Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

December 2, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Eva Wissting, and Sofija Popovska

The latest from Palestine, Sweden, and Macedonia!

In this batch of literary dispatches from around the world at Asymptote, we cover literary conferences, recent publications, and rankings of writers in translation! From a gathering dedicated to the late iconic Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, a new Disney+ series revolving around the life of a boy in Scandinavia, and a collection of contemporary women’s poetry in Macedonia, read on to learn more!

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

Last weekend, the A. M. Qattan Foundation and its partners revived the memory of the late iconic Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish with more fervor than anyone has done since his death and burial in 2008. In collaboration with Chaire Mahmoud Darwich, Bozar, and Mahmoud Darwish Foundation, a three-day conference titled “Mahmoud Darwish: The Narrative of the Past and the Present,” was held in Ramallah and on Zoom, with twenty speakers discussing nearly as many topics related to the poet’s works and life. 

It was indeed a very interactive conference, as many of the speakers and a majority of the audience knew Darwish personally. With lots of biographical anecdotes shared by panellists and attendants alike, Darwish’s designation as iconic was undoubtedly attested. It felt as if every single person knew every single detail of Darwish’s works and life. I wondered how long Darwish’s ‘response’ would have been if he were to attend the conference! He probably would have needed another three days to dot the i’s and cross the t’s! But, that wouldn’t have been too troublesome for Darwish; the relationship between him and his audience had always been one of tension. People loved him, his poems, and particularly his orations and readings. But it was such an overwhelming and imposing love that he himself had to write in 1969, “Save Us from this Cruel Love!”

READ MORE…

Anger as Purpose: On Caroline Laurent’s An Impossible Return

December 1, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Annilee Newton

All of Caroline Laurent’s substantive artistry of story and language is in service to a faith that literature can change the world.

An Impossible Return by Caroline Laurent, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, Amazon Crossing, 2022

“Courage is the weapon of those who have no choice. We will all, in our poor lives, have to be courageous at one moment or another. Just you wait.”

In 1967, the local population of the Chagos Archipelago was forcibly expelled from their homes. A cluster of over sixty islands in the Indian Ocean, the Chagos Archipelago is a British colony, once home to over 1,500 inhabitants, most descended from indentured and enslaved laborers from Senegal, Madagascar, Mozambique, and India. When Diego Garcia, the largest island of the archipelago, was identified as a desired location for a United States military base, the government of the United Kingdom ripped the Chagossian people from the land of their birth, threw them into cargo holds, and deposited them in Mauritius with only what they were able to carry.

This real life human rights tragedy is the setting of Caroline Laurent’s novel An Impossible Return, translated from the French by Asymptote contributor Jeffrey Zuckerman. More than a backdrop, the political maneuvering that led to exile for the Chagossian people is the machinery that fuels Laurent’s plot, and our two main characters, Marie Ladouceur and Gabriel Neymorin, are wrenched apart by the gears of history.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our November Book Club Title: Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada

November 30, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

. . . the tension of the story's thread does not snap; it remains taut and coiled, hinting but never giving.

After a long history of marginalization, unconventional narratives of gender, parenthood, and conception are coming to the forefront, representing a pivotal step forward as our conversations around these foundational matters continue to be rife with tumult, tensions, and inquiries. In this month’s Book Club selection, Weasels in the Attic, award-winning Japanese writer Hiroko Oyamada confronts the murky subject of family and childbearing with her signature command of the strange, weaving a narrative that encapsulates the surreality of these societal pressures. In her questioning of gender stereotypes and heteronormativity, Oyamada’s novella is a fascinating, disarming path through the psychology of not-yet parents, casting a dark suspicion onto the bright facade of nuclear familyhood.

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.  

Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada, translated from the Japanese by David Boyd, New Directions, 2022

Though Japan is famed for horror films of unsparing gore, I feel that the nation’s best stories of the uncanny are found in quieter narratives. Hiroko Oyamada’s Weasels in the Attic, translated by David Boyd, joins other globally famous Japanese authors like Yoko Tawada, Yukiko Motoya, Sayaka Murata in delivering a chill, caused not so much by overt implications of a world gone sideways than by the uneasy feeling that something is deeply wrong—something you can’t quite put your finger on.

Weasels in the Attic, Oyamada’s third volume from New Directions, also shares with Tawada, Motoya, and Murata a preoccupation with fertility and childlessness, two physio-sociological conditions gripping contemporary Japanese society as the population continues to shrink. While some politicians have acknowledged that reforms in work life and childcare are necessary to encourage population growth, blame is still often laid at the feet of women who supposedly prioritize career over family. In Weasels, however, the women of the story seem desperate to have children, while men are the ones expressing reservations or shock at the thought of starting a family. The narrator and his wife haven’t yet gotten pregnant, and she is increasingly frantic for a child while his interest is lukewarm at best. “I always tell her it’s her call,” the narrator explains to his male friends. “Then she comes back with all these pamphlets and websites . . . It’s the same thing every night. Then she asks me: ‘On a scale of one to ten, how badly do you want kids?’” The narrator’s qualms are further hampered by his possible impotency, something he refuses to investigate even when his wife hands him a sample cup point blank.

During a visit to friend-of-a-friend Urabe, the narrator holds Urabe’s newborn daughter and narrates her appearance: “The baby’s face was small and red. Her shut eyes looked like knife slits. I could feel her warmth and dampness through the layers of cloth.” In such a small child, there are already hints of the uncanny, of something lurking in the humid, murky depths. The moment the narrator relinquishes the baby to her mother, he becomes preoccupied with Urabe’s extensive exotic fish collection. Tanks fill Urabe’s home, and he and his wife breed the fish selectively, carefully—yet at the same time, unpredictably. “We still don’t fully understand the relationship between genotype and phenotype,” Urabe’s wife tells the narrator. “We haven’t been able to confirm which genes lead to which patterns. He says that’s why we need to experiment with different pairings—to see which combinations they produce.” In the course of rereading (which I would highly recommend with this text), this sentence rings differently, terrifyingly. Who precisely is experimenting with whom? And to what end? Is it Urabe experimenting with fish worth hundreds of dollars, or is it his uncanny wife—or more accurately, the mother of his child—experimenting with potential mates? After all, as we soon learn, she might possibly be the same girl he discovered in his storeroom dressed in nothing but underwear and a slip, eating bags of dried fish food. The reader, however, is never given clear confirmation of this fact; the shadowy depths of Weasels refuse any straightforward details. READ MORE…

Help us toward our big 5-0 this #GivingTuesday

November 29, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

A special message from our editor-in-chief

Dear reader,

Time flies. It’s almost the year-end. How was 2022 for you?

Amid new work from a staggering 75 countries across four quarterly issues, we were very proud to have shone a spotlight on Ukrainian voices this year, voices like Zenia Tompkins, Andrii Krasnyashchikh, Yaryna Chornohuz, Galina Itskovich and Sergey Katran (outraged by what we saw on the news, we also announced a #WeStandwithUkraine column on February 25, one day after the Russian invasion began). When Roe was overturned in June, we worked hard behind the scenes to center women’s experiences in the recent Fall issue.

But this year was also marked by great uncertainty. For one, inflation everywhere meant that some team members were no longer able to continue in their roles—this meant that many of us took on extra work to maintain our quality and output; we didn’t want to let our readers down.

We also had to brace ourselves for cancellations in Book Club membership when we announced our first increase in subscription fee after five years, no longer able to absorb the increases in costs (of postage, and of the titles) ourselves. And, on a more personal front—as contributors to the postponed Summer edition knew—I came down with COVID this July, with symptoms that have lingered till now. Though my health is in a better place today than, say, one month ago, nothing is assured about our future: We still don’t qualify for the generous funding that many like organizations from the US or the UK receive.

So, on #GivingTuesday, I have to ask on behalf of my entire team: If our work this past year has meant anything to you, will you take just three minutes and pledge five dollars a month to our mission?

Because we can do even more for world literature with your help. Even better, sign up as a patron or masthead member. To show our gratitude, I’ll even personally put together a care package for you.

Around the corner, our big 5-0 (in issues, not years!) looms. Help us stick around until then. Our 50th edition will be all the more magnificent for it.

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Gratefully,

Lee Yew Leong, editor-in-chief

Translation Tuesday: “The Killer in Compartment Number 8” by Ivanka Mogilska

November 29, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Lora Petrova

[It] turned out that the body was surrounded by poems of an unknown author.

This Translation Tuesday, a literary murder mystery aboard a train carriage reveals the intricacies of expressing a woman’s inner life. Briefly sketched yet drawn with a rich interiority, the Bulgarian writer Ivanka Mogilska’s short fiction is translated by Lora Petrova. Step right onto the crime scene now and find out who’s guilty!

If the cricket that lived in Emilia’s left ear had been less insistent, she would surely have learned the killer’s identity earlier. But he almost never stopped. Most times it was singing with a quiet monotone, making her feel as if she was drifting through a cloud, with a head stuffed full of cotton. The train was wriggling through the valley. The fog was hiding the warning signs on trees about the coming fall. Today, the cricket’s song was especially anxious and Emilia would often have to read the same page twice. 

Soon after departure, the frivolous young man in the group of guests staying at Waterby Manor found the hostess dead in front of an old cabinet in the corridor leading to the kitchen. Police arrived quickly and asked the guests to retire to their rooms. The officers inspected the crime scene.

The cricket in Emilia’s ear hit a high note when it turned out that the body was surrounded by poems of an unknown author and the cabinet had hundreds more pages written in the same hand. Poems, poems, poems. READ MORE…

A Conversation on Kurdish Translation with Farangis Ghaderi

November 28, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Holly Mason Badra

Translation is a commitment—a way of illustrating my commitment to making Kurdish literature known.

We speak here about the practice and politics of Kurdish translation, female representation in Kurdish literature, and the future of Kurdish literary works, culture, and understandings through digital archival projects. 

Holly Mason Badra: Can you talk about the project and translation process for Women’s Voices from Kurdistan: A Selection of Kurdish Poetry? 

Farangis Ghaderi: Women’s Voices from Kurdistan was the result of a collective initiative with my colleagues Clémence Scalbert Yucel and Yaser Hassan Ali. The idea behind it was that, as scholars and researchers of Kurdish literature, we were very aware of the invisibility of Kurdish literature in the world literary arena. The translation of Kurdish literature is emerging but still not comparable with other Middle Eastern languages. At Exeter, there were a number of Ph.D. students and researchers working specifically on Kurdish literature and we had been engaged in translation as part of our research, but these translations often remained unpublished (in theses or dissertations). Occasionally, some translations were published in scholarly publications, but they were only excerpts of the literary pieces and not the entire work. At the time, none of us considered ourselves literary translators. 

We also thought about how works published in academic outlets don’t reach a larger public audience. Reflecting on these issues and realizing our potentials, we hosted a translation workshop in 2017 that was led by Dr. Yucel and made possible by an outreach grant (by the British Institute for the Study of Iraq; BISI), where Ph.D. students working on Kurdish literature came together with researchers at the Center for Kurdish Studies at Exeter and colleagues in translation studies. Each participant had their own selections, but the overall theme was gender, with preference for female poets. Together, we practiced translation and held discussions for two days. After this workshop, Clémence, Yaser, and I continued to meet, discuss, and work on the translations and polish them. We presented our translations in a number of festivals in the UK and began thinking about publishing them. We then approached Transnational Press London about publishing the collection, and they were very enthusiastic about it. 

It was important for us to publish in an outlet that allows the publication of the original Kurdish language as well as the English translation. The collection includes poems from the nineteenth century to contemporary female poetry, written in various Kurdish dialects (Gorani, Kurmanji, Badini, Sorani) and in Arabic. 

HMB: When did you first start working in translation and what has that journey been like for you? 

FG: I started translating into English while pursuing my Ph.D. My research was on the emergence of modern Kurdish poetry. I had to translate classical and modern poetry in three dialects (Kurmanji, Sorani, Gorani) as part of literary analysis. The workshop I described above was foundational for me as a translator—following the workshop, Dr. Yucel and I conducted a research project on English translations of Kurdish literature which is now published. Both the workshop and the research project helped me to become aware of trends in English translations of Kurdish literature—the biases that translation can produce or reproduce and the politics of translation itself. I became more aware of the question of access and the politics of access. How a certain group of translators—in our case, a group of mostly Kurdish researchers at Exeter—were not thinking of ourselves as translators even though we were translating. Translation was part of our job. I began thinking about questions of confidence, exclusions, access (which is limited for Kurdish scholars). The journey has been one of gaining confidence and understanding what translation involves. It has been an educational process, too. 

READ MORE…

Announcing Our Black Friday Sale!

November 25, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Calling all world lit lovers, here’s the #BlackFriday sale you’ve been waiting for!

For three days only, we’re taking 10% off Book Club subscriptions (including the one-year membership). Click here for our special coupon applied pricing and remember: A book club subscription also makes the perfect gift for the reader in your life. Offer expires after 2359 hrs, this Sunday, so hurry!

SIGN UP FOR OUR BOOK CLUB TODAY

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

November 25, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas and MARGENTO

The latest from Romania and the Philippines!

In this week’s literary round-up, we’re bringing coverage from the myriad intrigues of world literature, from storybooks highlighting Indigenous narratives to diasporic Romanian writers, romance writing to exiled heroes. Read on to find out more!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Spain and Romania 

As the Romanian literary scene is gearing up for the twenty-ninth edition of Gaudeamus book fair, organized by Radio Romania in Bucharest from December 7 through the 11, the literary diaspora is both very active and a hot topic in and of itself. A one-day seminar, entitled “European Cultural Representations of Romanian Migration and Exiles” took place at the Romanian Centre, Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) last week. Presentations and roundtables on highlights from the Romanian diaspora across the Western world—such as religious studies international icon and fiction writer Mircea Eliade, Romanian-Spanish comparative literature pioneer Alexandre [Alejandro] Cioranescu, and former Asymptote contributor Matéi Visniec—were complemented by excursuses into the work and lives of personalities relevant to both Romanian and Spanish literatures. Former Asymptote contributor Felix Nicolau, Director of the Romanian Centre and Romanian Language and Literature Lecturer, gave a talk about Alexandru Busuioceanu: a poet, art historian, and essayist credited for establishing Romanian as an academic subject at UCM back in the mid-twentieth century, after founding the UCM Romanian Centre in 1943.

Another major name of the diaspora is Paul Goma, renowned opponent of Ceaușescu’s regime and dissident fiction writer forced into exile (to Paris, France) in the late 1970s, after having survived numerous attempts on his life staged by the Romanian communist secret police or their accessories—only to die from COVID in 2020. A hot-off-the-press book dedicated to the dissident hero by historian, poet, essayist, and Goma scholar Flori Balanescu, Paul Goma: Conștiință istorică și conștiință literară [Historical Conscience, Literary Conscience], is to be launched at Gaudeamus in a week’s time, and it has already grabbed considerable attention on social media. Awarded poet and fiction writer O. Nimigean, himself a Parisian exile, commented on the text as a breakthrough release and expressed his impatience to read the sequel—an already planned book he indirectly disclosed as having insider knowledge on. Such updates can only further stir interest—if not inevitable kerfuffle—since the (albeit rare) publications about Goma expose, just as the author’s own novels did, the collaborationism under communism of certain established literati or public figures: an implication to which the latter usually retort with accusations of anti-semitism. READ MORE…

Illness in the Mirror: An Interview with Senka Marić and Celia Hawkesworth

November 24, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Carol Khoury

I want to take on the subject of my personal journey—to maybe find some truth in it, or even just to ask the right questions.

Our October Book Club selection, Senka Marić’s Body Kintsugi, is a profound documentation of the author’s fight with cancer, and as such it is also an interrogation of time, of physicality, and of transformations. In writing of illness’ warping effect on reality, Marić broadens the claustrophobically private experience of disease and recovery to address universal themes of loss and survival. In this following interview, Carol Khoury talks to Marić and her translator, Celia Hawkesworth, about the immediacy of the text, the mirror image, and how powerful emotions can be distilled into text.

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. 

Carol Khoury (CK): Despite the narrative of Body Kintsugi not being contemporaneous, it’s ‎written with such an engaging power that it feels as though it is happening in ‎real time. ‎So my first question to you, Senka, is about your relationship with time. Is it really ‎as you say in the book—that it has no meaning?

Senka Marić (SM): In a sense, I have told the story of a distinct experience—that of suffering from breast cancer—in a relatable way. Within those moments dictated by illness, time becomes really relative; it doesn’t flow as it normally would, as it is directed or determined by check-ups and operations and chemotherapies. All other matters really cease to exist in the reality of the person who is sick, and as such, time becomes relative, because everything that life normally contains is no longer present. For me, personally, that was the case.

CK: Celia, how did you experience time while you ‎were translating this?

Celia Hawkesworth (CH): Because I had to spend a lot of my own time physically putting myself in the place someone who was going through such hell, I was always quite relieved to get to the passages where the protagonist was remembering her childhood, or other parts that took us a bit away from that continuous, strange world where time didn’t have the same meaning. It’s a bit like in Shakespeare, when you have high drama and high tragedy, and then occasional moments of release. I thought that aspect was very important for keeping one’s attention, but also giving one a bit of a break from the real horror of the suffering.

CK: Senka, one other element in the book that caught my attention is mirrors. ‎There’s something like fifteen mentions—all of which refer to physical mirrors. ‎Yet, the whole narrative is about another mirror. Might I say there was ‎some sort of a mental mirror, one that you used not only to see and show ‎the “you” and the “I”, but also to negate other existences.‎

SM: Frankly, I was trying to play with the idea of reality in its most basic sense: how we take things for granted, and how a sense of reality can be distorted when catastrophe occurs. That’s the background for the whole story—not being able to believe what reality is, and how we then perceive it. When everything is slipping out of our hands, time and space and mirrors in general are our checkpoints. We can be spiritual, we can be this and that, but in the most basic sense, we are physical beings, and we identify with the image of ourselves. We need the acknowledgment from the mirror that we are who we are. That’s why I wrote the moment in which the main character loses her hair, and she starts to cry. That’s the only time she actually really cries. READ MORE…

Tales of Contagion: A Comparative Reading of Goran Stefanovski’s Divo Meso

November 23, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Sofija Popovska

[T]he image of Western Europe as a cataclysmic pathogen becomes a motif, repeated unto the ages of ages.

The Macedonian playwright Goran Stefanovski, working against the background of ex-Yugoslavia, has long used the microcosm of the theatre to address shifting politics, disintegrating identities, and violence in both physical and spiritual levels. His most well-known work, which encapsulates this lifelong address, is perhaps Divo Meso, an intimate family drama that speaks to the overarching condition of the Macedonian nation, as it is subsumed by invasive forces. In this following essay, Sofija Popovska discusses how the play’s oft-overlooked pathogenic themes dialogue with other texts and narratives from across history, and how, seen along these lines, it speaks universally to the private tragedy of loss, as hidden within the greater global narrative of cultural collisions.

The horseman on the white horse was clad in a showy and barbarous attire. . . While his horse continued galloping, he was bending his bow in order to spread pestilence abroad. At his back swung the brass quiver filled with poisoned arrows, containing the germs of all diseases.

—Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

In Scene VIII of Goran Stefanovski’s 1979 theatrical piece, Divo Meso, a destitute Macedonian household is paid a visit by a German investor, who offers to buy their house in order to have it remodeled into a showroom. Upon his arrival, Maria, the mother of the family, plunges into reverie, ruminating about a mythical condition she’s certain she’s plagued by: the eponymous divo meso. It is, we are told, an “old wives’ tale”—flesh which forms around a hair inside the throat, and grows until its victim asphyxiates. Despite its superstitious roots, Maria’s fear sublimates the intuition of a condition more cataclysmic and widespread: the body of Macedonian society, weakened by discord and poverty, being infiltrated by foreign interests as if by a pathogen. Transformed into an eschatological growth, the will of their German visitor continues its indomitable conquest throughout the play, leading the family to a coda marked by desolation, surrender, and powerless rage.

Though indicated by the title, the element of illness in Divo Meso hasn’t been explored much, relegated to the background in favor of discussing the loss of tradition. Regardless, the pathogen metaphor is especially apt at describing imperialist intervention into cultures; rather than cultivating a mutualistic or commensalistic relationship between two consenting cultures, it introduces a drastically one-sided power dynamic, to the profit of one and the undoing of another. However, before we delve further into the specificities of Divo Meso, I would like to invite you to consider two episodes, one historical and one literary, that tell stories of cultural contagion. These will help unravel the pathogen-host relationship in its cultural, imperialist context, and illuminate individual processes that comprise it—such as the transformation of identity into a collision site of imposed, internalized, and inherent traits. Rather than the reductive (albeit also valid) reading of Divo Meso as a tragedy of familial and national scope, a simultaneous reading of the following tragic—and in many ways analogous—texts will allow for a richer understanding of the theatrical piece, one that includes transcultural motifs.

On June 23, 1763, trader and land speculator William Trent recorded in his diary that two Native American diplomats had arrived at Fort Pitt in order to persuade the British to abandon the location. After negotiations failed, the British offered the Delaware emissaries a parting gift. “Out of our regard to them we gave them two Blankets and a Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect,” wrote Trent. It remains unknown whether this instance of biological warfare succeeded, though the Native American population around Fort Pitt was “struck hard” by smallpox in the spring and summer of 1763. This wasn’t the first, nor last tale of contamination to be found in the imperialist trajectories of Western Europeans. Engraved upon traditions, echoing through languages, and rising scar-like from the surface of collective memory, the image of Western Europe as a cataclysmic pathogen becomes a motif, repeated unto the ages of ages. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “a day (like any other)” by Carla Bessa

November 22, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Elton Uliana

walk the dog, here comes the neighbour, hello!, help!, sorry?, how are you?

This Translation Tuesday, the inimitable Carla Bessa plunges us into the frantic interior of a woman (like any other) and her everyday frenzy. If you’ve read Bessa’s work in our pages, you’ll recognise her work as mining the dramatic possibilities of text to revelatory effect; today’s story is another stellar instance. Drawn from her recent book Todas Umas, which explores the effacement of women after marriage and motherhood, Elton Uliana offers us the gushing rhythms of an inundated mind in his tightly woven translation. Read while listening to a recording of the Jabuti Prize winner’s new microfiction!  

a day (like any other)

get up early, have a shower, make some coffee, wake up the kids, kiss them, wake up the husband, kiss him, welcome the housekeeper, good morning!, help!, hi?, good morning!, have breakfast with the husband and kids, help!, did you say anything, honey?, me?, strange I heard something too mum, come on, time to go to school, take the husband and kids to the car, say goodbye, help! walk the dog, here comes the neighbour, hello!, help!, sorry?, how are you?, very well thank you, see you later, help!, turn around, keep walking, go to the bank, go to the hairdresser, help!, help!, go to the beautician, go to the shops, come back home, cook, iron, clean the house, no need for the cleaner it’s done already, visit the mother, help!, help!, help!, make an appointment at the gynaecologist, smile to the doorman, help!, all right, ma’am?, all great and you?, give the car park man some change, help!, help!, take the blender for repair, help!, come home, help!, hang the new painting in the dining room, or perhaps in the bedroom, help!, help!, help!, pick up the kids from school, help with their homework, help!, help!, help!, help!, help!, dinner, put the children to bed, read them a story, sing them a lullaby, stroke them, smother them with the pillow, welcome the husband, poison the husband, go to sleep.

wake up in the middle of the night thinking, shit, forgot the dog.

Translated from the Portuguese by Elton Uliana READ MORE…

Words Like Gunpowder: An Interview with Najwa Bin Shatwan

November 21, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Chinmay Rastogi

What you consider unreasonable, logically fallic, or absurd is our ordinary reality. . .

Najwa Bin Shatwan is a Libyan academic and novelist—or so you will find written across the pages of many journals’ and publishers’ websites, alongside her stories in Arabic and their English translations. But she is so much more, as anyone who has had the pleasure of reading her works can attest to. Born in a land continually reeling with political unrest, she has been denied the privilege of free learning—such as of foreign languages—and suppressed and prosecuted for shedding light on the suffering of people past and present. Still, she weaves magic with words, painting vivid scenes with surreal imagery, and draws you into dialogue and contemplation by first making you smile. 

The imagery used in her pieces is enchanting, which is perhaps not a surprise given how images drive her. Her novel The Slave Yards, which made her the first Libyan writer to be shortlisted for the International Award for Arab Fiction, was catalyzed from an incident wherein she saw a photograph of Benghazi at a friend’s place; the photograph compelled her to show the reality and horrors of the slave trade in Libya. While there have been attempts to shut her down—which have succeeded in making her emigrate to Italy—her oppressors have failed to silence a voice that incorporates the many people, dialects, values, and thoughts she embodies. 

Her latest publication, Catalogue of a Private Life, is a collection of short stories translated form Arabic by Sawad Hussain, and it is a tapestry that incorporates many dualities of a people and their identity: their quirks and rigidity, their ready acceptance of bizarre circumstances and tunnel vision in regular circumstances, their warm humour and the dread of their situations. It won the 2019 English PEN Translates award, and I had the pleasure to talk to her about her life as well as the stories in this collection.

Chinmay Rastogi (CR): Your work has been a guiding light towards the suffering of people in Libya, but it also unveils the atrocities conducted by people of the region in the past, as in The Slave Yards. How difficult is it to stand on middle ground, to give both accounts through your writing?

Najwa Bin Shatwan (NBS): Writing in culturally thorny areas such as the Arab region is not easy, especially if the writer dismantles topics of social or political sensitivity—whether from the past or the present. It is easy for a book’s subject to incite conflict or escalate into a declaration of hostility. Our writing, which focuses on real matters, creates enemies, and such antagonism does not stop at a point of view that differs from what the writer’s. Rather, it may escalate into bloodshed or physical assault, simply because the writer presents a proposal that is different from the society’s vision, and is not in line with the prevailing ideology.

I felt the ferocity of this difference in my writing in terms of its social and political orientation, and with the spread of freedom of expression—which reached a chaotic peak with the emergence of social media—it became possible for those who disagree with a writer to inflame or incite public opinion against them.

Words are like gunpowder—they can ignite at any moment, and the type of writing that touches open wounds is not welcome; people prefer to proceed with their lives in denial, and believe that adopting a false mental attitude regarding many issues is better than getting into trouble.

As a writer, I work honestly and impartially, without complacency, and I feel the danger to my life, to my chances and fortunes in general. READ MORE…

Hate Makes Us Weak

November 19, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Vladimir Vertlib

We should never forget that this war is about defending freedom, democracy and truth against dictatorship, chauvinism and lies.

As Europeans try to make sense of the war on their doorstep, boycotts targeting Russia have reached past the country’s oil exports to its poets, painters and tennis players. The invasion of Ukraine earlier this year set off the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II; it also, according to past contributor Vladimir Vertlib (tr. Julie Winter), inspired a wave of “outright hostility” against Russian literature. This thoughtful essay by the Vienna-based Jewish Russian writer is an argument about the baby and the bathwater—Pushkin and Putin—and a strident call for nuance in wartime.

When I was a child, other people always knew who I was better than I did. One day my parents told me that I was Jewish. But I wanted to be a Leningradian because I was born in Leningrad, known today as St. Petersburg. My parents laughed. They said that you could be a Jew and someone from Leningrad, that was no problem, even if you lived in Vienna. I didn’t feel Austrian or Viennese at that time, although I was undoubtedly at home in our neighborhood Brigittenau. To this day, parts of this Viennese district, as well as the adjoining Leopoldstadt, have remained the only place in the world where I feel I belong.

This ambivalent identity confusion was soon as much a part of my being as was my accent-free German and everyone’s mispronunciation of my first name, which I accepted and eventually even adopted myself. For my Austrian classmates and teachers, however, the matter was perfectly clear: I was a typical Russian. Why I was “typical” was a mystery to me because whenever my classmates or teachers described something as “typically Russian,” they immediately said that they “of course” didn’t mean me.

Brigittenau, where I went to elementary school and later to high school, had belonged to the Soviet occupied zone in Vienna after the war; the memory of that time was still fresh almost fifty years ago when I started school. The “Russians” were said to be brutal and uncultured. They drank water from toilet bowls, screwed light bulbs into sockets that were disconnected from any source of power and then wondered why they didn’t light up, raped women en masse, stole, robbed, murdered and destroyed senselessly, simply out of anger and revenge. Russians are emotional, it was said. Sometimes they’re like children—warm, naive and helpful—but they could suddenly become brutal and unpredictable like wild animals. They were, after all, a soulful people, in both negative and positive respects. The latter was attributed to me. If my essays or speeches were emotional, it was said to be due to my “Russian soul,” and people thought they were paying me a compliment. I, on the other hand, was always unpleasantly affected by these attributions, because I knew, even in elementary school, that Jews and Russians were not the same thing. No Russian, my parents explained to me, would ever accept me as his equal. In the former Soviet Union, ethnic groups, which included Jews, were clearly distinct. So my supposed “Russian soul” was not only embarrassing, it was also presumptuous. I was assigned something that I was not at all entitled to, based on my ethnicity. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

November 18, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Cristina Pérez Díaz, and Julia Sherwood

The latest in literature from Poland, Hong Kong, and Puerto Rico!

This week on Asymptote, we’re your eyes and ears for updates on award seasons, special national literature features, and postcolonial discourse and strategy. Polish literature is soaring at a high after celebrated adaptations and translations are introducing new readers to long-loved works. From Hong Kong, the national security law once again catalyses questions in its suppression of writing, even as local writers are seeing much love abroad. in Puerto Rico, writers are questioning US-backed funding and its entrapments. Read on to find out more.

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Poland

Autumn is Poland’s award season, and this year saw the prizes go to a variety of genres. For the first time since 2009, NIKE, Poland’s most prestigious literary prize, went to a book of poetry: Jerzy Jarniewicz’s “erotically daring” collection Mondo Cane. Edward Pasewicz, whose novel Pulverkopf was also shortlisted, took home the coveted Angelus Prize for literature from Central Europe—only the second Polish book to win the accolade in the award’s twelve-year history. The Readers’ Angelus Prize went to Czech writer Jaroslav Rudiš for his novel Winterbergs letzte Reise, written in German and translated into Polish by Małgorzata Gralińska, and his publisher Książkowe klimaty scored another success with Bartosz Sadulski’s “literary fable and anti-historical reportage” Rzeszot, garnering the Kościelskich Prize.

Polish literature has enjoyed something of a boom in English, placing second in a recent survey conducted by The Bookseller, which is based on Nielsen BookScan data for the fifty-two weeks since April 16, 2022. The results show that in this period, translated fiction accounted for 11.4% of total fiction revenue, proving that we have moved even further from the proverbial 3%. Broken down into languages, 60% of the translations were from Japanese—unsurprising given that 99.7% of the total revenue was generated by manga. The next language, French, trailed at 6.1%, and Polish came in at third with 4.6%, beating translations from Italian, German, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, and Norwegian. Much of this success appears to be linked to Andrzej Sapkowski’s blockbuster fantasy The Witcher, which has filled the Game of Thrones-shaped hole on Netflix; the first two volumes of the eight-part saga were translated by Danusia Stok and the remainder by David French, who went on to translate his Hussite Trilogy. Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel Prize has also contributed to this success, as has the fact that Polish literature was the market focus at the 2017 London Book Fair.

Here’s hoping that this interest will extend to a slew of recent translations from the Polish. According to Her, “a book-length interview with the Mother of God” by Maciej Hen (recently interviewed on the Asymptote blog by fellow writer Wioletta Greg), was published by Holland House in Anna Blasiak’s translation on November 3. On the same day, Penguin Books released Anna Zaranko’s long-awaited translation of The Peasants, one of Poland’s most famous twentieth-century epics by the 1924 Nobel Prize winner Władysław Reymont. In What We Leave Behind: A Birdwatcher’s Dispatches from the Waste Catastrophe, translated by Zosia Krasodomska-Jones and published by MacLehose Press on October 13, ornithologist and writer Stanisław Łubieński shows how consumer society has spun out of control, leading to the point of environmental catastrophe. Finally, Vine Editions, a new non-profit publisher based in Detroit with a focus on world literature, is about to bring out its first title, Piotr Paziński’s Bird Streets (Ptasie ulice) translated by Ursula Phillips. READ MORE…