Translation Tuesday: “Colourful Fruit Trees” by Yao Yao

October 4, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Samuel Liangxing Luo

Those memories bathed in the bright sunlight reappear on quiet days from time to time.

Just in time for fall in the northern hemisphere, we have a special treat for nature lovers this Translation Tuesday: Yao Yao’s “Colourful Fruit Trees“ is in essence a paean to a wonder of nature and the conduit through which the warmth of the sun reaches into the sometime troubled lives of its myriad characters—some friends of the author in real life, others fictional. This is a living, breathing tapestry that is more than the sum of its parts. Thanks to translator Samuel Liangxing Luo, this marvel of a creative nonfiction that uses the list so well is now accessible to English readers. 

University teacher Frances Mayes, who had left San Francisco for a vacation in Tuscany, discovered a fascinating old house named “Yearning For The Sun.” There were hazel trees in front of the steps, fig trees by the well, and, on the surrounding hillside, 20 plum trees, 117 olive trees, along with countless other apricot, apple, and pear trees. These fruit trees were strikingly colourful and the scenery magnificent. Enchanted, she dug deep into her savings and put everything on the line to buy the house. Flooded with sunshine, her days there were brilliant and happy.

Cao Jie, who came to the city of Fuzhou to teach animation, connected frame-by-frame the images of the sky above the university city and the trees along the Minjiang River to create a Fuzhou version of Laputa: Castle in the Sky. The farm-style lychee and longan trees planted in the past were kept at the new campus. Every time she proctored for final examinations and looked out of the windows, she would see fresh lychee fruits shining in red on the branches, where two or three boys would be climbing and passing the fruits on to beautiful girls.

Cao Jie climbed all kinds of trees in her hometown of Chuandong. As a child, she fell from a red pomelo tree and pierced her eyelid on coal debris on the ground. There was a big yellow fig tree near the dormitory building at her middle school campus. Sometimes, she climbed up the tree and stayed alone quietly or had a nap there. Other times, she and three or four other classmates would sit and chat on branches more than ten metres high, just like the aliens living in the Hometree in Avatar. Cao Jie painted the best gouache for many trees. She was familiar with painting the details of the yellow fig tree, the winding branches, the tender yellow bud tips, and the little red fleshy fruits. There was also a big yellow fig tree at the university campus. Disguised by the fig tree, students turned over the wall, merged into the night, and played outside. READ MORE…

Shifting Temporalities: An Interview with Bryan Flavin

October 3, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

We should consider an absence not as something that inhibits access but rather as an opportunity to actively discover. . .

Featured in the Summer 2022 issue, “The Ayah of the Throne,” by Habib Tengour, is a lyrical story that explores the French colonial power in Algeria toward the beginning of the Algerian War of Independence. The story centers around how colonial forces shaped the narrator’s experience of education, language, religion, and even how and when one can tell stories. With this vibrant and original account of his childhood, Tengour reclaims the power of storytelling and relays a life-altering moment with humor and compassion.

In his English translation, Bryan Flavin deftly captures Tengour’s voice and introduces Anglophone speakers to an important piece of writing from one of the foremost voices in contemporary Francophone Maghrebi literature. I had the opportunity to speak with Flavin over email about his experience translating “The Ayah of the Throne.” In the following interview, we discuss the intricacies of working with multilingualism, the importance of not explicating in translation, and the complex and interwoven histories of French and Arabic.

Rose Bialer (RB): I always like asking translators how they first began translating. I am even more curious in your case since you work in both French and Arabic.

Bryan Flavin (BF): I’ve always loved the precision and structure in linguistics and language studies, as well as the exploration and plurality of language in literature and creating writing. During my undergraduate education, I studied linguistics and French literature with a specialization in Arabic language and culture and ended up discovering literary translation as a sort of intersection for all my interests. I was lucky enough to take classes on French translation and global literacy toward the end of my studies and started with translating student writing with an undergraduate translation magazine I helped co-found. It was something I continued practicing on my own until deciding to pursue it in my graduate studies.

RB: You mention in your Translator’s Note that you had the chance to work with Habib Tengour during his Fall 2021 residency with the International Writing Program. This program sounds fascinating, and I would love to hear more about your experience, especially collaborating with Tengour in person.

BF: My translation program had the opportunity to pair with one of the residents to produce a translation of their work during workshop sessions devoted to each piece. Both the original writer and translator were present and active contributors during each workshop, and the balance (and sometimes friction, but in a generative way) between the author’s original intention and the translator’s means to produce something independent in the English was uniquely pronounced due to the workshop’s collaborative nature, which made for a great learning experience.

READ MORE…

Our Crisis in Democracy: A View from Japan

October 1, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Fuminori Nakamura

It’s frightening to think of history repeating itself.

An ultranationalist religious cult infiltrating the highest levels of the Japanese state—the story of the Unification Church is, as Fuminori Nakamura writes, “straight out of a manga”. Yet the shooting of Shinzo Abe in July, by a man who lost his family to the cult-like practices of the Unification Church, has shone a light on the worrying ease with which fringe religion can infiltrate mainstream politics—and not only in Japan, Nakamura argues, but in embattled democracies across the world. With Abe’s state funeral held earlier this week, his essay, the first in a new series of translated opinion pieces we are hosting in our Saturday column, sounds the alarm at an important time.

The relationship between politics and religion in Japan is deeply rooted.  When considering the current iteration of the Unification Church’s connections with Japanese politics, it brings to mind the era in the 1930s when Japan was progressively listing toward war with the United States.  Before getting into that, however, first allow for a brief review of the attack on Japan’s former prime minister, Shinzo Abe.

On July 8, 2022, Mr. Abe was shot and killed while giving an endorsement speech ahead of the national election. The suspect who fired the gun is a forty-one-year-old man, Tetsuya Yamagami. His family was destroyed by cumulative donations his mother had made as a member of the Unification Church. Allegedly his intention had been to target the current leader of the church, Hak Ja Han Moon, the widow of the founder of the Unification movement, but he targeted Mr. Abe instead because he was, to use Yamagami’s own words, “the most influential person who was sympathetic to the Unification Church.” (Author’s note:  Though in Japan it is still referred to as “the former Unification Church,” the church changed its name to the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, but to avoid confusion I will use its previous designation.)

Since the incident, the depth of the Unification Church’s relationship with, in particular, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is increasingly clear. In Japan, the Unification Church is considered a cult: among their practices, the church tells followers that their ancestors are suffering in the next world and compel them to buy exorbitantly priced jars called “tsubo” (for several million yen) and scriptures called “seihon” (for ¥30,000,000, which is about 50,000 times the cost of a paperback edition of one of my novels in Japan). They also conduct mass weddings where members marry someone chosen for them by the church. Ostensibly, they advocate rather strongly for conservative and right-wing causes. In their desire to rewrite Japan’s pacifist constitution that includes a renunciation of war in order to empower the military as well as their refusal to acknowledge the rights of LGBTQ people, the church bears a strong affinity with the LDP. This has enabled a cult to infiltrate the center of Japan’s politics. Reports about the church’s ties with high-ranking officials within Japan’s National Police Agency as well as the chairman of the Public Safety Commission depict a world straight out of a manga. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

September 30, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Katarina Gadze, and Suhasini Patni

Literary dispatches from Croatia, Hong Kong, and India!

This week, our editors on the ground report on literary festivals, award winners, and exhibitions inspired by pivotal writings. From awardees of the Lu Xun Literature Prize to wide-ranging international programs, find out the latest news from the world of global letters below.

Katarina Gadze, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Croatia

The beginning of literary September in Croatia marked the tenth World Literature Festival, which ran from September 4 to 9 in Zagreb. The festival, a tradition for world literature aficionados throughout the region, has grown into an immersive experience for readers to see the best new works of world literature, meet novelists themselves, and listen to discussions regarding their works. This year, the festival brought forth a star-studded line-up of extraordinary international guests and talented authors—such as British writer Bernardine Evaristo, author of one of the most influential books of the decade, Girl, Woman, Other. 2020 Costa Book of the Year winner, Monique Roffey, also joined to share insight into their latest literary masterpiece, The Mermaid of Black Conch. On the local side of things, a talk on the heartbreaking novel/poem Djeca (Children) with its author, the Serbian writer Milena Marković, is also worth mentioning. Other foreign writers who took part in the festival’s fruitful discussions include Israeli writer Dror Mishani, Austrian novelist Karl-Markus Gauss, and German author Katharina Volckmer.

In Rijeka, the Croatian harbour city’s own literary festival, vRIsak, is also back for its fifteenth edition, in which both foreign and local literary voices flocked to the city’s new cultural center, the “Benčić” art district, to discuss contemporary writing and art. This year’s edition promised to be the most ambitious yet, with a lively program celebrating stories of emigrants, contemporary European poetry, and the city Mostar’s literary boom. On the topic of the latter, Mostar author Senka Marić, whose Kintsugi tijela (Body Kintsugi) will soon be published in English translation, spoke about the creative ambitions behind her latest novel Gravitacije (Gravitations). Another theme of this year’s festival was climate fiction, an ode to the healing potential of words in context to the rapid environmental changes of our time.

Last but not least, on September 22, Croatian Writers’ Association (Društvo hrvatskih književnika) organised a panel discussion on a hot topic in today’s literary scene, entitled “Literary Translation Today: Art or Transmission from Language to Language?” On the panel, numerous experts discussed what literary translators are up against in today’s competitive market, as well as the general lack of respect for such a demanding artistic process. READ MORE…

Announcing Our September Book Club Title: No Windmills in Basra by Diaa Jubaili

September 29, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

[Jubaili] departs from reality and time to scratch at those seemingly eternal themes so often associated with fairy tales.

In this fantastic, sobering, and imagistic collection, Diaa Jubaili uses the folktale traditions of Iraq to reflect newly on war, country, and national history. Unlike traditional legends, where magic lives in the world as phenomenon and circumstance, the characters of these stories defy their grave realities with feats of imagination, in bold and moving demonstrations of how the mind can transcend matter. In humanizing the struggles of Iraq across its conflicts, Jubaili addresses the horrors of war with philosophical wit and metaphysical possibility.

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.

No Windmills in Basra by Diaa Jubaili, translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti, Deep Vellum, 2022

On the surface, fairy tales should theoretically be easy to translate (if there is a world in which translation is easy); they’re usually simplistically narrated, lexically limited, and short. But of course, texts that seem simple on the surface can often turn out to be immensely difficult, and in the case of fairy tales, perplexing questions arise almost immediately, because so much of what they impart depends on a reader’s pre-existing cultural knowledge. Can any of us remember a time when we didn’t know the story of Little Red Riding Hood?

The challenges of translation are made even more evident when the fairy tales are intended for adults, as is the case with Diaa Jubaili’s stories in No Windmills in Basra, translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti. In this collection of tales—some less than a page long, some ranging over several pages—Jubaili engages slantwise with the history of Iraq and Basra over the past seventy years. Rather than writing a collection of realist fiction, the author departs from reality and time to scratch at those seemingly eternal themes so often associated with fairy tales.

In the opening story of the collection, “Flying,” for example, a security guard named Mubarak thinks often of launching airborne as he guards the chickens at a poultry plant south of Basra.

. . . he flew twice—not on a plane, or by means of a hot air balloon or parachute, and not even on a giant demon’s wings or a magic carpet as happened so often in the tales from the Thousand and One Nights. Nor was he an admirer of the medieval scientist-inventor Ibn Firnas, who dreamed of flapping wings and soaring heights, since Mubarak knew that with that sort of thing, he would eventually end up a pile of broken bones on the side of the road.

There is no magic in this story—at least not the kind we associate with fairy tales—but that does not stop Mubarak from experiencing a journey from the everyday to the cosmic. In his first experience with flight, As an infantry soldier whose company is targeted by bombing, he is tossed into the air after a detonation, being sent briefly into a world where a man airborne is not shorthand for a fighter pilot honing in for the kill, but instead a miracle that allows for deferred violence and peace accords. Of course, Mubarak’s flight comes at the expense of his company, all of whom die in the explosion. Fairy tales are fantastic things, but they’re also dangerous things, and miracles usually have exacting prices. In fact, in this story, American munitions are the only means by which Mubarak can again take flight. The djinns and magicians of the Thousand and One Nights have been replaced by the darker realities of modern warfare. READ MORE…

One Thing After Another: On A Postcard for Annie by Ida Jessen

September 28, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Rachael Pennington

A Postcard for Annie is a collection of stories in which hope is masked in grief, regret, and yearning.

A Postcard for Annie by Ida Jessen, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken, Archipelago Books, 2022

Where did it come from, this hope of hers? From him. Her hope came from him. Without him she was shapeless. She would never be able to explain it to anyone, not even to herself.

A Postcard for Annie, Ida Jessen’s collection of short stories, opens with a woman named Tove, writing a note to her husband after an argument about herring; “I am not your fucking housewife,” she scribbles. Through the following six tales, Jessen tracks the inner lives of women, whose day-to-day lives in Denmark are as mundane and normal as they are dramatic and devastating. These stories explore what binds these women to the people in their lives against a backdrop as often comforting as it is bitterly harsh, putting into words what the characters themselves cannot.

From the outset of Tove’s anger, we sense that this is about much more than the raw fish fillets she had bought for dinner, and as she embarks on an “excursion” to put distance between her and her husband’s constant derision and judgment—which has rippled through her since the day they met—we become aware of the essential role he plays in her sense of self. Later, when a stranger spontaneously decides to sit at the table where she is dining alone, we quickly realise the approval and presence of this man are more important to Tove than her own discomfort. Without a member of the opposite sex there to notice her, Tove is “shapeless.”

As such, despite a loveless, bitter marriage in which only hostile words are exchanged, Tove never loses sight of her husband, and similar strictures and relationships weave a common thread through these stories. Tine, who feels “doomed at fifty to be a fire that can’t be put out,” doesn’t give up on trying to get her husband to go to bed with her. Ruth finds herself at the hospital visiting her estranged son, who even as a baby would “would squirm from her embrace,” and Lisbet, caught in an enmeshed mother and son relationship that is tense and taut after twenty years of push and pull, cannot—or will not—break free from Malthe:

He turns and strides away, exuding as ever his own will; he cannot tame it, it surges towards her, away from her. He is surrounded by a light so fierce that even a bitterly cold day in a dismal parking lot feels like unrequited love.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Acharya Chatursen’s Bride of the City

September 27, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Pratibha Vinod Kumar and A.K. Kulshreshth

Sir Mahanaman, today, your daughter attains eighteen years of age. The Republic of Vaishali has chosen her as its foremost beauty.

“I gladly declare that the eighty-four books and ten thousand pages of my literary output over the last forty years of my life are worthless and I humbly gift this book to my readers as my first work.”

—Acharya Chatursen (1891-1960), in his preface to Vaishali Ki Nagarvadhu

In the ancient republic of Vaishali, a childless couple discover an abandoned infant girl in a mango orchard. They name her Ambapali, one who sprouted from a mango. When she turns eighteen, Ambapali is forced to become a courtesan–the Bride of the City–under Vaishali’s laws, which dictate that a woman as beautiful as her cannot be only one man’s wife. Ambapali bows before the iron law of her society, but does not allow herself to be crushed. She sets terms that make her residence, the Palace of Seven Worlds, a centre of power. While the richest and the most powerful men grovel before her, Ambapali bides her time even as she burns with revenge . . .

First published in Hindi in 1948-49, Vaishali Ki Nagarvadhu (literally, “Bride of the City of Vaishali”) took Acharya Chatursen ten years of deep research. This unrivalled epic of the human condition boasts of a vast canvas of characters that includes the Buddha and Mahavir among “a Bollywood-like panoply of opulent castles, warrior princes, courtesans, dancers, wily courtiers, [and] sorcerers.” Hitherto untranslated, this icon of world literature is now available in a two–volume series out from Cernunnos Books. After reading the sponsored excerpt below, check out Historical Novel Society’s review here. 

The Cursed Law

The city seethed. At the crack of dawn, men had started thronging towards the assembly. Royal Avenue was choked with men on foot, in palanquins, on horseback, and in chariots. The big merchants, tradesmen, courtiers—they were all in the crowd. The outer corridors of the assembly were jammed with men jostling each other. The imposing marble steps were occupied by men sitting on them. A little further away, in the open field, some men stayed in their chariots as they surveyed the large building. Some of them raised their glinting spears and shouted out, creating a cacophony.

The members of the assembly were dismounting where they could and gravely making their way through the unruly mob. A platoon of guards cleared the way for them, and gatekeepers announced their entry into the hall.

The assembly was built mostly of gleaming white marble from the Matsya Kingdom. Inside, its main conference hall had a black stone floor and a hundred and eight black stone pillars that supported the ceiling. Nine hundred and ninety-nine ivory floor pods were neatly arrayed all around the hall. On these, the members of the assembly—representatives of the clans—sat quietly in their demarcated areas. In the centre of the chamber was a raised jade-coloured and intricately carved altar housing two silver pods and covered with a silver canopy. The canopy was ornate with paintings and festooned with flags. Its pillars and the two floor pods had gold inlay work. The pods belonged to the chief minister, Sunand and to the supreme commander, Suman. These two luminaries had not yet reached the assembly.

The altar had steps on three sides, and these steps seated the aged clerks who recorded the minutes of the assembly meetings. Their assistants stood ready with rolls of black and red notebooks in open baskets. Some middle-aged officials directed the preparations in their usual efficient and unobtrusive ways. The rest of the staff scurried to follow their commands.

The chief minister and the supreme commander took their seats without fanfare. The rising tumult of the assembly was drowned out by a blast of the trumpet signalling that the proceedings had started.

The crowd outside became more restive. As they chanted and paced, their faces turned red, and their eyes glowed with anger. The courtyard was packed with the sons of courtiers and merchants. The former brandished their swords and spears, shouting phrases that were lost to all but those next to them. The latter, trained to smile and create bonhomie, looked ready to pick fights. With these crowds thronging the assembly building, it was clear that all the markets and guilds in the city and up-country were closed. Inside, the two chiefs and the members of the parliamentary council were in a pensive mood. They fidgeted as if an unwanted event was about to be thrust on them. The guards were deployed in full strength, their faces taut and foreheads furrowed.

A sudden hush descended on the vast gathering, broken only by the deep, loud creaking of a chariot’s wheels, accompanied by the tinkling of what seemed to be a thousand of its bells. The men in the restless crowd stopped pacing, as if bound by an inviolable command. All eyes were trained on a chariot that advanced at a stately pace towards the courtyard. The chariot was covered with a white cloth, and a white flag fluttered on its golden top. It traversed the courtyard and stopped in front of the steps that led up to the assembly. The quiet throng looked on as an imposing man stepped out of the chariot. His clothes were a spotless white, and so was his flowing beard. A long sword nestled in a sheath at his waist. The sheath and the handle of the sword glittered with inlaid gems. The old man wore a white turban that was topped by a solitaire. A young man joined him, and the old man climbed the steps slowly, but without faltering, leaning on the young one’s shoulder. The men made way for him. The silence remained unbroken as he took the first few steps. READ MORE…

Reframing Queerness: On Kim Hyun’s Glory Hole

September 26, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

These songs celebrate both queer rights and queer wrongs, the beauty and the madness, the mess that undergirds everything.

Glory Hole by Kim Hyun, translated from the Korean by Suhyun J. Ahn and Archana Madhavan, Seagull Books, June 2022.

Twentieth-century queer American visual artist Keith Haring was renowned for his pop art that emerged, according to critic Barry Blinderman, from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s. His work predominantly engaged in queer activism, urging for safe sex practices and AIDS awareness. The poet Kim Hyun cites his 1980 drawing, Glory Hole—also the title of his own collection—in the notes to the poem, “Old Baby Homo.” The drawing shows a standing man with his head out of the frame. Two vertical lines represent the wall the man faces and where the eponymous glory hole is located. His penis is shown on the other side, burnished and luminous like the sun, surrounded by disembodied hands seeking it out. In an academic paper titled “Faceless sex: glory holes and sexual assemblages,” the researchers—Dave Holmes, Patrick O’Byrne, and Stuart J. Murray—posit: “[T]he glory hole affords an intense, temporary escape from the demands of subjectivity . . . The hole itself becomes the site of sexual energy and exchange.” Glory holes, by facilitating anonymous sexual encounters, enable a new politics of desire.

Arriving during the full-blown AIDS crisis in the US of the 80s, the drawing reframes queerness outside of the pathology of promiscuity, depravity, and disease. The glory hole, instead of being a vector for proliferation of the virus, is transformed into a fecund well of possibility. The paper further claims: “[D]ue to the fragmentation—the disorganization—of the body, the glory hole allows the free play of desire and fantasy for both users. Users may feel liberated not only from the social roles and expectations dictated by a predominantly heterosexual world, but also from the codes of the gay world . . .” Kim Hyun’s collection is not interested in being contained within any sort of category. From futuristic dystopias and planet hopping to alternate histories and forged references, from science fiction to pornography and literature to art, between prose and poetry, Glory Hole is unrepentantly queer in every way. The poems desist simplistic readings and are expansive in meaning, using language both in itself and as a vehicle to advance images that transform incoherence into the sublime.

READ MORE…

Submit to our Winter 2023 Korean Literature Feature

September 24, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Korean translators: submit fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and stand to be a part of our twelfth anniversary issue!

For our Winter 2023 issue—also our special twelfth anniversary edition—we have partnered with LTI Korea to host a showcase of the best Korean fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry. For the prolific translators among you, we welcome multiple submissions across genres; due to limited resources, however, we will be waiving our submission fee for the first submission only. Translators whose work is published in this showcase will be paid USD90 per article. General guidelines (including word count) below apply. Send all work via Submittable. Deadline: Nov 15.

Not a Korean translator? We remain open to submissions in our regular categories throughout the year. We guarantee outcomes within a month. Feedback is available upon request at an additional cost.

Guidelines on how to submit can be found here.

SUBMIT YOUR BEST WORK TODAY

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

September 23, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Carol Khoury

Literary dispatches from the Philippines, Bulgaria, and Palestine!

This week, our editors on the ground report on the loss of a pivotal figure in the indigenous literature of the Philippines, the Palestinian Book Fair held amidst the politics of occupation, and the Autumn Salon of the Arts in Plovdiv. Read on to find out more.

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

The Philippine literary community mourns the passing of Higaonon Manobo novelist, poet, and translator Telesforo S ‘T.S.’ Sungkit, Jr. Sir Jun, as we fondly call him, also wrote as Anijun Mudan Udan, and his work represented the voice of the Higaonon, one of the eighteen ethnolinguistic indigenous peoples groups collectively known as Lumad, original inhabitants of the southern Philippine supraregional island Mindanao.

Writing in and translating from four languages, Higaonon (sometimes referred to as Binukid), Cebuano Binisayâ, (Tagalog-based) Filipino, and English, Sir Jun received fellowships from the 2005 IYAS National Writers Workshop (De La Salle University—Bienvenido N Santos Creative Writing Centre) and the 12th Iligan National Writers Workshop (Mindanao State University-IIT and Mindanao Creative Writers Group). His first novel, Batbat hi Udan [Story of Udan], came out in 2009 and was considered as the first epic novel from Bukidnon, his home province. In 2007, he won the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) Writers Prize for another novel Mga Gapnod sa Kamad-an [Driftwood on Dry Land] first serialised in Bisaya Magasin and later, self-translated into the English under the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House in 2013. Just this year, a translation of this novel from the Binisayâ into the Filipino secured the Rolando Tinio Translators Prize for the novel category.

Sir Jun’s third novel Ang Agalon sa mga Balod [The Lord of the Waves] bagged another NCCA Writers Prize in 2013, and is forthcoming from the University of the Philippines Press as Panginoon ng mga Alon—self-translated into the Filipino. (An excerpt is available from Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature.) In 2014, another novel Mga Tigmo sa Balagbatbat [Balagbatbat’s Riddles] received a National Book Development Board grant. In most of his short stories and novels, the structure veers away from the generic Western plot, being instead influenced by the nanangen oral storytelling ingrained to the Higaonon people and other Lumad. Other works of his can be read in Kabisdak: Cebuano Literary Lighthouse and BukidnonNews.net, where he once served as literary editor. (You can read his well-anthologised poem “I, Higaonon” from Australia-based Cordite Poetry Review here.) READ MORE…

In Good Company: Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall on Translating The Left Parenthesis

September 22, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Rachel Farmer

[B]eing able to share genius in whatever way or form is the most beautiful thing there is.

Muriel Villaneuva’s The Left Parenthesis takes place by the sea, a fitting setting for a story that weaves in-between motherhood and mourning, loss and reinvention, the mind and the body. In the stunning autofictional tale of a recently widowed mother attempting to piece together her shifting roles in the world, Villaneuva merges the surreal and the intimately physical to chart the mystifying journey one takes back to get to oneself. In the following interview, Rachel Farmer talks to the co-translators of The Left Parenthesis, Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall, about the book’s feminism, Catalan specificity, and its “uncomplicated” representation of motherhood.

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.

Rachel Farmer (RF): First of all, before we dive into The Left Parenthesis, I’d be really interested to hear about your process as co-translators. In the brilliant conversation recently published in the Oxonian Review, the pair of you talked about working together on another co-translation of Montserrat Roig. Can you tell us just a little bit about this relationship?

Megan Berkobien (MB): Well, my dissertation is about co-translation, especially as a socialist and ecological phenomenon; it really came from the fact that basically all my translation experiences have been collaborative. I went to school at the University of Michigan for both my PhD and undergrad, and in the translation workshop there, everything was done together. So, it came naturally when I met María Cristina. The first thing we worked on as a team was a little anthology on women writers in Catalan—that’s when I realised we were really on the same page. We wrote the opening essay together, and it just really worked. We just feed off one another’s poetic creativities, I guess.

María Cristina Hall (MCH): For us, having the interaction of editing together was a way to build trust, to understand that our voices were similar enough to co-translate. Our process involved dividing the book up, each doing fifteen pages, then looking at each other’s version and editing it as if it were our own piece—so there’s never that feeling of holding back. It seems very natural to edit, sometimes heavily and sometimes not. If ever a word comes up where we think, “how should we translate that?”, we have a back-and-forth, and it goes smoothly from there. It’s very enriching, and I think something Megan touched on in her dissertation was the importance of working in a community and having company. Translation is usually very solitary work, so it’s very different to have this practice.

MB: In a lot of ways, the fact that translators are artists insinuates at the worst part about being an artist: that you have to work by yourself, and that you have this “grand genius” inside you. I just don’t think genius is never located in one person, and being able to share genius in whatever way or form is the most beautiful thing there is.

RF: Was there anything in particular about The Left Parenthesis that needed a different approach?

MCH: Well, it was our first project together, and then we did Goodbye Ramona by Montserrat Roig. In that book, the voices are so distinct that we divided it by character, so I worked on the one from the 1900s and Meg did the one from the 1960s—and the one from the 30s, we shared between the two of us. Because Meg is more active in the Socialist party, she could be the character who was politically involved, while I took on the conservative one since I live in Mexico and I have more of a background in Catholicism. But The Left Parenthesis is just one character talking about herself.

MB: We did have to attend to making sure it was all one unified voice, and as such it made a lovely first project because it’s almost as if our voices were weaving together. If we take a cue from the book to describe this, it’s kind of like waves were flowing over us, and each new wave made us come together a little bit more. READ MORE…

Will the Present Suffice? On Disappearance in Fiction

September 21, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by MK Harb

It seems that disappearance creates even more presence, focusing around the individual instead of erasing them.

What is absence—this deeply felt substance that is not made of matter, but lack? In texts across time, writers have given form to vanishing and its metaphorical power, studying its mystery and its abjection, its myth and its experience. In the following essay, MK Harb discusses three cases of disappearance in short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Munro, and Danial Haghighi, and how the three authors use the duality of presence and absence to explore the psychology of those who go and those who stay, as well as experiences of class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism.

In a curious poem by the name of “Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage,” the late Larry Levis created, in words blown with the precision of a glassmaker, a philosophical text on life and desire. Beginning with, “It’s a list of what I cannot touch,” Levis narrates the myth of the Cumaean Sibyl, an ancient Greek priestess who, in her quest to ask the Gods for eternal life, forgot to ask for eternal youth. What ensues is a lesson in cruelty, for as time expands and centuries go by, she shrinks and dwarfs until she becomes as tiny as a thumb, upon which she is placed in a jar to “suffocate without being able to die.” As the years churn on, Sibyl eventually finds herself in a birdcage, placed there by an Athenian shop owner for her protection. She emits small bird-like whispers to Athenian boys, who often rattle her cage to ask: What do you want, Sibyl? To this she responds: death. Her voice goes mute as she witnesses an ever-changing Athens through to the Second World War, all the while continuing to be alive, shriveling and aging, yet somehow disappearing from living. Using Sibyl, Levis creates a melancholic irony in which a desire for a prolonged life leads to disappearance.

When I think of disappearance, I think of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and the soul-crushing friendship between Lila and Elena, two intellectual women haunted by the other’s abilities, acting out their insecurities through never-ending disappearances and reappearances within each other’s lives. I think of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1960s film Woman in The Dunes, where a depressive Japanese scientist spends the night with a seductive village woman in a remote sand dune. After their affair, the staircase leading outwards—a symbol of return to urbanity—vanishes, and the most Sisyphean struggle ensues. In such works, disappearance is an allegory for life and time, lost and spent.

Disappearance has long been a hallmark of serious prose, a thematic thread throughout literature of all variances. In three short stories set in Canada, India, and Iran, this allegorical device operates at the narratives’ center. The first is Jorge Luis Borges’ “Man on the Threshold,” which follows the tradition of narration through memory, telling us of the writer’s childhood friend, Bioy Casares, who brings with him from London to Buenos Aires a strange dagger. This object triggers another story from a friend sitting with them, Christopher Dewey, who served in the British colonies of India. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Marie-Célie Agnant

September 20, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Danielle Legros Georges

Love my skin / dark as your childhood nights / my mouth / rebellious nutmeg

This Translation Tuesday, we feature two extraordinary poems by the celebrated Haitian-Québécois poet Marie-Célie Agnant. Drawn from her first collection, Balafres, ardent readers of Asymptote might recall Agnant’s work from our Fall 2016 issue featuring Canadian poetry. But these two poems reveal a more personal dimension of the socially engaged poet, as translator Danielle Legros Georges shows us, with its heady mix of myth and memory. 

“Balafres, renamed Gashes in English, consists of 36 poems originally written in French, some spanning several pages, others epigrammatic. Agnant’s is a poetics grounded in the Haitian engagée tradition, a literature of social commitment; one in which political dimensions are not divorced from aesthetic ones. The poems here, however, are among her love poems—which are not so well-known. In translating them, I was, at moments, challenged (and subsequently charmed) by Agnant’s images, image-systems, and metaphors. In “Orphée,” for example, the question arose of how best to treat the breath (souffle) of the lover in mon corps/ balafon d’obsidienne / mes cuisses bilimbao et / mon souffle touffeur de savane.  Was the sultriness of the breath to be emphasized, the dry heat of it, its connection to biome, or a combination of these? Such have been the knots to untie toward equivalence.”

—Danielle Legros Georges

Orpheus

Honestly, break your pen
I’m neither
exquisite nymph nor
Madonna walled
in the great book of your dreams
far from the realm and frippery
of your words
move on

Break your pen I am not
this goddess
fairy
Aphrodite
with seawater eyes
who haunts your dreams

Break your pen and your mirror
look at me and
love me
with both hands
full-bodied

Love my skin
dark as your childhood nights
my mouth
rebellious nutmeg
my body
obsidian balafon
my bilimbao thighs
the heat of my breath like a savannah’s  READ MORE…

A Guest of its Originality: An Interview with Ghazouane Arslane

September 19, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alex Tan

What matters here is that translation implies both bifurcation and multiplication. Bilingualism splits in two opposite directions, but enriches.

A highlight of the current Summer 2022 issue, Abdelfattah Kilito’s “Borges and the Blind” stages an erudite inquiry into the classical Arabic underpinnings of Jorge Luis Borges’s famous “Averroës’s  Search,” traversing the proximities and distances that triangulate between writers, readers, and texts across disparate literary traditions. As a reflection on the innumerable angles from which one might approach—with varying degrees of blindness and insight—the mirror of the text, Kilito’s essay is nothing if not a testament to the fundamental questions of translation that mediate each of our relationships to language and culture. Ghazouane Arslane’s English translation interposes yet another layer in this mise en abyme, deftly capturing the labyrinthine turns of Kilito’s thought. I had the honor of corresponding with Ghazouane over email; our conversation ranged over vast swathes of terrain, from the difficulties of rendering the polysemy of Arabic literature, the ethics and politics of the “original copy,” the hospitality involved in any act of translation, to more specific (but no less essential) lingerings over the evocative scene of prayer in Borges’s story alongside Kilito’s singular talent for discerning “the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange.”

Alex Tan (AT): So much of Kilito’s piece revolves around the specific positionality of the reader. I thought we could start there, with how you exist in language. You speak, in a recent essay, of how English eludes the contested politics of language connected to Algeria’s postcolonial anxieties. While a Ph.D. student in Britain, you grasped English as “a way out of everything inherited.” In contrast, Arabic became something you had to “[translate] yourself back into,” a language that you inhabited as “both host and guest.” How do your differing relationships to these two languages inflect the way you approach translation and, more specifically, your decision to translate this essay of Kilito’s?

Ghazouane Arslane (GA): English, I must say, has furnished me with a space of expression and self-articulation that is deeply personal and, at the same time, inevitably political. If it somehow escapes the complex politics of language in postcolonial Algeria, it is nevertheless lurking in the background. I am referring here to the rivalry between English and French as imperial languages in the last two or three centuries, a rivalry that saw English triumph for reasons everyone is familiar with. But for me, English meant going beyond the linguistic world of Algeria—a window to another world, beyond Algeria, but also a window through which I can look back into the world that Algeria has always represented for me, into myself, and, above all, into the languages that formed me.

It was thanks to Kilito, in part, that I became even more conscious and fascinated by language, by languages, by what they do to you. To speak more than one language is to turn in multiple and often opposite directions, enabling one to be a translator in the manner of Musa ibn Sayyar al-Uswari—an interpreter of the Qur’an that al-Jahiz describes as “one of the wonders of the world,” being eloquent in both Arabic and Persian. Al-Uswari, al-Jahiz tells us, “would sit with Arabs to his right and Persians to his left. He would recite a verse from the Book of God, explain it in Arabic to the Arabs, then turn toward the Persians and explain it to them in Persian.” All of this I learnt in Kilito’s Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, my first encounter with his work. What matters here is that translation implies both bifurcation and multiplication. Bilingualism splits in two opposite directions, but enriches. To be both host and guest is better than being either—in the sense that it is more demanding, more exhausting, thus more rewarding (the pleasure, like the pain, is doubled). To wander and get lost in the labyrinth of languages—I can’t say labyrinth without thinking of Borges!—is to find oneself in the real world, whose frontiers you can only cross via translation. In this sense, therefore, I was led to translation as necessity, not choice. After reading Kilito’s essay, I told myself it must be translated. And, of course, from Arabic into English—the same crossing I had already made. Needless to say, there are considerations of visibility and readability, but the main drive is the quality of the essay—which means its translatability in Walter Benjamin’s sense. Perhaps even the multiple directions it takes you to. Kilito’s essay is a journey through Borges, Averroës, Kafka, al-Ma’arri, and others, into blindness and insight. Distances collapse. Time is insignificant. Here, indeed, is world literature. That, I must say, is what drove me to translate the essay. READ MORE…