States of Alienation: Dana Shem-Ur and Yardenne Greenspan on Where I Am

That’s a major part of translation: to make sure that it’s still the original book.

Our June Book Club selection, Dana Shem-Ur’s Where I Am, is a novel that looks intensely at the dissonances of daily life in the aftermath of migrancy, profoundly reaching below the surface of superficial comfort to read the disassociations and discontents that stem from being not quite in-place. Reaching into the mind of an Israeli translator named Reut who has settled in France, Shem-Ur constructs a map of navigations amidst cultural codes, languages, and physical agitations, drawing out the anxiety of belonging. In this interview, we speak to Shem-Ur and translator Yardenne Greenspan about this novel’s simmering frustrations and the new Israeli diaspora, and how they have both used language to reflect the confounding boundaries of our social fabric.

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. 

Laurel Taylor (LT): Dana, I’d like to ask you about what sparked the creation of this novel—particularly as you’re already a translator and scholar. How did Where I Am come about?

Dana Shem-Ur (DS): I come from a family of a female authors. My mom is a poet, and my grandma wrote over thirty books, so I always was involved in this world. In fact, when I was little, I didn’t even read a lot. I just wrote fiction, and even published a small novella of one hundred pages when I was about twelve.

Then I dropped it because I was engaged in studying history, and I channeled my life of writing into other domains. It was only later on, when I was in Paris for three years for my master’s degree in philosophy, that I just came home one summer and wrote the first few pages.

I think what generated this novel was my certainty that I would remain in France, and I would have a life there. I began writing this story about a woman who is twenty years older than me and lives in Paris, but she’s unhappy, and I think part of it was just a reflection of my fears. What will become of me? Will I become Reut?

LT: It’s almost like speculative autofiction?

DS: Yeah. I didn’t even notice it when I wrote it, but it was also inspired by a lot of characters that I met. No character in Where I Am is a real person, but the salon of people at the Jean-Claude household are all inspired by people I met and by these talks and these Parisian intellects, who I always found very fascinating; they are my friends, but throughout the period I lived there, I felt there was a barrier between us. I was always the observer who was looking at this spectacle, not completely present, like Reut. I’m very fascinated by foreign cultures, so it felt like something I needed to write about. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “sailing to batavia” by Zen Hae

we have left the city that belittled us, the country that shall vanish in one smack of the hand.

This Translation Tuesday, to coincide with our Summer Issue and its standout Indonesian Special Feature, the spotlight is on the subtle, elegant prose of Zen Hae. A colonial administrator longs for the comforts of his nyai —his Indonesian concubine—and the febrile sensations of the land he has subjugated, plundered, and since departed. He has sucked hard on its every pleasure, and the taste has brought everything into question.

may you my nyai be always under the lord’s protection—who allows interest on loans and subjugation of new worlds. be well in your acceptance of all things.

if this lowly one sails to batavia, nyai, wear a blouse and the best batik cloth. and betel nut…chew it gaily—use gambier from barus and quicklime from banten to perfect its redness. there’s no need for a parasol. that’s because we’ve missed the batavia sun from the very start. that’s the eye that kisses our ancestors on the fourth day. under it they supposed the swampland was a future heaven and the bare-chested men were sheep with no shepherd. someday that is where our kingdom shall be made real.

related thereto, wait for this lowly one in jacatra’s bay. welcome him at the mouth of the ciliwung with a three-blossom smile.

we have left the city that belittled us, the country that shall vanish in one smack of the hand. we have swallowed months of curses at sea, and have crawled across almost the entire earth, with a map more wondrous than a dream. we have sojourned at the cape of hope, at goa, coromandel, columbo, malacca, also cities wiped out before dawn. a third of us are dead, another third sick and will die the moment we arrive, and one or two now gone mad. we, though, the strongest men, remain.

we smelled the scent of liquor in the brick houses in the south. that one was he who subdued the mountain wind and boiled our blood into adulthood. we have dreamed for you nyais to pour it into cups when we are tired of building this city and would like to know what will happen ten seconds before doomsday. if this unworthy one grows old, oh lord, even if he shuts his eyes, let it not be at the end of the sword or muzzle of a cannon, nor even from malaria or dysentery, let it be only in your embrace alone, amongst the fragrance and warmth of spices.

if this unworthy one steps foot in batavia, nyai, receive us, your children too: our blood has been tainted and given birth to across the ocean.

Translated from the Indonesian by George A. Fowler

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When Shadows Evade Shadows: Wen-chi Li on Ko-hua Chen and Taiwan’s Tongzhi Literature

Queer Taiwanese literature has inherited the motives of escape and exile from its pioneer writers.

Historicising tongzhi wenxue, or gay literature, in Queer Taiwanese Literature (2021), Howard Chiang finds the origins of this political and literary movement in the “changing sexual configurations of the post-WWII era and the militancy and vibrancy of tongzhi 同志 activism in the 1990s.” Since its origins, the writers and texts of this subgenre have been prolific and varied, from avant-garde politico-cultural magazines such as Daoyu bianyuan (Isle Margin) to Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile, Tsao Li-chuan’s The Maiden’s Dance, and Chu Tien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man. But what can be considered as the movement’s foundational text is Decapitated Poetry by Ko-hua Chen, a writer, visual artist, and critic who came out of the closet in that historical decade, making him Taiwan’s first openly gay—or tongzhiwriter. With more than thirty books and a body of work that span from poetry, film criticism, novels, paintings, scripts, photographs, and song lyrics, he merges in writing the thematics of Buddhist philosophical thought, science fiction, and porous queer masculinities. Chen, like his tongzhi writer-contemporaries, is living proof of a literature that has been tested by time, fortified by the activism of its believers, and has withstood the police brutality of the state and the skewed conservatism of religious groups. Decapitated Poetry came out in its Chinese original in 1995, and was published last April by Seagull Books in English translation by Colin Bramwell and Taiwanese anthologist, poet, and scholar Wen-chi Li.

In this interview, I asked Wen-chi about the history of tongzhi literature, the diverse Sino-specific gendered identities of Taiwan, the dynamics of co-translating Chen’s poetry collection, and the post-Sinophone/Japanophone futures of contemporary Taiwanese literature.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): In the introduction to Decapitated Poetry, you and co-translator Colin Bramwell “felt that it was important to give a sense of the broadness of Chen’s output as a writer,” referring to the poet’s transcending beyond the corporeal-cerebral binary. Can you speak further about your experience in co-translating the aesthetic and thematic expanse of Chen’s oeuvre? How was the selection process of the poems in this collection? 

Wen-chi Li (WCL): When we submitted a translation sample to Seagull Books, we originally chose Chen’s work “Notes on a Planet,” which was composed from 1978 to 1980. One of the editors, Bishan Samaddar, replied to us that he was searching for “explicit poetry” for the Pride List series, and this queer sci-fi might be too lyrical and spiritual. I said to Colin that we could then instead directly focus on the works in Decapitated Poetry. The text was a milestone in queer Taiwanese literature, the first to intentionally expose homosexual lewdness and muscle love in Sinophone communities. We thought its English collection should provide a broad view of Chen’s eroticism, so later works like “Body Poems” were also included in the compilation—but we still could not forget the glamour of “Notes on a Planet,” which intertwines topics of gay exploration and posthumanism in the form of lyrical epic (something so unique in world literature). Colin also thought that putting “Notes on a Planet” in the last part of the English collection created an upward scale from concupiscence to otherworldliness, from corporeality to spirituality. The English collection harmoniously combines such opposite elements.   READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest in letters from Ireland and the Philippines!

This week, our editors-at-large bring us the latest in arts festivals, awards, and innovative adaptations across the literary landscape! From new spins on James Joyce’s Ulysses for its hundredth anniversary to a thriving theatre festival in the Philippines, read on to learn more!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Ireland 

It is festival time across Europe, and Galway, Ireland’s West Coast pearl, is gearing up for its International Arts Festival (GIAF), to kick off in 3 days and go on through July 30. The “balmy, bohemian” city (as ireland.com poetically describes it) is already buzzing with the vibe as events ranging from special-effect-rich theatrical, musical, and circus performances to public conversations with awarded war-covering journalists and writers are boisterously advertised on seafront billboards, dedicated websites, local TV and radio stations, and even on announcement screens on greyhounds across the country. 

On the literary front, James Joyce’s spirit looms as large as ever—and particularly so on the hundredth anniversary of Ireland’s most notorious book ever, Ulysses—only now in more playful and cross-artform shades. Ulysses 2.2, a collaborative project between ANU, Landmark Productions, and Museum of Literature Ireland, will be featured with two independent acts. The first one will be You’ll See, an obvious word-play on, and homophone of, Joyce’s title, produced by Branar, one of Ireland’s leading theatre companies for children. You’ll See has been announced as a mix of “live performance, intricate paper design, an original score, and Joyce’s odyssey” that will enchant prior fans as well as all those who haven’t read the book yet.

READ MORE…

When Woe Means No: Translating Women’s Survival as Resistance 

Carson grants her Trojan women agency, even if it seems that hostile men and unfeeling gods control their lives.

In our new column, Retellings, Asymptote presents essays on the translations of myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. Here, Hilary Ilkay considers the contemporary rendition of an ancient tragedy by Euripedes, as told by poet Anne Carson and artist Rosanno Bruno in the acclaimed The Trojan Women: A Comic.

Thanks to cinematic blockbusters like Troy and Emily Wilson’s bestselling translation of Homer’s Odyssey, the story of the Trojan War has established itself within the cultural mainstream. However, its continual revival is not just a contemporary phenomenon; as early as 5th century BCE, the mythical war had already taken on legendary status, and was ripe for adaptation and retelling.

Arguably the most tragic of the ancient Greek tragedians, Euripides’s plays are infamous for their bleak explorations of human hubris and divine cruelty. In his lifetime, as Athens was embroiled in the Peloponnesian War, a violent 27-year conflict with rival city-state Sparta, Euripides drew on the Trojan War specifically to reflect on the uncertainty of his time, making a connection between Athenian imperialism and the Greeks’ pretense of invading Troy for the sake of a single woman. Taking its cue from the ending of the Iliad, which features funeral laments from three women characters, Euripides’s play The Trojan Women casts a spotlight on the fates of the wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters of the male heroes—who typically occupied center stage in narratives of war. As a focused treatment of women’s suffering rarely seen in ancient Greek tragedy, the play is a brutal exploration of the commodification of women’s lives and bodies, as well as the ambivalence of “surviving” a tragedy when those remaining have lost all sense of meaning, stability, and security.

Given Euripides’ interest in the experience of women and the retelling of myths, it’s no surprise that his legacy continues through the work of poet and translator Anne Carson, who has received much acclaim for her rewritings of Greek classics. Carson constantly stretches the boundaries of translation in her work, dramatizing how every translation is necessarily its own “version” of the source material and not necessarily a “faithful” replica. In 2006, she published her loose translations of Euripides’s lesser known tragedies under the title Grief Lessons; in 2019, she adapted his infamously bizarre play, Helen, into Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, which interweaves the stories of Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe. READ MORE…

The Edge of Understanding: An Interview with Robin Munby

It matters a lot as a translator that you trust in the author, and the writing.

As Charlie Ng writes in her essay, ‘Translating Whale-Song into Human Speech’, the poetic ‘Song of the Whale-road’ embodies the “primordial unity” of humans and nature in the timeless, ahistorical figure of the whale. Published in Asymptote‘s Spring 2023 issue, ‘Song of the Whale-road’ is a series of experimental excerpts from the novel Oceánica by Yolanda González, arranged and translated by Robin Munby. It navigates the ocean not only as a landscape but as a powerful “symbol of the collective unconscious”, juxtaposing the false narrative of human godhood we tell ourselves against the whales’ magnitude in our shared planetary experience of nature and time. In this interview, I spoke with Robin Munby about his role in shaping the gravity and pull of this text, as well as about his piece ‘A New Vocabulary of Translation’, also published in Asymptote‘s latest issue, in which a serpentine glossary helps guide a critic’s review of translations.

Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): Robin, you almost seem to have gone beyond the remit of a translator with ‘Song of a Whale-road’. Building on González’s approach to Oceánica, you’ve brought ‘Song of a Whale-road’ into your own experimental realm of language, structure and presentation by compiling the text yourself. What was the creative process behind the piece’s cohesive form?

Robin Munby (RM): The way the piece came about is quite straightforward. I’d read and enjoyed Oceánica and planned to do something with it down the line, but it was the call for the Asymptote animal-themed special feature that gave me the prod I needed. Because I was translating the piece with that goal in mind, it made sense to focus on the intercalated sections running through the novel told from the perspective of a pod of whales, as opposed to working on sections from the novel’s various other strands.

In the context of the novel, the sections which became ‘Song of the Whale-road’ function a little like the Greek chorus. For that reason, I wasn’t sure until I’d compiled them and really until after I’d had a go at translating them, whether they would work as a standalone piece; there’s something a little absurd about presenting the chorus without the play. But I felt there was an internal logic to them and a music that would hopefully come through even outside of their original context. Though translation always involves re-forming and re-contextualizing to varying extents, I’m sure I’d have made different decisions had these pieces been translated alongside the rest of the novel. In particular, the translation of the wider novel would likely have influenced my approach to these sections, and I’d have had to focus slightly less on their internal coherence and more on the points at which they resonate with and speak to the novel’s other strands. I’ll come back with a fuller answer if/when I translate the rest of the novel! READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Broken Dreams” by Homvati Devi

Thoughts swirl in Gafoor’s mind. Pakistan...? I wonder how it will be.

This Translation Tuesday, we deliver a provincial story by Homvati Devi, a writer celebrated in her time, but since sadly overlooked. Following the daily routine of a junk shop keeper as he bears witness to his neighbors dreams of a better life in Pakistan, Devi beautifully captures a nation’s psyche – restless and uncertain– on the precipice of change. Hear translator Tanvi Srivastava’s first impression of Broken Dreams: “I found this story particularly interesting because it is a ‘partition story’—but set miles away from the borders of newly established Pakistan. It is one of the few stories I have read of the time which grapples with the critical question of citizenship and choice.”

Gafoor runs a junk shop; he travels across the city, from home to home, gathering unwanted items. He buys and sells broken boxes, punctured canisters, torn old blankets, discarded glass vials, cracked soap dishes, used brushes, dirty bottles, and so on. He even sells old mosquito nets and raincoats. Fine-quality objects—like flower vases, vacuum flasks, and toy vehicles—often fall into his hands, either discarded by rich Hindu households, or cajoled off memsahibs.

Over the last few days, work at his shop has increased substantially and so has his income. Those migrating to Pakistan are anxious to sell off their belongings. Gafoor promises to sell their items for more than they are worth, and so they end up giving all their junk to him. Soon his shop is crowded with broken vessels, old beds, musical instruments like tablas, footballs, wooden toys, used shoes and sandals; an unimaginable array of objects—from old burqas to a set of balance scales and weights; from damaged bird cages to nickel and brass jewellery. On the day of the weekly market, Gafoor’s shop is the busiest amongst all the shops on the mile-long road; he makes the most sales.

A traveller to Pakistan asks him, ‘Tell me, miya, how are you?’

‘I am well, by the grace of god,’ Gafoor immediately responds. The reason—the Hindu families he knows trust him implicitly; they agree to whatever price he quotes. To argue with Gafoor, people soon say, is to shoot oneself in the foot.

He knows how to keep his customers happy. He thrusts two cardamom pods into a child’s hand; he unwraps the shawl from his shoulders and lays it on the ground for his customers to sit on; he takes the trouble to arrange a paan for someone else. And in this manner, he reassures those who come to sell to him: ‘Ajji, I will recover at least two rupees from the torn pieces of this mat; this broken spittoon will sell for a full two and a half rupees; and spending twenty paise worth of polish on these sandals will make them as good as new.’

Gafoor rambles on, convincing people he will sell their items for a considerable sum before they leave for Pakistan.

And over there? Over there—it is heaven on earth; they will be given the best— beautifully decorated houses with electric fans and quality furniture, a retinue of servants, shining cars, the finest jobs. Those who stand on the margins of society today will be in a position of power tomorrow, enjoying the luxuries of life, marching ahead.

Hearing such tempting tales convinces many to sell off even the items they can easily carry, like handheld mirrors, cups and plates, knives and forks, coats and quilts.

Thoughts swirl in Gafoor’s mind. Pakistan…? I wonder how it will be. And the cities where so many people are rushing off to? Leaving their homes and jobs—they aren’t stupid, are they? They are all well-educated and intelligent. They say they’ll get large houses and bungalows to live in, jobs in prominent positions. An ordinary telegraph clerk or postman today will become a collector or commissioner tomorrow in Pakistan. Those staying in slums today will get palaces to live in, those who walk barefoot today will fly in motor vehicles, and then there’s me—despite twisting the truth, I still take home a pittance. Oh, the expenses have become unbearable. And Hamida doesn’t stop nagging me—get a necklace made for me, and so on. As if we’ll need such things over there—a land where gold is available at the price of silver. Here, even after slaving for a full year, one can only afford a nose ring worth a gram of gold. We’ve heard that the Congress party will make houses for the poor here; but a house is a house. Maybe they’ll build something better than a thatched hut, perhaps covering it with tin sheets or even levelling the roof flat. But in front of the palatial bungalows over there, what is a mere house?

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2023

New work from Natalia Ginzburg and Djuna!

This month, we’re excited to introduce two works that explore social intricacies from two respective angles: the familial and the technological. From the Italian, lauded modernist Natalian Ginzburg’s most recent English-language work plumbs into the combustive conflicts within a family unit to reveal the complex moralism within our most intimate relationships. From the Korean, science fiction author Djuna conjures a thrilling tale of how corporate politics and advancement colonises upon human identity. Read on to find out more!

ginzburg

The Road to the City by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff, New Directions, 2023

Review by Catherine Xinxin Yu, Assistant Director of Outreach

Seventeen-year-old Delia is a frivolous beauty with neither talent nor sense. Her hobby is to get dolled up in her blue dress, take the dusty road to the city, and stroll around, admiring its affluence. Seeking to escape from the drabness of her townish family, she thought a bright future had beamed on her when a rich doctor’s son began pursuing her, but little did she know that it was an abyss, instead, that beckoned.

The Road to the City is Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg’s earliest published work, written in 1941 and published in 1942. At the time, she had been sent into internal exile to a village in Abruzzo for her husband’s anti-Fascist activities. Missing her home city of Turin while developing close ties to the locals in Abruzzo, she blended the places and people from memory and real life to craft this nuanced novella, with a snappy style that “[her] mother might like”.

Ginzburg has an incredible talent for depicting explosive clashes within families, integrating insight and humour into her narrative. English readers might already be familiar with her voice through Family Lexicon, her autobiographical novel published in 1963, and in The Road to the City, we see her burgeoning style with same pithy descriptions and wry comedy, surgically precise choice of scenes and voices, refrains of familial sayings as inside jokes and memory triggers, and nuanced character sketches that highlight their contradictions and moral ambiguity. But unlike Ginzburg’s own family, which is soldered with love and a common cause against fascism, The Road to the City traces how a family splinters into pieces from collective shame and spite.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest in letters from Hong Kong, Palestine, and Kenya.

This week, our editors are reporting on the intersection between literature and social movements. In Hong Kong, writers reflect on the June 4 protests at Tiananmen Square, in light of  the continual tensions between China and the island. In Palestine, a new podcast features writers orienting their own work within the \ body of Palestinian literature. And in Kenya, the country mourns the loss of revolutionary playwright Micere Mugo. 

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

Since the National Security Law in Hong Kong came into effect in June 2020, the annual candlelight vigil for commemorating the June Fourth Tiananmen Square protests have not been organized for four years; the event’s host, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, was also dissolved in September 2021. Additionally, the event’s traditional venue, the Victoria Park in Causeway Bay, was under renovation and not available to be booked this year.

Although public commemoration was forbidden, remembrance could still be possible through writing; Cha: An Asian Literary Journal called for short submissions of reflections written about June 4, 2023—which could be directly, indirectly, or even not related to the event. The project, “Just Another Day”, also welcomed written works accompanied with photos or artwork. Fifty-four submissions were published on Cha’s blog, presenting a wide range of reflections from local and overseas writers. Translator Lucas Klein contemplates on the protest culture in Hong Kong and what he witnessed outside of the Victoria Park in his post, while Hong Kong poet Jennifer Wong contributed a prose poem on the importance of memory. Asymptote’s assistant editor of fiction Michelle Suen interweaves childhood nostalgia and postcolonial politics in her reflection, and I also tell a brief story of my personal experience of June Fourth over the years. Varied as they are, the texts testify to the unstoppable impact of the historical event, in both people’s mind and reality.

Meanwhile, as issue 72 of local bilingual poetry magazine, Voice & Verse, was just published, the magazine is organizing a reading session in collaboration with Cha, a crossover that echoes the issue’s English section theme: “Crossings”. The reading session will take place on July 12, hosted by Tammy Ho and Matthew Cheng. Local and international contributors to both journals have been invited to read their works. READ MORE…

Language Is Not a Means to an End: An Interview with Hajar Hussaini

Engaging with texts from Afghanistan is only one pathway toward recognizing our imperialist hearts and colonizing minds. . .

Poet and translator Hajar Hussaini has made her mark powerfully with the debut collection, Disbound, which navigates the distance between her two countries—Afghanistan and the United States—with musical precision and great sensitivity to linguistic friction and spark. Additionally, in her work to bring the texts from her native Persian into English, she is continuing a vital poetic lineage of political urgency, independent voice, and pathways towards empathy—powerfully exemplified in her translation of S. Asef Hossaini’s poems in our Spring 2023 issue. In this following interview, Hussaini discusses her personal statement of a “poetics of abandonment”, the communication channel between nations, and writing from “within” as opposed to “about”.

Terezia Klasova (TK): In an essay you wrote for The Poetry Foundation, you suggest an approach to writing called a “poetics of abandonment.” Is it characteristic only of your writing of poetry, or do you consider it descriptive of most, if not all, of your writing? Do you think it can be applied to other types of writing or other authors, and if yes, how so?

Hajar Hussaini (HH): I intended the “poetics of abandonment” to be a statement on my poetry collection, Disbound, and I’ve described it as the culmination of political and personal losses that manifest in a radical offering of language, sincerity, and understanding—in the hope of creating a (perhaps false) sense of equilibrium between the poet and her reader. I used the Persian concept of Taroof as the central metaphor of this poetics; I understand Taroof, in its essence, as a refusal to become the subject of pity, and through writing about it I came to see it as the only way out of certain intrinsically hierarchical relationships.

As I explained in the essay, writing abandonment is contingent upon the circumstances in which a poet writes. Of course, Afghan poets of my generation share this context, and some may conceive of composing poetry similarly (e.g. in giving one’s all to the poem). But I don’t know if categorizing their works under “poetics of abandonment” is helpful because the poets I translate have a readership in Persian, whereas I write in English. Their readers come from similar sociocultural backgrounds and are familiar with that loss because they share a collective memory, whereas that memory does not have an equivalent currency for my readers because the average English reader of American poetry who would gravitate toward my work is presumably less familiar with my literary and political references. In this way, I have lost something that an Afghan poet writing in Persian has not, but I have also gained readers that they will only have in English if a translator mediates.

It’s important to mention something about being an Afghan who has lived in between Afghanistan and Iran. I write poetry in English, and Persian is my mother tongue; I know both languages very intimately. Like Hossaini and myself, many Afghans have lived in Iran—and those who have not, have read Iranian books, watched Iranian films, and listened to BBC Persian. So, contemporary Afghan literature in Persian is a blend of Kabuli and Iranian Persian.

I think of the poetic statement genre as simultaneously personal and public. The statement traces the conceits of one poet while inviting other poets to similarly conceive. Regarding the influence of writing “abandonment” over my translations, I think it has so far played a role of gravitating me toward sincere and honest texts. READ MORE…

Dipped One in Dusk: Mai Serhan on the Diasporic Memoir and Translating Lyrics and Letters

I had a lot I needed to clarify, plenty of stereotypes to debunk, a narrative that was screaming at me to rewrite. . .

Short story writer, poet, memoirist, and translator Mai Serhan was born to a Palestinian father and an Egyptian mother, and raised between the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. Going on to study between Cairo, New York, and Oxford and work in Cairo, Dubai, and China, this mapping of her personal cartography and her transnational lineage transcends the borders of postcolonial nation-states—and so does her forthcoming memoir, Return is a Thing of Amber, which touches among national histories, letters, and the personal essay.

In this interview, I asked Serhan about her book in the landscape of the larger Arab memoir from the diaspora; the languages and genders that thrive in the liminalities of modern Egyptian literature; state censorship in publishing and the consequent rise of the literary blog; and translating the songs of Egyptian composer Sayyed Darwish as well as the letters of Palestinian activist Ali Shaath. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): The language of contemporary Egyptian literature, de facto, is Modern Standard Arabic—but there are writers who write in colloquial Egyptian Arabic and aʽīdi Arabic, echoing the lived reality of Egyptians in a gamut of dialects. Can you tell us the lingual milieu you write from—and how your decision to write in English come in? 

Mai Serhan (MS): Let me first map my geo-genealogical gamut. I was born to a Palestinian father and Egyptian mother, and carried a Lebanese passport for most of my life, since it is where my father’s family moved after 1948, and Egyptian mothers did not have the right to pass their nationality down to their children until 2009. When the Lebanese Civil War broke in 1975, my paternal grandparents moved to Cyprus where they waited for the war to end for fourteen years. It is there that I spent all my summers and Christmases as a child and teenager. The rest of my Palestinian family would fly into Limassol from all corners of the world—Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, the UK, and the US—and I spent all my formative years exposed to these different registers around me. After university, I joined my father in China where he worked in the export business, and I got to help him until the final year of his life. We travelled far and wide there, meeting with many of his Arab clients. After his death, I moved to Lebanon briefly, then Dubai where I worked as an English copywriter, then to New York where I studied screenwriting at New York University, eventually ending up in Oxford for my Creative Writing degree. All these places have deeply informed my upbringing—which is quite an international one.

I write in English because I went to a private British school, then to American and British universities. It’s the language I have been formally trained in all my life, both academically and professionally. I know how to express myself very well in Arabic, but the written word is definitely more present to me in English; it’s the language that has housed my scholarly and creative pursuits the most. That said, I am able to slip between Arabic and English with total ease and I am the bicultural product of both the East and West—and pretty much everything in between as well.

If we were to speak of my memoir, Return is a Thing of Amber, specifically, I would say the choice to write in English was a political one first and foremost; I wanted to address the English-speaking world, to debunk its many myths about land and people, and to promote awareness, compassion and understanding when it comes to Palestine and Palestinians. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Procedure” by Brynja Hjálmsdóttir

The foulest thing / to do to another person / is to pull out / their teeth

This Translation Tuesday, the sparse lines of Brynja Hjálmsdóttir express quiet horror at that most queasy and invasive of procedures, tooth extraction. Please: lie very still in the man’s chair, submit to the gassing, and let him pry your tooth from its socket.

A woman opens
her mouth
for the dentist

Gas thickens and shrouds the room

The foulest thing
to do to another person
is to pull out
their teeth

Yet it’s how
many good men
make a living

Translated from the Icelandic by Rachel Britton READ MORE…

Extinction: Missing a Whole Other World

. . . storytelling does not attempt to recover what has been lost, but creates another world that dreams of conservation. . .

In the second essay of a series considering ecological literature and writings on animal life, as collected in our Spring 2023 special feature, Charlie Ng examines the pressing issue of species extinction through Wu Ming-yi’s poignant story of grief and resurrection, “Cloudland”. By connecting an intimate loss to the broader losses caused by the Anthropocene, Wu equalises human relationships with the less visible connections between individuals and their landscape, illustrating vividly the consequences of absence to consider how storytelling and an return to indigenous knowledge can activate empathy and our impetus to preserve.

Earth is no stranger to mass extinction; the most recent, the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, was caused by a major asteroid collision, wiping out seventy-six percent of living species. In consideration of these great cycles of birth and death, it seems that lifeforms are destined to come and go—so why should we care about extinction?

Perhaps because we’re causing it. Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History has drawn public attention to the fact that the titular extinction we are currently experiencing is, unlike the previous five, attributable to human activities. As such, the sixth mass extinction has come to be referred to as the Anthropocene extinction, the consequences of which have been well-documented across the globe. One such case is Taiwan, which, despite being just roughly the size of twice that of Hawaii, has a remarkably diverse range of flora and fauna due to its forested mountains and oceanic surrounding. However, many of its native animal species have become endangered or extinct due to adverse impacts of human development such as deforestation, pollution, habitat loss, and overhunting.

Cloudland,” Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-yi’s short story in the animal-themed feature of our Spring 2023 issue, has an extinct animal at its center: the clouded leopard. Despite occasional reported sightings of the animal, experts generally believe that the leopards have been gone for decades—and such is the case in “Cloudland”, where the animal is only present through its absence. The nonexistent leopard is simultaneously a denotation of the extinction’s sad reality and a literary symbol, acting as a mythical figure and a stand-in for the protagonist’s deceased wife. In tackling grief and loss, Wu tells the story of a man named Shutter as he searches for the already gone, trying to heal by reconnecting to nature and the indigenous wisdom of intimacy between people and their environment. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Sweden, Japan, and Israel!

In this week’s news, our editors report on the various matters occupying readers around the world. From the power of literary awards throughout Japan’s modern history, a survey on contemporary literary habits, and the growing Hebrew Book Fair—read on to find out more!

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for Japan

On June 16, the nominees for the 169th Akutagawa Prize and the Naoki Prize were announced to the public. Long recognised as the most important literary awards in Japan, the two accolades are given to emerging authors for a work of “pure literature” (junbungaku) and “popular literature” (taishū bengei) respectively, a fascinating distinction that has shifted tenuously throughout the awards’ long history, reflecting the evolving perspectives on what constitutes literary excellence, the separation between author and work, as well as how taste and zeitgeist can be reflected in the awardees. While the difference between what constitutes a literary text and a popular text can be seen as elitist, there have been, in the past, a great many other factors that have gone into the consideration of awardees—perhaps best exemplified by the awarding of the 1937 Naoki Prize (considered the less prestigious of the two) to Masuji Ibuse, whose profound literary output has insured him a spot in the modern Japanese canon. Throughout their time, the separate realms that the Akutagawa and Naoki Prizes were intended to occupy have opened up significant inquiries as to what, exactly, is valued in writing, consulting the multiple planes engaged by the literary arts: the aesthetic, the political, the dialogic, and the compassionate.

This year, the nominees for the Akutagawa Prize are Sao Ichikawa, Ameko Kodama, Masaya Chiba, Yusuke Norishiro, and Kaho Ishida. The subject matter of the narratives veer from the life of a professional welder; the changing intimacies and relations between four high school students over a single day; the introduction of the Internet in the 90s and its reverberations in a young man’s life; the potentials of anonymity as discovered by a teenage pop star; and the sexual life of a physically disabled woman.

The nominees for the Naoki Prize are Tow Ubukata, Ryosuke Kakine, Kazuaki Takano, Ryoe Tsukimura, and Nagai Sayako. Their nominated works include a historical novel on Ashikaga Takauji, the first shogun of the Ashikaga shogunate; a psychological story centred around the spectral presence at a railroad crossing; a crime novel set between Hong Kong and Japan; a tale of a young samurai who avenges his father; and a work of horror that paints a violent world under Tokyo’s polished metropolis.

What becomes evident in looking at these two groupings, even just by the superficial delineations of their bylines, is that this year, there is indeed a conspicuous demarcation between their preoccupations. Whereas the texts up for the Akutagawa can be all considered as realist storylines, recognisably using the prism of an individual’s life to refract truths and insights into the society in which they—and we—live, the nominees for the Naoki are being publicised along the engaging capacities of thrill and mystery. It is reflective of the same bilaterality that has always troubled the book as an object of consumption: that seeming incompatibility between the educational and the entertaining. Such is undoubtedly a judgement we all make independently when selecting what we’re interested in reading—or what we think we should be reading—and it’s somewhat unsettling to see this consideration fortified in the institutional fixedness of an award, which is by definition a statement of authority, a mandate of a higher power. In this way, the very essence of the Akutagawa and Naoki Prizes presents a conundrum that expounds on the act of reading, not only within Japanese literature and its apparatus, but in regards to the invisible schematic that books themselves exist on—all of these gossamer compartments and classifications that aim to instruct us not only on our own literary predilections, but what the books and their authors should be pursuing. It reveals both the impossibility and the necessity of judgment within the literary industry, about how unruly we know the whole process to be, yet how implicitly we trust it still. The freedom of the writing-act and the imagination of the reading-act has so many binds to negotiate, so many contracts to overcome. READ MORE…