, each with a completely different idea of what the word means.

I learnt Spanish living in Mexico, and it’s definitely Mexican slang, rhythms, and speech patterns that I feel most comfortable with. When it comes to translating other varieties of Spanish, I think the important thing is remembering how little you know—it’s so easy to be tripped up. This is another reason why I’m in awe of people who translated before the internet; nowadays, you can watch films and videos, and read news articles, social media posts, etc. etc., from whichever region you happen to be working on, and get a feel for it that way as well. READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2021

July 26, 2021  |  in News  |  by Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, and Lee Yew Leong

Our Section Editors pick their favorite pieces from the Summer 2021 issue!

The brand-new Summer 2021 edition of Asymptote is barely ten days old and we are still enjoying the diverse offerings from thirty-five countries gathered therein. Last week, blog editors Xiao Yue Shan, Allison Braden, and Shawn Hoo shared their favorites. Today, section editors Lee Yew Leong, Bassam Sidiki, and Caridad Svich distill their highlights for us:

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, Special Features, and Interview Editor:

Why do so few men read fiction by women? lamented MA Sieghart as recently as seventeen days ago in The Guardian. With female authors taking five out of six slots, the Summer fiction lineup, published just in time for #WomeninTranslation month, offers parochial-minded readers a taste of what they are missing out on. These stories are also deeply centered on the female experience: Gabriel Payares and Maša Kolanović deliver unsettling takes on pregnancy and new motherhood, while the aging protagonists of Kathrin Schmidt’s and Can Xue’s stories go on mushroom-fueled head trips that seem to set the universe right again. A third set explores the corrosive effects of work on identity (in particular, Joanna Chen’s superb translation of mechanical engineer Tehila Hakimi’s Company recalled for me Amelie Nothomb’s masterpiece Fear and Trembling).

When you don’t go by a Judeo-Christian name, the constant bracing against mispronunciation can result in estrangement from your own identity, as Xiao Yue Shan explored in her recent essay on linguistic exile. I can relate. That’s why I found the ending of Abdushukur Muhammet’s “My Name” deeply moving. Translator Munawwar Abdulla not only does an excellent job nailing Muhammet’s melancholic voice, but also provides much needed contextualization in her translator’s note that imbues the poem with a sharp political layer. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “It Was Then That I Lost That Child” by Carla Bessa

July 20, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Elton Uliana

And so then, I had: my children, I had: seven children, I mean: six

The fate of a working class mother who loses her child is the focus of this week’s Translation Tuesday, which features an unforgettable experiment with the short story form. Devised through a verbatim technique, Carla Bessa—actress, director, and winner of Brazil’s most prestigious literary award, the Jabuti Prize—mines the genre for its dramatic possibilities. Bessa’s moving story switches deftly between a confessional monologue with eclectic punctuation that lends the mother’s voice a searing, staccato quality and, on the other hand, a set of intricate stage movements revolving around a domestic scene. The effect is a casual meeting of tragedy and mundanity. Indeed, for translator Elton Uliana, this story conveys “a reality of marginality and crime which is becoming increasingly prevalent in Brazil, particularly with the rise of far-right politics, its contempt for and disenfranchising of the lower classes.” This social commentary is achieved with great formal and emotional intensity in “It Was Then That I Lost That Child.” 

(She takes the chicken out of the freezer and puts it in the microwave. She rinses the thermos with boiling water, she puts the filter holder over the mouth of the flask, she places the paper filter in the holder and fills it with coffee powder, five level soup spoons.)

And so then, I had: my children, I had: seven children, I mean: six. Because: the one who got killed, I never really got to raise him. I couldn’t. I only: I only had him for the first month, then his father: stole my child from me, yes, it was his father: he kidnapped my boy.

(She pours the hot water carefully over the coffee until the filter is full. She stops, and waits for the water to seep through. The microwave beeps. With the kettle in one hand she goes to the microwave, presses the button that opens the door to remove the chicken. She realises that she has only one hand free and pauses.)

He beat me up. I’ve got the scars here on my face, see, ruined: it was him. That’s why I’ve got a face like this, all: destroyed, have a look. 

(She pours more water on the coffee, she stops and waits.)

He stole my son, and: I reported him. And so: it was his mother that had to look after my son. He and his mother raised my son, but: they never let me visit him. Then: I took them to court again: and I won: I won the right to see my own son. A right that was already mine. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2021

July 19, 2021  |  in News  |  by Allison Braden, Shawn Hoo, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors pick their favourite pieces from the Summer 2021 issue!

As Asymptote celebrates the first issue of our second decade in world literature, we bring to you new work from thirty-five countries and twenty-four languages in our Summer 2021 issue! Drawing from the theme of our Special Feature, “Age of Division,” these varied writings speak to a moment of mounting borders, fractious politics, and heightened suspicion towards the other—but so too do they hint at the possibility of unexpected solidarities, strange encounters, and new geographies of affinity. Not sure where to begin with this bountiful issue? Let our blog editors take you through some of their favourite pieces to reveal a world that is, in the words of Lêdo Ivo, “sweet, full, pungent, and luminous.” 

In the spring of 2004, an intifada singer in Ramallah said to his interviewer, “What I do on stage and what martyrs do on the streets are one and the same, just with different instruments.” Were resistance embodied in genre, the shape would undoubtedly be that of music. The art which “all art constantly aspires towards” for its certain coherence of form and content, this singular quality also speaks to its ability to move people passionately, crucially, to action. For music is a verb; it must be performed and enacted. It embodies, within its very idea, its eventual actualisation.  

In the excerpt from Olivia Elias’s forthcoming poetry collection Your Name, Palestine, she makes a graceful address: “Musicians, a few minutes more.” Moving on to materialise the scene in sensual, wondering lines, she makes gentle work of speaking the terrible wreckage done to the country where she was born. Born in Haifa and living now in France, she is said to occupy a privileged space within the Palestinian diaspora as one of the few poets in French. In these poems, translated masterfully by Sarah Riggs and Jérémy Robert, she creates in her adopted language the continuation of the Palestinian nation, transcending geographical realities to rhyme with the poetics of Palestinian agency, with both singing and the witness of singing.

Musicians, I am speaking to you of a country
engulfed in a fault of history
of a people chosen to pay the price
of another sacrifice
of a story more than a hundred years old
full of sound and fury and blood

Intended for voices set to instruments, Elias’s work speaks to the intifada singers, the debke performances that conceptualise art from the violences of occupation, and the traditional melodies evoking the dignity of liberation. But without violence and ideology, the measured cadences of her lines are patient with painterly instinct. These poems draw their necessity from their stoic dreams of clarity. Palestine, untorn, in concert, singing.

In Mulugeta Alebachew’s “Heaven Without Prickly Pears,” writing similarly seeks physical qualities—the savoury texture of the language, the kinetic scan of the eye as it seeks and takes in. The topography of the Ethiopian town, Geneté, is overlaid with the infinite dimensions of the mind. Familiarities, kinships, intimacies run through in capillaries of psychogeography, drawing further on its composite, ramified history: “her mosaicked gum-tattoos of more than a dozen languages and myriad cultures.” With co-translator Bethlehem Attfield, Alebachew has done a wonderful job of rendering the original Amharic text, lush with dialect, into a fluent poetry that nevertheless beholds the precision of references outside of the English language.

This town bears my fondest memories, life vividly lived, and lessons well learned . . . my yesterdays, todays, and predictable tomorrows lay on its streets. . . My home includes the highway. My home does not exclude the other homes. 

In this beautiful passage which eclipses the cautious private/public boundary, Alebachew speaks to the growing of the world. Just as in the acts of reading and writing, the dialectic division of outside and inside loses its binds, and one bleeds into the other. By bringing us into his Geneté, the subtle resentment of possessive being is defied; we are given interior knowing without it being our interior. In this world there is no space indifferent or vacant. It is all compounded in an infinite geometry of living; to inhabit a text that so generously navigates a place, it is an astonishing gift. 

—Xiao Yue Shan

READ MORE…