Translation Tuesday: “Midnight Falls Like a Bird” by Félix Francisco Casanova

October 17, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Adelaida Vida

wounded with sleeplessness...

This Translation Tuesday, a poem from the Canary Island poet Félix Francisco Casanova charts a journey from exhaustion to the brink of a balmy doziness. A page is turned, and the process begins. All the forces of wakefulness are surmounted by the dreamy, inexorable course of a perfect poem read on the cusp of dawn.

Midnight falls like a bird

wounded with sleeplessness,
tediously you turn the page
and the poem wends its course
like a river without end,
it dilates and narrows the eyes
enrages and pacifies you
while the wood’s burning wanes
drowsiness arrives with the dawn.

translated from the Spanish by Adelaida Vida

Félix Francisco Casanova was born in Santa Cruz de la Palma, in the Canary Islands, in 1956, and passed away in 1976 at the age of nineteen. In 1973, at the age of seventeen, he won the Canary Islands’ main poetry prize, Julio Tovar, with his book El conservatorio. In 1974 he won the Pérez Armas novel with Demipage’s reissued work, El don de Vorace. A month before his death, he won a contest sponsored by the newspaper La Tarde for his poetry collection, A suitcase full of leaves. The translated poem, “Midnight Falls Like a Bird,” is from Félix Francisco Casanova’s book, Cuarenta contra el agua, compiled by Francisco Javier Irazoki, and published by Demipage.

Adelaida Vida is a writer, translator, and student in San Francisco, California. She first read Casanova’s work when she was living in the Canary Islands.

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Read more from Translation Tuesdays on the Asymptote blog:

What’s New in Translation: October 2023

October 16, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal, George Newton, and Iona Tait

Discover new work from Venezuela, Poland and India!

In this month’s round-up, we present three works in singular styles. From Venezuela, Maria Pérez-Talavera gives us non-linear journal entries composed from a mental hospital. From Poland, modernist master Witold Gombrowicz puts his own spin on the Gothic tale, painting a psychologically sensitive portrait of a shifting society. And from India, some of the bold, experimental short stories of Rajkamal Chaudhary are gathered in a sharp and comic collection of unconventional plotlines and characters. Read on to find out more!

gombrowicz

The Possessed by Witold Gombrowicz, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Fitzcarraldo, 2023

Review by Iona Tait, Executive Assistant

A haunted castle, a mad prince, a pair of doubles, and a clairvoyant who saves the day—Witold Gombrowicz’s The Possessed has all the quintessential trappings of nineteenth-century Gothic fiction. Originally released as a serial in the summer of 1939, The Possessed merges its classic motifs with mystery and a comedy of manners, offering a remarkably profound reflection on authenticity at a time when older Polish divisions of social classes were being transformed.

Neighboring the Gothic castle—that relic of “antiquity breathing its last” where a deranged prince and his cunning secretary reside—lies a manor-turned-boarding house. Mrs. Ocholowska, the landowner and member of a downwardly mobile minor nobility, receives guests across all social classes: the petit-bourgeois Councilor Szymczyk, nosy and bickering middle-class women, a curious academic known as Skolinski, and a working-class tennis coach and parvenu named Marian Leszczuk. The latter proves to be a formidable rival to the tennis superstar and spritely daughter of the landowner, Maja Ocholowska, who is at the novel’s outset engaged to the secretary.

Lesczuk and Maja, however, are not only an equal match on the court; they also exhibit an uncanny similarity in their gestures and ways of speaking. Simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by this similarity, the pair undergo a process of self-discovery together, journeying between the manor and the haunted castle, with intermittent getaways to Warsaw. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 13, 2023  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Alton Melvar M Dapanas, and Carol Khoury

The latest literary news from Palestine, the United States, and the Philippines

This week, one of our editors-at-large reports from Palestine, amidst the outbreak of war. Our editors also report on new publications from the Philippines and literary festivals in New York. 

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

In a normal world, you would expect me to write my dispatch this week about the latest version of Palestine International Book Fair, or about Raja Shehadeh making the 2023 National Book Awards finalists list, or the just-concluded Palestine Writes Festival. But this week, Palestine is far from normal, although what we are living now is also déjà vu.

My last dispatch was about Gaza, but it was pleasant news. Little did I know what the following month would hold when I wrote “Each morning, as the sun timidly broke through the horizon, Mosab Abu Toha’s words flowed like a river, weaving tales of resilience and hope from the depths of despair.”

I will give the floor to Mosab this dispatch too:

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Truths in Ambiguity: On Uljana Wolf’s kochanie, today i bought bread

October 12, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Anna Rumsby

Nissan’s expert translations, in turn, are contemporary in the sense that they are unapologetically “unfaithful”.

kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf, translated from the German by Greg Nissan, World Poetry Books, 2023

In German, Uljana Wolf’s work inhabits the liminal spaces between the German and Polish languages, with all the fraught history that this double heritage involves. Now, in an English translation by Greg Nissan, this palimpsest of linguistic plurality has received another layer. Born in the German/Polish borderlands, Wolf has rapidly become a voice for a globalised, post-GDR generation, her life and work echoing the political and social upheaval of the twentieth century. In compact scenes of personal and shared experience, both dreamlike and jarring, she weaves together metaphoric word-sounds, juxtaposed imagery, and multilingualism. Nissan’s expert translations, in turn, are contemporary in the sense that they are unapologetically “unfaithful”. He has incorporated new imagery into the retold poems, such as the echoes of mink fur in “mornmink”, reiterating that his translated poems should not be seen as reproductions or ‘shadows’ of the original, but rather as a “jealous lover, eager to retort”.

Wolf’s verse is extremely dense and laden with historical and cultural references, making both the foreword by Valzhyna Mort and the afterword by Greg Nissan crucial pieces of the puzzle in beginning to decode Wolf’s poetry. This being said, such ambiguous verse is also a joy for the reader or reviewer; there are as many interpretations as there are eyes to read. The poetry benefits from its bilingual presentation, with the German on the left and the English on the right as equal partners that reflect one another without simply replicating the other. This allows readers to appreciate the form and page-feel of both languages, even if they are not bilingual.

Something that struck me initially in Wolf’s German was the formatting: a reader of German would expect the nouns to be capitalised, but here they are not. This only adds to the possibilities of their ambiguity, as words which could be both nouns and adjectives, or nouns and verbs, are no longer distinct from each other; the line einen gehorsam verzeichnen could mean, as Nissan has translated it, “to register an obedience”, but equally could have been translated as “to register (somebody/something) obediently”. The German prose is made ever denser by this use of the language, as the nouns no longer jump out on the page. While reading the German poems, I realised with a start that this is what reading English may have felt like to my German-speaking students, learning to read a language in which the nouns blend in with everything else. READ MORE…

The Amman International Book Fair: Translation Across Languages and Periods of Civilization

October 11, 2023  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Bridget Peak

How can you capture rhyme and rhythm, the cadence of a work in another language? If you can, should you?

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In its 22nd edition, The Amman International Book Fair ran from September 21–30 this year and featured over 400 publishing houses from 22 countries, offering a full calendar of literary activities from a reading marathon to calligraphy classes. The Union of Jordanian Publishers, established in 1989 to elevate the standing of publishing houses in Jordan, organizes the event each year under the recurrent theme “Jerusalem: Capital of Palestine”, and marks the start of book fair season across the region. The state of Qatar was recognized as the esteemed guest of honor of the fair in a symposium attended by Dr. Khalid bin Ibrahim Al Sulaiti, the General Manager of the Katara Cultural Village of Qatar (the foundation responsible for the Katara Prize for the Arabic Novel) and historian Dr. Hind Abu Al-Shaar was recognized for her contributions as a writer and academic within Jordan’s literary landscape as this year’s ‘key personality’. 

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The Amman International Book Fair is an immense organizational feat, a forum not only dedicated to the sale of books in the Arabic language but also an accessible discussion of literature’s role in Jordan historically and today. Inevitably, the topic of translation asserts itself, demanding rumination on grappling with meaning in a foreign alphabet and the challenges and opportunities implicit therein. When speaking with representatives of publishing houses of the broader region, the question of the quality of translations was ever-present and reflected in the events hosted by the fair and its partners. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: From “A Bathtub in the Desert” by Jadd Hilal

October 10, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Bryan Flavin

His shell was gigantic and green, with glints of bronze, copper, and gold.

This Translation Tuesday, we present a fairy tale encounter amid dark signs of a war’s beginning, elegantly entwined and counterposed by Jadd Hilal. The lonely Adel discovers two improbable creatures in his wardrobe, and they become his first real friends. In the outside world, meanwhile, something horrible is unfolding: school is cancelled, the local protests are turning ugly, shots ring out at night, and militias have begun to roam the streets. 

We reproduce here a note from Hilal’s translator, Bryan Flavin, who tells us more about the author and his work. 

A note from the translator:

L’Orient du Jour described A Bathtub in the Desert, Jadd Hilal’s acclaimed second novel, as “The Other Little Prince…[its] endearing narrator reminiscent of Saint-Exupéry.” Yet while Saint-Exupéry and Hilal both confront the expectations assigned to childhood and adulthood, Hilal does so within a different context, one of war and exile:

When war breaks out, Adel’s life changes forever. Fortunately he still has his two giant imaginary insect friends, Darwin and Tardigrade, to help him escape. Strained to make decisions beyond his maturity, Adel finds himself at a desert outpost where the combatants act like children, and the sheikh, leader of the outpost, forces him to grow up. Throughout, Adel must learn what it means to be an adult, traversing war and exile, friendship and isolation, innocence and identity.

With emotion and stylistic minimalism, the novel challenges the typical Bildungsroman in two ways: 1) it asks readers to re-examine and contextualize the biases surrounding childhood and adulthood; and 2) it subverts the Bildungsroman’s gradual trajectory, instead marked by Adel’s navigation of traumatic experience. The following translation is an excerpt, starting when Adel first meets Darwin and ending right before the start of the war.

A Bathtub in the Desert

When I say I didn’t have any real friends, that’s not entirely true—I did have one friend: my giant beetle. He appeared the night my parents announced their divorce. I still remember that night—I opened the door to my massive wardrobe and found him there, next to the toy plane my father had given me for my third birthday, the dozens of stones I’d collected on the roads, and the cardboard box decorated with lentils I’d made for my mother at school, along with a number of other memories.

I should say, I only ever used my wardrobe for this—for keeping memories. I had convinced my parents to buy me a dresser for my clothes, but in exchange, I had to give up my large jar filled with the Chiclets I used to collect. Not a bad deal. Besides, I ended up needing the space. Without it, I would’ve missed out on my very first friend.

Even though he was definitely a beetle, the thing that made me slam the wardrobe shut and rush back to my bed—the thing I forgot to mention—he was as big and as tall as a grown-up.

“Who are you?”

I remember fumbling back to the wardrobe door and opening it. He was still there.

“What do you want?”

He didn’t speak, but his eyes told me he was scared. Now that I think of it—he didn’t really look like a beetle at all. Instead of tiny little legs, he had two long ones, like us. He wore midnight blue dress pants with white pinstripes and white polished shoes. Above that: nothing. All black with only a pair of eyes at the very top. Blue eyes with wrinkles around the corners. As if he were smiling.

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Where Are You Racing To?

October 9, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Heloisa Selles

Russia has a long history of endings.

The apocalyptic story of a (fictional) post-epidemic Russia in Yana Vagner’s To the Lake had found an enormous international audience by way of a 2020 adaptation, directed by Pavel Kostomarov and Dmitriy Tyurin and released on Netflix. This positive reception of what audiences called an exceptionally prescient tale perhaps encouraged another English edition of the award-winning text, which is now out by way of Deep Vellum. In this following essay, Heloisa Selles discusses To the Lake in view of its on-screen reproduction.

When I first saw the publication announcement for To the Lake from Deep Vellum, I almost missed it. It was mid-July, and social media feeds were rife with pictures of a New York city ablaze with smoke from Canadian wildfires—scrolls of tiny red suns paired with tips on how to cope with poor air quality. Through the apocalyptic scenes, the outline of a hazy pine forest on a white, inconspicuous cover caught my eye, and within a few minutes I discovered that the book was, in fact, the book—that gave origin to the lauded Netflix series of the same name.

When To the Lake (Эпидемия in Russian, or “Epidemic”) came to screens in October 2020, we were all stuck at home, journeying around our rooms, trying to find ways to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, and two months away from the first vaccines being administered. The show seemed to be an addition to an ever-growing collection of media that depicted viruses, contagious diseases, and varying levels of societal panic—as though watching chaos unfold before our eyes made the palpable reality a bit easier to endure. But this story, an action-packed drama directed by Pavel Kostomarov about a group of people struggling to survive an epidemic ravaging Moscow, had a distinct texture. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 6, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Marina García Pardavila, Sofija Popovska, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary news from North Macedonia, Spain, and Kenya!

In this round of weekly updates from our Editors-at-Large, we hear about literary festivals, awards, and the latest translations from North Macedonia, Spain, and Kenya! From a festival themed “Air. Wind. Breathing.” to a recently completed translation of the Bible, read on to learn more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

The first weeks of autumn in North Macedonia brought exciting developments to the literary scene: the third installment of the Skopje Poetry Festival took place from September 24–28. The event spanned several venues, including the historic movie theater “Frosina”, the Skopje city library, and the bookshop-cafe “Bukva”. The festival opened with a performance entitled “Air. Wind. Breathing.”—a theme that was maintained throughout, as some of the readings were accompanied by musical improvisations with wind instruments. 

Represented at the Skopje Poetry Festival was a diverse range of cultures; Danish, Serbian, French-Syrian, Maltese, and Croatian poets gave readings alongside local authors. Aside from readings, there were screenings of several movies based on the poetry of Aco Šopov. One of the adapted poems was Horrordeath, which was featured in the Winter 2023 issue of Asymptote Journal in Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer’s translation. The screenings were followed by a musical concert, a creative writing workshop headed by Immanuel Mifsud (a Maltese author and recipient of the European Union Prize for Literature), a panel discussion on increasing the visibility of Macedonian literature abroad, and a yoga session in nature. Young Macedonian poets also had a chance to make their voices heard, during the “Springboard” event on September 24 dedicated to poets between the ages of 16 and 25.

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Principle of Decision: Translation from Swahili

October 5, 2023  |  in Principle of Decision, Translations  |  by Albert Mwamburi, Hassan Kassim, Idza Luhumyo, Jay Boss Rubin, and Wambua Muindi

. . . the auditory and visual imagery that gather as you read the Swahili version . . . How [to] transfer the same to the English version?

This edition of Principle of Decision—our column that highlights the decision-making processes of translators by asking several contributors to offer their own versions of the same passage—provides a look at how translators render the subtleties of a poem with multiple layers of meaning in a new language. This round, Asymptote contributor Wambua Muindi leads our Swahili edition of the column.

Ken Walibora’s Kufa Kuzikana was originally published in 2003 and just clocked two decades since publication. For this edition of Principle of Decision, I chose the first two paragraphs of Walibora’s novel partly to celebrate it but also to appreciate the story it follows in the context of what occupied the first half of 2023 in Kenya—the cycle of anti-government and cost-of-living protests, the ensuing police brutality, and the ethnic targeting and profiling.

I also found these paragraphs appropriate here given that introductions are always novel and always set the tone for a story. In this case not only do the two paragraphs borrow the geography of Kiwachema, the fictional country the novel is set in, they also illustrate the constant movement and consequent contact that is the backdrop against which Walibora animates post-colonial Kenya. The friendship between Akida and Tim—the novel’s main characters—becomes a fable for the nation and demonstrates the exclusionary logic of national politics despite the promise of nation-building. 

I wanted to see what different translators’ English renditions of the novel’s opening lines would sound and feel like. Of particular interest was the auditory and visual imagery that gather as you read the Swahili version, and the way these sentences introduce the tone of the narration. How does a translator transfer the same to the English version?  This is also a question many of the translators asked themselves. Phrases like ‘dhahiri shahiri’ and ‘miinamo ya vilima’ which embody the particularity of Swahili sounds, posed an interesting challenge. The particularity with which the translators supply the tonality of Swahili is fascinating. Take for instance the last word: It is translated differently by each of the translators below, showing the different interpretations given and techniques employed in English translation.

—Wambua Muindi

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The Simultaneous Precision of Each Person’s Storytelling and the Unknowability of the Truth: On Ismail Kadare’s A Dictator Calls

October 4, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Rachel Landau

Kadare suggests that memory itself can build discourse, poetic and otherwise, with those who are no longer living.

A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare, translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson, Counterpoint Press, 2023 

In A Dictator Calls, Ismail Kadare creates an interwoven narrative of historic suspense, gently challenging the line between personal storytelling and an encyclopedic index of information. John Hodgson’s eloquent translation from Albanian is densely packed with perspectives, anecdotes, and curiosity surrounding a significant moment in Soviet literary history. How a legendary conversation transpired and what impact it had on all involved is the question that Kadare seeks to answer in A Dictator Calls; he approaches the question from all angles, and in the process investigates his own complex relationships to historical and literary legacies, afterlives, and the very act of storytelling.

Kadare’s novel is grounded in a story from 1934: Osip Mandelstam, a legendary Russophone poet, had been arrested after writing a poem critical of Joseph Stalin, a text known in English as “The Stalin Epigram” or “The Kremlin Mountaineer.” According to the general narrative, Stalin himself decided to call Boris Pasternak, a contemporary of Mandelstam’s, to ask whether or not Mandelstam was a great poet. Stories diverge, and contemporaries of both poets, from Viktor Shkhlovsky to Isaiah Berlin to Anna Akhmatova, claim different conclusions to that conversation. 

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Two Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke

October 3, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Wally Swist

and I shall stand at its edge: / where there is nothing else, pain once more

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you a meditation on aloneness in the form of introspective poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, elegantly translated from the German by Wally Swist. Grappling with the immense and unspeakable, The Solitary and The Lonely One are indicative of the Austrian poet’s diverse repertoire on disbelief and mysticism. Read on and ruminate.

The Solitary

Like one who sailed on strange seas,
so I’m with the eternal natives;
the full days stand on their tables,
but to me the disgrace is full of figure.

A world reaches into my face,
which may be uninhabited as the moon,
but they leave no desire alone,
and all their words are occupied.

The things that I took far with me,
look rare, compared to yours—:
in their great home they are animals,
here they hold their breath in shame.

The Lonely One

No: there shall be a tumble out of my heart,
and I shall stand at its edge:
where there is nothing else, pain once more
and the unspeakable once more in the world.

Another thing in the immensity,
which becomes dark and light again,
one last longing face
in the never-to-be-satisfied,

another utter face on stone,
willing to its inner weights,
that the expanses that silently destroy it,
force it to be ever happier

Translated from the German by Wally Swist

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With Bones Against Heartbreak: Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek on the Ugandan Acholi Poetry of Exile

October 2, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I have been thinking about . . . how poetry might offer a space to imagine a different world, to challenge power, insist on life . . .

“Dear Dad” is how Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek opens a sequence of letter-vignettes to her late father, the revered northern Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek, who wrote in Acholi and English. The intimate piece, entitled “The Meaning of a Song,” was included in River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation, an anthology of decolonial and feminist politics published by Tkaronto-based trace press. In it, Okot Bitek meditates on her Africanness as someone born to Ugandan exiles in Kenya after the Uganda-Tanzania War of 1978-79: “What is it to claim an African identity? What is it to be African or not? How is it that we’re not reading both Ocol and Lawino as African and imagining that there are far more representations of what it means to be African?” Such poignant examination is also to be found in her award-winning poetry collection 100 Days (University of Alberta Press, 2016), in which she muses on the terrains of history, wanting to know “what is it to come from a land / that swallows its own people”. 

In this interview, I conversed with Okot Bitek on the expanse of Ugandan poetry of exile from Acholiland, African literature as world literature in itself (even and most specially) without translation, and the politico-literary legacy of her father, Okot p’Bitek. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I want to start this conversation by quoting from your essay “The Meaning of a Song”, anthologized in River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation (2023): 

We were people until we were Acholi, also Acoli, and then we were defined by foreign terminology by the Arabs and written in an even more foreign alphabet by the European colonialists and missionaries.

How is naming vital and significant in the collective sense, specially among the colonised?

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 29, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Eva Wissting, and Ibrahim Sayed Fawzy Elsayed

News from Egypt, Bulgaria, and Sweden!

In this week’s round-up of literary news, our editors report on losses, scandals, shortlists, and banned books. While Egypt mourns the loss of one its most gifted storytellers, the Katara Prize’s shortlist announcement has also given the nation’s writers something to  be proud of. Meanwhile, Bulgarian PEN and Swedish PEN are respectively dealing with separate issues surrounding the dissemination of sensitive literature. Read on to find out more!

Ibrahim Sayed Fawzy Elsayed, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Egypt

The 9th edition of the Katara Prize for Arabic Novels has unveiled an eclectic shortlist, featuring nine captivating titles hailing from Egypt, Lebanon, Kuwait, Oman, Syria, and Palestine. Egypt topped the shortlist with three outstanding titles: The Secret Society of Citizens by the best-selling novelist Ashraf El-Ashmawi (Al-Dar Al-Masriah Al-Lubnaniah, 2022), You Shine, You Light Up by Rasha Adly (Dar El-Shorouk, 2022), and The Signs of a Lover by Mohamed Mowafi (Dar El-Ain Publishing, 2022). These Egyptian novels employ a unique lens on history to dissect pressing socio-political issues within Egyptian society.

Additionally, there’s one more literary treasure on the horizon: recently, the prominent Egyptian publisher Dar El-Sharouq has posthumously released a final novel—one last Bedouin tale—by Hamdy Abu Golayyel (1967-2023), an author of Bedouin descent, celebrated for chronicling the lives of Egypt’s marginalized and working class. The novel is entitled My Mother’s Rooster; in his last interview on ArabLit, Abu Golayyel had said, “I’m currently working on a novel titled ديك أمي / My Mother’s Rooster. I first titled it as غيط أمي / My Mother’s Field. My mother used to raise chickens, and she had a rooster that was very dear to her. So I changed the title to My Mother’s Rooster.”

Abu Golayyel has left an indelible mark on Arabic literature. His literary journey began with the publication of a short-story collection, Swarms of Bees (1997), followed by Items Folded with Great Care (2000). His debut novel, Thieves in Retirement (tr. Marilyn Booth), hit shelves in 2002, while his second, Dog with No Tail (tr. Robin Moger, 2008), won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal. Notably, his 2018 novel, The Men Who Swallowed the Sun (tr. Humphrey Davies), earned him the prestigious 2022 Banipal Prize. READ MORE…

Announcing Our September Book Club Selection: Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri

September 28, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Thuy Dinh

To resist, the women in Birth Canal—as object of desire, porn actress, and sex worker—must stare back in their own fashion. . .

In an intricately woven novel of generational legacies, untold inheritances, and our multivalent history, Indonesian author Dias Novita Wuri navigates the matrixes of family and geography with a profound and powerful voice. Tracing a passage of interconnected lives across nations, regimes, territories, and spectacles, Birth Canal is a testament to both the visible and invisible impressions that our bodies make upon the world, a challenge to the archetypal presentations of sexuality that inflict their discreet violences, and a documentation of courage and perseverance.

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. 

Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri, translated from the Indonesian, Scribe, 2023

Birth Canal, Dias Novita Wuri’s provocatively-titled and self-translated debut novel, represents the Indonesian author’s mesmerizing endeavor to make visible both the female body and the structure of storytelling, deftly exposing the tensions between “legible” narrative and “shameful” history. Originally titled Jalan Lahir in its original Indonesian, the text carries multiple thematic and structural possibilities at its outset: jalan means pathway, road, approach, line, lineage, course, passage, while its etymological origins, borrowed from yalan in Ottoman Turkish, suggests deceit, fakery, lie; lahir, from the Arabic zahir, means “emergence / coming into existence” as noun, “to be born” as verb, and “outer,” “physical,” or “overt” as adjective.

Weaving this ambiguity throughout the narrative, Wuri explores the territory between linear storytelling and disputed, fragmented history by shifting gracefully between first-person, second person, and third-person omniscient viewpoints. As such, Birth Canal consists of four densely structured, cinematic chapters, crossing multiple timelines and cities in Indonesia and Japan to slowly reveal the links between its six female protagonists, Nastiti, Rukmini, Arini, Hanako, Dara, and Ayaka.

The novel opens in teeming, present-day Jakarta to trail after Nastiti, a young, sexually liberated office worker about to self-administer her abortion in secret; Indonesia—a Muslim-majority country—outlaws this procedure. The chapter is narrated from the perspective of an unnamed childhood friend who recounts his platonic, unrequited love for Nastiti up until the day after her abortion, upon which she disappears from his life. In his recollections, we see Nastiti refracted as a cypher—similar to how her image is captured on another occasion by a Western street photographer and subsequently enlarged for a gallery exhibition. The young man acknowledges that despite, or precisely due to Nastiti’s hypnotic allure, she is hard to read:

Sometimes Nastiti’s innocence could seem as bare as a peeled fruit, but that was only because she was allowing it. Other times she could close herself off completely.

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