Place: Greece

Towards a Greater Social Consciousness: Persa Koumoutsi on Translating Arabic Literature Into Greek

November 4, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou and Persa Koumoutsi

If a text is written simply to express our personal wants or concerns, it is not literature, in my view, but a form of self-centered expression.

Born and raised in Cairo, Persa Koumoutsi is a literary translator and a writer. Having returned to Greece after completing her studies at the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University, she began focusing solely on translating Arabic literature into Greek in 1993. She has since worked on the works of many distinguished authors, including fourteen novels by the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, as well many Arab poets. Her bibliography includes the first Anthology of Contemporary Arabic Poetry in Greek, for which she received the First Prize of the Hellenic Society of Literary Translators in 2017. Among her other works, the Αnthology of Modern Arabic Female Poetry was also widely lauded in 2022. She has also published the Αnthology of Palestinian Poetry and the Anthology of Egyptian Poetry.

In this interview, originally conducted in Greek, I spoke with Persa about the renewed interest in Palestinian literature in times of genocide, the importance of translation as a means to make struggles known and build solidarities beyond human borders and language barriers, prison literature, as well as the future of Arabic translation in Greece. The latter concerns not solely translation for the sake of itself, but as a powerful tool to bring forth voices of those marginalized.

Christina Chatzitheodoru (CC): Since October 7 and the ongoing genocide, several young Arab writers and poets have been translated into Greek, including your recent translation of Najwan Darwish. There is a renewed interest in Palestinian literature in particular. Can you tell us more about this?

Persa Koumoutsi (PK): Of course there is a renewed interest, not only in Greece but all over the world, especially in Europe. The tragic events in Gaza have brought to the fore an unspeakable tragedy, and thus many of my colleagues and translators around the world—and in Greece—have devoted themselves to translating works that highlight this problem and its dimensions, as well as its impact on our collective and individual consciousnesses—especially those of whom are concerned with contemporary Arabic culture and its literature. One such work is a collection by the renowned Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish entitled, in Greek, I Kourasi ton Kremasmenon (Exhausted on the Cross), which, as the title suggests, alludes to the enduring pains of the Palestinian people, the irredeemable trauma, and the grievous injustice they have been inflicted upon them. Poetry, in my opinion, is the most powerful literary genre in these cases, since everything can be said and highlighted through the condensed word of poetry. . .

CC: The Palestinian writer and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani once stated: “My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case, and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite.” How does this view relate to your own approach to translation? READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 18, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Christina Chatzitheodorou, and Kathryn Raver

The latest literary news from France, Greece, and the United States!

In this week’s roundup of world literary news, our team members fill us in on France’s literary awards season and exciting festivals in Greece and the United States. From the race for the Prix Goncourt to feminist literature in Athens, read on to find out more!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

As the leaves begin to shift their colors, France’s literary scene is shifting into awards season. Last week, Jean-Pierre Montal took home the Prix des Deux Magots for his novel La Face nord, the Prix Medicis announced their 2024 shortlist, and the contenders for the prestigious Prix Femina are to be revealed in just a few weeks. That’s only to name a few!

Perhaps the most esteemed French literary prize, however, is the Prix Goncourt, and the time for its conferral is fast approaching. Awarded annually in November, the Prix Goncourt is bestowed by the Académie Goncourt upon “the best and most imaginative prose work of the year.” They also give separate awards for poetry (conferred this year to Haitian poet Louis-Philippe Dalembert), biography, and a large variety of international works, among others.   READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2024

September 16, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Christopher Higgs, Fani Avramopoulou, and Henry Gifford

Ten translated titles that hit the shelves this month!

When we first started the What’s New in Translation column in 2015, it was to offer readers a look at the incredible work done by writers, translators, and publishers all around the world. Gathering some of the most exciting publications coming out each month, the column featured regular reviews from trusted critical voices, giving the spotlight over to this great wealth of literary work. A lot has changed in the last decade; though English still reigns, we’ve seen the advocates of literary translation win a lot of battles as they seek to make our reading landscape a more various, inclusive, and interconnected space. As such, we now feel the need to extend our purview to include more of these brilliant voices, more of this innovative work, more of the insights and wonders that they bring. We are delighted to announce that our monthly column will now feature a greater number of titles —but with the same incisive critical insight that we’ve always aimed to bring.

From Argentinian horror to the latest from a Hungarian master of form, an intergenerational Greek tale to haiku interpretations, read below for a list of the ten most exciting books out in September.

Backer-Promo-Cover-150

Documentary Poetry by Heimrad Bäcker, translated from the German by Patrick Greaney, Winter Editions, 2024

Review by Fani Avramopoulou

Documentary Poetry compiles a selection of German poet Heimrad Bäcker’s documentary poems and photographs with his published interviews, lectures, and essays, offering a richly contextualized introduction to his many decades of work documenting and reflecting on the Holocaust. Bäcker does not conceal his relation to the Nazi Party; he was an avid member for about a year, joining at the age of eighteen. He then denounced the Nazi ideology in the wake of the Nuremberg trials, and spent the rest of his life meticulously chronicling the Third Reich’s atrocities through photography and a poetic method he described as his “transcript system.” The collection’s title essay introduces what feels like the conceptual seed of Bäcker’s work: a reflection on the Nazis’ use of ordinary language to conceal, sanitize, enable, and systematize the horrors of the Holocaust. His conceptualization of language as a participatory, covert administrative tool of the Nazi ideological agenda leads to this development of the transcript system as a form of intervention—a way of undressing such language and purging it of its duplicities.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

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

The latest in literary news from Palestine and Greece!

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

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

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

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

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

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

July 12, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Alton Melvar M Dapanas, and Christina Chatzitheodorou

The latest from the Latinx, Greek, and Filipino literary worlds!

This week, our editors direct us towards the profound and plentiful artistic productions emerging from border crossings, diverse encounters, and cross-genre interpretations. From a festival celebrating multicultural writings, novel adaptations of classic canons, and the newly elected fellows to a prestigious international residency, these developments in world literature remind us that within the schematics of difference, shared passions grow and proliferate to create unities.

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the United States

Between June 21 and 23, Hispanic and U.S. literary enthusiasts gathered in San Francisco for the International Flor y Canto Literary Festival. Originally founded by Latinx poet Alejandro Murguia, acclaimed poet and professor at San Francisco State University, this year’s lineup featured a diverse variety of poetry readings, literary workshops, and movie screenings—all open to the public. Participants included Latinx and Mexican writers, poets, and directors dealing with topics such as identity, multiculturalism, language, and resistance. Most of the events took place at the legendary Medicine for Nightmare bookstore, a unique promoter of Latin American and Latinx literature in San Francisco.

One of the most exciting events was a poetry workshop led by the Mexican poet Minerva Reynosa. Titled “¿Quieres escribir pero te sale espuma?” (Do you want to write a poem but only foam comes out?), the workshop encouraged new writers to try out different techniques to overcome writer’s block. In another event, Reynosa read from her most recent book, Iremos que te pienso entre las filas y el olfato pobre de un paisaje con borrachos o ahorcados. The collection portrays life around the Mexico-U.S. border in the nineties, told from the perspective of a bicultural family dealing with gender violence. The works in the book are long poems of mostly short unrhymed verses, using colloquialisms endemic to the north of Mexico, in a fast paced and highly rhythmic prosody. They also include fragments from songs by the iconic Latinx singer Selena. In her reading, Reynosa usually sings these musical portions, highlighting the sonic elements in the poems and their cultural significance. READ MORE…

Serpentine

June 24, 2024  |  in Essays, Retellings  |  by Kanya Kanchana

The loop of the ☥ ankh is the Ouroboros, the endless serpent that swallows its own tail, and there is a void at its heart. Mind the gap.

In our column “Retellings,” Asymptote presents essays delving into myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. In this rendition, Kanya Kanchana traces the winding path of serpents across world literature and translation in a longform lyric essay. Weaving between times and traditions, Kanya draws together the philosophical concepts, conflicting perceptions, and atavistic emotions that serpents inspire, such that we are not quite sure where one story ends, and another begins.

“In every story, if you go back, as far back as you can, to the point where every horizon disappears, you find a snake, the tree, water.”

– Roberto Calasso, Ka

cobra transparent

When the word nāga (Sanskrit: serpent) is uttered, the first syllable must rear its hood in the air like a cobra, and the second must root into the earth like the coil it lifts itself from. The sound is the word. Where the ouraeus, the symbol of the rearing Egyptian cobra, Naja haje, is found, it’s an unmistakable mark of sovereignty, the golden hood that guards the head that wears the crown. The symbol is the deed. Sound, symbol, story—myth is the skin beneath the skin of the world, that which shapes from within.

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To Tear Down Since They Won’t Let Us Build: Katerina Gogou and Her Impressive Invasion of the Poetic Realm

May 29, 2024  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou and Dimitris Gkionis

Since they won't let us create life, we're going to ruin what's existing, and the new will follow.

As one of Greece’s most bold and unwavering poets, there is a ruthlessness running through the work of Katerina Gogou. In ferocious, free-styling verse, she vividly identified the brutalities and loneliness around her, and, with the incendiary vibration of a radical cry, came up always on the side of anarchism. As sensitive to hypocrisy as she was to corruption, Gogou dreaded a poetics that stood aside from politics, in one of her poems confessing: “What I fear most / is becoming “a poet” . . . / Locking myself in the room / gazing at the sea / and forgetting . . .” So it is that she remained dedicated to the necessity of rebellion and freedom until her death in 1993.

In this following article by Dimitris Gkionis, translated from the Greek by Christina Chatzitheodorou, we are offered an insight of this powerful poet in the midst of her time, navigating rages, passions, injustices, and her own poetic urgency. A woman who believes in words as action, as weapon—this is what comes into view.

On October 13, 1980, this piece, featuring an interview between Dimitris Gkionis and the poet Katerina Gogou, was published in the newspaper Eleftherotypia. It has since then been re-published—along with other interviews of Gogou—in Katerina Gogou, Mou Moiazei o Anthropos m’enan Ilio, Pou Kaigetai apo Monos tou (The man reminds me of a sun that burns by itself, published by Kastaniotis Editions in 2018). In both her poetry and interviews, Gogou’s work had always reflected her unconventional, rebellious, and combative spirit—always rebelling against authority, no matter what form. A supporter of the radical movement, she spent most of her days in Exarcheia—the historical centre of radical left-wing/libertarian politics—and was in constant conflict with the establishment, eventually giving up a promising career in acting to write poetry instead.

Through her verse, Gogou denounced social inequality, condemned police violence, criticised the death penalty, and stood in solidarity with political prisoners. Her mind was never at rest, and neither was her pen. While some of her poetry has previously been translated in English, it is the interviews that have been able to directly capture Gogou’s reasoning behind her aesthetic interventions, providing a more holistic picture of her and her work. In these conversations, she explains why she writes what she writes, and her anger at a stagnant world that she wants to change: “I am writing to get rid of this rock (kotrona) that is weighing me down. If I didn’t write, my ears would buzz. Ιf I don’t take this action, if I don’t put words on this white paper to bring myself to life, I could do things that are horrible and unimaginable.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Perfect Crime” by Tasos Leivaditis

April 9, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by N. N. Trakakis

This manuscript was discovered in the room of a low-ranking bank official. The official himself was found dead, his head smashed.

This Translation Tuesday, a twisted, rambling screed offers a window into the dark mind of a low-level bank clerk. Obsessed with money, plagued by seedy, morbid memories, buffeted by obscure resentments, he comes across a letter that confirms his paranoid delusions, and begins to plan his ‘perfect crime’. This is a powerful study of madness from the Greek writer Tasos Leivaditis, rendered into a genuinely disturbing English by N. N. Trakakis.

It continued raining, and so I too continued sitting under the porch of a cheap, commonplace hotel in a small cul-de-sac. How I got there is an entire saga, but I would often absent-mindedly find myself in the most unlikely parts of the city, and by ‘absent-mindedly’ I mean absorbed in thoughts that troubled me of late. I was always of course a procrastinator, but this delay had lasted for years and the resolution that had been ordained, from whatever angle you examined it, was not at all in my favour. When I left my boss’ house, in my haste I forgot my one and only coat, but I thought that, rather than trying to clear up such a messy situation, I’d be better off hanging myself. And I may well have done so if this letter hadn’t arrived. “The landlady must have left it on the table,” I thought. A letter that, the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that I had been waiting for it for a long while, it contained moreover so many details regarding my personal life that there couldn’t be any doubt that it was destined for me – despite the fact that people’s morals have slackened so much in our time that they might even call into question the authenticity of a letter, the contents of which would admittedly crush them.

The rain abated, I was ready to leave, then I remembered why I had come, it was the same hotel, many years ago, I might not have even been eighteen, I would often think “my God, if I could at least see one woman naked, then I can die!” but I was also afraid lest I did in fact die, one night it seemed I was hypnotised, a woman approached and brought me here to this hotel, I had no idea how.

“C’mon, get undressed and get in bed,” she told me.

It was winter, I was wearing a khaki scarf which belonged to my grandfather, I remember that it was this very scarf, hanging close at hand on a rack, that we used to bind his jaw as soon as he had died, as was the custom. I took off my jacket and lay down, the woman undressed completely, and I, of course, may as well have been dead, for whether from fear or bad timing nothing was happening. The woman got up.

“If you can’t do it, why hire a hooker?” she said, washing her hands in the basin.

“My apologies, some other time…,” I stammered.

She perhaps thought that I was trying to avoid paying, for she immediately replied:

“The body fell on the bed, it must be paid.”

That expression made an impression on me, in particular its tone: she spoke about her body as though she was referring to someone else, as though she was saying, for example, “the old lady is unwell, it doesn’t look like she’ll make it through the night,” an old lady, in fact, who’s lived her life and made your life miserable with her old-age grumbling – in exactly that way. Then, I don’t know how, I felt a kind of distress, as though they had stuffed my mouth with lots of cotton wool, I then observed the wall next to me: it seemed to tremble at first, then it began to tilt and tilt, until it was about to collapse on me, I rushed to the door and ran down the stairs.

At the exact moment when my boss was angrily showing me the door, I again noticed the wall shaking, “it’s weird how people live in houses like this,” I thought, when I got back home, past midnight, everything was shut, they were asleep, I began forcefully ringing the bell, eventually a window up high opened and that familiar, longish face appeared.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

March 22, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou and Kathryn Raver

The latest literary news from Greece and France!

This week, our editors take us to Greece and France, where they find exciting projects at the National Library, urgent new poetry in translation, and theater adaptations. From the Afro Greek experience to new takes on the work of Annie Ernaux, read on to find out more!

Christina Chatzitheodorou, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Greece

The National Library of Greece (NLG) is currently displaying the fruits of their project “We, the Afro-Greeks: black literature as a cultural bridge.” Until the end of April, the Library will be displaying new books by authors of African origin that focus on themes of immigration and racism—additions enabled by this project. This comes after a few initiatives by and for Afro-Greeks that engage with the lived experience of Black people in Greece. The term “Afro-Greek” itself, as Adéọlá Naomi Adérè̩mí explains, is relatively new: “We started using it around 2015 to 2017 as a term to express the experience of being Black and raised or born in Greece, of having our formative years in Greece and identifying as Greek citizens legally and culturally. We are Greek and African.” READ MORE…

An Unexpected Lurch of the Heart: An Interview With A. E. Stallings

February 28, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sebastián Sánchez

It’s an awareness of diachronic time, of the present and the past coexisting in the same space.

In the world of contemporary English poetry, A. E. Stallings is a giant. Known for both her innovative, various work within traditional poetic forms as well as her extraordinary translations of ancient Greek and Roman texts, her poems celebrate both the timelessness and resilience of technique, as well as how ancient constructions can continually metamorphose and evolve to enliven contemporary internalities and realities. In this following interview, she speaks to the allure of the classics, the essential work of keeping words alive, and the symbiotic relationship between translation and poetry.

Sebastián Sánchez (SS): Although you’ve spoken on writing poetry from a young age, you did not start to learn Latin until you were an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, where you switched from an English and Music major to a Classics major. What was it about Classics that attracted you?

A. E. Stallings (AES): I think I probably always had a sneaking attraction to it… to anything a bit arcane or out of the ordinary. My grandfather had studied Greek in seminary (he was an Episcopal priest), and was proud of his accomplishments in that regard. My Dad had wanted me to take Latin in high school (having been quite good at Latin in high school himself), but in the end, defiantly, I took Spanish—which I also much enjoyed. But I think I started to feel I was missing out, missing something. You know, you would run into these Latin or Greek tags in English literature, and feel that this was something you really ought to know. In the end, I thought I’ll just take Latin 101 and get a taste for it, but I had an extraordinary and extraordinarily eccentric professor, Dr. Robert Harris (at the University of Georgia). The class was riveting. And my classmates were interesting too, harder to pigeonhole than the average English major or even music major.

I then just kept taking Latin classes (because what was the point, Dr. Harris would say, unless we were going to get as far as some Virgil, which he recommended we read in the graveyard), until one day the department head (Dr. Rick LaFleur) took me aside and suggested I might as well change my major at that point. As an aspiring poet, I also appreciated the rather old-fashioned close reading we did of poems—scanning the meter, memorizing, looking at allusions and sound effects, rhetorical devices. This felt useful to me as a writer. I was not particularly interested in theory, which perhaps was having an ascendance in other literature courses at that time.

SS: In 1999, you moved to Athens and have lived there ever since. What led you to make this decision, and how did this impact your development as a writer?

AES: It was supposed to be, like so many things in life, a temporary decision. My husband is Greek, and he wanted to try moving back to Greece and living there a while. I think we said two years. Two children and two decades later, of course, it seems more momentous than it did at the time. It is hard to say how it may have affected me as a writer. It did probably affect how I wrote about Greek mythology (it all seemed less… mythological, I guess), and no doubt made me more aware of modern Greek literature. It probably pushed me more towards Greek generally, even though I had trained more as a Latinist. It has affected me in other ways; being in Greece and married to a journalist, I felt like I was both on the edge of where things are happening and at the forefront of some more general trends—the economic crisis, the migration surge, and climate change, all of that seemed more visible and more towards the surface of things in Greece, which is on the border of so much. That in turn has changed how I read classical literature, with an understanding of the geography: the placement of Greece, in the Aegean, is further towards the East and the global South than Western classics departments tend to place it, at least theoretically. It has re-oriented my sense of Classical literature quite literally. READ MORE…

From Palestine to Greece: A Translated Struggle 

January 10, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou

. . . utopias are not solely objects of fantasy but are objectives to be built and lived . . . at the intersection of art and revolution.

Palestine and Greece have long enjoyed a strong relationship of solidarity and friendship, fortified by mutual assistance during political tumults, expressions of recognition, and profound demonstrations towards peace and independence. In this essay, Christina Chatzitheodorou takes us through the literature that has continually followed along the history of this connection, and how translations from Arabic to Greek has advocated and enlivened the Palestinian cause in the Hellenic Republic.

Following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut in 1982, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) was forced to leave the city. Its leader, Yasser Arafat, then fled Beirut for Tunisia, and, in fear of being captured or assassinated by Israel, he asked his Greek friend Andreas Papandreou for cover. The two had previously joined forces during the dictatorial regime in Greece known as Junta or the Regime of the Colonels, in which Arafat supported the Panhellenic Liberation Movement (Panellinio Apeleutherotiko Kinima/PAK) founded by Papandreou, and had also offered training in Middle Eastern camps to the movement’s young resistance fighters. 

Arafat arrived then from war-torn Beirut to Faliron, in the south of Athens. He received a warm dockside reception by the then-Prime Minister Papandreou and other top government officials, as well as a small crowd consisting mostly of Greek Socialist Party (PASOK) members and Greece-based Palestinians, who stood by chanting slogans in support of the Palestinian cause. Papandreou called Arafat’s arrival in Athens a “historic moment” and assured him of Greece’s full support in the Palestinians’ struggle; after all, while Arafat was coming to Athens, accompanied by Greek ships, pro-Palestinian protests were taking place around the country almost every other day. 

Although our support and solidarity with the Palestinian cause neither began nor stopped there, that day remains a powerful reminder of the traditional ties and friendship between Greek and Palestinian people. But more importantly, it comes in total contrast with the position of the current Greek government. Now, despite the short memories of politicians, it is the literature and translations of Palestinian works which continue to remind us of Greece’s historical solidarity to Palestine, particularly from left-wing and libertarian circles. 

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Seas Otherwise Too Treacherous To Navigate: Mario Aquilina on the European Essay and Its Planetary Histories

December 4, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

. . . the essay sustains a tension between experience and the attempt . . . to derive ideas or abstractions from experience . . .

In The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form (2021), Mario Aquilina, a Maltese literary historian and scholar, probes through the philosophies and ethos of the genre’s figureheads—from Montaigne and Francis Bacon to Samuel Johnson and Ralph Waldo Emerson—and considers the “paradox at the heart” of the essay: “the more resistant to genre an essay is, the more properly an essay it is.” The foundations of the ever-expansive, proliferating possibilities of the essay as a genre, form, and mode can be found in its pre-Montaignean roots from Azwinaki Tshipala of 315 CE South Africa, al-Jahiz of 8th-century southeastern Iraq, and Heian Japan’s Nikki bungaku (diary literature) comprising of court ladies Sei Shōnagon, Izumi Shikibu, Lady Sarashina, and others, to the Graeco-Roman philosophers Plutarch, Seneca the Younger, St Augustine of Hippo, and Marcus Aurelius.

In the contemporary era, this obscured historico-aesthetic timeline courses through the genre, from the New Journalism movement of the 60s (Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Annie Dillard, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe) to ‘memoir craze’ of the 90s (David Sedaris, Mary Karr, Frank McCourt), from the British life-writing movement and its American counterpart, creative nonfiction, to its present-day extra-textual permutations: essay films, graphic memoir, the imagessay, and video essays. But what of this “memoirization of the essay” and “essayification of the memoir”—to quote from David Lazar? “If we think of the ‘I’ of the essayist as collaborative, then we understand that the essay does not have to be as narcissistic a genre as it has sometimes been presented. Its value—literary or communicative—not simply expressive,” writes Aquilina for The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (2022). 

In this interview, I spoke with Prof. Aquilina on, among other topics, the histories of the essay within and beyond the Western literary imaginary, his thoughts on Montaigne and Montaigne’s Euro-American stalwarts Georg Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, Phillip Lopate, and John D’Agata, and the genre’s recalcitrant relationship with categorisation, alterity, and selfhoods. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I would like to begin this interview with your opinion on John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) which was part of his trailblazing yet contentious trilogy. D’Agata follows the essay to its genesis in ancient cultures of Sumer, Greece, Babylonia, South Africa, and China: miscellanies of Ziusudra, dialogues of Ennatum, self-interviews of Azwinaki Tshipala, and biographies of T’ao Ch’ien. 

Mario Aquilina (MA): Editing an anthology is always a contentious act. Literary anthologies are political in the sense that they organise a body of knowledge in specific ways, bringing to our attention that which we might otherwise not see or something hiding from us that we should see. Anthologies establish or disrupt hierarchies of value and relevance, and they influence in decisive ways what is preserved and circulated as well as what is lost. Anthologising is inseparable from canonisation, archivisation, but also representation and social relations as shown in the well-known debate between Rita Dove and Helen Vendler in The New York Review of Books around The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011). 

John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) is provocative in the sense that, unlike some other accounts of the history of the essay, it does not begin with Michel de Montaigne. It also casts its net beyond the Western Canon. It thus stretches both the temporality and geographical positioning of the story of the essay that we often tell ourselves. It forces us to consider the possibility that the essay is not necessarily a fundamentally modern form (Jacques Rancière calls Montaigne the ‘first modern man’) and not necessarily tied to the rise of humanism and a human-centred perception of the world. However, what is perhaps even more contentious for some is that, through this alternative history of the essay, D’Agata also makes an intervention in the present by shifting the parameters within which one might think of the essay as a genre. D’Agata’s instinct in this anthology is to open the genre, to find it in places and times in which we did not see it before. The consequence of this is that as readers we are fascinated by the extent of the potential of the essay but also possibly confused by being presented with a form that is so stretched that it almost starts to incorporate everything. I personally think that D’Agata’s book does important work and I consider it to be a valuable contribution to not only studies of the history of the essay but also to its theory. 

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

December 1, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Christina Chatzitheodorou, Georgina Fooks, and Marina García Pardavila

Literary updates from Greece, Palestine, the UK, and Spain!

The week, we bring more updates from writers around the globe as they continue to commemorate, resist, show solidarity, and contemplate our present moment. In Greece, the literary world remembers the historic Athens Polytechnic Uprising; in the UK, the prestigious Warwick Prize for Women in Translation is awarded; in Spain, an exciting young literary festival brings together some of the best names in Spanish-language writing today, to talk about that eternal subject—time; and lastly, our editor from Palestine expresses gratitude for those around the world who have continued to stand up and show support.

Christina Chatzitheodorou, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Greece

The book Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales was recently translated from English into Greek by Dimitris Koufontinas and published by Monopati Editions. In the collection, editors Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana have gathered and selected stories from Palestine that best exemplify the Palestinian Arab folk oral tradition, and the translation represents an important addition for Palestinian and Arab literature in the Greek language.

Recently, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Athens Polytechnic Uprising (1973), Giorgos Perantonakis wrote an article for Book Press, highlighting the continual legacy that this demonstration—and the dictatorship, the Regime of the Colonels (1967-1974), that it protested—has left on Greek literature, citing important works from poetry and novels to personal memoirs. However, Perantonakis omitted one of the most important anti-dictatorial titles: Ta Dekaokto Kimena (The Eighteen Texts), a collective volume of eighteen writers (including Georgios Seferis, Manolis Anagnostakis, and Stratis Tsirkas) and their political works, which was published in July 1970 by Kedros Publications. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Tomas Venclova

November 28, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Diana Senechal

So death recedes. Morning approaches with a rooster’s cry / And a swallow takes heed

This Translation Tuesday, we find Lithuanian master Tomas Venclova sea-watching in a pair of entrancing poems, translated with beauty and guile by Diana Senechal. Lashes of brine, mist and cloud rise up from these chilly autumn seas, as do—so often the case—a soft sadness, and the observer’s most tender preoccupations.

August Elegy
For Z. B.

How are you, how is it to live
in the zone unknown to us still?
Forgetful and wet to the full,
the seasons float over the gulf.

Heat presses the narrow pavement,
the helicopter hones its direction,
takes notice: someone is absent.
This barely was able to happen.

Caught in the battered ships’ crush,
the whirlpools thrash the pavement,
and midyear soon comes to the seventh
year of your growing absence.

From that silent place what will I glean
on the balcony, pouring my wine
without you—who conquered alien
beds and bodies, you, skeptic, twin,

soul-likeness of mine? Almost always
you guessed what I had up my sleeve.
Now nature is all you have left—
the one God in whom you believed,

who always offered a safe
retreat from the State and its madness,
and whom—thrush’s skill, lynx’s craftiness—
you held higher than yourself.

Perhaps you are really in the fog,
in the film of glittering oil,
in scattered letters and logs,
by the promenade, where yachts jostle,

where road-loops are etched on the slope,
where the bell is contained in a breath
(a friend does not stay there long,
while an enemy stays to the death).

Perhaps you are really in the rays
where mollusks polish the deep,
in Vingis’s rusty pines,
and in Kotor’s salt molecules,

over here, where the sea vapor clears,
and in sands a thousand versts away.
“It is good,” you yourself would say,
“that nature gets by without tears.”

READ MORE…