Place: Spain

What’s New in Translation: January 2022

January 17, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Barbara Halla, and Charlie Ng

Featuring newly released titles from France, Spain, and Japan!

Though this new year comes with its own shares of doubts and questions, what remains certain is  that new titles and texts from around the world hold their own promises of enthrallment, knowledge, and beauty. This month, we present three works of fiction that traverse the realms of history, politics, and family. From a new collection of stories from Japanese master Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, to a novel interrogating the psychologies surrounding sexual predation by the award-winning Lola Lafon, to an imaginative journey into turn-of-the-century Barcelona with Eduardo Mendoza—these writings are sure to keep you thinking and dreaming.

reeling

Reeling by Lola Lafon, translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle, Europa Editions, 2022

Review by Barbara Halla, Assistant Editor

What we may reflexively call the “#MeToo era” has served as a cataclysm for the publication of several books of fiction and memoirs centered around women’s experiences with sexual violence. Far from being an Anglo-centric phenomenon, French works such as Vanessa Springora’s Consent (translated by Natasha Lehrer) and Camille Kouchner’s La Familia Grande (translated by Adriana Hunter) have garnered great acclaim for their unflinching and complicated portrayal of childhood sexual abuse. Lola Lafon’s Reeling, as well, lends itself easily to this movement, seeming particularly prescient considering the recent conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell for her role in the trafficking of underaged girls. The novel’s direct protagonists, Cléo and Betty, are two women whose lives are derailed by the Maxwell-like figure of Cathy—a stylish older woman who approaches young girls between thirteen and fourteen, offering them prestigious scholarships through the fictive Galatea foundation.

As Cathy prepares the girls for their “interviews,” she plies them with cares and attention, clothing and expensive perfumes; she makes them feel special, or rather that they are destined for something special. Yet, it is clear that something far more sinister hides behind the promises of scholarship. By the time the girls are to “interview” with the older male jurors, Cathy has earned their trust and affection; they would do anything to please her, to deserve her trust, to fulfill her expectations as she emphasizes the need for maturity and openness, the main criteria these “jurors” are looking for in the candidates.

Two important elements come to the fore in the figure of Cathy and her relationship to the young girls she grooms, and also in the encounters of girls like Cléo, Betty, and dozens of others with these older men. On the one hand, it is important to unpack the way Cathy manufactures consent through manipulation: although these girls do not want to do anything of a sexual nature during their “interviews,” many decide to go forward with it—not solely because of their own ambitions, but also to please a figure they have come to trust and revere. Secondly, the “jurors” themselves prey on the girls’ desire to appear mature, to show they are not “frigid” and thus somehow inadequate. This particular mind-game speaks also to the way sexual liberation—the result of the social and political movements that swept France during the 1960s and 1970s—often framed physical freedoms in ways that prioritized women’s and girls’ availability to men. As a thirteen-year-old Cléo thinks after her assault, “Cléo, thirteen years, five months, and however many days, had consented. To say no was to be frigid.” READ MORE…

A Language Like Life Itself: An Interview with Chus Pato

December 6, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Chus Pato and Erín Moure

Poetry has no future because the time of poetry is always the present.

Chus Pato is one of Europe’s most significant contemporary poets. She lives in Galicia, in Northwest Spain, and writes in Galician, a language that over time has weathered censorship, dictatorship, colonialist policies, and administrative neglect, all aimed at impeding its survival. Here, she converses with Erín Moure, Canadian poet and her translator into English for twenty years, on the occasion of the 2021 Poesiefestival Berlin. They discuss the current situation of Galician, the ways that poetry allows us to think out or rethink our relation to politics, the language of the poem and its difference from the language of consensus, and her current explorations into articulated language and human action in her work-in-progress, Sonora, from which she read in Berlin.

The original Galician conversation and German translation by Burghard Baltrusch are available; the interview has been translated into English by Moure with permission from Poesiefestival Berlin. Chus Pato’s most recent book in English, The Face of the Quartzes, appeared in Erín Moure’s translation from Veliz Books in fall 2021.

Erín Moure (EM): We’ve often discussed your choice to write poetry in Galician and how it is a political decision, a demand for justice for the language of your people—a language prohibited under Francoism—as well as a resistance to the political undermining of Galician and subtle promotion of a single and compulsory language, that of the unitary state of Spain, which we in English call “Spanish.” What I’d like to point out is that on the other side of the Atlantic, for your audience that is not Galician and that reads you in English translation, Galician is not a minor or defective tongue but simply a European language, and you a European poet. How do you see your role as poet, in Galicia, in Spain, in Europe, and now in the city of Berlin, a European capital of poetry as well as meeting point of the west and the east of Europe?

Chus Pato (CP): I think that in Galicia and in general I am well known enough as a poet and am read by the community of those interested in poetry. I know many loyal readers read my books when they are published. This is what I most value. Even so, I still perceive resistance on the part of canonizing institutions that I think has to do with what these institutions see as the difficulties in reading what I write (hermeticism, experimentalism, etc.) and with issues related to my political stance, a position that coincides neither with the right that governs us nor with majority nationalism.

That my work is known at all in the Spanish state is due in great measure to the efforts of my publishers and translators, and my feeling is that they have been remarkably successful. I can’t really gauge how I am perceived elsewhere in Europe. I feel I’m read more on the American continents. In Europe, my gratitude goes to Frank Kaizer, my Dutch editor at De Vrije Uitgevers, for his efforts and courage, and also to the Rotterdam festival and its former director Bas Kwakman.

EM: How would you describe the current situation of the Galician language, both in cultural milieus—where Galician figures prominently—and in daily life?

CP: The situation of Galician is dramatic, really. The Council of Europe, in its recent report on the fifth evaluation of Spain’s implementation of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, warns that only 23.9% of children in Galicia under the age of fifteen can express themselves in Galician.

Galician continues to suffer from a covert criminalization that has prevented generational transmission. The linguistic policies of the political party that systematically wins Galician elections are largely responsible for putting us in this extreme situation. Today, we can no longer say that Galician is strong in the private sphere, at least not in the case of younger generations.

We have to distinguish diverse political positions on linguistic diversity of the State: the Spanish right is always intolerant, and within the left there are degrees of tolerance. In the forty years that separate us from the end of the Franco dictatorship, we have not advanced much toward what is desirable, at least in my opinion.

What matters to me is what happens in Galicia, what the majority of Galicians think of their native language, and the reasons that lead them to turn away from it and not transmit it to their children as their mother tongue. These reasons have to do with the economic policies of the State, which has always viewed Galicia as a land from which to extract raw materials and labour. Two centuries of emigration and of the continual destruction of the values that constituted and still constitute us as distinct as Galicians largely explain the situation that faces us now.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Ernesto López Parra

November 23, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by James Richie

The fire / of the love with which we see things

The Ultraist literary movement—of which Jorge Luis Borges was one of its most prominent core members—was an early-twentieth-century avant garde literary movement in Spain that, amidst the influences of multiple European literary trends, promoted the use of imagery and references to new scientific ideas and technologies in poetry. This Translation Tuesday, we are delighted to present two poems by a major figure of the Ultraist movement, Ernesto López Parra, in James Richie’s translation. The poems’ energetic typographic style and evocative metaphors combine to create a new field of perception that reflect how new-fangled technologies from airplanes to electric balloons had begun to shape the literary imagination. The poems of López Parra—who has hardly been translated into English—enhance our appreciation of an influential experimental movement that shaped Spanish poetry.

Color does not exist

Color does not exist. Color—
A vice of the retina
Everything is white
Like the moon and the stars.
If we see the sky as blue,
It’s because Hugo told us,
“And foolishly, we followed his trickery!”
From afar, blue is the summit
Up close, the summit is gray,
But the only truth is that it is white.
The Sacred Books would tell us
That God made the colors.
Flowers are not red nor green
Nor yellow nor purple
The carnation and the violet
The rose and the daisy
Are white . . .
                            (The fire
                            of the love with which we see things
                    Makes us see them with different colors.)
                            Therefore, snow is cold
                            And we see it always as white . . .
                                       (in LIFE, truth, and snow
                                       White and cold)
God did not create color . . .
           He (Ecclesiastes) tells us nothing
           The commentaries silence . . .
  Man invented color
To play the roulette!  READ MORE…

Our Fall 2021 Issue Is Here!

October 21, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Octavio Paz, Sara Stridsberg, Wolfgang Cordan, and Marian Schwartz on Nina Berberova, amid new work from 30 countries!

In Asymptote’s just-released Fall 2021 Edition, “Beings in Time,” headlined by Octavio Paz and Marian Schwartz, time is painfully distended for many of the narrators in this issue as it has been for us. With Jakuba Katalpa and Wolfgang Cordan, in particular, revisiting dark chapters in recent human history, it was a deliberate choice to bookend the Fiction and Poetry sections with Patrizia Cavalli’s irrepressibly joyful “Dancing Shoes” and Ricardo Zelarayán’s thrilling narrative poem “The Great Salt Flats.” Kim Bo-Young’s I’m Waiting for You, reviewed with gusto by Cristy Stiles, sets time travelers in endlessly inventive scenarios. In Brave New World Literature, Caitlin Woolsey encounters, at age twenty-one, the timeless Bedouin oral tradition of Jordan’s people. Elsewhere, in Drama, Anna Carlier transports us to a future ecological nightmare, where “half the world is drying up” and “the other half . . . drowning,” with no way to tell if the clock is “counting up or . . . down.” All is illustrated by our guest artist the brilliant photographer Genevieve Leong.

Our wildcard Special Feature this issue spotlights the work of institutional advocates: Russia’s Institute for Literary Translation, the Lithuanian Cultural Institute, Catalan Culture’s Institut Ramon Llull, and the Literature Translation Institute of Korea agreed to take the same set of ten questions posed by our editor-in-chief. The result is a fascinating cross-cultural snapshot of the role of an otherwise mostly invisible player in world literature.

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Whenever and wherever we are, we can all spread the news of Asymptote’s latest wonders on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, where we will be plugging every single article in a 40-hour marathon. If you’re keen to spread word in real life, we invite you to download and distribute this magnificent flyer of the issue (pictured above). Many thanks from us at Asymptote!

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Translation Tuesday: “The Speed of Gardens” by Eloy Tizón

August 31, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Manuel Antonio Castro Córdoba and Natalia Baizán de Aldecoa

There are loves that crush those who receive them.

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the titular short story from Eloy Tizón’s Velocidad de los jardines (The Speed of Gardens), which was chosen by El País as one of the hundred best books published in Spanish in the past twenty-five years. A tale of adolescence, the dramatic expansion of life’s possibilities, and its accompanying disappointments—Tizón’s narrator recalls an entire class and their fascination with the luminous Olivia Reyes. All this is told through Tizón’s finely wrought sentences which itself is a kind of spellbinding music. Hear from the translators about the peculiarities and pleasures of Tizón’s baroque style. 

“Eloy Tizón is one of the most important baroque writers working in the Spanish language today. In his language, where the baroque tradition reigns supreme, mastering the baroque style is tantamount to mastering the style of the Spanish language tout court. There have been no shortage of competitors for this title on both sides of the Spanish-speaking Atlantic, and in the Iberian Peninsula, we find such luminaries of the baroque register: Gómez de la Serna and Francisco Umbra, followed by Cristina Fallarás and Juan Manuel de Prada. In these writers, who are equally as prominent fiction writers as they are columnists, we find in them an affected antiquarian prose, a contrarian bravado at the level of ideas, a curated brand of O.K.-Boomerism, with sudden tinges of chauvinism, misogyny, or anti-Trumpism—depending on the day.

Tizón is a stranger to this school. He is worthy of winning the baroque pennant—not that he would care—but he might not be playing the Spanish league. Though a stylist of excess, and a habitual contributor to newspapers, he has shaken off all remnants of regional scruff. His sentences abolish the habitual linguistic ostentation of his contemporaries; there is no old fogey gesturing in his work; he is not known to indulge in that strange form of Iberian competition that consists in piling up subordinate clauses and stringing consonantic polysyllables. This has to do with Tizón’s readings of Clarice Lispector and (I venture) Virginia Woolf. Like them, his style is elastic, image-heavy, allusive rather than exact in a pseudo-philologist kind of way. Like them, he knows when to surrender style to character. Like them, he knows the purpose of curlicues and filigrees: to entertain the reader and not the author’s vanity.

Praised by many of his contemporaries, perhaps the aptest compliment comes from Alberto Olmos, who once described his style as “pouring MDMA on the dictionary.” What dictionary, he didn’t say. Certainly not The Royal Spanish Academy’s.”

— Natalia Baizán de Aldecoa and Manuel Antonio Castro Córdoba

Many said the fun ended when we passed into eleventh grade. We turned sixteen, seventeen; everything gained an unsettling speed. Sciences or humanities was the first customs house, the first border crossed, separating friends like travelers commuting from one train to another, their luggage left somewhere between the snow and the porters. Classrooms disbanded. Javier Luendo Martínez broke up with Ana María Cuesta and Richi Hurtado stopped talking to the Estévez twins and María Paz Morago dumped her boyfriend and scholarship—in that order—and Christian Cruz was expelled from school after hurling a flask containing a fetus at the biology teacher. 

Oh, yes; from class to class we towed Plato and something called hylomorphism that belonged to some forgettable school of thought. The Russian Revolution spread itself wide across our notebooks, and on page seventy-something the Tsar was executed between crossed-out scrawls. The economic causes of the war turned out to be complex, not what they look like by a long stretch, even if impressionism brought a fresh palette and a new idea of nature to painting. Mercedes Cifuentes was very fat and didn’t get along with anyone,  but that year she came back crushingly thin and still didn’t get along with anyone.

It was a kind of hecatomb. Half the class fell in love with Olivia Reyes, at the same time or in turns. Every morning she came into the classroom, showered, barely powdered, it was a creaking and vulnerable vision that could hurt you if you dared think about it around midnight. Olivia always arrived forty-five minutes late, and until she made her appearance the syllabus was something dead, a waste, the teacher rambled on about Bismarck, as if painstakingly brushing his tailcoated corpse, the chalk repulsed. Her arrival resuscitated our desks. You couldn’t believe it, Olivia Reyes, something so sponge-like and scented, stepping into the classroom, laughing, providing us with her fabled profile, her light at the prow, you wouldn’t believe it, it hurt so much.

The first days of spring have an amazing air about them, unimaginable, you can’t tell where it comes from. This effect is heightened by the first sightings of summer clothes (the coats strangled in the closet until next year), of bare-armed students carrying decapitations and whole kingdoms inside their folders. We would walk into school through a great red-brick patio with the basketball courts outlined in white, a scrawny tree blessed us; we would jog up the double staircase, hurried on by the dean—who comprised a blonde moustache with a wholehearted dedication to cursing—and then the bell would ring, firing the starting signal to our daily race for wisdom and science. READ MORE…

Because Reading (Subtitles) Is What? Fundamental!

August 18, 2021  |  in Essays, Multimedia  |  by Francesca Leveridge

RuPaul’s Drag Race demands translation sensitive to global and local queer cultures.

In the twelve years since RuPaul’s Drag Race first premiered on the relatively unknown LGBTQIA+ cable channel Logo TV, the Emmy award-winning series has gained an immense global following and become one of the defining shows of our age. The reality TV show, which boasts thirteen seasons (along with six All Stars series), follows drag queens competing in a range of performance-based challenges to be crowned “America’s Next Drag Superstar.” More recently, the race has expanded overseas, with Spain becoming the latest in a series of international spinoffs, joining Thailand, the UK, Canada, Holland, and Australia/New Zealand. In its evolution from a niche talent show for US drag performers to a global cultural phenomenon, Drag Race has propelled a queer subculture from the margins to the mainstream and put drag performance in the international spotlight. In the journey to globalize the show, translation has played a key role in giving drag and LGBTQIA+ culture visibility around the world.

It is of course thanks to the subtitling and dubbing of Drag Race into multiple languages that the US original achieved global success and found audiences worldwide. For translators, capturing the nuances of the show is no small feat. Much of its entertainment relies on verbal and cultural humour, each episode packed with English-based puns, double-entendres, and innuendos that can be hard to translate. Similarly, the dialogue showcases slang terms, neologisms, and catchphrases that are deeply rooted in the drag and LGBTQIA+ culture of the US. Take “mothertuckin’,” for example. In drag culture, tucking, used here to rhyme with a certain English swearword, refers to a taping practice used by drag queens to make their genital anatomy appear more feminine. Recreating this kind of wordplay poses a challenge for translators working in a context with a less developed drag culture and associated vocabulary.

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…

What’s New in Translation: July 2021

July 12, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Barbara Halla, Ruwa Alhayek, Suhasini Patni, and Thuy Dinh

New texts from Italy, Brazil, Korea, Morocco, and Spain!

In this month’s selection of excellent literature in translation, there’s something for everyone. From a dreamy and architecturally expressive graphic novel that speaks to fates and futures, to a collection of strange and visceral short stories delineating the network between bodies and their definitions. And if science fiction or unsettling tales aren’t your thing, there’s also the powerful narrative on a prodigal son who returns to navigate the pathos-filled landscape of past tragedies, loneliness, and isolation; the masterfully told history of Catalonia as it plays out through the life of a woman embroiled in the tumult of her time; or a cunning satire of contemporary Morocco that traverses territory of both physical and virtual landscapes. Read on for reviews on each of these remarkable works; hope you enjoy the trip!

celestia

Celestia by Manuele Fior, translated from the Italian by Jamie Richards, Fantagraphics, 2021

Review by Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

“. . . from above, this island is in the shape of two hands intertwined.”

                                                           —Dr. Vivaldi, from Manuele Fior’s Celestia

Such is how Dr. Vivaldi alludes to Venice—curved strips of land yearning to touch and engulf each other in blue space. Ambitiously realized by Manuele Fior and eloquently translated by Jamie Richards, Celestia—Venice’s oneiric double—is a visual poem and modernist dance in graphic novel form, encompassing diaphanous terrains and gothic undertow, exuberantly tumescent with allusions to literature, art, and architecture.

Born in 1975 in Cesena, Italy, Fior currently lives in Paris, France. Drawing from his studies at Venice’s University of Architecture (Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, or IUAV), he has, over time, developed a dynamic visual language with narrative elements drawn from both Western and Eastern aesthetic traditions. Several of his acclaimed graphic novels have been translated into English and published by U.S.-based Fantagraphics, and Celestia marks his fifth collaboration with Richards—a scholar and translator of Italian literature.

Deeply influenced by John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poem “Profezia” (“Prophecy”)—Fior depicts Celestia as a fusion of dualities that exist both in the history of Venice as well as in the fictional universe of his work: Gothic and Renaissance, spiritual and secular, traditional and modern, rational and organic, freedom and oppression, community and exile. While in Fior’s earlier work—such as The Interview—telepathy is depicted as an extraterrestial gift, in Celestia this ability has existed from time immemorial among certain people, possibly as an evolutionary process. When the story opens, the island of Celestia is home to a group of telepathic refugees, who long ago fled from a horrific invasion that had devastated the mainland. One of them, Pierrot—cloaked in his commedia dell’arte persona—now wishes to renounce his telepathic power, which he perceives as a tragic link to his childhood. After delivering vigilante justice to a member of the demonic syndicate that controls the island’s murky depths, Pierrot escapes Celestia with Dora—a seer also burdened by her gift, as well as the oppressive intimacy enforced by her mind-melding circle of elites, led by Dr. Vivaldi.

Beset by this innate ability that has become a form of enslavement, Pierrot and Dora set off—hoping their journey would both resolve the past and guide them toward a new future. The couple’s subsequent arrival on the mainland brings them into contact with an omniscient child, or Child—who embodies both the future of mankind and its messiah. READ MORE…

Jordi Llavina’s Poetry & Prose Blurs the Lines Between Reality and Fiction, Writer and Reader

July 8, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Alice Banks

The author's unusual style allows readers to “write” the text along with him.

Poetry & Prose, by Jordi Llavina, translated from Catalan by William Hamilton, is a stunning collection of, as the title suggests, poetry and prose. The book opens with one astounding long-form poem—its English translation parallel to the original Catalan—and ends with an equally beautiful short prose piece. Themes of memory, time, and nature are prevalent in both, and Llavina’s lyricism flows effortlessly throughout the whole collection. Poetry & Prose—as well as the only other publication of Llavina’s work in English, London Under Snow—makes clear that this award-winning writer is an expert at blurring the lines between reality and fiction, and bringing reader and writer closer together than ever.

Poetry & Prose begins with Llavina’s breathtaking poem “The Hermitage,” its lines recounting one man’s climb up a long, dusty hill to visit the hermitage perched at the top. This climb is not just a physical journey, but a journey through the past in which the narrator revisits memories through Llavina’s brilliant imagery. Speaking at Sant Jordi NYC 2020, Llavina stated that the opening lines came to mind one day and stood out to him as symbolic of a return to the landscape of his childhood. These initial words and the ideas behind them came to Llavina somewhat naturally, thus leading him to embark on the feat of creating a long-form poem that stemmed from these seeds. Llavina put forth the idea that “[w]hen you have the first lines of the poem, it is easy to begin […] The most important thing is to have the first lines.” These all-important first lines, then, were the key to Llavina’s staggeringly beautiful “The Hermitage”:

Lone I climb once more, years later,
up to Sant Pere’s hermitage.
The air is still, and the glare of
a raw July sun will leave my
neck and shoulders burnt and tender.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “How I Went to War” by Miguel Gila Cuesta

April 20, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Will Carr

So he said, “Go on, get killing. In this company we kill hard 9:00 to 1:00 and 4:00 to 7:00.”

Gila’s star-making monologue “How I Went to War” (1951) broke a tacit taboo of postwar Spanish society. For twelve years, public discussion of the civil war had limited itself to the Franco regime’s mythos of a Glorious National Uprising, but Gila, with pitch-perfect working-class vernacular, replaced saintly heroes with indignant aunts, petulant commanders, and innocent spies dressed in drag. The diametrical contrast has led critics to hail Gila’s war routines as a comedic takedown of Franco’s official story. And yet the comedian never suffered reprisals—not even when he performed for the Generalissimo himself.

Gila’s comedic monologues present atypical challenges even for translators used to working with humor. Rather than relying on wordplay and culture-specific references, “How I Went to War” creates incongruities through clashes of tone and aspect. The comedian tells his war story in a casual, un-military style. The blue-collar narration and dialogues sometimes morph into exchanges that evoke children playing at soldiers. I’ve attempted to carry over the informal tone of Gila’s oral performances, with his hesitations and false starts, and to choose words and phrasing that would maintain the uncanny juxtapositions of a war narrated as work and play. Part of Gila’s genius is that he crafts a war story in which the words war and killing feel out of place both contextually and grammatically. When he uses matar (kill / killing), he breaks conventions of aspect in the same way that kill does when used instead of work or do (“How you killing?” “Killing good, how about you?”). I’ve tried to surround these words with a consistent baseline of idiomatic speech so that wherever Gila hammers matar into his workaday Spanish, kill fractures U.S. English along similar lines.

–Will Carr, translator

“How I Went to War”[1]

I’m going to tell you the story of how I went to war.[2]

I was working as an errand boy for . . . for some pharmacy warehouses.[3] And one day I accidently broke an aspirin tablet and they fired me.

So I went home and sat down in a chair we had for when we got fired, and my Uncle Cecilio came in with a newspaper with a want ad for the war: “Prominent War Seeks Hardkilling Soldier.” And . . . and my mom said, “You’re quick on the uptake, you should apply.”

And I said, “Me? Why do I have to go to war?”

She said, “Well you have to work somewhere.”

So I said, “But I . . . I don’t kill so good.”

She said, “They . . . they’ll teach you to kill good soon enough.”

Then my aunt said, “But now we’re going to have to buy him a horse.”

And my . . . my mom said, “Nonsense, the army gives you one when you join up.”

My aunt says, “No thank you, God knows who’s been sitting on that thing. He’s better off packing his own horse.”

So we went to buy a horse, but you couldn’t buy them separate. You had to get the cart and the flies with it.

And my mom said, “No, you’re not bringing flies to the war. At least as a foot soldier you’ll keep things clean.”

So I packed myself a hot lunch and went off to war. I showed up Monday at 7:00 AM, and the war was closed because it was too early. And there was this lady outside selling churros and bread and stuff. And I said, “Hey, is this the war of ’14?”

And she said, “This is ’16; ’14’s just down the street.”

So I went to the other war, and when they opened the war at 9:00 I went in. And there was this soldier killing there. I said, “How . . . how you killing?”

He says, “Killing good, how about you?”

I said, “Me, not too good right now, but once I get trained up . . .”[4] READ MORE…

Agustín Fernández Mallo’s The Things We’ve Seen Holds a Trick Mirror up to History

April 15, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Maddy Robinson

The writer proceeds as though attempting an exorcism, dragging flesh and blood relics to the present.

The Things We’ve Seen by Agustín Fernández Mallo, translated from Spanish by Thomas Bunstead, Fitzcarraldo, 2021

In 1989, an extraordinary exhibit opened at the Zoology Museum of Barcelona. Visitors flooded the unveiling of a retrospective on the work of German zoologist Peter Ameisenhaufen, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1955, and his assistant, Hans von Kubert. The exhibit consisted of the meticulous field notes, drawings, photographs, and x-rays of the rare animals the scientists discovered on their travels: Perrosomus, a desert rabbit with exaggerated incisors, Squatina squatina, a leathery sea creature with grotesquely humanoid features, and Solenoglypha polipodia, a snake with birdlike legs running along the length of its body.

If this is starting to sound far-fetched, it’s because it is.

Ameisenhaufen and von Kubert are the alter egos of Catalan photographers Pere Formiguera and Joan Fontcuberta, and the exhibition was, in fact, an artistic one. Designed to question the intentions of photography and its rich potential for deception and fakery (around 30 percent of those attending the inauguration with university degrees said that they believed the animals were real), the exhibit asked visitors to examine the blurred line between fact and fiction and see what truth they could extract.

In much the same way, Agustín Fernández Mallo’s latest novel in three parts, The Things We’ve Seen, sets the mind racing with blurs and glitches—periodic and perturbing reminders of just how malleable our reality, both past and present, can be in the hands of an expert. The English title of the book is taken from a line of poetry by Beat poet Carlos Oroza, which serves as one of the epigraphs to the novel, and subsequently appears with mantra-like regularity:

It is a mistake to take the things we’ve seen as given

With this as his cornerstone, Fernández Mallo creates an intricate network of information and stories, which sprawl outward and intersect seemingly at random, to form a vertiginous commentary on history, war, memory, and our interconnected, twenty-first century lives. In the first part, a writer not unlike Fernández Mallo himself attends a conference on the small Galician island of San Simón, where a group of Twitter-obsessed creatives and thinkers reflect on digital networks. He is accompanied by Julián Hernández, a real-life man who is part of a real-life punk band, Siniestro Total. With the mention of actual people, places, and events so early in the novel, it is tempting to think that what follows will be a species of essay. However, The Things We’ve Seen is published by Fitzcarraldo, whose color-coded covers give the game away (white for essays, Klein blue for fiction). Far be it from me to judge a book by its factuality, but in this case, it is as though the author is daring the reader to believe, to latch on to the recognizable markers of our shared world. READ MORE…

Translators Weigh In on the Amanda Gorman Controversy

March 17, 2021  |  in News  |  by Allison Braden

The incident sparked industrywide conversation about who gets to translate.

On March 1, The Guardian reported that Amanda Gorman’s Dutch translator, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, had quit. Amanda Gorman, the poet who catapulted onto the world stage after an astounding performance at U.S. President Joe Biden’s January inauguration, had approved Rijneveld, an acclaimed Dutch writer, themselves, but the announcement that Rijneveld would translate Gorman’s book The Hill We Climb provoked backlash. READ MORE…

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. 

in memory of memory

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…

Translation Tuesday: “Oyster Pond” by Xosé Anxelu Gutiérrez Morán

February 2, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Xosé Anxelu Gutiérrez Morán

When I swallow saliva I can feel / how it rained the afternoon I first knew about you.

Memories of a family outing are preserved for posterity in Xosé Anxelu Gutiérrez Morán’s “Oyster Pond,” this week’s Translation Tuesday selection. Our speaker’s second-person address captures the intimacy and awe of a parent-child relationship, here a one-sided epistolary written for a hypothetical being (the future adult) recording the experiences of an actual being (the present child). The recurring images of wetness—foam, rain, saliva, the sea—evoke images of nascent life and mimic the ebb and flow of a child’s mind (e.g., the “life or death” urgency of collecting beads). At the metapoetic level, the gift our speaker offers the child is placed into the interim care of the reader—we are witnesses and keepers of a private and cherished memory.

Oyster Pond

To Nora, barely two years old

You are not going to remember this moment,
that is why I am writing it down for you.
You do not know either that you have
all your memory to celebrate
while you bring us
more beads for a necklace
as if your life depended on them. READ MORE…