Two Poems by Mahmoud Darwish

March 27, 2024  |  in All Eyes on Palestine, Translations  |  by Catherine Cobham and Mahmoud Darwish

If peace is a pause between two wars, then the dead have a right to vote: we will choose the general.

Of all that Mahmoud Darwish has left to us in his legacy of prismatic language, transcendent humanism, and elucidation of Palestinian consciousness, the greatest gift might be his belief that literature can confront any question—even those that seem most unanswerable—and consequently, his profound demonstration of living, gracefully and with dignity, inside ambiguity. Translated beautifully by Catherine Cobham, A River Dies of Thirst is the final book of poems published in Darwish’s lifetime, and it provides us with another opportunity to share reality with a writer who has always astonishingly made poetry the site of actuality—the poem as a place where thinking is forged. They precisely mark enormous emotional ranges with a single, pointed image; they make short lines of long wars; and they push us, as always, towards the seeking of meaning. In the final lines of his memoir, Memory for Forgetfulness, the poet repeats: “No one understands anyone. / And no one understands anyone. / No one understands.” Perhaps so. But as these poems congregate irresolution with desire, the ethereal with the material, and conviction with inquiry—we get the feeling that we might begin.

A common enemy

It is time for the war to have a siesta. The fighters go to their girlfriends, tired and afraid their words will be misinterpreted: ‘We won because we did not die, and our enemies won because they did not die.’ For defeat is a forlorn expression. But the individual fighter is not a soldier in the presence of the one he loves: ‘If your eyes hadn’t been aimed at my heart the bullet would have penetrated it!’ Or: ‘If I hadn’t been so eager to avoid being killed, I wouldn’t have killed anyone!’ Or: ‘I was afraid for you if I died, so I survived to put your mind at rest.’ Or: ‘Heroism is a word we only use at the graveside.’ Or: ‘In battle I did not think of victory but of being safe, and of the freckles on your back.’ Or: ‘How little difference there is between safety and peace and the room where you sleep.’ Or: ‘When I was thirsty I asked my enemy for water and he didn’t hear me, so I spoke your name and my thirst was quenched.’ Fighters on both sides say similar things in the presence of the ones they love. But the casualties on both sides don’t realise until it’s too late that they have a common enemy: death. So what does that mean? READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “today I only took one ativan” by Maniniwei

March 26, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Emily Lu

your hand was bigger. sturdier. the nights were sturdier too.

This Translation Tuesday, senses heightened by a sleeping pill, Taiwanese writer Maniniwei exhibits a wonderful sensitivity to touch. Everything in this dreamy poem feels as if ‘felt’. The softness of her cat, the points of its claws and teeth, the texture of the night, the contents of her dreams; they are as if sensations in the fingertips have been translated directly into a lilting prose-poetry, which have been rendered with equal care and skill into the English by Emily Lu.

I needed more distance from you. cicadas screamed as if giants were about to descend. my morning. was your tiny playground. today I took an ativan. weighed you on the scale. patted my own belly. and patted the cat one hundred times. your hand was bigger. sturdier. the nights were sturdier too. don’t ask the sand what it saw. which horses. which humans. I liked time on you. the flying humans from the picture stopped to rest in your mind’s boat. the fresh flowers and IV pole on your body. your nighttime bite and cough. your shoulder, eaten. I wrote this song for you. today I ran. today I only took one ativan. patted your fur. celebrated your fur. comforted your fur. your sweet fur. wet from the rain. very quickly I got hungry. didn’t do anything and hungry. Two scratch marks left by the cat. no blood. nothing. I saw it. you looked like a god of spring.

Translated from the Chinese by Emily Lu

Maniniwei is a Malay-Taiwanese writer and illustrator. She was writer-in-residence at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2021. Her works have been recognized by OPENBOOK, the Bologna Ragazzi Award, the Taoyuan Chung Chao-Cheng Award for Literature, and the National Culture and Arts Foundation. Restarting her creative practice after age 30, she is the author of more than ten books. She lives in Taipei with one child and two cats. This is the first time her work has appeared in English.

Emily Lu was born in Nanjing. She completed her MD at Queen’s University in 2017. She is the author of the chapbooks there is no wifi in the afterlife (San Press 2022) and Night Leaves Nothing New (Baseline Press 2019), as well as works appearing in Waxwing, Augur, Honey Literary, Arc Poetry Magazine, and filling Station. She lives in Toronto. This is her debut translation.

Every Dirge Sung: Patricia Jabbeh Wesley on Liberian Poetry as Literature of Witness

March 25, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I wanted Liberia placed on the literary map of the world. And my life’s goal was to be that writer. . .

Named by The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry (2017) as “the first major poet to emerge from Liberia in decades,” Dr Patricia Jabbeh Wesley was born in her mother’s hometown of Dolokeh, Maryland County, southeastern Liberia, and raised in Monrovia, the capital city of Liberia. She then emigrated from there to the United States with her family during the First Liberian Civil War (1989-1997). With six critically-acclaimed poetry collections under her belt, Nigerian historian Ayodeji Olukoju has called her “a rising Liberian female literary star who has made a mark as a poet of note”, and she has been named Chee Dawanyeno by her people, the Grebo. Dr Patricia believes in the poetic moral imperative to bear witness on the brutalities—such as war, settler-colonialism, carnage, and genocide—perpetrated by those with structural power against the common people. In the words of Zimbabwean poet Tsitsi Jaji, from her panegyric “Praise Song for Patricia Jabbeh Wesley”: “But you look death in the eye and it looks down.”

In this interview, I spoke with Dr Patricia, recently proclaimed the Republic of Liberia’s inaugural Poet Laureate, on Liberian poetry as literature of witness and its poetic topography de nos jours; the presence of African orality and indigenous storytelling in Anglophone African writings; and the anthology she edited from the University of Nebraska Press, Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): As a survivor to the First Liberian Civil War, your activism involves documentation of and fact-finding on Liberian women’s stories of trauma as well as speaking your truth as an expert witness (such as during the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Hearings in Minnesota in 2008 as commissioned by The Advocates of Human Rights). You once spoke of enshrining the war through words and of literature as testimony. Is that, for you, the role of the poet in times of lawlessness and monstrosities—a witness?

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley (PJW): Yes. I believe that the role of an artist and poet is to be the town crier of her people, the voice of the voiceless, the preserver of tradition and history of her people’s sensibility. In our African tradition, the artist belongs to the people, to the community, to the village, and to the clan. As a survivor of the brutal Liberian civil war, I must keep alive our families, friends, and all the people who were silenced in the fourteen-year-long series of civil wars. I have always used my poetry and writing as a tool for activism. One of our mother authors, the late Ama Ata Aidoo of Ghana once said, rightly, that, “For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.”

AMMD: In Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), you historicised Liberian poetry, finding its roots as early as the 1800s in the time of statesmen Hilary Teage and Daniel Bashiel Warner—the anthology’s impetus being that “the silence [of Liberian literature at the global level] was deafening.” Can you speak more about this silence and how this anthology is speaking against it?

PJW: The anthology does not speak against the silence, though. It ends the silence. Liberian literature, art, and culture have been suppressed since the country’s founding. The founding fathers who were freed slaves from the South of America built a country fashioned after their former slave masters, where those who had always owned, lived on, and tended to the land were made the subordinates and those from outside were the lone leaders. They relegated the Africans who owned the land at the country’s establishment to a near second-class citizenship, not allowing indigenous Africans in what is now our country to help determine the direction of our country. That lasted for one hundred and thirty-nine years until the first military coup in 1980. The only other time an indigenous African was anywhere near the top of the country’s leadership was when Himie-Too Wesley, or H. Too Wesley, my husband’s great uncle, was made the Vice President in 1924 when the League of Nations charged the Liberian leadership with the enslavement of Krus and Grebo people, H. T. Wesley’s ethnic group. And for historical context, the newcomers, or Americo-Liberians, the freed slaves who founded the nation, were a very tiny minority, ruling the nation for 139 years while indigenous Africans were the huge majority and continue to be today. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

March 22, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou and Kathryn Raver

The latest literary news from Greece and France!

This week, our editors take us to Greece and France, where they find exciting projects at the National Library, urgent new poetry in translation, and theater adaptations. From the Afro Greek experience to new takes on the work of Annie Ernaux, read on to find out more!

Christina Chatzitheodorou, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Greece

The National Library of Greece (NLG) is currently displaying the fruits of their project “We, the Afro-Greeks: black literature as a cultural bridge.” Until the end of April, the Library will be displaying new books by authors of African origin that focus on themes of immigration and racism—additions enabled by this project. This comes after a few initiatives by and for Afro-Greeks that engage with the lived experience of Black people in Greece. The term “Afro-Greek” itself, as Adéọlá Naomi Adérè̩mí explains, is relatively new: “We started using it around 2015 to 2017 as a term to express the experience of being Black and raised or born in Greece, of having our formative years in Greece and identifying as Greek citizens legally and culturally. We are Greek and African.” READ MORE…

Scream of Freedom: Samar Yazbek and Leri Price on Where the Wind Calls Home

March 21, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Alex Tan

I love the world in Arabic, so I started to write it as my personal space.

Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home is a poetic rumination that shifts through the land of the dead and of the living, between thinking and intuiting, and from the vast destructions of war to its intimate, embodied experience. In taking us to the “other” side—that of the military—in Syria’s unsparing civil war, Yazbek offers a method of understanding pain’s blind immensity, as well as the metaphysical phenomenon of life at the precipice of death. With the incredible work of translator Leri Price, whom Yazbek calls here her “voice in English”, Where the Wind Calls Home arrives to us with all the weight of contemporary tragedy, and all the light of a spiritual encounter. Here, Yazbek and Price speak to us on the recurring motifs of the text, the fluidity of the prose, and how writing can reveal to us our own secrets.

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. 

Alex Tan (AT): Samar, in your previous novel, Planet of Clay, we follow the perspective of a mute girl from Damascus, caught in the middle of the Syrian Civil War. For Where the Wind Calls Home, why did you select a dying soldier as your protagonist?

Samar Yazbek (SY): First of all, we’re not sure if he will die—what will happen to him, and with his life. Actually, it was a challenge in my own life, because I was in exile from myself, and I had stopped writing literature. I came back with Planet of Clay, to literature, but when I decided to write this novel, I started writing it as poetry. I tried something different. It’s a very personal thing.

Ten or twelve years ago, I decided for the first time to speak about the victims who are living on the other side of the Assad regime. It was a very difficult choice for me. There’s a perception that the soldiers on the side of the regime are not victims, but the problem is that this has been a long war, and everyone is a victim. And what we’ve got to remember is that there’s a class element; we have to remember the poor. A fundamental part of literature, in my opinion, is that we learn to look at things from an alternate point of view, and to have empathy with others. Without that, it’s absolutely certain that things won’t change.

AT: The figure of the tree plays such a central role in the novel—it becomes this recurring motif, with Ali crawling towards it in the narrative present, and thinking back to all the trees that have shielded him, including the one next to the maqam. Did you have any specific personal, religious, cultural, or literary motivations in opting for the tree as the essential anchor of the text?

SY: There are lots of reasons. First, every maqam in the mountains has trees. They’re all surrounded by trees, and these trees are huge and ancient, hundreds of years old. Second, the tree acts as refuge for Ali. It represents a shelter from daily violence—from the sort of physical violence that he encounters in the village.

The most important thing is that trees are silent. Trees die standing, silently, without speaking the language of humans—and in this death they have dignity. Ali is able to communicate with the tree, together in their silences. Silence is Ali’s language, his way of resisting against the violence in his society, so he invents a new language with the trees, with the sky, with the wind. It’s like he builds a bridge between himself and all the elements of nature. Trees are part of his world.

I’m also talking about myself and my vision; I believe we need to be like a tree sometimes.

AT: I want to pick up on what you said about the language of the trees being Ali’s language in the novel. I’m also thinking of what you said earlier, that the novel began as poetry. Could you tell us how it evolved from poetry into the novel, and whether you think the novel becomes a good channel for this silence? READ MORE…

Ambiguities, Ruptures, and Shifting Perspectives: On Enchanted Lion’s “Unruly” Imprint

March 20, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Colin Leemarshall

Each of these Unruly publications presents a semiotically hybrid and richly aporetic narrative.

The art of book illustration has long accompanied the story in its imaginary expeditions—to vivify settings, to enrich character, and to extend language along sensorial planes. Yet, in contemporary publishing, there are few fictions for older readers that truly explore this complex reciprocity between image and text. In fall of 2020, the independent press Enchanted Lion addressed this lack with the announcement of Unruly: a new imprint that would be dedicated to “the picture book’s full potential for readers of all ages”. This was followed by the issuing of several titles dedicated to the dialogues between visual and literary languages, manifesting in enthralling alternatives of description, evocation, and narrative realities. In the following essay, Colin Leemarshall takes a close look on the three works out now.

In the popular imagination, the picture book is a highly circumscribed form. The apparent consensus—fomented both by market protocols and by entrenched reading habits—is that picture-heavy storybooks are for children up to the age of about eight; beyond this age, children are expected to graduate to chapter books, then to young adult novels, then finally (it is hoped) to sophisticated adult literature. (Those who remain drawn to the artistic gestalt of text and image have recourse to the graphic novel—a form that is now widely afforded the status of ‘serious’ literature.) This imagined trajectory not only obscures the fact that the world of illustrated children’s literature has always had its more provocative practitioners (from Heinrich Hoffmann to Tomi Ungerer), it also erects an unnecessary palisade against any ‘incursions’ from the adult world.

The New York-based Enchanted Lion seems to be one of the few anglophone presses invested in upending this prejudice. The publisher has long been open to putting out more challenging and unexpected works, and several of the books on its main title list might be said to be as much for adults as for children. However, it wasn’t until fairly recently, with the 2021 establishment of its Unruly imprint, that Enchanted Lion canalised these preferences into something more systematic. On its website, the publisher writes:

We’re launching Unruly because we believe that the possibilities for the illustrated book are larger and richer than the categories of board book, children’s picture book, graphic novel, and art book that currently exist [….] Picture books are rich with design and story, and yet the genre has come to be seen as one strictly for children. At Enchanted Lion, picture books are for readers of all ages, and sparking awareness of this boundlessness might finally be what is needed to allow the unique form that is the picture book—where word and image live together as nowhere else—to be seen as the expansive narrative medium it is.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Toothpick” by Mari Klein

March 19, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Mari Klein

it had been accidentally baked into a slice of Gerbeaud cake, and the confectioner, without knowing it or wanting to, had begotten a tragedy

This Translation Tuesday, we are proud to present a brilliant vignette from the innovative mind of Hungarian author Mari Klein, who also translates her own work into English. Dropping us in media res in this tableau of a woman crouching on a bathroom floor as she gasps for her dying breath—the ignominious cause revealed only near the very end—Klein not only gives us a masterclass in the depiction of consciousness but also a glimpse into her huge gifts as a mordantly funny writer.

(Then she groped on all fours on the worn bathroom floor, along the bathtub, under the washing machine, behind the laundry basket, but couldn’t find it: half a pair of the pretty green stone earrings were gone; there goes the family heirloom, she thought, wiping the blood that had clotted on her neck. But the snake bracelet―the clasp was broken and it was only cheap trinket gold anyway―she couldn’t get rid of, even though she threw it in the toilet and flushed it three times: the blue-purple marks of the scales would have to be worn and concealed on her wrist for a long time to come.)

She opened St. Peter’s Umbrella, to be read by Wednesday, and turned to the last page: “. . . a whisper, it sounded like the buzzing of a fly. Poor child!” she read, but suddenly slammed the book shut, crumpling the dust jacket in her hands, clenching it so tightly that her knuckles turned white. Then she gently stroked the letters on the cover, as if to apologise, and put the book back on the bedside table, next to the polka dot mug. With her finger she stirred the cold cocoa: the pale swirl swallowed the skin and then, as it weakened, spat it back to the surface. She licked her finger: the milk had gone sour. Titi said her daddy made her cocoa every night too.

 (From the white vinyl apron on the drying rack above the bathtub, she counted: water dripped on every fourth. The heavy body was sweating, panting, reeking of booze and garlic; but then all she could see was the fly on the mirror, rubbing its feet, buzzing, moving back and forth a few centimetres every now and then.) READ MORE…

‘Lost and Found in Maps of Wandering’: A Review of Bothayna Al-Essa’s Lost in Mecca

March 18, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Lost in Mecca is not a one-dimensional story; it is paradoxical, repelling readers while captivating them.

Lost in Mecca by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated from the Arabic by Nada Faris, Dar Arab, 2024

Best-selling Kuwaiti author Bothayna al-Essa’s Lost in Mecca —first published in Arabic in 2015 as Maps of Wandering/خرائط التيه—is more than just a literary crime thriller; it’s a journey through Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, as well as into the minds of its protagonists. Al-Essa moves from a mere personal incident to a human plight and the global crisis that is human organ trafficking, resulting in an expansive narrative and a much welcome addition to the growing list of modern Arabic fiction available in English.

Lost in Mecca opens with the ordeal of a couple on Haj. As a flood of pilgrims circumambulate the Kaaba, al-Essa focuses on a Kuwaiti woman, Sumaya, holding the hand of her seven-year-old son, Mishari—who she has brought along even though it’s not obligatory for children to participate in this annual journey. Sumaya’s husband, Faisal, is also performing the same ritual nearby. All of a sudden, a group of Africans rushes forward, holding onto each other, and in the chaos, Mishari’s hand slips away from Sumaya’s. In this human flood, Mishari is lost.

The spiritual scene soon fades away, and the flooded square transforms into an empty place filled with the echoing cries of a grieving mother, repeating, “Mishari! Oh God! My son!”, over and over again. The bodies diminish, the crowd thins, the distances shorten, the gaps decrease, and Mecca itself becomes a maze. How could a child possibly vanish in all this confusion?

From that point onward, the tragedy truly begins with the search for Mishari, a pursuit that transcends the boundaries of pages to become a terrifying nightmare. The ensuing chapters chronicle Mishari’s wanderings between the 7th and 29th of Dhu al-Hijjah, continually being confronted by the ‘forgotten’ worlds and stories of human negligence taking place across the Middle East. Al-Essa stretches out his challenging storyline from Mecca to ‘Asir, Jazan, and the Red Sea coast. Eventually, Mishari’s parents will even cross the sea towards Sinai through restricted maritime routes. The narration covers the Sinai desert and its vast expanses, up to the borders of Al-‘Arish in the north. It also highlights the geographical boundaries of occupied Palestine, and sheds light on what the Western media has reported regarding human organ trafficking, and secret deals involving Israeli and Egyptian officials.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

March 15, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Miranda Mazariegos

The latest from the Philippines, Bulgaria, and Colombia!

Join us this week as our Editors-at-Large bring us news on the most recent bestsellers in the Philippines, the translation of board games in Bulgaria, and the posthumous publication of García Márquez’s final novel in Colombia. From Wattpad-homegrown Filipino authors to the politics of posthumous publication, read on to learn more!

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines 

The memoir of Korean mega boy band BTS (both its English and Filipino translations) and the novel Queen of the Universe (Tuttle Publishing, 2023) by 2015 Miss Universe titlist Filipino beauty queen Pia Wurtzbach have triumphed over the early 2024 bestsellers list as gazetted by the National Book Store (NBS), the Philippines’ largest chain of commercial bookshops. 

A source of the so-called ‘Pinoy Pride’ from said list are The New York Times chart-topping debut fantasy novel by Thea Guanzon, The Hurricane Wars (Harper Voyager, 2023); journalist and historian Ambeth Ocampo’s Cabinet of Curiosities: History from Philippine Artifacts (published last year by Anvil, NBS’s sister company); and Panda Book Awards-shortlisted Gail Villanueva’s Lulu Sinagtala and the City of Noble Warriors (HarperCollins, 2024), a children’s book imbued with ancient Tagalog mythological lore—all testaments that Filipinos read books written by Filipino authors. 

Populating the local fiction hits are Wattpad-homegrown Filipino genre fictionists, their works ranging from new adult to romance, from chick lit to fantasy—among others, Gwy Saludes’ The Rain in España (which has since been adapted into a popularised Viva One web series) and Safe Skies, Archer, both released last year by Precious Pages under Saludes’ penname 4Reuminct; Disney Panganiban’s Zombie University 3 (Lifebooks, 2023); and No Perfect Prince (Majesty Press, 2023) by Jonahmae Pacala or Jonaxx, dubbed as the country’s ‘Pop Fiction Queen’ and the most celebrated contemporary writer from my hometown.  READ MORE…

I Write From A Lost Place

March 14, 2024  |  in All Eyes on Palestine  |  by Olivia Elias

refugee in Poetry / I live the life that is mine / over which hovers the shadow / of a great Catastrophe

In this wandering, immense poem, Olivia Elias, a poet of the Palestinian diaspora, shares the intimate elegy of the landless, travelling between voids, violences, and grief. Looking at the casualties of not only people and landscape, but also language, Elias’ rhythmic fragmentations hover and intuit around the immense unsayability of hell, in the guise of “civilized realities”. From precipices, from near-disappearances, and estranged by horror, by censorship, this poem is the work of a writer who sees her work—and its singular ability to give weight to negated spaces—as one of the few remaining places to situate life, and all of its losses.

I write from a lost place

on the edge of all edges

a land floating between presence and absence

I write & weave ropes of words
to overcome this Mountain
of fables & legends    lies & betrayals
face the storms of fire      resist the
hurricanes that would throw me
in abysses teeming with vipers
escape the soldiers judges & censors
on my heels

the new Khans & their powerful Allies require that I only use
words listed on their official registers while strictly complying
to the elements of language they carefully crafted over a
century ago

A land without a people     For a people without a land
Bedouins on their camels      and so on

among the forbidden words    this one that starts with the first
letter of the alphabet    using it means immediate excommuni
cation      relegation into the last chamber of hell READ MORE…

European Literature Days 2023: Literature for a Better World

March 13, 2024  |  in Dispatches  |  by MARGENTO

From the famed literary festival in Krems an der Donau!

Since 2009, acclaimed writers, artists, readers, and friends of literature have gathered in a small Austrian town for four days to attend the European Literature Days festival. With each edition addressing a vital, timely theme of contemporary European writing, the packed program features some of the most brilliant minds across the continent. In the following dispatch, Editor-at-Large MARGENTO reports from this singular event.

The town of Krems an der Donau in Austria is a unique place in Europe, conducive to genuinely special literary and arts events such as the annual European Literature Days. Off the trodden path of regular tourist destinations, it is both compellingly picturesque as well as conveniently distant from the hustle and bustle of the capital, but nevertheless retaining the latter’s intransigence for excellence in higher education and the arts. 

The city’s tortuously narrow medieval streets wind between old churches and traditional pubs, and every now and then, they open upon wide panoramas of the Danube and the terraced vineyards surrounding it, resulting in a landscape both mysterious and inspirational. Ancient, blurred guild symbols and still-colorful frescos of winemaking deities and feasts are punctured by modern glass-and-concrete design and dernier-cri technology logos and landmarks. The stately Minorite Church in the heart of the old town is one such hub that combines rich cultural and architectural traditions with widely relevant contemporary interests and activities; the church is nowadays a generous cultural event and concert hall of excellent acoustics and high-tech video and audio equipment. It was the venue of most of European Literature Days’ 2023 events, while the former monastery’s annexes host a museum, art galleries, and multiple multi-purpose spaces—some of which also played an important role in the logistics of the festival.

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Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Ghayath Almadhoun

March 12, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Catherine Cobham

All the metaphors in this poem are based on a true story that has not happened before

This Translation Tuesday, prose poems come in from Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun, translated with care by Catherine Cobham. A warning label alerts us to the peculiar nature of the metaphors in “Poet in Berlin”. Almadhoun’s poet starts, stops, and starts over, as if trying to get the metaphors in his head to express the correct thing. His slow progress perplexes the detective trapped in the poem’s dense and mazey interior—he needs that warning as much as we do. In “Everything’s the Same” the sorrow of a sudden disappearance is ‘green’, ‘still fresh’, and we find grief and shock doing their customary thing. The poet stalks the house he once shared with the absent presence. Time is either stopped dead or winding backwards, his senses are heightened, and household objects take on a sudden, dangerous redolence.

Poet in Berlin

All the metaphors in this poem are based on a true story that has not happened before

A lonely man with green eyes and a blue gaze, searching for a woman carrying a forest, who went into the sea and did not return.

Lonely as a bench in a public park, most of those who have touched his wound think he is a poet from Berlin, but he is in fact a poet in Berlin.

He resembles a park bench, and therefore, he used to swear to passers-by that a woman he loved took him to the sea and brought him back thirsty, and in another account, in a poem they found in a pocket of his blue shirt, he said she brought him back from the sea thirsty, but she did not return. On the other hand, the Poetry Foundation in Chicago has not been able to verify the truth of the information contained in this poem.

A lonely man, in a city crowded with lonely people, he assured the German police that he took full responsibility for the disappearance of a woman as ripe as a peach tree.

The detective asked him to stop using metaphor, because the investigation report was not a postmodern poem, and in any case the sea could not possibly be a crime scene in this city, for even in David Bowie’s most defiant songs there was no sea in Berlin, then he added as calmly as an abandoned house, I cannot bring any charges against you at the present time, for as of the date of the writing of this poem, no official reports have been submitted about the disappearance of a woman who looks like the sunset, walks like a herd of gazelles, and loves summer and children. Furthermore, according to German law, there is no crime if there is no body.

A lonely man with green eyes and a blue gaze went into the sea to look for a woman who went into the sea and did not return, and he did not return.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2024

March 11, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Bella Creel, Daljinder Johal, and Kathryn Raver

New works from Alexander Kluge, Marjane Satrapi, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson!

The latest text from one of German New Wave’s founding members and all around heavy-hitter; a wide-ranging compilation of art and testimony championing the Iranian feminist movement from Marjane Satrapi; and a moving, braided narrative of grief and recovery from a lauded Icelandic author. Our editors review some of the most exciting works in translation coming to the Anglophone this month. 

kluge

The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul by Alexander Kluge, translated from the German by Alexander Booth, Seagull Books, 2024

Review by Bella Creel, Blog Editor

Filmmaker, author, and philosopher Alexander Kluge’s most recent oeuvre, The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul, is an act of rethinking. Born in Germany in 1932, Kluge blurs the edges of the many years of his life in this ambitious work, expanding beyond the first-hand, beyond generations, drawing connections between now and before, all in order to fully describe the experience of a single life. Alexander Booth offers a wonderfully dense and witty translation from the German, with no aversion to a confusing syntax that demands rereading and rethinking.

Kluge is trying to find the right words throughout this collection, which, in the process of its creation, must have been turned over and inside out, stretched to snapping and magnified to the molecular; reading it, in turn, requires a certain liquifying of the brain. This giving-in allows one to absorb the words, which only then can be reformed into some sort of meaning. Kluge himself seems to follow a similar process:

Where does all my ‘fluent speech’, my rabid desire to write, come from? I listen to others. And carefully! A word that flies towards me, an observation that charms me into conversation, a quotation that I read: all of this gets stored inside me for the long-term.

I usually tear books to shreds, marking any places that captivate me in colour pencil before ripping the page out. These I attach to other findings of mine with a paper clip. They’re often annotated. My flat is full of these piles of paper. My personal bastion against the ‘ignorance that shakes the world’.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 8, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Areeb Ahmad, Carol Khoury, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from China, India, and Palestine.

New arrivals of a Sinophone Proust, a celebration of Lucknow and Urdu culture, and a new solidarity campaign to share Palestinian literature. Our editors are bringing you the latest literary news from on the ground, and there’s plenty to discover.

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China 

“Life is too short, and Proust is too long.” This snarky remark by (maybe) Anatole France has long hovered over the labours of translators worldwide, as much a challenge as it is an implicit acquiescence to just how difficult and time-consuming the text is. As multiple as his English appearances, Proust in Chinese also comes to us through a plethora of voices. There exists at present only one complete collection of À la recherche du temps perdu《追忆似水年华》in the Chinese language, published in 1989 through a concerted effort by Yilin Publishing House and a total of fifteen translators (who called themselves the “Suicidal Translators Squad”). This is the only version that has accompanied readers for over thirty years—with plenty of updates, corrections, and criticisms along the way—though the possibility of alternative editions always beckoned temptingly from the beyond; critics are always quick to note (not entirely without resentment) that in neighbouring Japan and South Korea, five or six full translations of this masterwork has been made available to the public.

Short as it may be, life presents plenty of distractions and exits for the overwhelmed translator. Luo Xinzhang exhausted himself after 50,000 characters. Xu Jun made it until halfway through the fourth volume before giving up at an impressive 230,000 characters, having expended eight hours a day for over two years (and also suffering from depression). Xu Hejin passed away. Zhou Kexi plead a lack of physical stamina, saying that he was drained by the text’s beauty. Many of them, along with readers, expressed tremendous regret that there would not be a single unified representation of Proust in the Chinese language, fluid in style, levelling up to the original, rooted in a single, persistent mind.

Then in 2020, something changed. The Dafang offshoot of CITIC Publishing Group suddenly announced the “Proust Project”, involving a plan to newly translate À la recherche du temps perdu with a single translator at the helm, based on Gallimard’s revised and annotated 1987 edition. The individual selected for the job was Kong Qian, a professor of French at Nanjing Normal University, who had been named Best New Translator at the 11th Fu Lei Translation Awards for her work on Kaouther Adimi’s Our Wealth. Kong has since been given ten years to complete the task—one that is, for any literary translator, a dream. It is the opportunity to occupy a permanent estate in world literature, a claim to a text that has embedded itself in both the literati and the public consciousness of China, even amidst the hurried days. (The book is so famous in China that directors will use it as a prop, in order to directly communicate a character’s highbrow tastes or worldly intellect.) READ MORE…