Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 16, 2024  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy, Thuy Dinh, and Wambua Muindi

The latest literary news from Egypt, Vietnam, and Kenya!

This week, our Editors-at-Large report on beloved literary figures and emerging talents from their respective regions. From personal tributes to literary luminaries to fan meetups, read on to find out more!

Ibrahim Fawzy, Editor-at-Large reporting from Egypt

In this dispatch, I won’t be reporting on literary festivals and book fairs, as usual. But I will share some good news that personally brought me happiness and gratitude in troubled, gloomy days: Literary translator and cultural worker Nariman Youssef was named head of the Poetry Translation Center (PTC), and Nashwa Nasreldine has joined the PTC team as editor. Excitingly, two Arabic translators have taken over the PTC though they were recruited through totally separate processes. Let this lovely takeover begin and stay tuned for all the amazing work they will bring into the world alongside the PTC’s already brilliant team.

When I praise the new leadership of the PTC, I speak from experience. One day in 2021, I stumbled upon a lifeline: a pay-what-you-want online workshop at PTC. This workshop, led by the extraordinary Nariman Youssef, laid the foundational bricks for my journey as a literary translator. Translating Mustafa Ibrahim’s “Nothing of Note” under her patient, quiet, and profoundly insightful guidance was a revelation. It was as if she was born to lead, with an innate ability to listen, to nurture, and to inspire.

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In my dreams I reply like this

August 15, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Oonagh Stransky

Either way, it too is a kind of reply—to the call of literature, the call of writing.

For her translation of Erminia Dell’Oro’s Abandonment, Oonagh Stransky received one of the prestigious PEN Translates awards in 2023; one year later, this powerful, lyrical novel is due to arrive by way of Héloïse Press on September 15. Rendered into English with great sensitivity and intimacy, Abandonment tells the story of a mother-daughter pairing in Eritrea, and their alienation from both local and the colonial Italian communities in the aftermath of racial laws. Stransky fought for its appearance in the English-language for twenty years, and in the following essay, she speaks on the emotional, introspective process of translating this tremendous work, and why she has remained so determined that the world should read it.

abandonment

It’s July 2024, and I’ve received the proofreader’s notes for Abandonment. I need to reply to an issue with the passage below:

“Then Sellass felt a deep languor come over her and she understood that her body was dissolving into the seawater, that the wave she had become was returning towards the light and slowly breaking on a beach where the shades of the dead had gathered. Even Mariam’s shells were there, specks of darkness on the sand, and a hand reached out to grab them. The wave tried to speak, to tell her that she was Sellass, but the voice was only a watery gurgle, and the shades, going through the gestures of life, ignored the coming and going of the wave.”

The proofreader says

This is a bit confusing—reads to me like the wave is speaking to Sellass, but if I’ve understood correctly the wave IS Sellass? And she’s trying to speak to Mariam? I think the confusion is using “she” to refer to the wave, if it read ‘to tell her that it was Sellass’ it would be clearer.

I reply

Using “it” does fix the problem but ambiguity and the gendering of the wave are important to both story and style. Actually, the original Italian doesn’t say that the wave is trying to speak to Mariam. It just says, L’onda tentava di parlare, di raccontare che lei era Sellass. . . I suggest modifying that line to: The wave tried to speak, to say she was Sellass. . . This keeps the female gender of the wave and retains an element of ambiguity.

In my dreams I reply like this

The world of this book is filled with objects that we readers might commonly see as neutral but that are attributed gender by characters who need them to survive, who see their fragile lives building and then crumbling, over and over, casually, randomly, like waves. Sellass in this instance is indeed the wave, and because the wave in Italian is a feminine noun, she is both wave and girl. More than trying to address Mariam here, Sellass is receiving a message from the universe that she is a mere mortal, that she coexists with death, with the shades. Her daughter, Marianna, will be made aware of her own mortality, but she is accepting of it, which in turn allows her to survive and not become a victim; this awareness is the key to her resistance.

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On Love & War: A Conversation with Majed Mujed

August 14, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

I’ve remained trying to confront death with the power of meanings that call for clinging to life, love, and the radiant beauty of human emotions.

Life is a perpetual conflict between love and war, their supposedly diametric imageries pervading our consciousness. In literature, our depictions of love have adopted the imagery of war to convey the depths of human emotion, and to describe and further lovers’ means and ends. Astonishingly, Iraqi writer and journalist Majed Mujed goes beyond imagery to present love as war, and war as love. “My poems are infused with love,” says Mujed, “even if they sometimes depict the struggles that I and the people of my country have faced.”

Majed Mujed had published six poetry collections in Arabic and received several awards in his native Iraq. Before moving to Ireland in 2015, Mujed worked in Iraq as a journalist and a cultural section chief of Iraqi official newspaper, al-Sabbah, and editor in other local Arabic journals and magazines. He is the recipient of the inaugural “Play It Forward Fellowship Programme,” a pilot programme lasting for eighteen months, offered by The Stinging Fly and Skein Press, and supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. This program aimed at creating pathways for writers to develop, showcase, and publish their work.

Mujed’s The Book of Trivialities, published by Skein Press in 2023 and artfully rendered into English by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, features Mujed’s original Arabic poems alongside their English translation. In my review of the book in Poetry Ireland Review Issue 141, edited by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, I wrote: “The Book of Trivialities is at once an immersion into a war-torn country and discovery (or rediscovery) of a unique voice in Arabic poetry. This beautifully lush book mirrors our own potential and challenges the violence and materialism of the post-20th century.”

In this interview, I spoke with Mujed on the meaning of poetry, the process of translation, love, war, death, and more. This interview was conducted in Arabic, and I translated it into English.

Ibrahim Fawzy (IF): What’s your definition of poetry? And how can poetry change the world?

Majed Mujed (MM): Poetry, in my view, is the wellspring of human emotion, a symphony of words that resonates with the deepest chords of our being. It is the art that captures the essence of our existence, speaking to our divine nature and the enduring principles that govern our lives. Poetry, when imbued with innovative aesthetic and artistic qualities, leaves an indelible mark on our consciousness. It expands our horizons, deepens our understanding of truth, and fosters acceptance of its consequences. This transformative influence prioritizes the humane aspects of our being, steering us away from violence and oppressive behaviours. The impact of poetry extends beyond the realm of words, encompassing the broader spectrum of art, intellectual pursuits, and philosophical endeavours. When we declare that art has the power to change the world, we are essentially acknowledging its potential to transform humanity. By challenging our rigid thought patterns and moral compasses, creative expression can reshape our cultural and artistic perceptions, ultimately promoting values of justice, shared goodness, and generosity. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “She-wolf” by Dieuwke van Turenhout

August 13, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Michele Hutchison

Only later, outside the city, when the meadows are staring at her, does she say, ‘Manouk is probably not going to make it.’

This Translation Tuesday, the spotlight is on an unflinching portrayal of bereavement from Dutch author Dieuwke van Turenhout, brought into the English by the award-winning translator Michele Hutchison.

Nicole’s young daughter is in hospital, hooked to machines that keep her alive. The prognosis is that she will soon die. Nicole is overwhelmed with a vicious grief, but a hospital is no place to voice the waves of anguish, panic and rage that churn and tear inside her. The blank pretence and sterile platitudes she must adopt serve only to heighten her desolation. But at her very lowest, a moment of connection with a fellow parent shows the beginning of a path forward. By cutting through suffocating politesse, she is able, finally, to confront the impending death of her child.

She passes the smokers, her fists clenched. Every afternoon, she makes her way through their fumes, dizzy from the hospital air and her faltering breath. Beyond the smokers, she sniffs disdainfully in disgust and then fills her lungs. She doesn’t give a damn that sometimes, walking with her eyes closed, she almost knocks over one of them. She doesn’t want to see them either, this good-natured puffing herd, choosing to smoke themselves to death, to wilfully destroy their organs.

Today had been a good day, as in ‘not so bad’—the nurse’s voice had sounded cheerful. And even though it could have just been the nurse’s mood, she dialled Hugo’s number right away in the stairwell.

As she says hello to Hugo, she looks up. She finds herself amid a group of people waiting around. The boy in the wheelchair is on his own. His blanket has slipped from his torso, he moves a hand slowly over the folded edge. She scans the smokers, no sign of the man with the drooping shoulders, the one she presumes is his father. Although she doesn’t want to, she makes eye contact with the boy. Now she knows he has no eyelashes or brows. Blue worms run across the boy’s hands, pointing to his skinny fingers.

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What’s New in Translation: August 2024

August 12, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks, Matilde Ribeiro, and Sofija Popovska

New work from Mexico and Martinique!

In this month’s compilation of newly released titles, our editors take a close look at three works that cohere stylistic invention with unconstrained probings into reality. In a bold collection of psychogeography, Daniel Saldaña París vivifies the urban space as a transformative intersection of image and imagination. From Aimé Cesaire, one of the founders of négritude, an early dramatic work provides further insight into his potent discourse against colonial violence. And in the English-language debut of one of Latin America’s most vital political thinkers, a volume combining dialogue and essay introduces the essentiality of communal resistance in the thinking of Raquel Gutiérrez-Aguilar.

9781646222315

Planes Flying Over a Monster by Daniel Saldaña París, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and Philip K. Zimmerman, Catapult, 2024

Review by Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large for North Macedonia

“The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations. . . It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them. . .” writes Michel de Certeau in his 1984 book, The Practice of Everyday Life. I thought of these words immediately as I immersed myself in the shifting landscapes of Planes Flying Over a Monster, a collection of ten essays by Daniel Saldaña París, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and Philip K. Zimmerman. In writing about (and moving through) Montreal, Havana, Mexico City, Madrid, and other places, Saldaña París engages in a transformative cartography, rearranging bits of metropolises in turn into a tangle of ruelles frequented by a secret writer; a map of zones where different types of drugs can be purchased; a junction between “three different groups playing the same son cubano tune at different rhythms on three different corners of the plaza”; and a stretch of space-time existing only momentarily within a locked gaze between a shy, adolescent cult member and his adult self. Tracing the connections between places, people, and events, Saldaña París creates a sense of communion with the world that is at times uneasy, yet always shot through with radical tenderness and a rare species of honesty—the kind that doesn’t confuse itself with the truth. This self-awareness, rooted in the memoir aspect of the collection, intensifies the realism that the genre of nonfiction always purports to provide, yet only occasionally delivers.

The collection’s closing essay, “Assistants of the Sun,” is also the beginning of the story—chronologically speaking. In it, we meet a young Saldaña París, dragged into joining a cult by his father and uncle. The sect’s activities happen during nature retreats, and include rituals of varying extremity—anything from walking in a neat line to a live burial. Saldaña París is forced to confront these memories years later, watching footage of these events while sitting with his partner Catherine in a borrowed Brooklyn apartment—an arrangement he mentions multiple times throughout the essay, as though attempting to anchor himself amidst the flood of disturbing recollections. He faces the past with striking empathy—remembering his father as “softness personified, mildly alcoholic, holding down three jobs . . . and a radical advocate of tenderness,” despite his having roped his son into a scam. This compassionate clarity, spanning all ten essays, is consonant with the author’s mission—relayed to him by an extra-terrestrial during a cult activity—to “help the sun to illuminate the world.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 9, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury and Christina Chatzitheodorou

The latest in literary news from Palestine and Greece!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us around the world for updates on recent publications and annual book fairs! From a discussion on ‘cancelling’ and its real-world parallels to the genocide of Palestinians, to the passing of a beloved Greek poet, read on to learn more.

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

Has ‘cancelling’ subsided lately? Surely not for the Palestinians. Sadly, these times might even be the worst for them, to the extent that the ICJ is considering whether they are being subjected to genocide, i.e., literally a cancelling, an erasure! But when it comes to literature, this concept of cancelling, of erasing, often serves as a lens to examine social dynamics, power structures, and questions of identity.

This is the case of The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem. Originally published in North America by Syracuse University Press some five years ago, a revised and updated English translation (by the original translator Sinan Antoon) is appearing this month by And Other Stories.

Using magical realism to shed light on real-world tensions and human experiences in Israel and Palestine, this book is a thought-provoking novel that explores those complexities through a unique premise. The story imagines a scenario where all Palestinians suddenly vanish overnight. Azem skillfully uses this surreal concept to examine issues of identity, memory, and power dynamics in the region. The narrative alternates between the perspective of Alaa, a young Palestinian man, and the reactions of Israeli society to the mysterious disappearance.

READ MORE…

Ways of Seeing: On Humberto Ak’abal’s If Today Were Tomorrow

August 8, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Miranda Mazariegos

What do they think, those who we believe don’t think at all?

If Today Were Tomorrow by Humberto Ak’abal, translated from the K’iche’ and Spanish by Michael Bazzett, Milkweed Press, 2024

To read Humberto Ak’abal is to be transported: first to the Western Highlands of Guatemala, full of mountainous forests and ravines where corn grows amid the mist, and then through the natural world and toward everything it encompasses—the elements, their sounds, and even their language. In a world where the sun eats the mist, butterflies kiss the earth, and peach trees weep, the boundaries of the conscious world expand to envision a new, shared world. 

Humberto Ak’abal was a K’iche’ Maya poet from Guatemala. His book Guardián de la caída de agua (Guardian of the Waterfall) was named Book of the Year by the Association of Guatemalan Journalists, and he was awarded the Golden Quetzal award in 1993. A world-renowned Guatemalan poet, Ak’abal oscillated between writing in K’iche’—his mother tongue—and Spanish, the official language of Guatemala. This new collection, published by Milkweed Press in June, spans five sections, each delving into a different facet of the poet’s oeuvre, while always retaining his essence, humor, and care for the natural world. 

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“My-selves” in My Languages: A Discussion with Paloma Chen

August 7, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Conner

. . . sometimes “you” are “me,” and there is no distinction, and we are a “we,” but other times I am not even “me,” I am just void, 空.

Born in Alicante, Valencia, poet, researcher, and journalist Paloma Chen dedicates herself to advancing migrant justice in Spain. Her first collection of poetry, Invocación a las mayorías silenciosas (Calling On All Silent Majorities, Letraversal, 2022), explores the depths and diversity of the Chinese diasporic experience in Spain through a kaleidoscope of voices, encompassing mothers, daughters, sisters, and lovers, while at the same time always challenging the suppositions of language. “Shanshui Pixel Scenes 山水像素场景,” published as an app in 2023 and translated by Paloma and her colleagues into Catalan, Mandarin, and English, renews the form of 山水诗, or “poetry of mountains and waters,” by pairing pixel art depicting scenes from China and the Chinese diaspora with poems that deepen the speaker’s relationships with their multiple and ceaselessly transforming selves. In the following interview, I spoke with Paloma about the importance of orality and quotidian language in her poetry, writing in community, and the multiplicity of the self.

Julia Conner (JC): In your essay “No tengo más que una literatura y no es la mía.” you mention how you envision Invocación embodying a Chinese diaspora collection of poetry, much like Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus being an Asian American poetry collection. When writing Invocación, how did you imagine your work in conversation with previously published literary works, both from Spain and abroad?

Paloma Chen (PC): I really like Asian-American poets like Sally Wen Mao, Marilyn Chin, Franny Choi, and Li-Young Lee, so their poetry was a great inspiration for me, as I wanted to write in Spanish, for readers in Spain, but taking into account my Chinese roots. Most of their works were truly enlightening and helped me build my own poetic language. I was trying to carve out a little space, one in which I can also find poets like Berna Wang, Minke Wang, Ale Oseguera, or Gio Collazos, that I could find liberating, one in which I could express the complexities regarding identity that I was all these years reflecting about. There is no me without all those before me, and all those walking with me right now. There is no Invocación without all the amazing books and artwork I had the privilege to encounter, without hundreds of fruitful conversations and lived experiences. I was writing for my friends, the amazing community of artists and activists, not only from the Chinese community, but from the anti-racist, feminist, Queer movements present in many places. I did not know if my book, which I thought was a very specific work by a Spanish-Chinese girl talking about her reality growing up in a little restaurant in rural Spain, could have the potential to connect with readers abroad, but I am happy to know that maybe it has.

JC: Many of your poems from Invocación center on speech and communication, fluency, disfluency, and the function of language. “Pero habla,” for example, repeats the visually interrupted line “pala/bras part/idas que hi/eren.” Your work also has powerful oral and rhythmic qualities to it. How do you see the relationship between the themes of your work and your poetry’s orality and visual form on the page?

PC: I guess that for a writer and a poet, reflecting about language itself is quite common. In my specific case, reflecting about identity inevitably leads me to reflect about language, as identities, languages, and cultures are so closely interrelated. Also, I do not think poetic language is that different from the quotidian tool we use to communicate daily. Our every-day interactions are full of poetry. The fact that in my normal life I am used to thinking about communication, fluency, and disfluency doubtless permeates my writing. I have always struggled to communicate, to express myself in the way that society demands me to. I studied journalism at university because I was truly worried about it back then. Some people think of me as being quite shy sometimes but, in a huge contrast, quite expressive in my poetry. For me, writing poetry is establishing a conversation with another true self, a self empowered by voice, body, presence, rhythm, a self that is connected with the environment and less in its own head. Because I value orality, I like to experiment also with the visual form of the verses in the page, so the reader can also have some visual clues of tones, silences, vibrations, etc.

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Translation Tuesday: “Baby Shower” by Isaura Contreras

August 6, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Janet M. Izzo

They were surprised when just four months later, Mat and Sara told them the news that they would be living together, for a very special reason.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you an understated comedy of modern manners from the pen of Isaura Contreras, translated from the Spanish by Janet M. Izzo. As the on-again, off-again relationship between Mat and Sara blooms into anticipated parenthood, their coworkers Pablo and Lidia watch first with amusement, then anxiety. Their own relationship, so secure in comparison to Mat and Sara’s initial misfortunes, begins to seem stagnant and decayed in the face of the other couple’s renewed affections, and the prospect of new life. Will they reconcile themselves to their differences, or end up like the formerly-single Mat, whom they once so smugly counseled? If nothing else, the story is guaranteed to amuse anyone who has been forced to endure the antics of baby-crazed friends—read on!

Pablo and Lidia had started seeing each other the year before they saw Mat arm in arm with Sara, who had arrived at the office just three months earlier. They were both glad that Mat was dating someone after the tumultuous breakup with his fiancée. Nevertheless, they couldn’t help but wonder what Sara saw in him, even though they considered Mat a dear friend. Sara was clearly kind and attractive, candid and sweet, compared to a resentful and hostile guy, who took advantage of any opportunity to bring to light others’ misfortunes. Pablo and Lidia disregarded these embittered episodes, keeping in mind the four years they’d known him, especially the compassion that suddenly surfaced after the wedding was canceled. Mat, once recovered from the shock, described in a surge of sincerity, the painful weeks he searched for her without success. Pablo and Lidia rehearsed their best lines and witnessed how he recovered his arrogant walk. They discussed the huge favor they could do for him if they only dared, as good friends, to give him advice. Pablo would tell him how girls should be treated, with signs of affection and attention to small details, with compliments every morning, noticing their different hairstyles and the color of their eye makeup. All activities that, punctually and purposefully, he had managed to accomplish in his own relationship. Lidia would also tell him that it is important to put arrogance aside, to stop being explosive and antagonistic, authoritarian and worried about appearing sensitive. She would tell him that relationships are like plants that need to be watered, day by day, with care and devotion.

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Discrete Acts of Love and Protest: On Bibhas Roy Chowdhury’s Poem Continuous

August 5, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Dustin Pickering

In Roy Chowdhury’s writing, one finds many mysteries and thoughtful riddles.

Poem Continuous: Reincarnated Expressions by Bibhas Roy Chowdhury, translated from Bengali by Kiriti Sengupta, Hawakal Publishers, 2024

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom writes: “Poetic Influence—when it involves two strong, authentic poets—always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation.” According to Bloom’s theory, the authentic poet stands in relation to poets of the past, and this relationship to tradition is a creative force, which Bloom calls “misprision.” In the instance of Bibhas Roy Chowdhury’s Poem Continuous: Reincarnated Expressions, the traditional poet is Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore. 

Both Roy Chowdhury and Tagore suffered from the Partition of Bengal by the British; in 1905, Tagore used Raksha Bandhan to unite Hindus and Muslims against the Partition, whereas Roy Chowdhury’s family lost their wealth, and upon the later division of Bangladesh in 1947, became refugees and common laborers. Throughout many of these poems, translated by Kiriti Sengupta, Roy Chowdhury laments this predicament, coalescing the historic developments with his father’s death. “True and False for My Father” reads:

I’ll say
(if I’m honest):
after my father’s demise
I found myself duty-bound
in the crematorium—
not from being his eldest son,
like an event manager, rather.

I didn’t perform his last rites.
I followed no ritual
nor did I take part in the funeral.

Someone remarked:
You are indeed
an ideal communist.

READ MORE…

Building a home for world literature in Lisbon

August 3, 2024  |  in News  |  by Samuel Miller

Lovers of brick-and-mortar bookshops, you’ll want to visit this new home for world literature next time you're in Lisbon!

Regular Asymptote readers will no doubt be familiar with the difficulties involved in sourcing the translated literature we all love. Thanks to small print runs, limited editions, and the vagaries of the publishing industry, it can be all but impossible to find certain books if you don’t live in their country of publication. Since moving to Portugal 6 years ago, I’ve really struggled to get my hands on books in English, and it’s a feeling shared by many who live here. 

Lisbon and Porto have some wonderful bookshops, including Bertrand, the oldest in Europe, and Lello, often called the most beautiful bookstore in the world. But the selection of literature available in English is very small, typically the same few mass-market paperbacks and classics; and after Brexit, it became very difficult to even order English books through the mail.

Over the past few years, Portugal has also become home to a cosmopolitan mix of tourists, expats, immigrants, and refugees, with English becoming a lingua franca. And so, as the need arose, we assembled a like-minded team and got to work.

We designed Good Company to be a true home for curious readers, and our dream bookshop. Every book is chosen by our team to create a selection that represents our interests, tastes, and reading experience. And we are always available to give personal recommendations, or special order anything you can’t find in our regular catalog.

Screenshot 2024-08-03 at 10.07.23 PM

With Good Company, we also wanted to bring the bookstore-as-a-third-space concept to Lisbon, creating a place for everyone to gather and meet, whether they are buying a book or not. Located in the elegant Avenidas Novas neighborhood, we’re building a community space full of beautiful books, comfy seating, great coffee, and event space that’s open for all to use. Every part of the bookstore was considered, and we have worked entirely with local artists and materials in its construction.

Even the design of the website was important. Having a beautiful and well-stocked online bookstore was always a priority for us, as we know how difficult it is to access independent literature and other English books in Europe, and how unpleasant most corporate sites can be.

We’ve tried to bring some of that bookstore magic to your screen. We hope you enjoy the little details, like how each book’s page is color-matched to better display the cover art, or our curated booklists, which range from our team’s personal favorites to recent prize winners, to highlighting the best Lusophone authors in translation. We’ve launched with over 3200 books in our catalog, and are adding more each week. 

Our online bookstore is live and currently shipping across Europe, and our physical store will be opening later this summer. Visit our website, browse our catalog, and if there’s any specific you’d like to order or you need a recommendation, just get in touch; we’d love to hear from you!

This is a sponsored post.

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 2, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Sofija Popovska

The latest from Bulgaria, North Macedonia, and the Philippines!

This week, our editors report on the foremost developments from their respective regions. In North Macedonia, a new collection from a renowned poet and director finds solace and profundity in the complex nexus between human life and its context. In the Philippines and Bulgaria, readers bid farewell to two titans of writing and translation. 

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

Prostori (Spaces), the third poetry collection by renowned Macedonian film director and poet Antonio Mitrikjeski, was recently published by Dijalog Press. With a track record of two well-received collections and several films playing at festivals across the world, Mitrikjeski is equally ‘intellectually rich and emotionally lush’ in his visual language as he is in literature, per writer Dimitar Bashevski’s review of Prostori.

The collection is fittingly cinematic; weaving together a mystical sublime, oracular dreamscapes, and a loving mimesis of familiar places, Mitrikjeski’s robust poetic voice blends inner and outer worlds, delving deep into the human psyche as he wanders into distant regions—mountain peaks, the ocean’s floor, the night sky. Frequently apostrophic, he foregrounds the deep entanglement between his human subjects and their environments, their ideas, and the people around them. In ‘Saraj,’ a poem about his childhood home, Mitrikjeski celebrates the ‘fraternity of children’ and ‘the mystique and simplicity of all the silhouettes who confessed their feelings’ in the ‘house bearing the roots of beginnings,’ where he still discovers the ‘eternal. . . fraternity of those present.’ Opening the collection and dedicated to his parents, ‘Saraj’ is programmatic. Throughout Prostori, the speaker is preoccupied with finding connection amidst distance, and this search is mediated via both real and oneiric spaces, as well as the relationships they make possible: ‘The lake’s water connects us all. / The fog is lifted,’ writes Mitrikjeski in ‘The Word’. The word itself, the material of poetry—’invisible, written upon the ruins’—will remain eternally within the lake, that is, within the space of human connections, among ‘familiar names’. READ MORE…

Scratched knees, pickled vegetables, and (un)belonging: A Conversation with Elina Katrin

August 1, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

The most honest way translation has shaped my work as a poet is through incompleteness.

 Published by Newfound in October 2023, Elina Katrin’s debut poetry chapbook If My House Has a Voice renders the (un)belonging of immigration, the fluidity of the cross-cultural self, and the sensory core of memories in a vulnerable, mesh-like voice woven from three languages, emojis, and blank spaces. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, to a Russian mother and a Syrian father, and currently living in Southern California, Katrin is profoundly aware of how living between cultures and languages both enriches and destabilizes the subject: in her work, multilingualism multiplies meaning, yet makes the mother tongue something which can be gradually forgotten, mixed with other languages, or, suddenly, spoken with an accent—somehow less authentically than before. Katrin’s poems—previously featured in Electric Literature, Poetry Daily, and Nimrod, among others—move across Syria, Russia, and the United States, recounting wounds both old and new, the love and pain of familial bonds, and moments of exhilarating rebellion and excruciating self-scrutiny. In this interview, I spoke with Elina about her experiences with immigration, her poetic techniques, food (and, more broadly, the sensory) as a medium for memories, translation, and her “personal English.”  

Sofija Popovska (SP): Congratulations on your debut chapbook! It’s definitely one of those rare books that make reading them for the first time feel like a homecoming. Can you tell me a little about how it came to be?

Elina Katrin (EK): Thank you so much. The chapbook originally started as a full-length book, or rather, my MFA thesis. Though I technically graduated with a complete manuscript, I quickly realized that the full-length needed more work. However, many poems in my thesis felt done and interconnected, so I decided to put them together into a chapbook. When I started treating If My House Has a Voice as its own separate project, I included the title poem into the manuscript—the only one from the chapbook that I wrote before graduate school. As this project was coming together, I was thinking about the curiosities and complexities of language—its beauty, pliability, and failures. Language is what ultimately connects us, it’s the center of any relationship, no matter what shape or lack thereof that language takes. I wanted to explore that in If My House Has a Voice, so I’m delighted to hear this chapbook reads like a homecoming.

SP: One of the first things that struck me was how memory was mediated through the body in your poems: a scratched knee becomes the point where love and hurt, control and rebellion converge, and biting into pickled vegetables suggests bottled-up fears and frustrations. What inspired you to choose touch, smell, and taste as privileged modes of perception/ expression?

EK: It’s no secret that most of our memories are attached to sensory details. Songs remind us of certain people, and scents transport us back to different periods of our lives. When thinking of Syria or Russia, my life in those countries came back to me through scratched knees and pickled vegetables—little fragments of time and space that reminded me what it felt like to occupy the body of a girl or a teenager. I wanted to document, archive those memories on the page exactly as I experienced them. For this reason, many images rooted in touch, smell, taste, sight, and sound work on different levels—the literal one that describes the physical experience, and the emotional one that allows us to look into how the speaker was feeling or what she was thinking about during any sensory experience. This layering of perception hopefully gives readers the opportunity to fully be there with the speaker, experiencing moments in her life they might otherwise have no way of accessing. READ MORE…

Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada

July 31, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan and Xiao Yue Shan

Tawada’s music-prose is a testament to the spirit of collaboration. . .

Yoko Tawada’s latest novel, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, presents us with the anatomy of a mind consumed by passion for a dead poet’s oeuvre. Ostensibly narrating the tale of a literary scholar mired in pandemic-era depression, the text expands into a reflection on various forms of friendship—and, one might venture, redemption—that might inhere between readers. At the same time, Tawada deftly traverses voice and perspective to meditate on language as pastiche, ventriloquizing another’s words within the space of one’s own consciousness. With this mysterious work, the German-Japanese author furthers her interest in questions of alienation and affinity across interpersonal, cultural, and temporal realms—polyvocal inheritances that are evocatively staged in Susan Bernofsky’s layered translation from the German. To enact and pay tribute to Tawada’s dialogic style through the spirit of collaboration, Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan and Assistant Managing Editor Alex Tan decided—for the first time in the Asymptote Book Club’s history—to co-write this following review.

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. 

Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky, New Directions (US) and Dialogue Books (UK), 2024

Paul Celan’s is a poetry riddled with hiatus and dislocation. Words are condensed into weighty German compounds or displaced into shreds, as if in a dream; adverbs are turned into nouns, and pronouns and prefixes are broken off, left stranded on the blank page. In the shadow of the Holocaust, his language concurrently reached for and estranged the singularity of experience, resulting in a body of work that yearns for nothing so much as silence—for that which writing itself would annul: something “absolutely untouched by language,” in philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s phrase. Poetry, as gesture, becomes nothing but the contour of an intention to speak, against which presence is felt only as a silhouette.

For the writer Yoko Tawada, Celan’s poems are less storehouses than “openings,” thresholds onto the inexpressible. What she gravitates toward, in the compact verse, is everything that resists and goes beyond the flatly nationalistic, the “typically German.” In her own literary production, she toggles adroitly between German and Japanese, writing across the two; her earlier novel The Naked Eye, for instance, was originally composed in both languages. Not only does Tawada seek unanticipated constellations of affinity with the foreign, she also refutes the common instinct to read literary texts for ethnographic value, consistently underscoring the mutability of selfhood, its unfixed boundaries.

Her latest novel, the pandemic-inflected Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, draws on the surrealist toolbox to sketch a solipsistic, obsessive mind haunted by Celan’s turns of phrase, floating through the ghostly streets of Berlin. Imprisoned in alienation and “intermission-loneliness,” he is known to us initially as “the patient,” his identity tethered to an unspecified malady. His name Patrik arrives almost as an afterthought several pages in, amid scrambled reflections on the pronouns with which he designates himself in his interior soliloquies. In his vacillations between the first person and third person, he is perhaps heart-sick, struggling to survive and bear with the burden of himself: “Opening hurts. Closing brings comfort.” READ MORE…