Language: Turkish

Strange and Stranger: On Leylâ Erbil’s A Strange Woman

April 14, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Carol Khoury

[Erbil] transcribes the coming-of-age of the protagonist—but also in many ways of the country.

A Strange Woman by Leylâ Erbil, translated from the Turkish by Nermin Menemencioğlu and Amy Marie Spangler, Deep Vellum, 2022

Before jumping to conclusions and judgments stemming from the title of Leylâ Erbil’s debut novel, I consulted Deep Vellum’s take on the book—hoping, or perhaps wishing, that the original Turkish title would give more to go on. Tuhaf Bir Kadın, of which the English title is a direct translation, caused quite a stir in Turkey upon its publi­cation in 1971. Since then, over half a decade has passed—a considerably long time for such a seminal and vital text to appear for the first time in English, by way of Amy Spangler and Nermin Menemencioğlu’s sinuous translation. This is also the first novel by a Turkish woman to ever be nominated for the Nobel, furthering the case for the Anglophone to take notice of this singular author, Leylâ Erbil—or as Amy Marie Spangler calls her, Leylâ Hanım.

A Strange Woman was originally translated by Nermin Menemencioğlu in the early 1970s; herself a scholar and an acclaimed translator of Turkish poetry, Menemencioğlu worked impassionedly to introduce A Strange Woman to a wider audience. However, despite receiving encouraging responses, no publisher was willing to commit. When Amy Marie Spangler stepped in almost half a century later, her contributions to the original translation further advanced the efforts towards publication—although Spangler admits in her preface that “world literature would have been all the richer” if it were published in its original form.

Further complicating the timeline is the fact that over the years, Erbil—in her signature defiance of convention—had “updated” the novel as further editions were released. Spangler worked on incorporating the new passages, only to discover that Erbil had also made additional edits and changes throughout the text. Naturally, these different versions had to be cohered, and one thing led to the other; Spangler found that “the English had been stylistically “smoothed out” in many ways.” The more she put one version against another, the more interventions she made. With both Erbil and Menemencioğlu no longer alive, Spangler and the publisher had to face and continually interrogate the ever-torturing question of how much authority the translator “could justifiably exercise.” She explains:

I decided to attach my name to the translation because the revisions were so substantial that I did not think it right to attri­bute it only to Menemencioğlu. I did not completely retrans­late the book, but neither was the translation Menemencioğlu’s alone. My name, the publisher and I agreed, should be added so that I might bear the brunt of any criticism. I wish only that Erbil and Menemencioğlu were still with us so that we might have collaborated on the text together in real time. […] It seems to me fitting that this translation process was, like its author, rather unconventional.‎

READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

March 17, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Andriana Hamas, MK Harb, and Suhasini Patni

Because, as Emily Dickinson once said, "There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away."

Tired of doomscrolling? We think you’d like these staff recommendations—hailing from the UK, India, and Turkey. Sign up for our newsletter to get these recommendations delivered right to your inbox.

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Like so many of us in this pandemic, my reading has turned to sci-fi and magical realism. When our world is wedged between the hybrid machination of zoom and an increasingly taxing everyday life, fantasy provides an escape into a world of pleasure. Perhaps no one has done this as masterfully as British author, Susanna Clarke, in her recent fantasy novel Piranesi. Set in a disenchanted world of The House, Piranesi, a futuristic scribe of sorts records his everyday life in an infinite universe consisting of severed statues, columns and fringe pockets of water. His universe is awfully lonely, yet he finds a way to narrate it with an uncanny curiosity. He has an endearing voice, which he often uses to enchant the only other member he interacts with, a dapper and sordid gentleman by the name of “The Other.” Together they enter a surreal journey searching for “Great and Secret Knowledge,” encountering the most mundane of objects along the way. Though The Other is not able to value this world in the same way Piranesi does, the latter often lends him his eyes to make him understand. The beauty of Clarke’s writing is not its construction of a highly centralized and systemized future universe, rather its focus on collapse and the journey that lurks between empty halls. I hope you give it a chance and let Piranesi guide your night.

—MK Harb, Editor-at-Large for Lebanon

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The White Umbrella” by Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil

September 14, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Daniel Koehler

Some faces are simply too familiar to leave any doubt that they have been encountered before.

This week’s Translation Tuesday features one of the foremost exponents of the Turkish novel in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil. As his works have been scarcely translated into English, we are delighted to feature this short story translated by Daniel Koehler. Powerfully manipulating the reader’s perspective of an unfolding scene as the narrator follows an umbrella, then a hand, then a person—hear from Koehler about the author’s advocacy of realism’s necessity and his assimilation of other figurative devices within this enchanting story. 

“Having dabbled with romanticism earlier in his career, Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil sat firmly within a realist tradition by the time the collection containing this story was published. His cultural partisanship was conscious and deliberate. In the late 1880s, his famous treatise, Hikaye (The Story), advanced his theories on the superiority of realism over romanticism in nineteenth-century French literature. “The most unsavoury reality,” he argued, “is preferable to the most ornamented fantasy.” If Uşaklıgil dons the mantle of the literary realist, to portray the world simply as it is, he does not shy away from the use of figurative devices. In what might be construed as a nod to Stendhal, he entitled one iconic novel The Blue and the Black. Symbolism, particularly the symbolism of colour, permeates that work, in which blue represents idealism and hope, black disappointment and tragedy. Similarly, the unmarried young lady in this story shields herself with a white umbrella, while five years later, the umbrella in the hands of the mourning widow is black. The clothes of the cheerful girl on the embankment are multicoloured and bright; as a newly married woman, she makes an excursion with her husband to Göksu, the village of the sky-blue waters; but the clothes of the grieving lady on the ferry are monochrome and dark. The only constant is in Zerrin’s blonde hair, which passes from mother to daughter, and in her name itself: the Persian word for golden.

The story presents unique challenges for the translator. First and foremost is the extensive use of the ornate and intricate sentence structure that Ottoman Turkish inherited from literary Persian. Contemporary English, with its affinity for the concise, can feel unwieldy as a tool for the representation of Uşaklıgil’s prose. Generally, sentences have been preserved, although punctuation has been used where appropriate to separate clauses. A further challenge arises from the use of symbolism to which the previous paragraph alludes. A Turkish speaker may well notice the chromatic association of the words Göksu or Zerrin; someone unversed in the language will not. The use of footnotes, and the presentation of the instant note, constitute an attempt by the translator to remedy this lacuna.”

—Daniel Koehler

An elegant, white umbrella . . . while looking from my window down onto the embankment, I saw this umbrella, first from a distance—like a small, frothy, playful, flippant wave that had escaped from the sea for a while to go for a stroll on the embankment—walking along with a prancing undulation . . . After I sighted it, I forgot everything, I looked at nothing else, something I could sense in its bearing, in its walk conveyed even from a distance that this white umbrella, in that entire sequence of umbrellas, was a most joyful, a most merry little imp . . .

It slowly bobbed along the embankment towards my window. I could discern the fine gauze, ruffled in places by broad silk ribbons as it extended over the tulle towards the peak of the umbrella, the lacework that bunched up into little frills as it draped from the edges, and slightly below that, part of the slender yellow shaft. Looking further down—I could only see two fingers’ length; within a black glove that rested on a handle coated in red glass, its ample silk tassels swinging from the edge of the cords, I saw a hand, small enough to complete the ornamentation of this elegant umbrella . . . A hand that conveyed an unbounded impression of elegance in holding that slender shaft. A hand that seemed to wink at you and say: “Well, since you’ve seen me, you’ve realised what sort of person I belong to, haven’t you?” Yes, I’d realised; the figure that was shrouded within the flowing silk of a light purple yeldirme¹ under this umbrella formed of froth, like a lilac that had blossomed under the shadow of a white rose, could only be as I had discovered it . . .

This was not a yeldirme, it was something rather different; it partly resembled a ferace², but partly a yeldirme, so that, in sum, it looked like no item of clothing at all. Perhaps it was because of this, because it had come into being as the product of a young girl’s keen aesthetic sense, that it was pleasing to the eye. It was so simple that it had not a single piece of lacework, nor a single small ribbon. Yet its simplicity was so delightful that one’s eyes could not tire of taking in its delicate folds, rippling like an ornament from head to toe.

As they passed . . . did I mention they were two people? It was likely her mother, who waved at an empty paving stone on the embankment and spoke.

“Zerrin, let’s go this way!” . . .

They went, she receded; yet I had only seen that white umbrella! And that purple yeldirme, that black hand, and I had also heard a name: Zerrin! . . . I murmured the name to myself like a pleasant song: Zerrin? . . . This name matched every other element, an arrangement of elements composed of colours: white, purple, and black. Zerrin! . . . A bouquet of flowers formed of a great white rose, of purple lilacs and yellow hibiscuses, and, at the very base of the stem, bound by a black ribbon; yet the black formed a blemish on this collection of playful colours.

They were walking away, disappearing; after they had eventually faded completely out of view, and I was on the verge of withdrawing from my window, I saw the white umbrella appear once more.

“Oh! They are returning, they will pass by again,” I said. Now I would see the face of this bouquet, a face to which I had already given form in my mind’s eye. Zerrin! . . . As this name ignited my fantasies, I envisioned a delicate white face tinged with a vague pink. This face had faintly coloured lips, and eyebrows that seemed to have been painted with liquid gold, collected from a moonlit night only to evaporate, leaving but a shadow; eyes that smiled with blue, with green, with yellow, or with a colour formed of a clay kneaded from all of these . . . They were approaching, I was watching intently, suddenly the white umbrella was cast back slightly, the face I’d been waiting for was completely exposed, framed by a fine gauze headscarf . . . READ MORE…

Focusing Back on Smallness: On Defne Suman’s The Silence of Scheherazade

August 9, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

Suman’s tale is at its heart about those small people living their daily lives within the city, loving each other and loving the land beneath them.

The Silence of Scheherazade by Defne Suman, translated from the Turkish by Betsy Göksel, Head of Zeus, 2021

In the unfathomable numbers of our current reality, big players—political, economic, scientific—very often overshadow everyday mundanities, the smallness of ordinary people’s lives. In this case, smallness is not meant as an insult, but rather as an important facet that we all lose track of when inundated with the major headlines numbering pandemic casualties. Similarly, the lives of the many characters in Defne Suman’s epic and entangled The Silence of Scheherazade are also eventually dwarfed by the backdrop that consumes them—the fallout of World War I and the crumbling Ottoman Empire.

Part Victorian Gothic, part cosmopolitan modernist, and part metatextual experiment, The Silence of Scheherazade traces the lives of a massive cast of characters from the late 1800s to the early 2000s. Jumping across decades and points of view with ease, moving forward and backward in time, the novel weaves a tangled tapestry over the city of Smyrna. Scheherazade sometimes narrates her life in the first person, but more often draws on the ghosts of the past to let other players come forward and speak. “My birth,” the novel opens, “on a sweet, orange-tinted evening, coincided with the arrival of Avinash Pillai in Smyrna.” A few pages later, Scheherazade recedes and we shift to Pillai himself, with his first encounter of a new home. “The young Indian man, fed up with the smell of coal and cold iron which had permeated the days-long sea voyage, was inhaling the pleasant aroma of flowers and grass. Rose, lemon, magnolia, jasmine and deep down a touch of amber.” In and out Scheherazade leads us, from the Armenian quarter of the city to British spies in the consulate, from wealthier Levantine suburbs to humble Greek grocers.

The focus falls especially to the women of this world, women who are constrained by all those huge players above them to live their lives in accordance with the expectations of their classes, their religions, their families, their countries, and who are forced to extraordinary measures when they fail to comply. Whether the flighty Juliette, the willful Edith, the skillful Meline, the daydreaming Panagiota, or the madwoman Sumbul, each woman is faced with terrible personal tragedies which are locked away behind walls of claustrophobic cultural silences. Edith, for her part, becomes addicted to hashish in order to endure the agony of each day. “That day had come around again. No matter how much hashish she smoked or how many secret ingredients Gypsy Yasemin added to it, whenever this date came around, that long-ago memory returned, like the sun shining through fog.” Panagiota, undergoing a different struggle, agrees to a distasteful marriage in order to protect her family. READ MORE…

Literature as Homeland: The English-Language Debut of Tezer Özlü

April 21, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Matt Hanson

[Özlü] attempted to make sense of life and death, and to create an individual by way of literature.

The conspicuous absence of Tezer Özlü’s work in the English language is, to many readers of Turkish literature, a huge oversight. With precise, knowing style and modernist sense of bending convention, the lyrically humanistic nature of her prose propelled her reputation as a writer in deep dialogue with the specificities and absences of her place and time. Now, in anticipation of her Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri, soon to be released as Cold Nights of Childhood by UK publisher Serpent’s Tail, Matt Hanson gives us a glimpse at the themes of Özlü’s oeuvre, as well as how the sensitivities of her writing continue to carry through to present day.

In 1980, a Turkish novel appeared under the name Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri (Cold Nights of Childhood), written by one of the country’s most beloved writers. As the text reached the public, Tezer Özlü had just six years left to live, before breast cancer would take her life at the age of forty-three. Even amidst illness, she continued to influence European literature from its fringes as internationalist writers—entering the late twentieth century—continued to adapt modernist expressionism as representative of individual, universal humanism.

Özlü wrote mainly in her mother tongue of Turkish, yet her style, temperament, voice, and life aligned technically and thematically with the earlier German and Italian writers she admired, from the Joycean experimentalism of Italo Svevo to the singular meta-fictions of Franz Kafka; yet, it was the atheistic loneliness of Cesar Pavese who inspired her to end her last book, Yaşamin Ucuna Yolculuk (Journey to the End of Life)—first published in German two years before her untimely death—in the very hotel room where he committed suicide. Along with the aforementioned, her four books, issued by Turkey’s prestigious publishing house Yapi Kredi, include a collection of letters with fellow lifelong comrade in literature Leyla Erbil, and a complete works edition of a plays, prose, and translations prepared by her sister, Sezer Duru.

In the last four decades, Özlü has not faded from the literary landscape of young readers. Between her books, the thirty-five printings of Yaşamin Ucuna Yolculuke are only outmatched by the thirty-eight printings for Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri. She is known, adoringly, as the melancholic princess of Turkey by the youngest generation of readers (such as the editor Dilara Alemdar), and as the wild child of Turkish literature by experts (such as NYU Turkish literature professor Sibel Erol). READ MORE…

A Brief Introduction to Nermin Yɪldɪrɪm’s Secret Dreams in Istanbul

March 11, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Ümit Hussein

Secret Dreams in Istanbul is a work of literary fiction, but deals with issues that are very much on the agenda of today’s society.

Secret Dreams in Istanbul is a fascinating Turkish novel by Nermin Yɪldɪrɪm, published at the end of last year by Anthem Press. Before I go any further, I must confess that I am the book’s translator, but I would want to share it even if that weren’t the case. Only very occasionally does one come across a book that leaps out from all others and lodges itself in one’s mind. When that happens, it mustn’t be taken lightly.

March 8 was International Women’s Day, and it strikes me as a very apt time to talk about this novel, given that it draws attention to so many issues that are relevant to the battles women have been fighting for over a century to combat injustice. These themes include domestic violence, forced marriage, feigned virginity, self-induced abortion, physical and social inequality, and, more broadly, the condition of being a victim. In varying degrees, all of the characters in this novel are victims: of their gender, their social class, their biological clock, their complexes, social taboos, social expectations, their physical, intellectual and financial limitations, and of their own family. This is a book in which the weak are oppressed by the strong: it’s about facing up to one’s insecurities and confronting one’s demons; it’s about the age-old problem of sibling rivalry. And running parallel to all of these conflicts is the other key theme in the novel—the role of memory in the human psyche.

To use a somewhat frivolous simile, if you have a diamond necklace, you wouldn’t leave it locked away in a drawer where nobody can appreciate it when it could be displayed for all the world to see. I am a translator in the very privileged position of making it possible for Anglophones to enjoy the literature of other languages, and I felt the need to share this particular gem. For that reason, I decided to translate the book and to now write of why I regard the book so highly, as well as the process of translating it.

I first encountered Ruyalar Anlatɪlmaz (as it is called in Turkish) in 2012 when I was commissioned to translate a section (the first seventy pages). It moved me very deeply; I knew there would be elements of this book that would stay with me forever. But it wasn’t until 2016 that I received the go ahead (at my instigation) to translate it in its entirety.

This is Nermin Yɪldɪrɪm’s second novel. She has since written another five, all of them very fine and more successful than this one. Yet it was Secret Dreams in Istanbul that I felt compelled to translate. Whilst re-reading it, four years after my initial reading, I was taken aback to discover it was almost unnecessary to keep reading because I remembered practically every word. I don’t recall that ever happening to me, either before or since.

To briefly summarise the plot, Pilar, the novel’s Spanish protagonist, returns from work one evening to discover that her husband, Eyüp, has suddenly and inexplicably disappeared from the home they share in Barcelona. She learns from the police the following morning that he has boarded a plane for Istanbul, the city of his birth that he has not visited since he left it almost two decades previously. Mystified as to what could have provoked such uncharacteristic behaviour, and assailed by her own insecurities, she decides to follow him there and bring him back. Packing a tiny bag with just a few clothes and the dream diary that Eyüp’s psychologist has asked him to keep (in an attempt to get to the bottom of what has been disturbing his sleep), she sets off for Istanbul, where she will embark on a journey of painful discovery. Meeting Eyüp’s dysfunctional family, from which he has been as good as estranged since before she has known him, and his friends, and seeing for the first time the city where he grew up, she pieces together the clues to uncover the horrifying truth about what drove Eyüp away. READ MORE…

Turkish Dude Lit Has a “Dad Rock” Moment: Barış Bıçakçı’s The Mosquito Bite Author

January 14, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Matthew Chovanec

[A] stream of academic writing still holds up these dudes and their self-pity as emblematic of national identity.

Turkish dude lit is much like dude lit elsewhere: it deals with the trials of privileged man-boys. Unlike some of the genre’s more vilified geographic variants, though, it has yet to be carefully examined. While grateful for the chance to indulge in it freely, former Asymptote contributor Matthew Chovanec has his qualms; in particular, he argues, pinning Turkey’s Volksgeist on its male antiheroes actually does them (and their readers) a disservice. Enter The Mosquito Bite Author, in Chovanec’s own recent translation: might acclaimed writer Barış Bıçakçı’s subtle parody of the vain male figure pave the way to its survival?

I really enjoy Turkish novels about men wasting away in their comfortable, petty-bourgeois lives. I can’t get enough of them. I love following along, a vicarious flaneur, as the protagonists stroll through my favorite Istanbul streets. I’m charmed by their ability to take just the right line of surrealist poetry from the Ikinci Yeni movement and make it fit as an oracular judgment on their own personal haplessness. I even like reading about them sitting at home, staring at their bookshelves and resenting their wives. Something about them has me consuming these titles with the faithfulness of a reader of policiers or harlequin novels, and Turkey keeps producing them with almost pulp-like regularity. Every decade, it seems, brings its own antihero, yawning at modernist art exhibits, slinking away from military coups, scorning the superficiality that comes with economic liberalization, or trying out the latest fashions in postmodern soliloquy.

While I myself am a voracious reader of highly literate accounts of sociopathy, I appreciate that they aren’t for everyone. As an American, I can also admit that I’ve basically taken a circuitous linguistic route to enjoying works that would face derision back home, reveling as I am in another country’s “Dude Lit.” Laura Fraser describes the genre as one whose “books generally propel a confused, often drug-addled or alcoholic, narcissistic, philandering male protagonist to, well, not self-discovery, but some semblance of adult behavior.” Her description could just as easily apply to the protagonists of Turkish novels like Yusuf Atılgan’s Aylak Adam, Oğuz Atay’s Tutunamayanlar, Vedat Türkali’s Bir Gün Tek Basına, or Ayhan Gecgin’s Gençlik Düşü; they, in turn, make frequent reference to the Slacker International, inhabiting the same fictional universe as Seymour Glass or John Shade. READ MORE…

Honoring the Art of Translation: Ümit Hussein

September 28, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Ümit Hussein

Our task is not restricted to giving readers access to literature . . . by doing so we also perform the role of cultural ambassadors.

Though Asymptote has made it a point to celebrate literary translation no matter the time of year, we’re still pretty thrilled that there’s a whole month dedicated to the cause. As we draw towards the end of National Translation Month, Asymptote is taking the opportunity to bring together essential components that complete the cycle of literature as it travels from one language to the next, with the intention of recognizing the meticulous, purposeful, and intimate labour invested into a text during this peregrination—from conception to publication. We have asked four valued members of the literary community, spanning the globe, to bring us their take on translation and its gifts. 

In this third feature, we are delighted to present an original essay by Ümit Hussein, an award-winning translator (and past Asymptote Book Club contributor!), who translates from the Turkish to the English. Her translation of Burhan Sönmez’s Istanbul Istanbul won the EBRD prize in 2018 and her translation of Nermin Yıldırım’s Secret Dreams in Istanbul is forthcoming from Anthem Press. Born and raised in North London in an extended Turkish Cypriot family, Hussein sees her role as translator reaching beyond the linguistic, in order to act as a cultural ambassador and elucidate a different cultural context for English readers. Here, she explains her own response to the question of why translation is essential to promoting literature and bringing about change.  

When I was asked to write this article, my brief was to make it about any aspect of translation I thought was important. Unaccustomed to so much freedom, I set about wracking my brain. One of the first thoughts that crossed my mind was, why do we translate at all? Given that it is widely believed that a translation can never be equal to the original; that a good translator is one that is completely invisible; that the translation must read as though written in the target language; that we are branded with the label traduttore traditore; that it is so poorly paid; and that, harshest of all, a certain award-winning writer, who translated fiction before she became a novelist, said in an interview, “For me it’s a waste of time . . . I want to write, not waste time with translations.” (Fortunately for this author, her translator, whose translation won her the prize, does not share her views.) What, then, motivates us to lavish so much love, care, time, and energy on what is frequently treated as the poor relative of “real” writing? READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2020

March 16, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal, Georgina Fooks, Josefina Massot, and Rachel Allen

We're feeling the need for great literature in these strange times.

These last few weeks of winter will be known as the time of stockpiling, and as countries around the world are shutting doors in response to COVID-19, stores are being cleared out and preserved goods and household necessities are piled up in cupboards. But just as it is vital to care for your body in these perplexing times, it is equally important to nurture your mind. So it is with that in mind that we present the newest and brightest in translated literature from around the world, in hopes that what is available to us remains our compassion, our desire to understand one another, and the privilege to travel amidst isolation. Below, our editors present a book of poetry written in a defiant border-language, a poignant Turkish critique of human cruelty, a Colombian novel depicting a young girl’s inner wildness, and the latest translated poems of Jacques Roubaud, written in the Oulipo tradition of valuing absence as equally as presence. 

night in the north

Night in the North by Fabián Severo, translated from the Portuñol by Laura Cesaro Eglin and Jesse Lee Kercheval, Eulalia Books, 2020

Review by Georgina Fooks, Communications Manager

How do we choose which language to write in?

For some of us, that choice can be fraught. Whether you’re a child of immigrants (as I am), or from a contested border region (as Fabián Severo is), there is a great deal at stake when making that choice. It impacts your identity, it shapes your politics. There’s no doubt that when reading this collection, Severo’s decision to write in Portuñol is a political act. READ MORE…

Our Year in World Literature

December 31, 2019  |  in News  |  by Alexander Dickow and Lee Yew Leong

The top 10 articles we published in 2019—according to you!

To send off 2019, we’re revisiting the ten most-read articles from our issues this year. Not surprisingly, most of them were concentrated in our Spring 2019 issue, voted by 290 readers as your favorite edition this year. Scroll down to see which article was the biggest hit in a year that saw never-before-published writing from 70 countries and 44 languages spread out over four quarterly issues.

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At No. 10 is Argentine author Sylvia Molloy’s thrilling but sensitive meditation on the bilingual condition from the Fall 2019 issue—read her essay “Living Between Languages.” READ MORE…

My 2019: Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

December 23, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

What follows is not a reckoning of everything I read this year, but rather a contemplation of the different ways that books assign themselves to me

Flaubert once said that one should read not for the purpose of instruction, but “in order to live.” Continuing our staff summations of 2019 in literature, Asymptote’s Educational Arm Assistant Katarzyna Bartoszyńska outlines an abundant year of reading, ranging from feminist favourites to autofiction to books about books, and in doing so, considers the sense of how books find their way to us, perhaps so that we may live.

Reflecting on my year in reading, I started to think about how various books came into my hands. I’m a literature professor, so a lot of what I read is determined by the classes I’m teaching, the syllabi I create. But making assigned book lists seems to have become a habit that spills over into the rest of my life as well—much of my reading seems to be part of various projects with lists of their own. It’s rare for me to randomly grab a book off my to-read shelf and just dive in, though I did just that with Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins, and it ended up being one of my favorite books of the year; a collection of formally dazzling short stories, whose pleasure was heightened for me, perhaps, because I entered it with almost no previous knowledge, and so was all the more delighted by every surprising twist and turn. I had a similar experience with Yiyun Li’s breathtaking A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. But as often as not, the result of such serendipity will be the creation of a new list—for instance, I’ve now resolved to read everything else Yiyun Li has written. What follows, then, is not a reckoning of everything I read this year, but rather a contemplation of the different ways that books assign themselves to me, and the highlights of these circumlocutious processes. READ MORE…

The Language of Non-Existence: Ümit Hussein on Translating Burhan Sönmez

December 12, 2019  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Sarah Moore

Ultimately, I believe the main challenge of [translating] literary fiction is that it’s a labour of love.

For our penultimate Book Club selection of the year, we looked to the occupations of memory and philosophy to find Burhan Sönmez’s masterful novel, Labyrinth. Brought into English from Turkish with every bit of its poeticism intact by the author’s long-time partner in literature, Ümit Hussein, the work tellingly arrives at a time when we as readers are questioning the integrity of our collective memories more than ever. In the following interview, Asymptote’s Assistant Blog Editor Sarah Moore speaks to Hussein on her relationship with Sönmez, the necessity of knowing where a novel “comes from”, and the lonely profession of translation.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers in the US, the UK, and the EU. Today is the last day to sign up to give or receive our Book Club titles—starting from this month! Take advantage of our special Black Friday sale and get 10% off three-month subscriptions. Once you’re a member, be sure to join our online discussion group at our Facebook page!

Sarah Moore (SM): You’ve translated several other books by Burhan Sönmez. How has his work evolved over the years in terms of content or style? Can you point to some longstanding themes? What stood out to you about this particular novel?

Ümit Hussein (UH): Burhan and I first met when we were both starting out. I have translated all his novels to date, including his first, North—the only one yet to be published in English. I don’t want to misquote the number of books he told me he read in preparation for it, but I believe it was over a hundred. Because the novel was still in manuscript form when I translated it (it hadn’t yet found a Turkish publisher), he kept revising it. I must say, that’s something that hasn’t changed over time! He’s incredibly meticulous. Every word he writes has been carefully considered and rethought and rewritten. I know because I work very closely with my authors; I think it’s important to establish a rapport during the translation process, and consequently I’m one of those tiresome translators who is constantly in touch with questions and comments and requests for explanations. 

While each of Burhan’s novels bears his unmistakeable stamp, they are all very different and have evolved over time. Istanbul Istanbul may be his most mature in terms of craftsmanship and poeticism, but my personal favourite is Sins and Innocents. Both revolve largely around storytelling, as does Burhan’s work at large. In Istanbul Istanbul, four prisoners sharing a tiny underground cell distract each other with stories. Similarly, half of Sins and Innocents is set in Burhan’s native village in Central Anatolia, and each chapter in the Anatolian half is devoted to the often dramatic story of a real life village character. These chapters could, if developed, comprise novels in themselves: there are tales of young girls being buried alive, a student mistakenly shot dead by his brother who is embroiled in a blood feud, a beautiful woman scarred for life when she is attacked by a she-bear maddened with grief after the death of her cubs. Burhan is a born storyteller, because he comes from a culture where the oral tradition is very prominent. READ MORE…

Announcing Our November Book Club Selection: Labyrinth by Burhan Sönmez

November 28, 2019  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Sarah Moore

In this exploration of the passage of time, Sönmez is at his most philosophical and his most political.

To live, to remember, and to forget—these are the mainstays of nearly every narrative both real and imagined, and this month, we have selected Burhan Sönmez’s masterful novel, Labyrinth, which traverses these themes with a lucidly Borgesian, yet stirringly original hand. A highly anticipated publication in Sönmez’s award-winning body of work, this profound book navigates the psychogeography of Istanbul to interrogate that most mysterious creature: the self.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers in the US, the UK, and the EU. 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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Labyrinth by Burhan Sönmez, translated from the Turkish by Ümit Hussein, Other Press, 2019

Boratin Bey knows that his name is Boratin, that he lives in Istanbul, that he is a blues musician with a tattoo on his back, but he doesn’t know why. And, more urgently, he doesn’t know why he jumped from Bosphorus Bridge—a fall he survived but which has now caused total memory loss. At the beginning of Burhan Sönmez’s Labyrinth (deftly translated by Ümit Hussein), Boratin wakes, disorientated in his unfamiliar apartment with no knowledge of who he is. Luckily, he has a few anchors that can guide him through his now estranged surroundings. Firstly, his bandmate, Bek, who takes care of practical matters, informs him of his likes, dislikes, habits and tries to settle him back into his old rhythm. His sister helps as well, taking great joy in remembering the past and recounting tales of his childhood to Boratin over the phone.

His experience of the world may only just be commencing, but it doesn’t take long before the big philosophical questions start to appear. “Did I choose and buy the furniture in this house?” and “Have I always lived alone?” are suddenly supplanted by “What does beautiful mean?” and “What brings on the desire to die?” A change that is, of course, understandable as Boratin is suddenly forced to step into his own life through the eyes of a complete stranger to it. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 24, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Janani Ganesan, and Rachael Pennington

We come to you this week armed with manifestos from Hong Kong, recipes from India, and voices giving shapes to poetry in Barcelona.

We look both backward and forward: a revolution in China, an election in India, poets uniting in Barcelona to cohere past and future with performance and verse. This week our editors are here with literary news items that display a history starkly immediate, a present gathering visions, and tomorrows which hope that remembrance may also be an act of resistance. 

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong:

The May Fourth Movement was one of the most influential events for China in the twentieth century as it powerfully revolutionised Chinese culture and society. The cultural movement complemented the political Xinhai Revolution led by Sun Yat-sen in heralding China’s modern era. Its centenary is celebrated across the Straits, and Hong Kong is no exception. Hong Kong’s Dr. Sun Yat-sen Museum is in collaboration with the Beijing Lu Xun Museum to organise “The Awakening of a Generation: The May Fourth and New Culture Movement” Exhibition, displaying relevant collections from both Beijing and the Hong Kong Museum of History to the public, including the handwritten manuscripts of Chen Duxiu and Hu Shih. The exhibition will also showcase visual and multimedia artworks that are inspired by the event.

The Hong Kong Literary Criticism Society has inaugurated the “Hong Kong Chinese Literary Criticism Competition 2019” to promote literary criticism in Hong Kong, and the launch ceremony of the competition was held in the Hong Kong Arts Development Council on May 18. Hong Kong writer Yip Fai and Chinese scholar Choy Yuen-fung from Hong Kong Baptist University were invited to give a talk on the necessity of literature and literary criticism, moderated by the chairman of Hong Kong Literary Criticism Society, Ng Mei-kwan.

READ MORE…