Turkish Tragedy Writ Small: Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn

November 10, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Irmak Ertuna Howison

A single night becomes the microcosm of the Turkish experience of militarism, gender inequality, and sexuality.

Dawn by Sevgi Soysal, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freeley, Archipelago Books, 2022

Writing in the 1990s, the Turkish literary critic Berna Moran praised Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn for its historical urgency, but noted that it would not be a novel that survived the test of time—that its themes would lose their relevance. Perhaps Moran was optimistic in thinking that women’s struggles and militarism would be issues of a distant past in the years to come, or perhaps he undermined the strength of Soysal’s formal innovations. Whatever his reasons might be for painting the novel as a historical relic, his prediction did not come true; Dawn is now more relevant than ever, with Maureen Freely’s flawless English translation.

Soysal isn’t a stranger to English-speaking audiences. Her novels Tante Rosa and Noontime in Yenişehir have been translated into English, and she is a legendary figure in the history of feminism in Turkey. Along with writers like Leyla Erbil and Adalet Ağaoğlu, she defined the écriture feminine of Turkish literature long before it was coined and theorized by Western feminists. The eccentric, self-reflective, and often ironic tone of their protagonists reflected on what it means to be a woman—not only in a modernizing Turkey, but also in a leftist milieu dominated by men. While women’s struggle and sexual autonomy took the back seat in the leftist quest to liberate “masses,” these authors problematized the very notion of “masses.” Did the dream of a liberated people also include liberated women? The tension between how the outside world views liberated, intellectual women and how they view themselves is often the driving force of such novels, and hence their writing is often turned inwards, with sharp observations of situations and characters.

Dawn is a visceral and cinematic example of this kind of writing: where the embodied social experience of women takes central stage. It is also, as Moran notes, a novel about militarism and incarceration. Written in 1975, after Soysal’s own imprisonment following the 1971 coup, the novel situates the woman’s body in its confrontations with authority. The brilliance of the novel might be traced to the formal structure through which the author reflects on this confrontation; ever the innovator, Soysal sets her novel within the course of a single night, interspersing the narrative with flashbacks of different characters. The stories beget other stories of individuals becoming situated in their own relation to authority, only to return to the “present” moment where they are confined within the four walls of the town jail. A single night becomes the microcosm of the Turkish experience of militarism, gender inequality, and sexuality. READ MORE…

“Queen of the Czech Comic”: An Interview with Lucie Lomová

November 9, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Sherwood

To what extent are we shaped by the society we live in? How far are we willing to swim against the current?

In the first of two interviews on the thriving Czech comic art scene for the Asymptote blog, we introduce Lucie Lomová, artist, writer, and author of numerous comic books for both children and adults. Comic art and graphic novels are increasingly gaining recognition as a serious art and literary form; since the start of the millenium, the Czech Republic has seen a boom in the genre. In the second interview, two Czech literature scholars will paint a more comprehensive picture of the scene for Asymptote readers. Dubbed “the queen of the Czech comic,” Lomová is the best-known woman comic book author of the new, postcommunist generation, with three coveted Muriel Awards, including two—for original script and best original Czech comic—for her graphic novel, Divoši (Savages) to be published in English translation by Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Slovakia, Julia Sherwood, and Peter Sherwood. We are delighted to introduce Lucie Lomová to Asymptote’s readers through this interview, conducted by Julia over email.

JS: You are a graduate of the Theatre faculty at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU), but you switched to writing and drawing comics in the early 1990s. In those days, this kind of career change required quite a lot of courage—you said in an interview: “To choose comics as one’s profession was rather like trying to make a living by catching earthworms.” What motivated you to take the risk? 

LL: Did I really say that? Perhaps I wouldn’t use that comparison now, but it‘s true that in those days comic art was a totally marginal and underrated genre, with publication opportunities few and far between. But, it didn’t really require any special courage on my part. The year of the Velvet Revolution, 1989—a turning point in every respect for everyone—saw the publication of my first comic strip about Anča and Pepík, a couple of mice kids. My sister Ivana and I had worked on it together for three years, writing the story and doing the drawings. I had just graduated in dramaturgy and started working in a theatre in Šumperk, a small town about 200 kilometres east of Prague. When the Velvet Revolution came, I decided to return to Prague, although I didn’t really have a clear idea about what I was going to do. I wrote art reviews for newspapers, drew cartoons, and pondered what I should apply myself to in all this new freedom—just then, the children’s comic journal Čtyřlístek (The Four-Leaved Clover) invited me to write and draw more stories about Anča and Pepík for them, this time on my own, as my sister had moved on to other things. In the summer of 1990, I hitchhiked to Greece with my boyfriend. We were penniless, but overjoyed and excited about all the possibilities that had opened up before us. I remember that it was during the long rides in strangers’ cars that the ideas for the first three stories came to me, and once I was back home, I got drawing. For the following ten years, drawing comics for Čtyřlístek was my bread and butter.

Anca&PepikIlu02

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Translation Tuesday: Excerpts from Galápagos by Malva Flores

November 8, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by J Buentello Benavides

The sea is also a cemetery: that lukewarm hammock we dream of

This Translation Tuesday, sail to the Galápagos with the poetry of the Mexican poet, Malva Flores, winner of the Aguascalientes National Poetry Prize in 1999. In five elusive and potent fragments, Flores fires up the islands of imagination that make up the tropical locale’s “intoxication”. On this Archipelago, a fascinating intertextuality is weaved throughout as we encounter literary figures from Victor Hugo to Salvador Elizondo. These poems, rendered in J Buentello Benavides’s marvellous translation, shine through with an allusive power that can only be described as “an excess of sun”. 

Terraces 

You must always climb. That is banishment,
a slope, even if it’s in the desert.
María Zambrano 

Lose a foot, the floor, the rhythm of a jump; stay standing on the terrace. Yes. Like that. Alone on the terrace, among hanging clothes like bloodless bodies and all the old things from which you detach because you don’t want to see what happened, but you save them, you stick them in chests, in boxes, even in plastic bags. You save them. 

What happened became simple. You were wrong. You lost a foot, the floor, the rhythm of a jump and you came to a stop on this island suspended in the whitest blue of a brilliant afternoon: this eternal terrace. 

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Memory as Terrain, Museum, Dictionary: On Kirmen Uribe’s Bilbao—New York—Bilbao

November 7, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

The mythologization of one’s personal repertoire begs the question of significance: what makes something worth telling?

Bilbao—New York—Bilbao by Kirmen Uribe, translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin, Coffee House Press, 2022

“I realized that our dad’s whole family history was made up of round trips, flights, and returnings,” reflects author Kirmen Uribe. Bilbao–New York–Bilbao, a novel which won Uribe the 2009 National Prize for Literature in Spain, stems from the family history in question. Translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin, it is a sort of metanovel that straddles fact and fiction, laying its mechanisms bare. Within the brackets of his own travel—a flight from Bilbao to New York—the narrator’s mind rambles through various elements he would like to weave into his hypothetical novel: interviews, folklore, philosophical reflections, images, and anecdotes. He meditates on structure and process, always on the precipice of making decisions, giving the whole novel the impression that it’s just about to start.

Uribe is from the Basque fishing town of Ondarroa, where the men have historically spent large parts of the year on the water. Urbanization, industrialization, and the mechanization of the fishing industry have by now, however, made the traditional way of life nearly obsolete. As a member of the intermediary generation, the rhythm of this extended round-trip journey is still familiar to Uribe; movement is not a means to an end, but a comfortable and creative mode of being that always ends in a provisional homecoming.

Throughout, the reader senses that his search for the novel’s structure is a search for meaning. Uribe’s desire for the moments that make up his personal, family, and national history to coalesce into narrative is tangible, though he struggles to make them conform. Details, encounters, images—he feels their weight and wants a story to give them coherence. But they resist, and his resulting frustration is echoed by the reader. When a new anecdote begins, we wonder: where does this fit in? Why should I immerse myself in this moment? Is this character major or minor?

Memory has always been the terrain that grounds seemingly disparate moments, and Uribe’s memory is like the ocean maps that his ancestors drew for their fishing journeys; the features depicted are those most salient to the cartographer. Before the time of GPS, Uribe recalls his father drafting a map of his habitual fishing ground off the coast of an uninhabited Scottish island called Rockall. It was a personal map, jealously guarded, that showed the significant underwater features and the migratory patterns of the fish. Rockall echoes through the novel, looming large like a landmark, as it would have been for Uribe in his youth—the place where his father was when he wasn’t home. I looked it up on Google Maps, but as I zoomed out to see where it was in relation to the United Kingdom, it quickly disappeared. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

November 4, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Eva Wissting, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary developments from Palestine, Sweden, and Kenya!

This week, our editors report on the rebirth of theatre in Palestine, the best Swedish crime novels, and the Kenyan Readathon Challenge from September. From the Palestine National Theatre Festival to the Nairobi International Book Fair, read on to learn more!

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

In Palestine, there is a generation of people who don’t really know what a theatre is! This might sound like an exaggeration, but sadly, that’s reality—or at least, that’s how it looks on the surface. 

When the first Intifada broke out in late 1987, all theatres and cinemas were closed and most did not reopen or regain momentum until the late nineties. With simple arithmetic, we can see that the chances are low today of finding high-caliber theatre actors or actresses, let alone directors, aged in their thirties and forties. 

With that in mind, I must admit I wasn’t too enthusiastic to attend the third Palestine National Theatre Festival running in the last week of October. Little did I know! All that was needed to get fully hooked was one play. 

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Political Mythmaking: On Barricade by Utpal Dutt

November 3, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Matilde Ribeiro

...in his attempt at creating a political myth, Dutt does not lose sight of his characters’ humanity.

Barricade by Utpal Dutt, translated from the Bengali by Ananda Lal, Seagull Books, 2022

The Indian playwright Utpal Dutt wrote that myth is one of the most crucial forms of political storytelling because of its ability to transcend time and space, becoming relevant over and over again in new contexts. In Towards A Revolutionary Theatre, which is simultaneously a memoir of staging radical plays amidst the tense politics of his native Indian state of West Bengal in the 1960s and 1970s, and a manifesto about the necessity of leftist theatre, he cites William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as an example of a literary work that has “freed itself of the trappings of its own age and has become a gigantic myth,” continually reinventing itself for new political circumstances. This is seen in productions set in Benito Mussolini’s Italy, which form a critique of the tyranny, demagoguery, and mob rule that make such regimes possible. 

Dutt’s play Barricade, which has been translated from the Bengali original by Indian theatre critic Ananda Lal and published by Seagull Books, is an attempt at such mythmaking. Set in the period just before the Nazi Party’s rise to power in Germany, the text is ostensibly about the party’s attempts to scapegoat their Communist rivals for the murder of an elderly political leader, but Dutt suggests throughout that the actual subject is the turbulent political situation then prevailing in West Bengal; the play was written in 1972, when the Congress-ruled government in Bengal was actively suppressing all forms of direct dissent. 

However, as Lal said in a recent interview, “The fact that he set Barricade in 1933, when the Nazis rose to power in Germany, didn’t make his viewers think that it was remote from their lives. On the contrary, they connected with it viscerally, sympathised and cheered at the right moments.” This speaks to Barricade’s power as political myth, one which is increasingly relevant in the contemporary Indian context exactly fifty years after it was written, especially for its narration of how various democratic institutions such as elections, the judiciary, and the media are slowly co-opted and corrupted by the ruling party. 

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Fall 2022: Highlights from the Team

November 2, 2022  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Annilee Newton, Barbara Halla, Bella Creel, Caridad Svich, Heather Green, Ian Ross Singleton, Janet Phillips, Marina Dora Martino, Megan Sungyoon, and Sofija Popovska

Where to start with our glorious Fall 2022 issue? Here are some entry points, courtesy of our global team!

Emma Ramadan’s work as a translator has been so important to me and my literary journey—not least because of the attentiveness she lends to the writers she translates from Francophone North Africa, such as Ahmed Bouanani. I also really admire the way she speaks about her process with Claire Mullen in her interview, the passion and commitment and genuineness that shine through, for instance, in how she discusses her feelings at finally finding a copy of Molinard’s Panics. It reminded me a little of Alice Guthrie’s work with Malika Moustadraf’s Blood Feast, which was also out of print and circulated online as low quality scans.

I really love the slow, meditative writing of Dejan Atanacković’s absent narrator in Lusitania (tr. Rachael Daum). When it ranges with a kind of radical exteriority over the ephemera that remains of Teofilović, and the marginal annotations of Stojimirović that accompany his journals, it reads almost like the prose of Sebald—with the enigma of Teofilović as one such central, inaccessible figure around which the story endlessly circles, never losing sight of the larger political and social context.

Laksmi Pamuntjak’s “The Tale of Mukaburung” could easily have been written and translated to pander to a white gaze, and it’s really to the credit of both Pamuntjak and her translator Annie Tucker that there is a pervasive self-sufficiency to the story and its world, a refusal to explain itself, a matter-of-fact revelling in the ordinariness of its own magic and ritual. This seems especially commendable when a dominant affect in the story is puzzlement and defensiveness, in confrontation with foreigners whose presence and purpose are unknown, even to the reader, until much later in the story when it is revealed that many among them are political prisoners.

—Alex Tan, Senior Assistant Editor (Fiction)

Olavo Amaral’s “Steppe” (tr. Isobel Foxford) is exquisite in every way: the writing of the translation, the unusual subject matter, the relationship and emerging love between the two main characters and how it is described, the mood created by the atmosphere of snow and remoteness.

I have been following closely the horrors of Putin’s war in Ukraine and though still angry and frustrated by its continuation, I thought I was fairly hardened to the extent of Russian atrocities. But I broke down towards the end of Galina Itskovich’s War Diary (tr. Maria Bloshteyn), where the unspeakable rape and violence against children is put into words.

—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor

Kudos to Jonathan Chan for beautifully translating such ancient poems of Choe Chi-won, whose characteristic loneliness metaphorized in natural images is successfully rendered in translation.

I think one of the most important missions of Asymptote is to sustain languages under oppression, be that a national language that is close to extinction or the voice of a people amid a political process of erasure. Lauren Bo’s review of The Backstreets by Perhat Tursun undertakes this mission in remarkable earnest and rigor, by not only posing the biopolitical question of survival faced by the Uyghurs but also diligently analyzing the text via a close reading, and ultimately marrying the two to derive a conclusion that engages readers with the enduring challenge of humanity that surpasses the violence that is immediately palpable: “The Backstreets is an account of survival and a reminder that even the cruelest elements of humanity are fabricated out of absurdity and fear of the uncertain.”

The elusive language of Krikor Beledian’s “Unpeopled Language” (tr. Taline Voskeritchian and Christopher Millis) is delicate yet piercing, and while  the history of the Armenian genocide cannot be separated from the poetics of Beledian, its implementation of “the tool against the game of expression“ speaks to the broader context of the survival of a people and their language in and after the era of mass murder.  

—Megan Sungyoon, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

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Translation Tuesday: “Halo and Mic” by Sian Northey

November 1, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Susan Walton

“Where’s yer bloody ’alo? Or are you a plastic angel?”

Today’s Translation Tuesday features a cracking piece of Welsh fiction from Sian Northey where a bored angel descends to earth and finds himself having to play to a human crowd. In Susan Walton’s translation, nuances in speech and register are captured to delightful effect, allowing the voices of angels and men to truly soar. Let yourself be enthralled by this wholly original tale of shape-shifting and light-hearted rebellion. 

They didn’t twig what I was. A bit of a disappointment, really, because I’d gone for a classic look—full-length white nightie, two wings, and a light dusting of radiance, but not too blingy. You don’t want to be trashy, do you? That’s why I told that Jelia and his bloody trumpet to stay at home.

“You can’t go by yourself,” he’d said, after snatching up a dusty volume from the piles at his side, opening it and starting to read. “A host—that means a multitude.”

“Nope. Never. No way, José. Not a chance in hell, gwd boi.” Jelia had looked at me suspiciously, raising one eyebrow, waiting for an explanation. “Practice. They must be communicated with. It’ll need to be done again at some point, for sure,” I’d said. “And anyway, I’m bored,” I’d added. “But you’re staying at home. Bad enough that one of us is breaking the rules.”

“Go then,” Jelia had said, turning back to his trumpet. “Anyroad, the place has changed a lot, they say. They won’t be very impressed with you.”

And they weren’t. I chose a spot where there were quite a few people and appeared as it was getting dark. I stood there for a few minutes before anyone said anything. I rather regretted not letting Jelia come with me—him and his twenty trumpets. I’d expected the people to be surprised, even fearful, but the only thing that happened was that a couple of them passed me to reach a long counter where drinks were being served. I noticed that one of the girls went through me, rather than pushing against me; she turned to look at me. READ MORE…

Announcing Our October Book Club Title: Body Kintsugi by Senka Marić

October 31, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Katarina Gadze

Marić has honored the vibrant, silent energy that the body contains, bringing it to the page in its truest form.

This month, the Asymptote Book Club is proud to present Senka Marić’s Body Kintsugi, a moving and lyrical documentation through a woman’s interrogation of her own body as it undergoes disease, fracturing, and metamorphosis. Tracing the lineage of her physical fracturing through a fight with cancer, Marić reconstitutes the ideas of bodily fault lines and ruptures to conceive of a new wholeness, addressing the rifts and traumas of life to incorporate loss as an essential fact of survival. 

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 USD15 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.

Body Kintsugi by Senka Marić, translated from the Bosnian by Celia Hawkesworth, Peirene Press, 2022

We don’t like to think of ourselves as a collection of fragments, but it is in our nature, as humans, to be cleaved into pieces by time and death—into “corpses strewn over the pages of history,” with nothing but the remnants of stories to tell of our struggles and victories.

Out of this nature of fragmentation arises Body Kintsugi by Senka Marić, a daring, visceral meditation on the female body and its reckoning with loss, fear, and mortality. A “story about the body” and “its struggle to feel whole while reality shatters it into fragments,” the book centers on Marić’s experience with breast cancer, a vehicle by which she uses to explore self-perception, self-preservation, and relationships. Although Marić begins with her singular, personal history, her discursive space gives birth to an ambiguous “you”; the narrative quickly evolves into a discourse on the collective reality of shreds and patches, enticing a metaphysical reconciliation of impermanence—our own and of those closest to us.

The protagonist’s rupture begins with the loss of her husband to adultery, followed by a more visceral loss: that of one breast, then the other, and finally her hair and life force through the traumatic process of chemotherapy. Although the protagonist loses her former self piece by piece, she comes to reassemble it through surgery, treatment, and radical acceptance, focusing not on the disease itself, but what remains in lieu of it. This theme blossoms to take hold of the entire text—that of physical and spiritual kintsugi. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

October 28, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Alton Melvar M Dapanas, and Andriana Hamas

The latest in literary developments from the Philippines, the Hispanophone US, and Bulgaria!

This week, our editors report on the state of regional, multilingual literature from the Philippines, the Feria internacional del libro de Nueva York, and the Frankfurt Book Fair and its presentation of Bulgarian writing. Read on to find out more!

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines

Panel discussions on publishing and writing served as pre-workshop events to the forthcoming Cordillera Creative Writing Workshop (CCWW). Dubbed Hobwal, book talks were co-presented by indie presses Milflores Publishing, Baguio Writers Group, and multilingual children’s book publisher Aklat Alamid. Ryan Guinaran, Dumay Solinggay, Richard Kinnud, and Sherma Benosa, writers working in Ibaloy, Kankanaey, Ifugao, and Ilokano respectively, spotlighted the panel on writing in the mother tongue. Last year’s workshop instalment featured panelists like Genevieve L Asenjo, International Writing Programme alumna and De La Salle University-MFA Creative Writing program faculty, known for her writings in/translation from the Kinaray-a and Hiligaynon. Other discussions centred on pandemic writings, Baguio City’s literary cartography, and climate fiction.

The University of the Philippines-Baguio’s College of Arts & Communication, and Cordillera Studies Center grant CCWW fellowships to emerging poets, fictionists, and essayists writing in 15 northern Luzon languages—from Bontoc to Ivatan, Kalinga to Gaddang, and major languages Kapampangan, Ilokano, Pangasinan, Filipino, and English. In a country where national writing workshops, awards, prizes, and festivals put premium to English and Filipino, so-called regional endeavours like the CCWW have epitomised what it means to be multilingual, thus sincerely national. READ MORE…

Every Word Counts: Chip Rossetti on Translating Diaa Jubaili’s No Windmills in Basra

October 27, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

Flash fiction is more like someone grabbing you by the lapels and then sending you on your way.

For the month of September, our Book Club selection Diaa Jubaili’s No Windmills in Basra, a visionary collection of short fiction that works from Iraq’s expansive folktale tradition to create vivid, surprising portrayals of the country’s complex present. In precise, yet fantastic prose, Jubaili jumps rope with the tight limits of short story to range from humour to darkness, from imagination to reality, from violence to tenderness. In the following interview, Laurel Taylor speaks to the translator of No Windmills in Basra, Chip Rossetti, on formalism, intertextuality, and the use of symbolism in Jubaili’s work. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 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): You’ve mentioned that Jubaili’s work was the first flash fiction you had read in Arabic, and also that the genre is still very new in Arabic. To what extent are you thinking about formalism as you translate something that is a known genre in English but perhaps less so in Arabic?

Chip Rossetti (CR): It’s interesting, as the short story’s both a very old and a very new phenomenon in Arabic. The earliest form of prose narrative in Arabic is the khabar, which is a very short sort of text. One example of its earliest use is the hadith, accounts of things the Prophet Muhammad once said or did, and a khabar could be a paragraph long, or a few sentences. Khabar were always preceded by a citation of its oral sources, such as “I heard this account from someone, who heard it from somebody else who heard it from somebody else.” So there’s a chain of transmission, and that’s what scholars always point to as the very core, the oldest examples of prose texts in Arabic. Of course, that’s fourteen hundred years ago. That’s a far cry from modern short stories.

There are, as I think I mentioned in the introduction to No Windmills in Basra, some other practitioners of flash fiction in Arabic—notably the Syrian author Zakariya Tamer who ­is, I think, in his nineties now. He’s also done very short stories, but the contemporary boom in flash fiction started making its way into Arabic much more recently than in English. The challenge, as I understand it—and I’ve tried my hand at writing English-language flash fiction—is the intensity required of the writer. The challenge for a translator of flash fiction is to mirror that same intensity in the translation. Obviously, every word counted for Jubaili when he wrote it in the original, so I’ve tried to make sure I’m keeping that emotional punch in a way that inevitably brings you to each story’s end: an ending that comes sooner than you might expect, but is still somehow satisfying. READ MORE…

How a Polish Writer Created His Own Apocrypha: An Interview with Maciej Hen

October 26, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Wioletta Greg

Either we shall fight until we wipe each other out, or we shall talk and build mutual understanding.

Maciej Hen is a well-known writer in Poland, awarded the Gombrowicz Literary Prize and shortlisted for the prestigious Angelus Central European Literature Award. Perhaps because the twentieth century was cruel to his Jewish family—himself being persecuted as a child in 1968 when the Polish government launched a campaign against the Jews—the writer writes primarily historical novels, describing the world at the precipice of immense change. In his debut work, According to Her, readers observe the birth of Christianity; in the following Solfatara, he describes ten days of revolution in mid-seventeenth-century Naples; in the third, a lonely, older hero from Warsaw goes on an unplanned journey amidst a change in regime, and discovers that his ancestor was at the head of a bloody people’s rebellion. Hen told me that in a new work—one which is not yet published—Doctor Faustus will be written as a woman. It seems to me that if the books of Maciej Hen were to be widely translated into other languages, he would become a contender for the Nobel Prize; his writing is visionary. With According to Her to be published soon in English translation by Holland House Books, readers in the Anglophone will now be introduced to this beautifully written book about the alternative life of Jesus Christ, told from the perspective of his old Jewish mother. I was moved and delighted by it; someone finally gave the voice to the Virgin Mary. 

Wioletta Greg (WG): In According to Her, the story of a son is told by nearly a woman named Mariamne, who is almost a hundred years old, and uncannily resembles Mary of Galilea. A bold idea for an author who lives in a Catholic country.

Maciej Hen (MH): Not only do I live in a Catholic country, but worse still, I’m a Jew living in a Catholic country. And, to top it all, I’m a Jewish atheist. Actually, I grew up separated from the basics of Judaism, because my parents belonged to the first generation of Jews who felt that religion was not so important for their children.

WG: I’m curious why you published your book under the pen name Maciej Nawariak. Were you afraid of being attacked for re-describing the life of Jesus from a Jewish perspective? 

MH: I took the pen name from pure vanity. My father is a writer who had earned himself a reputation long before I came up with my debut book, and I was so sure my publication would be a success, that, in order to fully enjoy it, I would have to disqualify in advance any suggestions people might put forward about my father’s name helping me enter the literary world.

WG: Your parents survived the Holocaust as refugees in Central Asia, and they met in Uzbekistan.

MH: Yes, they met in Samarkand in 1943. My mother was twenty-one at the time, and my father just under twenty. He was from Warsaw, and she was from a village outside Lwów. After the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union, they both evacuated eastwards and finally settled for a while in Samarkand, the former capital of Tamerlane. After the war, they returned to Warsaw. Out of their families—both once very large, as per custom—only five people survived, including themselves. My father changed his surname from Cukier to Hen, in time becoming a highly regarded writer in Poland, and my mother took care of the household, raising my sister and me—for a few years she was also a Russian language teacher. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpts from So to Speak by Ricardo Cázares

October 25, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Joe Imwalle

I look to the bone the tender thigh almost foam

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you excerpts from the award-winning Mexican poet Ricardo Cázares’s 75-page serial poem So to Speak. With a cinematic eye that hones in on the materiality of everyday experience, Cázares’s speaker leaps from image to image with dazzling grace and wonder. And, in replicating this sensation of poetic propulsion, hear from translator Joe Imwalle the process of working with a poet whose work is always already imbricated in the net of translation.

“In addition to his poetry, Cázares has translated Charles Olson and Robert Creeley into Spanish. These poets are clearly an influence on Cázares’ attention to breath and syllable. Olson’s statement in “Projective Verse” that “the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge” was ringing in my head when I first began this project. Surely, Cázares has carried this statement around too. Reading his poems aloud has a palpable energy with a forward momentum. The poems are open ended and each flows into the next. They enact the poetic moment that boils up from a quotidian event leaving the speaker on the verge of understanding something transcendent.

Translating these poems presented plenty of enjoyable challenges. So often the associative leaps being made are sound-based, pesa slips into pozo. Cázares also plays with ambiguity. I often had to choose one meaning over another when both were intended to resonate.”

—Joe Imwalle

I look at my hands

at the fingers of my hands
        at the yolks cooling down on my skin
and falling to the plate

____________I see the trace
                                        see the sun in a burner
                                        where someone’s boiling a stock

I look at the bread with compassion

                                               once
____________________on that same table
____________we studied the nervous system
____________of a frog

I look at the flames

                            boiling flowers
                                    dry leaves

                in the golden liquid steeps a tea
                for insomnia 

I look at the ceiling
                        a DC-10 lands
                        on the table’s edge

                   I look to the bone the tender thigh almost foam
                  there’s fine weather a breeze
                  scent of diesel and apples 

I see my hands
____________I scan the radar verify the instruments
________and fine tune their touch READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2022

October 24, 2022  |  in News  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Writing life as it is lived—that is, writing life that is half-lived.

In our Fall 2022 issue, we are presenting work ranging across thirty-two countries and nineteen languages, moving and shifting the demarcations of nation and language with the fluidity and imaginative capacities of language. Here, blog editor Xiao Yue Shan presents a roadmap through some of the most moving, exciting content encased within this latest release, including a text from our feature on Armenian literature, an essay on the “job” of writing from Catalan writer Montserrat Roig, and a Indonesian fiction of human distances—colonial, geographical, and carnal.

In every country there is a river, along the banks of every river there are people, and within the minds of each person there persists a single heartbeat of a mind that begins, as they situate themselves along the river, to pulse with that river’s inimitable current, to infiltrate that moment of flow with a different rhythm, that which they have carried with them and now relieve into the waters, and the water does what it does—it merges. In Aram Pachyan’s fluid, lyrical excerpt from P/F, translated sensitively from the Armenian by Nazareth Seferian, this instance of communion is fortified with the author’s masterful command of oratory and soliloquial language, iterating a return to faith “. . . like the prodigal son, sitting on your rib seeing my salvation in your murky waters, my peace in your obscurity, the lymph of life still gurgling in your grime.” The excerpt demonstrates not only the immense living intelligence of inhuman bodies, but also their pivotal and profound point of contact with human emotion—grief, loneliness, resolution, and hope. P/F is described as a text that swims in memory, and even in this brief extract we are afforded a wide-ranging glimpse at memory’s infinitely mutable potentials, of the seeds of experience which exponentiate into monuments of time, equally deceptive as it is formative, equally polluted as it is seeking of purity, and ever-changing even as it attempts to convince us of its sameness. In long, ranging lines melding concrete situation with poetic abstractions, Pachyan begins to tells us of this river:

This is not the Euphrates, nor the Tigris; not the Seine, the Thames, the Danube, nor the Po. The Getar has no bloodline in common with the daughter of the ocean, the Styx that flows in the land of Hades. The gods have not taken any oaths on its waters. There are no emphatic proverbs about it, no books or odes. It is left out of all possible discussions, it is off the planet’s axis.

And still it flows, merging what is cast in with what is hidden in its depths, and it is this movement that reminds us of the eternal sanctuary, in cities and villages alike, where one can stand and watch one thing become another, to watch time become memory and memory urge back to feed once again into time, and find in this merging some solace. READ MORE…