Translation Tuesday: “Return” by Cristalina Parra

my mother’s eyes in the morning and my father / ringing the doorbell, atop his bike, without shoes...

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you poetry from Chilean poeta Cristalina Parra’s debut collection Tambaleos. Translated from the Spanish by Julián David Bañuelos, “Return” is a tidal wave of nostalgia–overwhelming and sweet. 

Return

while swapping my papers, my mountains for the

desert gulf, i think about the reflections of clouds

cloaking the Santiago Mountain or the sun

rise measuring the length of your face, slowly

cracks the day, there, the winds cross

the valley, the leaves sing and the clouds dance, I

hear the music you sent and the music we listened

to while running from the pigs, i think of all

the shellfish in this cold ocean and how the squids,

before death, try for the shore, i see,

my mother’s eyes in the morning and my father ringing

the doorbell, atop his bike, without shoes, his olive

skin, i think about the pup attempting their first

steps and the whiskey i threw back with my cousin

while playing Charlie Garcia’s keyboard and

chatting about the void we both understood, I think of the sunrise

for the first time in three years.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our February Book Club Selection: Ten Planets by Yuri Herrera

Science fiction is Herrera’s springboard for a ludicrously inventive imagination.

Many are likely to be acquainted with celebrated Mexican writer Yuri Herrera by way of his novels, but in this latest collection of short stories, the author extends his brilliance to a vast array of disciplines and subjects. With elements of politics, philology, science, and storytelling, these tales not only display the talents of a master craftsman of language, but also an endlessly inventive imagination, a sharp humour, and a fascination with how this world—and other worlds—work. As our Book Club selection for the month of February, we are proud to bring to our readers this riveting constellation of ideas and dimensions.

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.  

Ten Planets by Yuri Herrera, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman, Graywolf Press, 2023

One of the simple pleasures of science fiction is the possibility of escapism—into another reality, galaxy, or dimension beyond our reach. In the vibrant imagination of Yuri Herrera, however, abandoning the rules of our world allows for a speculative fiction that unites fantasy with lucid reflections on contemporary culture, experimenting with the bounds of genre to create something uniquely Herreran. The twenty stories that comprise Ten Planets, astutely translated by Lisa Dillman, combine the philosophical musings of Borges with a characteristic humour and warmth, inviting us to explore the twenty-first century and beyond.

From a house that plays tricks on its inhabitants to a bacterium that gains consciousness in an unsuspecting Englishman’s gut, Herrera’s imagination works on scales both large and infinitesimally small. The stories cover distances ranging the interplanetary and the interpersonal while retaining a sense of warmth and wonder at the world, expanding beyond genre conventions with a wry humour that packs a surprising punch. Dillman, in an insightful translator’s note, reflects on her personal reservations towards science fiction until she read the works of Octavia E. Butler, within which she saw how science fiction can shake off the coolness of rationality by turning its attention to very human problems, the ones we experience on a day-to-day basis. Herrera’s work is exemplary of the best of the genre in that sense, joining Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and others in his ability to imagine a dazzling array of worlds that each speak to our contemporary anxieties—from technological surveillance in ‘The Objects’ and the absurdity of the terms and conditions tick-box in ‘Warning’, to real stories of alienation and societal marginalisation in ‘The Objects’ (two stories bear the same name—because why not be playful?). READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Dispatches from the Philippines, Croatia, and the Romanian diaspora!

In this week’s literary roundup from around the world, people in the literary community are both paying tribute to celebrated icons and paving paths for contemporary voices. From the Romanian diaspora, an exciting new publication threads the past and present, adding to an incredible legacy of literary journals. In the Philippines, book fairs are highlighting minority languages and independent publishers. In Croatia, new literary projects orient their local communities around the act of reading and writing, as well as making intellectual space to consider the role of the political novel. 

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting for the Romanian diaspora

One of the most significant recent events involving the Romanian diaspora was the debut release of the literary journal Littera Nova in Madrid, Spain, earlier this week. With an impressive range of established and emerging writers contributing literature both in original languages and in translation, alongside essays and criticism, the journal confidently joins a rich market as well as a solid and long-standing tradition. As the founding director Eugen Barz states in his prefatory note,  previous frontrunners in the literary journal landscape include post-WWII Romanian periodicals published in metropoles as diverse as Paris, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Honolulu, and edited by legends such as Mircea Eliade, Alexandru Busuioceanu, George UscatescuStefan Baciu, Vintila Horia, and many others.

In the wake of iconic late-Romantic/early-modernist Eminescu’s 173rd birthday, the issue also includes a significant number of remarkable texts referring to the great classic: an erudite and incisive essay from Asymptote past contributor Felix Nicolau drawing parallels between Eminescu and both Shakespeare and Dimitrie Cantemir; poems translated into English by K.V. Twain; and a selection from the poet’s correspondence by Ovidiu Pecican. The journal deftly balances criticism and creative writing/translation, featuring classic modernists such as Lucian Blaga and Ion Pillat (translated into Italian by Stefan Damian and Bruno Rombi, and into French by Gabrielle Danoux), and Surrealist master—and past Asymptote contributor—Gellu Naum (in English translation from Nicoleta Craete), amongst others.

The Romanian diaspora continues to contribute significant texts and translations in platforms all around the world; for example, Asymptote contributor Diana Manole has recently had one of her plays featured in EastWest Literary Forum, released a collection of new and selected poems by revered Nora Iuga (co-translated with Adam J. Sorkin), and is gearing up for the release of her own forthcoming poetry collection in Canada. Also, major diasporic poet, novelist, and critic O. Nimigean, whose rare social media posts are at times almost as impactful as his best-selling books, reasserted on Facebook the continued relevance of the late paradigmatic fiction writer and anti-Ceaușescu militant Paul Goma (himself an epitome of both domestic and exilic heroic resistance), particularly as reflected by Flori Balanescu’s recent books on the subject. READ MORE…

Writing Against Tradition: A Conversation with Stênio Gardel and Bruna Dantas Lobato

I’d like to think that when people read my book and looked at that environment, they could perhaps question their own privileges and prejudices.

In his debut novel, The Words That Remain, Stênio Gardel’s draws out the sublime transformations that language enables. Written in the vivid mind of Raimundo, an illiterate, gay man from rural Brazil, the novel depicts the after-effects of violence, the burden of shame, the pain of unrequited love—and movingly, how learning how to read and write in his old age has transformed all these experiences. We were proud to present this one-of-a-kind novel as our January Book Club selection, and in this following interview, Gardel and his translator, Bruna Dantas Lobato, talks to us about underrepresentation of Brazil’s northeastern region, queer literature, and combating prejudices with writing. 

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. 

Rachel Stanyon (RS): Firstly, I’d like to congratulate you on this wonderful debut novel. Could you tell us a bit about your paths here?

Stênio Gardel (SG): I started really dedicating myself to writing at the end of 2016. Before then, I’d only had a strong desire, and was storing everything I’d tried to write in computer files or drawers. I had carried this desire for a very long time—since I was twelve or thirteen years old—but never had the courage or the initiative to start, nor the dedication required to become an author. Then, at the end of 2016, I started taking classes with the writer Socorro Acioli, and everything changed from there. I learned a lot from her, and that was where The Words That Remain started.

Bruna Dantas Lobato (BDL): Like Stênio, I was also born and raised in the northeast of Brazil, but when I was about seventeen, I got a scholarship to go to a boarding school in New Hampshire for a while—I had the colonized dreams of speaking French and Latin—and then ended up going to college in New England. I stuck around, went to grad school in New York, and somehow became an immigrant in America.

I’d wanted to be a writer since I was a child, but it was when I found myself as a foreigner for the first time that I realized I was also already a translator; I didn’t really get to choose it. There were so many books I loved that I wanted to share with the people around me in my new life, and I was also continuously writing, so translation—translating Brazilian literature—felt like a way to be my full self again. I was an English major and then a comparative literature major, but it was still very Western, and it felt like I had renounced this huge part of myself. To feel like my full self again, I started translating a bunch in my free time, and took translation classes.

That’s what eventually brought me to Stênio’s work. I was committed to translating books from the northeast of Brazil, which is so underrepresented both in Brazil and abroad, because obviously writing from the big metropolises like São Paulo and Rio always gets a lot more attention. I really wanted to bring the kind of life I knew into the life I live now and into the English language. It’s an honor to translate a book like this one. READ MORE…

The Wish as Transaction: On Deena Mohamed’s Shubeik Lubeik

All the linked stories . . . embrace the stalemate struggle between external, seemingly deterministic forces . . . and individual choice.

Shubeik Lubeik, written, illustrated, and translated by Deena Mohamed, Pantheon, 2023

Shubeik Lubeik, Deena Mohamed’s ingenious graphic novel⸺whose title in Arabic means “Your Wish is My Command” ⸺seamlessly synthesizes Egyptian culture and history into an epic-scale social commentary, invoking direct parallels to the act of translation. Taking place at a Cairo kiosk, with “[its] banners, red iceboxes; [and] brightly colored snacks,” the vivid setting embodies both global capitalist influence and quaint elements of old Egypt, establishing a quirky but believable fictional venue where, among other sundry goods, bottled wishes are sold.

Originally self-published in Arabic as a ninety-page comic book, Shubeik Lubeik won the Best Graphic Novel prize and the Grand Prize at the 2017 Cairo Comics Festival. Mohamed then translated her work into English and sent it to Anjali Singh⸺a literary agent and translator of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis⸺who promptly agreed to represent Mohamed. After undergoing extensive developments in subsequent Arabic and English versions, Shubeik Lubeik is now released by Pantheon in its current 518-page incarnation, a magnificent trilogy of connected stories spanning over six decades of Egyptian social history—from 1954 to the present day. Kiosk owner Shokry⸺the seller of three bottled first-class wishes inherited from his pious father⸺serves as the central link to three narratives: Aziza, an illiterate, impoverished widow who refuses to be cowed by Egypt’s corrupt bureaucracy; Nour, a privileged, non-binary college student beset with mental illness; and Shawqia, a plucky matriarch whose life is marked with migration and health issues.

Shubeik Lubeik comic page

In the first story, Aziza is stubbornly resisting the state’s attempts⸺with its latent bias couched in convoluted wish licensing regulations⸺to deprive her of the ownership of a first-class wish, purchased with hard-earned savings from years of labor. While Aziza initially bought the wish to achieve material comfort, her dogged refusal to give up her wish—which lands her in prison—becomes a moral struggle against the state’s unjust process.

The second story, while also affirming individual choice, takes a different approach. Nour, steeped in material comfort but plagued by chronic depression, cannot decide if they deserve happiness. As a wish studies scholar, Nour is vexed by the gap of knowledge between the wish and its fulfillment. Since a disparity can exist between a wish⸺formed by exigent circumstances⸺and the irrevocable effects of its realization, Nour fears that their wish for happiness won’t alleviate, but perpetuate their exile in an emotional zombie land. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Painting of a Dream” by Sakthi Jothi

I am drawing an image of me that remains embedded in an undissolved dream of mine.

This Translation Tuesday, we feature the poetic reflections of Sakthi Jothi, translated from the Tamil by Thila Varghese. With painterly verse, Sakthi Jothi extracts a perfect image from the intensities of an “undissolved dream.” Feelings are captured in the lines, and colour and tools are sought to map their depths—but success may come at a price.

The Painting of a Dream

I am drawing
an image of me
that remains embedded
in an undissolved dream of mine.
I tried to put together a figure
by extending the lines in the summer
and contracting them in the winter,
stretching the lines farther
and erasing some of them as unwanted.
I painted it with colours
specific to each season.

It was only
during the times
passed in searching
for brushes and colours
to paint with precision
all the details,
such as the loneliness
that is undissolved by anything at all, READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (Feb 2023)

From winning prestigious prizes to publishing creative work, critical reviews, even books, Asymptote staff kept busy this past quarter!

Editor-at-Large for Palestine and Book Club Manager Carol Khoury’s translation of Mahmoud Shukair’s YA book Ghassan Kanafani . . . The Eternal was released on Jan 14th in Ramallah, Palestine. The book is published jointly by Tamer Institute for Community Education, the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, and Palestine’s Forum for Arabic Literature.

Visual Editor Heather Green was the recipient of the inaugural Albertine Translation Prize in Fiction for her translation of Isabelle Sorente’s La femme et l’oiseau, or The Woman and the Falcon. As a member of the judging committee for the first National Book Critics Circle’s Barrios Prize for a book translated into English, she wrote about Jazmina Barrera’s Linea Nigra for the longlist appreciation in Words Without Borders.

Ian Ross Singleton, Nonfiction Editor, was interviewed on the Haight Ashbury Literary Review podcast about his novel Two Big Differences.

Outgoing Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack published short stories in Necessary Fiction and the Four Way Review.

Assistant Managing Editor (Fiction) Laurel Taylor’s experimental translations from the Japanese appeared in Ancient Exchanges.

Assistant Editor (Poetry) M.L. Martin published new translations from W&E, a refracted translation of “Wulf and Eadwacer” (forthcoming from Action Books) in the latest issue of Gulf Coast. Find out more on her website here. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest from Guatemala, Palestine, and Macedonia!

This week, our editors-at-large report on a celebration of a beloved poets, a controversial change to a major literary award, the last chance to see a powerful museum show, and more. Read on to learn more about current events in world literature!

Rubén López, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Guatemala

On January 26, the Ministry of Sports and Culture of Guatemala announced several changes regarding the National Literature Award. The award, given yearly since 1988, honors the exceptional careers of writers like Augusto Monterroso, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Carmen Matute, Gloria Hernández, Eduardo Halfon, among others. However, the Ministry has now announced that the award will be presented every three years. Christian Calderón, Vice Minister of Culture, said that the decision is part of a “strategy to give an opportunity to develop young writers.” Gloria Hernández, who was granted the award in 2022, expressed criticism of this new policy in a local newspaper. She argues that the Ministry’s motivation for the change is only saving the monetary grant for three years and that this will not benefit local writers. She added that Guatemala should emulate Mexico’s National Literature Award, which grants a lifetime pension so that the creator can devote to writing. In her opinion, this would be more valuable to Guatemalan literature. In the same interview, Gerardo Guinea, who received the award in 2009, said that it is absurd to grant the award every three years and argues that the only effect of this change is to limit the number of laureates.

READ MORE…

Inside the Prison of Her Own Skin: On Violette Leduc’s La Bâtarde

Leduc is therefore bisexual, and La Bâtarde, a bisexual text.

La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc, translated from the French by Derek Coltman, Dalkey Archive Press, 2023

“. . . very often, women think that all they need do is to tell their unhappy childhood. And so they tell it, and it has no literary value whatsoever, neither in style, nor in the universality which it ought to contain. So there are many, many autobiographies which publishers reject . . . Very disappointing . . . to think that as long as they’re women telling their story it will be interesting. . . . [but] there are extraordinary cases, like that of Violette Leduc who, exceptionally, was wonderfully successful.”

—Simone de Beauvoir, La Revue Littéraire des Femmes (March 1986)

“Being a woman, not wanting to be one,” Violette Leduc writes about her mother, Berthe, in La Bâtarde [The Bastard]. Perhaps she is speaking about herself as well, the reader takes a guess, which later in the autobiography is—spoiler alert—confirmed. Originally published in 1964 by Éditions Gallimard in Paris, La Bâtarde was translated into the English by Derek Coltman (who has translated two of her other works) as La Bâtarde: An Autobiography, and released the following year by C Nicholls & Company in the United Kingdom and by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the United States. Over the years, at least two new editions have been published, and this year, we are given a new edition to this bestselling French autobiography from Dalkey Archive Press.

“Being a woman and therefore condemned to the miseries of the feminine condition,” echoes Simone de Beauvoir in the foreword. Like Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Robert Brasillach, and Richard Wright, Leduc is considered a historical contemporary and political protege of Beauvoir (although ecofeminist-biographer Françoise d’Eaubonne disagrees, stating that Leduc never subscribed to Beauvoir’s philosophy or politics). It may have been, however, more than that; newly discovered letters—two hundred and ninety-seven of them—have revealed Beauvoir rejecting Leduc’s repeated romantic advances.

This autobiography is unapologetic—particularly so, as Laetitia Hanin deems, because while its predecessors within Francophone women’s literature, like the memoirs of George Sand and Marie d’Agoult, sacrificed to self-mythification, Leduc did not apologise for writing the story of her life. Beginning in northern France, the author reveals a childhood spent under WWI German occupation, where the government’s rationing of food is so insufficient people resorted to stealing cabbages from the back of carts. Two maternal figures among a neighbourhood of women raise her: her mother, Berthe, with whom she has an extremely agonising and suffocating relationship (“You were all I had, mother, and you wanted me to die with you”); and her grandmother, Fidéline, “an angel” who loved her “in passionate silence.” In her youth, as an “unrecognized daughter of a son of a good family,” she yearns for a paternal figure, but she will never know her father André, a man whose dominant quality is anonymity: “It is a strange moment when you gaze questioningly at an unknown figure in a picture and the picture, the unknown figure, is your nerves, your joints, your spinal column.” Further contemplating on her lineage, Leduc writes, “I reject my heredity.” This is particularly true with her maternal relationship, when in the later years Leduc would say: “Her absence was a relief; I was oppressed by her return.” Eventually, she would burn André’s photograph along with his death certificate. She writes, “My birth is not a matter of rejoicing.”

READ MORE…

“. . . I am sure of it”: On Deranged As I Am by Ali Zamir

The readers . . . become interlocutors, individuals who would not easily dismiss him or his story, and give a patient ear to his list of troubles.

Deranged As I Am by Ali Zamir, translated from the French by Alice Banks, Fum d’Estampa Press, November 2022

In Ali Zamir’s third novel, Deranged As I Am, narrator-protagonist Deranged is an impoverished man, somehow surviving on the paltry daily wages he manages to earn through hard labour at the docks from transporting goods and cargo, who keeps himself aloof from his fellow workers who make fun of him, using his clothes as a calendar: “Deranged as I am I have only seven ancient shirts in all. Seven pairs of trousers and seven pairs of shorts all pocked with holes and on each of them a day of the week so I don’t forget remaining me that I shouldn’t wear the same outfit twice you see?!” The novel itself begins intensely in medias res with Deranged trapped in a confined space, wounded and on the verge of death, his limbs tied up as flies swarm around him. His crying out, while exaggerated, highlights a jagged agony. 

The rest of the narrative recounts the incidents that led to this low point, with Deranged refusing to keep quiet and hunker down in the face of his many painful oppressions: “Let me make you understand this loud and clear as long as my heart beats your ears will bleed they will bleed until my soul is dizzy lest I disappear with a stream of tears in my charmless eyes.” Situated at the dizzy intersection of various vulnerabilities, he has minimal hope of having his voice heard or his exploitation compensated, because to the “angels of darkness,” as he calls the flies that represent his numerous tormentors, he is nothing but a speck of dirt that they can wipe away and then go about their day. The readers therefore become interlocutors, individuals who would not easily dismiss him or his story, and give a patient ear to his list of troubles and problems. 

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Incidents of Everyday Elephants” by Gianna Rovere

Sus tells us at dinner that elephants have always been her favorite animal. Elegant is the wrong word. Maybe exceptional, extraordinary.

This Translation Tuesday, we are privy to Swiss writer Gianna Rovere’s intimate musings on her encounters with elephants in a year— from overheard conversations on the train to a trip to Ikea. In direct prose, deftly translated from the German by Regan Mies, Rovere imbues her daily life with whimsy through the simple act of noticing in “Incidents of Everyday Elephants.”

November 12, 2020: Toys

I’ve always thought elephants made sense on children’s products and as toys because they have such a practical shape for small hands: a slender trunk for a child’s tight grip; an arched spine to be stroked; and four sturdy legs that stand solid and firm. Lovely, round shapes. I recently met a friend again for the first time in a while, and we got to talking about it all. Toys, elephants. He had cancer. Chemotherapy, hair all fallen out, weighed a hundred kilograms. He’d just become infertile. My friend’s doctor gave him a special offer, so now his sperm’s waiting for his cue from a nitrogen tank in Bern, in case the infertility stays. And what have I been doing? Looking for elephants in everyday life. Do you know, then, why they’re so often pictured on kids’ products? my friend asked. He said, My father’s worked in marketing for quite some time now and told me once, during a visit to the zoo, that elephants have positive connotations all over the world. So that’s why. Sure, dogs might be cute here, but in Asia, they’re dirty.

February 4, 2021: Relocation

I’m transporting an Ikea bag brimming with elephants. I’ve strapped it down onto two moving boxes, each of which I’ve tied tightly to a bike trailer. Forty-six elephants; small and large, made of porcelain, wood, or wax. I pull the trailer unhurriedly behind me. Halfway across the crosswalk at Albisriederplatz, I get a call. I hold the phone between my cheek and shoulder, and the elephants tip slowly left. At the last second, I catch their fall with my free hand. A car honks. Apologetic, I raise my hand, and the elephants spill down onto the asphalt. It sounds like broken glass.

February 23, 2021: New Message

Today, I was once again offered an elephant via telegram. A saltshaker.

February 28, 2021: Level

On the train to Luzern, a well-dressed man asks his son, who’s playing on a tablet:

“So’ve you managed to do it yet, with the little elephant like that?” READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2023

New translations from Hungarian, German, and Spanish!

This month, we are excited to present new works in translation that consider survival and coexistence in many forms. From the Hungarian, renowned author Magda Szabó delves into the embittering effects of poverty and hardship. From the Spanish, Pilar Quintana creates a riveting familial portrait of vulnerable parents and too-wise children. From the German, Dr. Ludger Wess leads us on a journey to discover the smallest lifeforms amongst us. Read on to find out more!

Screen Shot 2023-02-12 at 9.27.41 PM

The Fawn by Magda Szabó, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix, New York Review Books, 2023

Review by Meghan Racklin, Blog Editor

In The Fawn, the latest of Magda Szabó’s novels to be translated into English, it is 1954 in Budapest. For Eszter, the novel’s main character (it is difficult to call her a protagonist), it is 1954—but it is also the interwar years and the years of the war, and it is also, disastrously, almost the future. “The Future . . .’” she thinks, “[t]hat was something I had no desire to build. I had enough of the past about me already for the thought to do anything but horrify me.”

The novel is Eszter’s account of her life and her surroundings, told in a monologue directed at the man she loves, and the language is as beautiful as Eszter is bitter. In Len Rix’s translation, Eszter’s sentences are full of clauses; she’s in a rush, trying to get out everything she wishes she had already said. She recalls, of the evening when her childhood home was hit by a bomb, “Mother neither wept nor blanched; we slept the sleep of the contented in the main hall of a school, along with everyone else who had lost their homes; I felt like the nation’s favourite child, everyone seemed to want to look after us, and the whole city shared our grief.” As her outpouring continues, details pile up like debris. 

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest from China, Sweden, and Kenya!

This week, our editors-at-large report on recent science fiction adaptations in China, the Sámi National Day in Sweden, and the passing of literary icons in both East Africa and China. From a revived book festival to the runner-up of the Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize, read on to learn more!

Jiaoyang Li, Editor-at-Large, reporting for China

Liu Cixin’s Hugo Award-winning novel Three Bodies was recently adapted into a TV series and streamed more than 3 million times in a week on Tencent Video, making it the most popular TV series in China. In addition to the live action, Bilibili, the largest animation website in China, also launched an animated series of the novel.

Although we must recognize it as a milestone in Chinese science fiction literature for IP adaptation, there is one thing to question: Why is it always Three Bodies? There are plenty of other wonderful sci-fi collections written by female Chinese writers needing our attention. For example, New York-based bilingual sci-fi writer Mu Ming’s fiction collection 宛转环 (The Serpentine Band), an excerpt of which was published by Clarkesworld Magazine in 2021, will be fully released in Chinese by One Way Books in 2023. 

READ MORE…

Hope and Money Unites Us All: On The Hand That Feeds You by Mercedes Rosende

. . .the visceral, gripping event only serves as backdrop—like the mentions of unusual weather—never bursting to take centre stage.

The Hand That Feeds You by Mercedes Rosende, translated from the Uruguayan Spanish by Tim Gutteridge, Bitter Lemon Press, 2023 

The Hand That Feeds You is Uruguayan author Mercedes Rosende’s sequel to Crocodile Tears, the thriller that won her the prestigious German literary award LiBeraturpreis in 2019, and it continues the author’s track record of bringing powerful, darkly comic crime novels to her readers. The duo of Rosende and translator Tim Gutteridge work together to fill these pages with characters both strong and deeply flawed—none more so than the protagonist Ursula López—living in the Old Town of Montevideo which, similar to its inhabitants, hides more than it shows. 

The high octane beginning nails the reader into their seat in Rosende’s theatre; the narrative feels cinematic throughout, with the author always adept in choosing what to spotlight, what to lampshade, when to pan out, and when to zoom in. The narrator is all-knowing, telling us what is happening and what will happen in the same sentence, but also proves adept at knowing when to let the characters speak for themselves for the benefit of the reader—a mark of Rosende’s command over her prose’s flow. There are many places where the focus shifts from the action to the characters, integral in showing the individual states of mind: 

We see her face in close-up: she is flushed, and perspiration is starting to accumulate around her open, smiling mouth. She is lightly made up, just enough to accentuate her beauty. She has taken great care over her clothes, loose black garments that suit her, even if many people, slaves to ideals of beauty imposed by some mysterious criterion, would say she is a few pounds overweight.

The people of The Hand That Feeds You are involved in a bank heist gone wrong, and by writing such vivid personal presences, Rosende allows readers time to catch breath between tense moments, all playing out amidst the backdrop of commentary on society and life in Montevideo—the author’s own hometown. In the crime’s aftermath, the robbers, the cop, and the lawyer who is behind the whole thing become engaged in a game of cat and mouse with Ursula—who drops in at an opportune moment to make away with the money.

The language does not try to override the plot in importance and impact (there isn’t much need for ornate style in a page-turner that has one holding one’s sides and breath in equal measure) but it has peculiarities that again, draw the eye to certain elements that Rosende and Gutteridge want us to focus on. For instance, there is something off about most of the characters that populate the novel. Ursula’s companion Diego, always at the mercy of the people around him and his own fears, “opens his eyes like a ventriloquist’s dummy”; his lawyer, Antinucci, has an unnatural smile and eyes like hard-boiled eggs. Our protagonist Ursula has schizophrenic conversations with her dead father. All these elements lend their characters something unnatural, broken. A touch of the preternatural also hangs over them, be it a haunting, a religion, or a reversion to superstition and a desperation for signs to aid decision-making in moments of stress.  READ MORE…