Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest from Peru and Bulgaria!

This week, an exhibition honouring an iconic poet resonates with contemporary social movements in Peru, and a play causes quite the stir in Bulgaria. Read on to find out more!

Xiao Yue Shan, reporting from Peru

At the Casa de la Literatura Peruana (House of Peruvian Literature), space has appropriately been made for a poet who never wavered in his conviction of literature’s physical presence. Alejandro Romualdo (1926-2008) was a key figure of the Generación del 50—a Peruvian literary movement dedicated to a social ars poetica that would address daily realities and further political agency, formed amidst the dictatorship of Manuel Odría. Though few beyond the country will have knowledge of the power and continual influence of Romualdo’s works (which are regrettably yet to appear in English), this new exhibition, ‘Alejandro Romualdo: En la extensión de la palabra (in the extension of the word)’, firmly establishes the poet’s legacy, multiplicity, and role in shaping the Peruvian poetic landscape. Moving through not only his written works but his prolific activities as a graphic designer, humorist, cartoonist, and revolutionary, the brief but wide-ranging collection reveals a writer deeply embedded in the consciousness of his country.

‘The extension of the word’ is the title of Romualdo’s 1974 collection, which saw its writer interrogating poetry’s materialism for what more it could give to a world that demands a continuously evolving application of language. Working with concrete poetics, polyphonic constructions, and techniques of montage, Romualdo equalised the blank space of the page to the air—that which is both a separation and a link. In this era, he conceptualised the poetic form as a space where disparate or even antithetical ideas are held in a closed frame, thereby demonstrating the mind’s capacity to travel back and forth between them, uniting them as a single conceivable reality. Distance is relative in these poems, something easily breached by a long vowel sound or a dangling, dismembered line. READ MORE…

Announcing Our October Book Club Selection: The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine by Mario Levrero

Life, as Levrero’s literature evidences, is richer and more beautiful when we follow our whims.

In The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine, the idiosyncratic wonderments of Mario Levrero are exhibited in a dazzling array. This first collection was, as the author tells it, ‘turned back into pulp’ in its first print run, but has since grown with tremendous repute, leading into a dedicated following in both its native Uruguay and neighbouring Argentina. It’s easy to see how these tales enthrall; each sees Levrero pushing the narrative form ever further into the enigmatic and the expansive, and any subject, object, and space is rendered as capable of endless transformations, creating portals at the seams of experience for the reader’s own marvelling journey. On live the bizarre, the mysteries, growing and multiplying at the non-existent borders of imagination.

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.   

The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine by Mario Levrero, translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott and Kit Schluter, And Other Stories, 2024

What does reality look like? Might it in fact be more dreamlike than we assume? Does true madness lie in the acceptance of daily routine? All these questions ricochet throughout the stories of The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine, a dazzling array of imaginative exercises from the eclectic Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero. The simplest beginnings—the daily rounds of a bedtime ritual, the anxieties of being late for work—take unexpected turns, leading us to places we never could have imagined. Along the way, chance is revealed to be the dominant factor in reality, rather than routine. Levrero is a dizzying stylist and he is matched with aplomb by translators Annie McDermott and Kit Schluter, who evidently share the author’s passion for imaginative play.

The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine is both a product of the imagination and a book that mirrors it; just like the human psyche, the diverse stories of the collection record both our meanderings and our obsessions. Often, our narrator is a Levrero-like figure: a good-natured, comedic man (prone to yearning for women, as the title attests) who follows his flights of fancy to their utmost ends. He is a charming narrator, skilled with wry turns of phrase, and his inability to leave any stone unturned takes him down curious paths. Whether it’s the miniature world hidden within a lighter in ‘Beggar Street’, or the young boy who grows old searching for a key in ‘The Basement’, Levrero plays with absurd economies of scale by stretching out both space and time. Reality and matter are his playthings, but the ensuing absurdity leads to some profound truths. Life, as Levrero’s literature evidences, is richer and more beautiful when we follow our whims. READ MORE…

A Country Grey with Sunlight: Samira Negrouche on Francophone and Arabophone Algerian Poetry

We are part of a country, a region, a language, sometimes of a generation or an aesthetic, but as authors we also try to bring a singularity.

Labelled by scholar Ana Paula Coutinho as one of the most gifted writers of the new Maghrebian literary movement, poet and translator Dr. Samira Negrouche sails across Algerian French, Tamazight, and Algerian Arabic languages. She is part of a group of Algerian writers collectively known as The October Generation, and her poetic vision (as sketched by one of her Spanish translators, the Argentine-born French author Carlos Alvarado-Larroucau) is in the same league as Stéphane Mallarmé and Alejandra Pizarnik. Resembling the Mediterranean Sea plainly visible from her Algiers apartment, her artistry and activism are fluid and expansive—crusading for the spirited interchange of literary and cultural thought across languages, artistic mediums, landscapes, and aesthetic style. ‘More literally than many poets, Negrouche has had her fingers on the pulse of Algiers’, Jill Jarvis summarises in Decolonizing Memory: Algeria & the Politics of Testimony (2021).

In this interview, I spoke with Dr. Negrouche on her body of work as a poet and translator; the current Algerian poetry and literary translation scene in the Francophone, Arabophone, and beyond; and the milieu that informs her philosophy and practise as a writer and cultural worker.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): You translate Algerian writers working in Arabic and Tamazight into French, and in turn, your works have been recast into several European languages. I’m interested in the ethnolinguistic milieu you come (and write) from—and write against. 

Samira Negrouche (SN): I was born in Algiers, a city that has always been multilingual. Growing up in this city, I have been surrounded by these three languages that I like to call my mother tongues (although there is a traumatic history behind it). I am lucky to be part of a Berber-speaking family that has kept our ancestral language, and it is a language I keep using every day. There is Kabyle, the local daily language we use in my family, and also is the standard Tamazight, used and taught by a much larger group.

As a citizen of Algiers, I use our common daily Arabic that is often mixed with words from other languages—mainly Berber and French. This language has its own music and images. It has a lot in common with languages used in other parts of Algeria, but retains certain specificities. Finally, the Arabic we use in newspapers and universities is more standard.

French is still the main language for scientific studies in local universities, and it is also used in many other fields. It is a vivid language, especially in urban spaces. Additionally, English is starting to gain more attention among the youngest generations. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Frames of Silent Walls” by Pınar Yıldız

Those voices and looks were as if they had been there forever and would remain there forever.

This week’s story, both written in and translated from the original Zazaki by Pınar Yıldız, is firmly confined within the walls of its narrator’s house. The photographs decorating the interiors offer an occasion for reflection on familial history for the narrator, who is suffocated by the silence that dominates the “soilless cemetery” of their home. These portraits, a collage of family members and Kurdish folk heroes, are portals into memories of a lush childhood, when the images seemed to manifest a corporeal existence, infusing the household with their vigorous commentary. Once, they held the power to influence the animate world; now, they are simply still lifes. The passage of time, resisted by the frozen shots, is instead measured by the tapering volume of their voices. Through reflections on preservation and vitality, Yıldız ponders what keeps a house, and a family, alive.

The walls of our house, like the walls of many other houses, were like a soilless cemetery. The unfortunate lives got stuck to the walls. It was as if the walls wanted to open their mouths and speak, but they were frozen like soulless frames. A silence spread from the walls into the house. Most of the time, like those frames, we would freeze without saying a single word. Like those photographs hanging on the walls, it was as if we were frozen in a different world.

Only three of the photographs hanging on the walls of our house had not been inside that soilless cemetery; they were struggling to live in a corner. One was Ahmet Kaya’s photo. With his saz (baglama) in his hand and his enthusiastic and hopeful smile, it was as if that photo had made him greater than death while he was still alive. The other photo was of my brother Roni, who had just started school. That photo of Roni in his blue apron was also very precious to my mother, just like Roni himself. Roni, born in the millennium century, looked at the camera with a look as if he was lost in worry and thought. The photograph of my father and Sheikh Necmettin taken by the sea in a distant city has been hanging on the wall in a frame for a long time, and liveliness and life radiated from this photograph. In that photo, Sheikh Necmettin did not look like a sheikh, but like a human being, a gentleman. He was not as old as he is now. I do not know why the sheikh, who I thought never left his big house with a courtyard, had been to that distant country. Maybe Sheikh Necmettin brought those pink hard candies from that distant land by the sea. Maybe he would keep those candies in his pocket as a souvenir from those days and distribute those candies not only to children but to everyone.

Apart from the photographs, calendars and timetables from the month of Ramadan were also lined up on the walls. I remembered the blue walls of my grandparents’ house. Calendars and timetables hung on the walls of their house too. An embroidered towel and a mirror always hung on the edge of the stove. The shape and model of the mirror never changed, but sometimes the surroundings of the mirror were blue and sometimes red. I never saw when the mirror was broken or replaced with a new one.

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2024

Exploring the breadth and depth of our latest issue!

Dive into our latest issue through the eyes of our blog editors, who take a close reading of the pieces that most moved them. In confronting shame and invisibilization, tracking the recurrent tides of grief, rending the mysterious forces of music and literature into poetry, and reimagining the painful, final moments of a migrant’s journey—these translations offer us avenues into wonderment, connection, and understanding.

When I was young, I developed a compulsion to count my fingers, pinky to thumb and back again, to fifteen, whenever I found myself in a situation I didn’t understand, or when I felt ashamed or guilty. The repetitive, reliable action was my way of putting a cork in my anxiety, to stem the building pressure that threatened to well up, and reorient myself in the world around me. No one else I knew had the same need—at least, not that I could see—and realizing this put a box around the world, shut by lock and key, depriving me of any access. In Ornela Vorpsi’s Offworld, in translation from the Italian by Antonella Lettieri, the main character Tamar feels similarly severed from the rest of the world. Where I experienced it like a dam ready to burst, Tamar feels a “fissure,” as if from an earthquake, splitting her brain and setting her apart from other people; where I had a box, Tamar views the world through a window, from which she observes the comings and goings of her neighbors and their visitors. Tamar’s fissure is fueled by an inexplicable wanting, a sense of shame and lust that she cannot put into words: “I could not tell my mother nor anyone else what was happening because I did not know either. I was brutally suspended in fear, under its control.”

From her window, Tamar watches the many sons of her neighbor Maria, entranced by their indulgence and languid masculinity, their bodies cast in light and smoke reminiscent of a Caravaggio. A Virgin Mary watches over the boys’ room, holding a baby Jesus—a reminder that God is always watching, and a source of the religious paranoia that haunts Tamar throughout her life. The religious undertones to her shame are in part what prevent her from recognizing what it is that she wants, even though she knows she lusts for something:

I too, Tamar, felt that I desired something uncatchable, even if I could not give it a name. It took many shapes, my desire, I only sensed that it was sly, that it deceived me, slipping like an eel from between my fingers, from between my thighs.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest in literary updates from Kenya and Hong Kong!

In this week of updates from around the world, our Editors-at-Large report on a monumental literary award and an insightful language-focused podcast. From the Nairobi International Book Fair in Kenya to Jennifer Feeley’s advice for emerging translators of Cantonese literature in Hong Kong, read on to learn more!

Wambua Muindi, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Kenya

This year’s Nairobi International Book Fair was held September 25–29, celebrating twenty-five years of bringing together the world’s literatures. On September 28, 2024, the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature 2024 winners were announced at the Westlands Banquet Center. Dedicated to authors writing in English and Kiswahili, Kenya’s official and national languages respectively, this year’s edition marked a comeback after a two-year hiatus due to funding challenges. An important distinction in the local book circuit sponsored by the Kenya Publishers Association, the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for literature has been celebrating Kenyan authors since 1972. This year, Ngumi Kibera’s The Gambler (2021), published by the Oxford University Press, took the adult category in English, and Tony Mochama’s A Jacket for Ahmed (2021) from Oxford University Press took the youth category. In the Kiswahili awards, Daniel Okello’s Kifunganjia (2021) published by Storymoja won the adult category while M.K. Taurus’ Swila Arejea na Hadithi Nyingine, published by Storymoja, took the children’s, and John Habwe’s Mshale wa Matumaini, published by Access Publishers, took the youth category. In addition, the association announced a list of twenty-five notable books and authors in the country over the last two and half decades. Congratulations to the winners and their publishers!

READ MORE…

Our Fall 2024 Edition Is Here!

Feat. Jon Fosse, Mikhail Shishkin, Natascha Wodin, Bothayna Al-Essa, and Nebojša Lujanović in our Special Feature themed on outsiders

You and I, self and the other—it is the oldest, simplest difference we know. At a time of flooding across the world, from India to the US, the writers of our Fall 2024 issue call attention to physical and social separation, to the rushing waters that pull us apart, rendering us #Outsiders to one another. In exploration of this theme, we proudly bring you new work from 32 countries, including drama from Norwegian Nobel Laureate Jon Fosse, an interview with exiled Russian author Mikhail Shishkin, a review of French icon Simone de Beauvoir’s latest English publication, nonfiction by Omani writer Hamoud Saud, a spotlight on Brazilian artist André Griffo, and, for our final Brave New World Literature entry, a moving essay by the recently announced US National Book Award nominee the Kuwaiti author Bothayna Al-Essa. One year on from October 7th, Al-Essa confronts the limits of literary activism as she reflects on her video calls with a Gazan colleague: “Did I expect a person besieged in an open prison since 2006 to rejoice at the sight of a shelf of books?” In another highlight, German-Ukrainian writer Natascha Wodin’s narrator resuscitates her drowned mother, trying to fathom her across the gulf of time even as she pictures the Regnitz river washing her away. Meanwhile, Swiss poet Prisca Agustoni and Moroccan author Khalid Lyamlahy confront another kind of drowning—that of modern day migrants in search of a better life—in particular, the 269 lives lost to the sea around Lampedusa in a shipwreck, the news of which lights up Agustoni’s phone, and the death of a Gambian Lyamlahy never got to know: “I dream of a book that would contain all the words refused you, all the silences imposed on you. A book where the word ‘help’ is constantly repeated, in which the author would fade from each line, each fragment, to give you back the space denied you in life.”

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Lyamlahy’s feat of empathetic imagination leads off this edition’s wildcard Special Feature, first announced on August 15th. By the time submissions closed one month later, anti-migrant rhetoric in the US had hit a new low with Trump repeating baseless claims of Haitians “eating cats and dogs” in his presidential debate. So, although we received more than one hundred manuscripts spotlighting every stripe of outsider, we decided to carve out space for the racial/national “other” so often denigrated in politics. From Cuban author Odette Casamayor-Cisnero drawing courage from her great-great-grandmother and taking a fiery stand against racism (“I’m done with running away”) to Croatian writer Nebojša Lujanović’s nuanced portrayal of a migrant who cannot bring himself to enunciate his full name for fear of outing himself to other members of his newly chosen community, the myriad voices showcased in this Feature are resounding proof of the struggle and humanity of those we as a society are so eager to condemn to the margins. All of this is illustrated by Spain-based guest artist Anastassia Tretiakova’s haunting photography.

As a magazine that does not receive ongoing institutional support because of our own outsider status—as elaborated in the Fall 2022 issue’s Editor’s NoteAsymptote counts on readers to sustain its mission more than most. If you think this “global literary miracle” (according to Dubravka Ugrešić) deserves to continue, please take a few minutes to sign up as a sustaining or masthead member today. (Interested in joining us behind the scenes instead? Our final recruitment drive of the year closes in four days!) Thank you for your readership and support. We can’t wait to see what 2025 brings!

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A Gazan Woman’s Voice: Michelle Hartman and Caline Nasrallah on translating Asmaa Alatawna’s A Long Walk from Gaza

. . . even in the face of oppression, Arab women . . . take a role in constructing their realities, demonstrating agency despite what they endure.

When it was first published in 2019, A Long Walk from Gaza resounded with Asmaa Alatawna’s evocative descriptions of girlhood, migration, and life under occupation, gathered in an acute testament against the societal and political repressions of a woman’s liberties. Today, in light of the events over the last year, it also preserves a city that has since been overwritten with violence, layering the streets, neighbourhoods, and homes of memory over the present map of destruction. In this following interview, translators Michelle Hartman and Caline Nasrallah discuss their process in translating this nuanced portrait of Palestinian life, the element of double marginalisation within the narrative, and the emotionality of working with a story that evokes the now-gone.

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. 

Ibrahim Fawzy (IF): How did you come across A Long Walk from Gaza?

Michelle Hartman (MH): I have a relationship with Interlink Publishing. It’s a smallish, independent publisher based in Northampton, Massachusetts, and the only Palestinian-owned publisher in the United States. It’s committed to doing many different things, particularly bringing fiction written in Arabic to English readers—and it’s been doing this for a very long time. There’s a significant list of Arab writers whom the publisher wants to bring to life in English. They occasionally send me novels, and A Long Walk from Gaza was one of them. As Caline and I were working on another project at the time, I sent this book to her for her opinion.

Caline Nasrallah (CN): As Michelle said, we have already worked on several things together, so we have this relationship of her sending me books to read. I’ll then go through these books and decide if we could continue working on them. Once she sent me Asmaa’s novel, I was so taken by it, and I thought it was an important project we had to work on. I felt a duty. I read it, then we discussed it more, and we went ahead.

IF: Thats great. As a literary translator, I usually read a book and find something that speaks to me, motivating me to translate it. What drew you to this book? What are the elements that convinced you to spend much time with it?

CN: Asmaa’s novel is a must-read because of the way it describes life under occupation and all of the hardships that come along with that, specifically in Gaza. There’s little that comes out of Gaza because of the situation on the ground, so the book felt like a lens into something we had never really seen before—that made it feel more relevant. Asmaa reveals this double layer of life under occupation, tracing life as a girl and a woman under occupation, the reality of occupation and internal issues impacting the society in which she lived. While united within a cause, women were also affected by society’s actions. It’s imperative to recognise this aspect, even though it’s often overlooked in literature focusing on a common enemy. Calling out injustice wherever it exists is essential.

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Translation Tuesday: “Some Notes on the Land of the Giants” by Luciano Lamberti

Explorers sent to the country of the giants come back different

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a tale of another world by the Argentine writer Luciano Lamberti, thrilling and poignant in equal measure. In fragments, the land of the giants is disclosed to us: a wilderness of impenetrable jungle, cloud-topped mountains, and carnivorous titans, all hidden behind mirrored portals. But as the years wear on and human explorers venture farther and farther into this new world, the same mysterious giants that they seek are driven out, until nothing is left but their tombs. Of course, Lamberti’s explorers are as loathe to learn from their mistakes as the colonial plunderers of our own devastated world, and what follows is no mere fable of human avarice, but a much subtler examination of how we fail, even in crisis, to see ourselves clearly in the mirror. The world of the giants is vividly rendered in Jordan Landsman‘s translation, as plain-spoken as any researcher’s fieldnotes, but at the same time as powerfully strange as any dream half-remembered before dawn. Read on!

EXPLORATIONS, ORIGIN. 1926. An eight-year-old Russian boy named Irino Shava accidentally discovers the first portal while investigating the basement of an abandoned house on the outskirts of Moscow. The portal is embedded in the southern wall of the basement, and little Irino cautiously passes through its mirrored surface with his finger, then with his hand and his arm, and finally with his whole body. He sees a wide valley covered in jungle surrounded by a huge chain of mountains lost in a blue fog. A flock of black birds cross the sky. Irino hears a noise that at first he mistakes for thunder, but it is the footfalls of an approaching giant, running and squashing trees as if they were tufts of grass. Terrified, Irino takes a step back and tumbles onto the damp basement floor. The following day he returns with his school friends and shows them his discovery. The two bravest boys cross through the portal. They will never return. In 1972, a team of North American explorers finds one of them living in the jungle. He is bearded and disheveled. The explorers try to carry him back, but the man no longer remembers how to speak or use cutlery, and he dies shortly thereafter for reasons unknown. The other one is never heard from again.

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Knausgaard Summons the Devil: On the Global Novel

But “what if,” asks Knausgaard, “Bellori’s ideas had won through, and Newton’s had sunk into oblivion? We’d now be living in a different world.”

In the following essay, Elisa Sotgiu considers the latest fiction series by Karl Ove Knausgaard, a Norwegian novelist who rose to global fame for his groundbreaking and controversial autobiographical saga My Struggle. Below, Sotgiu examines Knausgaard’s positioning in the literary canon, the critical reception of his novels, and the warped reflection of our world lurking beneath the characteristic mundanity of his oeuvre.

Like all famous authors of the past half century or so, Karl Ove Knausgaard is routinely asked about his creative process. He always replies with characteristic understatement, maintaining that he hardly knows what he’s doing when he sits down to write. He has no plan to speak of and does not make drafts or even sketch a plot; he simply starts with a rough idea of a situation or a character and follows it until it develops into something interesting. To be sure, the method is not conducive to brevity, and since as a rule he does not delete or substantially revise anything, his books tend to leaven into multi-volume series. His new cycle of novels, which started with The Morning Star (published as Morgenstjernen in Norway in 2020, and in English translation in 2021), was supposed to be a trilogy, but as of October 2024 five lengthy volumes have already been completed, with one more in the making.

It is probably this reckless expansiveness, however, that lends Knausgaard’s writing its inherent curiosity, its compelling tension. Anything can happen at any moment on the page; both reader and author are figuring it out together. In a literary world where novels are published on the basis of their polished pitches and synopses, Knausgaard’s liberty to send three pages a day of an undefined project to his editor (Geir Gulliksen at Forlaget Oktober) and have them published as they are is nothing short of miraculous. The resulting impression of open-endedness and unfiltered immediacy prompted some, at the time when Knausgaard’s autobiographical series My Struggle (Min kamp, 2009-2011, translated into the English by Don Bartlett in 2012) was galvanizing United States American and United Kingdom writers of autofiction to declare that the author’s humdrum confessional style was the literary counterpart of social media exposure. Similarly, the sprouting and shifting form of the Morning Star cycle could be considered apt to the era of ever-growing, unmediated Wattpad novels, more so than all the conventional stories that have been plucked from self-publishing platforms, neatly packaged, and endowed with an ISBN.

Knausgaard’s books are original, even ground-breaking, but they do not appear so at first. In fact, it is when Knausgaard becomes aware of their potential novelty, and embraces it, that the best outcomes are achieved. This is what happened in Book Two of My Struggle, when Knausgaard realized that he was not writing a novel with a beginning, climax, and ending, and decided instead to devise his own formal rules. And it has happened again with the third volume of his new series, titled Det tredje riket and now published in Martin Aitken’s English translation as The Third Realm by Penguin Press. What Knausgaard has recognized in The Third Realm is that something unexpected has emerged from his free flow of words. In the first interviews he gave after the publication of The Morning Star, Knausgaard had claimed that his initial idea for the novel was simply to have a gallery of different characters react to the presence of something unknown, a new star. But as in a psychoanalysis session, his unmeditated writing brought to the surface all the things that have been repressed in the polite republic of (global) letters. Within an international literary field where progressive social commentary is the prevalent mode of narration, Knausgaard conjures up hellish creatures, the after-world, religious horror, the politically sinister, and the Devil himself.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from France, Greece, and the United States!

In this week’s roundup of world literary news, our team members fill us in on France’s literary awards season and exciting festivals in Greece and the United States. From the race for the Prix Goncourt to feminist literature in Athens, read on to find out more!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

As the leaves begin to shift their colors, France’s literary scene is shifting into awards season. Last week, Jean-Pierre Montal took home the Prix des Deux Magots for his novel La Face nord, the Prix Medicis announced their 2024 shortlist, and the contenders for the prestigious Prix Femina are to be revealed in just a few weeks. That’s only to name a few!

Perhaps the most esteemed French literary prize, however, is the Prix Goncourt, and the time for its conferral is fast approaching. Awarded annually in November, the Prix Goncourt is bestowed by the Académie Goncourt upon “the best and most imaginative prose work of the year.” They also give separate awards for poetry (conferred this year to Haitian poet Louis-Philippe Dalembert), biography, and a large variety of international works, among others.   READ MORE…

An Allegory of the World’s Starving: ana c. buena by Valeria Román Marroquín

These untranslatables are signs of the fissures of hegemony, of cracks in its dominance through which other worlds can blossom.

ana c. buena by Valeria Román Marroquín, translated from the Spanish by Noah Mazer, Cardboard House Press, 2024

In his manifesto of New Brazilian Cinema, “An Esthetic of Hunger,” filmmaker Glauber Rocha called for art that communicates the poverty and misery of Latin America, and that could contribute to liberating the region from the “debilitating delirium of hunger.” He wrote this in 1964, at a time of global upheaval when Latin American cultural circles began to grapple with the torment of those left behind by globalization. Sadly, today, sixty years later, Latin America remains one of the most economically unequal regions on Earth. Decades-long neoliberal developmentalism keeps failing at what it—allegedly—has set out to do: eradicating the entrenched social disparities of the region. Instead, inequality only intensifies. The World Inequality Database reports that in 2020, the top 10% of Latin America owned 77.6% of the region’s wealth, a 2% increase from the 75.6% reported in 2000. The trend of increasing inequality is not unique to Latin America, but it is particularly extreme there. In Europe, the top 1% share of wealth rose from 24.9% in 2000 to 25% in 2020, while in the United States it increased from 32.0% to 34.9% in 2020. Capitalism confirms—time and time again—the falsehood of its mythical self-conception as a system that bolsters the progressive enrichment of everyone. Responding to this context, different Latin American groups have, of course, questioned the region’s unequal social conditions, calling for justice and change. In 2011, thousands of Chilean students dressed up as zombies in massive protests against educational debt and the privatization of public universities. More recently, Latin American women have taken to the streets in yearly Women’s Strikes to demand the recognition of care work as unpaid labor and to protest rising femicide numbers. Their demands for justice and their achievements are sources of light in an otherwise darkening global political landscape, and literary communities have taken up the same fight. The book ana c. buena, a 2021 poetry collection by the Peruvian poet Valeria Román Marroquín, presents a critique of capitalism that highlights its disastrous impact on the daily lives of working women. Indeed, the book’s main figure—Ana C. Buena, a woman under precarious and insecure work conditions—also functions as an allegory of the countries wounded by historical colonialism, current neocolonialism, and insatiable global capital. READ MORE…

Languages have their secrets: A Conversation with Mardonio Carballo

...poets are simply those who pay attention, observing what happens, and find a way to tell it…

Poet, journalist, editor, actor, broadcaster, producer, translator, and Nahua activist Mardonio Carballo recently published La canción de las flores, a book that brings together forty-nine poems printed on paper made from corn leaves and vine, published simultaneously in Nahuatl-Spanish, Nahuatl-English, and Nahuatl-French. In this interview, originally held in Spanish, I spoke with Mardonio Carballo about the experience of writing in Spanish and Nahuatl, the relation of memory and language, and the role of translation in preserving an indigenous language.

René Esaú Sánchez (RES): I was reading some of the poems you wrote in La Canción de las Flores, and many of them are quite synesthetic. So I wanted to ask: what smells, sensations, or tastes do you experience when writing poetry?

Mardonio Carballo (MC): This latest collection is atypical. I had resisted for a long time the theme of nature—this tradition of “Flor y Canto” that is always associated with Nahuatl poetry. To a certain extent, it annoyed me. On this occasion, unlike my previous collections, which have been more combative, expressing Mexico’s painful reality, I chose to step away from that theme of pain, blood, and death. In another book, I asked myself how much the dead weigh, for instance. But I realized the same thing happened to me years ago when making documentaries. I no longer wanted to focus on journalists, activists, and the same topics. So, I embarked on a journey to film a series of documentaries called We Insist on Hope. It turned out that all those defending land, water, and forests were either threatened with death or had been harmed in some way, which led me to a reflection: the one that guides this collection.

Just as there are no languages without people to speak them, there are no territories without flowers. That premise is what nourishes this collection, and yes, the physical book—the way it was designed—makes it seem like the typography changes, like everything is in motion. I believe it pays homage to the flowers, birds, and trees. After the whole COVID situation, I was left with the feeling that we were suddenly writing poems that were too profound, sometimes inaccessible and incomprehensible to most people. So in this collection, I sought the ease of understanding. In fact, one of the lines that deeply inspires me is from a Charles Simic poem: “I write so that dogs can understand me.” That line struck me. Because at some point, we start using grandiose words that make us seem special, fantastic, intellectual… but to me, poets are simply those who pay attention, observing what happens, and find a way to tell it. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Vultures” by Carla Bessa

It is astonishing the perfect imperfection of a human body.

This Translation Tuesday, we are thrilled to bring you a grotesquely disturbing yet distinctly lyrical short story from the pen of past contributor Carla Bessa, translated by her longtime advocate Elton Uliana. If vultures appear in popular imagination as the ultimate symbol of death, the reader of this tale will have other distinct associations to make. Surely the first such act of ventriloquism (although we have also featured whale narrators) in our pages, the gifted Brazilian author channels a group of vultures circling an unusual find on a deserted beach: an abandoned foetus. Within its darkly illuminating labyrinth of language, this powerful vignette reinscribes vultures as recycling agents in these urgent times of decay.

But we never deprive ourselves of the pleasures of gliding in giant circles, making the most of the rising currents of hot air, and the wind blowing on our wrinkled, hairless faces, flying without haste, despite the hunger. The prey down below no longer defends itself, devotion is in its nature, it is in the end: a carcass. We spend the days soaring, patiently waiting, confident in our luck, unafraid of not finding a single morsel. Here, remains are never in short supply, the entire city is a wasteland. Down there, however, on the beach, by the shore, we stare, what is it?, unrecognizable-inconceivable, neither person nor animal, neither end nor beginning.

The foetus was only a tiny dot, a mollusc, a soft invertebrate body, muscular head and foot, but without shell. Blossoming and putrefying at the same time. The skin, was it skin?, a very thin, very tender membrane already disintegrating, it would be easy to pierce with the beak. What was once a face, is now facing down, being brushed by the sand as the waves come and go, polished by innumerable shells, sand grains and pebbles.

We land with caution. One, two, seven, many of us, skittering around, still not in a hurry, and we approach the prey. As predicted, the skin gives way to the slightest touch, it rips and tears like paper. We open cracks, holes from which we pull guts, nerves, a small heart?, tearing and lacerating the exceptionally soft and sea-tempered little body.

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