Language: Turkish

What’s New in Translation: October 2024

October 14, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ben Goldman, Christopher Higgs, Jonathon Atkinson, and Matilda Nevin

Discover new work from Turkey, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Cameroon, Sweden, Chile, France, and Cuba!

In this month’s roundup of newly published translations, we introduce nine works from nine countries: Turkey, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Cameroon, Sweden, Chile, France, and Cuba. From a politically tuned memoir embedded with a familial conscience to a series of poems that consider diasporic experience through the lens of spectatorship—read on to find out more! 

WaitingfortheFear

Waiting for the Fear by Oğuz Atay, translated from the Turkish by Ralph Hubbell, New York Review Books, 2024

Review by Christopher Higgs

The oft quoted line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, “Hell is other people,” reverberates conceptually across Oğuz Atay’s Waiting For The Fear like a heavy skipping stone slumping across the surface of dark waters. Yet, in each of the collection’s eight stories, a confounding tension arises between the book’s Sartrean misanthropy and another seemingly competing desire: a strong craving to communicate, a yearning to connect. While Atay’s characters avoid human contact, holding deep disdain and even loathing for other people, they still thrum with a surreal pulse, a quivering mixture of rage and sadness in which their hatred comingles with a cry of the heart; they are desperate to embrace, to be accepted, to be acknowledged and valued, to be seen and heard by others. Six of the eight stories, for example, are epistolary, while the others rely on letters as plot devices. When the concept of written communication isn’t foregrounded, the narratives still hinge on concepts of storytelling, connecting, and sharing. READ MORE…

Spring 2024: Highlights from the Team

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

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

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

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

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

 —Vuslat D. Katsanis, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

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

 —Matthew Redman, Digital Editor READ MORE…

A Year of Reading the World

December 14, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart.

Every month, the Asymptote Book Club shares a newly published, translated title with readers and subscribers. From Nobel laureates to electrifying debuts, this selection features some of the most powerful voices writing in any language, opening up an entry into the immense archives of  wold literature. In this essay, we look back on the books of 2023 thus far. 

Sign up for the Asymptote Book Club here and have our curated titles sent to your door!

Whenever a major event transpires, anywhere in the world, the instinct of many is to reach into the annals of writing—for explanation, ruminations, solace, transcriptions of history, glimmers of what’s to come, stories of people and their ordinary or extraordinary lives. . . On January 1 of this year, Croatia officially joined the Schengen Area, making it the twenty-seventh member to benefit from the region’s removal of border controls—and the search for Croatian books and literature went up 30%. During the surprising and intermittently absurd “Chinese balloon incident” in early February, searches for books on Chinese espionage went up a full 100%. Interest for Ukrainian literature stayed at a high amidst the ongoing conflict, and peaked when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin for committing war crimes regarding the illegal deportation of children. As a devastating civil war broke out in Sudan in mid-April, the world immediately sought out writing from and about the region, and when Niger’s government was overthrown in a military coup on July 26, searches for Nigerien books and authors also saw a significant surge. And as writers from Palestine and Israel continued, over the decades, to release texts around nation, land, exile, occupation, humanity, and violence both physical and psychological, we all watched in horror as the devastation grew almost unimaginably—and we looked for those books.

Books and the world they’re written in, books and the worlds they give us—sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart. As the poet Adonis said, “My homeland is this spark this lightning in the darkness of the time remaining. . .” (translated by S.M. Toorawa); with language, such texts lend us that brightness, and we are rendered able to discover the many narratives and landscapes of our long, shadowy era.

In this year’s Book Club, we’ve thus far featured eleven titles: eleven authors, eleven countries, eleven languages, and eleven translators. Each brought their own entrancing energy of storytelling, whether taking history or the human psyche as material, building on myth or fearlessly experimental. There were titles that sought to give us a vivid portrait of a certain neighbourhood, a certain period. Others dove into the intricate channels of thinking to paint a picture of the mind. READ MORE…

Inside the Mind That Falls Apart: Aron Aji and Selin Gökçesu on Lojman

September 21, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

"Words by themselves don’t do much in literature; we encounter them inside syntax."

Our August Book Club selection, Ebru Ojen’s Lojman, is a vivid and absorbing novel that traces the depths and illusions of psychic agony, pulled along by a singular, poetic style. Within these flowing, absorbing pages of emotional surges, however, is a representation of how imposed orders and hierarchies can rob the individual of humanity. In this following interview, translators Aron Aji and Selin Gökçesu speak to us on the process of working with this language its rawness and its darkness, the narrative’s subtle political symbols, how it moves on from the Turkey’s social realist movement and its sociolinguistic history.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Lojman is a book that unleashes its narrative and its characters on us. There are so many uncontrollable elements in it, but what reigns it in is the prose, which is so precise and lyrical. I’m wondering what it was like reading this book in the original Turkish—if there was that similar effect, and if there were stylistic elements you were seeking specifically to preserve in translation.

Selin Gökçesu (SG): Lojman is very immersive, beautiful, and lyrical and Turkish too. I don’t keep up with contemporary Turkish literature as much as I would like to, but within what I’ve seen come out, this book is very in its lyricism—but also its topic and voice. Part of the unruliness of the narrative can perhaps be attributed to the Turkish editing style, which is definitely more open than in the American publishing industry; different voices will enter and come out barely edited—which has its drawbacks. The final translation, after Aron put the final touches on it, is a lot more polished in English then it’s in Turkish, but it still has the spirit of the original.

But I will say that Lojman’s forcefulness and gushing and uncontrolled quality, the very untamed writing—some of that is a product of how open the Turkish publication system is. They’ll allow people in, and they’ll publish things with very little editing or external control. So you get these really raw, powerful stories in different voices. Turkish contemporary literature is maybe less middle-class than American literature, so the class boundaries of allowing different voices in is a little bit more flexible, resulting in such unique products. I’m so glad we came together and caught Lojman amidst so many books being published in Turkey. It’s really serendipitous that this landed where it did.

Aron Aji (AA): I agree with everything Selin said about Ebru’s voice and writing style. To add to that, I was in Istanbul with Ebru this summer—she just finished her new novel. It’s being edited, and hopefully will be coming out in the next couple of months. It’s an entirely different novel. The form is entirely different, the language is incredibly elevated, but there was something very, very similar to the way she built the main character. I asked her to tell me what she was trying to do, and she mentioned how people always talk about the author as the witness of a character’s life and an author as the witness of her time. Then she said, “I want to put the reader in a position of witness, and the way I can do that is by pushing the reader as far into the mindset of the main character as possible.”

As you know, the characters in Lojman are very damaged, to say the least; your review also shows how that damage becomes pervasive. Ebru really is a writer that doesn’t want to stand in the way of the reader, so she writes with this incredible euphoria. There is another Turkish author, Aslı Erdoğan (also published by City Lights), who writes with euphoria, but it’s a lot more controlled, oddly enough. What we have in Ebru is really the rawest possible witnessing of a mind falling apart.

So by choosing to do this as a co-translation, we actually mixed two voices and two consciousnesses into the process—the splitting of voices. I should also say that Elaine of City Lights was incredible in her later editing. And the more voices and consciousnesses we incorporated, the more we were able to crystallize the language, but also retain its rawness. READ MORE…

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: Lojman by Ebru Ojen

August 31, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Ojen writes along the pulse, and everything she describes is powered by the thrashing motions of something holding on to life.

Lojman is a book that shows its teeth. In powerful, unflinching prose of malevolence and confinement, Ebru Ojen depicts the family unit as a condition in which the most abject of cruelties and annihilations are imagined, resulting in an unparalleled portrait of madness and oblivion. By pushing her characters to mental precipices, the author points us toward the emotional peaks of human existence, drawing blood in an open display of intense, battered aliveness.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Lojman by Ebru Ojen, translated by Aron Aji and Selin Gökçesu, City Lights, 2023

There’s something out there. Such are the familiar words that announce fear’s dramatic incarnations—a sudden violent churning along the horizon, a scream that shears the night-fabric, a figure separating itself from the darkness. The common portrait of horror is aiming its heavy steps towards us, drawing nearer with each quickened breath—a grasp, a suffocation, a descent inevitable as gravity, an opaque force and singular direction. We’ve all been stranded in this lingering vastness, certain of some unbearable thing that approaches, and yet this dreadful knowledge, of what may lie out there, is only an elementary stage in fear’s true theatre. Eventually, one finds a more intolerable, more defiling fact: something that does not pursue, does not invade—something that does not come scratching at our windows, but dwells already in the closest, most secret part of us, capable of everything and knowing nothing of order, nothing of control.

Ebru Ojen’s Lojman is a horror of intimacies. In brutal, visceral treads, it walks that demarcation separating the inside from the outside, revealing all that rages against walls both visible and invisible—the unspeakable violence of the precipice. And while the outside still holds the unknowable chill of our darkest suspicions, in Lojman, it is the inside where monsters are unleashed. The title, transliterated from the Turkish word for lodging, is the first indication of this novel’s form—as tightly fortified as architecture, and as taut and enigmatic as the human body. Through passages of incandescent maleficence and enthralled terror, we are led into the stifling, worldly containers that somehow manage to hold utterly uncontainable things—all that goes on in a house, all that goes on in a mind. We have been made so small in order to live, and that unbearable reality is given, here, for writing to bear. READ MORE…

Traitor to Tradition, Resister to Remorse: A Conversation with Kiran Bhat

April 13, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I want to shift the story before the labels set in; I want to blur the border before it has had time to be constructed . . .

Khiran Bhat is true to what he says he is: a “citizen of the world.” Among other things, he has authored poetry volumes in both Spanish and Mandarin, a short story collection in Portuguese, and a travel book in Kannada. He is also a speaker of Turkish, Indonesian, Hindi, Japanese, French, Arabic, and Russian, and has made homes from Madrid to Melbourne, from Cairo to Cuzco.

In this interview, I asked Bhat about writing across genres, self-translating from and into a myriad of languages, and being a writer who identifies as planetary, belonging to no nation—and thus, all nations at once. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): As a polyglot, a citizen of the world, and a writer “writing for the global,” are there authors (especially those writing in any of the twelve languages that you speak) whom you think were not translated well, and therefore deserve to be re-translated? 

Kiran Bhat (KB): What an interesting question! I’m rarely asked about translation, and since I dabble in translation, I’m glad to see someone challenge me on a topic that speaks to this side of myself. 

It’s a hard one to answer. I would pose that almost all books are badly translated because no one can truly capture what an author says in one language. Every work of translation, no matter how ‘faithful’ it aspires to be, is essentially an interpretation, and that interpretation is really a piece of fiction from the translator. Some people really want ‘authenticity,’ but when I read a translation, I just want something that compels me to keep reading (probably because I’m so aware of the ruse of it all). 

For example, a lot of people prefer the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace, but I fell in love with the Constance Garnett translation. This might have been because it’s easy to find on the Internet and I was reading it on my computer while waiting on a ferry crossing Guyana and Suriname in 2012, but Garnett’s effortless storytelling style really made me fall in love with Pierre and Natasha. I can understand why technically Pevear and Volokhonsky are truer to Tolstoy’s sentences and paragraph structures, but I feel riveted when I read the Garnett version. I want to turn the pages and find out what’s going on, and I think that’s important as a reader: to get lost and immersed in a fictional world.

READ MORE…

A Perpetual Coming-of-Age: On Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü

March 22, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Irmak Ertuna Howison

Tezer Özlü will never be imprisoned in the traps of bourgeois norms and conventions.

Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely, Serpent’s Tail/Transit Books, 2023

Known as the melancholy princess of Turkish literature, Tezer Özlü is one of the most influential figures of women’s writing in Turkey. Inspiring generations of writers with both her life and distinct writing voice, Özlü has been a permanent fixture in country’s intellectual history; it’s surprising that such a beloved figure of Turkish literature is debuting in English only now. Fortunately for us, her glaring absence from international publishing has finally been remedied by Serpent’s Tail (UK) and Transit (USA), and English language readers can now discover the genius of a unique writer.

Despite being remembered as a leftist and feminist, Özlü was never a part of the revolutionary struggle like other famous Turkish authors recently translated into English. In Cold Nights of Childhood, she writes: “I was never a part of a revolutionary struggle. Not during the 12 March era, and not after it, either. All I ever wanted was to be free to think and act beyond the tedious limits set by the petit bourgeoisie”. She wasn’t imprisoned or tortured like Sevgi Soysal or involved in organized politics as her close friend Leyla Erbil. Even though she retained leftist sensibilities and occasionally wrote about class struggle, her revolt was more individual and existential. Accordingly, she wrote autobiographical novels which situate readers in the midst of her confrontation with different kinds of authority.

Cold Nights of Childhood is a compact example of her autofiction, and a perfect choice to introduce Özlü to new readers, encapsulating the themes and style that launched her as a tremendous force in the Turkish literary. In the afterward to the novel, translator Maureen Freely writes: “she was one of the very few who broke rules at sentence level, refusing continuity, and slashing narrative logic to evoke in words the things she truly felt and saw, that we all might see them”. Rejecting the linear narrative, she weaves together fragments of time; this experimentation with chronology enables her to reflect on her past while also imagine a way for a gratifying future. READ MORE…

Winter 2023: Highlights from the Team

February 1, 2023  |  in News  |  by Barbara Halla, Caridad Svich, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Georgina Fooks, Heather Green, Ian Ross Singleton, Janet Phillips, Marina Dora Martino, and Thuy Dinh

Dip your toe into our milestone Winter 2023 issue with these recommendations from our global team!

I found, as I sat down to read this issue, that what I was hungry for was urgency, vitality, wit and I found pieces that gave me what I was looking for. “There’s No Cure for the Dead” by Nazli Karabiyikoglu (tr. Ralph Hubbell) weaves a breathtakingly complex tapestry, rife with competing rhythms and energies. Selim Özdoğan’s “Seven Difficulties and One Ever-Narrowing Path” (tr. Katy Derbyshire) brought exactly the acerbic, incisive voice I needed. The Alfred Döblin story “The Woman Who Walked In Her Sleep” (tr. Joachim Redner) was filled with great verbs, gestures, colors, sounds, taking the reader on a dizzying trajectory, a plummet, really, from the character swanning about Berlin, showing off his colorful fashion ensemble, to a murderous rag doll come to life. Menke Katz’s poems with their structural challenges around diminishing or growing numbers of syllables and the love of Yiddish had me re-reading them and admiring the translation. And Aco Šopov’s deep, painful poems (tr. Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer) after the devastation of the 1963 Skopje earthquake show how despair communicates across decades and has much to say to us about loss and survival now, sixty years later.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

This issue I was particularly blown away by the quality of the interviews published. The César Aira interview conducted by Michal Zechariah is truthfully hilarious, and the line of questioning really allows his trademark wit and absurdism to shine through. I found Geetanjali Shree’s interview with Rose Bialer to be incredibly generous and thoughtful, fascinating and sharp. In both cases, I thought a really strong sense of their writing came through thanks to the interviewers. The visual section brought together two incredible artists—I’m researching the interplay of poetic text and space at the moment, so Lynn Xu’s thinking (teased out by Laura Copelin) really spoke to me, and I appreciated the climate focus of Bahia Shehab’s work, and her interview with Heather Green. Last but certainly not least, I loved Jared Joseph’s review of Johannes Göransson’s Summer. As a researcher, Göransson’s thinking on poetry translation has been incredibly insightful, and I enjoyed the same insights applied to his work, really engaging in depth with poetry as a genre and mode of being. As a bonus, I thought the criticism section was pleasantly varied in terms of geographies and genres!

—Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach

All the fiction pieces in this issue are truly marvelous, as if they’re in conversation with one another! For example, Kim Cho Yeop’s “Laura” (tr. Sukyoung Sukie Kim) and Dalih Sembiring’s “Floccinaucinihilipilificatius” (tr. Avram Maurits) can be seen as companion pieces, as both stories deal with corporeal limitations and spiritual transcendence. Laura’s sci-fi context, on various conditions related to body dysmorphia, eloquently evokes the plight of non-binary and transgender groups, while Floccinaucinihilipilificatius represents a metaphorical lotus—its trajectory from pain and putrefaction toward the light of maternal love. There’s a sense of metaphysical wonder to both stories—even though one is inspired by science and the other by magical realism. READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, As Chosen by You: #6 An interview with Maureen Freely

December 24, 2022  |  in News  |  by Matthew Redman

To translate [Pamuk] was to fall under a spell that took me several years to break.

2022 was a bumper year for fascinating interviews, and one of the best of the bunch, in this humble editor’s opinion, is also our sixth most read article of the year. For our Summer issue, Assistant Interview Editor Rose Bialer sat down with acclaimed translator Maureen Freely to discuss her upbringing in Istanbul, the craft of translation, and the state of literature in Turkey today.

It takes two to make an interview really work: Bialer has a knack for perceptive questions, and Freely is lyrically articulate about her unusual upbringing. Unsurprisingly, the conversation is full of gems, such as when she talks about working with Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk as the English translator of his novels. Their relationship is complex, delicate, respectful, and as Pamuk’s star rises, it grows increasingly strained. The two are “exact contemporaries” and grew up in similar parts of Istanbul, and when he writes about his childhood in the city, his memories, so different from her own, start to crowd out hers:

I love that chapter he wrote about hüzün, and the black and white city that it veiled so hauntingly. To read it is to go into a trance. To translate it was to fall under a spell that took me several years to break. I could no longer see the golden Istanbul I’d known as a child. As for the campus where I’d grown up and he’d gone to school, he passed over it in just a few paragraphs. He wrote about the library, and he wrote about skiving. When we were going through that part of my translation, I pointed to the gap between two of those paragraphs, and I told him that my whole life had vanished into that blank space.

If you’re curious about some of Freely’s output, read Irmak Ertuna Howison’s review of her translation of Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn from the Asymptote Blog.

And if her interview piques your interest in Turkish literature, don’t forget that our twelve-year digital archive is a veritable treasure trove of gems waiting to be discovered.

DISCOVER OUR SIXTH MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022 READ MORE…

Turkish Tragedy Writ Small: Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn

November 10, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Irmak Ertuna Howison

A single night becomes the microcosm of the Turkish experience of militarism, gender inequality, and sexuality.

Dawn by Sevgi Soysal, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freeley, Archipelago Books, 2022

Writing in the 1990s, the Turkish literary critic Berna Moran praised Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn for its historical urgency, but noted that it would not be a novel that survived the test of time—that its themes would lose their relevance. Perhaps Moran was optimistic in thinking that women’s struggles and militarism would be issues of a distant past in the years to come, or perhaps he undermined the strength of Soysal’s formal innovations. Whatever his reasons might be for painting the novel as a historical relic, his prediction did not come true; Dawn is now more relevant than ever, with Maureen Freely’s flawless English translation.

Soysal isn’t a stranger to English-speaking audiences. Her novels Tante Rosa and Noontime in Yenişehir have been translated into English, and she is a legendary figure in the history of feminism in Turkey. Along with writers like Leyla Erbil and Adalet Ağaoğlu, she defined the écriture feminine of Turkish literature long before it was coined and theorized by Western feminists. The eccentric, self-reflective, and often ironic tone of their protagonists reflected on what it means to be a woman—not only in a modernizing Turkey, but also in a leftist milieu dominated by men. While women’s struggle and sexual autonomy took the back seat in the leftist quest to liberate “masses,” these authors problematized the very notion of “masses.” Did the dream of a liberated people also include liberated women? The tension between how the outside world views liberated, intellectual women and how they view themselves is often the driving force of such novels, and hence their writing is often turned inwards, with sharp observations of situations and characters.

Dawn is a visceral and cinematic example of this kind of writing: where the embodied social experience of women takes central stage. It is also, as Moran notes, a novel about militarism and incarceration. Written in 1975, after Soysal’s own imprisonment following the 1971 coup, the novel situates the woman’s body in its confrontations with authority. The brilliance of the novel might be traced to the formal structure through which the author reflects on this confrontation; ever the innovator, Soysal sets her novel within the course of a single night, interspersing the narrative with flashbacks of different characters. The stories beget other stories of individuals becoming situated in their own relation to authority, only to return to the “present” moment where they are confined within the four walls of the town jail. A single night becomes the microcosm of the Turkish experience of militarism, gender inequality, and sexuality. 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…

Summer 2022: Highlights from the Team

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Hail the Summer 2022 Issue!

July 28, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Elfriede Jelinek, Thomas Bernhard, Maureen Freely, and a spotlight on Swiss literature

You here for the party? Step this way! Bigger than any conversation pit, our newly furnished Summer 2022 edition boasts a staggering thirty-one-country capacity. From Austria, expect a darkly gossipy Elfriede Jelinek, who will be bringing along her whiny friend Thomas Bernhard (Tom doesn’t get out of his house too much, and it shows). Representing Algeria on the other hand is Habib Tengour; there he is, showing off a beloved trinket! Best known for introducing Orhan Pamuk to English readers, Maureen Freely is also in the house, regaling everyone with tales from her Istanbul childhood. In the corner, we have a cluster of French-, German-, and Italian-speaking guests huddled over a platter of cheese. One of them happens to be cheese expert Anaïs Meier, who swears by her compatriots’ rich inner lives (very much on display in the Swiss Literature Feature, sponsored by Pro Helvetia): “As a Swiss gets older, the outer rind toughens, but in their heart the cheese continues to seethe, hot and liquid.”

The game we’ll be playing tonight is Spot the Mise en Abyme! In case you don’t know the term, it literally means “placed in the abyss”; go here for examples of this mirroring literary device. How about one from the issue itself to get you started? See the Tower of Babel right there on the cover, gorgeously illustrated by Seattle-based guest artist Lu Liu? It’s picked up in the beautifully expansive poem by Almog Behar and again in the poignant nonfiction by Jimin Kang, before being reflected back in this Tower of Babel-like gathering of eighteen languages. (After all, according to Mexican essayist Andrea Chapela, “All this language is like a game of mirrors, multiplying to infinity whatever it touches.”) The guest who emails, with substantiation, the most mises en abyme—across all the texts in the new issue—by 30 August will win a prize worth USD50, along with publication in our blog.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 15, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, Suhasini Patni, and Thuy Dinh

The latest in world literature from Sweden, India, and Vietnam!

This week, our editors report on literary news from around the world as summer gets under way, from threats to dissident writers in Sweden to censorship in India to the anniversary of a pioneering author’s death in Vietnam. Read on to find out more!

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

As Sweden’s application to NATO proceeds, the Turkish government has used the opportunity to raise demands on the country to extradite certain individuals. One such person is Ragip Zarakolu, a publisher, journalist, and human rights activist who has lived in Sweden since 2012 as part of an asylum program for threatened writers and publishers. Last week, the International Publishers Association voiced their concern regarding the situation and encouraged Sweden to safeguard Zarakolu’s freedom. Since then, the Frankfurter Buchmesse and the German publishers’ association Börsenverein have followed suit. In 1977, Zarakolu founded the publishing house Belge together with his wife, Ayse Nur, and they published books in Turkey for over thirty years. He was the 2008 IPA Prix Voltaire laureate and is the former chair of IPA’s Freedom to Publish Committee, as well as an honorary member of the Swedish branch of the international PEN organization.

Another writer who has taken up exile in Sweden is poet and Swedish Academy member Jila Mossaed, who last week was awarded the Prix Max Jacob for her poetry collection Det åttonde landet (The Eighth Country), translated into French as Le huitième pays by Vénus Khoury-Ghata. Mossaed was born in 1948 in Tehran, Iran, where she had her literary debut at age seventeen when her poetry was published in the literary journal Khoshe; she later worked as a playwright for Iranian radio and television. In 1986, she fled to Sweden for political asylum. Initially writing exclusively in her native Persian, since 1997 she has also written in Swedish. Recurring themes in her poetry include exile, injustice, and censorship. About writing in her second language, she has said: “To write in the language of exile is to create a small room in that country’s memory. It is a great triumph to become a part of the literary history of a foreign country.”

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