Language: Spanish

El traductor y defensor del lenguaje / The Translator-as-Advocate: An Interview with Jerome Herrera 

October 17, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

It was not until I began working in Manila that I realized just how special the Chavacano language is. It’s funny how absence creates fondness.

When asked why he translated Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic The Little Prince into his native tongue, Jerome Herrera had this to say: love of, pride for, and respect to the Chavacano language. A hypernym for the several varieties of Asia’s only Spanish-based creole, Chavacano is reportedly spoken by almost a million Filipinos as their first language. Among these varieties are Chavacano de Caviteño (or “kitchen Spanish,” as Jose Rizal called it in a work by Gina Apostol), the now-extinct Chavacano de Ermiteño (once spoken in the Manila neighbourhood of Ermita), Chavacano de Ternateño or Bahra (a Ternate municipality in Cavite Province), Chavacano de Cotabateño (Cotabato City), Chavacano de Abakay (Davao City but presumed to be extinct), and Chavacano de Zamboangueño, the native tongue to almost half a million people—mostly in Zamboanga City where Herrera grew up. 

In contemporary history, Herrera’s is the fourth translation of The Little Prince into a Philippine language, which first appeared in Tagalog-based Filipino (by Lilia F. Antonio in 1969 and then Desiderio Ching in 1991), then the Central Bikol or Bikol Naga language (by Fr. Wilmer S. Tria in 2011). Most of these titles, I suspect, are translations from the English—translations of translations.

In this interview, I asked Herrera about El Diutay Principe, his translation into the Zamboangueño Chavacano of Saint-Exupéry’s novella, devising a practical orthography towards a language that is departing from its original Castilian Spanish meaning, and other geolinguistic issues in translating into the mother tongue.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Growing up, how was the Chavacano language instilled in you? Was it taught in school? 

Jerome Herrera (JH): My elementary school days were not very favorable towards the Chavacano language because I studied at a Christian school, where speaking it in class was discouraged. I guess this was a time in the nation’s history when they were trying very hard to promote Tagalog—I won’t call it Filipino for political reasons—as the national language. 

Even with my inauspicious beginnings, I grew up with Chavacano all around me. At home, my dad would listen to radio news programs and watch TV news programs in Chavacano all the time and occasionally, I would even hear mass in Chavacano. At the public high school I went to, Chavacano was used heavily by the teachers (as a medium of instruction) as well as students; however, I had already become used to speaking only Tagalog at school and, after six years, the fear of getting reprimanded for speaking Chavacano was heavily embedded in my mind.

Even in college, I had a hard time accepting the fact that speaking Chavacano was allowed in the classroom, but during this time, I had already slowly begun speaking Chavacano with some friends and even with teachers. So until the age of twenty, I had mostly spoken it only at home and with family. The Chavacano subject was reintroduced in schools only in 2012.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Literature is not about answers. But questions”: An Interview with Eduardo Halfon, Author of Canción

October 12, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

The trick is knowing what not to say, then being able to honor the decision to leave it unsaid.

By 2004, Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon had published three books: one about the life and death of Guatemalan painter Carlos Valenti; one about Miguel de Cervantes; one about how writers become writers. Four years later, he released a book of short stories called El boxeador polaco (The Polish Boxer, Editorial Pre-Textos), which inaugurated a new era for him as a writer. The book became an earthquake, and its ripples can still be felt today—nearly ten books later. Its stories went on to expand into novels, their themes and ideas forming a continual thread through the author’s prolific oeuvre, acknowledging the truth that stories, just like life, must be built on what came before. Canción, his latest book to be translated into English (Bellevue Press), borrows characters, plot lines, and entire sections from Signor Hoffman and Mañana nunca lo hablamos, books he published seven and eleven years ago respectively.

Because of this continuity and rehashing of stories, Eduardo’s body of work has often been referred to as a novela en marcha—an ongoing novel. It’s important to note that all of these stories share the same narrator: a Guatemalan author, former engineer, and chain-smoker named Eduardo Halfon, who shares many of the same experiences of real-life Eduardo. It seems all part of an intricate plan—though it’s everything but. Doubt, silence, contradiction, el no sé—not knowing— improvisation, and uncertainty: those are the many hands that pile one on top of another “to dominate” Eduardo’s writing.

In Canción, out last month and masterfully translated from Spanish by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn, Eduardo tells the story of his Lebanese grandfather, also named Eduardo Halfon, and the time the Guatemalan guerrillas kidnapped him in 1967. In this impactful and luminous novel, we read about the Guatemalan Civil War—its violence, fear, and, again, the uncertainty. We get glimpses, and nothing else, of the actual kidnapping. We get glimpses, and nothing else, of the time Eduardo’s grandfather was in captivity. Because that’s also part of Halfon’s remarkable style: silence, mystery, darkness.

Recently I spoke with Eduardo about all of that. About Canción, about his novela en marcha, about some of his most memorable characters. We talked about writing in the dark. About the engineering behind a story. We talked about what’s real and the truth. About memory, childhood, silences, and, again—and as always—about not knowing and how important it’s for him to blur the lines between himself and his narrator. We talked, we exchanged emails, voice notes, and messages, and he replied from Guatemala City, Mexico City, Spain, and Germany. As anticipated, after reading Canción and yet again talking to Eduardo about his book, I have more questions than answers.

José García Escobar (JGE): With Canción, it’s the first time I’ve seen you address Guatemalan history so thoroughly in a book. Naturally, you had to mention some events and people because they were relevant to your grandfather’s kidnapping; others, however, seem to be part of the story’s background (Jacobo Árbenz, the 1954 CIA-backed coup, the rise of the guerrilla movement in the 1960s, Julio Ramírez Arteaga). How did that weaving come to be—between foregrounding or backgrounding history?

Eduardo Halfon (EH): When you’re writing a story that’s part of a historical account, that history has to be believable. In the case of Canción, that means its historical background, the Guatemalan Civil War, and the country’s recent history. I needed to investigate all of that, and I felt like I had to include it more for the feeling than for the facts. Some details are in the background—they’re props, so to speak—and some details are part of the story. That weaving is very organic, though. There’s no premeditation. It’s just a feeling of what should be where on the stage. What should be in the foreground. What should be in the background. It’s a very natural process of selection and placing. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

October 7, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Eva Wissting, and Thuy Dinh

Literary news from New York, Vietnam, and Sweden!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on Spanish poetry readings in New York, new Vietnamese translations of classic Japanese novels, and the Gothenberg Book Fair in Sweden. Read on to find out more!

 Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from New York

Though I usually report from Mexico City, I recently moved to New Haven to begin a PhD program at Yale. However, relocating has not prevented me from engaging with Hispanophone literary communities, particularly in New York City, a creative hub that connects people from all over the world, and where literary readings in Spanish are common.

The first event I attended was a multilingual poetry open mic at the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan. Hosted by Spanish poet Marcos de la Fuente, the soirée “Se Buscan Poetas / Poets Wanted” takes place every last Wednesday of the month. It brings together poets from New York and beyond, who sign up to share their work to the Bowery’s attentive audience. I went on Wednesday, August 31, and participated both as spectator and reader among other emerging Spanish- and English-speaking poets. The event opened with a performance by De la Fuente and actress Clara Francesca. They set the mood for the night with a dramatic interpretation of the bilingual poem “Solstice,” published in the anthology Poetryfighters (Ultramarina Editorial, 2022), assembled by De la Fuente himself. The reading was both exhilarating and engaging. Beyond simply voicing words from the book, De la Fuente and Francesca modulated their expressions and walked around the stage in synchrony with the content and rhythm of the text, creating moments of emotional and aural tension that excited the audience, more like a concert or play than a traditional poetry reading. In addition to hosting the monthly open mic, De la Fuente also directs the New York City part of the Kerouac Festival, an international poetry, music, and performance celebration that takes place in Vigo, New York, and Mexico City. Earlier this year, the festival featured the Chilean writer and Asymptote contributor Arelis Uribe.

READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Blow-Up

October 6, 2022  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by MARGENTO, Rubén López, Thuy Dinh, and Xiao Yue Shan

Ultimately, both Antonioni’s cinematic approach and Cortázar’s literary vision are simply two sides of the same coin.

Michelangelo Antonioni and Julio Cortázar form our double feature for this latest edition of Asymptote at the Movies—a perfect pairing in their own idiosyncratic way, as two auteurs who both formidably challenged the responsibilities and capacities of their mediums. Cortázar’s “Les babas del diablo” was published in 1959, and a short six years later, Antonioni’s Blow-Up hit the theatres. Both works have at their centre a photographer: Cortázar’s narrator, Michel; and Antonioni’s protagonist, Thomas. Both also see their leading men stumble across something sinister, which drastically—and perhaps irreversibly—alter their engagement with their respective realities. Cortázar and Antonioni have both declaimed any other significant crossover between their works, and indeed they seem to have little more in common besides an overarching narrative catalyst. . . but isn’t there always more to be found when two intelligences are in dialogue? In the following roundtable, Chris Tănăsescu, Thuy Dinh, Xiao Yue Shan, and Rubén López discuss these two masterpieces, their phenomenology, and how the mode of translation works between them.

Chris Tănăsescu (CT): I read Cortázar’s story only after watching the movie—actually, after watching Blow-Up multiple times over the years. But I believe this is far from being the only reason why, when I did finally read the Cortázar text, it seemed to me that the story had been written after the movie, and not the movie that was based on—or rather, “inspired by”—the story . . . The story struck me as a piece I would have expected Antonioni to write himself. “This is Antonioni,” I thought to myself . . . His cinematic poetics, the style and language (of characters in various movies of his, quite a number of them writers or artists), even his obsessive motifs (such as composition versus/and/as the machine) were all there. What’s more, Cortázar’s speaker’s moody, stylistic, grammatical, translational, topographical, and voyeuristic flaneuring seemed like the perfect illustration [and at times even (re)wording] of some of Antonioni’s most well-known statements about the art of modern filmmaking; particularly the ones in which he ponders over the director’s mission to capture a never-static flux-like reality by continuously staying in motion and incessantly gravitating towards, and away from, moments of potential crystallization. The “arriving and moving on, as a new perception.”

Thuy Dinh (TD): I prefer to think that each work—whether the film or the story—exists independently of each other, with its own unique language and attributes, yet can converse with or sustain the other like a dance, a collaboration, or an equitable marriage: where no one has, or wishes, to have the upper hand. This idea of conversation seems more inclusive, and helps us to gain a more holistic view of what we call “reality,” don’t you think—especially since both Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Cortázar’s “Las babas del diablo” squarely address the limitations of subjectivity and/or the inherent instability of any narrative approach, and in so doing invite the audience/reader to accept the fluidity of all human experiences?

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): This concept of dialogic resonance operating inside the small words “inspired by” is so discombobulating and vast, it’s a shame that we only have the linear conceit of before and after to refer to it—but before and after it is. Chris, even though as you so precisely pointed out, the film is rife with Antonioni and his inquiries (that of the despair innate in sexual elation, that “memory offers no guarantees,” and that hallucinogenic quality of modern opulence), I think at the centre of his Blow-Up is this idea that life is always interrupted with seeing, and seeing always interrupted with life, and this is, I believe, a direct carry-over from Cortázar’s mesmerising, illusive tale of what it means when the gift of sight is led through the twisted chambers of seeing. Which is to say, I agree with both of you, that at the confluence of these two works lie a similar attention to fluidity. READ MORE…

In Good Company: Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall on Translating The Left Parenthesis

September 22, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Rachel Farmer

[B]eing able to share genius in whatever way or form is the most beautiful thing there is.

Muriel Villaneuva’s The Left Parenthesis takes place by the sea, a fitting setting for a story that weaves in-between motherhood and mourning, loss and reinvention, the mind and the body. In the stunning autofictional tale of a recently widowed mother attempting to piece together her shifting roles in the world, Villaneuva merges the surreal and the intimately physical to chart the mystifying journey one takes back to get to oneself. In the following interview, Rachel Farmer talks to the co-translators of The Left Parenthesis, Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall, about the book’s feminism, Catalan specificity, and its “uncomplicated” representation of motherhood.

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.

Rachel Farmer (RF): First of all, before we dive into The Left Parenthesis, I’d be really interested to hear about your process as co-translators. In the brilliant conversation recently published in the Oxonian Review, the pair of you talked about working together on another co-translation of Montserrat Roig. Can you tell us just a little bit about this relationship?

Megan Berkobien (MB): Well, my dissertation is about co-translation, especially as a socialist and ecological phenomenon; it really came from the fact that basically all my translation experiences have been collaborative. I went to school at the University of Michigan for both my PhD and undergrad, and in the translation workshop there, everything was done together. So, it came naturally when I met María Cristina. The first thing we worked on as a team was a little anthology on women writers in Catalan—that’s when I realised we were really on the same page. We wrote the opening essay together, and it just really worked. We just feed off one another’s poetic creativities, I guess.

María Cristina Hall (MCH): For us, having the interaction of editing together was a way to build trust, to understand that our voices were similar enough to co-translate. Our process involved dividing the book up, each doing fifteen pages, then looking at each other’s version and editing it as if it were our own piece—so there’s never that feeling of holding back. It seems very natural to edit, sometimes heavily and sometimes not. If ever a word comes up where we think, “how should we translate that?”, we have a back-and-forth, and it goes smoothly from there. It’s very enriching, and I think something Megan touched on in her dissertation was the importance of working in a community and having company. Translation is usually very solitary work, so it’s very different to have this practice.

MB: In a lot of ways, the fact that translators are artists insinuates at the worst part about being an artist: that you have to work by yourself, and that you have this “grand genius” inside you. I just don’t think genius is never located in one person, and being able to share genius in whatever way or form is the most beautiful thing there is.

RF: Was there anything in particular about The Left Parenthesis that needed a different approach?

MCH: Well, it was our first project together, and then we did Goodbye Ramona by Montserrat Roig. In that book, the voices are so distinct that we divided it by character, so I worked on the one from the 1900s and Meg did the one from the 1960s—and the one from the 30s, we shared between the two of us. Because Meg is more active in the Socialist party, she could be the character who was politically involved, while I took on the conservative one since I live in Mexico and I have more of a background in Catholicism. But The Left Parenthesis is just one character talking about herself.

MB: We did have to attend to making sure it was all one unified voice, and as such it made a lovely first project because it’s almost as if our voices were weaving together. If we take a cue from the book to describe this, it’s kind of like waves were flowing over us, and each new wave made us come together a little bit more. READ MORE…

Will the Present Suffice? On Disappearance in Fiction

September 21, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by MK Harb

It seems that disappearance creates even more presence, focusing around the individual instead of erasing them.

What is absence—this deeply felt substance that is not made of matter, but lack? In texts across time, writers have given form to vanishing and its metaphorical power, studying its mystery and its abjection, its myth and its experience. In the following essay, MK Harb discusses three cases of disappearance in short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Munro, and Danial Haghighi, and how the three authors use the duality of presence and absence to explore the psychology of those who go and those who stay, as well as experiences of class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism.

In a curious poem by the name of “Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage,” the late Larry Levis created, in words blown with the precision of a glassmaker, a philosophical text on life and desire. Beginning with, “It’s a list of what I cannot touch,” Levis narrates the myth of the Cumaean Sibyl, an ancient Greek priestess who, in her quest to ask the Gods for eternal life, forgot to ask for eternal youth. What ensues is a lesson in cruelty, for as time expands and centuries go by, she shrinks and dwarfs until she becomes as tiny as a thumb, upon which she is placed in a jar to “suffocate without being able to die.” As the years churn on, Sibyl eventually finds herself in a birdcage, placed there by an Athenian shop owner for her protection. She emits small bird-like whispers to Athenian boys, who often rattle her cage to ask: What do you want, Sibyl? To this she responds: death. Her voice goes mute as she witnesses an ever-changing Athens through to the Second World War, all the while continuing to be alive, shriveling and aging, yet somehow disappearing from living. Using Sibyl, Levis creates a melancholic irony in which a desire for a prolonged life leads to disappearance.

When I think of disappearance, I think of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and the soul-crushing friendship between Lila and Elena, two intellectual women haunted by the other’s abilities, acting out their insecurities through never-ending disappearances and reappearances within each other’s lives. I think of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1960s film Woman in The Dunes, where a depressive Japanese scientist spends the night with a seductive village woman in a remote sand dune. After their affair, the staircase leading outwards—a symbol of return to urbanity—vanishes, and the most Sisyphean struggle ensues. In such works, disappearance is an allegory for life and time, lost and spent.

Disappearance has long been a hallmark of serious prose, a thematic thread throughout literature of all variances. In three short stories set in Canada, India, and Iran, this allegorical device operates at the narratives’ center. The first is Jorge Luis Borges’ “Man on the Threshold,” which follows the tradition of narration through memory, telling us of the writer’s childhood friend, Bioy Casares, who brings with him from London to Buenos Aires a strange dagger. This object triggers another story from a friend sitting with them, Christopher Dewey, who served in the British colonies of India. READ MORE…

Breaking Down the 2022 National Book Award Longlist

September 17, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

A selection to whet your appetite for translated literature!

Now in its fifth year, this rebooted annual award for translated literature deserves a serious look. How does its newly released longlist compare to the Booker International counterpart?

Unlike its Booker International counterpart, works from European languages dominated, continuing the trend from previous years. Previous winner (and frequent Asymptote contributor) Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth was one of the only two titles from Asia.

Order a copy of Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani.

As with the 2020 selections, only one title appeared in both the Booker International and the National Book Award longlists, and it was an Olga Tokarczuk novel translated by Jennifer Croft. We hope it will be third-time lucky for this illustrious duo!

Order a copy of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft.

New Directions is the only publisher to have two titles on the longlist. Aside from Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, Olga Ravn’s The Employees, which our Criticism Editor Barbara Halla chose as her clear winner from last year’s Booker International longlist, is also nominated.

Click here to order a copy of Olga Ravn’s The Employees, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken.

Incidentally, Aitken, who is the only longlisted translator to ever be nominated for his work on different authors, was interviewed in our pages last year. This year, we sat down with Mónica Ojeda, whom interviewer Rose Bialer calls “one of the most powerful and provocative voices in Latin American literature today.” Her Jawbone made the cut:


Order a copy of Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker.

We hope we’ve whetted your appetite with these selections. Take a look at the full longlist here! Oh, and by the way, we may receive a small commission for your purchase(s), which will go toward supporting our advocacy for a more inclusive world literature. Other ways to sustain our mission include signing up as a masthead member, or joining our Book Club!

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 16, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Cristina Pérez Díaz, Julia Sherwood, and MARGENTO

Literary news from Slovakia, Belgium, and Puerto Rico!

This week, our editors from around the world report on a controversial book prize winner in Slovakia, a comic strip festival in Belgium, and a moving performance of a collection of short stories centered on gay life in Puerto Rico. Read on to find out more!

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Slovakia

Throughout June, ten writers longlisted for Slovakia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Anasoft Litera, presented their works online, at events in the capital, Bratislava, and the open-air summer festival Pohoda held at Trenčín airfield. However, much attention was paid to a major controversy surrounding one of the nominated books, Nicol Hochholczerová’s remarkable debut Táto izba sa nedá zjesť (This Room Can’t be Eaten Up), which depicts the relationship between a 12-year-old schoolgirl and her teacher, a man in his fifties. While there is universal agreement on the book‘s literary merits—it is among the five works on the award’s shortlist, announced on 7 September—the decision to also nominate it for the René Prize—a competition in which students of selected secondary schools choose a winner from five books—raised concerns that neither the 18-year-old students nor their teachers are equipped to handle  sensitive subject without specialist psychological support. Fearing the withdrawal of funding or even lawsuits by incensed parents, the jury decided to withdraw Hochholczerová’s book from the competition, offering instead to send the book to the schools on request. While the resulting turmoil was great for sales, it has caused a rift in the literary community, put the talented young writer under a huge amount of stress, and aroused some fear that it has sounded the death knell of the René Prize.

After two years of Covid-related disruptions, the Authors’ Reading Month (ARM), Europe’s largest literary festival, organized by the Brno-based publishing house Větrné mlýny in partnership with Slovakia’s Literárny klub, returned this summer. It was hosted by venues in five cities of the Czech Republic and Slovakia (Lviv, which has hosted the festival in the past, was not on this year’s itinerary because of the war in Ukraine). With Icelandic literature as the focus of the twenty-third edition, some of the best-known Czech and Slovak writers were paired with thirty-one authors from Iceland, including Hallgrímur Helgason, Bragi Ólafsson, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson, as well as Sjón, who also attended the Slovak premiere of The Northman, the American epic action thriller based on Viking myths whose script he co-wrote with the director Robert Eggers.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2022

September 12, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Irmak Ertuna Howison, and Rachel Stanyon

We review new releases from Romania, Guatemala, and Turkey!

In these brilliant feats of literature, three writers drive the vehicle of language through time and space to learn profound, painful, and complex truths about history and our inheritance of it. From Romania, Zsolt Láng braids imagination and reality to paint multitudinous portraits of the individual and society. From Turkey, Defne Suman tracks a family through present hauntings into the dark, deceptive recesses of the national past. From Guatemala, Eduardo Halfon opens up the question of a name as it is passed down through generations, delving into the chasm between who we are and what we are called. Read on to find out more. Also, for the first time since the magazine’s inception, we have included affiliate links to books under review. Please take note that we may receive a small commission for purchases made through these links, which will go toward supporting our mission of advocating for greater inclusiveness in world literature. Other ways include joining our Book Club or becoming a sustaining member. 

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The Birth of Emma K. by Zsolt Láng, translated from the Hungarian by Owen Good and Ottilie Mulzet, Seagull Books, 2022 

Review by Rachel Stanyon, Senior Copy Editor

What a swirling, kaleidoscopic reading experience. Zsolt Láng’s The Birth of Emma K. is a cracker of a book—albeit one that forces readers to commit to intricate twists and turns, before arriving at meaning within its refracted reflections on modern life.

Láng—a Hungarian writer from Transylvania, Romania—presents a plethora of perspectives in these twelve short stories, but unites them through a shared narrative style that constantly questions and blurs one’s sense of reality, while never quite descending into fantasy. The stories themselves are often equivocal, with endings that invite conjecture or remain opaque, and the plotlines that lead to these often ambiguous conclusions are full of hypotheticals, the language replete with conditionals and revisions, making every situation feel provisional and emphasising the contingent nature of the world.

The characters, meanwhile, are often driven by love, lust, hatred, or other forces of reproduction, but often also seem adrift, questioning their existence. This is evident from the very opening of the collection, which sees God observing and vacillating over the degree to which he should—and is able to—intervene in the lives of his creations. This version of God is not only not omnipotent, he has a heightened, anxiety-inducing awareness of the potentially negative consequences of his actions, and prays to another higher being that gave him his “not-quite-absolute power.” In the collection’s arch postmodernist style, which seems to use this initial framing by a semi-powerful God to parallel the figure of the author, scenarios are constantly retracted and resketched, and we are often told what is not happening, rather than what is:

That our Lord was sitting or standing about on the side of Gellért hill, at the top of Számadó street near the Sióvölgyi family’s villa, would be an exaggeration. Our Lord doesn’t tend to sit or stand about, he floats. But just so we aren’t constantly searching for words and forever refining what we come up with, let’s postulate that we’re not talking about the Father or the Holy Ghost, we’re talking about the Son, and then we can confidently say that there stood the Son of God…

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 9, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Areeb Ahmad, José García Escobar, and Nestor Gomez

Literary news from India, El Salvador, and Guatemala!

Our team of editors across the world is back with the latest literary news as summer winds down. In India, the recently released longlist for a major literary prize has put translations  center stage. In El Salvador, a newly published book of poetry interrogates the concept of terrorism in Central America and the United States. In Guatemala, the city of Mazatenango played host to an international book festival. Read on to find out more!

Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large, reporting on India

First awarded in 2018, the JCB Prize for Literature is India’s biggest literary prize and is given every year to “a distinguished work of fiction by an Indian author.” It is one of those rare prizes that gives equal attention to books originally written in English and translations from other languages, without putting them into separate categories as the Booker does. In a first for the prize, there are six translated titles out of the ten that comprise the 2022 longlist, which came out on September 3. This far exceeds the previous record of three longlisted translations. Two of this year’s longlisted books were translated from Urdu, and the rest were translated from Hindi, Malayalam, Bengali, and Nepali. One notable exclusion is Nireeswaran by V.J. James, whose novel Anti-Clock (translated from Malayalam by Ministhy S., who also translated Nireeswaran) was shortlisted last year.

Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, needs no introduction. After winning the International Booker Prize earlier this year, its chances of taking home the JCB Prize are high. Another promising title is Sheela Tomy’s Valli, a work of eco-fiction translated from Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil. Kalathil’s translation of S. Hareesh’s magical realist novel, Moustache, won in 2020 , meaning three of the prize’s four past winners were originally written in Malayalam.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 26, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Nestor Gomez, and Peera Songkünnatham

The latest literary news from El Salvador, Thailand, and Palestine!

This week, our editors from around the world report on a new poetry anthology promoting peaceful coexistence in El Salvador, new translations of Arab women authors, and discussions of magical realism and the Isaan dialect surrounding the Thai winner of a grant from English PEN. Read on to find out more!  

Nestor Gomez, Editor-at-Large, reporting from El Salvador

On August 5, Otoniel Guevara presented a new anthology titled Peace Isn’t Achieved Just With Desire at the Casa Morazán in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. In the anthology’s prologue, Guevara describes the project as a compilation of poems in defense of human rights, peaceful coexistence, and respect for life on the planet. He also characterized the anthology as a criticism of regimes that promote fanaticism, hatred, lies, totalitarianism, and disrespect for life in all its manifestations.

Inspiration for this project began several years ago when, in Guevara’s words, “a new religion was maturing in El Salvador, encouraged by a surge in journalism for sensationalism and blatant fake news in support of political projects empty of content, but rich in images and superficial concessions, especially to the youth. This populism, packaged to preserve and strengthen ignorance and ahistoricism, was rapidly coating a layer of corrosive mold: fanaticism.” Publication of the anthology was delayed because of the pandemic and the love affair that many Salvadorans established with the current ruler of El Salvador. However, supporters of the project continued to grow among friends and cohorts.

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Sculpting Words: An Interview with Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles and Paul Filev

August 24, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Carol Khoury

In these conversations with characters, I build imaginary convictions.

In Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles’ startling and tender work of speculative fiction, The Lisbon Syndrome, a comet has demolished the city of Lisbon to nothing, leaving people on the other side of the globe—in Caracas—to reconstitute the erupted world with only a strictly regulated stream of news, an overarching cloak of localized violence, and an unshakable faith in the potentials of storytelling. Translated expertly by Paul Filev, The Lisbon syndrome presents a powerful, telling perspective on the Venezuelan struggle against a repressive regime. In the following interview, Book Club manager Carol Khoury speaks to Sánchez Rugeles and Filev on the unique journey of this text, the learned method of its translation, and the courage and necessity of literature.  

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.

Carol Khoury (CK): Eduardo, how was the novel received when it came out in Spanish—in Venezuela and elsewhere?

Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles (ESR): It’s strange—the novel wasn’t published in the usual way because the English translation came out before the Spanish edition. The Spanish edition will come out later this year, in October, with the independent publisher Suburbano.

I began writing the novel in 2019 and finished it in 2020, and I showed it to a few publishers here in Madrid. It was during the middle of the pandemic, things were really intense at the time, and they told me, “Well, we like the book, but we can’t publish it until 2025, or at the earliest in summer 2024 maybe. If we take it on, you’ll have to wait in line.”

And I was very impatient to have this book published, because the novel was very emotional for me, given that the events in the novel mirrored what was actually happening in Venezuela at the time. I can usually be more patient with my work, but I felt a little anxious to get this book out. A friend read the manuscript—a movie director—and he told me, “I want to turn this into a movie. What do you say—do you want to work on a script with me?”

And I said to him, “Yeah, we can write a script and turn it into a movie, but let me publish the novel first.” But with the pandemic going on, the whole process of getting the book published was very slow. I felt a little sad about having to wait so long to find a publisher, so I started talking with the director, Rodrigo Michelangeli, and one day I said to him, “You know what? I’ll self-publish the book with Amazon. Forget the traditional publishing route. Let’s make this happen.” READ MORE…

The Feral Tenderness of the Margins: On Camila Sosa Villada’s Bad Girls

August 18, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Rubén López

Bad Girls isn’t an optimistic perspective on travestis’ life but a mirror of the grotesque that we are forced to see and feel.

Bad Girls by Camila Sosa Villada, translated from the Spanish by Kit Maude, Other Press, 2022

The night belongs to the marginalized, the outcast, the exile. It is here, amidst the shadows, that Camila Sosa Villada unveils the world of the travestis of the small Argentinian city of Córdoba. The daily tragedies encoded on the bodies of her companions are the backbone of her novel Bad Girls, but so too are moments—brief as a stab—brimming with beauty in which life on the margins does not seem impossible after all.

The English translation of the Spanish original, undertaken by Kit Maude, begins with a semantic manifesto by the author on the reappropriation of the word “travesti,” a Spanish slur used in the nineties to describe people who were assigned male at birth but develop a feminine gender identity. Sosa Villada, who herself identifies that way, rejects the idea of sanitizing her existence and that of her companions with other categories such as “trans women” or “transsexuals.” On the contrary: “I reclaim the stonings and spittings, I reclaim the scorn,” she declares emphatically. To identify herself in other terms would mean to erase her life and all the baggage of living in a society capable of using violence to reassure cisheteronormativity.

Bad Girls is an autofictional story, and the author serves as our narrator, recounting the time in her twenties during which she had to do sex work to survive. The novel begins one cold night with a caravan of travestis looking for customers in Sarmiento Park when an extraordinary incident occurs: Auntie Encarna—their 178-year-old leader—saves an abandoned child from a certain death in a ditch, “like a veterinary midwife shoving her hands into a mare to pull out a foal.” The child’s symbolic birthing has a visceral impact, as are most of the author’s descriptions in the novel. Her style can be described as what the Spanish author Ramón del Valle-Inclán called esperpento (roughly equivalent to “grotesque”), which is a literary technique used to examine the systematic deformation of reality by accentuating its most atrocious attributes. Sosa Villada’s prose constantly takes us to the limits and highlights the crudest details: “To thank her, he showed the dead snake that dangled from his knees,” is how she describes an elderly man seducing a prostitute. “She reached out for it and weighed it up like an artisanal salami at a country fair.”

After saving the child, Auntie Encarna decides to keep him despite opposition of the group. It is a transgression to the most conservative values engrained in Latin American (and indeed, most Occidental) societies: the rupture of the traditional family as the chosen family of travestis become the caretakers for Twinkle in Her Eye and endure the hatred of a neighborhood willing to terrorize a loving collective to defend their idea of how society should be organized.

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