In Spite Of It All: On Czech Comics with Pavel Kořínek and Michal Jareš

January 4, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Sherwood

"Comics" . . . as a genre is something fluid, evasive, and ever-evolving.

After decades of being dismissed as trash or a genre suitable only for children, comic books and graphic novels have begun to gain recognition in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, becoming the subject of serious scholarly interest and major retrospective exhibitions. Comic art now has an established infrastructure, with an annual prize, the Muriel Award, a Centre for Comics Studies (at the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at Palacký University, Olomouc), and an international comic art festival, Frame, in Prague. In the second of our interviews on comic art, Asymptote’s editor-at-large Julia Sherwood asked two of the Centre’s associates and noted experts Pavel Kořínek and Michal Jareš to introduce our readers to this art form and its leading Czech and Slovak proponents.

Julia Sherwood (JS): You and your colleagues have written widely on all aspects of comic art, from reviews to historical and theoretical articles and essays, including V panelech a bublinách (In Panels and Speech Balloons), published in 2015, the first detailed Czech work that summarizes the various theories and concepts around comic art, which you co-authored with Martin Foret. So to begin with, how would you define the genre? 

Pavel Kořínek (PK): The million-dollar question, and straight off, too. There are, of course, many definitions of comics, and new ones are being added all the time. We can revel in Scott McCloud’s definition of comic art as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer”; we can talk about sequentiality and the dominance of the sequential image primarily in the context of print media; we can reconcile ourselves to the fact that there is nothing that can be defined as being specific exclusively to comics; and we can talk about comics as whatever we (or, ideally, some higher institutional authority, by consensus) declare to be comics. After all, we all sort of subconsciously know “what a comic is” (we just don’t know if it’s actually a genre—and in what sense—a medium, a form, or what). It’s only when we look more closely that we begin to encounter more complicated cases: works that may be related to comics, for example, but don’t quite seamlessly fulfill our ideas of what comics are. In our book, we ended up approaching the question of definition as an open-ended challenge: we offered several influential approaches and tried to convey to the reader our conviction that “comics”—while being aware of all that has been said formally and functionally, socially and institutionally—as a genre is something fluid, evasive, and ever-evolving rather than a fixed category. Fortunately. Otherwise, it would have been a staggering bore.

JS: Your monumental Dějiny československého komiksu 20. století (History of Czechoslovak Comics in the 20th Century, co-authored with Martin Foret and Tomáš Prokůpek), published in 2014, details across almost one thousand lavishly illustrated pages on how the turbulent history of Europe over the past century has affected the development of the genre. Difficult as this task may be, could you outline the main stages and how they were shaped by the political events from the early days until World War; under the interwar Czechoslovak Republic, during World War II; under communism; and after its fall?

Michal Jareš (MJ): Talking about something that is new and still evolving, such as a “possible” history of Czechoslovak comics, we also have to bear in mind the history of Central Europe as a whole, particularly in our neck of the woods, from the time of Austria-Hungary to the foundation (and later dissolution) of Czechoslovakia. We also have to consider it within the context of the debates and trends that shaped all of twentieth-century art, including the avant-garde. We constantly encounter attempts to understand comics as well as attempts to forbid them, and attempts at innovation as well as attempts to stay within the educational form of comics. So, at the very beginning we can see a clear continuation of the tradition of Central European caricature and thus topics aimed at the adult reader as well. The development of magazines for children and youth spawned a variety of children’s comics featuring humorous animals (such as the children’s magazine Punťa).  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Cindy A. Velasquez

January 3, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas and Cindy A. Velasquez

But to birth new homelands, / the world has devised tremors

In the first Translation Tuesdays column of 2023, Cebuano poet Cindy A. Velasquez take us to sea as we find our bearings in the new year. With a sensuousness at once personal and geological, Velasquez’s poems look for a sense of connection in  water bodies, drifting continents and connecting islands. Start your year of reading voraciously—and widely—with us here every week!

“I first read Cindy A. Velasquez in Kabisdak: Cebuano Literary Lighthouse, edited by poet Michael U. Obenieta, and later on, in her first collection Lawas [Body]. Lawas was in so many ways antithetical from the poetry collections of Velasquez’s contemporaries within Binisayâ’s school of feminist poetics in particular, and the literary ‘Bisaya-sphere’ in general. The Oliverian lucidity is rich, far from being rife and banal, a contrast to the Instagram-Pinterest school of ‘poetry’ or the ‘hugot’ impulse that perpetually plagues the local spoken word and performance poetry scene. The islands and coastlines left and missed are seascapes we have never been to but have always known. And then, there is Dong, a recurring or haunting character almost always addressed like an apostrophe, whom the poetic I-persona, Day or Inday, perpetually yearns for.

Velasquez’s body of works is a lingering on bodies of women and water as well as a story of love, romantic, familial, platonic. Oceanic in topicality, her poems could be read through the lens of ‘sea-poetry’—a literary tradition from Homer, Shakespeare, Whitman, to the British Romanticists writing about the English channel and even Derek Walcott—very male, mostly white, very Western. Be that as it may, I find the act of reading Velasquez an evocation of the tender eroticism of Syria’s national poet Nizar Qabbani, the meditative ease of Brazilian neosymbolist Cecília Meireles, and the hydropoetic enigma of T’ang dynasty Taoist elegist Ts’ao T’ang. 

But she doesn’t try to be any of the above. Her writing is her own accord; she is a poet of her own island.”

—Alton Melvar M Dapanas

The Reason

Theory of continental drift: the continents were once one,
bound to each other, and we have been told that the origin
of one is also another’s. But to birth new homelands,
the world has devised tremors deep in its own core.

So fret not when now and again, as you hold onto
my hand, it would swiftly quiver until you let me go.

Why is it better to love only one

I.

You gazed at the dimmed skies, enraged once more
for the moonlight was found wanting

then I told you: “Would you be more pleased if this world
had two moons?  READ MORE…

Principle of Decision: Translation from Armenian

January 2, 2023  |  in Principle of Decision, Translations  |  by Kristina Tatarian, Lusine Kharatyan, Margarit Ordukhanyan, and Nazareth Seferian

[This] will, we hope, allow for a more direct look at the choices translators make—at the principle of decision they employ in their practice.

Each translation speaks with two voices; that of the author and that of the translator. Yet, it is often when they have done their work well that the voices of translators go unrecognized. Their names are left off of covers, and their efforts mentioned only as brief asides in reviews. 

This neglect fails to give translation its due. Walter Benjamin wrote: “Reading a translation as if it were an original work in the translation’s own language is not the highest form of praise;” it is, rather, a failure to fully considering a work in translation, with its two voices and two languages. In an essay for Astra, translator and writer Lily Meyer references Susan Sontag’s definition of style when discussing translation as an art, stating that “to make art without having or consulting your own stylistic preferences strikes me as impossible . . . [Sontag] defines style, more or less, as ‘the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of an artist’s will.’ Surely a translator’s will can also be found inside anything they translate, animating the text and powering it to full-fledged life.” 

This new column, Principle of Decision, is an effort to make the styles of translators more visible. In each installment, one translator will select a famous sentence or brief passage from the literature of a certain language, and several translators will then offer their own translations of it. The differences and similarities between the translations will, we hope, allow for a more direct look at the choices translators make—at the principle of decision they employ in their practice.

For our first edition, we are proud to feature a selection from the Armenian, chosen by Editor-at-Large Kristina Tatarian. Kristina’s word-for-word translation is accompanied by translations from three translators, whose work can also be found in the Fall 2022 issue’s Special Feature on Armenian literature. Kristina has also provided explanatory commentary on her selection, as well as on the translators’ choices.

—Meghan Racklin

 

One peaceful morning  was   one     sad      morning

Մի խաղաղ  առավոտ  էր  .  մի  տխուր  առավոտ :

Mi  haghah    aravot         er      mi   tehur  aravot
˘       ˘     ¯      ˘  ˘   ¯          ˘        ˘    ˘   ¯    ˘  ˘  ¯

This sentence is from the beginning of “Gikor” by Hovhaness Tumanian, one of the central figures in Armenian literature. Based on a real story that Tumanian had heard as a child, “Gikor” is a tale about the dreams and hardship of a twelve-year-old boy, the eponymous Gikor, as his father sends him away from his home in the village to “become a man” and earn a living in the big city. Unfortunately, the boy’s precocious aim to alleviate his family’s hardship eventually ends his life. This sentence marks the moment in the story when Gikor’s mother and siblings watch him leave; accompanied by his father, he moves further and further away from home. The story comes full circle as the father returns to the village—only this time, Gikor is not there anymore. The different translations of this sentence, which presages the early death of the young protagonist, highlight the theme of the Armenian Special Feature (half-lives) by presenting us the “half-life” of the protagonist, a life that prematurely ended. This poignant story may be seen as an emblem of cultural memory about the Armenian Genocide, as Tumanian himself was at the forefront of humanitarian efforts to save children. The contributing translators have each found their own way of translating this memorable sentence, which marks the day when this young and sensitive boy leaves his home, and never returns.

—Kristina Tatarian READ MORE…

Are you game for our New Year reading challenge?

January 1, 2023  |  in Book Club  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Discover the latest and greatest of world literature, curated by our award-winning team!

This New Year, pledge to read diversely by joining the only Book Club that partners with indie publishers on both sides of the Atlantic! To help you take the plunge, we’re taking 10% off all Book Club subscriptions from now till 2359hrs, January 5th. A steeper discount is available for group subscriptions—inquire via bookclub@asymptotejournal.com.

CLICK THROUGH FOR COUPON-APPLIED DISCOUNTED PRICING

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #1 A Ray of Light by Star Kim Su-on

December 31, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

The wonder of this piece is in how the eerie images burn in your mind long after the story ends.

And here is the moment you’ve all been waiting for! Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the attention that Korean literature has received all of this past year (LTI Korea reports that “Korean literature published overseas scored a total of four wins and nine nominations” in 2022), the top spot goes to a South Korean author: the 28 year-old Kim Su-on who made an appearance in our Winter 2022 issue via cotranslators Spencer Lee-Lenfield and Lizzie Buehler with her fittingly named short story “A Ray of Light.” 

As a ray of light will momentarily illuminate the objects in the dark it passes over, so too do the nameless figures in Kim’s story come to life via impressionistic brushstrokes such as these:

Light drifts over the faces of the people lying down, asleep, inside their houses. They shrug off the blankets draping their bodies and, one or two at a time, wake up. Though they strain to remember the previous night’s dreams, the more they try, the faster the dreams vanish. They start each day without any such memories. A certain sadness has become the foundation of their days. Each person’s sadness differs in scale, and so each person passes the days differently.

Through “writing [that]  fuses elegant, simple lyricism with startling, at times nightmarish visions,” a dystopian world is conjured with irrefutable logic. Plot is almost an afterthought: If there is a story at all, it centers on a nameless woman in a house that is surrounded by a forest littered with mute and directionless bodies, dead birds and animal carcasses. At the heart of this forest is a lake, which forms the backdrop to naked lovers who have never left the only place the light touches. Only the shadow of a man wrapped in a blanket remains in the darkness.

The wonder of this piece is in how the eerie images burn in your mind long after the story ends. “Once you read it,” add translators Lee-Lenfield and Buehler, who shared with us that they brought into English Kim Su-on’s “spooky irrealism” during the darkest days of the pandemic,“you can’t get it out of your eyes, your ears.” For this fact alone, ”A Ray of Light” is nothing short of a masterclass in worldbuilding.

That wraps up our end-of-year countdown! If you’ve enjoyed what we’ve brought you in 2022, please help us bring you more of what you love in 2023. In addition to these massive issues (only four remain to our big 5-0!), we’ll also keep bringing you weekly dispatches, fortnightly airmails, monthly book club selections, and quarterly educational guides—all of which we work so hard on behind the scenes on zero institutional support. Answer our commitment by becoming a sustaining or masthead member from as little as USD5 a month. Signing up only takes three minutes, but your support would mean the world to us, truly! See you on the other side of 2023!

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Announcing Our December Book Club Title: Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? by Max Lobe

December 30, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

To open up poverty is to open up migration is to open up blackness is to open up the love between two men.

For our final Book Club selection of the year, Asymptote is proud to present a work emblematic of how writing can transform, subvert, and negate borders. In Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, Swiss author Max Lobe traces how the complex factors of race, class, sexuality, and migration can cohere in a single life, and how nationhood can be refracted and reinterpreted by those who refuse to be defined by the standard. Speaking in the extraordinarily vivid voice of his protagonist, Mwana, Lobe balances tragedy with joy, freedom with entrapment, and home with home.

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.  

Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? by Max Lobe, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, Hope Road Publishing, 2022

As in love, mystery, and metamorphosis, the name of country draws a long throughline in our world of stories. Add to it a possessive—my country, your country—and the resulting narratives are instantly elaborated with the ontological intersections, demarcations, and dialogues that enmesh our landscape. Through this simple addition, a life is juxtaposed with a society, a single act comes to emblematise a culture, and an experience constitutes an identity—not necessarily out of any active political consciousness, but simply from having left, at some point, that arbitrary and mutable shape of one’s birthplace. Paul Gilroy, in conceptualising diaspora, described it as positing “important tensions between here and there, then and now, between seed in the bag, the packet or the pocket and seed in the ground, the fruit or the body.” To move across our jigsaw world is to know the fluid weight of difference and sameness—that they can be at once interchangeable and oppositional. These shifts from strangeness to familiarity do not begin with the boarding of a plane or a boat, but occur in minute swatches of conversation, in the passing from one minute to the next, between two people looking out at the same scene, not knowing what the other sees.

In Max Lobe’s Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, country is introduced by the most immediate and intimate of desires—food. Our narrator, Mwana, is lugging “two huge sugar-cane bags” across Switzerland, with all the provisions and gifts of another nation inside: “Fumbwa, saka-saka, makayabu, okra and dried impwa.” The list goes on, rich with sugars and starches and svelte oils. Wrapped meticulously by his mother, the treasured packages have been carried by his sister Kosambela, across the continental divide from what Mwana calls Bantuland, to the nation where they both now reside: Switzerland of the Grütli Meadow and the Rütli Oath, of white-out peaks and lakeshore villas.

A recent graduate of the University of Geneva and a settled Swiss resident, Mwana is black, queer, and unemployed; it is this lattermost factor that rules his life, his daily preoccupations, and his physical and mental wanderings. With repeated trips to the unemployment office, small yellow coins dug out of household crevices, kindly deceptive calls to his mother—this scarcity is the precipice that Mwana dangles from, and as such it is the swinging, breakneck angle by which he interprets everything. The two bags he drags onto the bus from Lugano to Geneva contain emblems of home, of care, and of a beautiful eradication of distance, but most importantly, they are an antidote to hunger. Amidst Lobe’s warm, loquacious prose, we first see the dissipation of difference into sameness, the shift from displacement in country to immediacy in the body. In all the discursive paths the mind takes to arrive at a single place, we see the need to live. READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #2 Borges and the Blind by Abdelfattah Kilito

December 29, 2022  |  in News  |  by Matthew Redman

Borges learned Arabic and died or, and perhaps more precisely, he learned Arabic and thus died.

Our second most-read piece of the year is Abdelfattah Kilito’s Borges and the Blind, expertly translated from the Arabic by Ghazouane Arslane (who was also interviewed about this article on the blog by Senior Assistant Editor Alex Tan). A lithe and subtle essay on Borges’ famous short story Averroës’ Search, it glides with a rather un-essayistic lightness that belies how profuse it is with ideas. We’ll limit ourselves to pulling on one of its threads: Borges writes at the threshold between European and Arabic literatures; he is a bridger, and—why not, though Kilito never says so explicitly—a translator of sorts bringing the literature of Arabic to the West. The essay never prescribes and Kilito consciously forswears snobbery; nevertheless, as he unpacks allusions only Arabists could know and Europeans would not deign to scrutinise we find suggestions on how to read Borges’ work—and indeed any work at all rooted in an unfamiliar culture. Dismiss those foreign words and names at your peril. With Borges as with the best translations, a trove of knowledge is resting literally under your nose, if only you think to look for it. It’s a thrilling notion, and there are other ideas that spark similar thoughts throughout Borges and the Blind. Like so many articles in this year’s top ten, it very much bears rereading.

Here’s an excerpt:

One is curious, in this context, about Borges’s relationship with languages, and namely with the Arabic language. He knew, of course, Spanish and English (his grandmother was English) and was proficient in French and German. He lived in four languages, but what about Arabic? In one of his poems, a rare and equivocal verse attracted my attention: “What language / am I doomed to die in?!” This could mean in what language will death strike me, or in what language am I to die, what is the language in which it is my duty to die? Borges partly made up his mind when, wondering, he added: “The Spanish my ancestors used / to call for the charge, or to play truco / The English of the Bible / my grandmother read from / at the edges of the desert?” He mentioned the two languages closest to his heart. What is rather strange, however, is that he would die in neither of them, let alone in French or German. He would die in a fifth language he had not expected or intuited to die in, a new language he was indeed able to acquire. Which language? The Arabic language, which he had started to learn during the last year of his life. Borges learned Arabic and died or, and perhaps more precisely, he learned Arabic and thus died.

If this piece has sparked an interest in Abdelfattah Kilito’s literary criticism, your next stop has to be his Dream of a Baghdad Night, translated from the French by former team member Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg for our Spring 2019 issue. If all this talk of bridge-building inspires you to join us behind the scenes, on the other hand, take note that we’re already advertising our first recruitment call of 2023. From Editor-at-Large to Assistant Blog Editor, check out the newly available positions here and send in your application today!

REVISIT OUR SECOND MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022 READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #3 An Interview with Georges Szirtes

December 28, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

In her brilliant interview, Rose Bialer reveals Szirtes to be a poet grappling with and exploring constraints—of memory, borders, mortality.

“Pulling narratives together is an act of blind construction, an exploration of the valid. Constructions suggest artificiality. And it is true, in legal prose terms, that poems, as constructions, are artificial and therefore unreliable. But poets should not be afraid of construction: construction is the poem’s natural way of witnessing.” 

Acclaimed poet and translator from the Hungarian Georges Szirtes comes in at Number 3 in our countdown of the most-read articles of the year, via his interview in the Winter 2022 issue. Renowned for both his poetry as well as for his translations, Szirtes writes prolifically and without pretense in print and on social media. As a translator, Szirtes is perhaps best known for his work on Hungarian phenom László Krasznahorkai (his translation of Satantango won the Best Translated Book Award in 2013; while you’re here, why not also read our interview with László Krasznahorkai?).

In her brilliant interview, our very own Rose Bialer reveals Szirtes to be a poet grappling with and exploring constraints—of memory, borders, mortality. Szirtes offers intimate insights on the lasting impact of his experience of migration in childhood and the memories—“small fragments of coloured glass that may—with a lot of luck—add up to a stained glass window of sorts”—that he has pieced together from the family photographs that he carried on the journey from Hungary to England. These memories drove Szirtes to reclaim the Hungarian language twenty-eight years after it “went to sleep.” Visualizations of what might have been permeate Szirtes’ poetry; taken as a whole, his collections reconstruct the story of his life, with glimpses of reality that appear as if frozen in film.

For example, of his latest work Waking in the Yellow Room, Szirtes says:

These are exercises of the imagination based on my experience of him [my father] and on my own sense of what Jewishness entailed for him then and what it entails for me now . . . The yellow room is the house of the soon-to-be dead. I see him as the child squatting in the corner. 

In this experiment, Szirtes rewrites the constraints of memory, suggesting a new reality in which his father didn’t eschew Judaism for Atheism in the traumatic aftermath of the Holocaust. In addition, “there are increasing reminders of mortality as one grows older; in my case the death of friends, the pandemic, my own state of health . . . my mother’s early death . . . I have been sure from the start that the apprehension of mortality is what drives the whole artistic project.” 

This is not the first time Szirtes has been featured in Asymptote, his poem The Swan’s Reflection: two sides of a postcard headlined our English Poetry Feature as far back as in our Fall 2011 issue, alongside Lydia Davis’s very first translations from the Dutch, new translations of Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, and a survey of Croatian novelists by Dubravka Ugrešić. Find contributing editor Sim Yee Chiang’s behind-the-scenes look at this issue from our #30issues#30days showcase. If you’re inspired to submit your own work after dipping into our twelve-year-old archive, check out our submission guidelines here and send in your best work today! 

CLICK HERE FOR OUR THIRD MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #4 Envy by Elfriede Jelinek

December 27, 2022  |  in News  |  by Matthew Redman

Their most pathetic longings are laid bare with sadistic glee; there are conspiratorial asides, loopy digressions about the financial crash.

“The waistband of Brigitte’s pants is so tight already, I’m surprised she doesn’t have to saw herself in half to get undressed! Her blouse, not so much: everything in there went south ages ago, but then that’s the way of all flesh. Brigitte has gone from the big top to the big bottom: in the one-ring circus of life, she is a one-woman seesaw, a no-man band.”

Number 4 is a monster of a text from our Summer 2022 issue, an extract of Nobel Prizewinner Elfriede Jelinek’s Envy, translated from the German by her frequent collaborator Aaron Sayne. Envy is viscerally unhappy in the finest Jelinekian tradition. Weirdness, deep pessimism, and misery are the big tonal flavors here. We are captive to a sadistic narrator who rants and raves and betrays her characters at every turn. Asymptote’s Liam Sprod puts it perfectly: this is the quintessence of “Mitteleuropa miserablism”: festering nastiness and narrative complexity and gallows humor.

Our narrator possesses total knowledge of the inner lives of the characters who litter her monologue, (a middle-aged piano teacher; the eighteen year-old boy she lusts after; his divorced mother who works all day in the bank the next town over). Their most pathetic longings are laid bare with sadistic glee, there are conspiratorial asides, loopy digressions about the financial crash and cannibals, and awful, awful puns; after a while it dawns on you that the mockery is not only for her benefit, but also possibly for ours. You get the sense she might be trying to make us laugh—worse, she might be trying to impress us, to curry our favor, even. There’s a pervasive meta-awareness to all the scorn and mockery—these may well be repulsive gifts laid at our feet. Is she afraid of us? Should she be? Is she insane? Read and decide for yourself. It’s powerful, polarizing stuff—a narrator so finely poised between awareness and delusion—and it rewards rereading. This may well be why it climbed so high on this list.

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DISCOVER OUR FOURTH MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #5 The Hundred-Faced Actor by Edogawa Ranpo

December 26, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

Every time he changed disguise, the shape of his face would also change completely. “Miraculous” didn’t cut it . . . Was I hallucinating?

Is Edogawa Ranpo Japan’s Edgar Allan Poe or is Edgar Allan Poe America’s Edogawa Ranpo? Securing the fifth spot in our countdown of ten most-read articles in Asymptote’s pages from 2022, “The Hundred-Faced Actor” makes good on the reputation of Edogawa Ranpo–as a masterful spinner of horror stories and the father of Japanese mystery. 

If you haven’t yet read “The Hundred-Faced Actor,” translated brilliantly into the English for the first time by Lin King for our Spring 2022 issue, we invite you to step into another person’s skin in this psychological thriller, which José Garcia Escobar, Editor-at-Large for Central America, praised as “bizarre, unique, and fascinating.” Told by an older narrator to a younger audience, this discomforting tale takes us on an excursion to a banned theater featuring the titular actor of hundred likenesses—and the revelation thereafter that emerges amidst old newspapers that is tied to a slate of grave robberies. We can’t bear to give away the twists and turns, but suffice it to say that Ranpo leaves his reader intrigued and a bit queasy. Helping to peel back the layers of mystery is translator Lin King, who shared in her translator’s note: “ The ease with which Ranpo’s work can be translated across both languages and time is, I believe, a testament to the timelessness of his themes: people’s capacity for harming each other, as well as our tendency to dismiss said harm as “impossible” and “faked” when we witness it. In this sense, Ranpo’s work is perhaps more relevant today than ever.”

Here is an excerpt of the fiction:

I’d told R ahead of time that I preferred to watch from the back of the room, but for some reason he sat down in the very front row instead. When the actors came close to the edge of the stage, their faces were only about one ken apart from ours, and we could see every minute detail. But even as close as we were, we still couldn’t make out the smallest flaw in the Hundred-Faced Actor’s disguises. If he was playing a woman, he was a woman; if he was playing an old man, he was an old man—the transformation was absolute. For instance, the wrinkles: an average actor would use makeup to draw on the wrinkles; if you were to look from the side, you’d see through the illusion straight away. The sight of black ink smeared haphazardly on soft, plump cheeks is enough to make anyone chuckle. But the Hundred-Faced Actor—how did he do it?—had actual wrinkles etched into his flesh. And that wasn’t all. Every time he changed disguise, the shape of his face would also change completely. “Miraculous” didn’t cut it: depending on the situation, his face would become round or long, his eyes and mouth would grow big or small, and the very shape of his nose and ears would change dramatically. Was I hallucinating? Was there some sort of secret technique that made something like this possible? To this day, my questions remain unanswered.

In all its shapes, and across myriad cultures, literature extends our notions of what’s possible and helps us conceive a better world—in short, it is a benevolent force of good in this age of divisiveness. If you are feeling generous this gift-giving season, why not support our mission to seek out and publish the very best in world literature? It only takes three minutes to sign up to become a sustaining member or masthead member from as little as USD5 a month!

READ OUR FIFTH MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, As Chosen by You: #6 An interview with Maureen Freely

December 24, 2022  |  in News  |  by Matthew Redman

To translate [Pamuk] was to fall under a spell that took me several years to break.

2022 was a bumper year for fascinating interviews, and one of the best of the bunch, in this humble editor’s opinion, is also our sixth most read article of the year. For our Summer issue, Assistant Interview Editor Rose Bialer sat down with acclaimed translator Maureen Freely to discuss her upbringing in Istanbul, the craft of translation, and the state of literature in Turkey today.

It takes two to make an interview really work: Bialer has a knack for perceptive questions, and Freely is lyrically articulate about her unusual upbringing. Unsurprisingly, the conversation is full of gems, such as when she talks about working with Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk as the English translator of his novels. Their relationship is complex, delicate, respectful, and as Pamuk’s star rises, it grows increasingly strained. The two are “exact contemporaries” and grew up in similar parts of Istanbul, and when he writes about his childhood in the city, his memories, so different from her own, start to crowd out hers:

I love that chapter he wrote about hüzün, and the black and white city that it veiled so hauntingly. To read it is to go into a trance. To translate it was to fall under a spell that took me several years to break. I could no longer see the golden Istanbul I’d known as a child. As for the campus where I’d grown up and he’d gone to school, he passed over it in just a few paragraphs. He wrote about the library, and he wrote about skiving. When we were going through that part of my translation, I pointed to the gap between two of those paragraphs, and I told him that my whole life had vanished into that blank space.

If you’re curious about some of Freely’s output, read Irmak Ertuna Howison’s review of her translation of Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn from the Asymptote Blog.

And if her interview piques your interest in Turkish literature, don’t forget that our twelve-year digital archive is a veritable treasure trove of gems waiting to be discovered.

DISCOVER OUR SIXTH MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022 READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #7 An Interview with Emma Ramadan

December 23, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

What I bring to the table as a translator is precisely that I come at books from a place of emotion.

We use our bodies to write, to type, to think, to read aloud, to listen, to gauge by our gut whether or not a sentence is right . . . When a sentence isn’t right, I feel it immediately in my back . . . what I bring to the table as a translator is precisely that I come at books from a place of emotion. That urge to translate a book comes from seeing what it can do for a reader emotionally, what it does to me emotionally, how it can impact the way people feel in the world.

For longtime followers of Asymptote, it will come as no surprise that our seventh most popular article of 2022 was Claire Mullen’s interview with Emma Ramadan from the Fall 2022 issue. An established, sensitive and sought-after translator from the French who not only interned with us way back in 2012, but also appeared in our pages throughout the years thereafter, Ramadan is the recipient of a Fulbright, NEA Translation Fellowship, the 2018 Albertine Prize, and the 2021 PEN Translation Prize.

In this interview, which easily topped our internal survey of favorite articles from the issue, Ramadan shines a spotlight on the lesser known role of the translator—that of the archive researcher, as demonstrated by her work on Marguerite Duras’s The Easy Life and Barbara Molinard’s Panics.

For example, she describes following a “little tingle” into the Providence Public Library where she finally discovered the elusive French manuscript of Panics that she had been looking for, to no avail, in France—no less.

This illuminating interview surely sets her apart as a translator whose practice goes beyond mere questions of language.

After reading what she has to say in our current issue, we invite you to revisit her other appearances throughout the years as well. For just a taste:

Former Blog Editor Allison Braden interviewed Emma Ramadan in October 2020 on her translation of Meryem Alaoui’s Straight From The Horse’s Mouth, in which Ramadan reveals “something that I do with every book, actually—is that I read out loud as I translate.”

In her September 2018 conversation with former intern Mallory Truckenmiller, Ramadan discusses her dual role as character and translator in Brice Matthieussent’s Revenge of the Translator, and the embodiment of the act of “Translation as erotic.” ”Getting inside the author’s psyche, recreating their words,” she says, is “incredibly intimate . . . intellectually stimulating . . . sexy.” 

If you find yourself itching for more insights into translation direct from the horse’s mouth—including the opportunity to pose direct questions to translators during the live Q&A session with the author and/or the translator of the title that we conduct each month—we invite you to join the Asymptote Book Club, for which past members have read Ramadan’s translations of Alaouai and Matthieussent alongside other cutting-edge works of world literature!

REVISIT OUR SEVENTH MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022

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Discover more on the Asymptote blog:

Everything Is in the Atmosphere: David Boyd on Translating Hiroko Oyamada

December 22, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

For me, the best way to approach idioms is to live with them for a really long time.

Hiroko Oyamada is a master of the uncanny. Though she made her English-language debut in only 2019, her surreal atmospheres and psychological insight has gained significant traction and acclaim, and we were delighted to introduce her third and latest work, the collection Weasels in the Attic, as our book club selection for the month of November. In the interconnected series of three narratives, Oyamada explores parenthood, fertility, and the demarcation between human and animal worlds with signature precision and intrigue, rendered into a graceful English by her long-time translator, David Boyd. In the following interview, we speak to Boyd on his relationship with Oyamada’s works, the challenge of idioms, and his approach to her singular style. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

Laurel Taylor (LT): David, this is technically the third title from Oyamada you’ve translated into English, but the stories in this volume originally appeared separately—did you translate them all in one go?

David Boyd (DB): No, definitely not. In Japanese, the stories in Weasels in the Attic can be found in the book versions of The Factory (Kōjō) and The Hole (Ana). They were written around the same time as those novellas — between 2012 and 2014, I think. In 2019, when we published The Factory in English, Oyamada came out to New York and Boston to support the book. At that point, I was already working on The Hole, and New Directions wanted to know what was going to come next. When we talked to Oyamada, she told us that she’d always considered these three stories—“Death in the Family,” “Last of the Weasels,” and “Yukiko”—to be a trilogy. It was never printed as a single book in Japan, but that doesn’t mean Oyamada didn’t view it in that way. Anyway, that was where we got the idea to collect the stories into a single volume: from Oyamada herself.

LT: That’s fascinating to hear, because I was very curious about whether these stories were originally meant to go together.

DB: Absolutely. Oyamada wrote them that way. In my mind, too, they form a single novella, just like her other two books, even if there’s no single volume in Japanese that contains all three. Novellas in Japan are usually published with accompanying shorter stories, and that’s how “Death in the Family” ended up as part of The Factory and “Last of the Weasels” and “Yukiko” ended up as part of The Hole.

I translated them in the order that they were published in Japan—“Death in the Family” right after working on The Factory. That had to be around 2018, or maybe early 2019. It was kind of refreshing, because “Death in the Family” feels nothing like The Factory. Then, after I translated The Hole in the summer of 2019, I came back to Saiki and the others, working on “Last of the Weasels” then “Yukiko” back-to-back. I didn’t mean to do it that way, but it worked out well to have some space between the first story and the other two. A fair amount of time passes in the narrator’s world; he’s older in “Last of the Weasels,” and even older in “Yukiko.” That being the case, I didn’t go back to make sure that they sounded identical. I didn’t feel like there was any need. READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #8 My Dear You by Jasna Jasna Žmak

December 21, 2022  |  in News  |  by Matthew Redman

Then we both mulled over the misfortune of words and the misfortune of the Croatian language . . .

Coming in at number 8 is Samantha Farmer’s translation of Croatian writer Jasna Jasna Žmak’s My Dear You from our Winter 2022 issue. Inspired by a possibly apocryphal vignette the narrator reads in a Barthes essay, about a tribe that removes a word from its language each time a member dies, Žmak’s pair of lovers wonder what would happen if the same rule were applied to Croatian. They dive into the thought experiment with a winning balance of whimsy and seriousness, partner briskly correcting narrator’s occasional lapses of logic, until they reach a sobering conclusion: Croatian would not be long for this world, even accounting for dialects and Serbo-Croatian, even if you included slangs and nicknames and toponyms, even if you made a new word every time a baby is born. It’s a tale as old as time, an idle what if? spiraling into an anxious oh no. But such thoughts can be bracing, and so they prove here, as they prompt a very sweet reflection on the preciousness of words:

At that moment, I realized that the idea wasn’t very romantic. I realized that I wouldn’t want even a single word to disappear from the world, not even from the list of words I hate, not even superlatives.

My Dear You, in the words of Farmer, is a “breezy romance”—a happy novel about a gay couple in the Balkans. Its happiness is precious, and softly subversive, with the knotty issues that trouble queer and Balkan fiction placed in the subtext for a change. Maybe it’s more than breezy: there’s a heft to the feelings and ideas that blurs the distinction we tend to make between weighty stories and happy ones. Follow Farmer’s recommendation and read this story aloud, preferably to your own “dear you.”

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Enjoy this story? With Christmas on the way, consider a gift to world literature: become a sustaining member, and with a small monthly donation help us to seek out and publish more stories like these from around the globe! READ MORE…