Eat Their Words: On the Translator’s Appetites

January 6, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Stories and poems can be shared, but voices cannot; languages can be shared, but consciousnesses cannot.

In this essay, translation is explored as a physical, materialist phenomenon. In comparing the craft of language-transformation to the corporeality of eating and digesting, the role of the translator is expanded beyond a secondary conduit of texts, and posited instead as the owners of a unique, private production.

In her Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Susan Sontag coined the word ‘cosmophagy’, defined as ‘the devouring of the world by consciousness.’ That neologism, physiological instead of cerebral, underscores the appetite so inherent within the act of thinking, a hunger that represents the need to absorb and to take in, but also to digest and to integrate—the outside brought inside, the other made into the self. In considering the relationship between eating and reading, the most common notion is the idea of literature as somehow satiating, or the insistence that books are an essential part of livelihood—but beyond the simplistic conjecture of text as food, correlating the two human acts invites the assertion of the self as a desiring presence, and the body as a capacious methodology of transformation. By affecting our hunger onto the world, we claim a type of ownership over it, and once the materials of the world enter the realm of our senses, they change—becoming irreducibly ours.

Translators are likely to be familiar with this textual ingestion, having spent more time chewing on their words than most. After taking their meal, they are the ones who make a home for the text, carrying it for months or years, witnessing it seep into their own voice, their own imagination. ‘A translator is a professional schizophrenic. . .’ the Hungarian writer Zoltán Pék stated. ‘He is operating in an elevated state of mind,’ which is to say, a state of harbouring multiple minds. When they are humble, many translators will use terms such as I hope or I tried to speak of their work, positioning themselves as simply one flawed interpreter, seeking the approval of the authors that still live inside their heads. This lack of vanity is essential to the craft, which often forces oneself to confront one’s lack of knowledge, fluency, originality, or ability—but it must also work to emphasise the singular inventiveness of each individual translational attempt. The author may be in there, a wonderfully influential companion, but at the end of the day, it’s still your head. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

January 3, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bella Creel, Carol Khoury, and MARGENTO

Literary updates from Japan, Palestine, and airports in Ireland and France.

Only three days into 2025, the Asymptote team is hard at work reporting on literature across the globe. In the first roundup of the year, our staff introduces a thirty-one day reading challenge of Japanese short stories, the liminal thoughts of a busy poet in European airports, and a look back on the numerous achievements of Palestinian writers throughout 2024.

Bella Creel, Blog Editor, Reporting from Japan

It’s often said that short stories and collections thereof sell poorly in the publishing market—and what a shame! There’s something about the short story, its attention to detail, the palpable shift between acts, the transience of characters and settings, that has made up some of the most impressive pieces of literature. Particularly in Japan, the short story has historically been a dominant mode of writing, pioneered by the “father of the Japanese short story” Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and is still today one of the most common genres seen in bookstores around the country.

To our delight, much of this oeuvre has been translated into English, and Read Japanese Literature (RJL), an extensive online resource for Japanese literature, has created a list of thirty-one Japanese short stories in translation available to read for free online—one for every day of January—in celebration of #JanuaryinJapan. These stories range from the great Akutagawa’s “Dreams,” a chilling and meandering tale of a paranoid artist, to Kenji Miyazawa’s satirical “The Restaurant of Many Orders,” an Alice-in-Wonderland-esque commentary on posturing and westernization following the Meiji period. Many of these stories and authors are also discussed in detail in the RJL Podcast, including deep dives into authors such as Osamu Dazai and Izumi Suzuki, historical context, and more. 

If this is your first time hearing of this month’s reading challenge, don’t despair. We’re only three days into the month, and it won’t take you long to catch up—the stories are short, after all.

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

2024 has been a tragic year for the Palestinian; still, Palestinian authors made significant strides in the literary world, garnering prestigious awards and recognition on both regional and international stages.

In April, imprisoned novelist Basim Khandaqji won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Booker Prize) for his novel A Mask, the Colour of the Sky. His brother Youssef and publisher Rana Idris accepted the award in Abu Dhabi. Nabil Suleiman, chair of the judging committee, confirmed that the decision was unanimous. Moroccan writer Yassin Adnan, who hosted the ceremony, emphasized that Khandaqji’s win highlights literature’s ability to transcend borders.

READ MORE…

A Long and Winding Way to Go: Luka Lei Zhang on Working-Class Writings from Asia

January 2, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I want to use the framework of ‘working-class literature’ to explore the transformations and tensions in literary texts.

Through the lens of comparative literature, the ancestry of working-class writings and the literature of labour trails from Russian novelist Maxim Gorky’s Maть (Mother, 1906) to South Africa’s Black migrant theatre, from the oeuvre of Argentine poet Elías Castelnuovo to the biographies of working-class Irish writers, and includes the many proletarian writers collectives springing up in response to the social moment: France’s Socialisme ou Barbarie, Japan’s Puroretaria bunka undō and Nihon Puroretaria Sakka Dōmei, Sri Lanka’s Dabindu, and United Kingdom’s ‘The Fed’ or the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers.

As Macau-based Chinese scholar-translator Dr. Luka Lei Zhang writes in The Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature (2024), the literary production of contemporary Asian workers ‘are often subjected to intricate social forces and power dynamics’, and it ‘would be a mistake to reduce these contradictions to simple good/bad, political/apolitical, and individual/collective oppositions’. It is this simplistic dichotomy that is contested by Asian Workers Stories, an anthology of fiction and nonfiction prose produced outside the fortresses of the canon, the middle-class literati, and the academe. Dr. Zhang, the anthology’s editor, brings her expertise as a scholar (and at-times translator) of working-class writers Chong Han, Tan Kok Seng, and Md Sharif Uddin of Singapore, as well as Mengyu, Wan Huashan, and Shengzi of China. In a 2023 interview, she confessed: ‘Personally and politically, working-class literature holds a special place in my heart’, going on to name Gorky, Annie Ernaux, Xu Lizhi, Takiji Kobayashi, and Filipino migrant worker-poet Rolinda Onates Española as her favourites.

In this interview, I spoke with Dr. Zhang on migrant workers writing from East Asia, Southeast and South Asia, and the Middle East, as well as the expansion of working-class writings within the larger body of the Asian literary canon.  

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Cheers to the anthology Asian Workers Stories! Apart from wanting to contribute a new dimension to Asian working-class literature (considering most existing books are either scholarly or poetry collections originally written in English), what are other motivations that impelled the creation of this anthology? 

Luka Lei Zhang (LLZ): I’ve worked on workers’ writings for several years and have encountered many great storytellers. Although several anthologies of workers’ poetry exist, short stories are translated and collected on a lesser basis. My main goal was to organise the writers in this region and, in this way, show that their work is valued and that they do not write alone. I am fortunate to know many Asian worker writers personally, which had allowed me to approach them and discuss the project, and their interest and encouragement motivated me to pursue the work further. I met Hard Ball Press’s publisher, Tim Sheard, at the Working-Class Studies Conference in 2019. He invited me to publish working-class writings with him—and that’s how it happened. READ MORE…

Announcing Our December Book Club Selection: Monsieur Teste by Paul Valéry

December 30, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Mia Ruf

What Valéry set out to accomplish with his Teste project was . . . a blueprint for intellectual liberation.

Perhaps for most of us, the idea of a poet still confers an indelible sense of the romantic, with odes and music and beautiful abstractions. For Paul Valéry, however, this association was at best weak, and at worst a diminishment of language’s complex facilities and capacity for precise worldly evaluation, never satisfying the sublimity and intensity that he sought in his writings. Thus, in 1896, he introduced an incarnation of reason and his “infinite desire for clarity” in a character named Edmond Teste, and this alter ego would remain one of the most enduring vehicles of thought throughout Valéry’s life. Now, in our December Book Club selection, Monsieur Teste, we are offered a fascinating collection of writings that track the poet’s evolving mode as he pursues his own consciousness in search of pure intellect and reason, puzzling out the dazzling relationship between language and existence. They are the imprints from a modernist icon’s search for self-knowledge.

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.    

                 Monsieur Teste by Paul Valéry, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell, New York Review Books, 2024

At first approach, it’s tempting to interpret Edmond Teste, Paul Valéry’s brainchild, as an embodiment of the poet’s own curmudgeonliness, as the character’s appearance roughly coincides with Valéry’s early renunciation of poetry and recession from the public eye. In 1892, shortly after launching into the Parisian literary scene and positioning himself as Stéphane Mallarmé’s successor—as well as being in the wake of a bad breakup—Valéry seems to have had enough of the bullshit. His frustrations with literature in the afterglow of Romanticism, with writers’ delusions of grandeur and pretensions of divine inspiration, prompted a sharp pivot toward the sciences. Heavily inspired by Cartesian philosophy, Valéry came to embrace a highly empirical, mathematical approach to creation, eschewing the abstractions and vagueness he’d found so tiresome in poetry. His primary focus shifted inward, and he became chiefly interested in the mechanism behind creative construction, the series of mental operations occurring within the creator’s mind, and in testing the outer limits of human capability. In his Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci (1894), Valéry marvels at the polymath’s ability to intake external data and investigate it with the utmost rigor in order to produce works beyond our fathoming—creations so staggering that the common man, the unenlightened thinker, could only attribute them to flashes of inspiration, invocation of the Muse, or some other abstract force that Valéry so disdained. In Leonardo, Valéry found an ideal creative archetype—the “universal man”—who “begins with simple observation, and continually renews this self-fertilization from what he sees” in contrast to the lesser, unempirical thinkers who “see with their intellects much more often than with their eyes.” Valéry remarks that “when thinkers as powerful as the man whom I am contemplating through these lines discover the implicit resources of the method . . . They can, for the moment, admire the prodigious instrument that they are.” Shortly after publishing this study, Valéry continued on this theme with the first instalment of the Teste cycle, The Evening with Monsieur Teste (1896). This and the subsequent works and fragments of the cycle have now been arranged in a single volume: Monsieur Teste, a luminous new translation by Charlotte Mandell. READ MORE…

The It Girl in Her Own Words: Helen O’Horan on Translating Izumi Suzuki

December 19, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Bella Creel

I wanted the translation to feel more emotionally driven, and that’s what I prioritized.

In her first novel to be published in English, the counterculture icon Izumi Suzuki draws from her real-life experiences to craft a musical, vulnerable portrait of nonconformism during a tumultuous era in Japan. From passion to nihilism, dreaminess to self-destruction, Set My Heart on Fire is unafraid of contradiction in its approach to the self, inscribing mind and body in all of its varying desire and directions. As our final Book Club selection for November, Suzuki proves to be a particularly resonant writer for contemporary readers in her audacious pursuit of pleasure and mutability in identity, all told in a vivid voice conjured by translator Helen O’Horan. In this interview, O’Horan speaks to us about how Suzuki channels a sense of disconnection, her knack for performativity, and the centrism of human relationships in her literary work.

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.   

Bella Creel (BC): How did you initially discover Izumi Suzuki’s work, and what drew you to her writing?

Helen O’Horan (HOH): I first worked on a short story for Suzuki’s collection, Terminal Boredom, just before the pandemic. I joined the project relatively late; by then, the reports had been written and the research done, so I want to credit the other translators and the publisher. That’s how I first learned about her work.

After that story, I really got into her writing—the timing was significant too. During the pandemic, I found myself feeling increasingly disconnected from my mind and body. My work as a translator wasn’t disrupted much since most of my clients are outside the United Kingdom, and it’s all online, but I started feeling like my mind and body were splitting apart.

That sense of disconnect reminded me of Suzuki’s writing—she often describes her body as something separate from her mind. Her work resonated with me at that moment, though of course, that’s just my interpretation. READ MORE…

Do You Like Adventures?

December 18, 2024  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

“The space between two languages is not between mirrors, but curves along the great wall of error, a refined form of adventure.” —Rosmarie Waldrop

Is it that time of the year already?

Yes! Today marks the start of our annual two-week closure (during which our entire 100-strong virtual but very human team enters hibernation—so we hope you understand if we only respond to your emails in the New Year).  But, before we go off the grid completely, let’s take a look at the rear-view. In 2024, we gave you:

Ahead of us, we have plans to:

  • Revamp our website, which has been overdue for an update for some time now;
  • Launch a Substack—with even more thoughtful coverage and greater depth!; and
  • Bring back our international translation contest for emerging translators.

But to do any of the above, we have to be sustainable first—an uphill task given that Asymptote is incorporated outside of the US and Europe, where most of English-language literary arts funding lies. Sadly, despite a full 14 years of hard work behind the scenes and a London Book Fair award under our belt, the revenue that currently comes in each year is still not yet enough to support one full-time member’s involvement.

Which is why we just have to ask during this season of giving: Can you spare us five bucks a month?

Because that’s all it takes to sustain this platform—that we use to advocate for a more inclusive world literature and to amplify underrepresented voices like H.W. Burg’s—if enough of you stand with us. Tempted to sign on as a patron or even a masthead member? We’d be overjoyed and shower you with perks—including newly unveiled ones like literary care packages I’ll personally assemble. We just want to make sure that those of you who value our work have the chance to support it before it’s too late. So, if you can afford it, please take a few minutes to sign up via the link below:

Translation Tuesday: “My Christmas: Memories of a Transvestite” by H.W. Burg

December 17, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by M.M. Pinky

Over and over, I would anxiously ask myself: where did you get this queer desire to dress and act so femininely?

Just in time for the holiday season, we bring you a different kind of Christmas story for this week’s Translation Tuesday. “My Christmas: Memories of a Transvestite,” written by H.W. Burg and translated from the German by M.M. Pinky, was originally been published 100 years ago, but remains startling in its immediacy. Through a series of Yuletide reflections, the author, assigned male at birth, relates their lifelong journey of coming to terms with their innate femininity. The quest for authentic gender expression expands into a tender exploration of self-discovery, longing, and the profound human need for pure acceptance. In a political climate where transgender rights seem to be an increasingly easy target, this short memoir reminds us why fearmongering rhetoric obscures the simple truth of people who, like anyone else, are searching for connection and love.

It is Christmas Eve again. Alone, I stand at the window of my quiet bachelor’s room and look into the cold winter night. Hoarfrost covers the trees. Hedges and bushes glisten in the light of the streetlamps as if the sky descended to Earth with thousands of little falling stars on this holy night. How beautiful it is when nature unfolds its wonders and no human hand disturbs its mysterious play.

The sound of “Silent Night, Holy Night” floats by my ears from the neighboring house. Through the thin window curtains, I see the dark outline of a Christmas tree and the bright glow of its lights. I close my eyes and imagine how those gathered around the tree join hands in love, how the quiet happiness of peace transfigures their eyes. I know the people. Quiet, simple, content people, who help each other carry the heavy things in life. How beautiful it is when two hearts find each other and love lifts them up from the vices of everyday life.

On my table there too is a Christmas tree. It is small; I bought it today, ready-made with decorations and candles already on it. As I’m about to strike a match, a deep sadness creeps over me. I am suddenly gripped by a desolate loneliness with a force I haven’t felt for some time. Lighting the candles is impossible. My eyes fill with tears and I have to sit down with my head against the table. My deep misery grips me with terrible strength, and I begin crying, crying bitter tears, today—on Christmas Eve—while everyone rejoices and celebrates the season of joy. 

Once my tears dried, I sat dreaming, pondering before my Christmas tree, from which no light fell into my saddened soul. Memories from days long ago unfurled within me, memories of celebrations of Christmases past. In my mind they all lay before me, and of the long list, four stayed in my mind with particular clarity. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2024

December 16, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Len Sander, Liliana Torpey, and Regan Mies

Discover new work from Germany, Lebanon, Romania, France, Taiwan, Hungary, Finland, and Tunisia!

In our last round-up of the year, we’ve selected twelve titles from eight countries, with tales of grand adventure and prose of intimate beauty, novels tracing orature or the piecing together of history, rediscovered poetry and letters from literary titans, stories tinged with horror or fantasy. . . All to send the year off the best way we know how: in the company of our world’s brilliant writers.

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What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, translated from the German and edited by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill, Liveright, 2024

Review by Liliana Torpey

In What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, we are invited into the private, poetic life of the author behind the seminal political texts The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem. The door is not opened by Arendt herself—who never published her poems and seemingly never intended to—but by the volume’s translators, Samantha Rose Hill and Genese Grill, who dove deep into the archives to collect these poems. Reading them feels at once like a gift and a faux-pas, knowing that we are trespassing upon the intimate thoughts and gestures of one of the twentieth century’s great political thinkers.

The entirety of Arendt’s poetic corpus appears in this book. For a lifetime it doesn’t seem like many—seventy-eight in total—but the book’s thorough introduction, translator’s note, and footnotes reveal just how carefully Arendt stewarded these poems over the years. Hill and Grill detail the way that Arendt hand wrote each piece in a notebook or letter, then continued to edit by hand before finally typing up the poems and arranging them chronologically, by season. Packing many of them alongside her essential documents when leaving Germany, her poems “remained among her most prized possessions.”

This care is evident in the poems themselves, which often fall on the shorter and sparser side. It’s clear that Arendt had considered and reconsidered each individual word, trying to communicate what she felt and sensed. In many cases, that world appears to be a rather bleak one: “The sky is in flames, / Heaven is on fire / Above us all, / Who don’t know the way.” While her political writings directly address the mechanisms of violence and authoritarianism, her poems often reveal an unsettling and probing uncertainty.

Alongside—and perhaps stemming from—this uncertainty flows a desire and sensuality that animates Arendt’s curiosity and nostalgia: “Heart warmth / Heart grace / Inhaling deep emotional-being / Sighing softly / Like cloud mist / Audibly trembling touched-being.” Her precision and tenderness are disarming, though not totally distinct from the Arendt that readers may already know. Marked by ambivalence and vulnerability in the face of life’s great mysteries, these poems don’t simply reveal all that we hope to know about Arendt’s internal landscape; instead, they deepen a sense of wonder that hovers, always, just beyond our reach.

letters to gisele

Letters to Gisèle by Paul Celan, translated from the German by Jason Kavett, NYRB, 2024 READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

December 13, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy, José García Escobar, and Thuy Dinh

The latest from Vietnam, Central America, and the ALTA conference!

This week, read about the annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association, the new pathways Vietnamese writers and translators are helping to pave in the Anglosphere, as well as the new accolades, conversations, and impact of Central American literatures.

Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Vietnam and the Vietnamese Diaspora

Han Kang’s recent Nobel win has spurred lively discussions among writers in Vietnam and the diasporic community on how to sustain and promote Vietnamese literature beyond its national borders. Thiên Kim, co-founder of UK-based Major Books, believes it’s not a quality issue but the scarcity of works being translated into English that has prevented Asian literature from being more widely appreciated.

To rectify the situation, Major Books has teamed up with talented translators Nguyễn Bình, Đinh Ngọc Mai, and Khải Nguyễn, among others, to present a “well-rounded portrait of Vietnam while preserv[ing] the integrity and … originality of each [translated] work.” Titles to be published in 2025-2026 range from a new translation of a beloved national epic (Nguyễn Du’s The Tale of Kiều), a broad satire on sexual mores during the French colonial era (Vũ Trọng Phụng’s Making a Whore), a gritty exploration of contemporary LGBQT culture (Vũ Đình Giang’s Parallel), to a biting social critique via the lens of folklore and existentialism (The Young Die Old by Nguyễn Bình Phương). READ MORE…

Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan and Sámi literature in Translation

December 12, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Linnea Gradin

Ædnan marks . . . a truth-seeking and reparational literature that is becoming part of a global vernacular.

Translation is a give and take—whether translating poetry or history, the questions of how and what are determined by the mode. In the following essay, Linnea Gradin discusses Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan and its translation by Saskia Vogel, an epic poem detailing Sweden’s colonial history in the Sápmi region, the dislocation and cultural erasure of the Sámi, and the effects thereof upon culture and lineages. In an astute and personal analysis, Gradin calls for Sweden to reckon with its past.

In October 2024, the twenty-five finalists were announced for The National Book Award, an award spotlighting some of the most groundbreaking literature of the year and one of the biggest accolades in the English publishing scene. Amongst the five chosen finalists in the Translated Literature category was Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan, an epic poem originally published in Swedish and Northern Sámi in 2018, now in Saskia Vogel’s translation.

Following two Sámi families over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Ædnan explores the dislocation and cultural erasure of the Sámi, traditionally semi-nomadic reindeer keepers who live in Sápmi, a region that spans “from the forest snow to / the windswept shore” in the north of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and parts of Russia. At the outset of the novel, we meet Ber-Joná, Ristin, and their sons Aslat and Nila at Lake Gobmejávri, close to the point where Sweden, Finland, and Norway meet. They are moving their reindeer herd across a familiar landscape, guided by a knowledge passed down through the generations:

We heard
heartbeats in the ground

Faint
beneath the inherited
migration paths

READ MORE…

Poetry as a Therapeutic Tool: On the Continual Work of Poets During Wartime

December 11, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Galina Itskovich

History is not somewhere ahead of us—and nor is it far behind. We’re right inside of it, being already chewed on.

Dislocation: An Anthology of Poetic Response to Russia’s War in Ukraine, edited by J. Nemirovskaya & A. Krushelnitskaya, Slavica Publishers, 2024

In the second year of the war in Ukraine, even the title of this bilingual tome confirms my observation that recent anthologies may remind one of diagnostic manuals. Thankfully, there is no need to diagnose a breakage; while Russian aggressors have persisted in their assault, Ukrainian resistance is relentless. Ukrainians are still fighting for their land, and the land is more than territory; it means real people and individual stories. Yet, as such stories demonstrate, dislocations—occurring in the wake of global trauma—take a long time to heal. There is a palpable incompatibility between realities past and present, pain amounting to chronic, and ruptures shaping both local and international discourses into liminalities. Beyond the battlefield, injuries beyond broken bones proliferate in the form of shifted responsibilities, wounded memories, betrayed values, and faulty beliefs; at the end of the day, even the mysterious “Russian soul” has turned out to be an inflamed spirit of contradiction.

Dislocation is edited in a way that critics of different disciplines can equally appreciate its logic, reminding one that when life’s plot betrays us in its twists, we are still left with words. In the last days of February of 2022, the Moscow-born author, director, and Russian culture scholar Julia Nemirovskaya announced through social media that she would be collecting poetic responses to the war in a kopilka—a “piggy bank” in Russian—for safekeeping; this resulting collection has slowly turned into a historical document. Moved by the incessant thought that “the world must be made aware,” volunteer translators began working on poems that they found poignant, and by the end of that year, the first bilingual collection, Disbelief, was published in London. In the nearly two years that followed, the geographies and demographics of contributing authors continued to widen, and two new translators—Yana Kane and Josephine von Zitzewitz—joined the original team of Dmitry Manin, Maria Bloshteyn, Anna Krushelnitskaya, Andrei Burago, and Richard Coombes. Their work proves to be precise and emotionally relevant, and Dislocation houses 117 authors in translation, ranging from Russian citizens and expats to Ukrainian poets who write in Russian (their native albeit traitorous language), featuring a stunning cover with art by Maria Kazanskaya. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Yung Yung by Lo Yu

December 10, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Fion Tse

In truth you are her muse. She writes about you; she can only write about you.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you an excerpt from Hong Kong novelist Lo Yu, translated from the Chinese by Fion Tse. In this short, plainspoken tale, an unnamed member of the Hong Kong diaspora travels to Paris to spend Christmas with her girlfriend, all the while haunted by thoughts of another lover, her “Hong Kong girlfriend” who she has left behind in London. Lo Yu’s prose has an urgent, almost frantic quality, which perfectly captures both the desperation of the narrator’s girlfriend, terrified of being left for another woman, and the despair of the narrator herself, who has only just realized that her Hong Kong girlfriend regards their relationship as more than a fling. In a bittersweet allusion to the surrealist paintings of René Magritte, the narrator finally understands how mistaken she has been. Read on!

You, Your Girlfriend, Your Hong Kong Girlfriend

Perhaps you’re already on the EuroStar to Paris, hurtling towards the city you were born in. Next to you is your girlfriend, elegant yet lost. You have yet to break up. You’re headed to her family home because it’s Christmas, and Europeans celebrate Christmas with family. And of course she wouldn’t dare to leave you on your own for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day, all alone in London.

You probably won’t go back to your family home in Paris, possibly to avoid Cantonese—because when you talk to your family, you’re reminded of that Hong Kong girlfriend, like a character in the Hong Kong shows Grandma likes to watch.

How many girlfriends do you really have?

READ MORE…

The Dance of the Torn Skin: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra on the Indian Anglophone Essay and Prākrit in Translation

December 9, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I’ve always been slightly more interested in the less visible than I am in those who are always in the limelight.

As an essayist, literary historian, and critic, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has been identified as one of the writers who wrestle with ‘what it means to connect the ideal of personal authenticity with wider forms of cultural identity’ by The Oxford History of Life-Writing (2022). As a poet, Modern Indian Poetry in English (2001) defines him as an experimentalist ‘who . . . has formed a poetic from local material, parody, and the conscious manipulation of chance’. In the late 60s, as a student at the University of Allahabad, Mehrotra started the avant-garde literary magazine damn you: a magazine of the arts, and later in Bombay, he founded ezra (1966-1969) and fakir (1966). In 1976, together with Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, and Gieve Patel, he started Clearing House, a small press. Along with Eunice de Souza, they’ve come to be known as the Bombay Poets. Today, he is a renowned figure in contemporary Indian literature, with a voluminous bibliography spanning poetry, literary criticism, history, translation, and essays.

In this interview, I conversed with Mehrotra on The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years of English Prose (Permanent Black/Black Kite, 2020), an anthology he edited, its earliest essays appearing in periodicals that were, as Henry Derozio described them, ‘short-lived as bugs, and not so infrequent as angel-visits’; his translations of the fifteenth-century bhakti poet Kabir; and of  love poems translated from the ancient Indo-Aryan language, Prākrit. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Let’s talk about your selection process for The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years of English Prose (Black Kite, 2020). In an interview with Saikat Majumdar for Ashoka University, you commented that you had wanted to include V. S. Naipaul and Jhumpa Lahiri, but had to ‘narrow the field’.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (AKM): The suggestion to do an anthology of Indian essays came from Rukun Advani, the publisher of Permanent Black/Black Kite. We discussed a few names—perhaps also some essays to possibly include—but at the time nothing came of the idea. Then, in 2019, under a pile of brown paper envelopes, I came across one marked ‘Black Kite essays’. I’d recently finished reading the proofs of Translating the Indian Past and had been wondering what to do next. In that envelope was the answer: a bunch of photocopies, the beginnings of what became The Book of Indian Essays.

It was decided early on—more for practical reasons than parochial ones—to exclude writers who had spent most, if not all, of their lives outside India. The exceptions were Santha Rama Rau and Victor Anant, forgotten writers who I felt should be brought back into the conversation—not that any conversation was taking place. By leaving out Naipaul, Lahiri, and a few others, I was also able to bring in people like Gautam Bhatia, who is an architect, and the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam.

Since the essay is more pliable than poetry or fiction, it has been wielded with considerable style and effect by writers who might be widely known for their work in their professional fields—as Bhatia and Subrahmanyam are—but are less visible as essayists in English. I’ve always been slightly more interested in the less visible than I am in those who are always in the limelight. The latter can look after themselves and are doing it very well. There will, however, come a time when present limelight will fade into the harsh glow of oblivion, and they too will be forgotten—which is why we need literary histories and anthologies. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

December 6, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest in literary news from Southeast Asia, Bulgaria, and Chile!

In this week of world literature, our editors cover the influence of censorship and propaganda on literature, and look back on Southeast Asian literature released this year.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Southeast Asia

What a year in Southeast Asian literature! The Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand took center stage in Penguin Random House Southeast Asia (SEA)’s catalogues, with a range of texts published throughout the year. First off in March was Bleeding Sun by playwright-novelist Rogelio R. Sicat, translated by one of Sicat’s children, the translator and editor Ma. Aurora L. Sicat, from the original Dugo sa Bukang-Liwayway, which was serialised beginning 1965. Sicat, who came of age in the aftermath of the American Occupation, wrote novels which further revealed his belief in land reform and love for Tagalog as a literary language, veering away from his contemporaries who were influenced by Euro-American conventions.

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