Place: Portugal

Translation Tuesday: “That Old Woman” by Raul Germano Brandão

November 5, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Jacqueline Frances Austin

She unhinged herself to eat, made herself small to eat, appeared stupid and contemptible to eat.

For November’s first Translation Tuesday, we bring you a short story by Raul Germano Brandão, translated from the Portuguese by Jacqueline Frances Austin. In this haunting tale, Brandão recounts the woes of the destitute woman Candidinha. Like Voltaire’s Candide, her life is an unremitting stream of unearned misfortune, but unlike her optimistic counterpart, she maintains an iron grip on her fury and indignation. In order to survive, Candidinha transmutes her tragedy into entertainment, adopting an exaggeratedly ludicrous persona; her affluent neighbors reward her performance with leftovers. The narrative traces this disjunction between public and private, unfolding between the voices of the onlookers—who alternate between mocking gossip and scathing reprimands, feasting on her misery—and Candidinha’s own voice, bitter and cursing. Brandão unsparingly renders the acute discomfort provoked by direct confrontation with inequality, a grotesque reminder of the irrationality of fate.

That old woman who sometimes faces me on nights of supreme affliction, dressed all in black, ragged and stiff, is made of hatred and stone. I speak to her. She doesn’t respond. Her mouth held tight she keeps her silence, a ragged shawl pulled up around her chest. She is huge, like despair, dry as the stones. . . What is her story?  

On ill-fated Tuesdays she always turned up in that big, lugubrious house, that witless, ridiculous old woman, holding her son, António, by the hand. Looking like a damp bird she would leap across the living room, her shawl aflutter, carrying her hat. Everybody found her comical and stupid, always dragging her boy, her look disorientated and her appearance somehow contemptible.  

“Here’s Candidinha again. . .”

“Oh no.”

“Oh my dears. It could only happen to me, just imagine. . .”

On seeing her they would all start to laugh at that dry and stumbling figure, crushed by her disgrace, her hat missing feathers and her smile quite put on. She was like some kind of starving jester to whom, for their poverty, one tosses a crust, but mostly because they are inoffensive and ridiculous. You could tell that old woman anything: troubles, disasters, irritations. . . If you did, for a few minutes she’d exchange a few words, her smile forced and sinister. Trailing her ragged shawl, she’d go hopping around the house. READ MORE…

How the World Appears in States of Language: On A Thousand Thoughts in Flight by Maria Gabriela Llansol

September 2, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

Llansol is a generous and poetic writer, sensual in her descriptions and intensely attuned to the metaphysical and the otherworldly. . .

A Thousand Thoughts in Flight by Maria Gabriela Llansol, translated from the Portuguese by Audrey Young, Deep Vellum, 2024

A Thousand Thoughts in Flight, the diaries of Portuguese writer Maria Gabriela Llansol, is divided into three sections: “Finita”, “A Falcon in My Wrist”, and “Inquiry into the Four Confidences”. Comprised of three books from the seventies that Llansol left behind when she passed away in 2008, these volumes were the only ones to be published in Portuguese during the writer’s life, and are also the first of her non-fiction writings to appear in English, thanks to the work of translator Audrey Young. In his introduction, the critic João Barrento describes these private texts as “osmotic diaries: their genesis, their development, and their final form are inseparable from Llansol’s other books, which always accompany them and are interwoven with them”. This is true not only in the conceptual but also the literal sense; the first diary begins the day she finishes The Book of Communities—the first volume in her acclaimed trilogy Geography of Rebels—and ends the day she finishes The Remaining Life, the second volume, in 1977. The second diary picks up when she is finishing In the House of July and August, the final volume, and beginning to write her second trilogy, while also providing glimpses at the author brainstorming her duology, Lisbonleipzig.

Llansol is a generous and poetic writer, sensual in her descriptions and intensely attuned to the metaphysical and the otherworldly, coalescing history, philosophy, and physical experience; these qualities are boldly apparent in her fiction, but appear with an experimental and kinetic mode in these diaries. A common thread across the volumes is silence: everything that remains in the journal is a “draft”, consisting of left-out pieces and vacant spaces for contemplation, and this attention and appreciation reserved for emptiness becomes integral to the diaries’ form. Silence manifests in the common use of gaps in the text, indicated in certain places by a horizontal line (________), and more compellingly in other places as unannounced fragments of poetry. And in between these fragments is life. She moves all around Belgium, from Louvain to Jodoigne and finally to Herbais, where she and her husband Augusto Joaquim run an experimental school as part of a cooperative—which also makes and sells furniture and food. There, Llansol cultivates her own garden, which provides a bouquet of scenes and observations for her diaries, and immerses herself in music. Still, she never pauses in her pursuit of literature, of writing and reading about theology, philosophy, the lives of poets and mystics. It is only in the final diary that she moves back to Portugal’s Sintra, sometime in 1983, remaining there until her death. 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…

What’s New in Translation: May 2023

May 15, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal, Matthew Redman, and Rubén López

New translations from the Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese!

This month, our editors feature three titles that showcase what’s possible when a writer fully showcases a firm and brilliant insight into their reality. From a collection of short stories that investigate the violence of Latin American society, to a multifaceted depiction of colonial Mozambique, to essays that focus on the intimate dailyness of human lives in twentieth-century China, these works educate, provoke, and enthrall. Read on to find out more!

ampuero

Human Sacrifices by María Fernanda Ampuero, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle, The Feminist Press, 2023

Review by Rubén Lopez, Editor-at-Large for Central America

In Human Sacrifices, a collection of short stories, María Fernanda Ampuero traces the deterioration of individuals who have survived an overwhelmingly violent reality. With guts, blood, and a dense anger, she escorts us to a precipice with each story, strips us naked, and delivers us to a place where the wounds of Latin American are made real, and thus can be dissected. Published by Editorial Páginas de Espuma in 2021 and now appearing in English translation by Frances Riddle, the collection contains twelve stories that question our reality as one occasionally resembling more a traitorous deception.

The stories in Human Sacrifices are profoundly Latin American, but more specifically, they describe the experience of vulnerable Latin American women: a unique kind of hell. Gendered violence is present in almost all the narratives—a bone that vertebrates the monster: “Desperate women,” states one of the protagonists, “serve as meat for the grinder. Immigrant women are bones to be pulverized into animal fodder.” The opening story, “Biography,” is perhaps the most intimate, narrating in first person the terror of being a migrant woman in a foreign country. The narrative implants the dehumanizing panic of crossing invisible borders in pursuit of a less harsh horizon, as well as the fear of becoming an anonymous number, a disappeared woman, a name written on a wall. As the narrator states: “I remember someone once told me that the stars we see have been dead for a long time, and I think that maybe the disappeared women might also shine on like that, with that same blinding light, making it easier to find them.”

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2023

April 24, 2023  |  in News  |  by Meghan Racklin and Xiao Yue Shan

Diving deep into the issue with spotlights on Bolivia, Ukraine, Romania, and more!

Our Spring 2023 issue is alive. Animated with the wide plethora of voices, lifeforms, and phenomenon from thirty different countries, this selection of world literature is moving, feeling, singing, and changing—wonderfully emblematic of writing’s capacities to transcend the page or the screen. To aid you in your explorations of this multivalent “Vivarium,” our blog editors present their favourites from the issue, including our first ever feature of Bolivian literature, and work from Portugal’s famed modernist, Fernando Pessoa. 

“Love does not fulfill itself,” the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy once wrote, “it always arrives in the promise and as the promise.” Though it seems almost flippant, in this line is the (not so well-kept) secret that has always led me to look for love in poems, that moves me to believe there is still no better medium than poetry to offer us love’s canyons and shadows, and that it is the poem’s purposeful language which allows us to seek love out—not in the validating or reciprocating constructs of daily life, but in truer forms: those sublime visions, conquerings of time, and suspensions of reality. Nancy knew that love is unfulfillable because its absolution is impossible, but it still comes to us as inextricable from eternity: the promise of love is love’s own perpetuity, the promise that love’s law is the one that overcomes all others. And though there are great, sweeping narratives of love in novels, there are wondrous portrayals of love in theatre and in cinema, there are photographs and paintings that capture love’s possibilities and devastations, but the reason I return to the poem is that it, too, is a form that recognises its own innate impossibility (because how can a word capture any of this), and then goes on to form its own laws, which enact the impossible.

Mariana Berenice Bredow Vargas’s alluring, propulsive work, “Let it Go,” is one of the most magical love poems I have come across in some time. Translated with the expert, time-keeping ear of Forrest Gander (whose prowess is especially evident in his rendering of the last lines), the piece begins with an invitation and does not wait a beat before seemingly taking us by the hand to sweep over the landscape, magic carpet-ing over the exhaustive obligations of everyday patterns and collected burdens, up and towards the vast and imagined horizon that separates the awake and the dreamed, into the kaleidoscoped marvels and cacophonic frequencies of everything the world has to offer. The poem is an exalted plea for the lover to recognise the availability of immense beauty and profound joy, but also a tender admittance that one can only get there travelling alongside another: “. . . there’s life // dreaming you past the pain, let’s go, I want / to dream it too . . .” Balancing the imploring voice of a hopeful romantic with the resonant fact that fantasy is essential to anyone wanting to live, within Vargas’s impatient call is the promise of love—a promise so beautiful, it almost doesn’t need to be kept. READ MORE…

Our Spring 2023 Edition Is Here!

April 20, 2023  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Fernando Pessoa, Franca Mancinelli, Wu Ming-Yi, and Yolanda González in our animal-themed special feature

Experience the world anew through non-human eyes in “Vivarium,” our Spring 2023 issue! From macaques to marmots, muntjacs to mosshoppers and microscopic prokaryotes, a superabundance of literary life overflows from 30 different countries. In this thriving biosphere, you’ll find work from Estonia and Oman flowering in the same soil as Alaa Abu Asad’s Wild Plants and our first entry from Bolivia via Pulitzer Prizewinner Forrest Gander. The same Pangaean ecosystem sustains our animal-themed special feature headlined by Yolanda González, recipient of the 2001 Premio Café Gijón Prize, and 2018 Booker International longlistee Wu Ming-Yi. Alongside these, there are the always thought-provoking words of Italian poet Franca Mancinelli, which bloom in both the Interview and Poetry section—the latter also shelters Fernando Pessoa, whose brilliant co-translators Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari have rendered him in one of his most mordant heteronyms, Álvaro de Campos.

announcement READ MORE…

Sculpting Words: An Interview with Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles and Paul Filev

August 24, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Carol Khoury

In these conversations with characters, I build imaginary convictions.

In Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles’ startling and tender work of speculative fiction, The Lisbon Syndrome, a comet has demolished the city of Lisbon to nothing, leaving people on the other side of the globe—in Caracas—to reconstitute the erupted world with only a strictly regulated stream of news, an overarching cloak of localized violence, and an unshakable faith in the potentials of storytelling. Translated expertly by Paul Filev, The Lisbon syndrome presents a powerful, telling perspective on the Venezuelan struggle against a repressive regime. In the following interview, Book Club manager Carol Khoury speaks to Sánchez Rugeles and Filev on the unique journey of this text, the learned method of its translation, and the courage and necessity of literature.  

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

Carol Khoury (CK): Eduardo, how was the novel received when it came out in Spanish—in Venezuela and elsewhere?

Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles (ESR): It’s strange—the novel wasn’t published in the usual way because the English translation came out before the Spanish edition. The Spanish edition will come out later this year, in October, with the independent publisher Suburbano.

I began writing the novel in 2019 and finished it in 2020, and I showed it to a few publishers here in Madrid. It was during the middle of the pandemic, things were really intense at the time, and they told me, “Well, we like the book, but we can’t publish it until 2025, or at the earliest in summer 2024 maybe. If we take it on, you’ll have to wait in line.”

And I was very impatient to have this book published, because the novel was very emotional for me, given that the events in the novel mirrored what was actually happening in Venezuela at the time. I can usually be more patient with my work, but I felt a little anxious to get this book out. A friend read the manuscript—a movie director—and he told me, “I want to turn this into a movie. What do you say—do you want to work on a script with me?”

And I said to him, “Yeah, we can write a script and turn it into a movie, but let me publish the novel first.” But with the pandemic going on, the whole process of getting the book published was very slow. I felt a little sad about having to wait so long to find a publisher, so I started talking with the director, Rodrigo Michelangeli, and one day I said to him, “You know what? I’ll self-publish the book with Amazon. Forget the traditional publishing route. Let’s make this happen.” READ MORE…

David J. Bailey on Translating Jorge de Sena’s “The Green Parrot”

April 6, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

Discover Portugal’s colonial legacy in de Sena’s humorous and heartbreaking account of life under the Estado Novo dictatorship

Featured in the current Winter 2022 issue, “A Tribute to the Green Parrot” by Jorge de Sena manages to be both a humorous and heartbreaking account of life under the Estado Novo dictatorship in Portugal. The story centers around an unlikely friendship between a young boy growing up in a stifling conservative household and the family’s pet parrot, an “impassioned” and “exuberant individual” from Brazil. In his English translation David J. Bailey captures the colorful hues of de Sena’s language and introduces Anglophone speakers to a beautiful piece from one of the greatest Lusophone writers of the twentieth century. I had the opportunity to speak with Bailey over email about his experience translating “A Tribute to the Green Parrot,” and in the following interview we discuss representations of colonialism in language, the power of children in conveying narratives, and the different measures that Lusophone writers have taken to overcome dictatorial censorship in their careers.

Rose Bialer: I wanted to start by asking: How did you first begin translating from Portuguese?

David J. Bailey: I became interested in Portuguese almost by chance, opting to study it at degree level alongside Spanish. I quickly grew fond of the language and culture and eventually took a PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian literature to pursue an academic career. I’ve done commercial translation in the past, but this was my first serious attempt at translating a literary piece.

RB: When did you first come to encounter the work of Jorge de Sena? How did your engagement with his writing develop into your translation of “A Tribute to the Green Parrot?”

DB: When I started lecturing at the University of Manchester, I inherited a course on Portuguese colonialism from my predecessor, Prof Hilary Owen. Some of Jorge de Sena’s stories were on the reading list and I was especially moved by this one, which ends the collection Os Grão-Capitães. De Sena was a key figure in the resistance to the Portuguese dictatorship, on a par with other writers from his generation such as Miguel Torga and José Régio. “A Tribute to the Green Parrot” was something of an anomaly in not having been translated before. I looked at it with some M.A. students last year and ended up translating the entire story during lockdown. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Breath” by Ana Luísa Amaral

February 22, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Margaret Jull Costa

The woman sitting opposite me / plays with her handbag— / distractedly

This Translation Tuesday, we are thrilled to feature a poem by the award-winning Portuguese writer Ana Luísa Amaral. In “The Breath,” the speaker’s observation of the mundane everyday on public transport turns into a moment of poetic transport. Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, this life-affirming poem from a frequent contributor duo is one to hold and behold, to turn over in our hands until, we realise, it becomes something too that breathes, something that moves.

The Breath 

The woman sitting opposite me
plays with her handbag—
distractedly 

She flips the handle-cum-wing
of the bag
back and forth
twines it around her fingers 

Like a small
dancerly bird,
the wing-cum-handle comes alive
between the woman’s fingers  READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2022

January 24, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

The reconstituting of memories that have been erased is a central concern for the playful yet meditative Winter 2022 issue.

Asymptote’s Winter 2022 issue is now out, marking the magazine’s eleventh year in publication! The newest edition features writing from a record forty-three countries and twenty languages. Here to introduce you to what this issue has to offer are our blog editors with some thoughts on the pieces that stood out to them the most.

In Maria Stepanova’s 2021 genre-defying work In Memory of Memory, she wrote that her excavation of family history was motivated by a desire to discover “the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.” Stepanova was absorbed with not only recovering the stories of her Jewish family but also probing her own obsessive relationship with memory itself. The memoir suggests the faultiness of memory in its rips and tears, while betraying an anxiety over its artifice in the way the memoirist manipulates the archive through inclusion, exclusion, and distortion for the purpose of her narrative. The reconstituting of memories that have been erased through the forces of time and displacement is a central concern for the playful yet meditative Winter 2022 issue. Like Stepanova, the authors of these varied works construct complex inquiries into the past through reappraisals of memory, dreams of alternate lives, and imaginative play with form. They seek the truth through memories while contesting their inevitable artificiality and malfunctioning.

In Rose Bialer’s deeply affecting interview, the Hungarian poet, memoirist, and translator George Szirtes speaks of returning to certain memories and themes in his personal history throughout his career in poetry, sometimes writing new poems that function as continuations of collections published decades before. This idea of Szirtes’s “return” to the same moments for their comprehension reflects his mistrust of memories but also his belief that truths are embedded within them. One of the talk’s many astonishing moments is when Szirtes claims that the return over time to the same memories in his poems reveals parallel narratives that add up to a palimpsest of personal history and identity. For Szirtes, formal constraints such as the terza rima continuously open the same memories to new facets and understandings. This illuminating conversation demonstrates how the fluidity of memory allows the poet-translator to construct an unstable past and self while “registering the sense of truth in all its complexity.”

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Place of the Living-Dead” by Gabriela Ruivo Trindade

January 18, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Gabriela Ruivo Trindade and Victor Meadowcroft

Some nights, my two legs and left arm come to visit me . . .

This Translation Tuesday, we feature a story that treads the line between the fantastical surrealism of dreaming and the brutal reality of living under conditions of war. In award-winning writer Gabriela Ruivo Trindade’s compact and evocative story, a disoriented narrator reckons with the aftermath of having stepped on a mine, where her lost limbs visit so as to relate to her the physical and spiritual damage that had been wrecked upon her body and her family. Translated from the Portuguese by the author herself and Victor Meadowcroft, the narrator’s voice exhibits a remarkable restraint. This quietly moving story brings the reader to a psychological space where the narrator’s processing of trauma feels at once real and irreal, at once emotional and strangely muted, an always liminal place. 

I don’t know my name, or where I was born, or how many years have passed since that day.  Around me there is only a grey haze, through which I try in vain to peer. I’ve lost track of the days: entire evenings are condensed into minutes. I’m surrounded by many others, stretched out on countless cots like mine. 

My head rests on a damp, foul-smelling straw pillow. My head is the only part of my body supporting me. The rest—my torso, my pelvis, both legs cut above the knee, and my right arm—I can barely feel. They’re entirely numb and don’t respond to my commands.  

Some nights, my two legs and left arm come to visit me; the arm, poor thing, always hurrying after the other two. That’s how I used to move, always rushing from place to place. I loved dancing, I remember that well, and people even used to say I would become a great dancer. Too bad. I heard one of the women who come to feed us say I’d stepped on a mine, a mina. I don’t know what that is; I can only remember Granny Mina, who used to tell stories of witches and sprites to all the neighbourhood kids.

But I was telling you about these visits from my arm and legs; it’s through them that I hear news of my family and other things I’ve long forgotten. They turn up every night, come through the door and begin talking right away, as if I were already fully awake, awaiting their arrival. And I am, really; I don’t know if it’s some kind of presentiment. On their first visit I was startled. I awoke to a hand shaking me and, upon opening my eyes, noticed there wasn’t a body attached to the arm. I thought it was a ghost and cried out.

Relax, said a voice, nobody’s going to hurt you. Come on, don’t you recognise us anymore?  READ MORE…

Domestic and National Dramas: On Empty Wardrobes by Maria Judite de Carvalho

January 6, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

The novella manages to cast the eye of a worried oracle on an entire nation.

Empty Wardrobes by Maria Judite de Carvalho, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, Two Lines Press, 2021

The year is 1966. Conservative Portuguese dictator António Salazar is advancing in age. During his thirty-four-year reign, economic policies have failed to fulfill their initial promise, the regime’s supposed “political stability” has stifled the nation, and costly colonial wars have wearied its citizens. The Carnation Revolution, which will end his corporatist Estado Novo with virtually no blood spilled, is still eight years away. Into this climate of looming uncertainty and cautious hope, Maria Judite de Carvalho inserts her simmering novella, Empty Wardrobes, asking impossible questions about the nature of self-determination, ambition, and love. On the eve of a revolution, it dares to doubt whether or not the people will be brave enough to support each other, rather than the powers that be.

Empty Wardrobes sets its existential drama in the domestic sphere. Dora Rosário is a young widow with a daughter, Lisa—young by today’s standards, but “both ageless and hopeless” to the onlooker. She had loved her husband Duarte desperately while he lived, upheld his purity of character, and believed their life together to be a happy one—albeit with some financial troubles.

An egotistical Christ, she used to think; a secular, unbelieving Christ who had only come into the world in order to save himself. But save himself from what, from what hell? She felt no bitterness, though, when she thought all this, only a slight bittersweetness, or a secret sense of contentment because she did love him. He was a good man, a pure man, untouched by the surrounding malice and greed. He remained uncontaminated.

In his death, she devotes herself to his goodness like a nun. Her name, after all, means “rosary”’ and indeed she does seem to be ticking off days like beads. She passes one to get to the next, her mind wholly focused on “the good times”—the happy days of her marriage, which she hopes neither to retrieve nor improve upon.

We come to know Dora as a rather pitiable creature—self-effacing, above all. The precarious period of early widowhood leaves her with the impression that “she and Lisa were on one side, and all the others were on the other side. The others were the enemy from whom she could expect nothing good, only evil.” Isolation and poverty, however, degrade her pride much more easily than the memory of her late husband; ultimately, one cannot live on integrity alone. A lingering acquaintance gets her a job at an antique shop, though her husband had never wanted her to work. She raises Lisa in a bourgeois manner of which he would surely disapprove. There’s an inconsistency between Dora’s idolization of her husband and the actions she takes in order to survive—a paradox analogous to that of her fellow citizens, and of anyone who has been failed by a beloved ideology. An ideology, whether implemented on the national or domestic level, is not necessarily flexible enough to meet the challenges of daily life. Though she may toe the party line in public—and even in private—it’s a less obedient resourcefulness that allows her to prepare her daughter for a more optimistic future.

READ MORE…

Distance Shapes Memory: An Interview with Karla Suárez

May 13, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Dorothy Potter Snyder

In my case, at least, I look first, get muddy and sweaty, and walk away. Only then do I write.

As I coordinated this interview with Karla Suárez, I had the impression that she was in constant motion. She is an inveterate bike rider and, even while working, takes “virtual trips by pacing around [her] writing table.” Her abundant energy is evident both in her productive career (nine books and participation in no less than forty-two anthologies during the last decade and a half) and in her female characters, canny women who are the architects of their destinies.

For Suárez, the mind’s attempt to understand is best complemented by a strong dose of the physical, because the body offers its own truths: “The best thing to do is to make love,” declares brainy Julia, the protagonist of Havana Year Zero. “. . . not think, offer up the body, the body, the body, the body, to the point of exhaustion . . . and the next day another body, and not thinking, not thinking, not thinking.”

Suárez’s background as an electrical engineer and a classical guitarist is evident in her novels which have the timing, complexity, and structural elegance of the proverbial Swiss watch. She likes her chapters to be about the same length to offer the reader rhythmic consistency, and intertextual gems await the attentive reader. But she is also something of an imp. She likes to have fun—and so do her characters.

I started our interview with word association, just as friends Lucía and Circe do in Suárez’s second novel Viajera, and she played right along. Then we talked about writing about home through the twin lenses of time and distance.

— Dorothy Potter Snyder

Dorothy Potter Snyder (DPS): Let’s play word association.

Karla Suárez (KS): Okay.

DPS: City?

KS: Should have an ocean.

DPS: Ocean?

KS: Motion.

DPS: Body?

KS: Sweat.

DPS: Stranger?

KS: What I am sometimes.

DPS: People call you a Cuban writer, but above all you’re an urban writer, whether the setting is Havana, Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Rome, Paris, or Lisbon where you live now. Can you imagine writing a novel that doesn’t have anything to do with a city? Or are they—and Havana in particular—indispensable to you?

KS: Four novels (Silencios, La viajera, Habana año cero, El hijo del héroe) compose what I call “my Havana Symphony,” because the characters in them are either from Havana or live there. In those novels, I wanted to deal with themes that concern the country and the city where I was born and raised, a Havana that goes from the 1970s to the ’90s. They are independent stories, of course, but there are subtle links between them. For example, some secondary characters appear in more than one novel; there are scenes in which the protagonists of several novels meet without knowing each other; and there is an object (a backpack) that passes from one character to another and thus travels from novel to novel. I wanted to create a micro-world where my characters cross paths—and even I with them, because I also appear in a very subtle way (though not as a protagonist) in some of these stories. This symphony is now complete, and I’ve started another cycle. The story I’m writing now, for example, does not take place in Havana nor does it have anything special to do with the city. It’s part of a different symphony. READ MORE…

The Indeterminacy of the Human: An Interview with Rainer Hanshe of Contra Mundum Press

March 31, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Rachel Allen

. . . we say to read for difference, for dissonance; read not to identify, or to sympathize, but from a principle of fascination.

Contra Mundum is a New York-based independent publishing house expressly committed to Modernist work and principles. Its catalog includes the dramatic writings and theatre criticism of Robert Musil; Celan’s posthumous prose as translated by Pierre Joris; two “pre-heteronymic” works from Pessoa; the generously-illustrated Letters of Otto Dix; and a late film script from Marguerite Duras. Preference is given texts with limited circulation, the under-translated and outré in particular. 

In 2012, for instance, Contra Mundum published Marginalia on Casanova, Tim Wilkinson’s rendering of Volume 1 in Miklós Szentkuthy’s cathedral-commentary-catalogus rerum, St. Orpheus Breviary. Contra Mundum is now five books into its tremendous project, bringing into English an immense cosmophagic-and-collapsing body of prose from a modernist still known as the “sacred monster” of Hungarian letters. In addition to works from the Breviary, Contra Mundum has so far contributed translations of Prae and Toward the One & Only Metaphor (also translated by Wilkinson, who died in October of 2020) and Chapter on Love (translated by Erika Mihálycsa, who will continue as translator for subsequent Szentkuthy works). That CMP should be the publisher to finally give Anglophone readers an adequate Szentkuthy is fitting: press and author share an understanding of zeitgeists alive—in art, in language—across history, unthreatened by chronology or multilingualism. Contra Mundum too experiences its periodic connection to modernism(s) without—or with different—temporal allegiances. In addition to Musil and Pessoa, CMP has published not only Baudelaire and Wordsworth and the Ghérasim Luca of Mary Ann Caws, but also Iceberg Slim, a new Gilgamesh (Stuart Kendall’s), Ahmad Shamlou, Maura Del Serra, and the collected prose of Robert Kelly. Many texts converge around performance, whether onstage, on screens, or in person(ae): CMP has published Elio Petri, Richard Foreman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, Rédoine Faïd, and Carmelo Bene. Adjacent to this swirl of codexical text and idea is Hyperion, CMP’s in-house and aptly subtitled journal: On the Future of Aesthetics.

Rainer J. Hanshe is the founder, editor, and publisher of Contra Mundum Press, as well as the author of two CMP titles, Shattering the Muses and The Abdication, and the translator of its three works by Baudelaire. We spoke recently about the nature of (his) modernism and its role in contemporary literature. Deviation, ambition, and heteroglossia were our major subthemes.

Rachel Allen (RA): How does Contra Mundum understand “modernism”? How do you recognize modernist work when you encounter it? (Is modernism limited, temporally? Geographically? Relationally? Formally? To whom is it available to be modernist?)

Rainer Hanshe (RJH): Although Modernism does occur within a specific epochal moment, I don’t see it as bound to that cluster of time, nor do I see it in absolute or purist terms. There is no kind of totemic Modernism with a unified set of precepts that every modernist abides by. Any kind of doctrinaire, sectarian, or dogmatic form of something cannot be abided. We are advancing modernism more as a kind of mobile act or event, like a type of living roving machine (not in a mechanistic sense but as a generative force) or combustion furnace and monster of energy. It is a question of extracting from any period, any event, any moment, its active, productive elements, like taking an arrow shot by Nature, picking it up where it has fallen, and shooting it in new directions, as Deleuze said of Nietzsche.

In that way, art is no different from science in terms of advancements—once a certain insight or knowledge has been developed, there is no reason to abandon it, let alone restrict it to its original moment. Modernism (let’s avoid the term neo-Modernism) is to us protean and metamorphic, an open, indeterminate constellation. Beyond seeing it solely as a specific movement in time then, consider its principal elements as if they were discoveries: a conscious break with tradition (abandoning outmoded elements of classicism); a rejection of historicism and the grand narratives of Western metaphysics, not to speak of its morals and values; the displacement of reason as a ruling force (the curse of the Enlightenment) and fostering in its stead a chiasmic fusion of the rational and the irrational; an abandonment of bankrupt forms of art, such as naturalism and realism (and so representation), which different scientific developments essentially undermined, and Enlightenment-type encyclopaedic projects of totality; related to consciousness and new conceptions of the self and the indeterminacy of the human: interior monologues; stream of consciousness; perspectivalist viewpoints; fracturedness, fragmentation, heteroglossic language, en plus.

It is a literature of incommensurabilities, of a dynamism in signification, of a rejection of absolute truths, of an embracing of dissonance. A literature that is aware of language’s limits, of its fissures, of its cul-de-sacs and cracks, and it vigorously pursues such. Flaubert’s book about nothing; Mallarme’s Le Livre; Beckett’s search for a literature of the unword; et cetera. Modernism understands language as Bakhtin spoke of it: a dynamic entity consisting of an interplay between centripetal and centrifugal discursive forces. The combustive furnace. Heteroglossia. An amalgam of linguistic registers. The Tower of Babel is not a curse. READ MORE…