Place: Israel

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 23, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bella Creel, Ibrahim Sayed Fawzy Elsayed, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary news from Japan, Egypt, and Kenya!

This week, our team from around the world brings news of literary award shortlists and winners! From the launch of the inaugural issue of Debunk Quarterly, to the winners of the Sawiris Cultural Awards, to the recent closure of a historical bookstore in Tokyo, read on to learn more!

Bella Creel, Blog Editor, Reporting from Japan

Where are Japan’s bookstores going? In the last two decades, the number of bookstores in Japan has nearly halved, dropping to only 11,495 in 2023. The figure speaks to the many locally-owned bookstores that have had to close over the years, unable to keep customers in a rapidly digitizing era. Some of these closures have garnered international and domestic attention, the latest of which was the historical “Bookshop 書楽” (Shogaku) in Tokyo’s Suginami ward. 

Owned by Mitsuru Ishida, Bookshop Shogaku has a long history in its small corner of Tokyo, located just outside of Asagaya Station for the past 43 years. The area of Asagaya itself—dubbed 文士の街, or “Literati Town”—has been a hub for creatives for well over a century, lined with jazz clubs, Showa-era coffee shops, and of course, bookstores. While famous literary figures such as Dazai Osamu and Masuji Ibuse once frequented the street and its many shelves, playing shogi and drinking as the “Asagaya Club,” over time Bookshop Shogaku became the last bookstore selling new titles in the area, until it closed as well. 

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Mixed Media on Galvanized Tin” by Zmira Poran Zion

January 23, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Yoni Hammer-Kossoy

rectangle like a leash with a yellow bird at its end

This Translation Tuesday, celebrated activist Zmira Poran Zion vividly conveys the silencing and marginalization she has faced as a Mizrahi Jew born to Iraqi-Jewish parents. In imagistic, concise verse, translated by Yoni Hammer-Kossoy, we see a voiceless existence ‘cast aside just because’. Read and recognize.

Mixed Media on Galvanized Tin

Bright ocher tin thick black stain
center of a wide rectangle
thin wordless bird wire-perched over mouth
she cannot sleep.

Dark ocher tin wine-red stain
rectangle like a leash with a yellow bird at its end
she cannot touch.

Her horizon is far
she hangs
over nothingness.

Clear ocher without stain
bird with no walls no windowsill
cast aside just because.

Translated from the Hebrew by Yoni Hammer-Kossoy.
READ MORE…

A Year of Reading the World

December 14, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart.

Every month, the Asymptote Book Club shares a newly published, translated title with readers and subscribers. From Nobel laureates to electrifying debuts, this selection features some of the most powerful voices writing in any language, opening up an entry into the immense archives of  wold literature. In this essay, we look back on the books of 2023 thus far. 

Sign up for the Asymptote Book Club here and have our curated titles sent to your door!

Whenever a major event transpires, anywhere in the world, the instinct of many is to reach into the annals of writing—for explanation, ruminations, solace, transcriptions of history, glimmers of what’s to come, stories of people and their ordinary or extraordinary lives. . . On January 1 of this year, Croatia officially joined the Schengen Area, making it the twenty-seventh member to benefit from the region’s removal of border controls—and the search for Croatian books and literature went up 30%. During the surprising and intermittently absurd “Chinese balloon incident” in early February, searches for books on Chinese espionage went up a full 100%. Interest for Ukrainian literature stayed at a high amidst the ongoing conflict, and peaked when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin for committing war crimes regarding the illegal deportation of children. As a devastating civil war broke out in Sudan in mid-April, the world immediately sought out writing from and about the region, and when Niger’s government was overthrown in a military coup on July 26, searches for Nigerien books and authors also saw a significant surge. And as writers from Palestine and Israel continued, over the decades, to release texts around nation, land, exile, occupation, humanity, and violence both physical and psychological, we all watched in horror as the devastation grew almost unimaginably—and we looked for those books.

Books and the world they’re written in, books and the worlds they give us—sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart. As the poet Adonis said, “My homeland is this spark this lightning in the darkness of the time remaining. . .” (translated by S.M. Toorawa); with language, such texts lend us that brightness, and we are rendered able to discover the many narratives and landscapes of our long, shadowy era.

In this year’s Book Club, we’ve thus far featured eleven titles: eleven authors, eleven countries, eleven languages, and eleven translators. Each brought their own entrancing energy of storytelling, whether taking history or the human psyche as material, building on myth or fearlessly experimental. There were titles that sought to give us a vivid portrait of a certain neighbourhood, a certain period. Others dove into the intricate channels of thinking to paint a picture of the mind. READ MORE…

States of Alienation: Dana Shem-Ur and Yardenne Greenspan on Where I Am

July 19, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

That’s a major part of translation: to make sure that it’s still the original book.

Our June Book Club selection, Dana Shem-Ur’s Where I Am, is a novel that looks intensely at the dissonances of daily life in the aftermath of migrancy, profoundly reaching below the surface of superficial comfort to read the disassociations and discontents that stem from being not quite in-place. Reaching into the mind of an Israeli translator named Reut who has settled in France, Shem-Ur constructs a map of navigations amidst cultural codes, languages, and physical agitations, drawing out the anxiety of belonging. In this interview, we speak to Shem-Ur and translator Yardenne Greenspan about this novel’s simmering frustrations and the new Israeli diaspora, and how they have both used language to reflect the confounding boundaries of our social fabric.

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. 

Laurel Taylor (LT): Dana, I’d like to ask you about what sparked the creation of this novel—particularly as you’re already a translator and scholar. How did Where I Am come about?

Dana Shem-Ur (DS): I come from a family of a female authors. My mom is a poet, and my grandma wrote over thirty books, so I always was involved in this world. In fact, when I was little, I didn’t even read a lot. I just wrote fiction, and even published a small novella of one hundred pages when I was about twelve.

Then I dropped it because I was engaged in studying history, and I channeled my life of writing into other domains. It was only later on, when I was in Paris for three years for my master’s degree in philosophy, that I just came home one summer and wrote the first few pages.

I think what generated this novel was my certainty that I would remain in France, and I would have a life there. I began writing this story about a woman who is twenty years older than me and lives in Paris, but she’s unhappy, and I think part of it was just a reflection of my fears. What will become of me? Will I become Reut?

LT: It’s almost like speculative autofiction?

DS: Yeah. I didn’t even notice it when I wrote it, but it was also inspired by a lot of characters that I met. No character in Where I Am is a real person, but the salon of people at the Jean-Claude household are all inspired by people I met and by these talks and these Parisian intellects, who I always found very fascinating; they are my friends, but throughout the period I lived there, I felt there was a barrier between us. I was always the observer who was looking at this spectacle, not completely present, like Reut. I’m very fascinated by foreign cultures, so it felt like something I needed to write about. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 30, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, Michal Zechariah, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest literary news from Sweden, Japan, and Israel!

In this week’s news, our editors report on the various matters occupying readers around the world. From the power of literary awards throughout Japan’s modern history, a survey on contemporary literary habits, and the growing Hebrew Book Fair—read on to find out more!

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for Japan

On June 16, the nominees for the 169th Akutagawa Prize and the Naoki Prize were announced to the public. Long recognised as the most important literary awards in Japan, the two accolades are given to emerging authors for a work of “pure literature” (junbungaku) and “popular literature” (taishū bengei) respectively, a fascinating distinction that has shifted tenuously throughout the awards’ long history, reflecting the evolving perspectives on what constitutes literary excellence, the separation between author and work, as well as how taste and zeitgeist can be reflected in the awardees. While the difference between what constitutes a literary text and a popular text can be seen as elitist, there have been, in the past, a great many other factors that have gone into the consideration of awardees—perhaps best exemplified by the awarding of the 1937 Naoki Prize (considered the less prestigious of the two) to Masuji Ibuse, whose profound literary output has insured him a spot in the modern Japanese canon. Throughout their time, the separate realms that the Akutagawa and Naoki Prizes were intended to occupy have opened up significant inquiries as to what, exactly, is valued in writing, consulting the multiple planes engaged by the literary arts: the aesthetic, the political, the dialogic, and the compassionate.

This year, the nominees for the Akutagawa Prize are Sao Ichikawa, Ameko Kodama, Masaya Chiba, Yusuke Norishiro, and Kaho Ishida. The subject matter of the narratives veer from the life of a professional welder; the changing intimacies and relations between four high school students over a single day; the introduction of the Internet in the 90s and its reverberations in a young man’s life; the potentials of anonymity as discovered by a teenage pop star; and the sexual life of a physically disabled woman.

The nominees for the Naoki Prize are Tow Ubukata, Ryosuke Kakine, Kazuaki Takano, Ryoe Tsukimura, and Nagai Sayako. Their nominated works include a historical novel on Ashikaga Takauji, the first shogun of the Ashikaga shogunate; a psychological story centred around the spectral presence at a railroad crossing; a crime novel set between Hong Kong and Japan; a tale of a young samurai who avenges his father; and a work of horror that paints a violent world under Tokyo’s polished metropolis.

What becomes evident in looking at these two groupings, even just by the superficial delineations of their bylines, is that this year, there is indeed a conspicuous demarcation between their preoccupations. Whereas the texts up for the Akutagawa can be all considered as realist storylines, recognisably using the prism of an individual’s life to refract truths and insights into the society in which they—and we—live, the nominees for the Naoki are being publicised along the engaging capacities of thrill and mystery. It is reflective of the same bilaterality that has always troubled the book as an object of consumption: that seeming incompatibility between the educational and the entertaining. Such is undoubtedly a judgement we all make independently when selecting what we’re interested in reading—or what we think we should be reading—and it’s somewhat unsettling to see this consideration fortified in the institutional fixedness of an award, which is by definition a statement of authority, a mandate of a higher power. In this way, the very essence of the Akutagawa and Naoki Prizes presents a conundrum that expounds on the act of reading, not only within Japanese literature and its apparatus, but in regards to the invisible schematic that books themselves exist on—all of these gossamer compartments and classifications that aim to instruct us not only on our own literary predilections, but what the books and their authors should be pursuing. It reveals both the impossibility and the necessity of judgment within the literary industry, about how unruly we know the whole process to be, yet how implicitly we trust it still. The freedom of the writing-act and the imagination of the reading-act has so many binds to negotiate, so many contracts to overcome. READ MORE…

Winter 2023: Highlights from the Team

February 1, 2023  |  in News  |  by Barbara Halla, Caridad Svich, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Georgina Fooks, Heather Green, Ian Ross Singleton, Janet Phillips, Marina Dora Martino, and Thuy Dinh

Dip your toe into our milestone Winter 2023 issue with these recommendations from our global team!

I found, as I sat down to read this issue, that what I was hungry for was urgency, vitality, wit and I found pieces that gave me what I was looking for. “There’s No Cure for the Dead” by Nazli Karabiyikoglu (tr. Ralph Hubbell) weaves a breathtakingly complex tapestry, rife with competing rhythms and energies. Selim Özdoğan’s “Seven Difficulties and One Ever-Narrowing Path” (tr. Katy Derbyshire) brought exactly the acerbic, incisive voice I needed. The Alfred Döblin story “The Woman Who Walked In Her Sleep” (tr. Joachim Redner) was filled with great verbs, gestures, colors, sounds, taking the reader on a dizzying trajectory, a plummet, really, from the character swanning about Berlin, showing off his colorful fashion ensemble, to a murderous rag doll come to life. Menke Katz’s poems with their structural challenges around diminishing or growing numbers of syllables and the love of Yiddish had me re-reading them and admiring the translation. And Aco Šopov’s deep, painful poems (tr. Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer) after the devastation of the 1963 Skopje earthquake show how despair communicates across decades and has much to say to us about loss and survival now, sixty years later.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

This issue I was particularly blown away by the quality of the interviews published. The César Aira interview conducted by Michal Zechariah is truthfully hilarious, and the line of questioning really allows his trademark wit and absurdism to shine through. I found Geetanjali Shree’s interview with Rose Bialer to be incredibly generous and thoughtful, fascinating and sharp. In both cases, I thought a really strong sense of their writing came through thanks to the interviewers. The visual section brought together two incredible artists—I’m researching the interplay of poetic text and space at the moment, so Lynn Xu’s thinking (teased out by Laura Copelin) really spoke to me, and I appreciated the climate focus of Bahia Shehab’s work, and her interview with Heather Green. Last but certainly not least, I loved Jared Joseph’s review of Johannes Göransson’s Summer. As a researcher, Göransson’s thinking on poetry translation has been incredibly insightful, and I enjoyed the same insights applied to his work, really engaging in depth with poetry as a genre and mode of being. As a bonus, I thought the criticism section was pleasantly varied in terms of geographies and genres!

—Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach

All the fiction pieces in this issue are truly marvelous, as if they’re in conversation with one another! For example, Kim Cho Yeop’s “Laura” (tr. Sukyoung Sukie Kim) and Dalih Sembiring’s “Floccinaucinihilipilificatius” (tr. Avram Maurits) can be seen as companion pieces, as both stories deal with corporeal limitations and spiritual transcendence. Laura’s sci-fi context, on various conditions related to body dysmorphia, eloquently evokes the plight of non-binary and transgender groups, while Floccinaucinihilipilificatius represents a metaphorical lotus—its trajectory from pain and putrefaction toward the light of maternal love. There’s a sense of metaphysical wonder to both stories—even though one is inspired by science and the other by magical realism. READ MORE…

Summer 2022: Highlights from the Team

August 8, 2022  |  in News  |  by Andriana Hamas, Caridad Svich, Daniel Naman, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Liam Sprod, M.K. Harb, M.L. Martin, Meghan Racklin, and Thuy Dinh

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…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2022

August 1, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

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…

All Hail the Summer 2022 Issue!

July 28, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

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.

finalized_issue_announcement

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Triangle” by Lior Maayan

July 19, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Lior Maayan

Wrinkling time is not like standing time

This Translation Tuesday, we present to you Lior Maayan’s self-translation of his poem “Triangle”, in a moving poem that meditates on the experience of time as the speaker moves through the vicissitudes of living, both grand and personal. Read on!

Triangle

Today it occurred to me that there is no real time,
That there is no time in the real sense, just matter changing around us—changing us.
And I really felt in my body that there is no direction to this change,
In a fallow outside Shefar’am I saw an olive tree two thousand years old.
According to the harvesters. How will you prove it, as you are required to
amputate the trunk and count the rings of time, and yet I write you this
on my way to Stuttgart as evening is falling.

Once in the grocery shop, time wrinkled, I’m not sure this sight will ever come back,
I think it’s because of the sun but it’s probably because of Ayelet’s death.
Wrinkling time is not like standing time, it is the feeling that there is no
movement and you are for one moment a wind.
In the past, I would have told you about such things: “it’s to die for”
And meant “it’s to die”.

The days to come touch the days that have come
like the skin around
a bleeding cut,
and our lives are like a series of cuts. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Chemistry Lesson” by Hagit Zohara Mendrowski

May 24, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Dana G. Peleg

In our room we are delivering / each other

Revel in the sensuous yearning of “Chemistry Lesson” this Translation Tuesday, a poem by the pansexual Hebrew poet Hagit Zohara Mendrowski’s that itself enacts a pedagogy of queer desire. In Dana G. Peleg’s translation, the linguistic aspects of gender between Hebrew and English unfold in poetic time to elongate and stretch the modes of desire latent in Mendrowski’s poem. Read this poem today and hear from the translator on the choices she made: 

“The love poems of Hagit Zohara Mendrowski, a pansexual Hebrew poet, reflect a great yearning. In many of her poems, the lover she yearns for is non-existent or a fantasy male or female lover. In this poem, the female lover is real, tangible. Furthermore, the gendered conjugation of verbs and prepositions in Hebrew does not leave any doubt regarding the type of the lovemaking depicted here. When using second person singular in Hebrew poets are forced to choose a gender. English, on the other hand, allows room for interpretation. I took the liberty of leaving readers with a question mark for a while. That question mark becomes an exclamation point when Mendrowski writes “pigeons” in the feminine. This is a grammatical error, or a children’s word, since “pigeon” in proper Hebrew is pluralized in the masculine. This usage adds another layer to the yearning expressed in this poem, for turning lesbian lovemaking into an act of procreation, of recreating.” 

—Dana G. Peleg

Brilliant formulae you have developed
Insist on impregnating me

When you squat on all six
my tongue draws infinite figures of eight
inside you. The whole room is lit. I drop into
The world of my childhood, scared
to sprout
but your obstinate womb pushes away—

Outside people continue to
Spit, swear, drag their heavy baskets.
Honk their limping cars.

In our room we are delivering
each other. Wander READ MORE…

The International Booker Comes Home

April 4, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

There is much to be said about the (fleeting) feeling of accomplishment in seeing a favorite longlisted.

With the upcoming announcement of the Booker International shortlist on April 7, our in-house Booker expert is here to take you through the impressive longlist, discuss the intersection between closed-door judging and fervent public online discourses, and the increased visibility of the translator in bringing these vital titles into the English-language sphere, Read on to find out more!

The International Booker Prize, like a number of other British literary prizes, has become a unifying topic amidst a very active online community. Twitter is the kind of place where bubbles of connections and affinities naturally form, but participating in this nexus simultaneously fosters a detached sense of irony that makes any earnest acknowledgment to it a touch mortifying. I am willing to take the risk of too much earnestness today because, for the sake of honesty, my relationship to the International Booker would not be the same without this community.

I became a regular follower of the prize after attending a meeting with the judges at Shakespeare and Company in Paris back in 2016 (a discussion I left certain in the knowledge that Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, was going to win, as it did). But it was entering in conversation with other readers and translators through Twitter that made the International Booker an event that I await impatiently every March. We make a friendly race out of reading the entire longlist, and debates about the merits of each selection get unreasonably heated, as we work to change the minds of others about the books we love—or even loath at times. Not to mention that I would be very happy not to have the “what constitutes nonfiction” debate again in my lifetime, which was in full swing both last year, with the longlisting of In Memory of Memory and The War of the Poor, and in 2019 when The Years was shortlisted.

Perhaps more importantly, being part of this community has shaped the approach I take the reading (and reviewing) the list. Thanks to it, I am constantly aware of the labor that goes into each book, not merely the translation but the efforts by the translators themselves, often acting as both agent and publicist. For instance, when Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights won the International Booker in 2018, Jennifer Croft had spent a decade advocating for it to be published. Furthermore, participating even somewhat actively in the discussion happening on places like Twitter is to be aware of the uneven dynamics of the publishing world. Much has rightfully been said about the International Booker’s Eurocentrism (which this year’s longlist provides a refreshing break from), but at the same time, as an online participant in these communities, you see in real time that the Booker is probably replicating trends that exist within publishing at large. READ MORE…

How to Start Women in Translation Month Off Right

August 5, 2021  |  in News  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Stock up this August with some of our favourite presses and titles!

The impetus to read women is very similar to the desire to read the world; one does not necessarily do it out of a purely social cause—though that can hardly be argued against—but because the profound, intelligent curiosity that sustains the act of reading can only be validated by reading variously, probingly, and with an awareness of life as it is being lived now. Even as the world of letters is slowly ridding itself of entrenched biases and definitions, it remains an indisputable truth that the idea of being a woman in this world continues to throb with chaos and fragility, and increasing globalist awareness only reinforces the fact that womanhood remains replete with mystery, inquiry, and greatly variegating methods of approach.

To find the language that does justice to this experience of living—whether or not womanhood is the subject—requires a persevering intellect and originality that one finds in the greatest of minds. A reader does not pick up a work of translated literature to learn how being a woman is done in that part of the world, but to be allowed entrance into a vast, ridiculously under-explored, realm of humanity, whose inner workings often prove to be—as a result of challenges that must be overcome—intellectually complex, stylistically thrilling, and revolutionary in their uncoverings of human nature.

That is why I, for one, am grateful for the existence of causes like Women in Translation Month, which celebrates the excellent work produced by women around the world and also urges towards an increased conscientiousness about our reading choices. In solidarity with our fellow comrades who support global literature, below are some incredible opportunities you can take advantage of this August.

Many presses are currently offering promotions for the duration of WIT Month. One of our favourites, Open Letter Books, is offering a generous discount for the women-written and women-translated books in their lineup. Some recommendations I can make confidently include Mercè Rodoreda’s Garden by the Sea, a gorgeously lyrical fiction of 1920s Barcelona; Marguerite Duras’ The Sailor from Gibraltar, of that terrific Durassian ardor and intimate poetry; and Can Xue’s Frontier, masterfully multilayered and graceful in its surrealism. Fum D’Estampa, a press specialising in Catalan literature, is also offering discounts on all their titles, with Rosa Maria Arquimbau’s brilliant melding of the personal and the political, Forty Lost Years among them.

The wonderful Charco Press, which time and time again has brought out exceptional Latin American works, has put together special bundles of their texts—three carefully curated sets of three books each. “Revolutions” includes Karla Suárez’s Havana Year Zero, a sharp and attentive novel about unexpected connections during Cuba’s economic crisis; “Interior Journeys” features the subversive, cerebral work of Ariana Harwicz; and lastly, “Stories of Survival” gathers narratives of persistence against violence and trauma, with Selva Almada’s incredibly powerful Dead Girls among them.

World Editions is another publisher getting it right, partnering with Bookshop to provide a list of highlighted titles. Included is Linda Boström Knausgård’s October Child, a poetic and elegant autofiction about the escaping borders of reality in her experiences with mental illness and memory loss. The Last Days of Ellis Island, the award-winning novel by Gaëlle Josse that centres around the painful tenets of migration, is also up for grabs. READ MORE…

Our Word Against Kafka’s

July 14, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Samuel Kahler

Kafka floats, shapeshifts, appears in many places at once; he is not a fixed subject.

Franz Kafka’s gigantic presence in the world of letters is undeniable, yet looking back along the labyrinthine volutes of history, one perceives distinctly the figure of a man who would likely be horrified at the depth and breadth by which we known his work. Having famously insisted that his texts be burned after his death, a betrayal by a close friend led to the remarkable corpus we freely access today. Since then, Kafka’s writings have undergone a dramatic escalade of ownerships, resulting most recently in its comprehensive release by the National Library of Israel. In the following essay, Samuel Kahler traces the events that led to Kafka’s legacy, delineating a writer’s intentions as they come up against the voracious appetites of the world.

 “I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”

—Franz Kafka

Part of the appeal of reading Kafka (or the madness, depending on who you ask) stems from the durability of the stories, parables, and novellas—their infinite resistance to decisive analysis enduring even after multiple readings. The texts evoke the quotidian anxieties of the modern age, achieving their incomparable effect by leaning into varied traditions of folklore, parable, horror, and the absurd, paradoxically balancing the polarities of universal relatability and a resistance against fixed interpretations. Can a body of work so ripe—so bursting with potential meanings—possibly be pigeonholed with a singular definition? To attempt a conclusive, complete answer—something like a grand unified theory of Kafka—would be the errand of a well-meaning but misguided fool.

Inseparable from the question, and equally difficult to answer, is another problem: namely, that of deciding which works belong in his official catalog and which do not. Mostly, we owe this state of affairs to a complex series of events that began with the discovery of Kafka’s will and continued onward through the next nine decades, through the many publications of his works and, later, the battles over his archival materials and the significance of the contents contained therein.

When the National Library of Israel released its newly digitized Franz Kafka collection this spring, it signified the end of a prolonged conflict over its acquisition. Yet, the collection’s publication does not portend a satisfying resolution for any facet of Kafka’s legacy; rather, it throws the spotlight on academia and the public at large, exposing our continued desire to make something concrete out of Kafka, despite his enigmatic condition.

Kafka’s posthumous drama—call it a tragedy, a passion play, a farce, or what you will—remains an unresolved mess, even after the curtain has supposedly come down. READ MORE…