Place: Mozambique

The Making of Rude Girl

July 27, 2024  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Priscilla Layne’s story, Birgit Weyhe’s graphic novel, an unexpected collaboration – and an English translation

Imagine translating a book based on your own life… That’s exactly what Priscilla Layne did with Birgit Weyhe’s German graphic novel Rude Girl, published in English by V&Q Books.

 Faced with accusations of cultural appropriation for her comics depicting Black characters’ stories, Weyhe was looking for a new approach when she met Priscilla Layne. A Chapel Hill professor of German and African Diaspora Studies, Layne grew up in Chicago with Bajan and Jamaican parents and learned German after watching Indiana Jones as a child – that’s what she’d need to fight Nazis, after all. Later, a fascination with Kafka and May Ayim fueled that enthusiasm even more.

 This time around, the author and her subject collaborated closely. First Priscilla told her life story, then Birgit drew a chapter and sent it to her. Priscilla gave feedback – “not using skin color in the drawings implies a ‘post-racial’ society; I prefer it when you combine two colors, like in your earlier comics,” for instance – and Birgit picked that up and adapted the way she worked as she went along. Each chapter is followed by a separate section detailing Priscilla’s comments and explanations.

 The book came out in German in 2022 and was promptly shortlisted for the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Prize – the first graphic novel ever to be nominated. Berlin-based imprint V&Q Books had previously published Birgit Weyhe’s Madgermanes, a comic about Mozambican contract workers in the GDR. And publisher Katy Derbyshire not only shares Priscilla Layne’s love of German literature… they’re also both big fans of punk, ska and reggae. In fact, their paths presumably crossed at gigs in Berlin during Priscilla’s time as an exchange student there. It’s the rude girl culture of the title that provided her with a sense of community among anti-racist skinheads, and the book features great stylized drawings of album covers that shaped her life at various stages – something Derbyshire very much related to.

 So it was a no-brainer to publish Rude Girl in English, and it was clear who’d have to translate it. Priscilla Layne had previously worked on writing by Feridun Zaimoglu and Olivia Wenzel, but Rude Girl posed new challenges. As she writes in her translator’s note, “having your life displayed on the page requires a degree of vulnerability.” The graphic novel explores personal and political hurdles she has faced and doesn’t shy away from depictions of difficult experiences, though they’re not always literal; Birgit Weyhe has a special gift for apt metaphors in illustration form.

In the end, the book is a beacon for a great many readers. As Priscilla Layne writes: “If you are a Black nerd, any other nerd of Color, or even just a femme-identifying nerd, you don’t necessarily see any (positive) representation of yourself. I’m glad Rude Girl is helping to contribute to these representations and that it is now available in English.”

Find out more about Rude Girl here.

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Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Aruanda by Virgília Ferrão

July 2, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Beth Hickling-Moore

“Witchcraft?” Pedro Lucas’ almost guttural voice catches in his throat in confusion.

This Translation Tuesday, we are honored to share with you an excerpt from the latest novel by the first woman to win Mozambique’s Prémio Literário 10 de Novembro literary prize. Here to tell you about this riveting tale of parallel love stories that traverse centuries is translator Beth Hickling-Moore herself: “Aruanda fluctuates between two stories, the first set in the 19th Century and the other in the 21st. In each story, prejudice, conflict and environmental destruction are destined to repeat themselves. In 1890, black servant Carina de Sousa is accused of witchcraft by the plantation overlord, along with her mother, Lina. What nobody knows is that Carina is in a secret and forbidden relationship with Pedro Lucas, the son of Carina’s boss, the captain. A scuffle ensues and Pedro Lucas is killed, leaving Carina pregnant with his mestizo child. The story then jumps back and forth between Carina’s story and the present day, in which professor Daniel de Barros —along with student Maria Cristina—embarks on a restoration project in the Aruanda region. As both stories develop in tandem, we discover that Daniel and Maria Cristina are in fact reincarnations of Pedro Lucas and Carina. As the professor and his students fight to save the Aruanda region from property developers who are destroying the landscapes just as the plantations did centuries before, we realise that Daniel and Maria’s love is similarly ill-fated. While Aruanda reflects on the country’s issues of prejudice, conflict and environmental destruction past and present, the novel does not feature the word ‘Mozambique’ at all: much like Isabel Allende’s Casa de los Espiritus is an allegory of national history without ever naming names, Aruanda takes place in fictional Aruanda, named after the Afro-Brazilian spiritual citadel of the same name, and considers whether postcolonial, post civil-war Mozambique is indeed a version of this utopia, or whether it is controlled by the same forces as it always has been. Aruanda will be of interest to a contemporary readership because it falls within the spheres of climate fiction, science fiction and race writing. Recent big-budget film and TV adaptations of novels such as The End We Start From and Leave the World Behind demonstrate the popularity of such genres, but very little climate fiction is published from the African continent, one of the regions most affected by the climate crisis. The book is also reminiscent of Octavia Butler’s classic, Kindred, in its historical episodes and supernatural elements.”

Aruanda is silent. Its solitude has risen, its melancholy dripping into the sea. I’ve never been to the Indian Ocean, but this is how I picture it: deep and still like the tombs of my ancestors who traversed its waters. Its quietude stretches right up to the large house belonging to the Prazo overlords: Captain Major Bento Noronha and his wife, Dona Luísa.

The dinner table is laid just so, just how Dona Luísa likes it. Tonight we are hosting young Doctor Fernando, the family physician. After coming to see Sargeant Pedro Lucas, he has been invited to stay for dinner.

Captain Bento and Doctor Fernando’s conversation lingers on banalities as the sweet scent of lilies tickles my nostrils. I inhale deeply and see Dona Luísa descending the granite steps, carrying a glass vase holding the flowers.

“It’s a pleasure to have you here, Doctor Fernando.”

“An absolute honour, Madam,” he responds politely, nodding in reverence to his hostess.

READ MORE…

Many Bridges To Cross: Sandra Tamele on Mozambican Portuguese and Unfolding a Publishing Scene

November 16, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

. . . translation plays a pivotal role in terms of making [Mozambican] borders more permeable to culture and knowledge and the circulation thereof.

Having envisioned a publishing infrastructure for Mozambicans and by Mozambicans after becoming the first published literary translator in her country, polyglot Sandra Tamele established a literary translation prize, attended the Breadloaf Translators’ Conference, obtained a diploma in translation from the Institute of Linguists Educational Trust in the United Kingdom, and eventually co-founded consortiums of literary translators and book publishers. She did all this while translating works from the English and Italian into the Mozambican Portuguese, from Premio Strega-winning Italian novelist Niccolò Ammaniti’s Eu não tenho medo (I Am Not Scared) to Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus’s A Perseveranca (The Perseverance), and learning other languages—including the Mozambican Sign Language. 

Throughout all this, establishing The London Book Fair award-winning independent press Editora Trinta Nove Zero (30.09) and the As Sete por Quatro (7×4)—which champions works by marginalised Mozambican writers writing in Mozambican Portuguese, English, and other local languages such as Makhuwa, Sena, and Changana—seems to be her career’s crown jewel so far. In this work, she has engineered a landscape more consequential than any edifice and armature: the new age of Mozambican literature, translation, and publishing. “Literary translation is still underrated in Mozambique,” Tamele laments in her essay ‘Desassimilar: Decolonizing a Granddaughter of Assimilados,’ “But I have chosen a different path now, and this work is too important for me to give up.”

In this interview, I conversed with Tamele on the intricacies of translating from English and Italian into the Mozambican Portuguese language; finding readership in the Mozambique and the rest of the Lusophone world; and being one of the architects of Mozambique’s literary and publishing scene. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Did you have a road map to develop a publishing infrastructure with your many contributions to Mozambican literature? What went unmentioned behind the scenes?

Sandra Tamele (ST): I have to admit that I did not have a roadmap, but wish I had one when I decided to become a ‘PublisHer’ back in 2018; most of the shifts in my career, through this past decade, were a result of my restless, problem-solver spirit. In hindsight, I think that I never expected or even dreamed that today I could win any literary or publishing awards, nor act as a PublisHer advisory board member and president of the Mozambican Publishers and Booksellers Association, among others. 

Long story short, I left a career where I felt unwanted for one where I felt invisible—and with less prospects of succession because I had never heard a single child say they wanted to become a literary translator when they grew up. The solution: a literary translation competition to raise the profile of language professionals, while promoting reading and literary translation practice among young people in Mozambique. Three years later, we had this amazing collection of stories that no publishing house in Mozambique was willing to invest in, in spite being written by award-winning authors like Alain Mabanckou, Marguerite Abouet, and Imbolo Mbue, to mention a few. 

Establishing 30.09 was the solution. It went from strength to strength and now encompasses a creative writing initiative for women, workshops for illustrators, the transcription of children’s and YA books to build a Braille library, agenting for Mozambican writers, and the project of a groundbreaking bookshop and community library. I guess I am The Architect without a plan. Despite the steep learning curve and the many hats I have to wear, I believe that I’m gaining focus as I grow as a publisHer. 

In 2024, I plan to be more intentional in working with my peers to provide training for a cohort of female high school graduates in key publishing and related fields, to start building the book sector infrastructure in Mozambique. A roadmap for those who follow on my footsteps is also on the agenda, in addition to building a database and statistics for the sector. I’m now also in the position to advocate for book and literacy policies with key decision makers.

AMMD: You disclosed that most Mozambican writers do not share your views about the potentials of literary translation. In what ways has 30.09 been a solution to the many challenges you previously outbraved and myths you tried (and are still trying) to dispel as a translator and publisher? 

READ MORE…

Help us toward our big 5-0 this #GivingTuesday

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

A special message from our editor-in-chief

Dear reader,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Gratefully,

Lee Yew Leong, editor-in-chief

Fall 2022: Highlights from the Team

November 2, 2022  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Annilee Newton, Barbara Halla, Bella Creel, Caridad Svich, Heather Green, Ian Ross Singleton, Janet Phillips, Marina Dora Martino, Megan Sungyoon, and Sofija Popovska

Where to start with our glorious Fall 2022 issue? Here are some entry points, courtesy of our global team!

Emma Ramadan’s work as a translator has been so important to me and my literary journey—not least because of the attentiveness she lends to the writers she translates from Francophone North Africa, such as Ahmed Bouanani. I also really admire the way she speaks about her process with Claire Mullen in her interview, the passion and commitment and genuineness that shine through, for instance, in how she discusses her feelings at finally finding a copy of Molinard’s Panics. It reminded me a little of Alice Guthrie’s work with Malika Moustadraf’s Blood Feast, which was also out of print and circulated online as low quality scans.

I really love the slow, meditative writing of Dejan Atanacković’s absent narrator in Lusitania (tr. Rachael Daum). When it ranges with a kind of radical exteriority over the ephemera that remains of Teofilović, and the marginal annotations of Stojimirović that accompany his journals, it reads almost like the prose of Sebald—with the enigma of Teofilović as one such central, inaccessible figure around which the story endlessly circles, never losing sight of the larger political and social context.

Laksmi Pamuntjak’s “The Tale of Mukaburung” could easily have been written and translated to pander to a white gaze, and it’s really to the credit of both Pamuntjak and her translator Annie Tucker that there is a pervasive self-sufficiency to the story and its world, a refusal to explain itself, a matter-of-fact revelling in the ordinariness of its own magic and ritual. This seems especially commendable when a dominant affect in the story is puzzlement and defensiveness, in confrontation with foreigners whose presence and purpose are unknown, even to the reader, until much later in the story when it is revealed that many among them are political prisoners.

—Alex Tan, Senior Assistant Editor (Fiction)

Olavo Amaral’s “Steppe” (tr. Isobel Foxford) is exquisite in every way: the writing of the translation, the unusual subject matter, the relationship and emerging love between the two main characters and how it is described, the mood created by the atmosphere of snow and remoteness.

I have been following closely the horrors of Putin’s war in Ukraine and though still angry and frustrated by its continuation, I thought I was fairly hardened to the extent of Russian atrocities. But I broke down towards the end of Galina Itskovich’s War Diary (tr. Maria Bloshteyn), where the unspeakable rape and violence against children is put into words.

—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor

Kudos to Jonathan Chan for beautifully translating such ancient poems of Choe Chi-won, whose characteristic loneliness metaphorized in natural images is successfully rendered in translation.

I think one of the most important missions of Asymptote is to sustain languages under oppression, be that a national language that is close to extinction or the voice of a people amid a political process of erasure. Lauren Bo’s review of The Backstreets by Perhat Tursun undertakes this mission in remarkable earnest and rigor, by not only posing the biopolitical question of survival faced by the Uyghurs but also diligently analyzing the text via a close reading, and ultimately marrying the two to derive a conclusion that engages readers with the enduring challenge of humanity that surpasses the violence that is immediately palpable: “The Backstreets is an account of survival and a reminder that even the cruelest elements of humanity are fabricated out of absurdity and fear of the uncertain.”

The elusive language of Krikor Beledian’s “Unpeopled Language” (tr. Taline Voskeritchian and Christopher Millis) is delicate yet piercing, and while  the history of the Armenian genocide cannot be separated from the poetics of Beledian, its implementation of “the tool against the game of expression“ speaks to the broader context of the survival of a people and their language in and after the era of mass murder.  

—Megan Sungyoon, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

READ MORE…

The Fall 2022 Issue Is Here!

October 20, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Kyung-Sook Shin, Emma Ramadan, Aram Pachyan, and Álvaro Fausto Taruma amid new work from 32 countries and 19 languages

Welcome to “Half-Lives,” our new Fall 2022 issue, where never-before-published work from 32 countries and 19 languages confront life as it shouldn’t be: stunted, degraded, perversely foreshortened—in short, half-lived. Its centerpiece is the Armenian Special Feature, generously sponsored by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, under the aegis of which we are proud to present stunning new translations of emerging authors such as Aram Pachyan, last year’s winner of the EU Prize for Literature—Armenia’s first recipient!—alongside more established voices like Narine Abgaryan, Krikor Beledian, and Hrant Matevossian. Inescapably harrowing because of their historical contexts, many of these works set the tone for the rest of the issue—including a gritty dispatch from Ukraine via Galina Itskovich and a spotlight on Ukraine-born artist Sergey Katran. Elsewhere, Claire Mullen chats to Emma Ramadan about the joy of translating from the archive, past contributor Anton Hur brings us a new short story by 2012 Man Asia Literary Prize recipient Kyung-Sook Shin, and Grant Schutzman delivers our first work from Mozambique in the form of moving poetry by Álvaro Fausto Taruma. All of this is illustrated by our amazingly talented guest artist, the London-born creative Louise Bassou.

On the heels of Roe being overturned, our editors have also responded by centering one half of the human condition in this issue. Pregnancy is the subject of Lusine Kharatyan’s keenly observed #America_place Pregnant and S. Vijayalakshmi’s intimately recounted Just Like a Womb. Growing up (a “difficult art” according to a very wise Montserrat Roig in this issue’s inspiring Brave New World Literature Feature), the women in these pieces are made to feel less than human in contradictory ways, shamed for the developing bodies in which they are trapped (Rosabetty Muñoz) while becoming objects of unwanted desire at the same time (Eszter T. Molnár). In Mexico, Karen Villeda reminds us that the consequences of being a woman can be fatal, writing that women are not alive, but only “still alive” until they are not. How do women counteract the stunting forces of a hostile world? From the ventriloquism of an Abuela who talks to herself to ensure that no one else speaks for her in Alejandra Eme Vázquez’s You’ll Leave Your Body Behind to the adoption of a third language by Jhumpa Lahiri to develop her own linguaggio, as revealed in Translating Myself and Others reviewed by Caterina Domeneghini, giving voice to female experience, as we endeavor to do in this issue, is one shared mode of resistance.

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No matter your taste, there’s something for everyone in this edition, so circulate this glorious new issue by printing our Fall 2022 flyer (downloadable here); like and share our issue announcement and article plugs on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

To read the world and read it more fully is itself a recipe for a fuller existence. If we’ve made a difference in that regard to your lives, please consider celebrating our full twelve years of publishing the best in world literature by joining us a masthead or sustaining member from as little as $5 a month—for a limited period only, we’ll even throw in a bonus 2023 digital Asymptote calendar!

READ THE NEW ISSUE

That Elusive Concept—Home: On Birgit Weyhe’s Graphic Novel of Mozambican Migrant Workers

December 8, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Maddy Robinson

The reader is left with the sensation that home is not a fixed thing, but something that must be made and remade.

Madgermanes by Birgit Weyhe, translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire, V&Q Books, 2021

The story of the Madgermanes, like that of so many displaced communities, is one likely to disappear into the footnotes of a war’s grand narrative. Having achieved independence from Portugal following the Carnation Revolution, the People’s Republic of Mozambique found itself once again thrown into armed civil conflict during the late 70s. Around the same time, in 1978, the German Democratic Republic sought to combat widespread labour shortages by reaching an agreement with the Marxist Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), which enabled them to contract workers from their heavily indebted socialist sister state. Spurred on by the spirit of independence and tempted by the education and employment opportunities which were so lacking in their war-ravaged homeland, around 20,000 young Mozambican volunteers left East Africa for East Germany. These volunteers would later be labelled the Madgermanes—a concatenated form of “Made in Germany,” used to taunt and belittle those who later returned to Mozambique after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Memory is a dog in heat . . . there’s no counting on it.

Birgit Weyhe’s Madgermanes is a book of memories. Translated from the original German by Katy Derbyshire, it is infused with all the homesickness, adventure, and exploitation that economic migration entails, hypnotically rendered in black, white, and burnished gold illustrations. Divided into three sections, the graphic novel follows three fictional members of this dislocated community who each recount their experiences, offering a multifaceted perspective on the intricacies of their particular situation, as well as the life-changing repercussions of geopolitics and civil war for the individual. José, quiet and bookish, wants nothing more than to play by the rules of his new German bosses and learn as much as he can, while his roommate, fun-loving Basilio, is more intent on having a good time. Pragmatic Annabella arrives in East Germany three years later than her co-volunteers, driven by the prospect of an education and of sending money home to what remains of her family. She soon becomes aware of the true nature of the volunteer programme when she is assigned a role on the production line of a hot water bottle factory, a far cry from the kind of jobs they were promised.

José, Basilio, and Annabella’s memories are as similar as they are different. Upon reaching Europe, they are all faced with racial exclusion, little agency over their place of work, and economic hardship. The latter remains a direct result of the ‘agreement,’ which saw 60% of the workers’ wages retained—wages which are still yet to be received. Each character is painted, textually and graphically, with their own private passions and motivations for migration, as well as the deep sorrows of bereavement and loss. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, each person reacts to increasing hostility and racial discrimination in their own way—faced with the decision of returning to a home they no longer recognise, or attempting to struggle on in hopes of a brighter future in the new Europe. Commendably, Weyhe seems especially committed to underscoring the intersectional nature of the trauma faced by Annabella; hers is the last of the three stories, and it is arguably the most harrowing, visually portraying the entwined struggles of racism, misogyny, and gendered violence with horror-splashed drawings and unflinching honesty. One is reminded of The Unwomanly Face of War, Svetlana Alexievich’s polyphonic masterpiece in which she collects the memories of hundreds of Soviet women who participated in the second world war. Where Alexievich chose to create many voices, Weyhe has chosen to condense the variant struggles into one, though the effect is no less striking. Through Annabella, we can hear echoes of the voices of many other migrant women—forced to choose between their own agency and bodily autonomy in order to protect their own future and their closest kin.

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What’s New in Translation: February 2021

February 22, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Darren Huang, and Thuy Dinh

Please join us in celebrating three new translations this month from Russia, Mozambique, and Spain!

Amongst the great gifts that translation brings us is an awareness to the alternation and variegations of perspective, informed by ever-shifting factors of fact, selfhood, relationships, and hearsay alike. In this month’s roundup of excellence in world literature, our selection of texts brings expansive voices to light in exquisite explorations in what it means to remember, comprehend, and believe: a luminous text on family history from Maria Stepanova, the reimaginings of folktales by Mia Couto, and a deft fiction on self-deceptions by Sònia Hernández. 

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In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale, New Directions, 2021

 Review by Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large for Taiwan

In W.G. Sebald’s final novel Austerlitz, the protagonist Jacques Austerlitz—an art historian who arrived in Britain as an infant refugee from Czechoslovakia in the Kindertransport—searches for the fate of his parents, who were displaced and lost amidst the Holocaust and the Second World War. The novel is a poetic and digressive excavation of family history through the innovative hybrid of photography, travelogue, history, art criticism, and fiction, as well as a meditation on the horrors of the twentieth century, the unreliability of memory and memorialization, and the weight of the past on the present. This unique, peripatetic narrative method of ruminating over the past, which Sebald described as “documentary fiction,” is adapted by the highly acclaimed Russian novelist, poet, and essayist Maria Stepanova in her autofictional, essayistic memoir, In Memory of Memory, elegantly translated by Sasha Dugdale for New Directions. Like Sebald, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in her multi-genre novel Dictee, Stepanova adopts an oblique, multifaceted approach towards her central project of assembling a family history dating from the late nineteenth century. She lodges memoir like a puzzle box within cultural commentary, historical documents from her ancestors, philosophical discourse, and literary criticism; the result is a densely textured memoir-in-fragments that is alive to the limitations of its project—the lack of historical evidence, the inaccuracies in memory, the fraught relationship between the storyteller and her subjects, and the inevitable incompleteness of the family narrative.

The text is deliberately structured into three distinct portions: the first two sections alternate between cultural criticism, personal anecdotes, and historical documents. Certain “chapters,” wryly entitled “Not a Chapter,” are entirely composed of letters from her forbears, including her maternal great-grandparents, Sarra Ginzburg and Mikhail Fridman, her maternal grandparents, Lyolya and Lyonya, and her paternal grandparents, Nikolai Stepanov and Dora Stepanova, among others. The letters, chronologically arranged from 1942 to 1985, offer intimate glimpses into the personal lives of Stepanova’s family, and serve additionally as pieces of cultural history. They are redolent of a particular place and time, evoking what Stepanova calls “a feeling for the age.” Each epistolary “chapter” is accompanied by minimal context or commentary and separated from each other by essayistic inquiries into memory—ranging from such subjects as the photograph, Charlotte Salomon and her epic novel Life? Or Theatre?, Sebald and his writings on history, and the memory boxes of Joseph Cornell. In the first two sections of the text, this digressive arrangement interrupts the family narrative so that it only appears in decontextualized fragments. The effect of this bifurcated structure is that the family narrative remains mostly unexplored until the end of the second section and the third section, which consist of more conventional biographical accounts of family members. Stepanova’s delay in directly grappling with both her personal and family history reflects her anxieties about writing on the past. For example, she cites Marianne Hirsch’s concern that inserting archival photographic images might de- or re-contextualize them and distort their original realities. Therefore, the sections of cultural criticism represent the author’s hesitant, fitful attempts at approaching the past, which she finally accesses in the final third of the novel. In these critical chapters, Stepanova admits to “picking through different approaches to the past, as one might pick through dried peas, in search of one that might work.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

April 5, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Diána Vonnák, Lara Norgaard, and Poupeh Missaghi

Start your spring off with literary dispatches from around the world!

With the arrival of spring comes a new slate of literary translations, festivals, and events all over the world. In Iran, we follow the sprouting of two new literary journals and several translations challenging the country’s censorship laws; in Hungary, we look forward to the 26th Budapest International Book Festival and the season of literary awards; and in Brazil, we discover a range of upcoming events celebrating such topics as independent publishing, the Portuguese language, and International Women’s Day.

Poupeh Missaghi, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Iran

March 20 marked the spring equinox, Nowruz (the Persian New Year), and the celebrations around it. To see the previous year off and welcome the new one, in addition to providing their readers with reading material for the holiday season, Iranian journals have long published special issues, each covering a range of diverse topics including, but not limited to: economy, philosophy, sports, film, and literature.

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What’s New in Translation: February 2019

February 13, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andreea Scridon, Jacob Silkstone, and Lindsay Semel

Find the latest in world literature here, presented by members of the Asymptote team.

Curious about new titles in translation from around the world? We’ve got you covered here, in this edition of What’s New in Translation.

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Woman of the Ashes by Mia Couto, translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw, World Editions, 2019

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Editor

Mia Couto’s Woman of the Ashes, translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw, is the first book of a trilogy called As Areias do Imperador (The Sands of the Emperor). It tells of the fall of the Gaza Empire in Mozambique at the hands of the Portuguese. Brookshaw’s translation successfully elaborates on the original’s rich images and themes while maintaining the ambiguity and contradiction that characterize the disordered world of war between cultures. Through its two narrators, the novel weaves together the threads of two archetypal narratives. The warp is a story of empire and war. The weft is a story of storytelling itself.

The year is 1894–5, the confused and bloody moment in which the Portuguese Empire replaces the Nguni as the leading force in a region full of once independent peoples. Alternating chapters consist of a series of letters from the Portuguese Sergeant Germano de Melo, ostensibly to his supervisor. The voice of the interceding chapters belongs to Imani, a girl from a tribe that’s tentatively aligned itself with the Portuguese in the hopes of resisting the Nguni invaders. Having learned fluent Portuguese, she is appointed by her father to attend Sergeant Germano, himself a convict exiled for the crime of political action against the monarchy. These complementary characters find themselves dislocated from their people and sense of identity, stuck serving the very forces that sentence them to their own demise.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

April 28, 2017  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by M. René Bradshaw, Maíra Mendes Galvão, and Poupeh Missaghi

Your latest updates from Brazil, Iran, and the UK

This week, Brazilian Editor-at-Large Maíra Mendes Galvão reports from Brazil’s vibrant literary scene. Poupeh Missaghi writes about how Iranians celebrated a revered literary figure’s birthday and gives us a peep into the preparations for the Tehran International Book Fair. And M. René Bradshaw has much to report from London’s literati! Hope you’re ready for an adventure! 

Maíra Mendes Galvão, our Editor-at-Large for Brazil, brings us the latest from literary events:

The capital of the Brazilian state of Ceará, Fortaleza, hosted the 12th Biennial Book Fair last weekend. The very extensive and diverse program included the presence of Conceição Evaristo, Ricardo Aleixo, Marina Colasanti, Joca Reiners Terron, Eliane Brum, Luiz Ruffato, Natércia Pontes, Daniel Munduruku, Frei Betto and many others. The event also paid homage to popular culture exponents such as troubadour Geraldo Amâncio, musician Bule Bule, and poet Leandro Gomes de Barros. One of the staples of Ceará is “literatura de cordel“, a literary genre (or form) that gets its name from the way the works (printed as small chapbooks) have traditionally been displayed for sale: hanging from a sort of clothesline (cordel). It was popularized by a slew of artists, including a collective of women cordel writers, Rede Mnemosine de Cordelistas, who marked their presence in a field originally dominated by men.

The northeast of Brazil is bubbling with literary activities: this week, from April 26-28, the city of Ilhéus, in the state of Bahia, hosts its own literary festival, FLIOS. There will be talks and debate about local literature and education as well as a book fair, workshops, book launches, performances, and readings.

The other upcoming literary festival is Flipoços, hosted by the city of Poços de Caldas in the south eastern state of Minas Gerais. Milton Hatoum, celebrated writer from the state of Amazonas, will be the patron of this edition of the festival, which will also pay homage to the literature of Mozambique. Guests include Rafael Gallo, Roberta Estrela D’Alva, Tati Bernardi, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, and others.

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Neustadt Prize Winner Mia Couto’s “Serpent’s Embrace”

November 5, 2013  |  in Translations  |  by Eric M. B. Becker

2014 Neustadt Prize Winner Mia Couto

The latest winner of the Neustadt Prize, Mozambican writer Mia Couto, stands as one of the preeminent writers working in Portuguese today. Couto, 58, counts poems, short stories, novels, and essays among his output of 25 books. The Neustadt honor comes on the heels of the 2013 Prêmio Camões, awarded to Couto in May. Much as the Neustadt is often called the “American Nobel,” the Camões is likewise nicknamed the Portuguese-language Nobel.
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