The World in Transformation, The Poem in Translation

A guide to translated poetry through our archives!

If you happen to be participating in The Sealey Challenge, wherein the literary community is encouraged to read a book of poetry everyday for the month of August, then the following is a guide to translated collections that might help you meet your mark, curated through Asymptote‘s annals of world literature. And if notconsider picking up one of these authors or text anyway, for within these works are brightnesses of spirit and sensuality, ranging journeys through landscapes and psychologies, and the courage of witness and words. These bold and wondrous works show that if you want to know a language, you should seek the knowledge of its poets.

We read widely to nurture our wonders—this much is true for all of literature, but is underlined especially when reading poetry. As the particular challenge of translating this tempestuous and evasive craft continues to unfold across the pages of poets and translators around the world, the growing numbers of collections that come to meet our shelves and hands are a testament to an endless dialectic of what Kenneth Rexroth called “imaginative identification”. The translation of a poem starts with wonder, with the identification of a gleam at the centre of the words, and a fierce urge to protect it. When this intensity then survives the removal of its own language and finds an exacting home in another, the result is just as wondrous. So much is left behind in translation, this much is true and shall always be true, but what remains constant is this sense—of awe, of the sense of something having opened up, of breathlessness in front of beauty, in front of truth. It arrives with a different music, in a different voice, but it was struck with the same spirit.

In the many poets and collections that we’ve covered at Asymptote, the work always identifies with the precise tenet of poetry to be close to its language. In German poet Kathrin Schimdt’s Twenty Poems, translated by Sue Vickerman, reviewer Andreea Scridon describes how “the two poets meet in their exigency and perspicacity, their quintessentially European writing towards a determined and defined idea.” Similarly, in Chinese poet Yi Lei’s collection, My Name Will Grow Wide Like A Tree, reviewer Marina Dora Martino notes translators Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi’s efforts to “open Yi Lei’s private world to the possibility of dialogue.”

Some translators work closely with their poets, in constant exchange and negotiation. Filip Noubel notes how in Taiwanese poet Amang’s Raised by Wolves, translator Steve Brandbury was careful to consult the author, ensuring that she “understands the various options I have for representing that in English.” Their collaboration defied limits, resulting in “a humorous approach to these seemingly insurmountable obstacles.” Other translators do not possess such luxuries. Alexander Dickow and Sean T. Reynolds, the translators of Swiss poet Gustave Roud’s Air of Solitude and Requiem, had to work without insight from the originating mind, the poet having passed in 1976. Nevertheless, reviewer Sarah Moore exalts the work as a “powerful, superb translation from one of Switzerland’s greatest poets of the twentieth century.”

So much of the importance in these texts lies in introducing the works of vital figures in movements that changed the world. In Alice Paalen Rahon’s Shapeshifter, translated by Mary Ann Caws, we see a collection that sheds light on a multi-faceted Surrealist, whose literary output had previously been overshadowed by her achievements in visual art. As reviewer Georgina Fooks states: “. . . with the arrival of Shapeshifter, we can gain valuable insight into this remarkable poet who was one of the best of the Surrealists, despite the lack of wider recognition.” Another Surrealist giant, Giorgio di Chirico, is revived in poetry by way of translator Stefania Heim; in his collection, Geometry of Shadows, reviewer Garrett Phelps identifies “a visual mind orienting itself toward the written word: a promiscuous use of strong imagery, and waves upon waves of metaphors at the expense of a more nimble and protean style.” Also defying any singular definition is Russian sculptor and founder of Russian Conceptualism, Dmitri Prigov, whose defiant and liberated poetics have reached the Anglophone by way of Simon Schuchat and Ainsley Morse in Soviet Texts. READ MORE…

Dubravka Ugrešić on Asymptote: The Visa to Enter is Good Writing

Check out our submission guidelines and send us your best work today!

“As a reader of Asymptote, I am overjoyed to see literary texts by friends I haven’t seen for a long time, to discover new writers and new names from all over the world. Asymptote has become a literary realm in cyber space built by enthusiasts: the visa to enter is good writing.”

Dubravka Ugrešić, winner of the 2016 Neustadt Literature Prize

Did you know that Winter in Sokcho, last year’s US National Book Award winner for Translated Literature, made its English debut in our very pages way back in 2017, and it was on the basis of that publication that translator Aneesa Abbas Higgins was able to find a publisher for her manuscript?

Asymptote is proud to be a leading purveyor of world literature—with a truly global readership that includes luminaries such as Dubravka Ugrešić. In our twelve years, we have built one of the best archives of world literature by casting our nets as far and wide as possible—not only is our team spread out across six continents, we are also open for submissions—in all the usual genres: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, criticism, and interviews—throughout the year. And we now guarantee a one-month turnaround time for submission outcomes, and offer optional editorial feedback so that you can grow as a translator.

If you’d like to be a part of our next issue, we encourage you to send in your best work today! Worth a special mention is our “Brave New World Literature” category, under the aegis of which we invite critical or even celebratory essays from readers, critics, authors, publishers, and of course translators discussing and problematizing the ways in which non-English texts reach Anglophone readers, perhaps envisioning a “brave new world literature.” Highlights have included Gitanjali Patel and Nariman Youssef’s essay that fleshes out the very real challenges faced by non-white literary translators, as well as Eugene Ostashevsky’s whipsmart poems, from the current issue, that capture the translator’s liminality.

If you would like to publish in the blog instead, we welcome pieces on topics ranging from global cinema to the ethics of review to the literature of revolution. Apart from essays, we run dispatches from international literary events, interviews, weekly new translations, book reviews, and more. Like our journal, we are looking for creative, original, and highly engaging work that considers the role of translation in literature, the arts, and the fabric of everyday life. We welcome pitches for the blog via email.

READ OUR SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Photograph of Dubravka Ugrešić by Shevuan Williams

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Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Mateo Morrison

my home becomes / a democratic cemetery / everyone free to choose their tomb

This Translation Tuesday, dive into three poems by the Dominican poet Mateo Morrison, recipient of the Premio Nacional de Literatura. Drawn from Morrison’s collection titled Hard Equilibrium, the poems here exhibit a form of night vision that navigates the reader through a world of emerging outlines. Rendered by poet and translator Ariel Francisco in a language that evokes through its understatement, we are thrilled to share these alluring poems with you. 

Scene of the Dead

Night arrives,
my home becomes
a democratic cemetery
everyone free to choose their tomb.

We lay bare our vocation
of living cadavers.
Not even a whisper is heard
and sometimes
—the neighbors know—
we play at death.

Our flowers no longer grow
their yellow’s become
one with death’s playful touch.

The gnawed doors are rigid
the moths have decided
to cease their gorgeous woodwork. READ MORE…

Summer 2022: Highlights from the Team

Don’t know where to begin with our latest issue? We’re here to help!

The most striking piece in this issue was Abdelfattah Kilito’s “Borges and the Blind” (tr. Ghazouane Arslane) for informing me of Borges’ deep affiliation with Arabic literature (something I wasn’t aware of before)—it opened my eyes to another dimension of Borges’ works as well as highlighted the blind spot of critics and readers of translation who might not be privy to the multifaceted aspects of the text behind the text. Cao Kou’s “The Wall Builder” (tr. Chen Zeping and Karen Gernant) is a truly wonderful and chilling fable on the idea of border, i.e., a porous wall between insider and outsider, individual and the collective in a repressive society. Anna Felder’s “Unstill Life with Cat” (tr. Brian Robert Moore) is a lovely, fully immersive tale from a cat’s point-of-view. The translation is magical, wondrously immediate. I love Rose Bialer’s perceptive questions and the resulting interview with Maureen Freely for revealing how Turkey’s political situation might affect the relationship between an author and his translator, and how there are so many layers of “the other” in Turkish society.

—Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

Kelsi Vanada’s translation is itself a reflection of Andrea Chapela’s long meditation on the meaning and mechanics of mirrors, with all the inevitable subtle distortions and complex reconfigurations that Chapela elaborates on. This extended reflection employs myriad angles of vision‚ philosophy, science, toys, personal narrative, literature, and history, from which to view the significance of mirrors, the act of looking at oneself, and the act of constructing a self-image, with and without the fragmented and inevitably distorted images that mirrors provide. Juan Calzadilla’s poems from Dictated by the Pack (tr. Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott) are virtuosic translations—the complexity of the diction and rhythms as well as the subtlety of how the language accretes are very challenging to carry over into English without disrupting the balance between sense-making and surprises in the language. The lines shift across the page, like waves lapping onto the shore, as if the rhythms of thought have been recorded faithfully in their syncopated arrivals, gaps, and runnings-over. Almog Behar’s long poem “First We’ll Speak Many Words About God” (tr. Shoshana Olidort) is a meditation on religion and god, but also an interrogation of our conception of god, an interrogation of the faithful as well as the faithless. It’s subversive and yet hopeful. Sa’eed Tavana’ee Marvi’s ”The Open Tome” (tr. Khashayar Kess Mohammadi) is set in a post-apocalyptic, interplanetary, post-Earth world. The voice of the poem shifts‚ from an unnamed speaker, to a television set, to an ”Oceandweller,” to an unnamed speaker again. The experimental formatting of the poem allows the reader to shift between these different lens ratios. As such, the reader experiences a telescoping which perhaps informs the experience alluded to in the poem‚ by a visionary which either documents the future, or foretells the otherworldliness of the present moment. I really enjoyed Rose Bialer’s interview with Maureen Freely, which touches on the craft of translation, the challenges and the advantages of translating through the prism of race, gender, sexuality, etc., and what it’s like to navigate a translator-author relationship that spans two very different cultures, especially when the author in question is famous, and at certain points even infamous.

—M. L. Martin, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

I have a distinct affinity for Mitteleuropa miserablism, and this edition contains two quintessential instances of this literary tendency: Elfriede Jelinek (tr. Aaron Sayne) and Thomas Bernhard (tr. Charlie N. Zaharoff). It does not get much more central European than Austria, and the Austrians seem to have an affinity for misanthropy, self-loathing, destruction, perversity, and psychosis, but all expressed in the most perfect prose, poetry, painting, and music. Part of my love for these two writers in particular, however, is their pushing, bending, and breaking of the formal rules of language. Perhaps this formalism is my own perversity, since, as a copy-editor, I should be forcing such language back into its grammatical and syntactical straightjacket; but as much as I know and can enforce such rules in a professional manner, I thrive and find a thrill in breaking them. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, and Sweden!

This week, our editors from around the world report on book-crafting as political resistance and new poetry anthologies in Puerto Rico, a controversial book fair in Hong Kong, and the recovery after decades of a lost manuscript by a major literary figure in Sweden. Read on to find out more!

Cristina Pérez Díaz, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Puerto Rico

The poets Nicole Delgado and Xavier Valcárcel founded Atarraya Cartonera in 2009. Making books out of discarded cardboard boxes was their response to the economic crisis just beginning to hit Puerto Rico—the result of more than a decade of neoliberal policies and obscene corruption. In the 1990s, neoliberalism had left its mark on the book market with the arrival of the gigantic US chain Borders, whose monopoly forced many small independent bookstores out of business. Borders sold books mostly in English, which clashed with the reality that Puerto Rico’s first language is Spanish and most of the population is not bilingual. In their stores, Puerto Rican literature was showcased in a small shelf under the headline, “Of local interest.” Nicole and Xavier paid frequent visits to Borders but through the back door. They took the stores’ discarded cardboard boxes to handcraft Atarraya’s own “of local interest” books. Thus, they turned book-crafting into a political gesture by looking at the neoliberal crisis, as Nicole puts it, “not as an obstacle but rather as a material to work with.” The press participated in a larger web of cardboard presses in Latin America, each in its own way a response to a national and global crisis. Atarraya was hence an effort to connect with literary movements in other parts of Latin America, something that has always been hard in Puerto Rico because of the trade limitations imposed by the US. Active until 2016, Atarraya published a total of twenty-four poetry titles, all of which are now available for free as pdfs on its archival blog.

Nicole and Xavier have continued collaborating––and dream of reviving Atarraya one day. Last month, they co-hosted a virtual editing workshop at La Impresora, a publishing press and Risograph shop founded in 2016 by Nicole with fellow poet and editor Amanda Hernández. La Impresora recently received a grant from Proyecto Inversión Cultural, which has facilitated, among other things, the offering of free workshops. The first, addressed to emerging writers without a published book, tackled the ropes of the editorial process. Together with the ten participants who were all in their early twenties, Nicole and Xavier rehearsed what goes into bookmaking, including content, conceptualization, and production. The result is a collaborative, forthcoming anthology including poems from each of the attendants. The title, Ese lugar violento que llamamos normalidad (That violent place we call normality), reveals how things have and have not changed in the ten years since Xavier and Nicole edited a first poetry anthology, back with Atarraya Cartonera. The latter’s title was Plomos (Lead Sinking Weights), a loaded word that simultaneously alludes to the small weights used for sinking the fishing net, to water contamination by lead, and to gun violence––part of Puerto Rico’s “normality.” As Nicole and Xavier write in the blog, “any relationship between that word and the violent circumstances of the country or with the contamination caused by certain heavy metals, is absolutely intentional.” Back in 2012, there was room for metaphoric language. In 2022, an emerging generation of writers names violence with even more earnest precision.

READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (Aug 2022)

What has our literary powerhouse of a crew been up to this past quarter? Read on to find out!

Editor-at-Large for the Philippines Alton Melvar M Dapanas’s original cross-genre work (part poem, part essay) will come out in In Between Spaces: An Anthology of Disabled Writers (Virginia, USA: Stillhouse Press), which is now available for pre-order. Their translation of Filipino transgender writer and past contributor Stefani J Alvarez’s short prose has also been published in the first issue of the Oxford Anthology of Translation and their book review of Shuntaro Tanikawaz’s anthology The Art of Being Alone: Poems 1952-2009 (tr. Takako U. Lento, Cornell University Press) appeared in the eleventh issue of Tokyo Poetry Journal. 

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania & Moldova, recently presented a #GraphPoem computational performance at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2022, #DHSI22, and contributed an article on the #GraphPoem poetics of “network walks, stigmergy, and accident in performance” to the latest issue of IDEAH.

Blog Editor Erica X Eisen has found an agent to represent her debut novel, I Come from a Cold Country. An excerpt will be published in Guernica in August 2022 under the title “To Kill a Horse.”

Incoming Nonfiction Editor Ian Ross Singleton’s novel Two Big Differences will be featured alongside The Orchard by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry on Punctured Lines, the blog for post-Soviet literature.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has a review of Kjell Askildsen’s “Everything Like Before” out in Full Stop and an appreciation of Aimee Bender’s short story “Off” in Fiction Writers Review.

Educational Arm Assistant Mary Hillis recently reviewed Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight by Riku Onda (tr. Alison Watts), Death on Gokumon Island by Seishi Yokomizu (tr. Louise Heal Kawai), and Silent Parade by Keigo Higashino (Giles Murray) for Asian Review of Books. 

Rachel Farmer, Chief Executive Assistant, has translated a chapbook for Strangers Press as part of their +SVIZRA series focusing on Swiss literature. Her translation is an extract of In Foreign Lands, Trees Speak Arabic by Usama Al Shahmani, a memoir of his experiences as an Iraqi refugee newly arrived on Swiss soil.

Translation Tuesdays Editor Shawn Hoo‘s translation of Singapore Literature Prize-winning writer Wong Koi Tet’s “Turtle Fever” was recently published in Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation. Shawn’s debut chapbook, Of the Florids, has also recently been published by Diode Editions and is available to order here. 

Interested in joining us behind the scenes? Good news: We’ve just released our final recruitment drive of the year—check out the newly available openings and submit an application today! READ MORE…

Her Turn: The English and Russian Stories of Olga Zilberbourg, AKA Olga Grenets

The Russian language, here, gifts its writer a context. . .

When a writer earns a second language, what does it mean to write in the distinct spaces within and between the two? In this essay on Russian writer Olga Zilberbourg, who also goes by Olga Grenets, nonfiction editor Ian Ross Singleton explores the various ways that language can reveal, point to, and emphasize in both originals and translations.

What does another language afford an exophonic writer—one writing in a language other than her native tongue? Olga Zilberbourg, also known as Olga Grenets in her Russian publications, is both translingual and exophonic. The English-language collection, Like Water and Other Stories, was published in 2019 after a trio of Russian books; then, in 2021, many of the stories from Like Water appeared in Russian as Задержи дыхание (Hold Your Breath). The stories of Like Water and its edited, translated successor open up the span of Zilberbourg’s/Grenets’ linguistic experience. The Russian iteration of the tales are not word-for-word translations, and, as with any translation, they present a reflection of the English-language original—no matter how close, even the strictest of translations alters a story. So, while Hold Your Breath may be a closely related work, it nonetheless stands as its own expression of (in this case) Grenets’ work.

Many of the stories in both collections present reflections on an immigrant’s experience. “Plastic Film With a Magnetic Coating” is about mixtapes, and the part they played in childhood romances and gender roles during the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet nineties. It is almost identical in both the English original and Russian translation, but in the English, the last sentence makes a disclaimer: “I’m speaking, of course, of a very different time and place.” What is significant about Zilberbourg’s work is that the two versions of this story span those two different times and places. In the Anglophone literary world, Zilberbourg is allocated under the umbrella of writers born in the Soviet Union, a clear mark of difference; to the audience of Like Water, then, this sentence is clear, intended to describe the exotic content of the story.

However, what might sound foreign to a reader of Like Water may, of course, be more commonplace to a reader of Hold Your Breath. The Russian translation of the story has a completely different ending, omitting this sentence entirely. Such a drastic change make sense; presumably, for the majority of those reading Hold Your Breath, the setting would not be a completely different place, and the narrative time is simply the not-so-distant past. In the English version, Zilberbourg’s narrator belongs to a generation that would recognize the romantic exchange of mixtapes in that time and place, and in the Russian version, the narrator adds a more specific, personal passage to their story, and it’s this reveal that concludes the Russian version of “Plastic Film . . .”

This passage in question specifies the narrator’s sexuality as one not necessarily falling within heterosexual norms: “Разумеется, когда через кассету я получила признание от девочки, я решила, что сообщение предназначено не мне, и ничего не ответила.” (“Of course, when, by cassette, I received a confession from a girl, I decided that the message wasn’t meant for me and didn’t answer.”) In English, the story can be intuited as relating to heterosexual relationships; in the Russian, there is a potential lesbian romance. In this case, the question of what an attained language can offer might be inverted to ask what a return to one’s primary language can afford. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Prodigy” by Nei Lopes

Rumor had it the festival in the bay was being watched from the highest parts of the city too.

This Translation Tuesday, dive into a short story from Jabuti Prize-winning author Nei Lopes that takes the reader a century back to Guanabara Bay in Brazil where a circus troupe disembarks. Drawn from a short story collection (Nas águas desta baía há muito tempo: Contos da Guanabara) that zooms in on complex and forgotten chapters in Brazilian history. Hear from translator Robert Smith how Lopes, in Smith’s own words, “undertook meticulous historical research to offer a sweeping view of the place and era, celebrating Afro-Brazilian culture and exploring the history of systemic racism.”

“In portraying a dynamic period of upheaval, the narrator Prodigy occasionally overwhelms readers with the feeling that too much is happening too fast. At the same pace that his story becomes entangled with that of the geographical region, two revolts, and the historical figure João Cândido Felisberto, his ebullient mood overlaps episodes of horrific violence. This translation took some liberties in altering punctuation to maintain this disorienting effect. When translating idiomatic expressions indicative of a past era, I looked to rough English equivalents that would sound similarly dated to contemporary readers. A challenge specific to this short story is the multivocal narrative, which leaves the question open as to whether we are facing a carnival storyteller who is cordially inviting us to suspend disbelief, a folktale with elements of magical realism, or an unreliable narrator whose traumatic experiences as a victim of abuse and a soldier have led him to rewrite his life story.”

—Robert Smith

This island has a lot of stories. They all do, I should say; the whole bay: land and sea. The day the first circus arrived, for example, was like the world was starting all over again.

When the barge docked and started unloading all that stuff, we had no idea what it might be. But a strange joy took hold of everybody, made us want to sing and dance to do something to please that gift that had fallen from the sky without saying what they had come for. Little by little, the colorful poles, the boards, the wheels, the iron braces, the motley flags appeared… Then the cages with the animals.

It was the Seventh of September¹, and, while we were watching everything in awe, the fireworks were going off. The ships, Tamandaré, Trajano, Liberdade², were sailing by in the bay, shooting their fireworks toward the city, way over on the other side. Right then and there, we knew that something truly beautiful had begun in all of our lives.

Disembarking in the quay, the caravan of oxcarts and wagons continued down the bumpy old road. The company was directed by the famous artist Benedito de Lima. And it arrived on our island, straight from Niterói, to save us from our isolation and change our daily routine. It popped up out of nowhere, the only attraction in our village, stirring up the hopes and daydreams of rich and poor, young and old, black and white; everybody.

No one had known the circus was going to come. But when it arrived, even without announcements or pamphlets or newspapers, word got round. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2022

This issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured.

The Summer 2022 Issue is our forty-fifth edition, featuring work from thirty-one countries! From newly translated fiction by luminaries such as Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard, to our special feature highlighting Swiss literature, and to probing essays that interrogate the adoption of new languages, these intricately linked writings feature characters who are thrown into abysses both personal and political but discover moments of solace, communion, and revelation. To introduce you to another rich, wide-ranging issue, our blog editors discuss their favorite pieces.

In Elisa Shua Dusapin’s 2021 National Book Award-winning novel, Winter in Sokcho, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins from the French, the unnamed narrator, a young French Korean woman living on the border between North and South Korea, experiences an ongoing crisis of identity due her inability to be seen, displacement, and strained relationships with her domineering mother and absent boyfriend. In the novel, the narrator seeks to recover a self that has been rendered invisible. One of Dusapin’s most fitting metaphors for this reassembling of the self is the narrator’s constant search for her reflection in the mirror of the guesthouse where she works. Similarly, the search for a true reflection emerges as a central theme in the introspective Summer 2022 issue. It is apt in these precarious times when the stability of the self is being shaken by forces of displacement and politics that this issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured. The building of the self is literalized by Lu Liu’s playful yet melancholy cover art, in which two boys nervously construct a sand tower out of words, alluding to the Tower of Babel made personal in Jimin Kang’s moving essay, “My Mother and Me.”

The mirror is the object of Andrea Chapela’s kaleidoscopic, multidisciplinary self-inquiry, “The Visible Unseen,” elegantly rendered by Kelsi Vanada. It adopts the fragmentary form of a series of failed beginnings, in the manner of Janet Malcolm’s famous essay on David Salle, Forty-One False Starts. Chapela’s variation of the form represents the difficulty of locating the self in one’s reflection. By extension, Chapela argues that at a given time, the self can never be completely isolated; rather, it can only ever be seen through a particular type of mirror, at a certain angle, beneath a certain light, yielding a fragment of the whole. Just as Chapela scrutinizes the mirror through a variety of perspectives—scientific, literary, philosophical, memoiristic—so must we be as comprehensive yet fragmentary when we search for ourselves. As Chapela writes, “Little by little, I start to accept that each new beginning of the essay is just one piece of the full picture.”

READ MORE…

Sponsored Post: Register for the American Literary Translators Association’s Virtual Programming, ALTA45!

ALTA is hosting an exciting series of virtual programming exploring literary translation. View the full schedule of events and register today!

Dates: April – November 2022

For aspiring, to mid-career, to seasoned translators, the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) has something for you!

Now through November 2022, ALTA is hosting an exciting series of virtual programming exploring literary translation. View the full schedule of events and register today!

At ALTA45, you can:

  • Learn from twice-monthly panels and roundtables on literary translation, such as:
    • Overthrowing the Idea of the Mother Tongue
    • Words that Get Off the Page: Translating for the Stage and the Page
    • Translating Children’s Literature: Values, Norms, and Ethics
    • …and many others!
  • Listen to monthly Bilingual Readings, where translators present new and exciting work in translation
  • See a staged reading of a play in translation held in Tucson, AZ in the fall
  •  …and much more!

How to register: Purchase an All-Access Registration which includes access to all 2022 events. All-Access Registration is $75 at the standard rate, and $150 at the Pay-it-Forward Rate, while single event tickets are $10 per event. Either purchase your All-Access Registration here, or browse all the events and purchase a single event ticket for each panel, roundtable, or reading.

ALTA is excited to welcome attendees from all over the world to take part in these events for ALTA45! What are you waiting for? Check out the full schedule and register today!

The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) supports the work of literary translators, advances the art of literary translation, and serves translators, and the students, teachers, publishers, and readers of literature in translation. Find out how to become a member here.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from Thailand, Poland, and the Philippines!

In this week’s collection of literary news from around the world, our editors report on political dissident writers in Thailand, a literary festival in Poland, and prizes for writers in the Philippines. Read on to find out more!

Peera Songkünnatham, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Thailand

Activists critical of the Thai establishment have to contend with not only the threat of royal defamation laws but also charges of mental illness. No one knows this more intimately than writer, translator, and bookseller Small Bandhit Aniya: in 1965, he was thrown in a psychiatric hospital by police after he camped outside the Russian Embassy in Bangkok and wrote “It is better to die in Moscow than to stay in Thailand” on the embassy walls in chalk. In 1975, he was charged with lèse-majesté for a booklet lambasting Haile Selassie I, the emperor of Ethiopia, but escaped imprisonment due to being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. This professional-opinion-turned-legal-fact would become the saving strategy for his lawyers in subsequent decades, most recently in 2014—to the dismay of the man himself, who insists he’s perfectly sane.

Starting this week, a literary translation initiative is putting a spotlight on Bandhit’s work along with the voices of other allegedly insane subjects in the kingdom. Under the theme “Madman, Madwoman, Madhuman,” the website Sanam Ratsadon released an excerpt from Bandhit’s autobiographical novel, in which he plays with the idea that he may indeed be insane. Rather than rejecting the diagnosis outright, as he has in his public statements, Bandhit takes the strange route of fictionalizing madness. “There is no doubt that I am mentally ill,” he writes. “Many things I have done in the past and will do in the future clearly signal that I am a psycho, the kind with paranoid schizophrenia.” Is this satire? In any case, this is a literary experiment that has yet to be fully appreciated and properly interpreted in Thailand. May the world be introduced to him, then.

Meanwhile, the short story “Sound of Laughter” by Mutita Ubekka, published as part of the same initiative, questions the self-help, positive-thinking mindset of the Thai public health sector and its allies through the perspective of a woman who is pushed to the brink of suicide by the country’s sociopolitical conditions, like many others in the “Sufferers Association of Thailand.” The story was originally written for a 2020 creative writing contest under the sunny theme of “Day of Suffering That Passed” as part of the project “Read to Heal the Heart.” Seeing through it all, the madwoman discovers her own way of overcoming suffering—through the Jokeresque laughter in a therapist’s office.

READ MORE…

All Hail the Summer 2022 Issue!

Featuring Elfriede Jelinek, Thomas Bernhard, Maureen Freely, and a spotlight on Swiss literature

You here for the party? Step this way! Bigger than any conversation pit, our newly furnished Summer 2022 edition boasts a staggering thirty-one-country capacity. From Austria, expect a darkly gossipy Elfriede Jelinek, who will be bringing along her whiny friend Thomas Bernhard (Tom doesn’t get out of his house too much, and it shows). Representing Algeria on the other hand is Habib Tengour; there he is, showing off a beloved trinket! Best known for introducing Orhan Pamuk to English readers, Maureen Freely is also in the house, regaling everyone with tales from her Istanbul childhood. In the corner, we have a cluster of French-, German-, and Italian-speaking guests huddled over a platter of cheese. One of them happens to be cheese expert Anaïs Meier, who swears by her compatriots’ rich inner lives (very much on display in the Swiss Literature Feature, sponsored by Pro Helvetia): “As a Swiss gets older, the outer rind toughens, but in their heart the cheese continues to seethe, hot and liquid.”

The game we’ll be playing tonight is Spot the Mise en Abyme! In case you don’t know the term, it literally means “placed in the abyss”; go here for examples of this mirroring literary device. How about one from the issue itself to get you started? See the Tower of Babel right there on the cover, gorgeously illustrated by Seattle-based guest artist Lu Liu? It’s picked up in the beautifully expansive poem by Almog Behar and again in the poignant nonfiction by Jimin Kang, before being reflected back in this Tower of Babel-like gathering of eighteen languages. (After all, according to Mexican essayist Andrea Chapela, “All this language is like a game of mirrors, multiplying to infinity whatever it touches.”) The guest who emails, with substantiation, the most mises en abyme—across all the texts in the new issue—by 30 August will win a prize worth USD50, along with publication in our blog.

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Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: The Lisbon Syndrome by Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles

[T]he past and present histories of Venezuela and Portugal intertwine in this moving story about art and human resilience.

In The Lisbon Syndrome, Venezuelan writer Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles movingly navigates the intricate conflux of tragedies both far away and close to home. Juxtapositioning the cities of Lisbon and Caracas as each is underlined by its own catastrophe, Rugeles positions a human perspective amidst events far beyond a single individual’s control, offering a glimpse at singular agency and narrative power behind greater systems of repression.

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.

The Lisbon Syndrome by Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles, translated from the Spanish by Paul Filev, Turtle Point Press, 2022

If a comet were to wipe away a major city, leading to the economic and political collapse of an entire continent, would it radically change how we live? It seems impossible to imagine a disaster of such proportions leaving us unaffected, but it depends on where you’re standing. After all, the apocalypse can take many forms; it’s not always as swift and ferocious as a comet. In Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles’s The Lisbon Syndrome, the eponymous catastrophe happens off-stage. The central locus of the story is Caracas, set in an alternative 2017 where the knowledge of Lisbon’s disappearance is scarcel the only wisps of information are those that manage to escape media and internet channels tightly controlled by the government. These crumbs, as well as a dark cloud enshrouding the sky over the Caribbean, are the only sure signs of a catastrophe big enough to arguably recalibrate how we think about human life and the universe. But if “discontent, hunger, and humiliation” is already part of the daily agenda in a world always at the brink of complete destruction, how can an apocalypse an ocean away be more pressing that that which is outside your door?

Nevertheless, the past and present histories of Venezuela and Portugal intertwine in this moving story about art and human resilience. The novel centers around Fernando, a high school teacher, and his benefactor Moreira, an elusive Portuguese immigrant. Alongside Moreira and his students’ involvement, Fernando has established a ramshackle theater company where—at the former’s explicit request—they perform only classics like Shakespeare and Brecht. The company sells tickets at a loss, and students, as they are disappeared one by one, replace each other in key roles. Fernando also brings his love for theater to the classroom, pushing his students to new, ever more daring heights—even when a particularly unorthodox take on Dante’s Divine Comedy (already dripping in political significance) lands them all in hot water with the government, setting the stage for future tragedies.

Both the preparation of performances and the theater space where they rehearse and dream (called La Sibila) come to be a sacred slice of space and time that anchors Fernando and his students against the rising tide of violence and repression sweeping Venezuela. As a literal war between the Venezuelan government and its citizens unfurls outside the walls of La Sibilia, inside the conversations are far more tender. Amid rehearsals, students drink and dream of becoming reggaeton superstars or classic ballerinas, but the discussion of dreams—a rehearsal in its own way—extends the students into a future so uncertain that Ferando feels guilty for even encouraging the possibility of such fantasies turning to reality. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Hip-hop Songs from the Swahili

Not everyone in jail committed a crime / Not everyone in jail committed a crime

In this very special edition of Translation Tuesdays, we are thrilled to bring to our readers three translations of hip-hop song lyrics translated from the Swahili by Richard Prins. From LWP Majitu to Juma Nature to Inspector Haroun, these three songs give us a peek into the music made by a generation of hip-hop artists working out of contemporary Tanzania. These lyrics, thoughtfully arranged in a visually refreshing use of space, find their own musicality and rhythm on the page in Prins’ translation as they tackle issues such as power and punishment through allegory and allusion. Be sure to check out the music videos in the links under each song as you feel your way into the counterpoints of page and performance. 

Story! Story!

“Hadithi Hadithi” by Sloter ft. Juma Nature

Back in the old days,
in the village of Kwale
in the land of the Pare,
there came a lion,
a lion,
stomping an elephant
dead.

Come, deceit
Make it sweet

So listen: When the wild dogs saw that the lion was a killer,
        They pulled a gun on the lion.
        They pulled a gun on the lion.
        The elephant rose from the dead.

Story! Story!
Come deceit
Make it sweet

Better hear it young
Or you’ll be lost

And now that the elephant was resurrected,
Giraffe
        Lion
                Gazelle
                        Hyena
                                Monkey
                                        Cheetah
                gathered around Lake Tanganyika
                        to witness the matinee
                                spectacle:
An elephant, trampled
        to death.

And once the elephant was resurrected:
        He pulled a gun on the lion.
        The lion pulled a gun back.
        Beat the elephant down.
        Lion stomped him afresh
        and knocked his lights out.

The elephant fell,
extinguished.

Story! Story!
Come deceit
Make it sweet

Better hear it young
Or you’ll be lost READ MORE…